None of this Ever Really Happened (19 page)

"How about 'The Lady of Shalott?'" I ask. "Do you guys
know 'The Lady of Shalott'? Nick, grab
Sound and Sense
behind
you. Is it in there?"

"No."

"Grab the
Norton.
I know it's in there."

"Here it is."

"Run across the hall and make some copies, would
you?"

"How about Odysseus?" says someone. "He's gone for
twenty years, during which time he says no to immortality,
says no to living with a beautiful, sexy goddess on a desert
island
because he's so in love with his wife, and when he finally
gets home she doesn't even recognize him."

"But who does?" asks the girl with pink hair. "Do you
remember who does? His old dog does. I rest my case."

"Yeah, but then the old dog dies on a pile of shit," says the
dog-faced boy.

"So he's gone twenty years," says someone. "He's home
one night, and then he says he has to go see his father and
then he has to take another journey, for God's sake. What
about Penelope is Odysseus in love with? And what is she in
love with?"

"Nick, pass those out. Everyone read 'The Lady of Shalott'
for tomorrow. Here's the question: What's she in love with?"

I stopped to get a big tablet of newsprint and then went back
to Carolyn's place to get to work. I put both extra leaves in
her big Mission-style dining-room table and pulled it into
the middle of the living room beneath a skylight and facing
the longest interior wall, from which I removed Carolyn's
artwork. I put the dining chairs in the spare bedroom
and brought in Carolyn's office chair. I set up my laptop and
stacked my notebooks and files. Then I started making lists
in Magic Marker on the newsprint and taping these to the
long wall. I made a list of everything that I knew. I made a list
of everything I suspected and a list of everything that I did
not know in the form of questions. The first and foremost of
these was, "Was Lisa Decarre's patient?" I made three timelines;
one for the day of Lisa's death, one for the preceding
thirty days, and one for the preceding one hundred eighty
days. I made a sheet for each of the major players and on it I
listed everything I knew about that person. I made a list of all
the people I'd encountered with phone numbers, addresses,
and e-mail info. When Rosalie called with Lisa's Social Security
number, I wrote that large on its own sheet. I wrote some
scripts of imagined conversations—at least, my half of them.
Finally, I wrote down a list of things to do and, in the days
ahead, I did them.

I rented a post-office box. I took out ads in the little
weekly newspapers up and down the North Shore in an effort
to locate other patients of Dr. Decarre's. I called the Psychology
Department at Northwestern University and had a nice
chat with the secretary there. I gave her a cock-and-bull story
about representing a company that had developed a series of
new personality-assessment tools and was looking for grad
students to test them "for $35 an hour. Do you think anyone
in your program might be interested?"

"Oh, I think so." I found out that I could send or bring
materials to the office to distribute in student mailboxes,
and I found out the names of the two students in the program
who had off-campus mailboxes. One of these was all
I needed: Geoffrey Hand.

I called Mike Peoples. He and I had been in the English
Ph.D. program at Northwestern, and at one time we had been
interested in the same minor Lake District poet; he decided
to study the guy, and I decided not to. He became a scholar,
and I became a teacher. The absurdities of academic economics
being what they are, that allowed me to bow out with
a Masters degree so that I could start competing for fairly-high-paying
high school teaching jobs, and it allowed him
to pay two more years of upper-end tuition and write a dissertation
before he could start competing for fairly-low-paying
college-teaching jobs. He did have an office in University
Library, however, and that was another thing I needed.

Although some years had passed since we'd been in
school together, we seemed always to revert to that particular
brand of grad-student repartee that is a lot like shower-room
towel snapping. He liked to call me "the common man" and
"an unsung hero in the trenches of the war on ignorance and
ignominy," and I liked to ask if he was still masturbating in
the stacks. This time I also said, "How's the book going?"

"Pretty damn good. I'm almost finished. I read a chapter
at St. Andrews last spring, and I'm reading the last chapter at
the MLA in December."

