by Susan Conant
"I need to get this bread out of the oven," Kelly said brightly. "The crust is supposed to be crunchy, but Joel just hates it if it's too brown, and I haven't finished slicing the oranges, either."
Before I knew the Bakers, if somebody had asked me, in the abstract, who was more strange, a woman pretending to be a man or the woman married to the first woman, I'd have answered wrong. Of the two, Kelly was by far the weirder.
"Kelly, listen to me. I have tried to be so fair and so sympathetic and such a goddamned perfect liberal that I could have died for it. I know that what started this was nothing more than bad luck. If Donna Zalewski had happened to see some other therapist and not Joel, none of it would've happened. Or if she'd told that story to somebody besides Elaine, somebody who wasn't so happy to believe her. It almost didn't happen. But it did, you know, and it has real consequences. In fact, two women are dead. I can't pretend that didn't happen."
She repeated something she'd said before: "I feel sick about your dogs." Then she added an accusation. "You should have known not to give them chocolate. I shouldn't have trusted you. I'm so sorry."
"This discussion is not rational," I said, mostly to myself. "And I can't take it much more. We are talking about people, not dogs. I'm going to get Joel, and the three of us are calling the police. I have had all I can stand of all this damned ambiguity about everything. We're going to get it all out in the open. I don't know what else to do."
"I do." Her tone was pert and superior. "You're just like everybody else, aren't you? I know what you think of me. Everybody thinks I'm the most reactionary woman in Cambridge." Pride filled her voice. "But I have a lot of clever ideas. You'd be surprised."
"I'm sure you're clever," I said. "I wouldn't be surprised at all."
"Go and get Joel," she ordered me, as if she wanted me to do nothing more than summon him to breakfast, and, in fact, she picked up the white-handled knife and began pulling the peel off an orange.
When I got down from the high stool, the scraping of its legs on the hard tile disturbed the dogs, who escorted me silently to the front hallway. There was certainly an inside staircase that led down to Joel's office, but I didn't want to poke around looking for it, and I didn't want to ask Kelly for directions. I felt guilty for letting Kelly continue to believe that she'd killed Kimi and Rowdy, and I almost turned back to tell her that they were alive. I also felt guilty about Nip and Tuck, whose pack was about to disintegrate. They weren't growling, and I could probably have patted them both, but I didn't. It would have been a sleazy thing to do, a superficial gesture of unfounded reassurance. I let myself out and followed the little brick path around the house. The temperature outside had risen to about zero.
The door to Joel's office was locked. I couldn't find a doorbell, and I had to tap on the glass for a long time before he appeared. As usual, he had on a suit, but his tie was loose, and his shirt was unbuttoned at the top. He looked tired and distracted.
"Come with me," I said.
"Just give me five minutes. I'm almost done. I canceled all my appointments last night, and I've only got one more client to finish writing up. I just hope everybody takes these referrals."
I followed him down the stairs to his waiting room.
"Kelly is in bad shape," I said.
"Five minutes. I need to finish this. I need to know it's done."
"She's acting very weird."
"That's what happens when denial breaks down," he said.
"We have to get this over now. I know I told you twenty-four hours, but that was before. Didn't you understand my message? Kelly did."
"I've been here all night," he said. "She's only been down a couple of times."
"I left a message on your machine."
"Here or home?"
"The one to call for emergencies. Home, I guess."
"It's upstairs," he said. "I haven't checked it. Oh, Christ. I hope none of my clients called."
"Joel, wake up. It's a lot worse than that. When I left here yesterday, Kelly handed me a package of chocolate croissants. After I got home, my dogs stole the package, and they got a lot sicker than if they'd just eaten chocolate. A whole lot worse. I left a message that I couldn't wake them up. Kelly didn't tell you?"
He gave a big, pained sigh. "Your beautiful dogs."
"They'll be all right," I said. "They survived. But it was very close."
"Does Kelly know they're all right?"
"No," I said. "Come on. She's acting strange."
