In any case, I returned to the empty apartment with a very strong sense of dissatisfaction and displeasure concerning Mr. William Brooker. I had decided that if he was a man who deserved my respect, he was not the man of great qualities that I had imagined him to be. And when, that evening, I took his wife’s picture down from the wall and carried it with me into her reading room with its small, flower-fragrant bed, I thought of him with something like the mixture of pity and disdain that an adulterer feels for the man he has cuckolded.
5
ELAINE DECIDED not to come until the first of September—the original moving date. I took this news quietly. I had stopped all work on the rental house. I had stopped going out; I was spending each day in the rooms of that apartment, watching television, reading, sleeping, and gazing at what I could find of photographs and belongings of Helen Brooker. I found a box of pictures of her as a girl, and as a bright young student; I found honors and trophies she had won in college, for her work in the yearly stage play, or for her contributions to the literary magazine; I found a stack of lurid-looking paperback books on a shelf in her closet; and, best of all, I found a bundle of old letters and cards in the back of a bureau drawer—birthday greetings, Christmas cards, cards to accompany flowers, and a few thank-you notes, along with letters from her mother, from a sister in Connecticut, and, to my great fascination, from an ardent somebody who kept complaining that she never paid him enough attention. These love notes or complaints were all signed with the initial W.
Darling, one of them went, I suppose you’ll laugh when I say this, but someday you’ll read what I’ve written to you and remember me as your one truest friend; and you’ll miss me. On that day you won’t laugh. And wherever I am, I’ll still love you. Always, W.
Another said, Helen, I have written a poem called “Sorry.” It’s about us. You said to keep in touch, and this is the only way I know how. The poem is simple: Could you spend Sunday / or just any one day / with me / she said / “Sorry.” It goes on in this vein, so you see, Helen, I am not without humor concerning you and me. Love, W.
It suddenly dawned on me as I read that W. probably stood for William, and that these sophomoric and romantic missives were from the then senatorial staff worker William Brooker, already in his forties and sounding like a nineteen-year-old boy with a crush on his English teacher.
Helen, there’s something in your eyes that makes me unable to speak, and the only thing I have is pen and paper. I’m not a poet, but if I were I’d find the words to make you see what happens to me every time you turn your head my way. I love you, Always, W.
This snooping of mine was exactly as undignified and sneaky as it sounds, and I suppose the only thing to be said about it now, once having admitted this, is that it was also a function of a kind of madness that had taken hold of me. At night I had begun to dream about Helen Brooker in a way that left me exhausted in the mornings, and there was always the haunting and shadowy figure of Sweeney, always the terrible fact of his passionless violence in the dreams. I had taken to following the development of the case on the local television stations, two of which were doing specials about him; and there were the continuing newspaper articles. And so in fact, Mr. Sweeney was part of the daytime, too. In the newspaper articles the reporters said Sweeney spoke in a soft, countrified voice about stabbing a girl through the heart, and my own heart shook in my chest, and yet I couldn’t look away or stop reading or put my mind on my work. And when I wasn’t following the news, I stalked the house for a woman’s privacy.
When Elaine and I talked on the phone, our silences grew longer, and the suppressed irritations began to find terms of expression. We argued, or bickered, or teased each other into bickering, and finally she suggested that something was wrong with us which a separation might solve: she wanted to wait through the fall before coming east, if she came east at all. We could see how we felt in six months. I don’t know if she thought much would change in that time, but I felt as though we were dissolving the marriage over the telephone, and I told her so. Her response was a very calm denial that this was so; she just wanted a little time. I even offered, near the end of the conversation, to come west; I said I was willing to give up the job. But of course this was a ridiculous idea, and in any case I didn’t think I could bring myself to go through with it. If she wanted me to—which she did not.
So after a week in Brooker’s apartment, I was fairly crazed: I was sure my wife was divorcing me; I was having a fantasy affair with a woman I had met only once in my life (there was something about being among her things; it was as if I were a ghost, haunting another ghost, and there was always the feeling that I did know her after all), and I was monitoring with avid and horrified fascination the story of Mr. Sweeney and his many victims. To put it simply, I was in no condition for what took place at the end of that first week. And to spare you any unnecessary suspense, I’ll just say here that what happened was that I had a visitor, a woman I’d never seen before, someone close to my age or younger, who stood in the light of the Brookers’ landing and stared at me as if I had materialized out of the summer night.
I HAD BEEN READING Brooker’s vaguely plagiaristic love notes (Helen, nothing is as intensely delicate as you are), when the doorbell rang, so loudly and so suddenly—it seemed the tolling that calls the guilty to their punishment—that I let out a cry and nearly fell from the chair in which I sat, the letters and notes in a loose bundle on my lap. I almost dropped them all as I came to my feet, and for a confused minute I didn’t know what to do with them; I thought this visitor would surely be Helen, or Brooker himself, and that I would be caught red-handed with the evidence of my spying. Finally I jammed everything under a cushion of the sofa and went to the door to peer out at whoever it was. In the dim light of the landing I made out enough of the face to know it wasn’t either of the Brookers.