I asked Mike if I could use his carrel once or twice for
private meetings.

"Of course. No problem. Just call me the day before and
buy me a pint of Guinness at your convenience."

"It's a deal."

"Anything I can do to help the common man."

When Carolyn called, I couldn't find my calendar in the swirl
of papers on my desktop; I was sure I'd lost track of time and
she was due home the next day, or she'd aborted the trip for
one reason or another. "No, we just got these cheap phone
cards, so we've been calling everyone, and we thought we'd
call you and see how Cooper is. Actually, we're still in Italy."

It was a good thing. Her living space had taken on the
appearance of a command post, with furniture pushed to
the side and her paintings and prints stacked against the
wall. There were piles everywhere—clothing, newspapers,
telephone books, some dishes. Now all the walls were covered
with taped lists on newsprint, and two big window fans,
one drawing air in the front, one pushing it out the back,
caused these to ripple and billow like so many sails in my
secret little regatta.

"Everything okay?" she asked.

"Absolutely!" I told her about the dogs, about our morning
walks to the dog beach and evenings on the deck. I told
her about Lydia and Charlie. Finally I told her about Lisa
Kim and Decarre, that he was a psychiatrist and that he'd
been disciplined once before. Then I said, "Now listen to this:
He was with her in her car minutes before the crash. Also, the
autopsy report shows that she had opiates in her system, and
her best friend says no way would she ever use heroin."

"Which means what?" Carolyn asked.

"Codeine or morphine, maybe."

"I see. And who has access to morphine?"

"Right." Neither of us spoke for a long moment.

"There's something that isn't right here, isn't there?"
she said.

"I think so," I said.

"I'm going to assume that everything you've told me here
is true and verifiable."

"Everything I've told you is true. Not quite everything is
verifiable, at least not yet."

"I'm thinking maybe you should go to the police,"
she said.

"Do you think I have enough?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. You have something, but I don't know anything
about criminal law. Just go ask the cops. Or go see Officer
Lotts."

I had finally found my calendar. "Hey, what are you doing
in Italy? I thought you were supposed to be in Greece
by now."

"Well, we met a couple of Italian guys," she said. "Aldo
and Luca."

Wendy was in love with Aldo, and Luca was in love with
Carolyn. "Zee Irish woman," he would say, "is zee better
woman of zee world." She told me about bobbing through
Siena traffic on the back of a Vespa, about a weekend at Aldo's
family farm in the Tuscan countryside, about visiting some
Etruscan ruins so far off the path that they were the only
people
there, about evenings of candlelight, pasta, and wine.

"This sounds serious," I said.

"Not really. A few weeks and it will all be over."

"Are you sad?"

"No," she said, "he's not the guy." Besides, she was finally
tired of traveling, had been away long enough, was anxious to
start her new job. "That's another reason for my call. I think
I'll be home on September 15," she said.

We talked some logistics. We didn't talk about where I
would go on September 15.

Dorothy Murrell's voice was as plaintive and precise as a
stringed instrument, and she spoke with the caution of someone
walking on new ice. I told her my name was Geoffrey
Hand. "You responded to my newspaper advertisement . . ."

"Oh, yes. I see. Okay . . ."

I said that I had a few more questions, and I wondered
if I might be able to meet her. She thought not. She thought
that she'd said all she wanted to say in her letter. I suggested
a public place. "University Library, for instance. I have access
to a carrel there."

"Are you a student at the university?" she asked.

"I am a graduate student in psychology," I lied. I told her
I was gathering information for my dissertation, and that her
letter was exactly what I was looking for.

She interrupted. "I won't identify him. I will not identify
him."

I explained that unless she did, nothing could really be
done.

"I don't care," she said. "I will not do that to him. It would
crush him. I cannot hurt him like that."

When I finally accepted her terms, she agreed, albeit a bit
reluctantly, to meet me in the reference room of the library at
10:00
A.M.
on Saturday.

"I'll wear a yellow baseball cap," I said.

