So we play by the rules. If Whoever He Was was going to have his way, if he was going to get to speak his piece before push came to shove, he would have to take his chance. Things would have to be so arranged that Guinness wouldn’t be simply offering himself up for execution. Something had to keep him from simply disappearing down a hole.
Not that Guinness had the least intention of disappearing, not yet. It was all very nice that his nameless antagonist was being such a gentleman about it—that way there would be a little breathing time; perhaps enough to figure out an angle—but no matter what, if the guy came tomorrow with flame and sword, Guinness was sticking around until one or the other of them was finished.
He had made himself a little promise, had promised Louise, that she would have her revenge or he would die in the effort. It was a stupid business, he knew that—after all, nobody but he would be keeping score—but it seemed to him a hell of a lot more important than merely staying alive.
So, where were we? Guinness didn’t know who was after him, which gave Whoever He Was the initiative. But Whoever He Was was clearly just a shade on the flaky side, and flakes tend to get in their own way a lot. The two canceled each other out, which made Guinness’s chances of survival about even money. A man could do worse.
. . . . .
It was the day of his wife’s funeral. He adjusted the knot of his tie and, holding up in one hand the coat of his dark green, three piece suit, picked a tiny fragment of lint from the lapel. It was the suit in which he had been married and was the closest thing he owned to mourning.
As he dressed, he worked out in his mind the ponderous calculus of his dilemma, his lips moving silently from time to time, as if he were rehearsing the speeches of a play.
In five minutes he would walk down the hotel corridor and knock at the door of another room precisely like his own. There, with any luck, he would find his father in law dressed and ready to leave, although there was no certainty about it. The old boy might just as easily still be sitting in his underwear on the edge of the bed, weeping as much from the exhaustion of grief as from grief itself. Murray Harrison was taking the death of his child very much to heart.
Had Louise been alive to arrange her own funeral, she probably would have hit upon some excuse for not inviting her father at all. One could not have said, at least not with any kind of accuracy, that she hated him. She didn’t hate him—there was nothing so grandly tragic about their relationship—she merely avoided him with all the dexterity at her command.
In the five years of his married life, Guinness had seen him on only one other occasion. About a month after their nuptial trip to Las Vegas, they had been invited down for a visit to his house in a retirement village outside of Los Angeles.
“Do you really want to go?” she had asked. At the time they were still moving into their new house, and the floors were awash with sheets of crumpled newspaper and cardboard boxes; it didn’t seem that they would ever get everything sorted out. She had pulled the letter out of a back pocket of her jeans as they sat on a packing crate in the living room, sharing dinner out of a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He remembered the way her face had puckered as she spoke.
“Sure, why not?” Guinness looked at the postmark and noticed a date of four days previous; she must have been keeping it to herself for a while. “He has a kind of right, doesn’t he?”
“Aaaaaall right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
In any case, she was careful, without making a point of being careful, to arrange things for just before the beginning of the autumn term, so they couldn’t under any circumstances stay longer than two or three days.
In the vague sort of way peculiar to people without families of their own—and for all practical purposes Guinness was alone in the world—he had rather looked forward to being possessed of in laws. During his brief first marriage his wife’s parents had been content to stay put in Washington State, so he had never met them.
Louise’s attitude amounted almost to a grievance, as if she were trying to withhold something.
It was a strange experience, their visit. Sitting on the sofa in Mr. Harrison’s front parlor (“My God,” Louise had whispered to him the first moment they were alone, “this place, it’s like a time capsule out of the Truman era”), his knees captives to a squat little blond coffee table covered with a succession of doilies, Guinness found himself being guided through a scrapbook tour of Louise’s early life, of the life they had all lived—Louise, her father, and her long dead, apparently much loved mother—before the family had crumbled away and Mr. Harrison had retired from his stationery business in Chico and moved down to Southern California to cultivate a tan and a heart condition.
Guinness maintained a kind of bored, deferential attention, asking a question just often enough to keep his father in law’s monologue going smoothly—he wanted the old boy to like him—but Louise was in agony. Occupying a chair in the opposite corner, next to a portable record player that rested on a brass stand, she was working her way through a pack of cigarettes she had purchased from a service station machine in Santa Barbara (Guinness couldn’t remember ever having seen her smoke before), drumming her fingers and frowning. Her father didn’t seem to notice.
It was out of character for her, but not inexplicable. She had a new husband and a father who was something of an embarrassment, and probably still some feeling that she was out on approval, so it couldn’t have been a very pleasant afternoon for her.
After that she was better. She made dinner that night and the three of them played canasta until nearly ten o’clock. They went back to Belmont on the morning of the fourth day, and so that was that. There was a meager exchange of letters, perhaps two a year, and father and daughter never saw one another again.
Then, the day after Louise’s murder, about three hours after he had inserted the key in the ignition of his car and received its gaudy warning, Guinness phoned Mr. Harrison and delivered the news.
