Guilty Parties

by Thomas Gifford

  “Be charming, loyal, friendly. Sympathize. Be curious, tell him you want to know what the hell is going on. Look upon it as research for your novel.”

  Hacker cleared his throat at the other end of the line. “Antonelli called on me today.”

  “And?”

  “You were right. I felt like I should raise my hand to go to the bathroom. Then I bought an insurance policy. Anything to get him out of the house. He’s so kind. Sort of guy who means it when he says this is going to hurt him more than you. I told him the unvarnished truth. Sanded down a bit to make it as innocuous as possible, but no varnish.”

  “So will you call Jack?”

  “Sure. I’d like to see the old bastard, anyway.”

  “Then call me back, okay? Let me know if you’re going to see him.”

  Three hours later I was sitting at the counter of a flyspecked coffee shop so far up on the East Side that I felt I should have brought my passport. A fan sitting at the end of the counter was blowing more out of habit than a belief in itself. I’d been working on a Coke and a tuna-salad sandwich for half an hour while I watched the entryway of what had once been a rather grand old building across the street. Now torn curtains hung limply in the tall windows. The front doors into the darkened lobby stood open and unmanned. But flowers bloomed in windowboxes. The building wasn’t dead yet, it was putting up a fight, although the end looked to be near. Jack lived on the second floor rear. I was waiting to see him leave to meet Hacker for lunch. Two guys at the first booth were talking baseball with the proprietor. Baseball and the heat. A little girl on a trike kept riding back and forth on the sidewalk ringing the bell on the handlebars. I waited.

  At one-fifteen I saw him come out, check his watch, and head off up the street, past the green plastic sacks of trash and a gushing fire hydrant where some kids were having the time of their lives. I went out, watched him hail a cab, and crossed the street. I had the key he’d forced on me when he moved. The lobby was dim and the floor of cracked white tile was uneven, as if a giant had been trying to hammer his way out of the basement. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The walls were freshly painted and huge old-fashioned floor fans stirred the leaves of a couple of potted palms. I saw the broad stairway and went up one flight, feeling furtive, regretting the whole idea.

  I needn’t have brought the key. The door was unlocked, as I’d half-expected it to be. Jack refused to remember to do things like that: it was part of his nature, an almost studied casualness. He figured that any burglar stopped by a simply locked apartment door hadn’t yet worked his way up to New York. So I’d always been the official door-locker in the family. There was no one in the hallway. I smelled burned fried eggs, but the frayed carpet was neatly vacuumed, the standing ashtrays full of clean white sand. I took a deep breath and went inside.

  The room was small and stuffy and badly lit. There was a tiny bedroom, more like an extension of the corridor off which the bathroom opened. The sink in the galley kitchen was full of dishes soaking in gray water. The square of countertop was cluttered with the white cardboard containers from a Chinese takeout. A couple of coffee mugs rested in a spindly wooden drying rack.

  There was a couch, a small TV on a hassock, its antennas shooting out at crazy angles trying to bring in a better signal. An almost full bottle of Glenlivet sheltered beneath a lampshade on the end table. A dropleaf dining table had been turned into a desk. A couple of boxes of books he hadn’t unpacked and a glass-fronted bookcase full of those he had. It wasn’t a depressing or filthy place, just a small New York apartment, maybe five hundred dollars a month. Maybe more. No evidence of mice or roaches. Neat. It made me feel just a little better about Jack.

  I turned on a lamp and there it was. The shrine Harry had told me about. Dozens of snapshots of me. They were arrayed on the finely figured flowered wallpaper, fixed with thumbtacks. Belinda at the beach, Belinda squinting in the sunshine at a lodge in the Adirondacks, Belinda at twenty-eight on the boardwalk at Coney Island, beneath a gate into the Harvard Yard at twenty-one, Belinda in a bikini and in jeans and in an expensive suit he’d bought for her in Paris, Belinda looking up at Big Ben under a gray London sky, Belinda holding a mug of ale outside a pub in the Lake District, Belinda making faces at the camera in some forgotten moment of hilarity—every time he looked up from the typewriter he was confronted by all these images of Belinda … of happiness lost… of the past.

  I sat down in his chair before the typewriter. I swallowed hard. There wasn’t a solution that would satisfy Jack. We weren’t going to dance a soft-shoe into the wings together. No matter how many snapshots he tacked on the wall, no matter how I felt my heart wrenched, that wasn’t the way it was going to work out.

