Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  I took the Suit out of the closet and eyed it assessingly. Tony had bought it for me at Bergdorf Good man’s last year. I’d never owned anything even half as expensive in my life. We had been invited to a formal dinner thrown by the commissioner, and I don’t exactly know what image Tony had in mind for me, but it certainly wasn’t professorial. Purple shot silk, with a long wide-shouldered jacket and a short straight skirt, the Suit was worn over a bright orange low-cut shell. It was designed to reveal a copious amount of leg and a discreet suggestion of cleavage.

  “What the hell.” I stepped into the skirt. Yes. Just as I remembered: lots of leg.

  Amanda gave a wolf whistle as I walked into the living room in the purple suit, orange blouse, and matching purple suede high-heeled sandals. “Way to go, Mom!” Sophia just stared, eyes wide. Amanda took a second look, said “wait” and darted into her room. She came out dangling an outrageous emerald green drop earring between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. In the light from the Christmas tree they glittered like, well, glass.

  I twisted my hair on top of my head in a dragon-lady coil and donned the earrings. Amanda applied eye shadow and bright red lipstick. The effect was quite—spectacular.

  I wasn’t able to see anyone watching the house when I left at eight P.M., but then I didn’t expect to. Parked facing the house about a quarter mile down the road, however, was a Jeep very much like the one Piotrowski had driven to the state park the previous week. Just pulled over into the hedgerow as if it belonged to a hunter out illicitly jacking deer. As far as I could tell, the car was empty.

  In front of Greg’s house, automobiles, mostly Volvos and Hondas, were parked on both sides of the road. He and Irena lived in a sprawling contemporary on a wooded hillside just outside of town. With two incomes and no kids they could afford to live quite well: handcrafted Scandinavian tables, Persian rugs, low-slung leather chairs and couches, hand-stitched Amish quilts decorating the walls.

  I parked the Jetta behind Ned Hilton’s battered Toyota. I was surprised Ned would attend a party with his colleagues so soon after he’d been denied tenure; he must be gutsier than I’d thought. Carrying a bottle of champagne in one hand and my dress shoes in the other, I trudged over the icy packed snow toward the brilliantly illuminated house in my heavy coat and boots. Greg met me in the foyer and gave me a quick hug.

  “Thanks again for Christmas, Karen,” he said. “You’re a real pal.” He checked out the bottle I’d handed him. “New York,” he said. “Nice.”

  I smirked at him. “Snob!”

  Greg directed me to a bedroom in use as a cloakroom. Magda Vegh’s full-length mink was thrown carelessly on a pile of wool coats and down jackets. I knew it was Magda’s, because in politically correct Enfield she was the only college-associated woman who had the nerve to flaunt a fur coat. She wore it, even to faculty meetings, with a raw sensuality, as if the coat were a natural manifestation of her own animal powers. For Magda, style was everything. She dressed as if she lived to dress. I threw my five-year-old black cloth coat on top of the mink, pulled off the clunky boots, and donned my purple suede sandals.

  In the bathroom I brushed back a few tendrils of hair and touched up the bold red mouth. “Not bad,” I informed my reflection in the full-length mirror, but I was nervous. The image that gets me through my daily life is intellectual, serious, maybe even a little prim. Blacks, browns, dark greens, denim. Now here I was, cross-dressing as Madonna. I resisted a strong impulse to run home and change.

  I paused for a moment in the French doors that opened into the Samoorians’ large living room. The room was full of people. Irena, her blond curls up in a Lucille Ball curly do, wearing brown-and-gold leopard-skin leggings and a loose brown silk shirt, was circulating with a crystal bowl full of jumbo shrimp. Ned Hilton seemed to be deep in earnest conversation with Greg, who carried a tray. I hadn’t had dinner, and my eyes fixated on the food. Thin-sliced whole-grain bread spread with salmon mousse? Yum.

  Ned, in a sober brown tweed jacket, a cowlick of light brown hair flopping over his left eye, was listening intently as Greg spoke. I wondered if he’d heard the rumors suggesting he was Randy’s killer. If so, it was doubly brave of him to be here tonight. As a fellow suspect, I decided to make a point of talking to him.

