by Peter Ferry
“Look, Pete, all summer I’ve been thinking about how much I love you, and I do. I know it took me a long time to admit it, and maybe that’s the problem, but I do. Anyway, all summer I’ve been thinking about the wrong thing. I should have been thinking about how much you love me, and the answer is ‘not enough.’”
“Lydia—”
She raised her hand. “Stop. It doesn’t matter. All that matters now is what I think, and I don’t think you love me. Not in the way I love you. Not in the way I need to be loved. Pete, I’ve lost my belief in you. You know me. I’m an extremist; I can’t live on maybe and sometimes. I do not want to be lying in bed alone late at night when I’m fifty-five wondering what your latest doubt is. I can’t live like that.”
“Lydia—”
“No,” she said. “The thing is broken irreparably. It can’t be fixed; it won’t heal. I know that I can never trust you again, not with my heart. I tried all summer to get you to love me, and now the summer is over. Now I’m going to leave, and I’m going to ask you to let me. All your attempts to be a nice guy have only made things worse, so please let me go.” She stood up and looked at me. She went out the door. I watched her go down the stairs. Then I went to the window and watched her cross the street.
I had no intention of killing the doctor. None at all. It was research or a game or a great indulgence, a return to the summers of my youth. Now I was pretending again, pretending to be a detective or a mystery novelist or the right hand of God. And I was having an enormous amount of fun. Still, I know that the only difference between a passenger and a skydiver is a single step, and the closer I got to the open hatch, the more exciting and pregnant my fantasy became. And I must admit that somewhere in me I knew that the ultimate thrill would be to discover that it wasn’t a fantasy at all.
That’s why I took the bullet that night. I had never intended to, but at the last minute I knew that it just wouldn’t be the same with an empty pistol. I wanted verisimilitude. I wanted to feel that adrenaline rush again. I wanted to have the doctor in my sights and to make the decision not to pull the trigger. And I thought that I had everything planned right down to the last second and the final detail, but as it turned out, I was in no way prepared for what happened.
I practically idled up Sheridan Road refusing to even think about my destination, a man in search of a lake breeze on a warm autumn evening listening to a ball game on the radio. The Cubs were playing out the string and the announcers were working very hard—too hard—to not sound bored silly, distracted, and tired of it all.
I parked at the far end of the lot with a clear view of the doctor’s black BMW. I opened the Trib over the steering wheel, section by section, and slowly the lot began to empty. When the spot to the left of the doctor’s car became available, I looked at it a long time and then idled forward into it. This upped the stakes. Now I not only had means and motive, I had opportunity. I had proximity. In a few minutes he would be practically close enough to touch, certainly close enough to kill. My heart beat in my ears.
But it wasn’t a few minutes. It was forty-five minutes after his last appointment had ended. It was getting dark and there were just three cars parked in the lot now, all side by side, with the doctor’s in the middle. As each faded ray of light made my enterprise more conceivable, more possible, I imagined the scene. I envisioned it. I picked the heavy, cool gun up, held it, raised it to the open passenger window of my car. Too close, I thought. He would be right there. How could I shoot something—someone—so close? Blood would splatter. It might splatter on me. He might fall against my car and smear blood on it. I saw myself driving back down the lakeshore with a big smear of human blood on my passenger door, specks of blood on my glasses. What if he fell under my car, fell and rolled under my wheels? Drive over him? Get out and pull him away by the feet? I had almost come to the conclusion that I couldn’t shoot him, that I couldn’t shoot anything at such horrifyingly, intimately close range. But of course that would be the exact time to do it; when you thought you couldn’t possibly, when you were absolutely sure you wouldn’t. Then blam! And “intimate” was the word. It would be a very intimate act; I had not realized that. It would be as intimate as kissing him, as intimate—more intimate—than sex. . . .
