After the nightmares, I hired a private detective. I told him my mother had been raped when I was a young boy, which was certainly closer to the truth than not. I told him that I had witnessed what had happened, which was also as close to the truth as you can come and still not be there. And I told him the time had now come when I felt I had to face the man who had done it.
He was a good detective, maybe because he believed in the case. It took him a little over three months, working part-time, with nothing more to go on than a vague description and the stranger’s first name, which were all I had to offer. Then one night after Beth and the kids had gone to bed, I got a call to meet him at the local Denny’s. He handed me a piece of paper across the table. Printed on one side in blue ink was: BLAINE JEFFRIES. 16289 TICONDEROGA. SARATOGA, CA.
“What are you going to do?” he asked with honest concern.
“I don’t know,” I said, just as honestly. I stared at the paper with the name on it, then folded it in fourths and stuck it in my shirt pocket. “Visit him, I suppose.”
And eventually that’s what I ended up doing.
“Mr. Jeffries? Blaine Jeffries?”
He stood in the doorway, beneath an entry light, and I realized this was the first time I had seen this man out of the shadows. His eyes were dark and weary, the eyes of an old dog that knows its better times are far behind it now. That realization seemed to have settled deeply into many of Mr. Jeffries’s features. By his coloring, I gathered he had not been out under the sun in a good long time. His face was lined. His sagging jowls reminded me more of fresh bread dough than the fleshly face of an old man. And beneath it all, there was a sense that here was a man who was near the end of his life.
“I know you,” he said, after a good look. “A long time ago, wasn’t it? A little boy in a little no-name town on the outskirts of Sacramento.”
“Greenhaven,” I said. “The name of the town was Greenhaven.”
He nodded. “I remember.” It seemed almost as if he had surprised himself, remembering such a little thing from so long ago. “You hid in the shadows, outside the bedroom door. I… don’t recall your name, but you were a young man then, a boy, with eyes much wiser than your years. And I see they still are.”
“My name’s Marshall,” I said.
“Yes. And your mother was Eve. Yes, I remember.”
I could barely find the restraint to stand there without lashing out at him. Hearing my mother’s name spoken through this man’s lips… it… it stirred a rage inside me that I could only assume had been there, waiting, for more than thirty-five years now. It may have settled there, this rage, like sediment to the bottom of a river, but suddenly it was kicking up again, and I was forced to swallow it down, because if I didn’t, I was afraid I might very well lose all control.
“She was an exceptional woman,” Jeffries said with admiration. He stepped away from the door like a butler inviting in a guest, proper and courteous. “Why don’t you come in, Marshall. I’ll try to explain the unexplainable; you try to listen and understand.”
I hesitated, wondering why I had come here, and what I had expected to find beyond an old man still clinging fondly to his memories. There was a part of me, aside from the rage, that felt surprisingly sympathetic to the man.
“When you stop asking questions,” he said, “the answers come naturally.”
He raised his eyebrows questioningly. I didn’t know if what he said were true or not. I had always asked questions. It was how I got along in the world. Sometimes the questions led to answers. Sometimes not. Maybe I had been asking the same questions for too long now.
I entered.
I think my mother would have described the house as uptown, or out of our league. It had an old European-family flavor. The floor was done in brown British quarry tile, the walls in some sort of imported stone. There was a dank, musty smell inside and I thought how much the house and its master resembled each other.
Jeffries, his feet doing an old man’s shuffle across the tile floor, led me through a huge anteroom into an even larger room with a rustic stone fireplace that stood nearly as tall as I. Near the center of the room was a banquet table handcrafted from dark wood, perhaps mahogany. He motioned for me to sit, then sat across the table from me. I could feel the heat of the fire against the side of my face.
“You came to me,” he said flatly. He steepled his fingers, patiently, apparently aware that he had all the time in the world and that I did not. And it was true: I had come to him, not he to me.
“I want you to explain the unexplainable,” I said.
“Ah, my own words used against me.” He smiled, with a touch of sadness, and it occurred to me that this was a lonely man sitting across the table. I wondered when he had last held a woman in his arms, when he had last conversed with a neighbor or a friend. It had been a long time, I imagined.
“Where to start?” he said. “Where to start?”
“How about with my mother?”
That smile again. Then he rested his chin atop the bridge of his hands and stared at me as if he could read my entire history with a single glance. His hands were pale and brown-spotted, the fingers thin and delicate. His fingernails were unmanicured and quite long, and, as strange as it was, I thought of Howard Hughes and reports of how long his nails had grown near the end of his life.
“She was chosen, you know,” Jeffries said calmly. “Your mother was an exceptional woman. Most young ladies in her line of work, they’ve long since stopped feeling anything. They’re dead inside. Maybe it’s defensive, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s a form of self-punishment. Though I rather suspect it’s probably a little of both, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said evenly.
Jeffries grinned, a little self-satisfiedly, and I thought it was his hideous side creeping through. His teeth were the color of a dark urine stain against white Jockey shorts. I could see that something black and funguslike had begun to form pockets along the line of his gums, and it occurred to me that this man’s teeth weren’t going to last much longer.
