“Glynnis had everything, I thought, and when I met her husband, at a party at her house, the single time I was invited to her house, I looked at this man and thought, ‘That’s the one,’ though I knew it was all absurd, simply childish and absurd, and, as I said, I was really in love with this other man; I was caught up in this love affair which seemed to be sucking all the life from me. It was just a state I had drifted into . . . a pathological state of the soul. I looked at these people, so comfortably middle class, I should say upper middle class, with their glass-walled houses, and shelves of books, and the expensive food and drinks they served, and their careers—most of the men were attached to the Institute, and the Institute is so famous, even the grounds are so beautiful—and some of the women I met had done things too, had their own careers, like Glynnis McCullough.
“And there was Ian McCullough, of whom, frankly, I had never heard, though I quickly found out his position at the Institute, and his reputation, the things people said about him. And I envied too the friendships the Hazelton people seemed to have, which seemed to me very different from the friendships my parents had, very different from the friendships I’ve usually had; which fascinated me but primarily made me angry and resentful, because I couldn’t understand it. Like, you know, there’s a riddle put to you, like the one the sphinx put to Oedipus, and it’s something so close to you you can’t see; the answer is obvious as something written on your forehead, or it’s the nature of the mask you’re wearing, but, because you’re wearing it, you can’t see. So I fell in love with Glynnis McCullough’s husband . . . and that same night forgot about him.
“Then we met again, by accident. Though I’d gone to Hazelton hoping I might meet him, or someone like him. That something might turn up. Along with being unlucky I’ve always had intermittent bits of luck. . . . And I met Dr. McCullough that day, wholly by accident, this was in November, a year ago last November, and we talked for a while, and he seemed quite friendly, and I thought afterward there was the possibility he might call me and want to see me; but he never did.
“Glynnis had not called me in some time so I understood that she’d dropped me; I don’t mean that she had deliberately dropped me, just that, busy as she was, with the social life she managed and her family and all, and her writing, she hadn’t time for me; I slipped through the cracks of her life, the way I’d slipped through the cracks of other people’s lives in the past. And while I understood the situation, and felt I’d behave the same way in her place, I also felt angry with her, as if I’d been cheated; as if some sort of friendship that was meant to be, or destiny, had been broken off, and it was her fault. And that was another thing I envied in these people, and resented, that they were so damned smug and secure in their lives, in their circle, in their precious homes, and they’d take you up or let you down at will. And in fact there was one man who did call me . . . a Hazelton husband . . . but I wasn’t able to see him when he wanted to see me . . . and . . . it sort of trailed off into nothing. But that man wasn’t Ian McCullough; if Dr. McCullough had called me, I would have seen him.
“But he never called, and I got pregnant, and more and more desperate, taking drugs sometimes, I don’t mean seriously, or that I was a junkie or anything because I never was, but there were times when I wouldn’t have cared if I’d OD’d. And one of these really bad sort of crazy times, when I hadn’t slept for two or three days and had had a bad fight with my fiancé and was afraid of him, I telephoned Dr. McCullough at the Institute, and I don’t even know what I said to him, just asked for help, more or less, begging for help, for someone to talk to, though at the back of my mind there were two things: that I’d ask him for money and get an abortion, and that I’d make him fall in love with me. He came to see me in Poughkeepsie and saved my life, I do mean that literally, and I must have asked him for money because he lent me a thousand dollars, just wrote out a check for me, trusted me; I told him I would repay him and he believed me, or seemed to . . . he was that kind of man. I don’t remember the details of that visit because I was so spaced out, but I remember that he stayed an hour or so, and talked with me, and reasoned with me, and I think he might have found some pills I had been taking, some tranquilizers, and flushed them down the toilet. And I think he wanted to call a doctor or an ambulance but I said no, I was terrified of being committed to a psychiatric ward. . . .
