Now You See Him (2 page)

N
OT LONG AFTER THE MEDIA FRENZY
ramped up, the phone rang at our house with Shirley Castor, Rob’s widowed mother, on the other end. I hadn’t talked to her in years, and I felt a sharp, not entirely pleasant pang at hearing her voice. She wanted to see me, she said, in a commanding tone that recalled the theatrical haughty lady who had intimidated me as a boy. Shirley was a controlling, unnaturally present mother who had fused with Rob in a way I’d vaguely envied as a child. He was clearly her favorite of the three of her kids. For several years, she’d basked happily in the reflected light of his success. But from the moment of the murder-suicide on, there was another woman linked far more memorably with him than his mom. In death, Kate Pierce had eclipsed Shirley forever, and I knew she didn’t like that one bit.

I should explain that after Rob became well known for writing a book that, for at least one whole season, was
the must-have fashion accessory on trains and planes for its “lyric anatomizing of the human heart,” he began a new life which seemed to consist almost entirely of him moving in long, elliptical circuits through college campuses and art colonies, and arriving home about twice a year with an exotic new woman in tow. He came here to see his mother, and also to see us, his old roadies, at our monthly pizza-and-beer dinners, held by long-standing arrangement at a local dive called New Russian Hall. Most of us found it amazing that in the face of the stern challenge of earning a living, our grade-school pal had become not only famous, but on top of that had somehow achieved the slippery distinction of writing for a job. But we collectively envied him—to a fault—the by-products of that distinction: his conquests. We were awestruck by the beautiful young Turkish painter who moved through life doing the Dance of the Seven Veils with her hair. We were intrigued by the career novelist with perfect nails and a blinkless stare. We were bowled over by the smoldering, anorexic poet, and dear Lord but we were
killed
by the sensitive Winnebago Indian girl with the downcast eyes and the shimmering cataract of black hair. Each of these women, tense, gorgeous, and dramatic looking in entirely different ways, arrived in town on Rob’s arm, took a look around, and did their best to conceal their disappointment.

Kate was unlike them from the start. She wasn’t obviously an artist, to begin with. She didn’t toss her hair, speak in a fake baby voice, or act like European royalty inexplicably fallen to earth among American hayseeds. A poised woman of about thirty, she was pretty enough in a regular way, affable but slightly cool, with straight blond hair
combed so as to fall in two evenly parted curtains, modest clothes and a pleasingly upturned nose. Standing in front of you as self-contained as a vase, she smiled at you in a way that made you feel punched clean through with inner recognition. There was knowledge in that smile, otherwise kept carefully under wraps. And though we knew she was a writer herself, we were still deeply surprised that Rob had chosen her. Rob had always been such a strutting out-loud type in his own way that we were sure he’d end up with someone stridently beautiful or an aggressive social climber. Yet this girl, at least at first blush, was perfectly normal, the kind of forgettably average-looking woman you’d find loitering in an apron at the cosmetics counter, offering up spritzes of the featured scent of the day.

We were shocked when they swore eternal love, moved into Manhattan and began a life together. From that moment on, most of our information about them came from a guy named Mac Sterling. I’d known Mac—that grasping phony—since grade school, when we’d shared equal billing as “best friends of Rob.” A big, loud, smart kid, he would later go on to be a top-tier journalist writing celebrity profiles in national magazines. I was always a little bit helpless in front of his obvious affinity with Rob—an affinity of wildness, as children, and of writers as adults—and after high school, Mac stayed more in touch with Rob than anyone else did. When Rob and Kate left the art colony where they’d met and planned to move in together, it was Mac, already living in New York, who visited them regularly and faithfully reported back to us during his return trips to Monarch to see his ailing mom.

Aloft on an updraft of love, the happy couple came
to earth on the outer reaches of downtown Manhattan, in some edgy neighborhood filled with the smell of fried grease, piss and poverty and that way the streets of New York (Mac talking now) reek from deep inside themselves in summer, their stinks activated by the heat. Rob had begun working on a novel for which, Mac explained, he was already under contract. Kate had meanwhile given up her previous long-standing secretarial job in Cincinnati and been able to transplant her skills to a rich lady on the Upper East Side who loved her dependability, her calm and her typing speed.

