American Appetites (46 page)

“I really don't think . . .”

“I've been so busy, I haven't had time to get up to the courthouse, but Meika tells me your defense counsel is winning every round now, or nearly. Meika tells me it looks very, very good. Don't read the damned papers, says Meika, they give you the wrong impression!” When Ian made no reply Vaughn went on, still belligerently, “And I'm lonely, these days. D'you know what it is, Ian, to be lonely? Married and lonely?” He mumbled to himself; perhaps he was laughing. It sounded as if the telephone receiver had been dropped. “Though I guess you wouldn't know, would you. Since you're not married now. You're of widower status. And you're not lonely.”

Ian stood mute, accused. He felt a quick stab of pain between the eyes. He had the strange, unsettling idea that Meika was standing close by Vaughn, or was even, slyly, on another extension, listening in on her husband's call.

Vaughn said, “Hello? You there? Ian? Still there?”

Ian said, “Yes.”

“Hell, Ian, I know you're going through . . . hell. Whatever happened with you and poor Glynnis, it was just something that happened. It wouldn't happen again. Right? I've had a little too much to drink but I think I can make myself clear. Right?” He paused; Ian could hear him breathing. “Meika, are
you
on the line?” he asked suddenly.

There was no reply.

Vaughn said, “Meika,
are
you?” He waited, and again there was only silence. “Bad puss, if you are.”

Ian said, embarrassed, “Vaughn? I don't think I can make it tomorrow night. But thank you.”

“Another time, then? When the trial is over? When you're acquitted? Free and clear? We can all go out, then, right, and celebrate? Not like it would be hubris then, or anything. Challenging the gods. Once you
are
acquitted.”

“Yes, fine,” Ian said, desperate to get away.

“You're my friend too, you know.”

“Yes,” said Ian.

“We're all friends. We don't judge. Fundamental principle of civilization.”

“Yes.”

“When you die, you die alone. But when you live, you can't live alone. Can't bear to live alone.” He paused again; again there was a sound of mumbling, or laughter. Perhaps it was sobbing. “I've been exploring some of these problems—I call them ‘problems'; to an artist all substance not yet given a structure represents a ‘problem' to be solved—in my Poetics, of course. You saw my Poetics, didn't you? Back around Christmastime.”

“I'm afraid I can't talk now, Vaughn. Bianca and I have only just arrived home—”

“Let's make it another time, then. You and your daughter, and Nick Ottinger, and Meika and me, shall we? Celebration dinner. Vaughn's treat. Right? Shall we?”

“Yes,” Ian said quickly. “Yes, good. Good night.”

“Good
night
.”

7.

On the night of March 29, near midnight, Nick Ottinger telephoned Ian McCullough and said, in a voice that fairly trembled with excitement, “Ian, I have a surprise for you, can you guess?” and Ian, who had been sitting in the darkened kitchen of his house, drinking Scotch and thinking of his wife's snow-covered grave, which he had not visited in weeks, and of Sigrid Hunt whose face was now a dim dreamy blur in his memory, said at once, “Sigrid Hunt. You've found her.”

And so it was.

SINCE THE START
of Ian McCullough's trial there had been rumors, some of them very public indeed, that Sigrid Hunt—“the Missing Woman,” “the Mystery Woman,” “the ‘Other' Woman”—would appear: initially, to testify for the prosecution; then for the defense. Concurrent with these rumors, though antithetical to them, were rumors that Sigrid Hunt was dead, had (in fact) been murdered. (And if Hunt had been murdered, who was the “likely” murderer?)

So, on the morning of April 4, when Sigrid Hunt did at last appear in court, taking the witness stand beside the judge's high bench as naturally—which is to say as hesitantly and as self-consciously—as any other witness, there was a truly palpable air of excitement and anticipation in the courtroom: crude, melodramatic, yet contagious; an assumption too, particularly among the press, however erroneous and however frequently denied, that the defense had timed its coup deliberately. (But this was not the case. Sigrid Hunt had only just been contacted, by a private investigator in the hire of Nick Ottinger, the week before, in a coastal village west of Guadalajara, Mexico; Ottinger had then been required to spend a total of four hours talking with her on the telephone, to convince her that she was in no way under arrest or in violation of any state statute, before she agreed, and then with reluctance, to fly back for the trial.)

An extra row of benches had been reserved for the press, and television camera crews and photographers crowded about on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, waiting, with a determination and a sort of defiant communal cheeriness Ian rather admired, for those confused, fleeting moments when the “principals” appeared. The heightened interest today was of course focused upon Sigrid Hunt and not on Ian McCullough; or, if on McCullough, it was minimal and cursory; for the man's tall spare rangy “professorial” frame was familiar to the regulars by now, and his face, and now silvered hair, yet more familiar and unyielding of dramatic surprise. Over the long months, Ian had grown not only accustomed to but philosophically accepting of the childlike appetite of the press for material, substance, essence,
life;
its elaborate formal structure existed, in contradistinction to Vaughn Cassity's Poetics,
a priori
, and must be filled. Glynnis had told him, following one of her television interview shows (it had consisted of an eight-minute sequence requiring approximately six thousand miles of air travel) that the thing most dreaded on network television was silence. Not the collapse of a performer, or even his death, for that could be accommodated by the media, if not energetically exploited; but, simply, silence. So with the newspapers' blank pulp pages, which must be filled.