“That was the only time we were alone together in my apartment, I think, or anywhere. After that I called Dr. McCullough a few times, and he was kind enough to call me, to see how I was; and that was the extent of it, really. Of course I never repaid the thousand dollars; I’d never intended to. I might have gotten it from my boyfriend or from some other man, to repay it, but I never did. I was attracted to Dr. McCullough, as I’ve said, but I had a grudge against him too: because he didn’t seem to like me quite as much as I wanted him to, and because he was who he was. He was just too sweet. He was too damned nice. I thought, There must be more to him than that, another side to him, as there mostly is to most men, but it never came out. So I thought, That thousand is mine. (The abortion only cost about four fifty.) I’ve earned it.
“Then, later, when I read in the newspapers about Glynnis’s death, and Dr. McCullough arrested for it, and began to see my name linked up with his, I couldn’t deal with it. So I ran away. I can’t even say that I panicked, because it was reasoned out enough, but I ran away and figured things would work out by themselves. I did this shameful cowardly childish thing, this absolutely selfish thing, for which I knew beforehand I’d be ashamed: I simply ran away; I got some money from a friend and flew to Mexico.
“I suppose I should say, since I’m under oath, that I got money from a number of men, the kind of men you go out with exclusively to get money (not that I was a hooker or anything, though I am not on principle opposed to making money by turning tricks)—and I flew to Mexico, where I knew some people, not friends but friends of friends, but I used another name with them, called myself Coco Stephens, and no one knew me there as Sigrid Hunt or would ever have made the connection if they knew about Sigrid Hunt, which they didn’t. I told them I had a teaching diploma but couldn’t get a job in the States, and that seemed reasonable; nobody much cared, nobody asked many questions of me or of anyone else. I felt guilty about running away, but it wasn’t the first time I had run away as a solution to my problems. I thought I should telephone Dr. McCullough, or write him a letter, and I did write letters but didn’t mail them; I was afraid of the mail being traced.
“Then I got sick, and recovered, and traveled around, and got sick again, and went to Panama and Costa Rica, and spent some time in Mexico City with a person who was nice to me, more or less, but never knew who I was, or much of anything about me. A sort of amnesia came over me. I liked it that way. I was comfortable that way. People in my former life were on the other side of a kind of barrier, a one-way mirror, through which I could see them but they couldn’t see me. I don’t know how long I could have lived that way—until I got sick again, or my luck seriously ran out—but . . . it came to an end.”
And Ian sat, staring, in a transport of wonder. And thought, for the first time since Glynnis’s death, I want to live.
8.
That she loved him or might love him, that his life had not after all ended, that he was not condemned to a posthumous existence after all . . . but a life like the old life, even more wonderful than the old, for its impurities had been blasted away: this seemed to him the miraculous, the unspeakably miraculous thing. And it was within his grasp, was it not? So close, so tantalizingly close, was it not?
So he told his attorney that he would testify after all. In his own behalf, after all. And at the trial’s next session he took the witness stand and told the court the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God, to the extent to which he could remember it. And this in a fairly clear and coherent and reasonable voice, for he was, after all, the most civilized of men.
He did not believe, he said,
that he was guilty of having murdered his wife. But he did believe he was guilty of having killed her: of having killed her by accident, reacting blindly, in an animal panic, and pushing her away from him, without knowing what he did or what the consequences would be. “She had been drinking, and she was furious. I tried to reason with her but failed. I could have prevented the accident if I had walked away, simply walked away, but I didn’t walk away, and I have never understood why. I had been drinking too, I was drunk, but even drunk I should have known the wisest thing to do, the only thing to do, was to walk away. But I didn’t. I seemed drawn to her, to the quarrel, eventually to the fight, the physical scuffling, as she was drawn to it, helplessly, and I have never understood that. It was as if everything, the very fabric of our lives, had been turned inside out . . . exposed in reverse, like a photograph negative.