Outwardly at least, things ran smoothly for a while. She did her best to blend in among Rob’s social set of grungy artist types. According to Mac, she’d increased the percentage of black in her wardrobe, and at Rob’s urging had cut her hair in one of those dramatic downtown cantilevers that leans way out over a face. Her accent remained the same, as did the way she had of saying little and remaining poised inside the frame of her self-possession. But she’d begun to seem a little bit more subtly Manhattan, and less the Midwestern girl she was by birth.

The seasons passed, the leaves fell and in miraculous fits, in tantrums of green, they appeared again, and every day, Rob climbed to his desk like an exhausted swimmer battling the outgoing tide to the beach, and there tried to concentrate. Something, he reported to Mac, was off. The work didn’t flow, the sentences built outward to no apparent purpose. For the first time in his life, his artistic nerve was failing, Mac explained, failing the way a healthy person fails into illness, taking their light and laughter with them, and the situation was all the worse because the
expectations were running so high. Rob had never lacked for industry, and so he redoubled his time at the desk, roaring through draft after draft of the book and growing only more dissatisfied with the thickening end product. Maybe he was up against the limitations of his gift. Or maybe fame, in its suddenness, had blasted him right out of his formerly unshakable sense of self. Out, in any event, went the drafts, and back they came, covered all over with the penciled evidence of the editor’s calm, sober and supportive no. And in this high wind of refusal, Mac said, Rob was beginning to panic. Because he wasn’t prepared for rejection. It wasn’t in the Rob Anthology. It was missing from the Rob Theory of Self. Misunderstood, yes, and important even. But rejected, no.

The only saving grace in it all, if there was one, was that almost no one in the wider world knew as of yet about his block. The city of New York tosses up so much noise and light that it’s easy to pretend you’re busy and convince everybody else of it as well, even if you’re sitting all day in a box of squared failure and staring out a window waiting for the phone to ring.

Kate, meanwhile, had burrowed down into life and quickly found her footing. She loved the speed and efficient deployments of Manhattan. She found a cognate echo of her own ambition in the streaming, nervous vitality of the city. Every morning, she woke early and went to her millionairess’s castle on Sutton Square, where she sat with perfect posture while typing 125 wpm and managing the woman’s social schedule and fielding her calls. One day the woman, Annabel Radek, asked Kate if she’d like to stay on after work, because she was having a little cocktail
party and there was someone there she wanted her to meet. After mulling it over, she said yes, thank you, and phoned Rob to explain that she’d be late that evening. And that was how she got to meet David Framkin.

The event was held in the double-height penthouse “library,” with views, so the press later said, of both rivers. There was a guy playing the piano and waiters in white livery revolving around the room with tiny silver trays. The room was filled with that category of people who look like famous people, along with a few genuinely famous people themselves, and everybody was very stimulated and trying out their best looks, their wittiest lines. Kate had washed her face and put on a little bit of eye makeup, but that was all she’d done by way of getting ready. Probably she understood her role was to be social filler, and she did the best she could, circulating around the room with a little smile and making polite conversation, while occasionally refreshing people’s drinks when the waiters were occupied.

About an hour after the party started, David Framkin filtered in. He was the famous corporate raider who had recently bought and bankrupted one of the city’s oldest leather manufacturers. His preferred mode of operation, in fact, was to purchase heirloom companies, squeeze leveraged money out of them, cashier their employees, and then declare with a long face that these businesses were no longer “viable.” He loved the word “viable.” A balding fifty-something man with a big penguin belly, upswept gray hair, and an expression on his face of angry diagnosis, he strode into the penthouse, looked around himself, sniffing, like maybe the room was a day past its sell date,
and then he went straight to the bar. On his way, he passed Kate, and stopped, drew himself up, and said hello. She would later confess to a friend that he was a “stiff, oddly formal man” who eyeballed her, she thought, with that important person’s way of assessing the potential damage she might do him. She simply smiled and told him that she was Ms. Radek’s personal assistant and had he tried the marinated porcini spears? A half an hour later, their paths again crossed. David Framkin had had two glasses of wine in the interim. He was a little bit warmer this time, and told her with a small air of self-congratulation that it was clear she was not a New Yorker, and he’d bet his bottom dollar on it. He leaned into her personal space while saying this. She was a Buckeye, she said, an Ohio girl. Holding her eye gravely, he opened his arms as if in ecstatic confirmation.

