Ian swallowed hard and said, embarrassed, “I’m grateful for your sympathy, Meika. I—”
“I think of her more now than I did while she was alive. I mean, more obsessively. We were never close, I mean not in the way she and Roberta were close, but, since her death, I mean, since it happened . . . the accident . . . since then I seem to be thinking of her more often; and of you.”
There was a brief, pained silence. Then Vaughn, his heavy face rubescent in the firelight, reached out again, to take hold of Meika’s thin hand, and said, “We really should talk of other things, dear. We don’t want to upset Ian, do we?”
“Are you upset, Ian?” Meika asked, nudging him coquettishly with her shoulder.
Ian said, “I’m fine.”
“He says he’s fine,” Meika said curtly. “Perhaps you should let us alone, dear.”
It was nearly midnight. Ian got to his feet, not very steadily, with the intention of going home; but both Meika and Vaughn expressed surprise, and disappointment, and insisted that he join them in a final drink, a nightcap—“It’s the holiday season, after all.” So, against his better judgment, Ian found himself accepting another drink: a liqueur glass of wickedly powerful Armagnac.
He said, “You are both extraordinarily kind.”
Meika said, smiling, “We are both extraordinarily fond of you.”
They talked for a brief while of Ian’s class at the Short North Rehabilitation Center, of which neither Meika nor Vaughn had heard, though they knew from mutual friends that Ian was involved in some sort of volunteer effort. “Teaching adult illiterates to read?” Meika said, narrowing her eyes in disapproval, “You? It’s too absurd.”
Vaughn said, frowning, “A white man of your sort, with, you know, your particular background, and manner . . . it seems to me a naïve and dangerous enterprise. Some evening when you go to get into your car—”
Ian said, annoyed, “It isn’t that bad at all, really. It isn’t bad at all, really. The parking lot is well lit and perfectly safe.”
“What of your students, aren’t they mainly black? Drug addicts, and alcoholics, and parolees—”
“They are black,” Ian said, less forcefully than he would have wished, “but they are perfectly fine people. Decent, good, serious, reliable.”
“Have they made any progress?” Meika asked.
“Progress?”
“In learning to read.”
“Yes, of course . . . some progress.”
“Ah, well! Dei gratia!” Vaughn murmured, with an expulsion of breath: signaling, perhaps, that the subject was to be dropped. He rubbed his hands together briskly and said, “I have an idea. Why don’t we go upstairs to my studio for a minute? I can show Ian my secret portfolio; and you too, Meika, since you haven’t seen the latest additions. These past few weeks—”
“I’m perfectly content right here,” Meika said lazily. “Though I would like another brandy, please. And where are my cigarettes?”
“My dream project, I call it: an experiment of many decades,” Vaughn told Ian, with a shy sort of excitement. “I’ve shown it to very few people . . . mainly Meika. And one of my teachers, a very long time ago. The man has been dead for twenty years.”
He poured Meika more brandy and refilled Ian’s glass as well and though Ian supposed he should go home he heard himself responding enthusiastically to the invitation. Yes of course he would like to visit Vaughn’s studio. He had not been up there, he said, in a number of years.
So they all went upstairs, by way of a spiral staircase, and Vaughn switched on lights, saying, “It’s an experiment of a kind, an exploration of the poetics of pure space, done in the interstices, so to speak, of my ‘real’ work: the heartrending real work that pays the real bills. Unless the dream work is real and the other is false. Who can tell!”
Meika, out of breath from the climb, leaned playfully against Ian as if she were faint, and yawned like a child, and, her mood having shifted, complained of the mess in the studio—like the interior of a madman’s skull, she said—and that smell: such stale, stuffy air, with a strong undercurrent of cigar. “There is a draft from the skylight and it’s freezing in here,” she said irritably, “yet, paradoxically, it smells. How is that possible?”
Vaughn, opening a large portfolio, said, hurt, “I never smoke while I work.”
“Then the odor is you,” Meika said cruelly, nudging Ian as if inviting him to share the joke. “The unmistakable odor of Vaughn Cassity’s soul.”
