American Appetites (23 page)

She broke down suddenly, hid her face in her hands, began to cry. Ian thought, So Glynnis spilled her guts after all.

“You must not blame yourself, Roberta. Of course you must not blame yourself. . . .” He remained sitting, stiffly, his legs crossed, fingers hooked about a knee, in a posture of paralysis, speaking in a slow dull stunned voice. “Please, Roberta. You must not blame . . .” I will not defend myself, he thought. He had heard clearly enough but could not believe: Sigrid Hunt's name known, Glynnis's mad accusation known, their unspeakable quarrel made public.

His eyes too brimmed with tears. Not of grief or even of regret but of hurt, humiliation, outrage! For Glynnis had betrayed him doubly: had betrayed their marriage and had in effect willed her own death, for which he was not to blame yet would be blamed. I will not defend myself, he thought.

The hell with you all.

ROBERTA GAVE HERSELF
up to the luxury of grief: a specifically female luxury, Ian thought it, in envy. And then she rose to leave, wiping her face with a tissue, clumsy, apologetic, deeply embarrassed, and, yes, fearful of him—for it was so very explicit, his failure or refusal to speak: to deny Sigrid Hunt, and Glynnis; to proclaim, like any guilty man, his innocence.

He walked with her to the door, clumsily too, tall and stork-legged and blundering, walked with her into the courtyard, which was fragrant with the heavy scent of wisteria, that scent, Ian thought it, of desire: of utterly inchoate, undifferentiated, unnamed desire. She was wiping her face with a tissue, her eyes, which were bloodshot, and her cheeks, which looked tender, even chafed, streaked with tears. How close to the surface of our lives are tears, Ian thought, recalling his daughter's childhood, her babyhood in particular, when Bianca wept so easily, and stopped weeping so easily, and a while later wept again, a depthless reservoir of tears, it seemed; and you must endure another's pain, attempt to alleviate another's pain, protect, embrace, caress, shield with love or love's mimicry—so he found himself touching Roberta, his dear friend's wife, his arm about her shoulders, his face against her hair, murmuring words of comfort that were in truth words of desperation: Please don't blame yourself, don't blame yourself in any of this, it was a dreadful thing an unspeakable thing an accident that might have been prevented had we only known. . . .

She stood very still, did not turn to him, yet did not step away from him or push his arms away; did not repulse him. Ian felt a wave of sheerly sexual desire that hit him like a blow; a concentration of blood, yearning, need; a crisis as of a sudden terrible density. . . .

He said, “Don't go,” begged, “
Don't
go,” now weeping himself, hoarse and guttural, yet childlike, helpless. “Roberta, don't leave me, don't go, I'm so afraid.”

They were in the courtyard, in the open air, stumbling together like drunken lovers, Ian's arms around Roberta as if he were drowning and she might save him, the very buoyancy, warmth, and life of her body might save him, and Roberta, so much shorter than he, shorter than Glynnis, was swaying on her feet, taken by surprise yet not resisting him; nor acquiescing. What words she managed to say, what confused comfort she proffered, what gestures of womanly, motherly, spontaneous, and unwilled solicitude, he would not afterward recall, any more than he would recall his own anxious words: only that, knowing Ian's desire for her, knowing his ravenous need, she nonetheless detached herself from it and refused it. “I can't stay. You know I can't stay. Don't ask me. Let me go. Please. I can't stay. I must leave—” And Ian, suddenly repentant and deeply ashamed, let her go.

At her car he heard himself speak in a nearly normal voice, and Roberta, a former psychiatric nurse after all, replied in a nearly normal voice. “Of course,” Ian was saying, and, for some reason, “I know, I understand”; and Roberta was saying, “Please come to dinner with us soon, now that Bianca is gone,” and squeezed his hand. “It isn't good for you to be alone.” Ian opened her car door for her, and shut it; stood back, smiling at her, dazed, stricken with desire, something beating behind his eyes, yet—and how astonishing this was, how his pride would batten on it!—speaking calmly, even affably: would she say hello to Denis, and would she tell Denis he'd like very much to resume their squash games soon, perhaps next Monday; by then things should be more under control; he'd been going over to the Institute for a few hours a day and bringing work home with him; the correspondence was piling up, “It's this time of year, God knows why everything comes to a crisis now.” They made a tentative date for dinner, Thursday evening: day after tomorrow.