He had spoken himself only briefly with Sigrid Hunt, and that over the telephone; he had not much wanted to see her and had not been much moved by Ottinger's relaying of messages from her, to him, to the effect that she was sorry for her behavior and asked to be forgiven. (“Why didn't she ever write to me, in all these months, then,” Ian said indifferently. “She says she did write, but couldn't mail the letters,” Ottinger said. “She says she has saved them all.” Ian allowed himself the indulgence of an expletive for which there is no genteel equivalent: “Shit.”)

But they spoke, finally, on the telephone, and the conversation was not very satisfactory. Hearing her voice, which was so thinly nervous and agitated he would not have recognized it, Ian felt little excitement and even less resentment; rather a dull flat vague clinical curiosity about what the young woman would find to say to him, after so long. And of course she'd said she was sorry, so very sorry; simply could not express in words how sorry, et cetera; then asking, “Oh, Ian, is it terrible, those people, all those crowds of people, those strangers, that you can't control, staring at you, and thinking about you, and judging you?” and he'd realized she was asking not of Ian McCullough's ordeal but of her own, the ordeal shortly to be hers. He said, “Yes. It is terrible.”

“
AND WERE YOU
‘involved' with Dr. McCullough during this period of time?”

“If you mean romantically involved—”

“Romantically, sexually—”

“I was not.”

“You were not?”

“I was not his lover. I was not his friend, really. Though I would like to have been. I would like to have been a friend to them both . . . I admired them both so very much.”

Sigrid Hunt gave her testimony in a voice that occasionally wavered but was, for the most part, steady, calm, and audible, fixing her attention for nearly two hours on Nick Ottinger, as if oblivious of others in the courtroom, except, from time to time (such times as she faltered in her speech), glancing at Ian McCullough, seated only a few yards away . . . a look of appeal, of, oddly, hurt: for he had been very chill in his greeting and had stared at her, and stared at her now, as if she were a stranger to him.

Yet he thought, She has come back from the grave to save me.

Or was it rather—and he did not understand this either—she has come to save me in my grave.

Sigrid Hunt was still, though perceptibly changed, a young woman of unusual beauty, with her dead-white skin, her quaintly asymmetrical features, the way in which, not at all stiffly but with a pose of utter naturalness, she held her head, her shoulders, her arms. Oversized plastic-framed glasses, with tinted lenses, made her features appear the more finely cut, as if in miniature: the elegant nose, mouth; the “widespaced” eyes; the rather high narrow forehead; the tips of the exposed ears. She had brushed her long glossy red-gold hair back severely from her face, and parted it in the middle of her head, and coiled it up, at the nape of her neck, in a chignon; she wore a black costume—for Sigrid Hunt was the sort of woman upon whom clothing is not mere clothes but costume—of some soft wool fabric, an overblouse and a skirt that fell to mid-calf; no earrings, no necklaces, no bracelets, no rings. How tall she was, and how odd, teasing, fascinating, the asymmetry of her features, which had the look of being willed and not accidental, like nature. Ian thought of Modigliani and of Parmigianino; he stared and scarcely heard what she was saying, though all that she said was about him and for him.

Whether by way of the defense counsel's skillful questioning or by way of the repentant young woman herself, there now unfolded a narrative in which Ian McCullough emerged in yet another mode of being, rather more victim than agent: a person of enormous sympathy and generosity, though perhaps something of a fool. For Sigrid Hunt confessed both to “admiring” and being “very attracted to” Ian McCullough even as she confessed to “hoping to manipulate him” for her own purposes.

“I was desperate then. I was rather crazy. I'm not at all proud of that time in my life, and I look back upon it with loathing. I had been involved with a man, in love with a man, who wanted to marry me and wanted me, as he said, to have his son, though at the same time he often spoke of killing me and of killing himself. ‘We can't be any more miserable than we are now,' he'd say, ‘if we were dead.' And though I knew this was madness I saw the logic of it, so to speak. I saw the logic of it quite clearly. At the time. But I was desperate, also, to get free of it . . . of him. There has never been a time in my life when I have not felt a profound sense of shame for what I seem to be doing, a sort of role I seem to be performing, that isn't me, truly isn't me, but a sort of mask I am wearing, yet of course it
is
me since it can be no one else after all. And this was one of the most shameful times. . . .

“I should also say that, at the time I became involved in this love affair, I was feeling ill-used and embittered about losing my job at Vassar. I had been hired to teach dance; I was what's called an adjunct instructor, which means expendable; and so I was. But that doesn't have any bearing on this situation; it certainly has nothing to do with Dr. McCullough or his wife, whom I met around this time, through artist friends in Hazelton: Glynnis McCullough, who was so lovely to me . . . for a while. I liked her very much; there are some women, not many, whom I like immediately and enormously, as if they are larger than life, sort of . . . Amazonian; but it's usually just in my imagination.

“Mrs. McCullough was one of these women, and she seemed to take to me too for a while, as I said, introduced me to friends of hers, some very nice women friends, all of them her age, older than me, of course; and I liked them, too, and felt some sort of . . . envy, I suppose . . . jealousy . . . that their lives were what they were, and mine was what mine was: so shabby, by contrast, and so stupidly desperate. I felt—oh, I've always felt, so often!—I felt I deserved more. I envied them their marriages, and their families, and their expensive houses, which they took for granted, or so it seemed.

“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.