The next morning they met at the San Francisco Airport and drove directly to Sergeant Creon’s office on the second floor of the Belmont City Hall. Guinness had already decided he would prefer not to be present and waited in the car. He had seen the performance before.
Sitting behind the wheel with the window rolled down, listening to the birds chirp, he tried not to think about anything, but that was impossible. A couple of kids went by on bicycles (Guinness wondered for a moment why they weren’t in school and then remembered that it was a Saturday) and a squirrel was carefully picking his way over the roof gable of the Episcopal church. The noon whistle sounded; Guinness checked his watch and frowned at the unrelieved ugliness of life.
After thirty-five minutes Murray Harrison came back out into the sunshine, and Guinness could tell by the way he walked that Creon had at the very least strongly intimated that he had a favorite suspect all picked out.
That evening, in Murray’s room, Guinness twisted apart the seal on a bottle of Jack Daniels he had smuggled into the hotel in a paper shopping bag marked “Kepler’s Books.” He poured a good three fingers each into two stubby water glasses from the bathroom, and the two men sat together in the filtering twilight, silently drinking.
It wasn’t until about two thirds of the way through the second glass that Murray began to cry. Small and birdlike, with his white hair falling down around his ears and his Adam’s apple pumping up and down, he sat on the edge of the bed, rocking back and forth in time to the spasms of his grief.
“I dunno,” he whimpered damply, “I just dunno who coulda done a thing like that.” His eyes were on Guinness in a way that suggested he might be afraid of what sort of an answer he would receive. Guinness only shrugged and freshened the old boy’s drink. After all, to him the question of who could have killed Louise was technical rather than moral; it contained no element of outraged surprise.
After a tentative sip, Murray brought the glass down to rest on his thigh and uttered a kind of wheezy groan. He took a couple of panting
, carefully separated breaths and then, for a moment, didn’t seem to breathe at all. “Well, at least she didn’t suffer,” he said at last. “At least we have that to be thankful for.”
Guinness could think of no appropriate answer, or at least not one that he would care to give to a ravaged, half ¬drunk old man, so he simply made a small noncommittal sound that his father in law would be free to interpret as agreement if he wished. Anyway, Murray was probably correct from a medical point of view—an ice pick in the medulla oblongata probably wouldn’t leave one with any time to suffer. But, God, what must have preceded it. It didn’t bear thinking about.
But he did think about it. How could he help but think about it? Over and over, almost compulsively, Guinness had, like a man suffering through his wife’s birth pangs, lived his way over Louise’s final twenty minutes or so of helpless existence. It must have been horrible: the fear, the certainty of death, the crazy pointlessness. The stranger with his fingers buried in the flesh under her jaw, keeping her head straight as she knelt on the bedroom carpet. Out of the corner of her eye, just at the limit of her field of vision, she must have seen his hand raised to strike.
Only a Murray Harrison, a man with no imagination, a man who had passed his life conducting inventories of his rubber band stock, could suppose the absence of pain any kind of comfort. More terrible than pain was the prospect of pain, and more terrible still the prospect of death. Pain was nothing, just a fact of existence like passion or bereavement; it could be accepted and overcome. Fear was the final enemy, the crucible in which intelligence, dignity, any sense of oneself as a human creature were melted down into a numbed wretchedness infinitely worse than any mere anguish of the flesh.
“Do you know who did this?” Murray both sobbed and shouted, in a kind of capitulation from the comforting fact of death’s painlessness. “Ray, do you have any idea who coulda done this?”
The real question, of course, the one he wanted to ask, was, “Did you do this?” There was something like an implied forgiveness if he would only confess and relieve an old man of his intolerable burden of uncertainty.
Guinness drained his glass in a single swallow, setting it down on the tiny circular table next to which he was sitting in a low armchair, the back and arms of which were a single curve of red naugahyde, and with the same hand he poured himself another three fingers, holding the bottle by the neck.
“No, Murray, I don’t know who could have done it, but believe me when I tell you it wasn’t me. I know what you’re thinking, but Creon is full of shit.” With a smooth, careful movement he reached across the perhaps four feet of space to where his father in law was sitting and refilled his glass.
“Here, you need this worse than I do,” he said quietly, suddenly heavy with compassion for a sorrow that was no less real because it had been yielded to.
As if unaware of its existence, Murray took a sip of the whiskey. You might have thought the operation performed by some agency independent of the will. The drink had its effect, though, and with a slight shudder the angular, storklike figure on the bed seemed to come back into focus.
“I never really believed you did it, boy. Not really. But still it’s a comfort to hear you say so.”
“Yeah.” Guinness rose to go back to his own room, leaving the bottle of Jack Daniels behind him. “Good night, Murray.”
“Good night, Ray.”
For most of that night Guinness lay awake, staring up at a ceiling hidden in darkness. He didn’t even try to sleep; he was past that.
Instead of numbing him, the whiskey had produced a version of clarity all its own, difficult but persistent. He didn’t drink usually, and now he could remember why: the stuff made you feel melancholy and self pitying and at the same time left behind sufficient intellectual detachment with which to deplore such maudlin excesses. It was like being two people at once, and they didn’t like each other.