As Roberta backed her car carefully out of the drive, Ian thought again how easy it would be for him to say, You know of course that I am not that young woman's lover, I have never been that young woman's lover; how easy for him to follow after her, to defend himself, to say, In that, Glynnis was mistaken, poor Glynnis whom I loved so much but who did not trust me—how easy, yet how impossible; something bitter and resolute in him would not allow it. He might have said, Glynnis died out of pride; he might have said, Please forgive me: I allowed my wife to die out of pride; but of course he said nothing, simply stood in the driveway, like any host seeing off a visitor, waving goodbye, farewell, come again soon please, a man observing the rudiments of social protocol though disheveled, flush-faced, sweaty, absurd as any rejected suitor.

HE WENT BACK
into the house and, in the kitchen, poured himself an inch or two of Scotch and drank it down, not as Ian McCullough would do but as another man might do, practical-minded, tough, willing to face facts: And if the police questioned her? and if she told, as she must tell, the truth?

He thought, staring at the snapshots scattered across the kitchen table, the sympathy cards in piles on the windowsill, But I am a posthumous man, am I not?

He smiled, thinking, What can they do to
me?

4.

Glynnis died: and was buried. But her death, in a sense, was only now beginning.

In compliance with state law, the Hazelton Medical Center had reported the death to the Cattaraugus County Department of Health. The chief medical examiner for the county, a physician named Boesak, found nothing with which to fault the Medical Center itself, either in its surgical or its postsurgical procedures, but did rule that the circumstances surrounding the death were suspicious: enough to justify turning the case over to the county prosecutor's office with a “strong recommendation” that a criminal investigation be made. It did not appear, on the basis of X rays taken upon admission to the hospital, that the subject had walked into the plate-glass window, or even, in all probability, that she had fallen against it; her injuries were to the back of the head primarily, and not to the front, and of sufficient severity to suggest she had been pushed, with considerable force, against the glass. Which might indicate, under the New York State statute, charges ranging from second-degree murder to voluntary or involuntary manslaughter.

It was early, not yet eight o'clock in the morning of May 27, the day following Roberta Grinnell's visit, when two Hazelton police detectives, Wentz and Holleran as they introduced themselves, came to the house to ask Ian a few questions and to take a look, if Ian did not mind, at the scene of the accident. Though at this time Ian knew nothing about the medical examiner's report, and certainly nothing about a formal police investigation, he asked the detectives at once, and simply, “Am I under arrest?” And they said, “No, no, Dr. McCullough, you are not under arrest”—politely, even a bit deferentially—“but we do have a few questions; may we come in?”

“Yes,” Ian said. “Of course.”

He had been waiting for this for so long, so very long, the crucial telephone call, the knock at the door, the hour of accounting. Now that it had arrived, however, he realized he had not been prepared for it at all—for its effect upon him was immediate, and visceral, and surely transparent. He must have looked like a man who has been kicked hard in the belly.

In a haze of pain he let the police detectives in, led them in. “This is the dining room,” he heard himself say, surely unnecessarily, “and this is the window that shattered . . . this is the window that shattered.” There was a brief pause during which time the three of them stared at the window; and, beyond it, at the splendid morning sunshine, and the flagstone terrace with its white wrought-iron furniture, its pots of now rather desiccated geraniums—plants that Glynnis had wintered over, and someone, not Ian so it must have been Marvis or Bianca, had set outside. “Of course, as you can see, I had it replaced,” Ian said. “The window.”

