Degree of Guilt

by Unknown

  The woman was dressed for the outdoors – boots, jeans, green sweater – and her long strawberry-blond hair was pulled back. But the heavy clothes made her look too slight; there was something about her that seemed more suited to the city. As the woman stepped outside, Terri saw more clearly her pale skin, probing hazel eyes, and delicate face, pensive and lightly freckled. She was startlingly young.

  ‘I’m Marcy Linton,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you could find me.’

  Her voice was clear but almost whispery. When she extended her hand, it felt fragile, as if Terri were cupping a bird in her palm. ‘Thank you,’ Terri answered. ‘I’m glad you could call me.’

  Linton gazed at her boots, as if checking them for snow. ‘Have you ever written?’ she asked, and then glanced up at Terri. ‘I know that sounds foolish, and a little vain, but I think most writers survive partly by imagining how others must feel. The way you described my feelings was so perfect that it was like calling someone who already knew.’

  Terri shook her head. ‘I’ve never written – I wouldn’t know how to start.’ She gave Linton a curious look. ‘I didn’t expect you to be so young and to have written so much.’

  ‘I’m twenty-eight.’ Linton tilted her head. ‘And you?’

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  Linton looked off into the distance. After a time, she said, ‘Whenever I imagined talking about this, it was to a white policeman with the blank, somewhat cruel expression of an Aztec carving.’ She paused. ‘I suppose I made him look like Ransom.’

  Terri appraised her. Linton could put feelings into words, and Terri liked her instinctively. But they were still standing outside, as if lingering on the threshold of Linton’s story, more painful than she made it sound.

  ‘Do you have coffee?’ Terri asked. ‘I’m pretty cold.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ Linton sounded chastened. ‘Come on in.’

  The inside was more elaborate than Terri had imagined: a stone floor of odd-shaped pieces; a marble fireplace; high ceilings; an expanse of glass window, which framed the mountains. There were animal skins on the floor, and above the fireplace, the head of an elk stared into space.

  Linton followed Terri’s eyes. ‘My uncles kill things,’ she said. ‘I can’t work in this room.’

  Terri nodded. ‘I’ve never been able to imagine hunting. Or even owning a gun.’

  Linton gazed at the elk. ‘Oh, I own a gun now. But not for that.’

  Terri paused a moment, wondering what next to say. ‘Do you ski at all?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really.’ Linton did not turn. ‘I used to come here for the quiet.’

  To Terri, Linton’s voice carried a trace of sadness, perhaps loss. Then Linton shrugged, as if to herself. ‘Do you like anything in your coffee?’

  For an instant, Terri thought of Melissa Rappaport, making coffee as she avoided mention of Mark Ransom. Even here, where Ransom had come but once, Terri felt him as an unnamed presence who had broken the quiet, the reason Mary Linton had a gun.

  ‘Just black,’ Terri answered. ‘Thanks.’

  Linton disappeared.

  Terri sat on a couch behind a heavy oak coffee table. On its lowever shelf were two volumes of poetry, a thick book on impressionist painting, and a collection of Stieglitz photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, which included several nudes. The volumes lent an urban sensibility, the slightest hint of female sensuality, as if to subvert the oppressive maleness of the room itself.

  ‘He liked this room, he told me.’

  Reentering, Linton spoke in matter-of-fact tones. Her voice had none of Rappaport’s pained ironic intellect; it was as if she were relating puzzling scraps at the margins of her memory, looking for clues to what had happened. She held a mug of coffee out to Terri, then sat on a heavy chair across from her.

  ‘So,’ she asked, ‘will I have to testify?’

  ‘Only if you want to.’ Terri hesitated. ‘We won’t make you.’

  Linton considered that. Finally, she said, ‘But the only way to help is to be a witness.’ Her voice was measured and subdued.

  ‘Yes,’ Terri answered. ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Linton nodded, almost to herself; it was as if the silent gesture helped her absorb the truth. ‘Will it be public?’

  ‘If Judge Masters thinks it’s relevant to whether Ransom tried to rape Mary Carelli.’ Terri hesitated. ‘And if she’s even thinking about throwing out the case, she’ll want it public – for her own sake. To keep from getting pilloried as a biased woman judge.’

