by A. R. Taylor
He stayed with her the whole night, but when the sun came up, Jenna arose before he did, soundlessly plucking up her purse and what she had been wearing yesterday off the floor. She gazed for a moment at his sleeping face, a great man, an awful man, both. She tiptoed out and dressed in the hallway, praying that the sweet housekeeper would not appear, but it was far too early for breakfast. She got out of that house as fast as she could, and when safely in the driveway, called a taxi, with her Vince-phone, as she had named it, telling them to wait for her on the road. Looking back for a moment at that glorious mansion, she felt a pang for the man still sleeping in the bed. Probably a lie, what he had said about her as a lover, something meant to keep her nearby, but the momentary flash of her as a betrayer of those around her had left a mark, like a newly formed bruise. Curiously, as she got into the cab, she thought of something Tasha had said. “He’s not smart enough to avoid the big tragedies.”
Whether she would return to her job, whether that was possible, remained a question. She couldn’t afford to stay in New York if she lost it, but how dare she ever face the man again, his flesh still molded to her own? These matters she vowed to consider on the long drive home, and she told the cabbie to keep on driving all the way into the city.
FOUR
Late for work, she strode in with a new determination, glancing only briefly at Jorge, who was as usual working hard. He barely glanced up, but when he saw her, he looked twice. She was rosy, flushed, excited somehow, and she moved with an intensity that surprised him. Usually she just seemed panicked. “Good weekend?”
“Long, but I got the inventory done, at least insofar as the stuff that exists in the United States. I doubt they’ll send me to Paris, and Hull said the pictures in Hawaii weren’t worth much.” She flopped her purse down, conscious that this new dress wasn’t quite the thing she usually showed up in. After the initial shock of being back at the office, the same place, the same setting, yet now she had an entirely different location somehow, at least in her own head. Jenna began to worry about when Vincent Hull would reappear. Would he burst in on her, once again yelling orders into the phone, threatening everyone in his wake, as he had before? Would he show embarrassment about their weekend, worse yet fire her in front of Jorge, thereby letting him know what they had done together?
And then Sabine Hull called her at the office, on her very own designated phone line. She demanded to know why her husband had had six antique Audemars Piquet watches overnighted to the old family home she and the girls now shared in Villefranche-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, having gone directly there from Wyoming. “I’m sorry, I have no idea about this.”
Jorge watched her as she looked over at him in dismay, indicating, “Say what?” with a wave of her hand.
Sabine’s warm soft voice and restrained manner didn’t seem threatening to Jenna at all, but she wondered about the timing of these purchases and what she could have had to do with them. Did the wife think she had picked them up at the store or something? “Truly, I don’t know, but he did buy some other watches several days ago. I’ll speak to Jorge. Do you need them returned?”
“No, no, of course not, but I haven’t been able to get hold of him lately, and I thought you might know something.”
“I did do some work at the Water Mill house this weekend, the art inventory, but no shopping or anything.” She really wanted to burble out some long excuse about having not seen him since the last Ice Age, but even she knew that when hiding a lie, short works better than long.
The Frenchwoman sighed, and there was silence, until, “Oh well, thank you. We will see what this all means.”
Jorge came around to her desk and shoved a piece of paper in front of her. “The great man is off to Paris today, not back for a whole week.” Jenna looked at the elaborate itinerary and burst into tears. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” The usually restrained man bent down and knelt before her.
“We should tell his wife this,” she managed through her sobs.
“Never interfere in their scheduling or lack thereof. It’s a no-no. Look on the bright side, we’ll be free as birds around here. We can move some of his Buddhas around and see if he notices. After all, it’s the small little triumphs that make the world go round.” She kept on snuffling into a Kleenex. “I’m trying to make you laugh.”
“I know, and thank you, Jorge. It’s fine, I’m just. . . .”
“A weekend at that house in Water Mill would make anyone crazy. Envy, lust, greed, at least half of the seven deadly sins got me going when I was there. It’s too much for anyone in this world to have, and yet that S.O.B. has it all, and I do mean all, plus the wife and kiddies.”