  Avery Mitchell, with his back to me, was standing in a windowed alcove talking to Magda. As I stepped into the room, Avery turned around to survey the crowd. His eyes swept casually over me, and then swung back, as if in astonishment. For maybe five seconds—an eternity—he stared quite frankly, his mouth slightly agape. Then, abruptly, his expression became formal, his eyes hooded. He nodded at me stiffly, a polite recognition, and turned back to Magda.

  I was thrilled. I mean that literally. That brief, unguarded erotic gaze sent an electric charge through my body. Oh, woman, I told myself, you are swimming in dangerous waters here. But, for that one brief heady moment, I didn’t really care. Send in the tidal waves, I thought, send in the sharks; I am riding the riptide.

  Fortunately, however, I have always been sane. Rationality came roaring back, and I reminded myself that Avery Mitchell was off bounds, out of my league and my boss, for chrissake. The reality check, a glass of champagne to sip at, and a plastered-on smile helped me through the next few minutes until my pulse rate slowed to almost normal.

  I found Ned in the dining room pouring Glenfiddich at Greg’s improvised bar. For the moment we had the room to ourselves.

  “That looks good, Ned. Make one for me, will you?”

  He handed me the glass in his hand. “Here, take mine. Then you’ll know I haven’t put cyanide in it.” His tone was bitter. He didn’t smile.

  “People a little leery of you, are they?”

  “Aside from Greg, you’re the only person who’s initiated a conversation with me this evening. I’m obviously a pariah.” He finished pouring his drink and took a sip from the chunky glass.

  “Presumed guilty until found innocent? Yeah, me, too.” I sipped the golden liquid. Smooth. Those Scots really know their stuff.

  “You? But Randy hadn’t done anything to you.” His expression of pure hatred took me aback; I hadn’t suspected Ned of the capacity for such rage. For that brief moment I thought that if hate could kill, this fragile-looking academic was indeed capable of murder.

  “Not yet, he hadn’t,” I babbled, uncomfortable in the face of this powerful feeling. “But he was working on it.” I sipped again, not wanting to be any more specific about what “it” might be. “And, besides, I was the last one to admit to seeing him alive. My social life’s suddenly become extraordinarily limited—Greg, Earlene, Jill Greenberg.”

  “Jill’s okay. She coming tonight?” Ned had him self under control again. He seemed marginally more stable than the last time I had seen him, slumped in the doorway to Randy’s office.

  “You kidding? A party? Jill wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Then there wasn’t anything left to talk about. I was grateful when new arrivals invaded the room in search of refreshment.

  The evening elicited a few surprises, but not much that I thought worth passing on to Piotrowski. Surprise number one was Randy’s wife. With a glint of mischief in his eye, Greg steered me across the room saying, “There’s someone here I’d like you to meet, Karen.” We were heading in the direction of Miles Jewell, who sat in a capacious black leather chair deep in conversation with a young girl of about twelve. She perched on an ottoman at his feet, her small face turned up to him, rapt with attention. When we reached the pair, Miles reluctantly fell silent, and the girl arose gracefully, seemingly in deference to her elders.

  Greg introduced me formally. “Karen, I’d like you to meet Eve Astin-Berger. Eve, Karen Pelletier.”

  “Randy’s daughter?” I asked.

  The girl tittered. “No.” Her voice was high and breathless. “Randy didn’t have a daughter.” Silly, her breathy tone implied. “I’m his wife.”

  Greg’s grin grew wider as I stare
d at this apparition. She was at best little more than five feet tall and only beginning to develop, dressed in a knee-length black velvet dress with a white lace collar and a gathered skirt tied in back with a big taffeta bow. Her straight auburn hair was cut chin-length with bangs across the forehead. On her feet she wore red patent leather Mary Janes and white socks with a ruffle of lace around the cuff. The idea of this child being married to the highly-sexed Randy Astin-Berger was appalling.

  Yet there was something about her….