  I felt like a shit of the worst sort. Here I was, with no claim and no right to be there. I was premeditatedly intruding on his privacy, just as voyeuristically as someone watching through a peephole, like Anthony Perkins in Psycho. I sat still as a little girl listening to her parents fighting, afraid and fascinated. Jack deserved his privacy, his solitude, his secrecy.

  A faucet was dripping into the dishwater. Boy George singing “Karma Chameleon” in the airshaft, no ray of sunshine, just the heat like an oven and the dirt-encrusted, defunct air conditioner. No wonder he’d gone for a walk. I was dripping wet.

  God, I felt like a traitor! One of the worst, far worse than Harry could ever have been. But I wanted to help. I wanted to help Jack and I didn’t want to be afraid of him anymore. I wanted to find something in his work that would explain his state of mind, his view of the past … something that might explain what was going on between him and Venables. I desperately wanted to be convinced that Jack was all right, that he hadn’t killed anyone and wouldn’t kill me. I was doing a wrong thing for a right reason, that’s what I’d told myself as a little girl. A wrong thing, Mommie, I did a wrong thing but I didn’t mean it.

  The manuscript was neatly stacked beside the typewriter. Not a long work, if it was complete. Maybe 250 pages. I knew the drill. Twenty-pound bond. Squared edges. A blank page on top.

  I peeled it away. No title page yet. Page one.

  She woke to the fluttering curtain, blowing across the bed, stroking her leg like a lover’s touch.

  I began to read.

  An hour later I laid my head on the table, my face slippery with tears, sobbing, trying not to scream.

  I had never read anything like it.

  It was the vilest possible pornography. An American woman visiting her lover in Paris, betrayed by him, drugged, made to perform in an erotic theater … her body and her thoughts and reactions described in minute detail, page after page after page, as she grows to accept her role, then to enjoy it, and finally to develop a voracious, insatiable need for all the perversions.

  Normally I’d have read a couple of pages, leafed through the rest of it with vague sexual curiosity, and thrown it away. No, it wasn’t the fact that it was a dirty book. It wasn’t even the fact that Jack had written it.

  No, it was the way Jack had dealt with the woman. The vicious enjoyment the writer had taken in her fate. The exquisite detail of the descriptions of her body, the textures of the orifices, the flexing of her muscles, the sounds she made … the things she said … the things she did.

  She was me.

  Every bit of her, every inch and every syllable, she was me.

  And he hated her.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I didn’t finish the manuscript, God knows. I lay half-sagged across that old dropleaf table, sobbing like someone who’s been hit hard in the stomach, which was just how I felt.

  Someone who could write this, who could use his wife as the model, could also pull those triggers, kill a man. He could kill me. He had symbolically killed me on those pages.

  I had to get out of that room.

  I stood up weakly and knocked the manuscript off the table in the process. It splayed across the worn carpet.

  I went out the door and shakily negotiated the stairs. At
the foot I stood in the semidarkness and took several deep breaths, squared my shoulders. The inner chill had dried the sweat on my skin. I felt brittle.

  A cab. I needed a cab. I stood on the sidewalk, blinking in the unearthly brightness, spots dancing before my eyes. I felt light-headed. Where was a cab? I began walking toward the park. I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t watching for anything but a friendly cab. And some twig of memory scratched me: I focused on the man coming down the street toward me.

  It was Jack.

  Sick with a weird complex of reactions, terror and fright and disgust, I turned and dashed across the street, hearing him call my name. A cab was coming toward me and I waved at it frantically. Jack called to me again. The cab stopped, back door locked, the driver had to reach back and punch it to get it open, and Jack was coming toward me. He couldn’t figure out what was going on. The door popped open and I got in, slammed it as he reached the side of the cab.

  “Go, hurry up, just go,” I shouted, and being a New York cabbie, he got the point.

  I looked back. Jack was standing in the middle of the street staring after us. He didn’t move until we got to the corner and began to turn, and then he looked up at his building and began to run toward it.

  Chapter Thirty

  I STOPPED SHAKING ABOUT HALF an hour after I got back to the loft. That kind of primal fear is a terrible thing. I think I must have sat catatonically on the couch staring out the window, not moving, waiting for it to pass. It was so visceral. What did I think he was going to do to me there in the street? Why had my heart felt like it was going to burst in my chest? How could the words he’d written—and which he had never intended me to read—have brutalized me so completely?

