Gossip (38 page)

Their silence grew restless. I didn’t know why I talked about Bill, except to keep from talking about myself. Or was I talking about myself?

“It’s not like death is new to us. But he was one of us. Yes, for all his faults, Bill was one of us. And he wasn’t in the closet when he died. He came out. On
Nightline.
For all the wrong reasons, but he must’ve known something wasn’t right. So maybe he was no worse than many of us. No worse than I. In some ways. Another stupid victim. We talk like being a victim gives you clout, makes you smart. That suffering is good for you. But it can turn you into a shit. It can make you nuts.”

I was only talking to myself. Here was my chance to deliver wisdom, yet I had no wisdom. I had nothing but uncertainty.

“I’m not saying hate the sin and love the sinner. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. Sorry to be unclear. I’m not clear about any of this.”

Angry with myself, I suddenly snapped, “What do you want from me anyway?” Then, more softly, “What do I want from you? Why should it matter what you think or say about me? Why should we be so important to each other? Why should other people matter? What are other people for?”

I stopped. I blinked.

“Yes,” I said. “What are other people
for?”

“Fucking!” a voice shouted.

Nobody laughed. The rest of the audience was with me, either in sympathy or embarrassment.

“But what else?” I said. “There’s got to be something else. What are other people for?” I repeated. “Something besides sex and money and votes. Or we wouldn’t constantly talk about each other. Are we just entertainment? Distractions? Are we just burying our own shit in other people’s shit?”

There was a ripple of heads turning and whispering. I felt someone standing to my left.

“I hope not,” I continued. “But I don’t know what else there is anymore. I don’t.”

I turned and found Lady Remington beside me. She made no move to intervene, but patiently waited for me to finish.

“Sorry,” I told the mike. “I’m just talking to myself up here. It must look like I’m having a nervous breakdown.” Was that what was happening? “What
are
other people for?” I repeated one last time, still hoping for an answer, and still nothing came to me. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Yes. Sorry. Thank you. Good night. Sorry.”

I fled across the stage, toward the glass eye of the video camera that promptly swung back to Lady Remington. She clapped her hands to stir up a delayed, uncertain applause.

“What did I tell you?” Veronica whispered. “You did fine.” As if he’d noticed nothing cracked about my speech.

“What Ralph was saying,” declared Lady Remington, “in his oh-so Zen way, is that we must love each other. Yes. Each other and ourselves. So we can stand firm against those who don’t.”

Was that what I’d been groping for? Love? No. It was too glib, too easy. A drag queen could get away with saying it, but I couldn’t. Such a private word meant nothing when said in a crowd. It was only a dry wish, a vague hope.

I’d failed. I could not give them the mean, small truth about Nick, or the large, slippery truth that I’d felt before I went up. We are in trouble. Why didn’t I say that? I’d said nothing. Desperate to get away from there, I ducked out from under Veronica’s arm, and collided with Nick.

“Thanks,” he whispered.

“For what?” I pushed his hand off my shoulder. “For talking nonsense? For being too chickenshit to say what you knew all along I wouldn’t say?”

“I thought you could. I was sure you would.”

Was he bullshitting me? “You did a damn good job hiding your panic.”

“I was never panicked. Because I knew I deserved it.”

Lady Remington continued to tease and cheer the crowd back to life, her speech covering our exchange.

I stared at Nick, sorry I hadn’t hurt him yet glad I hadn’t, wanting only to escape his sheepish, knowing look. “I’m leaving,” I said, and stepped past him.

“Ralph? Ralph?” called Veronica in a loud whisper.

“Let him go,” said Nick.

“But we’re not done. Gay Cable wants to—”

I swung toward the left to avoid the crowd concentrated in front of the stage, although I didn’t feel as if I were fleeing. I felt strangely unashamed, oddly relieved. The forest of faces continued to watch Lady Remington, but people along the border noticed me. They stared blankly, like they thought I’d gone mad, except for an older man with a bushy beard who sadly smiled and nodded, as if approving of what I’d said, as if he understood what I didn’t.

I was almost to the door when I spotted the scarecrow figure in the back. His hands were clasped on top of his head, his pursed frown in a halo of elbows. Among the spectators along the wall, Peter was the only one watching me. When he saw that I saw him, he lowered his arms and came out.