I was sitting at the table staring at my lists on the wall when
Lydia called. Her car had broken down halfway between Chicago
and Milwaukee. "Is there any possible way—"

"'Course. I'll come get you. I'll be glad to."

She was sitting on her briefcase working on her laptop
in front of the gas station when I pulled up. She was thinner
and tanner, and now she had some highlights in her hair. She
was wearing a suit and high heels. "My goodness," I said, "if
I didn't know better, I'd think you were someone important."
It was a joke, but it was a bad one, and I knew it as soon as I'd
said it; she treated it as a joke.

"Shut up," she said. "My God, what a day!" Her battery
light had come on on the highway, and then all the dash
lights, and then the car had died going full speed. She had
gotten it onto the shoulder, and a nice guy had stopped and
tried to give her a jump, but it had not taken, so she had
had the car towed and it's the alternator, but the guy can't get
to it until tomorrow morning. She told it all like that, a bit
breathlessly.

I said that I'd bring her back the next day to pick it up if
she wanted me to.

"Oh God, that would be wonderful," she said. "I don't
know how else I'll get out here."

I liked that she was nervous; I found it a little titillating. It
was as if we were on a little date. I had even showered quickly
and put on a clean shirt, one that she had given me.

Suddenly I realized what I had been doing; I'd been waiting.
I'd been waiting for a feeling that I had once had and
somehow lost. This made me feel better because it meant that
I wasn't just stringing her along, and I wasn't just afraid to
leave her or hurt her. And if that morning didn't exactly give
me the feeling, it at least gave me hope that it was still within
me or within us. I told a dumb joke and she laughed. I told
another.

She told me that she had gotten a nice letter from Charlie
that was addressed to both of us. I was a little bothered that
it had come to her; I was sure I'd given him my address at
Carolyn's place. "So, what did it say?" I asked.

"I'll give it to you when we get home."

"Can't you just tell me?"

"Not really. You can read it yourself." She started to
laugh.

"What?" I asked.

"There's something in there about a one-legged flamenco
dancer named Paco Paco," she said. She was laughing
harder.

"What?" I was laughing now, too.

"I loved it when you said, 'Charlie I've never known any
of these people . . .' " She was laughing too hard to finish. I
was, too. We couldn't stop for a couple of minutes. When
we finally did, she said, "And when he said he didn't know
most of them either . . ." That started us again. We were on
the highway doing seventy-five and laughing so hard, I was
afraid we'd crash into someone or something. There was a
car running parallel to us and a woman in the passenger seat
watching us with a look of horror on her face.

I touched Lydia's arm. "Look," I said to her. That started
us a third time. When we finally settled down and wiped our
eyes, the woman was gone and we were approaching the toll
plaza. "She probably thought we were crying," I said.

"Oh Lord." She stopped her laughter this time. "My God."

"Hey," I said. "Have you eaten? I'm starving."

"I could eat something," she said.

"Burger King okay?"

"Sure." For a long time, we'd ordered the same thing: two
chicken whoppers, no mayo, one order of onion rings, and
a vanilla shake. We'd split the rings, put them on our sandwiches,
and share the milkshake. That's what we did that day.
Afterward she was quiet.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Aren't you going to finish that?" I asked. Her sandwich
was half eaten.

"No. You want it?"

"Well . . ."

When I dropped her off, I said, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she said. We both forgot about Charlie's
letter.

"About the third time I saw him, he said 'Call me Paul,'" said
Jeanette Landrow. "Very California, I thought. What a red
flag!" She laughed. "Oh God, I should have seen it coming,
but . . ." She laughed again. "Anyway!"

She was a pretty, dark-haired woman with a straight, thin
nose, a wide mouth, and very large black eyes who had sent
me a timid, tentative letter. We were sitting on either side of
and at either end of a picnic table in a park by Lake Michigan.
We could see joggers and bikers on the path across the
way, but we were alone. There was a breeze off the water,
and Jeanette was looking at the big paper cup of coffee I had
brought her.