The Scapegoat

by Sara Davis

  A drink, I thought, and the words made a little echo in my mind. Then I saw that a bottle of gin, a bucket of ice, and two glasses were sitting on top of the cabinet, where they had not been previously. But before I could think with any meaningful result about that, a bright scrap of clothing caught my eye, and I leaned over the bed and saw that wedged between it and the wall was a lavender suit jacket, splayed out on the floor, its sleeves twisted as if it had been strangled. This turn of phrase struck me as funny: as if it had been strangled.

  “Is someone dead?” Professor Pindar had asked. Yes! I thought. It is the lavender suit jacket; it has been strangled! I laughed, despite myself. And then I was interrupted by the woman in the bath—the guest lecturer, I reminded myself—because if her suit jacket was on the floor, then surely it was she.

  “Hello?” she called from the bathroom. Now her voice was unmistakably annoyed. “I couldn’t understand anything you just said. If you didn’t want a drink that’s fine, but can you make yourself useful and get one for me?”

  Of course it was the guest lecturer, I thought, as I moved away from the bed, from the suit jacket, back toward the desk. Because who else would it be? This was exactly the kind of bizarre and mysterious rendezvous she would prefer. Here was a person who was not content to arrange a meeting in the customary way, in a regular place—one’s office, say, or a coffee shop. And yet, I could not quite say that she had arranged this rendezvous. I had come here of my own accord, for no other reason than the overwhelming sense that the answer to all my questions was here in this hotel.

  “Yes, of course,” I called in the direction of the bathroom, and then I smiled to myself, a small, private smile, because I had just set the briefcase down on top of the desk, its gold buckles gleaming in the waning light. I opened it and removed the paperweight.

  Now I approached the cabinet and turned over one of the glasses. The briefcase! I thought. The suit jacket! Dusk creeping into night! Everything that held meaning was here in this room! How could I have stayed away so long?

  Here was the red thread that had run through my whole existence. All that wasted time, I thought, as I tonged ice into a glass and poured gin over it; how lamentable, herding myself from one confusion to the next, when the answer had always been here in this hotel room. But! I scolded myself. Now is not the time for self-reproach! Holding the glass of gin in one hand and the whale-shaped paperweight in the other, I leaned my shoulder against the bathroom door and pushed it open.

  I hadn’t been inside the bathroom on my previous visit, so it would not quite make sense to say that something had changed. Still, as I stepped into the small, slightly steamy room, I had the distinct impression that I had crossed some more significant threshold, as if I had woken into a universe that was in every detail a copy of my own, but, in some essential way, different.

  And this feeling, nebulous as it was, was somehow unrelated to the central unexpected feature of the bathroom, the main surprise it held, which was that the woman in the bath was not the guest lecturer. Despite the voice, which I’d thought I recognized, despite the lavender suit jacket, the woman in the bath, though she was also a blonde, also a big-boned woman, a nude woman who filled the small space amply, was not the guest lecturer; she was Kirstie.

  * * *

  She did not look up as I came in; she seemed to accept my entrance as an inevitable and not particularly interesting matter of course. Her hair, a truer, paler blond than that of the guest lecturer, had been piled on top of her head and secured with a blue plastic clip. At the other pole, a flushed and sturdy foot had surfaced—I could not bring myself to catalogue what lay between.

  “Is that my drink?” she said abruptly. “You can set it there.”

  She indicated the lip of the tub, where a previous, now-empty glass sat, fogged with condensation.

  “I think you may be under the wrong impression,” she said at last, her voice unfriendly.

  This was entirely possible, I thought; somewhere along the line I had most certainly erred. There was no logical combination of events that should have resulted in this particular scene. All I could manage, however, was a choked, “Oh?”

  “I don’t need your money,” said Kirstie.

  My money?

  “Maybe that’s how they did it when you were young, but that wasn’t what I meant at all. I may be a graduate student, but I’m not exactly destitute.”

  My throat began to close around a dry and increasingly useless tongue. Obviously there had been a case of mistaken identity.

  Now she was unwrapping a tiny bar of soap, liberating it from its white paper jacket, and I had a flash of—

  “No,” she continued. “I told you because I was under the impression that my pregnancy might interest you.”

  Her pregnancy, I thought, and before I could integrate this new idea she went on:

  “Yes, I know. You just wanted to deal with it. That’s your only mode, it seems. But you can go ahead and cancel that appointment you made me at that Morgenthaler Clinic. It’s too far away, and I don’t want an abortion from one of your medical school cronies, thank you very much.”

  Now she rolled her eyes. “Excuse me, your attending.”

  Morgenthaler Clinic, I thought.

  She had applied the soap to a washcloth and was soaping her arms and shoulders vigorously, covering them in a layer of white suds, and causing her breasts to dance a lunatic little jig.

  After a long pause, she said resignedly, “Yes, I know. Linda told me.

  “No, of course not,” she went on, “she was just being gossipy.

  “Really, it doesn’t bother me at all—I have tickets to go and see my parents. And I’m really not sure what you could do to help—whether you’re in Jackson Hole or not. It will all be over by then.