“What’re you doing here?” I said accusingly.

He sighed and shook his head. “I couldn’t just sit on my ass at home wondering what I’d set in motion tonight.”

“You? Oh yes. You.” Each of us saw him or herself as the center of the drama.

We lingered by the door, guiltily frowning at each other, only what were we guilty about? Complicity? Helplessness?

“Does Nick know you came?”

“No. My being here isn’t about Nick.”

“Enough politics for tonight, my darlings,” Lady Remington concluded. “We must march, but we must dance too! So. Dance!”

She clapped her hands; the music resumed. The bodies shifted, clustered and resumed dancing. They forgot about my breakdown. Or maybe they only wanted to forget. Either way, I was glad to have Peter.

Without asking where we were going, he followed me out to the street. The silence was sudden and deep, like stepping into a photograph. I started us away from the river toward Tenth Avenue, where I knew he could catch a cab. It was too far for Peter to walk home.

“You did the right thing,” he said. “Nobody would’ve blamed you if you blasted Nick. But this was better.”

“Oh yeah? So what the hell did I do?”

“You told the truth. You said you were confused and didn’t know anymore. Which ain’t what one expects at a rally. And you told people to be more thoughtful and tolerant and careful.” His head ducked into his shoulders. “That’s what I heard anyway.”

It was certainly what I’d felt up there, but—“Negative capability,” I said. “I’m nothing but negatives, Peter. I didn’t denounce Nick. I didn’t kill Bill.”

“Better to do nothing than the wrong thing.”

“Is it?” Yet I was pleased to be out of there with my soul intact—my frivolous, ineffectual soul. To have had the power to do harm and refused to use it.

We walked up a slight slope, in and out of shadows, Peter setting the pace.

“I was surprised you said so much about
him.”

“Not as surprised as I was.” But much of what I’d said still amazed me. “So what the fuck are other people for?”

I didn’t expect Peter to have an answer either, but he promptly said, “They’re not
for
anything, Ralph. They simply are. You have to take them or leave them.”

“Yeah?” It sounded like the answer to a different question, but it would do. “Well, I wish they’d leave me. In peace. Because I’m finished with them. Every last one.”

He solemnly nodded, accepting it as a perfectly natural desire. “Does that include me?”

“Oh no. Not you,” I said. “But everyone else.” I gladly took Peter—I slipped an arm through his arm—but what could I do for him? What could I do for anyone?

Y
OU CAN’T WIN FOR LOSING
. All I did that night was save my very private ass from a public fire. Which wasn’t nothing, but it seemed a meager thing, a successful failure, a relief of failure. There are many ways to fail.

But I still had the law in my life, my long, loveless marriage to a murder charge. I was actually pleased that I had to go down to D.C. on Wednesday for the motion to eliminate, my first appearance in court. I took refuge in that other, colder, impersonal public fire.

I rode an early-morning train in my coat and tie and polished work boots, calmly watching the endless spin of summer fields and cool green woods. It looked so peaceful out there, so open. I wondered how many more changes of season I’d see from a train window before this was over. Diaz said that today might be only the first of several pretrial hearings. He’d gone down on Monday for another case. We were to meet in superior court at Judiciary Square; our hearing was scheduled for two o’clock.

The judicial theme park of my arrest looked entirely different when I walked through it freely in daylight. The Superior Court Building was new to me, a mammoth concrete bunker half-sunk in a terraced slope. I entered a grim rectangular mouth at the foot of the hill. It opened into a wide, dimly lit corridor of beige marble, a low-ceilinged mall lined with many courtrooms. Families sat in the scoop chairs along the walls, mothers with children, adult children with parents, most of them black, like the population of Washington, everyone dressed in clean yet casual clothes. Only the lawyers wore suits and ties. It was like the waiting room of a hospital or a bus station in the underworld. People spoke in hushed, self-effacing whispers, although nobody except the lawyers had much to say.

The lights in courtroom 23 were off, the chairs outside the door empty. Diaz told me to be here early to discuss our motion, but he hadn’t arrived yet, so I took a seat and waited. Not until then, perched alone in this underground hall of anxiety, my jail cell buried somewhere nearby, did I begin to suffer a feeling of dread. The harsh smell of floor cleaner matched a remembered smell from the lockup, as if the cells hidden under my boots seeped their air into the courts. I was amazed I’d been able to block out my raw physical fear of jail for the past two months.