“She had found the canceled check for one thousand dollars. And she was hurt, and angry, and we began to quarrel . . . quite violently . . . as we had never before quarreled in our lives. The quarrel became a struggle, an actual physical struggle; and Glynnis slapped me, and I pushed at her; and she took up a knife, a knife she’d brought to the table with her, a knife with a long sharp blade, swiping at me with it, as if she wanted to stab me; and I thought, Of course she doesn’t mean it, Glynnis would never hurt me; but she was so angry. . . . And I seem to have rather stupidly closed my fingers around the blade and cut them badly. And the knife may have fallen. And Glynnis was screaming at me. And I reacted instinctively; I must have taken her by the shoulders and shoved her from me, in a sort of animal fright, because of the knife. . . . She struck the window and fell through. And that was how it happened. That quickly, and that irrevocably.
“I did not mean to kill my wife. I did not mean even to hurt her. I wanted only to protect myself from her, I suppose, at that moment, when things were so . . . confused. So unlike anything in our previous lives, anything we could recall. It had seemed to me that the furious woman who attacked me was not my wife but a stranger, and my response to her was a stranger’s response; and I loathed both people. The man, the woman . . . the strange and terrible connection between them. A sort of madness coursed through us both. It was like the shock of love, of profound love, erotic, sexual, a violence of which one can’t speak, to which one can’t give a name. I was utterly helpless; I seemed to have lost all volition. One moment I had been thinking fairly reasonably that I would walk away and leave the house and in the morning things could be cleared up . . . probably . . . and the next moment I seemed incapable of thinking at all. And my wife whom I loved, and who I knew loved me, nonetheless seemed to want to hurt me, had picked up a knife as of course she’d never done before in her life, would never have conceived of doing, yet she was striking at me with it . . . and I shoved her away from me . . . and killed her.
“And I didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened between us. Because it was a violation of my wife’s honor, and a violation of our marriage. I didn’t want to seem to have made her into an adversary when in a very real way she had not been, had never been. It was only this madness that came upon us . . . this sudden terrible fury that has ruined our lives.
“So I refused to explain. I refused to defend myself if it necessitated, as it seemed to do, making my wife into my enemy. I thought, If I am found guilty, then I’m guilty. I will let others decide.
“I thought, I won’t lift a finger in my defense.
“I thought, What does it matter if I live or die?—my life is over.”
HE WAS SUBSEQUENTLY cross-examined at length, and rather brutally, by Lederer but held his ground, or seemed to, though speaking in an increasingly hoarse voice, with frequent long pauses and spasms of stammering. Lederer demanded of him why, having told police repeatedly that he could not remember what had happened between him and Mrs. McCullough, he now seemed able to remember, and in such persuasive detail. And Ian said, “I want to be cleared of the charges. I want the trial to end; I want to set things straight; I want to resume my life.”
“But why now, Mr. McCullough?” Lederer asked, his face mottled with emotion, his voice heavy with sarcasm; “why, so suddenly, now, in the sixth week of the trial?” And Ian drew breath to speak and could not. The courtroom shifted in and out of focus like an ill-conceived dream. He seemed to see himself from a distance, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Was he dead? Already dead? When he had wanted so desperately to live?
He said, “I have told you. I want to resume my life.”
AFTERWARD, THEY TOLD him that he had made a “profound impression” on the jurors and Judge Harmon; and he himself sensed, despite his fatigue, that he had succeeded in moving the hearts of his listeners. I have told only the truth, he thought, as if in protest.
But where was Sigrid Hunt? And where was Bianca?
Ah, there: Bianca. Standing alone a few yards away, staring at him, her coat slung over her arm, one of her gloves fallen unnoticed at her feet. He made his way to her, eager to speak with her, but she edged away and shot him a look of hatred. Her face was clenched like a muscle, her eyes bright with tears. “Murderer,” she whispered. And that was all.
She pushed her way into the aisle, and Ian stood, struck dumb, staring after her. What had she said? Had he heard correctly?
But I have told only the truth. I have saved myself, but I have told only the truth.