I opened the door.
She stared at me for some time before she spoke. “I am looking for Mrs. Brooker.” As I have said, she was my age or younger, and she looked Spanish—her hair was very black, her eyes a facetless black. “I know they live here.”
“Mrs. Brooker isn’t here,” I said.
She looked down a moment, apparently deciding something. Then she simply turned and started back down the steps.
“Excuse me,” I said.
She stopped, looked back at me. “You are her son?”
I shook my head no.
“I need to talk to her, not him. You tell him that Maria Alvarez came to see Mrs. Brooker. You tell him that.”
“Mr. Brooker is in New York State,” I said.
“Remember the name,” she said, going on, “Maria Alvarez.”
I stood out on the landing and watched her cross the parking lot, moving very slowly, almost warily, as if she were afraid someone might spring out at her from behind one of the parked cars. But then it wasn’t quite like that, either—for there was an element of discouragement about it, a kind of defeated dignity that made me wonder where she had come from and what she might be going back to. I almost called to her, though of course she probably would not have come back. She got into a small, beat-up Volkswagen bug and drove away, and I went back into Brooker’s apartment and took up my invasion of Helen Brooker’s personal life.
That evening, Brooker called, and I told him about his wife’s visitor.
“Jesus Christ,” Brooker said. “Jesus Christ.”
I waited.
“Slight Spanish accent?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And she asked for Mrs. Brooker?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“She drove away in an old Volkswagen bug.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake.”
I said nothing. For a moment there was just the faint interference on the line of another, distant conversation.
“Listen,” he said. “If she comes back, tell her Mrs. Brooker and I are separated. Okay? We’re not living together anymore.”
; I stood there holding the receiver to my ear.
“Got that?” he said.
“You’re separating?” I said.
He took a moment. “Just tell her that. Will you tell her that for me?”
I heard myself say I would.
“Did you tell her when we’d be home?”
“That didn’t come up.”
“Good.”
“She probably won’t be back,” I said.
“Well, if she comes back, you’ll remember to tell her Mrs. Brooker and I are separated. We’ve been separated for some time, you don’t know how long.”
“Mr. Brooker,” I said, “are you asking me to lie for you?”
He took another moment to answer. “Just tell her we’re separated. That’ll be the truth.”
“All right,” I said.
“And then call me at this number if she does come back.”
“I will,” I said to him.
And then he had hung up. I sat for a long time by the phone, not really thinking about anything, and yet feeling low and lonely and sick at heart. Finally I called Elaine.
“Honey,” I said, “I miss you.”
She had fallen asleep studying, and was groggy and irritable. “Call me back,” she mumbled, “okay?”
“Elaine, I’m going crazy here,” I said.
“Call me back,” she said sleepily, and then the line clicked.
THE AFTERNOON NEWSPAPER, in the third part of a four-part series about Mr. Sweeney, carried a summary of his early life. Apparently Mr. Sweeney had been raised by a self-styled freethinker, a man who believed in exposing children early to the realities of life, particularly the sexual realities: the senior Mr. Sweeney had made his young son take part in his own sexual escapades, had made him watch while he and the boy’s mother and a friend of the boy’s mother had relations. There were other unpleasant details: in Sweeney’s own words, he could never be near a living, breathing Human Being without thinking of murder. Mostly, of course, he had chosen little girls because, he said, they were less trouble; everything was easier. In his early twenties he had been married to a young woman for about a month before he killed her, and in his late forties, after almost thirty years of drifting—during which he had spent stretches in prison for petty crimes and felonies, for vagrancy and public drunkenness, and during which he had also lived for a few intermittent years in Canada and Mexico—he had met and married one Marilee Wilson, a motel keeper, who for three years had somehow kept him happy, though he had continued to wander out in search of victims from time to time. In the words of Mr. Sweeney:
I should’ve probably killed her when we got separated, and I guess I would have if it wasn’t for her changing the motel to my name and her boy being such a pal to me. We done a lot of going around, that kid and me, and I come close to telling him more than once that his stepdaddy weren’t no ordinary stepdaddy. She’s a lucky one, though. She don’t know how lucky. I come close more’n a couple times.
Reading this, I thought of poor Mrs. Sweeney, who would certainly have read the same article, and must now be trembling to think what she had barely missed. And then I was thinking about them as a couple: there must have been moments of tenderness between them, moments when they were happy with each other. Mrs. Sweeney had talked about how she missed him.
I almost never can get really excited about sex with somebody unless they’re dead.