  Linton sipped her coffee. ‘That’s a lot of pressure,’ she said. ‘On the judge, I mean.’

  There was something tired in the phrase, as if the thought of too much pressure on anyone made Linton feel enervated. Terri had first encountered Linton’s short stories while riffling through New Yorkers in the waiting room of her obstetrician: lately, Linton’s characters seemed to spend more time deciding whether to open their apartment door than they did on the other side of it. Terri, who admired Linton’s sensitivity, found the increasing tentativeness of her people distressing, as if they bled strength from Terri herself. Yet, looking at Linton, Terri felt that whatever inner balance Linton had achieved belonged to her, and that Terri had no right to challenge it.

  ‘There’s a lot of pressure on everyone involved,’ Terri said at last. ‘If you do this, it’s got to be for yourself. Because everyone else in that courtroom will have their own agenda, and they’re going to play for keeps. Even Chris, my boss.’ Terri hesitated. ‘Perhaps Chris most of all.’

  Linton stared at the floor. ‘It’s hard to know what to do with this.’

  In these few stark words, Terri felt a deep loneliness. ‘Do you think,’ she ventured, ‘that we can just talk it through?’

  Linton looked up at her. ‘And afterwards, if I don’t want to testify?’

  ‘Then it never leaves here.’ Terri paused. ‘I just stick it where I stick my own stuff. The things I never talk about.’

  Linton seemed to search Terri’s face. Then she said simply, ‘Let me tell you about it.’

  Why, Terri wondered, was she herself so much on edge. She took one deep breath, nodded, and continued to sip her coffee, watching Linton over the rim.

  ‘I was twenty-four,’ Linton began, ‘and three years out of Barnard. I’d come here to write the novel I’m hoping to write now.’

  The clipped last sentence, Terri thought, had an undertone of damage. ‘What is it about?’ Terri asked. ‘Or is that a dumb question?’

  ‘Not dumb, just difficult.’ Linton looked at her shoes again. ‘Perhaps I’m a short story writer, not a novelist. Some people just can’t do both.’ Linton glanced up at Terri. ‘Mark Ransom could, of course.’

  Terri hesitated. Part of Linton seemed disjointed, shaken beneath the calm. ‘Did you admire him?’ she asked.

  ‘As a novelist, yes. Our sensibilities were totally different, and his politics weren’t mine. But page to page, he was a master of narrative and character. His characters weren’t slight, at least not his men – he could make them struggle, breathe, quiver with surprise and change for twelve, thirteen hundred pages.’ Linton shook her head. ‘We were nothing alike, and I thought there was nothing like him.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘Here, that one time. At a writer’s conference.’ Linton’s voice grew quiet. ‘I timed my arrival in Aspen to coincide with two events – the beginning of my novel and meeting Mark Ransom.’

  Terri felt puzzled. ‘Did you expect to spend any time with him?’ When Linton looked somehow hurt, Terri added quickly, ‘What I mean is that someone like Ransom must have had friends here, people competing for his attention, dinner plans in advance.’

  A quiet pride crossed Linton’s face. ‘I’d already been published in The New Yorker. People knew my work.’ Then, as if to herself, she added softly, ‘Young writers have no sense of proportion. If they did, they’d never write.’

  Terri tried to imagine Mark Ransom caring about Marcy Li
nton’s delicate fiction; it was like van Gogh being intrigued by Japanese watercolors. Finally, she asked, ‘Did Mark Ransom know your work?’

  ‘He knew of my work.’ Linton’s voice grew softer yet. ‘Before the conference, John Whitley, my editor at the magazine, called Mark himself. To tell him to “take care of me.”’ Linton looked away. ‘John is a very nice person. When he later asked if Mark had caught up with me, and I said yes, he looked quite pleased.’

  Again, Terri thought, a few oblique sentences conveyed much more: the small literary world to which Linton aspired; the naïveté of Linton’s benefactor; her desire for approval; her fear of shattered friendships and notoriety had she denounced Mark Ransom as a rapist. Except for the exotica of Linton’s chosen milieu, Linton had limned in a moment the dilemma of any woman raped by a respected man in a small town or university, or after an office party. It made Terri feel small.

  ‘What is it?’ Linton asked.

