Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  And yet there he was, Malcolm getting out of that very car, then walking over to Mr. Singleton and Detective Alabrandi, offering them a friendly hand. How could I have known that it would all begin to unravel with such a decidedly unthreatening man, that it’d be his gently offered confirmation of Alabrandi’s initial suspicion that would keep the fire burning under the good detective and, by that means, keep his gimlet eyes on me. Watching the three of them stroll casually to a bench and sit down, I could almost imagine Alabrandi’s first suggestion that there might be something fishy in Sandrine’s death, Alabrandi sitting in Malcolm’s musty little town house, trying out the idea on Malcolm, waiting for his response, then infinitely pleased with what he hears, though, in fact, it was little more than a hint that perhaps all had not been peachy between Sandrine and me.

  A troubled marriage. Who doesn’t have a troubled marriage? And yet I know now that Malcolm would not have had to say any more than that to add a wolfish pointiness to Alabrandi’s ears.

  The door of the room opened.

  It was Alexandria with sandwiches and soda.

  “Nothing for me,” I told her.

  “You need to eat, Dad.”

  She sat down at the table and began to unwrap the sandwiches.

  I was still peering out the window. “You know what I miss, Alexandria? I miss the simplest things, like being able to walk around the town, go to the market.”

  “But you hate the market here,” Alexandria reminded me. “You were always complaining that it didn’t even have balsamic vinegar.”

  This was true. Still, only a few months before, I could at least have gone to the place without fear of being noticed, save by the occasional stray faculty member or faculty spouse of Coburn College. But since Sandrine’s death I’d become a local celebrity. My picture had been in the paper and I’d been the subject of numerous local television reports. I’d even been the unidentified subject of Jesse Bloom’s radio talk show, the subjunctive-deprived topic for the day having been: If your spouse was planning to murder you, would you see the warning signs? The show had generated a lively discussion from Bloom’s phone-in audience, some of whom felt certain that they’d have been able to figure out if their spouses were planning to kill them, others who—rather sadly, I thought—admitted they were not so sure. I remember a woman quite distinctly, the vaguely broken and self-accusatory tone in her voice, saying, My husband has deceived me so often and in so many ways I’m sure I’d be dead before I had a clue. As for me, I’d been quite certain I would have seen any sign of such a lethal intention in Sandrine. Surely she would have betrayed herself in some way, a look or word that would have tipped me off.

  Yet was it not possible that I’d never really seen how much her feelings for me had changed over the years, never had the slightest inkling she might actually want me dead?

  “Dad,” Alexandria said, this time more sharply and with a quick nod toward the sandwiches. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  I joined her at the table and took a small bit of the sandwich. “Bad stuff is on the way,” I said. “With Alabrandi, I mean.”

  “Nothing I don’t already know,” Alexandria said.

  Ah, but there was a great deal my daughter didn’t know, and on that recognition I thought of April Blankenship in her pale blue dress, Clayton’s neglected wife. She’d never expected much in the way of notoriety, and she’d certainly been unprepared to be drawn into a murder case.

  It was at the town park I could no longer visit that I’d had that fateful meeting with April. I’d seen her before, of course, while shopping and also at various Coburn College functions. When it came to food shopping, she was a meticulous squeezer of fruit, as I’d observed in earlier produce market encounters. Her smile was so small as to be almost invisible, and I’d instantly pegged her for one of those needy faculty wives so often caricatured in films and books, tortured by longing, but afraid of her own shadow. In all of this, as it turned out, I’d unfortunately been right.

  With these thoughts, I felt myself drift back down bad-memory lane, this time to a summer day in the town park, I with the latest award-winning novel, turning the pages slowly, admiringly, wishing I’d written what I read. Leslie Stephen had once said that genius is mostly a matter of taking the trouble, but with rewrite after rewrite of “The Pull of the Earth” I’d learned that this was not exactly so. Years had passed since the last of those efforts, of course, the one Sandrine had so soundly criticized, increasingly resentful years, as I’d privately acknowledged, and which, by the time April appeared in the town park on that summer day, had caused me to ridicule my own past efforts as, well . . . an enormous waste of time.

  What are you thinking?

  Such had been April’s question as she found herself standing before me that afternoon, her thin, faintly freckled arms holding a striped folding chair like a shield over her breast.

  “I wasn’t thinking much about anything,” I told her. “Just reading.” I nodded toward the book. “This year’s NBA winner.”

  “Oh,” April said, clearly having no idea what the initials NBA stood for.

  “Is it good?”

  “It’s okay,” I answered. “At least it got published.”

  “That’s nice,” April said. “It’s important to publish, Clayton says.”

  Some women give off sparks and some sprout beads of mother’s milk. The latter should be nuns or nurses of the old school, comforters to those wounded in the soul or on the battlefield. They are an eternal type, and they almost always attract the perfect man to use and then discard them. In love’s labor, they always lose, and I had known more than one of them before April stood over me that day in the park, clutching the tiny folding chair as if it were the baby she had always wanted but never had.