I heard voices. He wasn’t alone. “Shit,” I said, relieved. I saw two figures cross my rearview mirror: a man and a woman. Quickly the doctor was at the door of his car and across my car I could see his torso. I held my breath. I had never been this close to him. Then the woman was there, too. She touched his elbow and pressed against him.
“Don’t,” he said. “We can’t.” Then she disappeared, and just as quickly, he had closed his door and started his engine and backed away like a drawn curtain, and there was the woman unlocking her car door and getting in.
“Oh fuck,” I said. It was Tanya Kim. She heard me. She looked toward me. She backed out and was gone into the night.
Lydia left me a rug, a dresser, a coatrack, a boom box, a coffee table, an easy chair, most of the dishes, flatware, pots and pans, and an old-but-good maple dining-room set with ladder-back chairs that had once belonged to my parents. I instantly transferred my operation to this table and taped my lists around it, although by the middle of October, the lists were mostly new. I bought a bed, borrowed a couple of lamps, and brought home one of the couches students had donated to my classroom. For the time being, I didn’t buy a television. I like TV, but I didn’t have any time for it that fall; I was too busy. Unfortunately, what I was busy with was very seldom schoolwork, so in early November, I went to see John Thompson and told him that I needed some time off. I told him I wanted to take a leave of absence. He listened to my plans.
“How much time do you want?” he asked.
“One year, two semesters.”
“If you do this, will you come all the way back and be the teacher you used to be?”
“Yes. I will or I’ll resign.”
He looked at me, thinking. “Tell you what I want you to do,” he said. “Go home and write a letter of application to the sabbatical committee. Tell them you want to do some writing; you’ve got the credentials for that. You’re way past the deadline, but who knows. Can’t hurt to try, and you might get half your salary.”
I invited Tanya Kim to dinner at my apartment three weeks before Christmas. I was straight with her on the phone; I told her I had things to tell her about Lisa and Decarre. I did not tell her that I had also invited Decarre’s other two victims, Dorothy Murrell and Jeanette Landrow, nor at the last minute, Carolyn O’Connor, thinking that the others might feel more comfortable with another woman there. Carolyn could put anyone at her ease.
I decided to make a casserole, a favorite of mine with hot Italian sausage, artichoke hearts, rice, green peas, and Parmesan cheese. More of a man’s dish, I suppose, but mighty good on a chilly, winter evening, and I’d serve it with a big mesclun salad full of nuts, berries and cherry tomatoes and good, crusty bread. I had tiny lemon tarts as a sweet, and three cheeses with fruit for afterwards.
About mid-afternoon it began to snow, and I thought for sure someone would use that as an excuse, someone wouldn’t show, but they all did. Carolyn was the first to arrive. She brought some red-pepper hummus and her pictures of Europe, but I was too busy and nervous to look at them. “Hey,” she said when she saw my Trek. “That’s a serious bike.”
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
“I thought you were the guy who said you could find everything you needed in life at a garage sale. I don’t think you got that at a garage sale.”
“No, I sold out. I even got a helmet and a spandex outfit.”
Jeanette came next. She carried with her a file that she held against her chest even after she was also holding a glass of red wine. She leaned against the kitchen counter, and we spoke of Christmas plans as I prepared dinner. Then came Dorothy. She was nervous and laughed a lot. Jeanette and Dorothy shyly, curiously, looked at each other when they had a chance, when the other was saying something.
When the chatter died for a moment, Jeanette said, “I guess it’s kind of an intervention, isn’t it?”
Tanya came last. I poured her a glass of wine and carried a plate of crackers and hummus out to the living room, then went back to the kitchen and turned up the music. I realized then that I could feel my heart beating, and I raised my eyebrows at Carolyn and said, “We’ll see.” I half-expected Tanya to be gone when we went into the living room, or maybe all of them to be gone, but they weren’t. Instead they were all sitting on the couch with Tanya in the middle. The two other women were doing the talking and mostly to each other, but Tanya was listening. She was listening and watching. The talk went on at dinner, and at times it gushed out, as if in relief. Everyone relaxed. Carolyn and I just listened, but we were not excluded. It was as if all of us were a part of a secret club, and I guess we were.