A police sergeant entered my courtroom and turned on the lights.

The nervous quiet was suddenly broken by the banter of a man and woman around the corner. Diaz strolled into view, tall and bearded, sheathed in a stone-colored suit, accompanied by a pretty blonde in a long skirt and floppy bow tie. They smiled and talked, smiled and talked, like old friends, Diaz teasing her with the manila folder in his hand. He was friendlier with this woman than he’d ever been with me.

“Good afternoon, Ralph. My client,” he explained. “Ralph Eckhart. Elizabeth Gaskins. Your prosecutor.”

She nodded without looking at me and finished what she was saying. “No way, Michael. This Baltimore thing is immaterial. We have a watertight case, with or without the tape.

Nothing about the police not looking into this other thing means beans. There was no prejudice. No incompetence.”

“Have it your way, Beth. Just want to save your office embarrassment if this goes to trial.”

“You’re so damn considerate,” she scoffed. “But it will go to trial. I’d reconsider my deal if I were you.” She shook her wavy hair and sailed through the swinging door into the courtroom.

Diaz saw the fallen look on my face. “Don’t worry, Ralph. They all talk tough at this stage.” He sat down and handed me the folder. “I knew I wasn’t going to convince her with this, but I hoped to plant a seed.”

I opened the folder. Inside was a rough, childish sketch of a thuggishly handsome face with a crew cut.

“The Baltimore suspect,” he said. “Faxed to me on Monday.”

Straight brows, narrow eyes, square chin—a generic cartoon. “He looks like a dozen guys you’d see any night in a gay bar.”

“Exactly. Which I’ll point out if there’s a witness who says they saw someone
like
you with O’Connor that night. Which I doubt or Gaskins would’ve mentioned it when I waylaid her upstairs. Meanwhile, you’ll be happy to know your alibi is in place.”

I was too absorbed with trying to believe this cartoon had killed Bill to catch what Diaz meant.

“Wenceslas came by my hotel last night,” he whispered. “She told me what might come out.” He wrinkled his nose. “Sticky. But we can work around it. I can keep it out of court anyway. If worse comes to worst, she can plead the Fifth. What they did is technically a crime in Pennsylvania. Not sodomy, but adultery.” He shook his head. “The law works in mysterious ways. However, if the DA’s office finds out about it, and they might once they investigate our witnesses and find that footnote, there’s no guarantee they won’t leak the story to the press.”

I thought: Poor Nancy. I was safe. Thank you, Nancy. I was safe. This could go on for years, but I should be safe.

“There’s nothing we can do to protect them?”

“Nothing except hope and pray the prosecution doesn’t figure it out.” He tapped his watch. “We better go in.”

The courtroom was lit like a theater, bright lights around the judge’s bench, the rest of the room in shadow. Gaskins sat at the table on the right going through her papers. A man in white shirt and tie set up what looked like an adding machine under the bench. We sat at the table on the left. It was like any courtroom scene in the movies, except that there was nobody else in the room, the jury box and other chairs staring emptily. The whole thing had the leisurely, provisional air of a play rehearsal.

“How was she?” I asked Diaz.

“Your friend? Not happy. I’ll say that. Hearing how much has to be left to chance did not make her feel better. But that’s not our concern. Well, not mine anyway.”

The police sergeant opened a door in the pine-plank wall behind the bench. “All rise,” he declared, as if to a packed room. He announced the court and presiding judge. A baggy-faced white man with a gray crew cut and many chins fluffed his black robe and seated himself at the bench. He put on a pair of half-moon glasses.

“The United States versus Ralph Eckhart?” He read from an index card with a genteel Virginia accent. “Mr.—Diaz? You have made a motion in limene to disallow from evidence the tape recording of a telephone conversation dated April 15 of this year.
Miss
Gaskins.” He pointedly emphasized the archaic title. “You sent me a transcript but not the tape. I won’t read it without hearing it, both to check the accuracy of transcription and the context.”

“I have the tape with me, Your Honor.” She held up a black cassette, a commonplace item hung with a large tag.