Two days later, Kate was sitting at the computer answering her e-mail. It was ten
P.M
. Rob and she had been fighting a lot lately, with him finding her “unreachable” and increasingly cold, and her refusing to “nurse” him through his extended bad moods. On that particular evening, an online glance at his dwindling bank account had triggered an irritability attack in which he’d flung a dish into the wall, and stomped off to bed early, leaving Kate to clean the higgledy-piggledy kitchen and eat dinner alone under the fluorescent bulb. She was writing to her mother back in Akron when a message with a corporate return address blipped in her in-box. Rob was sleeping across the room from her in the pull-out bed, and I like to think she turned and looked once at him, faintly lit by the lunar glow of the computer monitor, as she clicked and the icon popped
open on her screen. I like to think she made some sign or gave some acknowledgment to his unconscious form that she was about to do something of momentous consequence. But probably she just clicked and read the letter from David Framkin, who wrote her, formal with embarrassment, to say he’d enjoyed meeting her and that—he hoped she’d forgive him—he’d had an assistant do a little research on her, and this assistant had found one of her two published short stories and he’d read it and loved it. He added in his rigid way that if she were interested in discussing it with him over a drink, he might be amenable himself.

A
FTER THE MURDER-SUICIDE THERE WAS A WRONGFUL-DEATH
suit brought by Kate’s parents against Rob’s estate, and because the e-mail transcripts were eventually classified as evidence and read out loud at the trial, we know exactly what happened next. At nearly one
A.M.
, in a friendly noncommittal manner, she wrote him back thanking him for his interest, and marveling at the fact that he’d found one of her published stories. After another sentence or two of casual chitchat, she said that yes, if he liked, she’d be willing to see him to discuss it further.

They met, Mac told us, two days later in a bar in midtown, a place that was plush with dark wood paneling and mirrors in the pretend Irish pub manner, even if the main clientele these days, Mac explained, was young hedge fund managers eager to drink fancy vodkas and wax expansive about the day’s killings. As we heard it, David Framkin was nervous at the beginning. He was out of the carefully
controlled environment in which he usually traveled, and on top of that was faced with the challenge of wooing the calm, perfectly contained person of Kate Pierce. Somehow or other, he managed, because they made a date to meet again two days later.

Of course, back up here in dozy Monarch, we didn’t know any of this at the time. And ever since then, one of the things we’ve pondered is exactly how much Rob was aware of what his girlfriend was getting up to. Like I said, he and Mac went way back and they spoke to each other with the honesty of old lodge brothers. But Rob was a proud, stubborn man, and I think it would have been hard for him to admit, even if he knew it, that the woman who’d cashed him out of long-term bachelorhood could be wooed and won by a fat man with the grim, faintly pissy look on his face of someone who’s just taken a bite of fish with bones in it.

But that was well in the future. At the moment, Framkin was still in the phase of meeting her at bars and restaurants around Manhattan, and doing his increasingly urgent best to reel her in. There is abundant testimony of waiters and bartenders on this point specifically, and they describe an older man bent always forward into the face of a girl invariably raked back, and smiling slightly. Meanwhile, predictably, the situation at home between Rob and Kate was lurching from bad to unbearable. His creative block was now nearly total, and he spent hours simply walking the streets, or getting so stoned and drunk at parties that he passed his days drifting in the long, slow curves of hangover. One evening, Mac showed up at our monthly pizza dinner and told us, shaking his head, that
after more than two years together, he didn’t think the two of them were going to make it after all. At the next dinner he quoted Rob describing himself and Kate as two people who over time had individually retreated toward the center of their loneliness, circling warily until that moment when they were finally back-to-back, facing outward, and every space on earth was foreign save the little warm spot where their tailbones met. After Mac stopped talking that time, there was a silence in which we all suddenly became aware of the rowdy sound of the jukebox and the low roar of chat along the bar. We tried to joke it off, but it was, we later agreed, probably the single saddest thing any of us had ever heard.