Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (20 page)

During the lunch adjournment, I couldn't keep the scene with Sandrine and me in that Greenwich Village diner from replaying in my mind. But it wasn't this scene alone. For by then I'd begun to rethink not only the last weeks of Sandrine's life but all the years before that, all the classes, the student conferences, the faculty meetings, retreats, teas, all the graduations, the long drumbeat of our years together. I wondered if Sandrine had died with these same scenes playing in her mind, wondering too how thin it was, the line that had divided her life from an enormous waste of time.

Morty was having lunch with some fellow lawyers, and Alexandria had gone out to get us a couple of sandwiches, so I was alone in the room, alone with these thoughts. Had Sandrine finally come to believe that in marrying me she had made not only a grave mistake but the one great mistake of her life, the error from which all later errors flowed? And as the years passed, and without consciously being aware of it, had I grown increasingly defensive with regard to Sandrine, and was it my own pent-up disappointment that had finally exploded on that last night of her life?

This was all icily disturbing, and like a man fleeing the voices in his head I walked to the window and looked out. I could see the front grounds of the courthouse, with its squat war memorials, marble columns that erupted from the green here and there and upon which the names of the local fallen had been inscribed. There was also a statue of some regionally renowned Civil War commander who'd distinguished himself at Gettysburg . . . or was it Spotsylvania? Coburn's monuments were like Coburn, I thought, untouched by any distinction.

My gaze drifted about the grounds. The lawn was dotted with the sort of sunlight poets and bad writers inevitably call “dappled.” The town traffic was moving with its usual lethargy, a pace I'd long ago labeled “sub-Saharan” and which I thought typical of the average Coburnite's failure to find anything of true moment to do.

Nothing in this Norman Rockwell tableau caught my attention until I saw Mr. Singleton and Detective Alabrandi as they moved down one of the courtyard square's concrete sidewalks. They were walking shoulder to shoulder. There they are, I thought, my twin nemeses, utterly convinced that they have seen through my plot, equally determined to make sure that I pay with my life.

I would have turned away but, just as they reached the street, a brown Ford station wagon pulled into one of the parking spaces a few feet away. It was a car I recognized, because it had always struck me as odd that a single man, as Malcolm Esterman certainly was, would buy a car that says family all over it, a car for transporting kids to school, games, lessons, for taking long in-country vacations to such faraway and exotic locales as, say, Charleston.

And yet there he was, Malcolm getting out of that very car, then walking over to Mr. Singleton and Detective Alabrandi, offering them a friendly hand. How could I have known that it would all begin to unravel with such a decidedly unthreatening man, that it'd be his gently offered confirmation of Alabrandi's initial suspicion that would keep the fire burning under the good detective and, by that means, keep his gimlet eyes on me. Watching the three of them stroll casually to a bench and sit down, I could almost imagine Alabrandi's first suggestion that there might be something fishy in Sandrine's death, Alabrandi sitting in Malcolm's musty little town house, trying out the idea on Malcolm, waiting for his response, then infinitely pleased with what he hears
,
though, in fact, it was little more than a hint that perhaps all had not been peachy between Sandrine and me
.

A troubled marriage. Who doesn't have a troubled marriage? And yet I know now that Malcolm would not have had to say any more than that to add a wolfish pointiness to Alabrandi's ears.

The door of the room opened.

It was Alexandria with sandwiches and soda.

“Nothing for me,” I told her.

“You need to eat, Dad.”

She sat down at the table and began to unwrap the sandwiches.

I was still peering out the window. “You know what I miss, Alexandria? I miss the simplest things, like being able to walk around the town, go to the market.”

“But you hate the market here,” Alexandria reminded me. “You were always complaining that it didn't even have balsamic vinegar.”