Epilogue
THE VERDICT
Late August in Maine, and an eye-piercing day, very blue, a bit windy, tinged with autumn, but they served lunch outside for their guests, on the terrace, at the glass-topped iron table above the crashing surf, and if conversation wavered, or waned—which was in fact not often the case, not with these guests—there was always the ocean, and the sky, and the rocky beach with its sculpted, rebarbative shapes; there was always, as Sigrid said, all that’s there.
They were self-conscious, to a degree: in truth, mildly embarrassed, like newlyweds entertaining their first guests.
(For of course they were, though not yet married, newlyweds. And Denis Grinnell and Malcolm Oliver were their first guests: their first guests, one might say, from the “old” life. We really can’t count having people over for drinks, Sigrid said, just our neighbors here, and the real estate people; they don’t exactly count.)
Their guests arrived shortly after noon, in a rented Audi: Denis, who was visiting his brother and his brother’s family in Bar Harbor, twenty twisting miles to the south, and Malcolm, who, quite by coincidence, was in Bangor for a week, preparing an article for The New York Times Magazine. “How good to see you again,” Ian said to them, shaking their hands as hard as he dared; and, “How good to see you again,” they said, shaking his hand hard, in turn, and looking frankly into his face, which was handsomely tanned, though a bit weathered about the eyes, and the eyes themselves—well, the eyes were hidden, or stylishly obscured, by the dark-green-tinted prescription sunglasses Ian was wearing. “It’s been a long time,” they said to one another, marveling; “it’s been, how long?” staring grinning and incredulous at one another, in the way we have when, suddenly confronted with the fact of our friends’ existences, apart from our own, we are confronted too with a realization of their, and our, mortality; “three months at least,” in the happy nerved-up moments before Sigrid appeared on the deck of the house, in her white summer shift, and waved to them.
Denis said quickly in his ear, “You’re looking good, Ian,” and Malcolm, giving his upper arm a pointed little punch, said, “You are looking good,” and Ian laughed and said, “And so are you, so are you both,” and led them up to the house. He wore pale blue seersucker trousers, a white cotton-knit sports shirt, and sandals; his hair blew, rather lavishly it seemed, in the wind. His friends knew Sigrid, of course; had spent some evenings with her and Ian, in Hazelton, in the spring. Still, there were some awkward moments.
Sigrid had prepared a superb cold scallop salad, had in fact spent much of the morning on it—for the recipe insisted upon fresh squ
eezed lime juice and fresh chopped basil—and Denis and Malcolm had brought two bottles of excellent white Rhone wine, and there would be a kiwi cream pie for dessert, so the luncheon itself, the crucial matter of the food and drink, could not fail; this Ian understood, for food and drink rarely fail us. He hoped in her nervousness Sigrid would let things take their natural pace.
He himself had so anticipated this visit from his friends, he was in a strange exhilarated mood: his concentration fierce, as if he were edging along a high parapet, yet susceptible to sudden breaks or fractures, so that, in the very midst of an animated exchange of his own initiation, his thoughts drifted off; and though he saw his friends, and Sigrid, talking, smiling, laughing, he could not, for the merest hair’s-breadth of a second, grasp their words.
Before they sat down to lunch the men climbed out onto the rocks above the beach, where, eddied by the rocks and in some way reflected by them—though the stone itself was a harsh ungiving lightless dark-earthen brown—the sunlight was stronger, shining down directly on their heads. Denis said, “I should have worn my sailor’s cap; now my hair is so damned thin my very scalp gets sunburned”; and Malcolm said, “It’s certainly beautiful here,” shading his eyes, staring at the glittering pocked waves; “how did you manage it?” And though, surely, Malcolm knew how Ian had come to rent this exquisite little white clapboard house on the ocean, at Prospect Harbor, since arrangements had been made through a mutual Hazelton friend, Ian helpfully recounted the brief tale, which had to do with another’s misfortune (the orthodontist who had intended to spend August here had died suddenly of a heart attack, and naturally his family had canceled out); and both men listened as if hearing it for the first time, as we so frequently listen, in such circumstances, to tales whose outcomes we already know, or have already been told us by our friends.
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