Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  Sandrine had looked up from this literary dustbin, her head cocked slightly, so that I thought some phrase from the Pavarotti aria playing in the background had suddenly struck her. But the thought that had occurred to her had had to do with Pavarotti’s person, rather than his song.

  “It’s said that Pavarotti once asked his teacher what it took to be a great singer,” Sandrine said. “The teacher answered that it was ninety percent great singing. But that the final ten percent, the part that lifted great competence to grandeur, was something else.”

  “Really?” I said. “And what was this something else?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think it would still be there, even if he didn’t sing.”

  The topic of this conversation was way too abstract or magical or just plain woo-woo for my thinking, and more or less to bring it to its conclusion I said, “So it could never go missing, I suppose.”

  “No, it could go missing,” Sandrine said. She leaned forward and snapped off the music. “The question is whether it could be gotten back.”

  I quickly ran back the calendar, and it was clear that Sandrine and I had had this exchange only a few days after she’d gotten Dr. Ortins’s diagnosis, obviously a time during which she’d been going through a very difficult time, the “thinking things through” she’d earlier spoken of.

  The snap of Morty’s briefcase brought me back to the present.

  “Alexandria’s waiting,” he said.

  Dinner

  I headed down the stairs and got into the car, but this time I made no effort to engage Alexandria in conversation and so we’d gone all the way home in near silence.

  “Go in and relax,” she told me as she pulled into the driveway. “I’ll bring in the groceries.”

  I did as I was told, and to aid in the relaxation I opened a bottle of wine and walked into the kitchen, where for some minutes I was lost in undefined and inchoate thoughts, shards of memory whirling about like bits of paper in a mental storm.

  “Drinking already?” Alexandria asked after she’d gotten a whiff of my breath. “You haven’t even had dinner yet, Dad.”

  “It was a stressful day,” I answered by way of explanation.

  “There are going to be days a lot more stressful than today,” Alexandria responded.

  She looked at me as if I were a shark fin she’d glimpsed in the distance, something scary moving slowly but inexorably toward her. I couldn’t help but wonder if she were thinking that now might perhaps be a good time to get out of the water.

  Rather than face so final an abandonment, I began to unpack one of the grocery bags she’d lugged in from the car. She’d bought fruit and vegetables and several salmon fillets, all very sensible. She’d obviously noticed that I had begun to go to seed, everything sagging as if invisible weights hung from my cheeks and jaw and eyebrows.

  She made no comment about this, however, but simply and quite methodically began to put away the groceries.

  “You can cut the zucchini,” she said.

  I drew a kitchen knife from one of the drawers and went to work. For an instant she looked at the blade warily, as if it were the pistol introduced in Act I and thus must inevitably reappear before the curtain falls.

  “Not too thick,” she instructed.

  She is very methodical, my now half-orphaned daughter. The vege­tables go into the vegetable bin. The bread goes into the breadbox. Our domestic chaos taught her to value design, it would seem. She has seen the whirlwind that disorder sows, and she will have none of it in her life, not even in the buttons and the bread.

  She is right, save in one thing, I decided, the fact that moderation is possible, even in disarray. One can know, as Jean Cocteau once noted—this yet another learned reference stolen from Sandrine—how far to go too far. But where along time’s famed continuum, I asked myself, should I have reined in the tiny nipping angers and frustrations that were ceaselessly tearing at me? And had Sandrine seen that, although outwardly calm, on the inside I was a thrashing pool of piranha?

  Time now hurtled backward, as it had when I’d stood on the courthouse steps with Morty, and I found myself in the NYU library reading, of all things, Paul Verlaine, no doubt to impress Sandrine.

  She glanced at the book as she came toward me. “Paul Verlaine threw his three-year-son against a wall,” she said, “during an argument with his wife.”

  I closed the book. “I didn’t know that.”

  Sandrine’s dark eyes were motionless. “You would never get that angry with me, would you, Sam?”

  “No,” I said. “There would have to be something missing in a man to do something as cruel as that.”

  “Something missing, yes,” Sandrine said.

  Had she sensed that missing thing in me, I wondered, sensed it or something worse, actually saw it with devastating clarity as I faced her in the scriptorium all those years later, casually brushing off an anecdote from the life of Pavarotti while the sword of Damocles swung closer to her by the day?

  “Dad?”

  Alexandria was looking at me oddly because the knife in my hand had suddenly gone deathly still.

  “You’ve stopped cutting,” Alexandria said.

  “Oh, sorry,” I explained. “Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Your mother’s mind,” I said with an infinitely fragile smile. “How knowing she was.”

  She looked at me sourly. Such talk only irritated her now and in her eyes made me seem hopelessly oblivious to how things had turned out.

  “Finish cutting the zucchini,” she told me.

  I remembered the earlier conversation I’d had with Morty, his questions about Alexandria’s whereabouts on the day Sandrine died, and particularly the nature of any conversation they might have had. For a moment, I thought of asking her outright about that conversation, but I stopped myself because I feared that Sandrine had, in fact, told her all the hateful things she’d said to me, and I was in no mood to hear them repeated.