  “My parents? In Philadelphia. But don’t you think the time for pretending to be interested in my family has passed?”

  Still she did not look up, but her motions had an air of finality, she was giving the washcloth a thorough rinse. I supposed she was clean now, gleaming from head to toe.

  Suddenly I found my voice.

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” I said.

  At my words a sudden sharp shift took place—a little crack in the vertebrae of the situation—and Kirstie turned to look at me for the first time.

  “Well,” she said, sneering. “Who knows what that’s supposed to mean?”

  I should try to explain, I thought. It’s important to be precise.

  “It’s just that,” I began—but already I could feel it slipping away from me.

  “It’s just that,” said the woman in the bath, in a high and bleating voice that was meant to be an imitation of my own. She wrung the washcloth out with a violent twist, and it seemed to me, improbable as it was, that she was now the guest lecturer.

  “It’s just that,” she began again, “you’re not sure what you’re doing here, and you’d like very much to, but you’re not sure if … Is that right? Trust me, we know all about you and your unique challenges. We had hoped for someone with a little more oomph to them, someone a little more self-directed, but you were what we got. Still, we did have your general instability working for us. How lucky it was that you happened to show your hand in such a timely fashion. He assured us we were making the right choice.”

  She set the washcloth down beside her with a wet slap.

  “Are you in a hurry, Mr. Shriver?” asked the guest lecturer.

  I shook my head no.

  “Good,” she replied. “These things don’t get arranged just like that, you know.”

  We were talking about something else now; that was clear. The tone of her voice had changed.

  “See that candle?” she said, and for the first time I noticed a candle on the edge of the tub, a squat, peach-colored candle studded all over with seashells.

  What an ugly candle, I thought. How was it that I hadn’t noticed it before?

  “Look at it,” said the gues
t lecturer. “At the flame.”

  Obediently, I looked at the pale orange, dancing flame.

  The lights in the room began to flicker and fade, until only the candle stayed lit. Then the bathwater, instead of behaving the way bathwater usually does, began to toss and pucker like a miniature sea. Tiny waves were breaking on the shore of the woman’s white belly and lapping at the undersides of her breasts.

  The flame wavered, grew slight and sputtered, and finally went out. The room was plunged into pitch-blackness.

  * * *

  Into the darkness, a new voice spoke.

  “What are you doing in here?” it asked. This voice was a woman’s, too. “You know I don’t like it when you follow me around like a little dog.”

  I had, it seemed to me, some protest, but whatever it was it died on my lips; it dried up in my throat.

  “Well,” said the voice peevishly, and it seemed to me the voice was familiar to me, very much so, perhaps the most familiar voice of all. “Is there something you want to say? He won’t like it, you know, if all evening you only stand around like a mute.”

  “Who…” I managed to say. “Who is coming?”

  The voice clucked her tongue peevishly.

  “Is that supposed to be funny? You know perfectly well it’s your father.”

  My father, I thought, with sudden sharpness.

  “My father?” I asked, in a voice as dry as sticks, as the wind rustling through dead grass. “How do you know my father?”

  The woman in the bath was silent, and it seemed to me she was growing more and more like someone I knew by the second.

  “Come over here,” she said, her voice calm. “Come over here and I’ll show you.”

  Does this make sense? I asked myself for the second time, as I crossed the room toward the bath and the woman in it. It seemed as though I were crossing the room for eons, as though I had to cross the whole horizon to get there. When I reached the edge of the bath, I realized that the lights in the room must have restored themselves at some point, because I could see the woman clearly, though I tried not to stare down at her naked body: the flat breasts with their dark nipples, the thatch of hair that sprang between her legs.

  “Kneel on the floor,” she said, and when I hesitated, she said, “Go on.”

  Don’t, I told myself, lose the thread—but already it was spooling away from me, I sank to my knees beside the edge of the bathtub and found myself looking into my mother’s eyes.

  I did not see her lift her hand—did I ever? Only a bright blackness that stung me on the temple.

  “Now,” she said.

  How changeable this woman is, I thought. Nothing is fixed.

  “What was that question you asked? Do you need to ask that question again?”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “No is right,” she said. “Now come and rub your mother’s head.”

  Thoughts small and large flooded my brain. Stick to one thing, I told myself, as I knelt behind the woman in the bath and began to stroke her thin brown hair. I drew one thumb across her forehead and then the other. Two fingers, I thought, and the thought ballooned in me and then vanished.

  “You know,” said my mother in a dreamy voice, her eyes closed. “It is really a shame that he won’t come and stay longer. Wouldn’t you like that? To have a real father, like all your little friends?”

  I nodded, though I knew she couldn’t see me.

  “I know I would like that,” she said. “Of course, you don’t know how exhausting it is, raising a child on your own.

  “You know,” she went on, splashing the water languidly with her hands, “I know you might want to pester him when he comes, but you might try being a little less attention-seeking, do you know what I mean? He travels a long time to get here, and he wants a boy, not a little dog following him around and breathing down his neck.”

  I nodded again, behind her back.