  In the past, I’d resisted such women, but on that day, reading that book, a man in his mid-forties whose last creative juices had long turned to dust, I’d suddenly felt a need to play a dangerous game, embrace the thrill of folly, skate, as it were, on the only stretch of thin ice that lay immediately before me, pale, wintry April.

  “I guess you read all the time,” she said admiringly.

  “I’m sure Clayton does the same,” I replied.

  She nodded softly. “But his eyes are going.” A tiny smile flickered briefly, then disappeared. “It happens, you know.” She added shyly, “When you’re old.”

  I knew that compared to leathery old Clayton I surely looked to April like Hercules, a middle-aged man with a straight spine and eyes that could still read the small print.

  “Yes, that’s part of the deal, isn’t it?” I asked gently as I got to my feet and faced her.

  She nodded again but said nothing.

  “But it’s a bad deal,” I added softly. “Isn’t it?”

  She nodded yet again, and like a seducer in a pulp novel tugging at the button of a maiden’s bodice, I drew that garishly striped lawn chair from April’s arms.

  “A very bad deal,” I said. “For you.”

  She looked up and her eyes turned liquid, and right there, right then, as she pressed her face into my chest and began to sob, I thought, She’s mine, and felt as heartless a surge of vanity and power as I had ever known.

  Alexandria knew nothing about this, of course, so I kept silent and simply watched as she ate her sandwich in the same pleasureless way she’d been doing since her mother’s death. Like me, she’d lost weight as well as a good deal of her sparkle.

  “You don’t have to come to court every day, you know,” I told her.

  She took a small bite of her sandwich. “It would make a bad impression if I weren’t here. It would look like I thought you did it.” She smiled but not warmly. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m loyal.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder if by this profession of loyalty Alexandria was hinting at her moral superi
ority to me, one she has a right to feel. After all, in betraying Sandrine I’d also betrayed her. It is part of the old problem of parenthood, the need to be hypocritical, to espouse values you do not practice because not to do so will expose your children to the withering winds of moral ambiguity. And who can stand in those?

  I didn’t say any of this, of course, because it would open up the deep wounds that have not healed in my daughter, and probably never will. Instead I asked my usual question. “How do you think it’s going so far today?”

  “Okay,” Alexandria answered. “Nothing Morty can’t deal with when the time comes to defend you.”

  “That part about my calling it a suicide note, you don’t think that was damaging?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s hard to know. You were under a lot of stress. And Mom had done it, hadn’t she? It was a suicide, so why wouldn’t you think the last thing she wrote would have been a suicide note?”

  “Of course, they’re saying it wasn’t a suicide,” I reminded her. “That’s why there is a trial in the first place. They think it was a murder.”

  She stared at me with unwavering eyes. “But it wasn’t,” she said, in a way that made it clear she had no wish to discuss it further.

  And so we moved on to other subjects. I told her about an earlier exchange with Morty, how I’d mentioned the narrator of The Stranger, the fact that he’d then warned me away from such pedantic literary allusions. After that, we briefly fell silent, and then she talked a little about her work, first her job at the literary agency then, to supplement that income, a second job in which she churns out what she calls “content” for an online magazine devoted to celebrity mishaps and malfeasance. She has lately been following the descent of an aging female rocker, a former flower child whose Haight-Asbury antics and girl-with-the-band beddings had once been chronicled in Rolling Stone magazine but whose present troubles are of interest only to the invisible online readers of sleeplesseye.com. Rumor has it that either a botched plastic surgery or a reaction to some drug has emulsified her nose.

  “Creepy stuff like that,” Alexandria told me. “We’re read mostly by insomniacs. It’s not great literature.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said. “There is a letter from a girl who has no nose in Miss Lonelyhearts. And that’s great literature.”

  She stared at me silently.

  “It’s by Nathanael West.”

  Her smile hung like a frayed string. “Just be sure you do like Morty says, Dad,” she warned me, “and don’t bring elitist stuff like that up when you take the stand.”

  “It’s elitist to read Nathanael West?” I asked with a light chuckle. “Christ what a low culture we have now.”

  “Which is what I work for, is that what you’re saying?”

  “I wasn’t aware of saying anything of the kind.”

  “Sleeplesseye, I mean,” Alexandria said. “Low culture.”

  “Those are your words, not mine.”

  “No, they’re your words actually.”

  “Perhaps, but—”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” she interrupted sharply. “I know I’m not a tenured professor. And, you know, I’d like to find myself, okay? I’d like to discover something I really want to do, but I haven’t, Dad. I haven’t. I’m adrift, okay? Can we agree on that?”

  “Alexandria . . .”

  She waved her hand like a blade, cutting off the subject. “Really, Dad,” she said, her voice now quite soft. “It’s okay.” She passed her fingers over the surface of the table in the way I’d once seen Sandrine pass hers over the small indentions of our copper sink, a gentle, tender probing. “So let’s drop it, okay?”