He opened a door in the waiting room and took quick, familiar steps up a flight of beige-carpeted stairs. By the time I got to the little hallway at the top, he was on the other side of what turned out to be a back door to the kitchen. He didn't close it, but when I tried to follow him in, Tuck blocked my way. Her strong legs were braced, and her growl warned me not to push past her. When I heard Joel's voice, I thought he must be talking to a dog, presumably to Nip. He was murmuring, but I couldn't make out the words, and I couldn't see either him or Kelly.
"Joel? Tuck won't let me in," I called. "Kelly? Call the dog, would you?"
I heard a soft thump of something on that hard floor, then Joel appeared. The front of his shirt was stained with blood. "Tuck," he said quietly. "Tuck, here."
The Ridgeback stopped growling at me, and I opened the door wide. I waited for Joel to speak, but he only stared vacantly at me. His face was empty, completely without expression, as if the person inside had left.
"Joel?"
"She used a Sheffield knife," he said blankly. "She didn't have much time. I guess she didn't have much choice."
"Where's Nip?"
Joel pointed with his chin. "Back there. Did you think . . . ? You didn't know her very well, did you? Kelly would never hurt a dog."
25
"Let me see her." I must have sounded ghoulish, but it's hard to tell whether a creature—a person or another animal—is dead. When in doubt, assume life.
Kelly Baker, though, sprawled on the tile near the granite island, had made a gory mess of leaving little room for doubt. She'd taken off the apron and plunged the white-handled knife into her chest, the same narrow-bladed knife she'd been using to peel and slice the blood oranges. The juice and zest must still have been clinging to the blade when she turned it on herself. I knelt down beside her.
"Joel, get the dogs away. And call someone." For once, I wanted no dogs around.
The Ridgebacks were not, of course, trying to drink her blood, and they weren't licking her. Nip, in fact, was asleep in a corner of the room. Dogdom's champion dozers, Rhodesian Ridgebacks guard their slumber as if it's a diamond mine they've been trained to keep inviolate. Neither Kelly's suicide nor our voices had broken through Nip's defenses, but Tuck was wide awake and nervous, pacing around and whipping her tail back and forth.
"Joel, call someone," I repeated. "For Christ's sake, get the dogs out and call someone. Or I will."
I sat on the cold tile next to Kelly and picked up her tiny, limp left hand. I tried to find a pulse, but I'm not sure I know how. I couldn't feel or see a sign of life, but I kept holding her hand while Joel put the dogs in another room and used the phone. It must take extraordinary control to do psychotherapy and even greater control to spend your whole adult life passing yourself off as someone you're not—or to keep passing yourself off as someone you've become, someone who isn't the person you once were. Joel's voice didn't crack or give out on him. He sounded exactly the same as always. "It's the pale yellow house with the fenced yard," he said calmly and slowly. I heard him hang up. He wandered to the massive doors of the refrigerator and freezer, only a few yards from where Kelly lay, and faced the appliance doors as if to study the inventories.
"She left a note," he said, as if remarking that she had made a shopping list or had run to the store and would be right back. Still facing away from me, he held up one of her recipe cards.
Hysteria filled my chest and bottlenecked in my throat. When I dropped her hand, it hit the tile with a soft spl
at. From the Kitchen of Kelly Baker. Waves of hideous laughter pressed the back of my tongue and gagged me. No other element had seemed so grotesque, or maybe Kelly had compressed all of the grotesquerie onto a five-by-eight recipe card. Elaine, to whom a life of exclusive domesticity meant a living death, would have interpreted the symbolism, I thought. I began to sober up.
"Joel? What did she write?"
He remained silent.
"Did she make a confession?"
"Of sorts," he said. "She confessed to depression. To infertility." He turned to face me and leaned the back of his head against the freezer door. His eyes moved back and forth as if searching the ceiling for cobwebs. "I wanted to leave. I wanted to go anywhere. She refused. She cared much more than I did. In a way, she was like those tiny women who get a kind of superhuman strength in a crisis, a rush of adrenaline. Those women who lift up cars when their children are trapped underneath?" For the first time that I'd seen, he looked down at her body. "Or more like someone who steps in front of a speeding car to stop it from killing someone else." He paused and then added, to himself, it seemed: "She had more investment in my identity than I do myself."