  I didn’t have any of those answers. I only had the crazy fear. I’d done something I shouldn’t have done, I’d found something awful, and I’d nearly gotten caught at it. Sitting there waiting for the tremors to pass, I knew I’d already begun paying for it.

  I finally got to the telephone and called Hacker. No answer. I had to tell someone, I had to shift some of the burden of knowledge. I called Sally but I got Harry.

  He sounded distant, exhausted, as if life were ashes for him. “Belle,” he said, “how are you? Are you still upset with me?”

  “No,” I said. “I know you were thinking of my own welfare. It’s okay.” But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I had found in Jack’s apartment. “Is Sally up and about?”

  “Oh, hell …” His voice trailed away. “She keeps taking those tranquilizers or sleeping pills, whatever they are. I don’t know … the doctor says she needs rest, says she’s very upset, he talked to me about whether or not she might be willing to go back into therapy—how the hell should I know? Oh, dammit, Belle, I don’t know what to do. … I wish you were here, we could sit in the garden and have a drink and listen to the fountain and just be happy.” The phone went silent and when he spoke again he’d gotten himself back together. “Anyway, she’s dead to the world—do you want me to ask her to call you when she comes to?”

  “Please, yes. And, Harry? Have faith in her and in your marriage, okay? It’s just one of those bad times. It’ll all come around.”

  “Sure it will,” he said. “God knows it is one of those bad times. Funny thing is, I don’t feel much about Peter—I mean, I don’t really seem to care. I don’t even notice he’s gone. I feel shitty about not caring … the first dead Ruffian. I said something to Hacker about that, and you know what he said? He said maybe I’d feel better if we had him stuffed and stood him up in the foyer! What a crazy bastard! I’d say nothing’s sacred to old Hacker …” He was rambling again. “Of course Peter hasn’t got a head, he’d look weird stuffed … look, Belle, I’d better go look in on Sal. I’ll tell her you called.”

  I called Mike but he wasn’t in his office. I was about to call Leverett just to come over and keep me company when I heard the elevator start banging and wheezing. Someone was coming up.

  Jack came off the elevator and stood staring at me. His face was empty. He wasn’t carrying a shotgun. I looked at him, then looked away.

  He walked past me, crossing the loft and going to the window in the corner by the wheel-of-fortune. He was looking out the window when he started speaking. He sounded like a man talking to himself.

  “Don’t you think that was a pretty cheap trick? Did you ask Hacker to buy me lunch just to get me out of the apartment? Was it a kick, spying on me? Real Nancy Drew stuff? Sneaking in and poking through things? You really give me a pain in the ass, Belinda. What am I going to have to do with you? Why do I keep trusting you? Why do I come to you when I’m down to the last bit of guts I’ve got? …”

  I sat down, trying to get my bearings. He felt wronged. He felt wronged. He had written that manuscript and he felt I was a pain in the ass. He kept talking but wouldn’t turn to look at me. His voice was as expressionless as his face had been.

  “Venables came back for you—you were what he wanted. He told me that, just told me to my face. So what if I hit the bastard? What’s the big deal? It’s not the first time I’ve made a bit of an ass of myself. Suddenly I’m a goddamn untouchable, I’m a murderer. Well, maybe I did kill him. Maybe I loaded up the old blunderbuss and let him have it. But maybe I didn’t. My friends all seem to think I did. And my wife seems to think I did. And she knows me best.” Slowly he turned around and folded his arms across his chest. “Whattaya think? You poked around in my place, looked in the drawers—how does it look to you, Belinda? Your hubby a shotgun murderer?” He smiled at me.

  “I read your manuscript,” I whispered.

  “Like it? Did it capture the true essence—”

  “I think you’re very sick.”

  “Ah, I see. Does that mean I blew Peter away, then?”

  “It means you’re capable of anything.”

  “Really? One dirty book makes me capable of anything?”

  “You raped our lives, our marriage. That’s me in your book, Jack. Me. You were watching all that happen to me in those pages. I can’t even talk to you—”

  He looked at me as if I’d begun speaking in tongues. “Whoa! What’s that book got to do with you? What are you talking about?”

  “Please, leave me alone. I’m begging you …”

  “Christ, don’t start crying.”

  “I’m not. I just want you to go.”