Louise and her father. The shame of the clever child for the weakness of her parent, whose love is rather like conventional piety and chiefly operates at weddings and funerals.
Still, Murray wasn’t a bad man just because his emotions had been patterned into clichés. Louise had been wrong to turn her back on him, even if he hadn’t noticed.
But so what? It didn’t matter anymore—Louise was dead—and who the hell was he to criticize? He hadn’t himself been precisely what one would call a model son. He hadn’t seen or had contact with his own parent in twenty-two years, not since his sixteenth birthday had ended her legal obligation to support him and they had parted with mutual relief.
Mother. At the time he had felt—what? Distaste, resentment, a whole series of confused, hostile sensations, no two of which fitted perfectly together. He had been glad to get away from her, to be on his own (that would pass soon enough), but angry that his mother should be glad to see him go. Somehow your mother didn’t have the right to be tired of supporting you.
God, that woman, how he had hated her. She had been, at least at the time, the embodiment of everything he wanted to put behind him, of everything from which the effortless dignity of academic life would protect him. A dark haired, bony vulgarian who made her living and his by tracing parallel lines in whitewash around the bells of crystal water goblets in a glass factory in an ugly little town named Newark, Ohio. The lines served as guides for the cutters and were washed off when the design was complete. She would place the goblet upside down on a little potter’s wheel on the table in front of her, wet the tips of her brush that looked like a pair of navigator’s compasses, fit the brush into its vise, and turn the wheel. Day after day for years, the same thing. It must have been maddening.
She was a woman who perceived her life—and perhaps rightly—as a series of unprovoked calamities, and of these her son Raymond was by no means the least. It wasn’t that he was perverse or unusually stupid (she credited him with these failings, but they were not the source of her grievance against him); it was merely that he existed. In himself, by virtue of the fact that he needed to be fed and clothed and put up with, he was a burden she most emphatically did not need. He was expensive and a distraction; these were his sins. And she never forgave him.
Guinness returned the compliment.
He remembered her as a coarse skinned, scowling figure with knuckles the size of golf balls, leaning against the refrigerator, holding a dark brown bottle of unidentifiable beer delicately by the neck between her first finger and thumb. In recollection she was enormous, but that had to have been a carryover from childhood; she couldn’t have been more than five feet four, and even at sixteen Guinness would have towered over her. How old had she been then? Late thirties, perhaps—no more.
Of his father he knew nothing. He had been merely The Deserter, a figure of myth, and Guinness couldn’t even be sure whether he and his mother had ever been divorced. Or even married, for that matter. Perhaps even she wasn’t sure who he was. Perhaps, except in a purely chromosomal sense, he had never existed.
So that left Murray Harrison down the hall, mourning for his butchered child. Father and daughter had appeared little concerned with each other alive, although that again might have been nothing more than an impression, and Murray’s grief was no doubt largely compounded out of a sense of propriety, but so what? It was there. It is the emotions that create one person’s responsibility to another, and they are, after all, finally something more than the sum of their ingredients.
So, what the hell. Guinness slipped his arms into the sleeves of his coat and prepared to depart. Today he would bury all the family he had left in the world—except the mother and the daughter on whom, at various times, he had turned his back; and could they have been any less dead to him than Louise was now?—and then Murray would get on a plane and go back to his condominium and his pinochle games and his scrapbooks of life in Chico, and the whole issue would become academic.
He walked to his father in law’s room and tapped lightly on the door with the joint of his first finger.
“Come on, Murray. It’s time.”
7
It was laundry day. Exactly a week had passed since the Belmont Police Department had packed his suitcase for him, padlocked his front door, and driven him to the hotel of his choice, and he was running perilously low on underwear.
Guinness hadn’t been inside a laundromat since his bachelor days, but the only change he could perceive was that the washing machines seemed to take fifty cents now instead of thirty-five. Otherwise, everything was the same. The same long, narrow room with the washing machines against one wall and huge, vatlike driers built into the other. Even the molded plastic chairs where you sat transfixed before the drier windows, watching your clothes tumble past like the characters in some particularly repetitious television show, were exactly the same, linked together in groups to make it harder for aficionados of vulgar furniture to rip them off.
It wasn’t a very entertaining way to spend time, but time was suddenly something Guinness had plenty of, so it didn’t matter. He was officially on leave from his university—paid leave, which provided some measure of how badly they wanted him out of the way.
The day after Louise’s death, just half an hour before he was nearly blown up in his car, he had found a note in his department mailbox that the dean would appreciate a word. Not the chairman, but the dean. In the six years of his tenure at Belmont State, Guinness could remember only one other private encounter with that august personage; a rather perfunctory welcome on his first day. Perhaps it was different in the prestige schools, but at Belmont State the deans were like gods, powerful and distant. You were thankful if in their brooding majesty they left you alone, because a summons from that quarter usually meant you stood in violation of some particularly serious tribal taboo.
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