But Hull had certainly not had the missus for much of the summer, and this was by her design. She wanted him to feel her absence, to let him worry and wonder across a transoceanic distance because she had been particularly miserable of late. Several times a week she journeyed up to the almost always empty Saint Thomas More Church on 89th Street, dropped herself down into a pew, and just sobbed, reflecting up at the magnificent stained glass windows for a moment and then sobbing again. All she could do was relive those wonderful days when she had first met Hull at the tennis club in Villefranche-sur-Mer, where she had been a young and obsessed player. “How do you improve your game once you hit a plateau?” This she had asked Hull on a hot, windy day in 1983, he looking carefully at her taut legs, she watching the golden hair that he brushed away from his face.
“It takes time, small steps. You must be specific with your coach, if you have one.”
“I do.”
He had taken her by the arm and drawn her away from the scrum of people at this exhibition match. “What bothers you most about your game?”
“Return of serve and my net play. I’m afraid to run up there.”
“Tell the coach only these things, not anything vague like ‘I’m at a plateau,’ just the specifics. You will get better, I promise.” He had smiled down at her in all his splendid self-confidence. She didn’t seem intimidated by him, despite the dazzling aura and the gossip about his money, and once when the two had played a game together, he had noted this fact. “Nothing really impresses you, does it?”
She had taken his hand in her own, turned it over and kissed his palm gently, “You impress me.”
By the time their second daughter turned five though, silence and anger had closed in around them. During one particularly ghastly summer, for reasons Sabine could only dimly understand, Vince became obsessed with their gardener in Water Mill, with the fact that he wouldn’t do what he wanted him to, specifically cut down the neighbors’ salvia plants that marred the view on the south side of the house. Said gardener, a noble-looking man of thirty, himself with a wife and three children, humbly and repeatedly refused. Sabine took the man’s part. “You can’t just cut down other people’s plants, Vincent. It’s illegal. Go talk to the neighbor and see what you can do.”
But Vincent didn’t want to be that “known” to his next-door neighbor, so he persisted in this now-doomed campaign to get both his wife and the gardener in cahoots with his plan, but they stood fast. He often spotted them talking together in the garden, heads bowed over the salvias, and in the dark hours of the night, riven with Scotch and suspicion, Vince decided that the two of them were having an affair. Once his wife realized what he thought, she found it incredibly funny. After all of Vincent’s own secrets and lies, she supposed that it did make some sense to suspect such a thing, but really, it was too much even for Sabine, who had a highly developed sense of irony. She never formally disabused him of the notion, but at the last, when Vince ventured out at two in the morning with a large pair of hedge cutters to cut down the plants himself, she told him he needed therapy.
Sadly, Sabine saw the plant-cutting business as symbolic of a permanent break and that she must live and act alone, even while the powerful, relentless personage who occupied her house—rather houses—came and went at will. So her rare phone call to the office struc
k both Jorge and by now the very guilty Jenna as an anomaly that must mean something.
Jorge seemed genuinely concerned. “I’ve got to say he’s been acting strangely for the last couple of months—manic, then depressed, then, I don’t know, sick somehow, or sicker. Tormented, dare I say it? I’ve always wondered who or what could bring him down.
“He needs someone like you to look after him,” Jenna said.
Finding this a startling remark, Jorge stood back a moment to survey her. “Hmm, yes, maybe. Listen, I’ve got an idea. There’s a new wine-tasting class, high atop the World Trade Center downtown. Why don’t we take the class together? We could actually learn something, and then we could gaze down in complete condescension as people run around below us like rats. I could sign us up, if you don’t mind being seen with an old fart like me. It starts tomorrow night at Windows on the World, a fantastic restaurant with the best view in Manhattan.”
“Let me think about it. It sounds great, but I need to hunker down for a while and just do nothing. I’m exhausted.”