  “That’s not you!” The color suddenly fired his face. He came toward me, his voice slipping away, out of control. “It’s not you! Damn you, listen to me—”

  I grabbed the telephone, some hopeless idea about dialing 911. He yanked the phone out of my hand, pulled it with all of his strength, and I heard it rip out of the jack. He grabbed my bare arm and twisted. I screamed. He threw me back on the couch. All I could think was that he was going to start hitting me, he was going to kill me. His eyes were bottomless with fury. I tried to squirm away but he pinned me down, staring at me, the black hair hanging across his forehead, the memory of his boyish good looks still lingering on his face. He might have been in the grip of sexual passion. But suddenly he loosened his grip and stepped back, still staring at me. The anger and frustration faded, his eyes widened.

  “My gosh,” he said, the innocent expression characteristically indicating a dawning recognition, “you really do think I wrote that crap about you! Oh, Belinda—what an idea! My heroine, if you’ll pardon the expression, doesn’t even look like you—she’s a character given to me by the book packager—no, I’m not kidding, Belinda …” He came tentatively toward me and held out his hand. “Come on, upsie-daisy. You’re not hurt—God, look at the phone. Well, here comes apology ninety-nine-oh-three. I’ll plug it into another jack.”

  I watched him fumbling around and fixing the phone. He picked it up and nodded. My head—or more accurately my psyche—was spinning. The swings and shifts of his behavior were like nothing I’d ever seen before, not even from him. Almost childlike. If it was the pressure building on him, he’d had more than enough.
But for the moment I thought the danger had passed. I pulled my knees up under my chin and stayed put on the couch. He perched on a stool watching me, shaking his head slowly.

  “It was me, Jack,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t mean it, maybe it was entirely subconscious, but it was me. There was a lot of hatred in those pages and it was all directed at me.”

  “Why don’t you look at it this way,” he said reasonably. “Better to work it out on paper than on you.”

  “Seems to me you’ve had it both ways. I haven’t exactly escaped unscarred lately.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

  “It’s a question of how much rage you’re working on. I’m scared now, Jack. One minute you look like bloody murder, the next you’re calm and collected. I’m scared of one of you. I’m scared of the one who attacked Peter and hit me. The one who wrote that godawful book—”

  “The book,” he said. “Thereby hangs a tale, if you’d like to hear it.” He wiped his forehead with a crumpled handkerchief. I was so used to sweating I no longer noticed it.

  “Sure, tell me.”

  He looked at his watch. “I need a drink. Need. You want one?” I shook my head and he went to the kitchen. It seemed as if everybody was living on gin-and-tonic and iced tea that summer. He was clinking ice and talking to me.

  “I’ll try not to let this sound too pathetic, but the fact is it’s a pretty pathetic story. I’m an expert, as you know. Fellow I know, used to be an agent, now he’s a packager—he has ideas for books, usually book series, he makes deals with writers to write them from basic plots he comes up with, he sells the whole package to a publisher.” He came back in, took a long drink, and sat down at the other end of the couch. “This guy, Harvey, spotted me in a bar one day and came over and made his pitch. It was all bullshit but the upshot was I could make a fast seventy-five hundred dollars if I’d write a book for him. He said he wanted a real writer, not one of the hacks he worked with on some of his other stuff. He told me that he wanted a ‘classy porno,’ and if it worked out there was another project he’d like me to consider, not a porno, but a World War II series about a ‘spy behind enemy lines.’ Well, I had a brainstorm—I’d at least be writing for money again, I could polish off the porno quickly, and then—remember, I’m a dreamer—maybe really make something out of the spy series. Maybe craft was where my talent lay, I reasoned, not finely wrought autobiography.” He sighed and gave one of his sheepish smiles. “And I had another thought which will no doubt make you laugh. With the seventy-five hundred dollars … I was going to win you back. The money was going to buy us one helluva second honeymoon, a return trip to the Lake District and then a month in Italy, Venice, Florence, the works. I was going to be irresistible and you were going to be beautiful and we were going to get our show back on the road. … And if the girl in the novel reminded you of yourself, all I can say is that when I think of sex and pleasure and masturbatory fantasies—well, I think of you. “He stared down into his drink. “Now, this little confession leaves me pretty naked, Belinda. But it is true and I might add that you had no business going into my place and reading that manuscript. You shouldn’t have done it. I’m not at all sure I can forgive you for doing it. And maybe you can’t forgive me for the way I’ve been acting. And for all I know, that’s the way it should be. Look, I think I’m going to get out of here.” He stood up and took his glass back to the kitchen.