I closed the newspaper and went upstairs to Mrs. Brooker’s room. There were pictures of her on the bed, and I moved them to the nightstand and lay down. It was warm and bright in the room, the sun pouring through the chinks in the white curtain over the window, and through the curtain itself. I had most of the day ahead of me and I didn’t have the energy to move. I thought of trying to write, but I felt empty, and anyway it would take energy to write. I could easily have imagined that I might never have another thing to say. At that moment, nothing seemed further from me than my own dearest and oldest interest. Indeed, the idea of writing stories seemed somehow so much beside the point that thinking about it even in this abstract way made me feel foolish.
I tried calling Elaine again, but there wasn’t any answer.
Finally I went out, and drove myself over to the Sweeney Motel. I don’t think I intended at first to go there. I remember I thought about riding around the campus, perhaps stopping in on one of my new colleagues. But the truth of the matter was that I hadn’t liked any of them much. They had struck me as a closed group; their conversation in my presence had been full of in-jokes and references to things I couldn’t know and therefore could not respond to. (During my years traveling and reading at the colleges I have come to see that this is a rudeness particular to academics, and that my first colleagues were no worse than most.)
So I wound up back at the Sweeney Motel, which was closed now, the windows all curtained and shut and the NO VACANCY sign replaced by a single large wooden plank with the word CLOSED painted on it in black. I pulled in and sat for a minute, looking the place over. Mrs. Sweeney came to her doorway as I got out of the car.
“What is it?” she said.
“Mrs. Sweeney,” I said, “how are you?”
“I’m closed,” she said. But then she recognized me.
“I just thought I’d—stop by.”
She opened the door and stood back for me to enter. I was afraid I’d come at a bad time, and I apologized, or tried to, but she was already talking.
“My son got his leave canceled. And I know why—I wouldn’t come here either if it was me.”
The office was a mess. There were newspapers and magazines everywhere; on the television cabinet, glasses and dishes were stacked, and the tables were strewn with clothes. There wasn’t anywhere to sit. Mrs. Sweeney cleared a place on the sofa, and then poured herself a tall glass of whiskey from one of several bottles of liquor on the coffee table.
“You want some?” she said.
I declined, and she sat down across from me, keeping her eyes on the TV screen, where a doctor and a nurse argued in an antiseptic-looking hallway. She drank her whiskey, licked her lips. It struck me that I had come there to stare at her, that no matter what I’d convinced myself with when I started out, my motives were no better than those of the merely curious. She was watching me, and I couldn’t really return the look, couldn’t meet her gaze. “So you’re all closed up,” I managed.
“Nothing else to do. My son’s not coming home. I got people calling me all hours of the day and night. Godalmighty, you know I didn’t kill anybody. It wasn’t me, goddammit. I don’t know anything. All I know is I was married to the guy three years and I never saw him hurt anyone or anything, and if he wasn’t a real exciting man to have around the house he wasn’t half bad, either. He left me alone mostly and he never expected much. It wasn’t such a bad marriage and now I got to feel like I’m going to grow boils and horns if I miss him a little bit every now and then. People coming here wanting to know did he ever do anything that made me suspicious. I’ve had three husbands in my life and they all had things about them that you couldn’t say was too normal. Who doesn’t? Who’s normal in private? He didn’t seem a bit more strange than anybody else is when nobody’s looking.” She took a long pull of her drink. “Sure you don’t want any?”
“No, thank you,” I said.
“I’m going to sell this place and move. Change my name back.”
“I’m sorry your son isn’t coming.”
“He doesn’t want to be seen in this town again.”
I shook my head as if to say how unfortunate this was, but she thought I was disagreeing with her.
“I’m serious,” she said. “He doesn’t want to be seen. He won’t ever come back here. He told me he wouldn’t, and I can’t say I blame him.”
“No,” I said, “I can understand that.”
She stared at the television. There was a commercial on about sheer panty hose, and then there was one about an airline. She took another drink of the whiskey and then leaned back in
her chair. “I don’t usually drink,” she said. “I don’t like the taste of it. I’ve just been taking it to calm down. You know, I just escaped death. More than once. He was going to kill me.”
“I—I saw that,” I said.
“Everybody saw it. You know he was with a lot of people here. He knew a lot of people and went to restaurants and fishing and all that, and even sat in church every week—we were regulars, the two of us. And nobody else figured out what he was either, if you know what I mean. You’d think somebody would’ve noticed something.”
“It’s very strange,” I said.
“And I’m not going to pretend I didn’t like having him around because I did, and I don’t care what they say.”
I nodded agreement.
“You know,” she said, “you’re the last tenant of the Sweeney Motel.”
“Why don’t you just call it the Wilson Motel again?”
She looked a little puzzled. “Oh, it was never the Wilson Motel. It was the All Nighter Motel.”
This harmless piece of information had the effect of putting us both in a kind of musing calm. We might indeed have been mother and son, considering some fact or circumstance that had caught our attention. I reached over and poured a little of the whiskey into a cup on the coffee table.
Wives & Lovers Page 21