Marriage does that to women, Elaine would have said.
Kelly was dead, of course. She knew how to use a kitchen knife. When the ambulance took her body, Joel went, too. I said nothing to anyone about anything except to confirm that Kelly had stabbed herself and that she had told me how desperate she was for a baby.
If the weather had been warmer, I'd have taken the Ridgebacks home with me and boarded them in my yard, but zero degrees with no doghouse would have been cruel. With Joel and Kelly gone, the dogs were glad to follow anyone willing to take charge of them. Without any tugging on their leashes, I led them to the Bronco, and they soared into the back. When I got to Steve's, he was in surgery, but Rhonda, one of his aides, took the dogs. I collected Rowdy and drove home. With my bandaged hand encased in a plastic bag, I took one of those prolonged, boiling showers that scald fragile skin. It left me red-splotched and woozy. I put on a flannel nightgown printed all over with flowers, unplugged the phone, got into bed, and picked up the new L. L. Bean catalog that was on the nightstand. Rowdy wandered around the bedroom looking mystified and disoriented. I'm not a daytime napper. And where was Kimi?
"Bed," I told him. I thumped the comforter with my good hand. One of the luxuries of owning a highly intelligent dog is the freedom to declare exceptions to rules. Let a stupid dog sleep on the bed only once, and you'll have to keep kicking him off for the rest of his life, but an Alaskan malamute can understand that something is forbidden unless you give permission. Rowdy made a long, happy arc in the air and landed next to me. "Good boy," I told him.
A good grip on a dog is a grip on reality. With an arm wrapped around Rowdy's sturdy, furry neck, I studied the most comforting prose in the English language, that great refuge from uncertainty, the fully fashioned, practical, durable world of L. L. Bean, where the well-constructed pants are always cut full through the hips and thighs to provide unrestricted mobility, and turtlenecks of breathable knit neither bind nor bag. All sleeves are designed to allow freedom of arm and shoulder movement. Sweaters create a richly textured, intricate appearance, and shirts retain their crisp, fresh look. It is a prewashed, preshrunk land reliably bar-tacked at points of stress, a land devoid of difficult personal decisions: Lightweight jackets provide warmth and wind resistance on brisk fall and spring days. Utility jackets are appropriate for errands, shopping, and weekend yard work at home. All products are guaranteed to give 100% satisfaction in every way. Nothing is ambiguous, and you never have to think for yourself. I fell asleep.
A stupid or selfish dog would have awakened me at his dinnertime. Rowdy let me sleep until nine that night, when he planted his wet nose on my cheek. Then he let loose a series of snarls that sounded like an immediate threat to rip my throat open. Translated from the malamute, it was a polite request to go out.
Not long after I let him into the fenced yard and back into the house, and fed him dinner, Rita came home early from a date and tapped on the kitchen door. Her hair was swept away from her face and smelled of hair spray, and she was wearing a mauve silk dress and lots of silver jewelry. While I put on jeans and a sweatshirt, she scrambled two eggs and made toast for me. I told her what had happened and how, oddly, I'd slept. Therapists are more interested in responses to events than in events themselves.
"Regression in the service of the ego," Rita said. "It's a useful defense. There's nothing wrong with it."
"If Rowdy hadn't been frantic to be let out, I might've slept until morning. I never sleep in the daytime. And this was some strange kind of heavy, drugged sleep. The food is helping. I think I might've eaten lunch yesterday, but I'm not sure. I'm not really awake yet."
"So what's that about? That heavy sleep?"
"I was tired." That kind of answer never satisfies Rita.
"Of . . . ?"
"Complexity. Ambiguity. You know what I want?"
"A dog," she said.
I laughed. It felt like the first time in years. "No. For once."
"So what do you want?"
"One answer, just one. I'm tired of everything being complicated. I want one reason for everything. I want some kind of clarity."
"That's not what's bothering you," she said.