  Terry shrugged off her depression. ‘Sympathy pains, I guess. I had a vision of this benign, white-haired editor, so pleased that Mark had honored his request, and how lonely that must have made you.’

  ‘John has black hair and is far too thin to look benign. But yes, I did feel lonely.’

  ‘The morning I saw John, my mouth felt swollen, and I still hurt inside.’ Linton paused, staring down at her lap. ‘When Ransom did it, I wasn’t wet.’

  Terri realized that she had crossed her arms. Quietly, she asked, ‘How did it happen?’

  Linton nodded slightly; the small gesture seemed irrelevant to Terri’s question, as if Linton were reviewing some thought of her own. ‘I was so vain,’ she said softly, ‘to have published at twenty-three. I thought what I did with words was so extraordinary that even Mark Ransom would want to read them.’

  Like her characters, Terri thought, Marcy Linton was having trouble opening the door. Terri waited, wondering how much of this reticence was the woman herself, how much she owed to Ransom. When Linton said nothing more, Terri asked, ‘When did you first meet him?’

  Linton seemed to be summoning a specific memory. ‘It was the last night of the conference,’ she answered. ‘At the bar of a glitzy hotel called Little Nell, jammed with writers and snow bunnies and slick men in ski clothes. But I found him right away, from the mellow voice and all that red hair. When I introduced myself to Mark, his smile of recognition thrilled me. “Marcy Linton,” he said, “the most famous twenty-three-year-old writer since Sylvia Plath. John Whitley says you’ll have even me reading short stories again.” He grinned down at me. “Short stories, of all things.”’

  Linton looked pensive, as if ashamed at some secret foolishness. ‘Except when I’m on some sort of literary high, I’m not very confident at social things – I’m more of the quiet observer type, I think. But the instant Mark clasped my hand, it was as if I felt connected to the confidence he gave off: bolder, almost brash.

  ‘Suddenly it seemed right that America’s most famous writer was interested in me.

  ‘“Maybe you don’t have to read short stories,” I told him. “I’ve just started my first novel.”’

  ‘“Good,” he answered. “Short stories are to novels what raisins are to wine – you can either shrivel your characters or let them breathe.” He laughed. “I don’t know what kind of metaphor that is, but it’s how I feel.”

  ‘“Well, I’m going to let them breathe,” I answered. “I just hope they don’t get vertigo.”’ Linton paused; her persona shifted from an excited twenty-four-year-old to the cautious woman Terri sat with now. ‘Listening to myself,’ she said with quiet irony, ‘I know why I never talked about this. My own bravado is far too painful to remember.’

  Terri waited, then asked simply, ‘What happened next?’

  Linton touched her wrist, as if tracing a scar. When she spoke again, her voice seemed chastened by some hidden censor. ‘Mark looked at me for a moment. “If you’ve just started,” he told me, “I suppose I’ll have to wait.” He sipped his drink and then, as if a new thought had just struck him, asked, “Did you bring any pages?”

  ‘God, I thought, he wants to read them. I was scared and excited, but more excited than scared. “I didn’t have to bring them,” I said. “They’re here, because I’m here. Living in a cabin, off by myself, until I finish.”’ Pensive, Linton added softly, ‘I thought it made me seem more serious about the novel I’d just started. But what it must have told Mark Ransom was that I was available – away from the hotel, with no roommates and no boundaries, eager for him to think well of me.’

  Beneath the bulk of her sweater, Linton’s frame appeared to settle, becoming smaller. ‘For a moment, as I remember it now, his eyes seemed to glitter. At the time, I thought that this was a moment when one writer recognizes another – older to younger, but members of the same species. Then, very politely, he said, “I’d be flattered if you’d let me read them.”

  ‘I remember imagining: What if Mark Ransom found a woman writer he admired enough to say so.’ Linton shook her head. ‘In the narcissistic way of young people who’ve been told they have talent but have yet to learn the limits of it, I began to imagine the bright dinner parties, the influential articles in the Times and New York Review, the great literary friendships that would start with this meeting. My own celebrity.’ Her voice, soft and clear, held a trace of self-contempt. ‘What a fool I was – how romantic, how unlike the people I’ve come to write about. It humilitates me just to think of it.’

  ‘Why?’ Terri asked. ‘Were you supposed to be immune to dreams?’