Tanya didn’t say much, and she didn’t show much, but she did drink a lot of wine and in the end both Carolyn and Dorothy offered to drop her off, but she said no, she wasn’t driving; she wanted to walk.
At the door I said to Carolyn, “I never looked at the pictures.”
“We could now quickly.”
“I don’t want to do it quickly, and I’m too pooped anyway. Let’s have dinner next week, and I’ll see them then.”
“Okay, sure,” she said. “Call me.”
“Thanks for tonight,” I said.
At midnight, as I was finishing the dishes, I thought to myself that neither Tanya nor I had acknowledged that it was the anniversary of Lisa Kim’s death, and I wondered if Tanya even realized it.
On Monday I got a letter with Mexican postage on it. It was addressed to both Lydia and me, and that made me feel for just a second as if I’d gone over a rise in a fast car. I hadn’t bothered to tell Charlie, and I imagined that Lydia hadn’t, either.
Charlie’s Christmas letters were famous between Lydia and me. They consisted of his usual picturesque prose decorated with winking lights and sparkling bulbs. I made a cup of tea to enjoy with it, then sat down at my big table and opened it.
Dear Pete and Lydia,
I’m very sorry to have to inform you that Charlie died of a heart attack in October after he had gone back to school. He had a slight attack teaching and was immediately taken to the hospital. I talked to him by phone that evening, and we made plans for my coming to drive him home in a couple of days.
That night, however, he suffered another attack that was massive and fatal. He was in intensive care and surrounded by doctors, but they could not save him.
Since then I’ve been busy with his affairs. Two of his children were down for a memorial service. He was cremated and buried here at the ranch.
Charlie was a man with many friends, and he counted you among the best of them. I’m sure you’ll keep him in kind memory.
Sincerely,
Dick
There’s a painting by John Sloan in the Art Institute of Chicago called Renganeschi’s Saturday Night, that shows three young women out to dinner in a popular New York restaurant in 1912. The tablecloths are white, the waiters tuxedoed and the place is busy, crowded, and gay. The painting always reminds me of Mia Francesca, the spot Carolyn and I had dinner that Friday night. It’s a narrow, bright, loud, and festive room on North Clark Street, just around the corner from Carolyn’s place. She already had a table against the wall and a glass of red wine when I came in.
“Thought I better get a place. It fills up fast.”
“I’ll have whatever she’s drinking,” I said. “Cold out.” We talked about the cold and Christmas and Carolyn’s new job and Tanya Kim, who had left me a thank-you phone message and said she was going to send me something that hadn’t arrived yet. We talked about that evening.
“You know, it was really interesting,” Carolyn said. “These three women . . . they couldn’t decide if they were rivals or allies. I’ve never felt a stranger dynamic in a room, yet it wasn’t bad. It was good, really. Don’t you think it turned out well?”
“I’m just glad it’s over.” I thanked her for recommending Gene, and we talked about him. She said she liked that he didn’t make judgments rashly.
I said, “Neither do you, you know. I don’t know if you’ve always been like that or if you learned it from Gene, but it seems to me you’ve always been like that. When people were rolling their eyes behind my back, you treated me as if I might actually be sane. I mean, I did go a little overboard there for a while.”
“Maybe, but when you told us about the accident, I was touched. I think it was because you believed that you could have done something—very few people think that they can—and maybe even more, that you should have done something—even fewer of us think that—and I guess I liked that you believed in yourself when you must have known that other people were doubting you, so I just kind of decided to believe in you, too, and it turns out that your instincts were pretty good and I guess mine were, too.”
“Then you don’t think what I’m going to do is harebrained?” I asked.
“I think it’s what you need to do.”
“Think it will work?”
“Who knows, Pete. I have no idea. What are we toasting?”