Without meaning to do so, Ian laughed; he was light-headed from the spiral climb and, yes, there was a curious smell in the studio, an air of something dry, scurfy, indefinable. He had not remembered that Vaughn’s studio was quite so large, or so cluttered. Against one wall there was an enormous filing cabinet, most of whose drawers were, to varying degrees, pulled out; there were several worktables and two desks; several full-scale drawing boards, each with work on it, projects in medias res; hundreds, perhaps thousands of sketches, drawings, blueprints, designs, photographs; dozens of small models of buildings, residential and commercial. . . . Vaughn was turning pages with care, tall stiff sheets of parchmentlike paper, murmuring excitedly under his breath. “Here, Ian, this will give you an idea of the project; step over here,” he said. Half-moon reading glasses, low on his nose, gave him an owlish elderly look. “Meika?”
In the fluorescent light, chill, lunar, Meika looked like a mannequin: unnervingly pale and without expression, her eyes bracketed by shadow. She draped her arms across her husband’s and Ian’s shoulders as Vaughn led them through his “poetics of space,” a magnum opus of some thousand pages, still in progress, of course, a work entirely visual in concept yet, here and there, amplified by words; but the words, at least to Ian’s confused eye, were of no language he knew: rather like hieroglyphics. Buildings . . . landscapes . . . cities . . . “temporal dimensions” . . . “spatial hypotheses”: the drawings were architectural in execution yet fantastical in conception, elaborate—indeed, dizzyingly elaborate—composed of numberless fine filose lines, like a spider’s web. Ian tried to concentrate, tried very hard, thinking, as vaughn led them through this altogether mad yet beautiful and surely original curiosity, that this was the man’s soul: and must be honored.
As if not quite knowing what she did, Meika was leaning heavily on Ian’s shoulder, breathing warmly against his ear. She began to stroke, knead, caress, his upper arm; drew the tips of her fingers lightly across the nape of his neck; even as, so very happily, Vaughn explained his project’s gestation thirty-nine years before—“More of a visitation, really”—and his sense of what it portended, what its significance might one day be in terms of architectural theory and in the history of architecture itself. He did not know, he said, whether he should begin publishing it piecemeal or wait until it was completed. The problem of course was that he did not know when it would be completed, or if. “A posthumous celebrity would be a melancholy thing,” he said slowly, in so neutral a tone that Ian thought he must be joking, and laughed; as Meika did, fairly dissolving in a spasm of giggles. She pinched her husband’s ruddy cheek and said, “A posthumous celebrity is better than no celebrity, isn’t it? Just as nouveau riche, like us, is a fucking lot better than no riche. Isn’t it!”
Ian, disturbed by Meika’s provocative behavior, which he did not quite know how to decode, eased away from her, his breath short and his senses flooded, the very hairs at the nape of his neck stirring as, unmistakably now, with a playful boldness, she caressed him on the neck and ran her hand slowly down his back, to the small of his back and his buttocks, then drew it, yet more slowly and caressingly, up to his neck again, and to his head: all the while looking, with a schoolgirl’s mock attentiveness, at the extraordinary drawings Vaughn was showing them.
Vaughn said, as if talking to himself yet with apparent reference to Ian, “More and more, this past year—since last spring, I mean—I seem to be concentrating on the Poetics. My imagination seems naturally to swerve in this direct
ion. Almost, though I shouldn’t say so, I wish the San Diego commission would go to someone else. Those massive public structures are so . . . external. They seem to weigh so much, pull so heavily on the soul. Ah, here: can you see, Ian? This is a subterranean city, a sort of metropolis not of the future but of the past, the classical past—Athens, note; and a bit of Pompeii; and—”
Ian was by this time so enormously excited, so sexually, it very nearly seemed angrily, aroused, he could not attend to Vaughn’s words at all but stepped frankly away from Meika and looked at her as if to say, Stop. And so, as if chastised, Meika did stop: her mouth blood-swollen and pouty, her eyes sleepily narrowed. She said, in a voice that startled, it was so calm, so measured, so presumably sober, “Vaughn, I’m going to bed; you and Ian can continue but I’m going to bed; please don’t keep Ian too long; you know how you are, when professional men get talking together,” turning to leave, waving a hostess’s warm kiss in Ian’s direction, mouthing “Good night” and “Love you!” and disappearing down the spiral staircase. Ian stared after her for a full minute or more, sick and giddy with desire, his brain so besieged he could not think at all.