“No?” he said. “I would have thought that you were intimately qualified to know such things.”
“Then you would have thought wrong,” I responded.
“Really?”
“Really:’
“I see.” He frowned and gazed hypnotically at the fire, and seemed to drift away in his thoughts. Apparently he was fond of where they had taken him, because he seemed suddenly peaceful and at ease with himself.
“I was born in 1887,” he said at last. “In a small New England town called Willows Branch. My father was an industrialist, my mother a seamstress. I had two brothers and four sisters, and I was the youngest.
“In those days—much unlike these modern times of ours, I might add—children were expected to contribute to the finances of the family. We worked from a very young age. We did anything and everything just to bring home a few extra pennies.”
He sighed, somewhat longingly, his gaze still fixed on the fire.
“And?” I prompted.
“I’m sorry. An old man’s thoughts can wander at times. I’m learning that.” He smiled dully, unaffectedly, then sighed again, and if I had taken a deep breath myself I have no doubt I would have inhaled a good deal of this man’s loneliness. He was a creature who I suspected had always lived in solitude. And how sad that was.
“I worked for a carriage house,” he continued. “As a stableboy. One day, when I was… oh, eleven or twelve, a woman came to town. She was a foreigner, with an accent that sounded like a mix of British upper class and Austrian, wry different from anything I had ever heard before. I was a good stableboy, and she took a liking to me. And when she was ready to depart after her two week stay, she pulled me aside and asked me what I thought of the idea of immortality.”
Jeffries paused and shook his head. “I had never heard the word before. So she had to explain it to me, and it was the kind of dream that sparks a young boy’s imagination. The
chance to live forever. Incredible. It was absolutely incredible.
“She offered it to me as a gift, though it wasn’t a gift at all. Not with the price I had to pay. You see, in exchange for this thing called immortality, she wanted my innocence.”
“Is that what you took from my mother?” I asked.
“Your mother had no innocence left,” Jeffries said matter-of-factly.
“You killed her, you know.”
“I did not kill her. I emptied her.”
Emptied her. Now there « a polite way of putting it. Though it was true, she wasn’t dead. She was sitting in a convalescent home, breathing and eating and getting around with a little help when she needed it, but she wasn’t dead. Emptied her. I hated the way that sounded.
“Let me show you,” Jeffries said, with tired resignation. He climbed, with some effort, out of his seat, and when I didn’t follow immediately, he looked down at me. “You coming or not?”
He took me down a flight of stairs to the cellar.
At the bottom, there was a short tunnel leading off to the left. One side was a rubble and brickwork wall, damp and cool to the touch. The other side was a floor-to-ceiling wine rack. There must have been a thousand bottles doing their time here. Blaine lightly tapped one and said, “1910 Château d’Yquem.” He beamed, like a little boy showing off his prized marble.
The end of the tunnel was blocked by a wood panel that drew back and opened into a small, dimly lighted room lined with shelves on both sides. It smelled musty here. I took a breath and felt as if I might cough myself silly. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the plop-plop-plop of dripping water.
Jeffries stepped into the shadows at the far end.
I stopped at the doorway.
“This is where I keep them,” he said cryptically. Except I understood what he meant, the way a husband understands a half-finished thought from his wife. He meant that this was where he kept his collection of whatever it was that he had stolen from my mother and undoubtedly from others as well.
He flipped a light switch.
The room brightened.
And I knew immediately this was why I had come here. The shelves on both sides were lined with specimen jars: thick glass, maybe four liters in capacity. Each fell under the soft glow of an individual spotlight. Each was labeled with a brass plate, engraved in black.
I read the one nearest me on the right. It said, simply enough: JOY. Inside was a brightness nearly indescribable. I would suppose—not having experienced such a thing myself—it was something like the light at the end of the tunnel that people who have had a near-death experience often talk about. It was peaceful and serene and most of all it was what it was labeled to be: joyous.
Beneath that, one shelf down, was a jar labeled: ENVY. It was true, apparently, that old saying about turning green with envy. I didn’t know where the saying had come from, but the stuff in the container—which resembled a thick, lumpy goo—was the grayish-green color of weathered copper. Green with envy.
“They’re all here,” Jeffries said.
“All?”
“The emotions. They’re all here.”
“These are what you took from my mother?” I asked. I was standing over a container labeled ANGER now. Inside was a roiling blackish cloud that seemed to be pressing against the inside of the glass. It’s going to break out someday, I thought, and I stepped back a pace.
“No,” Jeffries said. “Not these. Not specifically. Your mother’s emotions… I used those up a long, long time ago.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that he caught me completely off guard. And for the first time, I realized that something was terribly wrong here, something inside Jeffries was not only bankrupt, it was barren. No, this was not a well man. Not physically, and not emotionally. Where was the man’s fear? And if he felt he had nothing to fear from me, then where was his joy or his anger or his—
In the glass jars, I thought. They’re all in the glass jars.
“You on a diet, Jeffries?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
I nodded to the nearest container. “You aren’t partaking, are you?”