“When did you have it replaced, Dr. McCullough?” Wentz asked, notebook in hand, unless it was Holleran who asked, for Ian could not remember which man was which, or even whether he had heard the names correctly. At the door they had shown him their IDs and their smart polished badges, not unlike television actors impersonating police officers, but Ian hadn't seen; hadn't somehow heard. He knew only that the men were strangers to him, not friends, though with an edge of friendliness—unless he imagined it: no taller than he but large, stocky, physically imposing, within seconds using up too much oxygen in the room, so that, despite the most strenuous efforts of his will, he became dangerously light-headed; indeed, he was suddenly on the verge of fainting and was obliged, to his embarrassment, to lean forward against the dining room table, both hands flat on the table, his head lowered, until the spell passed. Replaced? When had he had what replaced . . . ?

They asked was he all right, would he like to sit down, and Ian seemed not to hear, trying very hard to answer the question he knew he'd been asked. “The window,” he said. “The day after the accident, I had it replaced, that glass installation and repair store on Charter Street in the village; the receipt is in my desk drawer if you'd like to see it.” It pleased him that he could proffer these men—so reassuringly professional in their suits, white shirts, neckties; the elder of the two even wore horn-rimmed glasses that resembled Ian's own—this small nugget of information, this most factual of facts.

“Are you all right, Dr. McCullough? You're looking a little pale.”

“Not at all. No. I am fine.”

“Do you mind—?”

“What? Oh, no. Of course.”

They unlocked the plate-glass door and pushed it carefully open; went outside to examine the terrace beneath the window; spoke in an undertone to each other, which Ian could not hear and did not wish to hear. As soon as he'd come home from the Medical Center that day he had done his best to clean up on the terrace—he'd swept away the broken glass, scrubbed away the bloodstains. There had been blood in the gravel directly beneath the window, too, and this gravel Ian had carefully raked up, and tossed away in the woods behind the house, and replaced with fresh gravel from the driveway. He had performed his terrible task slowly and even dreamily and had forgotten it immediately afterward; now, as he watched the detectives squatting outside the window, poking in the gravel, he remembered; felt physically sick, remembering; for he'd known at the time that, later, at this time—he hadn't any doubt this time would arrive—he would remember having done these things, with the understanding that of course he was a murderer, whether Glynnis died or lived.

Wentz, or was it Holleran, lifted a sliver of glass between his fingers, and examined it briefly, and let it fall. When the men stood they brushed their hands against their heavy thighs, and Ian thought of how they were kindly men, men who wished him no personal harm, yet his enemies, as Glynnis was becoming his enemy, against the grain of all he desired: in opposition to all he knew of himself, of the fundamental decency of his soul.

The men came back into the house, staring hard, it seemed, at Ian, as if something had been decided. It was Wentz (if Wentz was the one with the glasses) who had the police report, the young officers' report, made on the night of the twenty-third of April, regarding the circumstances of the accident as it had been told to them, the condition of the dining room, evidence of struggle, and so on and so forth, reading aloud, skimming, too quickly for Ian to entirely grasp. He was stunned to realize that a police report existed; he remembered only dimly the young police officers in his house, summoned, for reasons of inexplicable and unforgivable malice, by their neighbors the Dewalds. One of the officers had wrapped Ian's bleeding hand in a towel, had helped him walk out to the ambulance. Careful, mister.
Care
ful.

They had had no right to enter his house. He'd made an irrevocable error to have allowed it.

Wentz and Holleran were examining the dining room table, the chairs, the rug, the parquet floor . . . though there was nothing to examine, nothing to see. What was there to see? Ian had put everything to rights long ago, Marvis had done a general housecleaning; what was there to see? They went into the kitchen, commented on the attractiveness of the kitchen; they'd heard, they said, that Ian's late wife—the words “late wife” hung oddly in the air—was a well-known writer of cookbooks, and Ian said yes, yes, that's true.

Had he not feared they might think him boastful, he would have showed them Glynnis's books in their bright cheery wrappers.

Wentz and Holleran took note, though without comment, of the snapshots on the kitchen table and of the bulletin board, whose numerous items Ian had not touched and did not intend to touch. In the kitchen, the men seemed yet larger and fleshier than before, their expressions graver. Wentz pointed to the magnetized knife rack on the wall and said, as if casually, “Which is the knife the officer found on the floor? Is it one of these?”

“Knife? What knife?”

“‘Steak knife, ten inches, bloodstained.' Is it one of these here?”