The Stark Truth

by Peter Israel

  The Stark Truth

  Peter Israel

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For the woman I love,

  also known as J

  PROLOGUE

  I parked at the edge of our property under an overhang of branches. The night air blew cold in my face. I walked in through the trees, keeping to their shadows, trampling their fallen leaves, so as to skirt the wide lawn. Already I could see the white columns lit by hidden floods, the ground floor with lights on here and there—part, I knew, of the random security system. A pinpoint of red by the front door confirmed that the system was on.

  No matter. I already knew she was home.

  I went in through the garage, using my key. The old Aries stood there, next to her new and little-used Mercedes. I paused behind the cars, glanced into the tool bin, then entered the house through the back hall. Silently I passed the servants’ quarters, the kitchen, the pantry, crossed the dining room and came out onto the marble floor of the center hall, where, just four months before, I had watched her flee up the stairs in tears, tripping over her dress.

  Partway up the stairs I held my breath, stopped. The hall lights behind me had just gone out. I turned, saw a new and dimmer light coming from the living room.

  The system at work.

  It was near midnight. Silence.

  I waited outside our door in the carpeted upstairs hall, hand outstretched, listening.

  Nothing.

  Then I turned the knob.

  She was alone, asleep, clothed. The beaded Victorian floor lamp with the large lime green shade was still lit in the far corner of the room, casting a faint light over her. She lay on her side of the bed, her eyes closed, her hair spread dark against a sea of white lace pillows. The covers, silk figured sheets under a lacy down comforter, were pulled up to her breasts. She wore a dusky pink and silken nightgown, which rose to her neck and then fell away. Unseemly, I thought. In the time I had known her, only once had she come to bed dressed.

  I beheld her. I stood over her. I listened to our breathing: hers, my own. I said my last silent good-bye, feeling, even as I gave inner voice to the words, a faint rekindling of desire. I suppressed it.

  Even so, what would it have taken? What sign, what beckoning? Even at that last twelfth hour?

  I had my answer momentarily.

  Perhaps she’d heard my breathing. Or her antennae, still keen, had sensed some subtle change in the surrounding atmosphere.

  She didn’t stir, but I realized abruptly that her eyes were open, black pellets in their misty pale nests.

  She saw that I was holding a gun.

  “Go on, Tommy,” she said quietly, staring up at me with steady contempt. “Do it. Show me you have the guts.”

  PART ONE

  1

  We first met at a party. It was the firm’s annual bash at Tavern on the Green. There’d been an early snowfall that year, and the world outside the restaurant’s frosted windows gleamed in the white Christmas lights that hung from the trees. A five-piece band played Cole Porter—Night and day, da-dum da-dum, you are the one—but later in the evening, after the clients went off and the partners left with their wives and girlfriends, the band would switch into rock for the associates and the paralegals, the secretaries and the messengers who got to rub elbows annually with those of us from the twenty-first floor.

  Attendance at the party, at least for the Cole Porter period, was compulsory for yours truly, as it would be at the Partners’ Dinner some two weeks later. That would be private, at the Century Club, black tie, no spouses. But at both functions the booze flowed as though there’d be no New Year.

  “I bet I can guess what you’re thinking.” Her voice next to me broke my reverie. “You’re thinking, What a waste of money, and some of it’s mine.”

  For the record, she had it wrong. In point of fact, I remember what I was thinking: whether the percentage of the women at the party who would end up in bed with men they’d never spoken to before would vary from the previous year. I myself doubted it would. The only difference would be the condoms. Condoms had made a comeback.

  “Well?” she persisted at my side. “Am I close?”

  “Close enough,” I answered, jostled by the crowd as I turned to look at her. “How’d you guess?”

  I had on my clients’ smile, just in case.

  “I was watching you from across the food,” she said, gazing up at me. First impression: appraising eyes, wide apart, almost as dark as the wavy black hair. Broad cheekbones; full scarlet lips. “You were scowling. As though you disapproved.”

  “Of the food? Or the cost?”

  “Both,” she said.

  Very smartly turned out, I noticed, in black silk, padded shoulders. On the short side, full-busted. I was standing too close to her to see her legs.

  Manicured hands with red nails.

  I liked the way she stood up to being examined.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “Just a single woman at a party,” she answered directly. “Possibly a client.”

  “A client of whose?”

  “Yours, maybe.”

  “Mine? But you look too young to be a widow,” I said, out of habit.

  “Nobody’s too young to be a widow these days.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, again from habit. “Deeply sorry.”

  For some reason this seemed to annoy her.

  “Not to worry,” she said sharply. “There’s no reason at all to be sorry.”

  I thought I recognized the type. Most widows I’ve known want at least the appearance of mourning, bereavement, want condolence or the formality of condolence, leaving room, then or later, for more intimate tears, the still more intimate confessions of helplessness, fear, loneliness, with appropriate commiseration from yours truly. But every so often you run into one, refreshingly enough, who can’t wait to get past the formalities and down to the brass tacks, such as how much is the estate worth and how soon can she get her hands on the money.

