It's Not About Sex

by David Kalergis

  “My God, James!” Lennie said, as I burst into his studio. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  Sweat was running down my face, and I was breathing so hard I couldn’t speak.

  Lennie left his work and, taking me by the arm, led me to a chair, into which I lowered myself gratefully. His irritation at the interruption vanished, and he looked truly alarmed.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Another dead body . . . off the Outer Loop.”

  “An accident on Millbrook School Road? Have you called an ambulance?”

  “It’s too late. She’s been dead for days.”

  “Oh, my God!” said Lennie. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Tamara! She’s at the bottom of a well. I can’t see her clearly, but I can smell her. Ray killed her, and probably Lars too!”

  Lennie’s face took on an exasperated expression. He had crouched by the chair next to me, but now he stood up quickly and walked back to the easel where he’d been working.

  “Get ahold of yourself, Bradley.”

  He’d have to be shown before he’d believe me.

  “Bring a flashlight,” I said. “See for yourself.”

  “Bradley, I don’t know what you smell, but it’s not Tamara. She’s at her sister’s. And Ray didn’t kill Lars. Mario did. The prosecutor has offered him a deal—he’s pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter.”

  My face grew hotter, and I used my sleeve to mop sweat from my brow as I tried to gain control of my emotions. Lennie continued to stare as I struggled to explain.

  “Yesterday I learned frightening things about Ray from his sister,” I said. “Did you know why he was kicked out of that school? He didn’t just borrow a car—he stabbed the headmaster with a pair of scissors.”

  “I know about that,” said Lennie. “It was a misunderstanding. No one was badly hurt.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “I don’t know what you heard, but you need to get a grip.”

  Let him get upset with me, I thought. I wasn’t willing to continue playing his game of denial. There had to be more than endless misunderstandings behind the violence that followed Ray.

  “There is somebody in that well, Lennie, and I think it’s Tamara. I’m calling Detective Ritter right now.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Suppose you’ve made a mistake. I saw Tamara myself a few days ago, before she left for her sister’s. She wouldn’t have had a chance to rot that quickly in this temperature—now, would she? You’ll look foolish.”

  I tried to picture what I’d seen at the bottom of the well, and couldn’t, with any assurance, swear to the image. But there was no forgetting the stench. How long does it take for a body to smell like that?

  “It’s been a bit warmer,” I said. “There’s something dead in there.”

  “Why don’t we take a look for ourselves? Wait here while I get a flashlight.”

  Maybe Lennie was right. Maybe I was being premature to call the police. It was a very putrid smell. We needed to know what was in the well; otherwise we might come across as hysterical. I nodded my agreement.

  “Don’t go anywhere or talk to anyone. Okay?”

  I nodded again and he left for the kitchen. He returned minutes later, carrying a flashlight and a coil of flat nylon rope with metal hooks on each end.

  “What’s the rope for, Lennie?”

  “It’s a tow rope from the Wagoneer, in case we need to climb into the well.”

  Arguing with him wouldn’t do any good. Once he’d taken a whiff, he’d know that neither of us would be climbing down anywhere. We slipped out of the house and walked in silence to the Outer Loop, then made the turn to the abandoned house site and the old cistern. I had removed the boards from the opening earlier this morning, and the smell had dissipated, but the stench was still powerful enough to gag anyone who tried to look inside. Lennie recoiled at first, then held his breath and shone the light into the shaft.

  I leaned to look along with him, but he had already straightened up and handed me the flashlight.

  “See for yourself,” he said.

  I took a breath and leaned over the well, shining the light on the bottom. The beam settled on a decomposing dog, its teeth bared in a perpetual snarl as it lay among a pile of bones and other debris.

  “It’s Baron,” I said.

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Not exactly. He belongs to the new neighbors. Stanley and Mrs. Scharpe. He followed us to Schoolcross that day we visited Harkaway.”

  “But it’s clearly not Tamara, is it? Bradley, what in the name of God is going on with you? Do you have a bizarre grudge against Ray because he saved your life? You were being mugged!”

  Without waiting for a response, he turned back to the well.

  “Shine the light down there again,” he said. “I see something else.”

  Baron’s body lay on top of other long-dead carcasses. Lennie unfurled the tow rope into the well and moved it around a bit. When he pulled it up, a little dog collar—obviously not Baron’s—dangled from the hook.

  “‘My name is Lucy,’” I read from one of its tags. “‘If I am found, please return me to Heather Daniels.’” It gave a Millbrook address and phone number. The dog license had expired five years ago.

  “This is Claude Rhodes’s work, I’m sure,” said Lennie. “For years we’ve been getting calls from neighbors that their dogs have vanished. Now I know where he puts them.”

  “Why would he do such a thing?” I asked.

  “He’s afraid they’ll kill his fighting chickens. It’s another Schoolcross tradition. The English gentry do it this way, I’m told. They worship their own dogs, but their staff will shoot any stray that comes on to the property.”

  “It says, ‘My name is Lucy.’ Hardly a stray.”

  He shrugged. “Hardly Tamara, either. Aren’t you the least embarrassed about this? Or about accusing Ray of killing Lars, when Mario is pleading guilty?”