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said, after which there was another silence, this one longer.

  During that silence I found myself returning to the final day of Sandrine’s life, the interval between our last heated battle and when Alexandria had returned to have her last conversation with her mother. Before, I’d avoided any discussion of what they’d talked about, but now, following some curious impulse, I wanted to know.

  “That evening when you were with your mother—that last ­evening—the one the day she died, did she talk about us?”

  “Us . . . meaning?”

  “Your mother and me.”

  “Not specifically,” Alexandria answered. “But she talked about marriage.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said it was like a boxing match,” Alexandria answered. “Between round one and round ten, you swing at each other a lot. But you both have this hope that at some point the bell will ring, and there’ll be peace, and the struggle will have been worth it. And so you stay in the ring because you want to make it to that round-ten bell.”

  It was as discomfiting a view of marriage as I’d ever heard, and it was hard for me to imagine that Sandrine had thought of ours in such unhappy terms, and yet, like all the evidence in my case, it offered a certain undeniable if circumstantial proof that she had thought of our life together in just that bleak and cheerless way.

  “I’m sorry if any of that bothers you, Dad,” Alexandria said when she caught the downcast expression on my face. “But you asked.”

  “Yes, I did ask,” I replied softly.

  There was another silence after that, this one longer than the previous two, and during which I could feel Alexandria’s eyes upon me like two hot beams.

  “Do you think you would have made it, you and Mom?” she asked. “To round ten, I mean, if Mom hadn’t died?”

  I thought of how Sandrine had often tossed and turned in bed, how she had sometimes risen in the middle of the night, tiptoed to the scriptorium to read, her gaze darkly quizzical when she glanced up to find me at her door. Once, I’d asked her what she was thinking about, expecting her to speak about the book she was reading. But she’d said only, “Our school,” by which she’d no doubt meant the dream she had voiced while we were still in New York but hardly even mentioned after we’d taken our jobs at Coburn. When I’d only shrugged at this answer, she’d quietly returned to her book, though later that night she seemed particularly restless, moving about the house, reading awhile, then listening to music, then reading again.

  Since her death I’ve found myself plagued by a similar restlessness because the question of what Sandrine sought in the middle of the night will not let me go. I think of our first days, our tour of the ancient world, those few spectacular weeks in Paris, playing the expatriate game, then our settling down here in dear old Coburn, and through all those memories Sandrine remains the same. Then, rather suddenly, she wasn’t the same at all.

  “Your mother changed after she got sick,” I said to Alexandria.

  “In what way?”

  “She became more distant.”

  “Distant?” Alexandria asked. “Really? She didn’t seem that way to me at all. Frankly, you’re the one who seemed more distant.”

  “I did?”

  “Well, what would you call it?” Alexandria asked. “You hardly ever came out to the gazebo to sit with Mom. You avoided the room where she went to read.”

  “The scriptorium.”

  Alexandria shook her head. “She hated that name for it, by the way,” she informed me. “She said you gave it that name when you first moved here because you thought you were both going to write great books there.”

  “That’s true, I did,” I admitted.

  “But Mom didn’t want to write a book, Dad,” Alexandria said. “That was your idea, not hers.”

  This was also true, as I now freely admitted. Sandrine had never intended to write a great book, or any book at all, for that matter. I’d tried to blame her failure to do so at the feet of her unaccountable devotion to Coburn College, those interminable private sessions with its mediocre students, more often teaching them the rudiments of literac
y than anything more august. It was a lowly, remedial form of education I’d once ridiculed as “the lofty heights of subject-verb agreement,” to which my firm and passionate wife had fired back, “I will be what they need me to be, Sam, not what you need me to be.”

  And what they’d needed her to be was a teacher, not an author, as Sandrine had fully understood.

  “You’re probably right, Alexandria,” I said quietly. “Your mother was never ambitious in that way.”

  Alexandria shrugged. “Anyway, wherever Mom was, in whatever room, you didn’t go there.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted. “But there was a reason for it. Your mother had gotten more difficult, more hard to read, and there was this heat coming from her.”

  I stopped, reluctant to go further, then felt the sharp point of a dread Morty had mentioned earlier, the fact that Alexandria might know about that last argument, which was reason enough for me now to be proactive.

  “So it really didn’t surprise me that last night when she just went crazy,” I said.

  Alexandria’s gaze suddenly grew more intense and I could see something pent-up and explosive gathering in her mind. “Don’t try to put the blame on Mom.” She looked at me quite sternly. “Don’t try to paint Mom as the mad woman in the attic, Dad, because she wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t say she was the—”

  “Just so you know, Dad,” she interrupted, her voice very firm, “if you and Morty come up with some way of blaming Mom, you can both go fuck yourselves.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m not trying to—”

  “Haven’t you done enough to her,” Alexandria said sharply. “Haven’t you done enough to hurt her?” Her lips trembled. “She’s dead, okay? Isn’t that enough?”