  “I’ll tell you what else I know about you,” she said. “You’ve been married and divorced. But if I’m right, it didn’t happen recently.”

  “How do you know I’m not just single?”

  “You’re too good-looking,” she said. “No man as handsome as you could have escaped marriage unless he’s gay, and you’re not gay.”

  “And why divorced?”

  “Something in your expression.”

  “You mean when I’m not scowling?”

  I meant it lightly, but she didn’t take it that way.

  “I’m not sure how to describe it,” she went on. “Not sadness, exactly, or bitterness. Maybe a little of each. It’s more of a wary look, as though you’d been in somebody’s bed and didn’t like what you saw. A little cynicism. Cruelty, too, I think. Makes you look older than you actually are.”

  “Sad, bitter, wary, cynical,” I enumerated, smiling as if in apology. “Cruel to boot. Gee, that’s not a very promising description.”

  No comment from her.

  “Well, how old do you think I actually am?”

  “Around forty, give or take. Not quite, I’d say.”

  In fact, I’d just recently turned forty-one. And almost four years had gone by since Susan and I had signed off on our divorce and gone our separate ways, she with the children, I with the bills, which—or so I liked to think—was what had kept me locked into Trusts and Estates, and holding hands with widows bereaved and unbereaved, and standing tall at Christmas parties playing Psychoanalysis by Facial Expression with prospective clients.

  “What about the divorce stuff, though?” I asked her. “What makes you so sure I wasn’t divorced yesterday?”

  She laughed at that, her dark and sparkling eyes animating her expressio
n.

  “Well, you’re bored, for one thing. You’ve had enough time to find out being single isn’t as much fun as you thought it would be. Besides, any man who’s just been divorced is in a panic about food. He doesn’t know how to cook, hates eating alone. If you’d just been divorced, you’d have been stuffing yourself here, even though the food’s mediocre. As is, you’ve hardly eaten a thing.”

  True enough. It also made me curious as to just how long she’d been watching me.

  The band had stopped playing. Break time, union rules. Break time, too, for the party—a signal to those on the make to extricate themselves if they’d made a mistake, change partners, check out the remaining action or leave if there wasn’t any. In the commotion I spotted Mac Coombs, the venerable capo da capo in the firm since my father’s retirement. That’s Dwight MacGregor Coombs, Senior Partner and former Undersecretary of State, shaking hands and exchanging quips as he headed for the exit and the livery service that would take him home to New Canaan. And I knew that my fellow lemmings, the senior members of our illustrious firm, would take his departure as a sign that they could, and even should, go home. But as the others began to leave, my unsolicited partner simply stood her ground, gazing up at me, dark-eyed and full-lipped, her cheeks flushed.

  I knew she wasn’t my type, not at all, a recognition which irritated and intrigued me at the same time. Quite clearly she was offering herself.

  “Anyway,” she said, her eyes fixing mine, “I’m glad you haven’t eaten.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because it means you’re going to take me out to dinner.”

  2

  We went to La Banquette, a French bistro way west in the Fifties. Out of some sense of decorum, perhaps, I’d stopped going there for a time after the divorce, but the food was too good to stay away from forever. The narrow, mirrored main room of the restaurant was bordered by tables for couples sitting side by side on leather-covered benches, leaving the center alley free for the waiters and their trolleys. For groups larger than two, or those preferring intimacy, there were a few alcoves in the rear, almost like private dining rooms. My usual table was in the main room, but as Georges, the maître d’, explained apologetically, this night, so close to Christmas, the situation was hopeless. “After all,” he said, scolding me, “Monsieur didn’t call for a reservation.” But then he led us back to one of the alcoves and, with a Gallic flourish, said that for Monsieur and his beautiful guest, and given the holiday season, the wine would be on the house.

  Also knowing, I assume, that the gesture, given the holiday season, would be recognized in my annual gift.

  En route in the taxi, we had gotten around to introducing ourselves. Katherine Goldmark Sprague, meet Stark Thompson III. Kitty, meet Tommy. Or, as I think she was the first to point out, Kitten, meet Tom.

  “People call me Kitty,” she told me. “Someday I’ll get around to dropping the Sprague. People know me professionally as Kitty Goldmark, anyway.”

  “But you are widowed, didn’t you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “I still say you seem awfully young for that.”

  “I know. I was; he wasn’t. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not go into that.”

  “Done,” I said. “But it so happens I know a Goldmark. Ted Goldmark. Dumb question: You’re not related, by any chance, are you?”

  “By some chance, we are,” she answered. “In fact, not by any chance at all. Teddy’s my brother.”

  I remember that she shifted her body so as to face me in the taxi, the silk of her dress slithering on the seat—an unconscious movement that, I was to learn, invariably accompanied some confession.

  “The truth?” she asked, then answered herself: “The truth. I was at your party just now because of Teddy. I had some business at his office this afternoon, and he more or less dragged me along. What he actually said was: ‘If you’ve got nothing better to do, come along and I’ll introduce you to some boring lawyers.’”

