About the Author (28 page)

Throughout this pantomime, she listened and watched, her forehead corrugated with concern, her painted lips in a small O of sympathy.

“Oui, oui,” she said when I was finished. “
Hôpital
? You need da doc-
teur
?” I shook my head. I said I was fine. Just needed a room. I produced from my pocket a small wad of cash. “I give you,” she said, her eyes on the money, “
la chambre meilleur
—da best room.” Anything, I assured her, would do.

The
chambre
proved to be almost eerily similar to the accommodations of the Pleasant View, minus the boom-box musicians. I showered. Then I climbed into bed. I did not, despite my marrow-deep exhaustion, fall immediately to sleep. My heart was still pounding too hard for that, my brain still too feverishly replaying the events of the past few hours. Could it be, I asked myself, that she was well and truly dead? Could it be that fate remained so well disposed toward me that it would actually agree to remove this threat to my life, yet at the same time leave me free of all guilt, or complicity, in the act? True, I had plotted to murder her; I had planned it; and I had even ferried her to her death. But I was not her murderer. Her killer was—who, exactly? Alain? Or Alain’s henchmen? Or was it some rival drug gang that Alain had, for some obscure reason relating to the vagaries of the drug dealer’s shadow world of cross and double-cross, tipped off to Les’s doomed mission? Who knew? Who cared? The point was,
I had not killed her
. More than that, I had actually tried to
save
her life when I snatched that bundle of heroin from her and tossed it to our pursuers. It had been
Les’s
insane choice to attempt to retrieve the drugs. It had been Les’s inability to relinquish the Big Score. It had been Les’s greed (her Aristotelian “tragic character flaw”) that had led to her inevitable appointment with death. Had I
not
agreed to ferry her upriver, she would surely have found another accomplice, and her fate would have been the same: her corpse would be lying in the forest in the same state of punctured, bleeding decomposition.

It was the macabre comfort of this line of thought that finally permitted me to still my seething brain and allowed sleep to draw its shroud over me.

I rose early the next morning and went down to the front desk. A small blond Anglo girl was now behind the counter. She explained that I was a mere seven miles from the town of Magog, where I would be able to “hop a Greyhound headin’ pretty much anyplace in the States or Canada.” I had the girl phone for a cab, and twenty minutes later I was driven into town. On Magog’s minimalist main drag, I bought, and put on, a new pair of running shoes, a fresh shirt, and clean pants, discarding my almost unbelievably dirt-, blood-, and sweat-encrusted turtleneck and jeans of the night before. At the local luncheonette, which doubled as the bus depot, I bought breakfast and a bus ticket for Burlington, Vermont. At eleven A.M., I boarded the Greyhound and within a half hour had (with blissful uneventfulness) cleared Customs at Derby Line (“That’s right, Officer, just visiting Canada for the day”). By early afternoon, a cab was carrying me into New Halcyon. It was all so easy as to seem practically dreamlike.

My cab driver (a watery-eyed, droopy-mustached old reprobate who told me of his exploits shunting the local crack addicts between the suburbs and inner-city Burlington) did not return me directly to the house I shared with Janet (or rather,
used
to share with Janet). There was one loose end that still needed tying up. I had him drop me off at Les’s (former) house. I paid him and waited for him to drive off. Then I crept up over the veranda, and stuck my head in the front door.

“Hellooo?” I warbled, just to be safe. “Anyone home?”

Silence.

I entered. My eyes took a moment to acclimatize themselves to the cottage’s gloom.

I started in the living room, getting down on all fours and peering under the antique sofa, looking under the chair cushions, checking behind the bookcases. I moved to the closet under the stairs (where I had hidden from Janet little more than a week before), and hunted among the badminton nets, archery targets, and croquet mallets; I pulled open a desk drawer: empty, except for the stub of a gnawed golf pencil and two grass-stained tees. I crouched by the fireplace and felt around the flue. Moving on to the kitchen, I flung open cupboards, stuck my head under the sink, and even checked the oven. Upstairs, I searched all four bedrooms and all six closets. Armed with a flashlight I’d found in a bedside table, I hauled myself up through a trapdoor in the ceiling and searched the attic, pulling up the layers of pink insulation from between the joists. I plunged downstairs and went outside, where I removed a section of the black latticework that ran around the house’s foundations, played the flashlight beam into the crawlspace under the house, then slithered right in and searched among the spiders and slugs.