  A few minutes later we ate dinner in the same nearly unspeaking way in which we’d earlier driven home from the courthouse, and after that I retreated to the scriptorium with a glass of wine.

  At around ten I returned to the kitchen and put the glass in the copper sink. It was an old sink, hand hammered, and it had the rough, uneven texture of things made by hand. I’d barely noticed it until the ­afternoon—this now two weeks after the consultation with Dr. Ortins—I’d come upon Sandrine standing before it, peering into its battered basin. She’d looked quite lovely, framed by the window, her dark hair flowing down her back. But I’d long ago gotten used to her beauty so that was not what stopped me. Rather, it was the way she’d reached down and run her fingertips over the pits and gouges as if she were seeking something precious within them, a tiny jewel of some sort, minuscule as gold dust.

  I’d assumed that she was thinking about her illness, the horrid way it would progress, all the powers that were at that very moment diminishing and would continue to diminish until they disappeared entirely. There really is a sorrow beyond words, and I suspected that in reaching into that copper basin Sandrine was touching that deep place.

  When she sensed my presence, she turned and faced me. “I’ve made my decision,” she said.

  I’d felt quite certain I knew exactly what that decision was, and had felt, God forgive me, a surge of relief that she had made it, that she would not put herself—or me—through years and years of grim decline.

  But now, rethinking this scene, feeling the ghost of Sandrine’s hands on my face, recalling the dark glint in her eyes as she made this announcement, I no longer felt so sure that I knew what her fateful decision had been, or even if it had been about herself at all.

  How long the nights have become without her, I thought suddenly, or with her only in my memo
ry, only as a ghost. If she were here, I realized with a truly tragic irony, I would discuss my case with her, go over all that led up to it, all that has been discovered as a result of it, and where it all might end. During the slowly moving hours I would describe the little quakes that have shaken me during these few days of my trial, along with what they have revealed about the woman for whose murder I stand accused, how this grave accounting has returned me to those first years with her.

  On that thought, I abruptly remembered a morning in Antibes. The day before we’d been at Neapolis, in Siracusa, where we’d tested the famed acoustics of the Ear of Dionysius. Sandrine had thought the story of Dionysius having been able to hear his slaves hatching plots against him by means of their voices bouncing off the exposed stone quite unlikely, and she’d been right. I’d stood at the point said to be perfect for transferring sound to that tyrant’s hearing and whispered, “I’m going to kill you,” and Sandrine, stationed at the king’s listening post, had heard no word of murder.

  Remembered joy is a heartbreaker, especially when the long view holds future tragedy, but at that moment I found myself quite rejoicing in this memory of Sandrine, the sweet life we’d led in those early days.

  Thinking of that distant time returned me to music, and for a moment I considered putting on a CD and playing Sandrine’s favorite piece, “Air on a G String,” a musical title that, given its inherent double entendre, she’d always found rather funny. But simple as it is, Bach’s little air is decidedly classical, and so I recalled Morty’s caution, and I wondered what might be the effect should some errant member of the jury pass within hearing distance of my house. Would those gentle, meditative tones be detrimental to my case, further proof of my elitism, my snobbery, the ethical morass into which my life was sunk, and which, taken collectively, had created a man so lacking in moral boundaries that he could easily slide into murder? I could almost hear the cautionary didacticism that would emerge from any of my so-called peers’ consideration of all this, the fact that life is not a mountain or a valley but the slippery slope that leads from the heights of one to the depths of the other. I knew they’d put it just that way, use me as an example of how badly a life can go wrong.

  The doorbell rang.

  When I opened the door, he smiled.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  I looked at my neighbor Carl Santori and saw the product of his many ailments. He has lost one kidney and has had bypass surgery, and for these reasons I had certainly expected to outlive him. This is an expectation I can no longer entertain, however. In the words of Mr. Singleton: “The plot was too cruelly premeditated and carried out over too long a time not to warrant death.”

  “Honestly, Carl, I never know,” I answered.

  Carl nodded softly. He has dropped by once a week since Sandrine’s death, always, as now, with a hot meal from his restaurant: spaghetti, manicotti, eggplant rollatini. We have been neighbors for eleven years. His life has been seasoned by misfortune. Along with his own poor health he has known widowhood, and his son, now fourteen, has never been well. We’ve borrowed tools from each other and from time to time had short conversations about nothing I could later recall, but it was the night I’d quite by accident saved his son’s life that had turned acquaintance into friendship, at least in Carl’s mind.

  On that particular night, he had suddenly gotten the idea that he’d left one of the restaurant ovens on and had rushed to his car. He was barreling toward the street when I noticed his son, Anthony, facedown in the driveway. He’d had one of his seizures, and at that instant it was clear to me that he lay directly in the path of Carl’s car. As anyone else would have done, I bolted for Anthony, swooped him up, and dove, with the boy in my arms, into the safety of the adjoining yard just in time to miss the right rear bumper of Carl’s Saturn. We were still on the ground when Carl rushed over to us. He leaped from the car without first putting it in gear so that it had continued on down the driveway and rammed into the brick mailbox at the end of it. Carl had seen none of this, however. He was focused on Anthony. We both immediately dashed over to my car and rushed him to the local hospital, where he’d quickly recovered.