He smiled again, and now I could see it clearly. It was a practiced smile, a smile without anything behind it at all. “No,” he said solemnly. “Immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be, as you might well have guessed already. It’s a lonely life, my friend. A long, lonely life.”
“And what happens if you don’t… “
“Draw a breath every once in a while?” he said euphemistically. “I guess you could say my immortality would be shortened considerably.”
“You’ll die?”
“I’ll die.”
“And that’s what you want?”
He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, thoughtfully. “It’s not so much that I want to die,” he said. “It’s that I don’t wish to be immortal any longer. I hope you can find the distinction there, because there is a difference. It is, perhaps, the difference between the time it takes to say yes and the time it takes to say no, but it is a difference.”
I thought I understood what he was trying to say, at least as well as any mortal man can understand such a thing. “So, you’re dying?”
“I am… aging. I haven’t made the decision to die yet. I may not make that decision at all, and by not making the decision, I may die. Or perhaps the decision will be made for me. We shall see what we shall see.”
He stared fondly at a nearby container, then ran his hand along the rim of it, like a hungry man staring at a pastrami sandwich that belongs to someone else. It was everything he could do not to empty it, I thought.
“We’re all born that way,” he said suddenly, as if he could read my thoughts. “Empty, you know. And when our mothers pick us up and hold us and lovingly coo at us, we breathe it all in. One breath after another. And when our fathers jingle the plastic keys in front of us and read us bedtime stories and playfully toss a ball in our direction, we breathe all that in as well. We breathe it in and it becomes part of us, part of who we are and how we see the world and what makes us laugh and what makes us yearn. We’re all born empty. All of us.”
“It’s a little like an addiction, isn’t it?” I asked.
“A little.”
“And you’re the addict?”
“We’re all addicts.”
And maybe we were. I didn’t know for certain, of course, though I knew that it was an addiction that had brought me here, an addiction I had carried with me since the age of eleven. And I couldn’t have said if I’d ever get over my addiction, regardless of what I was about to do. Maybe some addictions are never satisfied.
“It’s got to stop somewhere,” I said. “Don’t you think?”
“Does it?” he asked. He said it in such a way that it wasn’t a question as much as a prompt. It was what a father might say to his son who has come home crying after being picked on by the local bully. The words didn’t matter. What mattered was what lay beneath the words, and that part went like this: So what are you going to do about it?
I hadn’t come with anything specific in mind. I had come to see what this man looked like, to discover what this man was beneath his mask, but I had not come with the intent to do what I did. I looked at his face, and something erupted inside me, and without thought, I found myself crossing a line that I never thought I was capable of crossing.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s got to stop.”
And I smashed the glass jar nearest me. It was the one labeled ENVY, and the glass shattered much more easily than I ever would have imagined. I hit it with the knuckles of my right hand, and when I pulled my hand out, it was covered in grayish-green slime. It felt cold. I snapped my wrist in an attempt to throw off as much of the substance as I could.
Jeffries didn’t move an inch, didn’t flinch, didn’t smirk, didn’t react at all. “Feel better?” he asked.
“No.” I reached for the next container, this one label ANGER— and oh, how appropriate that was. No fist
this time. I simply scooped it off the shelf and let it crash against the concrete floor. It shattered instantly. Glass shards exploded in every direction. For a moment, it looked like a miniature nuclear explosion, a little mushroom cloud expanding upward, black and malevolent.
I gasped and stepped back, and I’ll admit without argument that it frightened me at first. But then I felt something inside me like I had never felt before. It was the most unambiguous, most primal passion I had ever experienced. I wanted this man dead. I wanted him dead so badly I could taste it, and I had never been so frightened of myself before.
Jeffries had backed away a step as well, maybe two, and he was pressed against the back wall, holding both hands over his mouth. It didn’t occur to me at the time what he was doing—except cringing in a fear of his own—but later it became oh so obvious: Jeffries was making certain he didn’t inhale any of the anger. What had he said? Or perhaps the decision will be made for me.
I slammed another container to the floor. I can’t remember now which one it was. It doesn’t matter, I suppose, because they all went, one after another, until the shelves were empty and a small portion of my anger had dissipated.
I leaned back against the doorjamb, bent over, nearly out of breath. Jeffries hadn’t moved. “Now I feel better,” I said triumphantly. Only it didn’t feel triumphant at all. It felt a little sad, I suppose, a little like winning a race because you took a shortcut. Not a victory at all, but a hollow sick feeling because you know that you haven’t accomplished much of anything.
“Done?” Jeffries said finally. For all my anger, he was completely unruffled.
I nodded, and straightened again, feeling my breath coming back. “You can rot here, for all I care,” I said angrily. “My mother deserved better.”
Then I headed back down the tunnel and up the stairs.
And I never looked back.
It was several weeks later, when I was reading the paper, that I came across an article with a slug that read simply enough: MAN FOUND DEAD IN CELLAR. It was about Jeffries. When the mail had begun to pile up in his box, his delivery man notified the authorities. They ended up breaking into the house, and after a thorough search upstairs, they made their way downstairs to the cellar.
Love in Vein Page 10