“I’m saying good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
“I’m going to Mexico.” Carolyn raised her eyebrows. “It’s cheap and I’m not going to have a lot of money. And I really like Mexico; I feel at home there, and I figure I can make a little money writing travel pieces.”
“To Mexico, then.” She raised her wineglass.
I looked at her and she at me and we smiled. “I did fall a little bit in love with her, you know.”
“I know.”
“I think its time to get beyond that, too. I’ve been thinking I might start dating again.”
“Good. I think you’re ready for that,” she said.
“Yeah, but I don’t know where to begin.”
“You must know a lot of eligible women. Aren’t schools full of them?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure I want to date someone I work with. And I’m not sure . . . that’s the thing. What am I looking for? I don’t want to do this the same way I did it when I was twenty-two, and you can imagine what criteria I used then. No, I said to myself, don’t even think about sex or love or romance or marriage. Think about one thing: Think about someone you would really enjoy having dinner with, nothing more. So I decided to make a list. I went to Café Express with a pad and pen and I wrote down your name, naturally, since we do this from time to time, and I always enjoy it, and then I couldn’t think of anyone else whom I’d rather have dinner with, or even whom I’d like to have dinner with, so I stopped.”
She looked at me strangely. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I’d like to write you while I’m away. May I do that?”
She didn’t answer. She was flustered, and I liked that she hadn’t seen it coming. For all her wisdom and intelligence, there was something in her that was also naïve and innocent. She regained her composure as we looked at the photographs, ate our meals, and talked of other people. Steve’s doing this, Wendy’s doing that, and someone else something else. She asked if I had talked to Lydia.
“No. You?”
“We haven’t talked.” She had called and left two or three messages, but Lydia hadn’t called back, and Carolyn thought that meant that she wasn’t interested in continuing their friendship. Too many associations, probably. By this time we had paid our bill and were standing in front of the restaurant on the pavement, and Carolyn asked me where I was parked.
“I’m right on your block. Can I walk you home?”
“Sure.” I think we were both trying not to touch each other—not even to brush shoulders—but when we came to an icy patch, I took her elbow, and when we got to her steps, she asked me if I wanted to walk Cooper with her.
“Sure.” Cooper was happy to see me. We followed him down to Halsted Street and back to Clark Street, and when we got there, Carolyn said,
“I’ll buy you a nightcap at The Outpost.”
“What about Cooper?”
“We’ll tie him to the no-parking sign, and everyone who comes by will pet him. He’ll love it.” So we sat at the bar sipping Grand Marnier and watching Cooper through the plate-glass window. Carolyn mused, then turned to me and said, “Pete, I know we’ve known each other a long time, but I still don’t think you know me very well.”
“I know you have strong friendships,” I said. “I know you like to travel and scuba dive. I know your favorite color is green. I know you don’t allow dogs on your furniture. I know you love to read.”
“Reading is almost my favorite thing to do.”
“And cooking,” I said, “and singing.”
“Yes,” but she said she sang only in big groups or entirely alone. She wanted me to know that; she didn’t like to stand out; she didn’t like to be the life of the party. “I can’t tell a joke, and public speaking gives me panic attacks.”
“Not good for a lawyer.”
“That’s why I’m not a litigator. I do not like to be the center of attention. It makes me nervous. I do not like the limelight. A lot of people find me a little boring.”
“I do not, and you still haven’t told me anything I don’t know. Tell me something that will surprise me.”
“I’m a nervous driver. I’m scared of heights. I hate football.”
“I’m still not surprised.”
“Okay, I don’t like Christmas very much except for the music and I hate ‘Little Drummer Boy.’”
“Something more.”
“You have a white car and I don’t like white cars.”
“What’s wrong with ‘Little Drummer Boy’?”
“It’s repetitive and sentimental.”
“Why don’t you like Christmas?”
“It’s a hard day for single people. I always try to be traveling on Christmas Day.”
“And white cars?”
“They look like kitchen appliances.”