Moving a thick forefinger along one of his labyrinthine designs, this one conical, with a series of machicolated projections not unlike that of a terraced garden superimposed upon, say, the interior of a television set, Vaughn said, in a voice both reverent and critical, “This is the means by which one moves from one plane to another.” He glanced toward Ian and emended, wryly, “If, of course, one can move from one plane to another.”
AND SHORTLY AFTERWARD, within twenty-four hours in fact, Ian McCullough and Meika Cassity were lovers.
And for the space of such time as they were together, or times—for adultery, in so public a place as Hazelton-on-Hudson, makes of us, by necessity, as unsentimental as coroners in the art of dissection: “time” becomes an hour this afternoon, two hours on Thursday morning, a miraculous stretch of three, late Saturday afternoons—Ian forgot the tragedy of his life: or nearly.
He told her, How beautiful you are, how beautiful: warmed by her body as a convalescent is warmed by the sun. And she told him, seemed at times to be vowing to him, that she loved him, adored him, had adored him in fact for years. (Meika reminisced about their first meeting, many years ago, which Ian, unhappily, could not remember. No matter, Meika said curtly, kissing him in forgiveness; I remember.) She worshiped his body, she said, embracing him fervently, standing on tiptoes to kiss him and, when they were unclothed and lying in her bed, hugging him passionately about the hips . . . kissing the tip of his penis . . . taking his penis in her mouth . . . as Glynnis had never wished to do. She looked up at him in triumph, a greenish fire flaring in her eyes, and eased her slender snaky so very thin yet strong little body over his, to guide him into her, to draw him inside her, yes, like this, ah exactly like this, I adore you damn you fuck you you ignored me and I did, I always did, adore you . . . just like this.
3.
There came, on the first day of testimony, such surprising good news Ian could scarcely, at first, grasp its significance: Fermi Sabri had returned suddenly to Cairo, without having informed Lederer, and would not be testifying for the prosecution.
Thus the man’s malicious account of Ian McCullough’s “affair” with Sigrid Hunt would not be admitted as evidence; under the statute, no testimony from any witness not physically present at a trial was valid.
Ian asked why this was. “For the obvious reason that the defense doesn’t have the opportunity to cross-examine,” Ottinger explained. “This witness was lying, and I would have exposed him to the court.”
“But why do you think he ran off? Do you think—”
“I don’t ‘think’ at all about him; now that he’s out of the picture he doesn’t exist for me.”
“But he might know about Sigrid; he might in fact have killed her, and hidden away her body, and—”
Ottinger waved him into silence. In a gesture resembling eerily a characteristic gesture of Meika’s, he pressed a forefinger to his lips. Ian stared at him and could not guess what this meant. That Sigrid was not dead; that Ottinger knew of her; or, that, being out of the picture, nothing Fermi Sabri had done was of immediate, pragmatic interest?
Ian did not pursue that subject but asked Ottinger, “If a witness gives valuable testimony to a grand jury and subsequently dies or disappears or is in fact erased by the defendant himself, is his testimony nonetheless invalid in terms of the trial?”
“Certainly,” said Ottinger. “It happens all the time. When you are dealing with professional criminals, I mean. With organized crime.”
THE PROSECUTION WAS to require four weeks, with numerous interruptions, delays, and adjournments, to present its case, the main argument being of course that the death of Glynnis McCullough was not, as the defense claimed, an accident, but had been committed both “in the heat of the moment” and “with intent”: and for a self-evident motive, to be proved by the testimony of witnesses and evidence.