  In the dim party light, I looked closer, and it became apparent that Eve Astin-Berger’s presentation of herself as jeune fille was an exceedingly artful illusion. Her face was actually that of a woman in her mid-to late-thirties, slightly weathered, with crinkles around the eyes and lines etched lightly from the outside of her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. Her little-girl socks were worn over sheer stockings. She had made herself up with pale foundation, rosy childlike cheeks, a bowlike pink mouth, and wide innocent eyes. This mask of naïveté, superimposed on the experienced face, created a disconcertingly eroticized image of girlhood. At second glance it was clear that her body was not undeveloped at all. Rather, it was carefully starved and exercised, in the fashionable mode, to approximate prepubescent femininity. At second glance it was clear that the second glance was what counted. Was it possible, I wondered, that Eve Astin-Berger had, with her body, self-consciously created a commentary on femininity?

  Well, yes, as it turned out, it was more than possible. I must travel in the wrong intellectual circles; I didn’t know until that moment that Eve Astin-Berger was an up-and-coming literary theorist in the French feminist mode, which equates female writing with the female body: l’écriture feminine. Somehow I had missed her recent controversial study, T/Sex/Ts, and the op-ed piece on “Bimbos, Divas, and Drag Queens” in the New York Times. Within five minutes of meeting Eve, however, I knew all this about her—and more—because she told me, in a high girlish voice. What I didn’t know was how she felt about Randy’s death, because she never mentioned it, but it gwas safe to assume from the widow’s demeanor that she wasn’t totally devastated.

  Eve taught Literary Theory and Gender Studies at New York University. Now that her semester was over, she had come to Enfield to pack up Randy’s “effects”—as she kept calling them—and “close this chapter of the book of my life.” Hah, I thought, I’d better let Piotrowski know about this.

  “Thanks for warning me, pal.” I smacked Greg on the arm as we moved away from this faux ingenue.

  “I just wanted you to get the full impact.” Greg’s wide-eyed innocence didn’t mask his wicked grin. “Some piece of work, huh? But what else would you expect from a creep like Astin-Berger? She contacted Miles yesterday, and when he heard I was having a party he called and invited both himself and her. What could I do? Exclude widows and orphans?”

  Remembering Piotrowski’s injunction to behave normally, I left Greg and circulated among several groups of colleagues and spouses. I spotted Jill Greenberg. She was perched on the arm of an overstuffed chair looking up at Ned attentively. Her short black sleeveless dress rode high up her thighs as she crossed her long slim legs. A tattoo of a daisy decorated her left ankle, which she swung back and forth provocatively. No, Jill, I thought. Please, Jill, don’t. He’s married. He’s got two little girls. He’s depressed about being denied tenure. He can’t handle it.

  Stifling the impulse to play sex cop, I turned away. A minute or two later, Jill materialized beside me. She lightly fingered the purple silk of my jacket. “Bergdorf’s, right? I can always tell.”

  “How’re you doing, Jill?” I smiled at her. She had the wacky innocence of an Irish setter pup. Rebuking her would have been as futile as chastising a force of nature.

  “I thought I was doing okay….” She pushed a strand of curly red hair off her face. “But then Ned had to go call his wife. His kids both have chicken pox. He’s really sweet, isn’t he?” She sighed, wistfully.

  Then, in a swift change of mood, she grinned at me. “Did you see what’s going on over by the window seat?” She gestured with what she clearly thought was a discreet motion to where Avery stood with Magda, his head bowed slightly to catch the fluid murmur of her voice.

  I glanced toward them, returned Jill’s grin, and shrugged smugly. After all, I’d seen him look at me earlier. I knew what I knew.

  As the hour approached midnight the party became increasingly uninhibited. On a trip to the bathroom I inadvertently interrupted what seemed to be a fervid French kiss between two colleagues, both married to other people, both male. The heavy, sweet odor of marijuana smoke wafted from underneath a closed bedroom door. In the kitchen, a low-toned but intense squabble was taking place between Jerry Bingham from Philosophy and his red-headed wife Trudy. As I blundered in, looking for a glass of water, I heard her hiss “Who are you to be so goddamn self-righteous?” before they saw me and we were all embarrassed.

  The champagne was flowing fast, but the gossip was flowing faster. I picked up tidbits of information but nothing that seemed related to either of the murders. Miles Jewell was still being pressed by the college administration to retire from the English Department within the next year and free up the chair for someone more progressive. Margaret Smith actually had a publisher interested in reading her twenty-years-in-the-works manuscript on Emily Dickinson. Magda Vegh was returning to Budapest in the fall after five years at various elite American colleges, during which time she’d missed the entire revolution she had ostensibly been agitating for. That kind of stuff.