Interrupting their tête-à-tête, to Jenna’s great surprise, the long-absent Martin reappeared with a tray of pastries. “Did I hear crying? That’s my job, to cheer people up with food.” He handed her a chocolate croissant and a cup of coffee.
“You’re back, as in back back?”
“That’s right. I decided to give the great man another chance to slap me around, and this time I got him to sign on to a raise and more vacation, so screw him and that gauche restaurant of his. Baby back ribs, my ass!”
Jorge plucked a pastry off the tray. “You’ll get used to this revolving door routine. Hull can’t bear to let anyone go. Everybody just keeps coming back, like Lassie.”
Both Martin and Jorge recognized that something major was amiss with Jenna too, but they didn’t discuss the possible source of her troubles. All the while she sat at her desk, plowing through the vile letters that arrived without fail every day, only this time she agreed with every word. “I’ll rip your heart out, you should be deported to Rwanda, give all your filthy wealth to the poor, die you stinkin’ fucked up bastard. . . .” It all made sense, and she actually started to laugh, but in her heart she waited for Vince. Waiting for what, she didn’t know.
While she pined, someone else altogether waited for her, noticing that she might like to get out of town, and he could help. He had no ranch, but he had a mystery on his hands. “Come up to Rye, you promised,” Inti spoke into his new Motorola StarTAC cell phone. Only four days since her Water Mill junket, it seemed months longer, and the suspended animation of Jenna’s heart made her angry and lonely at the same time. She wasn’t sure she even liked Inti. Still, he was an enticing guy with a real job, and he seemed to be interested in her.
“Is there anything going on up there? Isn’t it just a suburb?”
“Oh, but what a ‘burb.’ And we have a mystery of sorts. You could help me figure it out, since I definitely need a scoop of some kind to ratchet myself upwards in the hierarchy. Much as I love having no real future at the Rye Register, it’s beginning to eat away at me.”
“We can’t have that, now, and you haven’t even been there that long.” Jenna was tempted.
“Come on Saturday morning. You’ll need to pack some jeans, a jacket, and good walking shoes, socks and all.”
“We’re not going camping, are we? I did way too much of that in Ohio.”
“Camping crossed with sleuthing, more likely. I don’t want to say more. Somebody could be listening.”
“Who? Our phones aren’t bugged.”
“For all you know they are. Listen, please bring that camera of yours. I need pictures.”
Jorge had tried to listen discreetly to Jenna’s half of the conversation, hoping that Vincent Hull did not occupy the other end of the line and finally became convinced that he did not. No woman was safe around the man, and he knew this from long experience. He felt protective toward his fetching office buddy, and while none too sure, he had uneasy feelings about the increasing proximity of this woman to his boss. She wasn’t the man’s type, but still he worried. This one was special. If he could see it, so could Hull, but perhaps he could stop him from getting his hooks into her. When finally she hung up the phone, he offered, “Rye is fantastic, I mean beautiful.” He didn’t want to oversell the town, since he’d never actually visited it.
“I don’t know much about it.”
“New boyfriend?” There, he’d committed himself to snooping.
“Not really. A friend, a journalist. He’s at the Rye Register.”
“If you’d wanted a writer, you could have had your pick of these guys hanging around here. They’d have been thrilled.”
“He did work here, Inti Weill.”
“Not familiar with the guy.” He had long since given up on the world of the scribe, the kind that he met at NewsLink anyway.
FIVE
No word from Vincent, and nothing from the man to Jorge either, so Jenna prepared herself for a suburban junket. While her roommates scurried off once again to Fire Island, she packed her duffel for some sort of outdoor encounter, her ultra-cool camera packed in its case very carefully. She could feel her sometime lover in its heavy leather strap. Did he know she’d absconded with it? No doubt yes, but so far he hadn’t said a word, nothing at all to her after what they’d done together. Though manifestly a crazy idea, she felt nagging guilt about Vince. Was she being disloyal, venturing off with someone else? What a mad thought, one that should be emphatically rejected, so she made her way to the Metro-North railroad line leaving out of Grand Central Station. On this Saturday, everyone else in town had also had the clever idea to avoid a Friday train, and the mayhem was total. The crowds, the vendors, even the man playing the violin, soliciting coins looked especially haggard. When finally she sat back in the cool railroad car, though, she felt blessed, freed at last from every care of that strange building she inhabited and the world of its ruler. About Inti’s world she hadn’t a clue, but she didn’t think it would lumber so mysteriously through her soul as Vincent Hull’s did right this very minute.