There came, one by one, like a procession in an old morality play, Mr. Lederer’s witnesses: known to the defense beforehand and repeating, with some deviations and embellishments, their grand jury testimonies, but subject now, in court, to rigorous cross-examination by Mr. Ottinger. (The “cross,” as Ottinger referred to it, quite intrigued Ian, who had never before attended a trial. How like a game the process truly was, a game of squash, say, in which the ball, slammed back and forth between the players, was the witness.) Each stepped to the witness stand, and each, with varying degrees of confidence, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth so help me God. Ian wondered how one could tell the truth if one could not know the truth.
But the “truth” was presented, at least initially, as a sequence of objectively verifiable events. The prosecution’s first witnesses took the stand to give factual testimony: one of the paramedics who had been summoned to the McCullough residence on the night of April 23, 1988, by an emergency telephone call of Ian McCullough’s, put to the Hazelton Medical Center . . . one of the young police officers who had been summoned by neighbors “to investigate a disturbance” at the McCullough residence . . . the chief physician in the emergency room at the Medical Center, to which both Mrs. McCullough and Dr. McCullough were brought, the one unconscious and requiring immediate neurological testing, the other “inebriated but lucid,” with minor lacerations of the face, arms, and hands . . . even Jackson Dewald, who avoided Ian’s eye but would not be led by questioning into claiming that the disturbance at his neighbors’ house was “part of a pattern” of similar disturbances.
Each witness in turn was required to formally identify Ian McCullough. “Is the defendant present in this court?” he was asked. “Would you point him out, please?” And Ian, pointed out, duly rose from his seat at the defense table: Yes, I am he. It was a curious ceremony but one, he supposed, he could understand. For what if the wrong Ian McCullough had been apprehended?
And there came, one morning, Dr. Morris Flax, who also avoided Ian’s eye and remained resolutely neutral in his testimony, willing to be led by neither Mr. Lederer nor Mr. Ottinger. “The trauma to Mrs. McCullough’s head might have been an accident,” Flax said, “though of course it might also have been something else.”
During the neurologist’s lengthy, technical testimony, which involved a display of magnified X rays, measuring about two feet by three, for the jury’s inspection, Ian began to tremble and worried that he might break down, this episode to be duly reported and headlined in the next day’s papers. How quiet the courtroom was, and how reverently everyone, not excluding Judge Harmon, listened to Flax’s clipped, cautious voice, the voice of the professional dealer in tragedy, as he described the numerous injuries to Glynnis McCullough’s skull; showed, with a pointer, the shadowy brain areas, the fractures in the bone, the blood clot that was removed by emergency surgery from the upper left side of the cerebral cortex. Suppose the patient had lived, Lederer asked, in
a dramatically lowered voice, would she have had a full recovery, or would there have been permanent brain damage?
Dr. Flax hesitated for the first time and for the first time allowed a flicker of an expression to pass over his face, a look of regret, annoyance, disdain. “I really cannot say. But I would guess, if forced to do so, that the patient might have sustained some brain damage, and a partial paralysis.”
Ian shut his eyes quickly. He had not known this, had he? Had Flax told him?
He began to cry; yet so quietly, with such gentlemanly constraint, sitting as always straight and tall, his head high, he did not think anyone noticed. For the jurors, even with their unimpeded view of his face, were staring at Dr. Flax, fully absorbed in the X rays and his terrible teacherly pointer.
There came then, more aggressively, a Dr. Albert Frazier of the State Department of Health, a forensics expert, a Special Command liaison officer between police and district prosecutors in the state, who testified, and would scarcely be budged by cross-examination, that in his opinion the trauma to the skull and to the brain of the victim—for “victim” was Dr. Frazier’s conspicuous term, and not “patient”—could not have been an accident. Again the X rays were exhibited, and again the pointer brought into play. Again the fractures in the bone, the injuries to the brain, the hemorrhaging, the blood clot, the subsequent hemorrhaging, the death. Bruises on Mrs. McCullough’s shoulders suggested, Dr. Frazier said, that she had been seized and pushed backward with a good deal of force; had she merely stumbled backward and fallen against the window, her own weight would probably not have been sufficient to account for the trauma. And when Ottinger challenged him he simply repeated what he had said: in his judgment the trauma could not have been caused by an accident.
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