"I killed her. I think I meant to do it."
"And how did you accomplish it?"
Anybody else, except maybe another therapist, would have assured me that I was innocent.
"By not telling her about the dogs. I let her think she'd killed them. I could have told her they were all right, but I didn't. I let her think she'd killed them. I did it deliberately. I mean, I didn't say to myself, 'Well, if I don't tell her they're okay, if I let her think they died, then she'll kill herself.' But I did want her to suffer for it. I wanted revenge. And she really did try to kill me."
"I believe you," Rita said.
"And Kimi almost died. That's what I wanted to kill her for. In a way, I'm not that different from Kelly. Actually, what I did was worse. She was protecting someone, and I wasn't. I knew Kimi was okay. And I didn't do it because of Donna and Elaine, either. I did it because of my dogs. I wanted revenge. It doesn't feel very good now that I've got it."
"I can see that," Rita said.
"And it's partly because I was so devious. And what came to me in a kind of flash, after I'd been trying to work everything out but really just delaying and putting things off, is that if I'd been dealing with men, I wouldn't have done that. I wouldn't have hesitated. But even after I realized that, it didn't really change things. I still wasn't direct."
"Insight doesn't automatically change behavior, you know."
"Well, it seems as if it should. I mean, what was it I got all of a sudden? First, that I'm more afraid of women that I am of men, but, second, I also have this image of us, that we aren't fair game."
"Or," Rita said gently, "this is a world that makes it difficult for women to act directly, and people prevented from acting directly become people who find it difficult to play fair."
"That's very charitable."
"Do you have anything to drink? I can run upstairs."
"There's some of Kevin's Budweiser, or you can have Scotch."
"Scotch."
"Water?"
"Just ice."
I dropped the cubes into a glass tumbler that Rowdy won at a fun match, filled it three-quarters full, and handed it to her.
"Thanks," she said.
"You know what? Have you ever seen those old movies where at the end, you find out that some guy murdered someone? And he's about to be arrested, but then some suave English guy tells him he's got the chance to take the honorable way out. So he goes into his wood-paneled study, and you see the door close on him, and you hear a gunshot. Right? He's done the honorable thing. Well, you know what? It's not like that."
"There are other ways to think about this." She made it sound like a statement of fact
, not an accusation.
"Such as?"
"That the effort to sustain the illusion became too much for her. For all these years, she'd been living as if things were true that just plain were not. And that's not your responsibility. You might also want to consider the possibility that all the things she did really had very little connection with any secret about Joel."
"Bullshit, Rita. They had everything to do with it."
"Not necessarily. In a way, maybe she reaped the consequences of making someone else the center of her own life."
"Would you not make some sickening feminist parable out of it? You sound like Elaine."
"So what?"
"Okay. So what," I said. "I liked Elaine more than you did. So Kelly made someone else the center of her life."
"And maybe it doesn't make any difference who that someone is."
"It does," I said. "It makes a difference if the center of your life is keeping up some kind of pretense. I mean, if what's at the center is fake. Not Joel. The whole illusion."
"It reminds me of something Gloria Steinem said." Rita stretched her arms, rolled her neck a little, and then held still. "You know what she said about Marilyn Monroe? She said, 'Marilyn Monroe was a female impersonator. We're all female impersonators."
"Joel isn't. But, okay, I get it. Kelly was even more than most of us, right? Joel sort of said the same thing. So okay. She was more of an impersonator than he is. And to begin with, Donna Zalewski, of course. That abuse act was another kind of impersonation, you know? Playing the role of the victim."
Rita shook her head.
"No?"
"Holly, ask yourself: How would someone happen to select that role?"
"Oh, God."
"With a patient like that, a woman? A woman with those symptoms? Always. People never lie, Holly. All they do is alter the details."
"Her father?"
"My supposition is an uncle who lived with the family off and on. We never dealt with it directly. I didn't have time to see her, and I didn't want it surfacing in what had to be a brief contact. My hunch is that what happened with Joel is that it did start to surface, before their alliance was strong enough to withstand it, and she ran scared."