  ‘Not immune. But clear-eyed. Enough not to invest someone else with the power of my own fantasies.’

  Terri shook her head. ‘It’s normal to look up to someone older, to want to be like them, or be close to them. It’s just that for women, that can present a special problem. Because, in his mind, the man you’ve started to invest in may already have his fingers on the top button of your blouse.’

  Linton gazed at Terri. ‘We’re supposed to know that,’ she said finally. ‘You must have always known that. But somehow I forgot.’

  ‘The penalty for forgetting,’ Terri answered quietly, ‘shouldn’t be rape.’

  Slowly, Linton shook her head; once more, the gesture seemed to take her inward. ‘I offered to meet him the next morning, for breakfast. “Don’t worry,” he told me. “I’d like to explore this country. If you’ll be in tomorrow, why don’t you let me find you?” He made it sound like an adventure. A game, almost.

  ‘The next day, I was so excited that I could hardly write. I laid out all the bottles of wine my uncles had so that Mark could make his choice, then presliced some cheese and wrapped it in cellophane to keep from running around the kitchen when he got here, acting nervous like I do. About every half hour I would get up from my desk and look out the window for a car. It got so hard waiting that I almost called him.

  ‘Around four-thirty, when I’d finally settled into my writing, there was a knock at the door.

  ‘It was Mark Ransom.

  ‘He had fresh sushi from town, and an expensive bottle of wine. “First things first,” he told me. “Put these in the refrigerator, and show me a quiet place to read.”’

  Reflectively, Linton glanced upstairs. ‘I took him,’ she said quietly, ‘to the atelier. The place where I wrote.

  ‘I had fifty pages waiting for him. Fresh and clean, worked and re-worked. The absolute best that I could do.’

  Her tone became flat, as if from the effort of memory. ‘He settled into my chair, leaning both arms on my desk, waving me away. He seemed totally intent on what I had written.’ Linton’s voice fell. ‘I remember thinking that he wanted to know my work. To know me.’

  It was strange, Terri thought, to listen to Linton after reading her stories. In her speech, as on the page, Linton was a minimalist: she conveyed her pain by indirection, in a few understated words. ‘You felt that he cared,’ Terri ventured.

  Linton watched her. ‘What I felt,’ she said wit
h equal quiet, ‘was that I had opened myself to him.’

  She turned to the fireplace. ‘I came down here, made myself busy. Opened the wine he had brought, to let it breathe. Started a fire. All the time wondering what he thought of my pages.’ She shook her head. ‘Writers have this great protection: unlike singers or actors, we don’t have the terror and ecstasy of confronting our audience. But now I would, and it was Mark Ransom.’ Her voice lowered. ‘I felt so vulnerable.

  ‘By the time he finished, an hour had passed, and it was dark.’ Once more, Linton shook her head. ‘When I heard his footsteps coming down the stairs, I wanted to run.

  ‘He walked into the living room.’ Linton paused. ‘He just stood there, saying nothing. Giving me this enigmatic, knowing look. I couldn’t stand the silence.

  ‘“So,” I said, “should I throw it out?” When he didn’t answer right away, I cursed myself: instead of sounding clever and self-confident, I was a supplicant, and the smile I pasted on to cover that felt like a rictus.’ Linton folded her hands. ‘I already felt naked, and he hadn’t even touched me.’

  Terri gazed around the room. In the present, it was perhaps noon; through the windows, Terri saw that sunlight made the boughs of snow-covered pines glint with crystals, saw more sun streaking the jagged peaks on the far side of the valley. But what Terri imagined was a window blank with darkness, a room made close by firelight, dancing on the stone slabs and the skins of animals. A man with glittering eyes and a slender young woman, facing each other in silence, a few feet apart.

  ‘What did he say?’ Terri asked.

  Linton stared at the fireplace. ‘“Oh, I wouldn’t throw it out,” he said, and gave this little smile. The smile gave the words an almost casual cruelty; what it said to me was that his answer was less about the merit of what I’d written than the pitiable way I’d asked the question.’ Linton turned to Terri, fresh pain in her eyes. ‘At night, when I still think about it, I wonder whether he’d intended all along to strip away my confidence.’

  Somehow, Terri felt the fragility of her own body. ‘And did he?’