  “Now that I think of it,” she said, shifting a little from side to side, “that might have been the problem, last time. Because he was meant to stay the whole weekend, wasn’t he?”

  She crossed her arms over her belly, and above them her breasts lay like two collapsed balloons.

  “And I had so much planned, so that was a shame. We won’t let that happen again, will we? You will try to be more self-sufficient?”

  There was a thing, deep inside me, and this conversation had piqued its interest, and while my mother had been talking and I’d been rubbing her temples, it had scrabbled up bit by bit, so that now it had reached the base of my skull.

  “Young man?” said my mother. “Did you hear what I said?”

  There was a sound as the water splashed. She shifted around. I heard her laugh, a nervous, ragged sound.

  “What is that?” she said. “What’s that you have in your hand?”

  “Oh, this?” I said. “This is just something I picked up earlier.”

  Because of course it would have been impossible to explain about Professor Pindar and his harpoon, and how he was descended from New England whalers. Even though I feared gravely for my ability to keep the right thoughts afloat, I knew that those things were not relevant here, in this time. Because I could recognize this as one of the many evenings (though perhaps, I thought, there had only really been a handful, each one blazing out of my memory as brightly as Christmas) when my father had been due for a visit at my mother’s house and had failed to appear.

  Now I brought the paperweight down. One! And again. Two! Something gave beneath it, a bright noise.

  Because (Three!) I thought, as I brought the paperweight down again to meet the noise. What is a face, in the end? What is a face, but a layer of skin over bone? Because, I thought, as I raised it up and brought it down, this face has changed so much, in such a short time—surely, and again it came up and down, like a hammer at a fair, this is not the way a face should be. Surely, I thought, a face should not be so changeable. Surely, I thought, and another thought crept up beneath it like a worm: This face has run its course.

  I had paused for a breath, to wipe sweat from my brow, to allow the other thought to come up to the surface and bloom, when I saw that at the other end of the tub two long, gray feet were groping for purchase, slipping and sliding on the white porcelain.

  That is not good, I thought, and I brought the paperweight down again, and this time I held it there with all my strength, until the gray feet shuddered and stopped. Through the water, a red tide rode toward them. And then the thought broke over me, immense, and I knew that this was what had eluded me for so long. I am two fingers! I thought. I am the steeple. I am, I thought, and it was the last thought that came to me before the room shuddered and went black—I am the Death that lives within the walls, these walls that have such a long and storied history of Death.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes, the room was dark again, almost black. Eventually, I stood up; I switched on the light. I surveyed the scene.

  In the tub was an arrangement that seemed hardly to belong to this current reality. Now that she was dead, the woman in the tub had changed again. She was no longer my mother, that was certain, but whether she was Kirstie or the guest lecturer again, I couldn’t tell. I felt spent, exhausted like I hadn’t been in years. How much nicer would it be, I thought, if I were home, sitting at my dining room table, watching the fog roll in from the sea. I would almost certainly have made my sandwich by now, and I would be without obligation, with nothing to do but watch the fog come creeping up the lawn to reach through the pines like long white fingers.

  Some time should be spent here, I thought, even so, and I took one last look around. This, I thought as I turned, looking at everything with care, was just the right amount of death. I would not make the mistakes they had made. I would not be too heavy-handed. Someone coming after me, someone in the midst of their own investigation—they would understand; they would not be left like I had been, my nose buried in my father’s coats, harassed by the bleating of the r
eal estate agent. I had left things just right. But just in case, I thought, twirling on my feet, paperweight in hand, coming out of the bathroom—just in case, because you could never be sure of the caliber of other people, I would leave them a little clue. It was a shame, undoubtedly, to stain the lovely suede of the briefcase with blood, but it could not be helped. Then I buckled the bright gold buckles and slid it under the desk.

  31

  In the dark I heard Gerry Van Gelder’s deep voice say, “Is that you?”

  The porch light switched on, a white globe in the night.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  I heard the sound of bolts unlocking, and then the door opened to reveal a frowning, enrobed Gerry Van Gelder, peering through glasses. He looked at me and said, “Do you know what time it is?”

  Really, Gerry, I thought. These people and their obsession with time. If only I could have shown him how it felt—life, death—but I held back; I refrained. To be inside the house first would be best.

  “I don’t,” I said. “But it must be late.”

  “Yes,” said Gerry. “It is late.”

  “Who is that?” came Ann’s voice from the darkened hall. “Oh gosh, it’s you,” she said.

  Gerry looked at me, his arms crossed.

  “Could I come in?” I said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “Something wrong with your house?” said Gerry.

  “Oh, let him in, Gerry,” said Ann. “He’ll let us know soon enough.”

  Gerry looked at me, expressionless, and then held the door open so I could pass.

  “Thank you,” I said, as he re-bolted the door. “I must be very late.”

  “Late for what?” Gerry asked.

  “Okay, Gerry,” said Ann, appearing in the hallway in her own bathrobe and white socks. “That’s enough.

  “Come on,” she said to me. “I’ll make you a plate.”

  She motioned for me to follow her into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and peered inside.