  Anyone would have done what I did but Carl thought it heroic, and from that moment on he pledged to be my friend eternally. Since Sandrine’s death, with his visits and his gifts of steaming Italian food, he has proven to be just that.

  “I put in some garlic bread,” he said.

  “Thank you, Carl.”

  “Enjoy,” he said as he pressed the bag toward me.

  He had always been deeply inarticulate, and the trouble I was in had only made him more so. Even under normal circumstances he would have had little to say. Now every word seemed the product of a long travail.

  Carl eased away from me as if to the sound of a ticking bomb.

  “Well, good night, Sam.”

  “Good night, Carl.”

  He seemed to dissolve almost instantly, leaving me alone and staring at the bag of food he’d brought me.

  Normally I’d at least have a taste of that garlic bread, but at that moment I had no appetite for anything. In fact, encased within the bleakness of this occasion, I wondered if I’d ever have a taste for anything again. Whatever the food, it would remind me of Sandrine. If it were Middle Eastern I’d think of our few days in Istanbul. If it were French I’d think of her in Paris. If it were Italian I’d think of strolling the streets of Rome with her or swimming with her in Capri. Or would I think of Venice, drifting beneath the Bridge of Sighs, that storied kiss. Some years later, I’d asked her quite seriously if she thought that moment would perhaps be that the one she would most remember about our Mediterranean trip. Her answer had been swift and sure. No, she’d said, her gaze very soft and loving, that will be Albi.

  Albi, I thought now, where that candle had come from. Albi, the page she dogeared in the travel book she’d taken to her bed on that last night.

  “You really should try to get some sleep, Dad.”

  I turned to find Alexandria standing a few feet away, backlit and motionless, a figure that struck me quite suddenly as rather sinister, a woman in the house who was not Sandrine. My daughter, yes, as I realized quite achingly, but even so a woman I did not actually know.

  “A long day tomorrow, remember?” she added.

  “I remember,” I said quietly. “Okay, I’ll go to bed very soon. You should get some sleep yourself.”

  She nodded, turned, then disappeared in the same ghostly way as Carl had vanished moments before.

  I put the food Carl had brought me in the refrigerator, then washed, brushed my teeth, went to the toilet, and finally, with no alternative, crawled into bed.

  It was late but I couldn’t get to sleep. Alexandria was right. Tomorrow would be a long day. I had seen the witness list and so I knew that as of tomorrow the case against me would build steadily and grow more sinister.

  I grabbed the remote and turned on the television.

  On the screen, a beautiful young actress was talking to a middle-aged late-night host about her new movie. In the film she played a comic book character rather than a person.

  “Is it easier to be a comic book character than a human being?” the host asked her in the slightly mischievous bad-boy way of late night hosts.

  Surprisingly, the young actress appeared somewhat troubled by the question. A hint of gravity appeared in her eyes, as if she’d glimpsed the looming approach of a force bent on killing her.

  “Safer,” she said.

  Well, that much is true, I thought, then glanced over to the bureau where Sandrine had kept her scarves and blouses along with the faded jeans and floppy sweatshirts she’d often worn around the house. Beautiful women are even more beautiful, as Willa Cather once observed, in a state of dishabille. This had certainly been true of Sandrine, a fact made entirely evident by the photo tha
t rested in a little chrome frame on top of this same bureau, and which showed her sitting on the steps of the Coburn College library.

  I was still drifting in the remembered beauty of those early days when Alexandria tapped at my door.

  “It’s one-thirty, Dad,” she informed me. “You really should go to bed.”

  “Sleep is for the dull,” I said, knowing quite well that there would be little sleep for me that night.

  “Whatever,” Alexandria muttered.

  The bedroom door was closed but I could hear her step away and move on down the corridor to her room. I couldn’t see the expression on her face, of course, but I knew it was sour. She had previously made it clear that I was one of those people who always had an answer, and I had to admit that for most of my life I had, in fact, always had one. But since my trial it seems that I’d had only questions for which I can find no answers, though I continued to feel that they were there waiting for me, these answers, and that I would eventually find them. In one of Sandrine’s unpublished essays, she wrote that there should be no distinction between questions for the head and questions for the heart because no compelling answer could be offered to either without giving voice to both.

  Sociopath.

  Her voice sounded so clearly in my mind at that moment that I actually spun around, as if expecting to see her standing before me as she had that night, her eyes aflame as she’d reached for that white cup.

  Sociopath.

  Perhaps she’d been right, I told myself, as I twisted around and turned off the light. Perhaps I am even now strangely disconnected to the very events that are most critical to my life, and thus increasingly hard-pressed to defend myself against the many charges made against me. The only thing about Catholicism that ever made sense to Sandrine was the confessional, and in this she was right. More, perhaps even more than someone to love and love us back, we need someone to whom we can tell the unvarnished truth about ourselves. That is what I found myself missing most at that moment as I stared into the darkness. What I missed more than ever, and would forever miss, was simply and irreducibly Sandrine, her heartbreaking truths, the way she’d released the last of them like an arrow into darkness.