  The only thing that seemed even slightly relevant to the two murders was the information that Magda had known Randy in Budapest a few years ago when he was a Fulbright Fellow. I’d tell Piotrowski, but to what end I didn’t know. Could we postulate a murder of sexual revenge? Or Randy’s involvement in some smoldering Balkan feud? Neither seemed likely. I’d keep an eye on Magda, but …

  As I lined up at the buffet for my portion of beef en croûte and au gratin potatoes, Magda, in puffy peach taffeta, was still holding court in the window alcove. As always she was the center of a fascinated group of male colleagues. Avery Mitchell, I noted, was walking toward the alcove carrying two plates of food.

  I waited in line to fill my own plate and wondered, not for the first time, what it is that attracts men in droves to a woman like Magda. Maybe it’s simply animal instinct, I thought, a knowledge that she’s available and that, more than anything else in her life, she wants them. On the other hand, you have women like me, I thought virtuously, who enjoy men, but who have other interests and desires to flesh out a well-rounded and fully realized existence….

  It was close to midnight and Greg had turned the television on to the Times Square mob scene. With the ball about to drop announcing the birth of the new year, I noticed Greg put his arm around Irena and smile at her in anticipation of the New Year’s kiss. At other New Year’s Eve parties, I thought, Tony had kissed me—and kissed me and kissed me. Now I was alone, because I’d chosen to be. No, I corrected myself. Not because I’d chosen to be alone.Because I’d chosen to fulfill myself in the career for which I had prepared so long and arduously. Yes. That was it. I had not chosen to be alone; it was simply a consequence. Besides, there’d be other men, other New Year’s Eves. And I smiled a little as I remembered Avery’s brief but enthralled gaze. A rudimentary but vivid fantasy began to form.

  Then, simultaneously, three things happened: Greg’s big grandfather clock chimed midnight, the Times Square ball dropped, and Avery, holding a glass of champagne in his right hand, placed his left hand possessively on the small of Magda’s peach taffeta back, bent over her, and kissed her on the lips, lingeringly and with evident passion.

  I spilled beef gravy all down the front of my purple skirt.

  Seventeen

  EXCEPT FOR the front door light, the house was dark when I pulled into my driveway at one-thirty A.M. I turned off the motor and leaned back in the seat, my hand still on the ignit
ion key. My head was buzzing, not so much with alcohol as with a totally irrational sense of betrayal. When he kissed Magda, Avery had shattered a fantasy, nothing more—or less—than that. But I’d flushed, hot with shame, as if my humiliation were a public one rather than merely—what?—a simple correction of a romantic misapprehension? Driving home had been difficult, and now I felt too exhausted to negotiate even the short distance from the car to my front door.

  The night was clear and bitterly cold, with a scattering of intensely bright stars. Within a couple of minutes the windshield began to frost over. I knew I should make the effort to get out of the car, but pulling the key out of the ignition was about as far as I was able to go. I was lost to the world, adrift in misery and self-pity. When someone tapped on the driver’s window I barely stifled a shriek.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Pelletier.” Piotrowski opened the car door. “I didn’t mean to scare you. But when you didn’t get out of the car, I started to worry. You okay?”

  “I guess so.” Then the significance of his presence struck me. “You haven’t been hanging around here all evening yourself, have you? I thought you’d send a trooper or someone.” I felt a pang of guilt about how hard Piotrowski worked.

  “No,” In the bright moonlight I could see concern in his serious brown eyes. “I just got here a few minutes ago, after the trooper called in a suspicious vehicle.”

  “What?” I jumped out of the car so fast I would’ve collided with Piotrowski if he hadn’t taken a couple of instinctive steps backward. “What suspicious vehicle? Where are the girls? Are they okay?”

  “The young women are fine.” The lieutenant stressed young women as opposed to my retrograde use of girls. He was a fast learner. “Or at least I assume they’re fine. And sound asleep. But not for long if you keep making that racket.”