Inti stood waiting for her at the Rye station, reading a book and sipping on a soda. As the locomotive crawled into the station, Jenna watched anxiously through the window, and with sudden anxiety wondered whether this little outing would possibly involve sex. She wasn’t prepared for that and didn’t even want to let it enter her mind. Other people thought of these things, but she had been living in her own little Hull fantasy world, much removed from the reality of something like a real date with an available male. Now as she watched the young man standing there, she realized how beautiful he was, soulful but also slightly goofy, unlike any “face man” she’d been tempted to go out with in college. He had the sort of grace she associated with men in magazines, in his usual uniform of a blue T-shirt and beige linen trousers, but he didn’t seem vain or affected, or even really conscious of how good he looked. Instead he appeared preoccupied, a bit out of it.
Over fried chicken and biscuits at a diner, she learned more about him. The sheltered product of two professors at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, he had grown up on eccentricity and granola, at least that’s how it sounded to Jenna, and he played the cello. “My mother taught child psychology, my father anthropology, a people-of-many-lands thing. He was into the Skokomish and the Puyallup, all their artifacts, their way of life. One Christmas he put a teepee up in the back yard, and my sister and I had to spend the whole weekend there chanting weird songs with them about various gods. It was our version of a sweat lodge.”
She could barely imagine such a world but envied the idea of cultivated parents with interests beyond beer and bowling. Her own ever-shifting set of adults, some of whom appeared to have just wandered off, had never focused on any interest whatsoever, with the dramatic exception of her grandmother, who had concentrated on her. “How eccentric,” Jenna said, unsure what all this meant.
“Where we lived, we didn’t mak
e too much of it. The Pacific Northwest, you know, home of the brave and the strange.”
“Really?” Jenna felt unbelievably ignorant about at least sixty percent of what he was saying. “So what’s the big mystery in Rye?”
“Small dogs and cats are disappearing at an alarming rate. Is there a pet killer about? Someone or something is going after them, always at night, and they end up mutilated. That’s why we have to camp out and watch and photograph at the epicenter of all this, if possible. Are you up for it?”
“Sure, I guess. Will there be any violence involved?”
“I certainly hope not, but just in case I have some Mace here, also some salt. Let’s see, a Snickers bar, hmm, a little pot. Want some?”
“Not right now.”
“We really lived on weed in Olympia. I think it was meant to combat the rain.”
“Any lasting damage?” Jenna said as he threw his coat over her shoulders even though it was a balmy night in Westchester County.
“Hard to tell. I am as you see me.” He lifted his arms out wide and gave a quick salute. “I consider myself blessed because you’re here.” This winningly nerdy speech made her laugh, and at once these last few weeks lost a touch of their fire. She vowed to enjoy herself and find more people her own age.
Armed with a bottle of wine and their duffle bags, the two set off into the woods of Rye. Inti had arranged for them to camp in the spacious backyard of one of the city fathers, not in his own guesthouse rental. That would have been too much sharing for him right now, but also there had been no disappearances in his area. Behind the white colonial house, they spent the next hour setting up their tent under a voluminous red maple tree, building their small, regulation fire, and setting out sleeping bags. Inside the tent, it was cozy, so much so that if she had not had on clothes meant to deter ticks and other critters, Jenna might have been tempted to take them off. Almost immediately Inti stripped down from his fashionable getup into a sweatshirt, and at that moment she saw the torso of someone seriously in shape, but she tried to look away. Sex occupied her too much of late. Vince had started her up again, and the engine thrilled at being able to turn over at all, like a car too long parked in the garage.