In short, I looked everywhere. I did not find the laptop. I knew it must be hidden somewhere inside the hundred-year-old structure. I briefly considered burning the house down and thus ensuring that the computer, like Les herself, was eradicated from the earth, but I could just imagine, after all I had been through, getting caught for an act of arson. So instead of torching the place, I rationalized that if the laptop was so well hidden that my search had not revealed its whereabouts, then it would in all likelihood
remain
hidden—squirreled away beneath the floorboards or tucked behind the plaster in one of the walls—for the next hundred years.

Obviously, I would have liked to be able to say that I had eliminated every incriminating piece of evidence linking Stewart to the novel published under my name. At the same time, however, I am a realist, and I know that perfection in life, as in art, is probably too much to hope for.

I got back to our house at around three. The place was just as I had left it—which is to say, uninhabitable. Dirty plates, empty liquor bottles, stuffed ashtrays, strewn clothing—was I alone responsible for this apocalypse?

I cleaned the place from top to bottom, throwing open the doors and windows to disperse the sour cloud of misery that had collected in the rooms over the previous week. I gathered up the sticky glasses and loaded them into the dishwasher; I clanked the bottles into a bag bound for the recycling bin; I vacuumed the rugs. I kept finding spent matches, and even a couple of burned-down butts, lying on the floor. Speaking of arson, it was amazing that I had not burned the place down. I Pine Sol’d the kitchen and bathrooms. Evening had fallen by the time I finally stripped off my rubber gloves and surveyed my handiwork. Perfect.

Then I went down the hall to my office, picked up the phone, and dialed Janet’s parents’ number.

Her father answered. Ordinarily, Ben Greene and I enjoyed a warm, relaxed relationship, kibitzing about taxes, chewing over the latest political scandal in the news, whatever. But now old Ben’s voice sounded a little constrained at my greeting. “Oh, hello, Cal,” he said. “I guess you want to talk to Janet. She—I don’t think she was expecting you to call.” I started to say something, but then I realized, by the nature of the silence on the other end of the line, that he’d put the phone down to summon my wife.

Then Janet came onto the line.

She was clearly surprised to hear from me. I said that I’d been unable to wait any longer to speak to her. I missed her, and I wanted to know when she was coming home. I swore to her that I had not been having an affair with anyone, that I had been completely faithful, and I reiterated that I wanted her to return to New Halcyon. Then I simply fell silent and waited to hear what she would say.

In a lowered voice (presumably so that her parents wouldn’t overhear her), she said that
my
fidelity was no longer the sole issue. “I told you about what happened between me and—and
that girl
. How can I ever face her again? How can I face
you
?”

I told her to forget about Les: the girl had left town, apparently for good. “And as for me,” I added, “it’s already forgotten. I know why it happened: I hurt you. And you wanted to hurt me back.” There was a pause in which neither of us said anything. Then, in a voice that sounded close to tears, Janet asked me to swear that I was not having an affair. Relishing this opportunity again to tell her the unalloyed truth, I swore to her that I had been faithful.

Janet sighed. “Give me another few days here, Cal,” she said. “I need to think about what direction I want to go in. I need to think about whether I want to keep teaching. Or if I should start painting full time. Or should we have a baby? Oh, Cal, I’m confused. I have some things to work out that don’t have anything to do with you or our marriage. At least not directly. Give me another week. Today is Saturday. Give me until next Saturday.”

“You’ll come home then?” I asked, scarcely able to believe it.

“Yes,” she said.

I told her that I loved her. I told her that I would be counting the days until her return. She said that we must both be patient. And with that we rang off.