  “That sounds like him,” I said. “But it surprises me that you had nothing better to do.”

  “Don’t be surprised at anything,” she countered. “Anyway, when I saw you there, I asked him who you were. I said, ‘Why don’t you introduce me to that boring lawyer over there? The handsome one.’ Do you know what he did? He refused! He said you were the smartest one in the bunch but that you ran too fast a track for me. Can you imagine? My own brother? I made a bet with him on the spot.”

  “What kind of bet?”

  “That I could pick you up before the party was over.”

  “And how much did you bet?”

  “A hundred dollars.”

  “Not bad,” I said, amused. “Looks like you won. Tell me, though, what else did he say about me?”

  I realized that I enjoyed making her talk, not so much for her voice, which had that loud, New York sort of brassiness, but because of the body language that accompanied her conversation. The bristling indignation, for instance, over her brother.

  “Actually,” she admitted, “I’m not as clairvoyant as all that. It was Teddy who told me you were divorced, though he didn’t know for how long. I guessed that part. He also said you had a reputation as a skirt-chaser, Social Register level. Is that true?”

  “Overstated, I’d say. And what else?” Then, seeing that she hesitated: “Come on. It’s always salutary to hear what other people make of you.”

  “Well, he said the major mistake of your life had been to stay at a law finn that had your father’s name on the door. A still living and famous father, in addition. He said you were smart enough—and well connected enough—to have chosen your ticket almost anywhere—in politics or business as well as the law.”

  She hesitated again. I imagined that she was translating, maybe censoring, what Goldmark had really said, but our arrival at the restaurant stopped the conversation.

  I also, as I soon discovered, liked watching her eat.

  We sat across from each other in the alcove, Kitty with her fur still around her shoulders while Georges hovered over us. She ordered steamed lobster with lemon butter only, over Georges’s objections, but after she’d debated the subject of sauces with him, half in English, half in French, the maître d’ reluctantly conceded. Then, when we were served, she set to work, bibless, with cracker and pick, dismembering the red crustacean. With accomplished gestures, she picked it clean, sipping white wine. And questioned me the while, pushing, probing.

  I gave her my life story, the once-over-lightly version, something I’d learned to do with wit, brevity, and—true enough—a certain cynicism. Usually this sufficed, but not with Kitty. It was as though she wanted to strip me clean, too. I managed to hold her off, but just barely, and stranger still, the sparring aroused me.

  She had crème caramel for dessert, I a double espresso and a double cognac.

  “You don’t seem very satisfied with it,” she said, licking caramel sauce from her spoon.

  “With what? My life? Or talking about it?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that, exactly.” Then, a familiar line of self-judgment: “Maybe being buried alive has its points.”

  She didn’t react.

  “Probably it’s the money,” she said.

  “What money?”

  “You don’t make enough,” she said, eyeing me levelly across her spoon. Why she should have thought that, I’ve no idea, even though it happened to be true. She did know—in fact I’d alluded to it myself—that I came from wealth, the “Funds,” as it was known, product of the nineteenth-century merger of the Starks and the Thompsons, which by clan honor and tradition no one touched except in extremis. And even then …

  But that, I saw, wasn’t her point.

  “Do you really believe money’s the only way people can measure themselves?” I asked her.

  “If there’s another way,” she said, “please tell me what it is.”

  “But just money? The accumulation of money?”

/>   “No, I didn’t say that.”

  “Then what? Material goods? Power? Self-esteem?” Maybe the subject irritated me because it made me think of the firm, and the firm of my father. “Well, I wasn’t brought up that way.”

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, running her tongue across her upper lip, “I wasn’t either.”

  “Then …?”

  I’d been watching her mouth during dinner, the movements of her lips, her tongue. The scarlet was now gone from her lips, but they remained full, glistening, the color of dusky rose. I watched them curl now, then open into a smile, and her tongue licked across her upper teeth.

  “Because it’s sexy,” she said.

  “Money’s sexy?”

  “Yes,” she said, her lips spreading into laughter. Then she reached across, touching my hand, holding it a moment, her red nails arced onto my wrist. “It’s just a joke, Tommy. Come on, this has been a lovely meal, but let’s get the check.”

  Amen, I thought. Perhaps I even said it.

  Georges brought the check in a paisley folder on a white china plate, and I simply scrawled my signature across the back and handed it to him, explaining to Kitty that one of the civilized practices of La Banquette was the itemized monthly bill, to which they added a fifteen percent service charge.

  “And what do I go down as?” she asked with a smile. “Business or pleasure?”

  “If’ll have to be pleasure,” I answered with mock rue. “I forgot altogether that you said you were a potential client. We haven’t even talked about that.”

  “Let’s not. I’d rather call you and make an appointment.”

  “Good.”

  We walked—her suggestion—she in the heavy red fox which hung almost to the tops of her high heels, I in the old alpaca-lined greatcoat I’d bought in Italy some five, six years before, pre-divorce. She linked her arm easily through mine, and from time to time our hands touched, held, pigskin to suede, and our breath came out in little puffs in those dark and empty streets of the West Fifties.