  “Lennie, we need to talk. I admit I was wrong about Tamara. But will you listen with an open mind?”

  We were still standing near the well, and we moved away from the odor. The wind had picked up, and the temperature was dropping.

  “Of course,” he said. “Will you please tell me what this is all about?”

  “Let’s walk while we talk,” I suggested.

  As we followed the trail from the clearing through the woods, I again told Lennie my misgivings about Ray. Not just how quick he’d been to stick the knife into Raider, but about my conversations with Dr. Freeman and with Ray’s sister. I told him again of Lars’s anger the night that he had found Mario in the studio with Ray, and of Tamara’s taunting Ray about the bloody sleeve. Lennie wasn’t persuaded.

  “The shock of what happened in New York the other night has addled you,” he said. “You haven’t told me anything about Ray that I don’t already know. Mario has confessed. And we know how the blood got on Ray’s sleeve. He was protecting himself—and you. Yes, he had problems as a child and as a teenager. He went to prison for it and served fifteen years. We all knew that.”

  As we neared the Big House, he stopped walking.

  “Is there something else you need to tell me?”

  Perhaps he knew more than I’d assumed. I was thinking of Ray and Nora asleep together, and about Ray’s anger when I’d warned him that the two of them were playing with fire.

  “There is something I haven’t told you,” I said.

  “Is it your argument with Ray after you made those accusations about him and Nora? Because she’s told me the whole story.”

  “Wait a minute, Lennie. I didn’t make any accusations. Tamara and I walked in on them together asleep.”

  “They were fully clothed, right?” said Lennie.

  “Yes . . .”

  He was getting fired up by his own self-righteousness now.

  “And Ray had been upset at the thought of going back to Lorton, and Nora had tried to comfort him. They
explained all this to you, didn’t they? Because they made what happened that afternoon clear to me. No wonder Ray wanted to move out. He thinks you’ve gone insane.”

  “Lennie, it seemed like such a risky situation—not so much for me, but for you, and for your marriage.”

  “I understand, Bradley. I’ve been through a divorce myself, and I know how the trauma can upset a man’s judgment. You start projecting fears about your own wife onto other women and believing all sorts of incredible things.”

  His voice was rising, and I stood there staring at him as his anger grew.

  “I am very upset about one thing, though,” he continued, “and that’s the way you’ve been talking about my wife. Didn’t you predict that she’d be ‘on the floor doing the nasty’ with Ray? Tell me those aren’t the exact words you used.”

  Despite all my protestations, Lennie’s mind was made up. Everything was my fault. The only concession he’d make in his damning judgment was that my reasoning must be distorted by some shameful secret in my own marriage. The conversation was one of the most humiliating of my life, and when it was over, we parted, furious at each other, without saying good-bye.

  Back at the Quaker Cottage, I stretched out on the bed, fully clothed and still wearing my shoes. Despair engulfed me as I tallied the year’s losses: my wife and daughter, my apartment, all my new friendships, the opportunities with Ray and Lennie in my business. How had my life gone so wrong?

  When I woke to the sound of knocking on my bedroom door, light was still coming in the window and the clock on the bedside table read three-thirty. I lurched out of bed and unlocked the bedroom door. I had forgotten to lock the front door, and Lennie was now standing, slump-shouldered, in the hall outside my bedroom. He looked stricken. I gathered clothes off the armchair to give him a place to sit.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said.

  “Has something happened, Lennie? You look awful.”

  He was ashen and looked much older than when I’d left him that morning. After sinking into the chair he leaned forward slowly, placing his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands.

  “I may have made a monumental mistake bringing Ray to Schoolcross. I know you warned me, but I couldn’t hear you this morning. The truth was too frightening to admit as a possibility. Now . . .”

  “Now what?”

  “Tamara is dead!”

  “Oh, my God, Lennie!”

  “She never made it to Connecticut. Her sister called, worried. When I went into the Buttons, I found her hanging from a beam. It’s horrible, unbelievable.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Of course! They say it looks like suicide. She has a history of depression, you know. She’d been off her medication. But there’s more. I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been.”

  “What else happened?”

  He sighed deeply and shook his head.

  “After I found Tamara and called the police, I ran to the stable to look for Nora because I thought she might be putting her horse away . . .” He took a deep breath before continuing. “. . . and when I got there I looked in through the big sliding doors. She and Ray were standing in the aisle. The sun was shining in through the other door, behind them, and they were backlit so they looked like silhouettes, but silhouettes surrounded by sunlight.”

  “They were talking in a soft, intimate way and didn’t notice me. It was so obvious by their body language and the sound of their voices. I knew that your warning was true. And I couldn’t see them—they were silhouettes.” His voice was hollow. “Three people are dead! I brought the killer into my home, and he and my wife have fallen in love.”

  “Lennie, Lennie, that’s too dramatic. You’re getting carried away.”

  I couldn’t think of a more accurate description of the events, but I found myself taking the other point of view, for his sake.

  “This thing between Ray and Nora is only an infatuation,” I said. “The attraction will pass.”