So it was all over. Janet would be coming back to me. The girl—my nemesis—had been canceled out, removed, eradicated. Stewart’s ghost had at last been put to rest. I was free. Yet instead of feeling like a man released from a death sentence, I still felt oddly ill at ease. A sense of unnameable dread continued to hang over me, an unfocused intimation of disaster. Was it because I had not yet seen confirmation, in the newspapers or on TV, that Les’s corpse had been found? To be sure, I was anxious to have that part of my plot resolved, to know once and for all that I had not left some telltale clue about my own role in her death at the scene of her murder. But no, that wasn’t quite it. After all, I was sure that I had left nothing in the woods that could be traced to me. Yes, my fingerprints were on the canoe paddle left at the scene, but my prints were not on record with the authorities, so the mystery of the “phantom paddler” would remain precisely that: a mystery. There was also the matter of my footprints, which of course were all over the scene. But I’d thrown away the pair of almost treadless old sneakers I’d worn on the night in question. So what was I worried about?

And yet there remained an unbearable sensation as of ants crawling on my skin.

I drew a hot bath and got undressed. It was my intention to submerge my body in the hot water and allow it to leech the twitching unease from my muscles. Yet after just two minutes of lying there, I found myself climbing agitatedly out of the tub, too restless, after all, to stay in the antiseptically clean bathroom, with only the
plick, plock, plick
of the dripping tub faucet for company.

I toweled off, then wandered naked, and with no particular purpose, to the back of the house, into my “office.” I paced the Oriental rug. I walked back out to the hallway and examined that part of the wall where Janet’s portrait head of Stewart had hung for the past year. I had rescued the painting from the ashes, but what had happened to it since then? Had Janet thrown it out? This, too, obscurely bothered me.

I walked back into my office and dropped onto the swivel chair facing my desk. On the leather blotter in front of me was a Pilot Rollerball pen. Beside it was one of the yellow legal pads that I used for drawing up lists of household chores. I lifted the pen and, in a firm hand, wrote a sentence that I might have been holding in my head for hours, or days, or a year:

For reasons that will become obvious, I find it difficult to write about Stewart
.

I stopped and read the sentence. “You’re fucking crazy!” I said aloud.

I started to scratch out the incriminating words. Instead I found myself writing two more sentences:

Well, I find it difficult to write about anything, God knows. But Stewart presents special problems
.

What was this, then? What spirit of perverse self-destructiveness had compelled me to set down, in my own handwriting, three sentences that, if read by Janet, could spell the undoing of the entire charade? I found that I was, of all things, laughing. And then, bizarrely, I was choking back sobs
. Do I speak of him as I later came to know him
, I wrote,
or as he appeared to me before I learned the truth, before I stripped away the mask of normalcy he hid behind
?

It was as if I were taking dictation from some unseen source, the ruled lines of the legal pad filling effortlessly with words
. For so long he seemed nothing but a footnote to my life, a passing reference in what I had imagined would be the story of my swift rise to literary stardom
. The words were coming faster now, almost in a scrawl
. Today he not only haunts every line of this . . 
. and here I paused. This
what
? For a moment I felt the familiar doubts and hesitancy threatening to stop my pen, but then I charged on
: Today he not only haunts every line of this statement but is, in a sense, its animating spirit, its reason for being
.

I flipped over the page and began a new paragraph:
We were roommates
. And once I’d set that sentence down, the floodgates opened. In a blinding scrawl, I wrote of my early days of living with Stewart, evoking details, sensations, and conversations that I could not consciously have brought to mind but that now spilled out onto the page effortlessly. I scribbled for six hours straight, then slept for four, and then immediately began writing again, not stopping until twelve hours had passed. And so it went for the next six days, as I poured out my story from start to finish, from the squalor of Washington Heights to the terror of the Canadian forest where Les had been gunned down.
Why
I should have felt such a need to fix these facts on paper, I did not know. Only now, when I have extracted the whole tale, do I even question the impulse. I wrote only because I knew I
must
write. I knew I must somehow
rid
myself of all that had happened. And in so doing render myself capable of moving on, with Janet, minus the burden of conscience that might otherwise make a life of innocent, unsullied love impossible. This stack of pages is confession and therapy; absolution and insight; cleansing and discovery. And though I have not paused to read anything I have written, I know that for all its flaws of haste, of slipshod phrasing and bad word choice, this manuscript is the most honest, and thus the finest, thing I will ever write.