  He’d risen from the chair and was pacing the room now.

  “This is all my fault,” he said, ignoring me. “Nora was so upset when Ray broke his nose. I should have known then that there was more between them.”

  “Well, you’re the one who insisted we take Ray riding that morning. Nora didn’t want him to come. Anyway, none of this means Ray had anything to do with Lars’s or Tamara’s deaths.”

  He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. “No more rationalizing!” he yelled. “I don’t know what happened with Raider or Lars or Tamara. I just know that they were all involved with Ray, and they’re all dead. But when I saw him with Nora in the barn this morning, the scales fell from my eyes. They’re in love with each other!”

  He paused then said, “Besides, things have been different between Nora and me lately.”

  “Different?”

  “We’ve been having problems. That’s no secret. She wants to have a child. She just hasn’t gotten pregnant.”

  “Have you been to a doctor?”

  “She’s been twice. They say she’s fine.”

  “And you?”

  “I haven’t seen a doctor about it in ten years. I went during my first marriage, and I’ll never subject myself again. They make you masturbate in a cup, you know. I won’t go through that humiliation a second time.”

  “What did they say ten years ago, Lennie?”

  “‘Low motility and sperm count.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean infertility, but I’ve never fathered a child. And Nora’s never gotten pregnant. We finally stopped talking about having our own children and started talking about adoption. After Ray came to Schoolcross and he and Tamara spent so much time together, Nora got stirred up on the subject again. Things became worse between us in every way, but especially . . . in our relationship.

  All my anger from the morning was gone, and I felt truly sorry for him.

  “Do you remember that drunken night at Mortimer’s and walking through the city?” he asked.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Before Thanksgiving, the problem had been getting worse. I bought books: Masters and Johnson, that sort of thing.”

  I remembered the book Tamara had shown Ray—Red Tantric Yoga: Worship of the Goddess Kundalini. Tamara said she’d gotten it from Nora.

  “You didn’t happen to buy a book about tantric yoga, did you, Lennie?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “The tantric yogis know all about this sort of thing,” I said, evading the question.

  Lennie clearly wasn’t interested in discussing the knowledge of the tantric yogis.

  “Nora wouldn’t read the books, anyway. Or rather, she read them but called them ‘misguided.’ She said our problems weren’t about sex, and that the notion of ‘technique’ was too middle-class to discuss.”

  “Technique is middle-class?”

  “That’s what she said. That any technique other than simply loving another person makes sex ridiculous and sad.”

  “Women are impossible to understand,” I said.

  “Last night I found her reading that book by Masters and Johnson, and we tried a technique they recommend to prevent things from being premature.”

  “And?”

  “At first I was happy she was willing to get to the heart of the problem, but then I got nervous. What if it didn’t work?”

  “Did it?”

  “I thought so—at least for a while. But Nora was different.”

  “In what way?”

  “She’s always been wonderfully understanding. Last night she ran out of our bedroom crying.”

  I could only speculate on Ray’s role in all this. Maybe Nora had been frightened by her feelings for him and tried to reach out to Lennie, to get a safe hold on the familiar. But their lives together had already changed too much for that.

  “I don’t know what to say, Lennie, except that I’m sorry you’ve gotten yourself into this.”

  “What should I do?”

&n
bsp; “You need to talk with Nora about her feelings for Ray.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But what else?”

  “We can go to the police and tell them about Raider. It’s something we should do anyway.”

  But Lennie was still thinking about Ray and his wife.

  “That son of a bitch . . .”

  “Be careful, Lennie. Keep your distance from him.”

  “She’s my wife,” Lennie said. “Ray’s the one who needs to keep his distance. You’re not planning on leaving Schoolcross are you, Bradley?”

  “Yes, I am. After this morning I knew I wasn’t welcome here anymore. I’m going to check into a hotel in Manhattan. I want to be nearer to my family. We’re having a rough time right now.”

  “Please don’t go. If there was ever a time I’ve needed you, it’s now. I apologize for what I said this morning.”

  I didn’t want to stay, but I felt sorry for Lennie and didn’t want to abandon him. He could see I was wavering.

  “There’s still so much we could do together,” he pressed on. “I know this isn’t the time to talk about it.” He paused to see if he had my attention. “But you must know I’ve been thinking about getting new representation for my own work . . .”

  God damn you, Lennie, I thought.

  “All right,” I said, interrupting him. I didn’t want to hear another word of this shameful bribe. “After all you’ve done for me, I can’t leave if you ask me to stay for a few more days. We can go to the police together.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ve got to get back now. Please don’t talk to anyone else about this. The whole thing is a nightmare. We need to come up with a plan.”

  He headed toward the door but stopped and looked back. “Any word from Linda?” he asked.

  “We went to see a marriage counselor on Friday. It made things worse.”

  “That’s why I never wanted to go to one with Nora,” he said, and left the room.

  The news of Tamara’s death was still sinking in. I went downstairs and into the kitchen, leaned over the sink and splashed water on my face. After drying off with a paper towel from the counter, I sat at my desk in the corner and impulsively picked up the telephone. Linda answered on the second ring.