This was true. Still, only a few months before, I could at least have gone to the place without fear of being noticed, save by the occasional stray faculty member or faculty spouse of Coburn College. But since Sandrine's death I'd become a local celebrity. My picture had been in the paper and I'd been the subject of numerous local television reports. I'd even been the unidentified subject of Jesse Bloom's radio talk show, the subjunctive-deprived topic for the day having been:
If your spouse was planning to murder you, would you see the warning signs?
The show had generated a lively discussion from Bloom's phone-in audience, some of whom felt certain that they'd have been able to figure out if their spouses
were
planning to kill them, others who—rather sadly, I thought—admitted they were not so sure. I remember a woman quite distinctly, the vaguely broken and self-accusatory tone in her voice, saying, My husband has deceived me so often and in so many ways I'm sure I'd be dead before I had a clue. As for me, I'd been quite certain I would have seen any sign of such a lethal intention in Sandrine. Surely she would have betrayed herself in some way, a look or word that would have tipped me off.

Yet was it not possible that I'd never really seen how much her feelings for me had changed over the years, never had the slightest inkling she might actually want me dead?

“Dad,” Alexandria said, this time more sharply and with a quick nod toward the sandwiches. “We don't have a lot of time.”

I joined her at the table and took a small bit of the sandwich. “Bad stuff is on the way,” I said. “With Alabrandi, I mean.”

“Nothing I don't already know,” Alexandria said.

Ah, but there was a great deal my daughter didn't know, and on that recognition I thought of April Blankenship in her pale blue dress, Clayton's neglected wife. She'd never expected much in the way of notoriety, and she'd certainly been unprepared to be drawn into a murder case.

It was at the town park I could no longer visit that I'd had that fateful meeting with April. I'd seen her before, of course, while shopping and also at various Coburn College functions. When it came to food shopping, she was a meticulous squeezer of fruit, as I'd observed in earlier produce market encounters. Her smile was so small as to be almost invisible, and I'd instantly pegged her for one of those needy faculty wives so often caricatured in films and books, tortured by longing, but afraid of her own shadow. In all of this, as it turned out, I'd unfortunately been right.

With these thoughts, I felt myself drift back down bad-memory lane, this time to a summer day in the town park, I with the latest award-winning novel, turning the pages slowly, admiringly, wishing I'd written what I read. Leslie Stephen had once said that genius is mostly a matter of taking the trouble, but with rewrite after rewrite of “The Pull of the Earth” I'd learned that this was not exactly so. Years had passed since the last of those efforts, of course, the one Sandrine had so soundly criticized, increasingly resentful years, as I'd privately acknowledged, and which, by the time April appeared in the town park on that summer day, had caused me to ridicule my own past efforts as, well . . . an enormous waste of time.

What are you thinking?

Such had been April's question as she found herself standing before me that afternoon, her thin, faintly freckled arms holding a striped folding chair like a shield over her breast.

“I wasn't thinking much about anything,” I told her. “Just reading.” I nodded toward the book. “This year's NBA winner.”

“Oh,” April said, clearly having no idea what the initials NBA stood for.

“Is it good?”

“It's okay,” I answered. “At least it got published.”

“That's nice,” April said. “It's important to publish, Clayton says.”

Some women give off sparks and some sprout beads of mother's milk. The latter should be nuns or nurses of the old school, comforters to those wounded in the soul or on the battlefield. They are an eternal type, and they almost always attract the perfect man to use and then discard them. In love's labor, they always lose, and I had known more than one of them before April stood over me that day in the park, clutching the tiny folding chair as if it were the baby she had always wanted but never had.

In the past, I'd resisted such women, but on that day, reading that book, a man in his mid-forties whose last creative juices had long turned to dust, I'd suddenly felt a need to play a dangerous game, embrace the thrill of folly, skate, as it were, on the only stretch of thin ice that lay immediately before me, pale, wintry April.

“I guess you read all the time,” she said admiringly.

“I'm sure Clayton does the same,” I replied.

She nodded softly. “But his eyes are going.” A tiny smile flickered briefly, then disappeared. “It happens, you know.” She added shyly, “When you're old.”

I knew that compared to leathery old Clayton I surely looked to April like Hercules, a middle-aged man with a straight spine and eyes that could still read the small print.

“Yes, that's part of the deal, isn't it?” I asked gently as I got to my feet and faced her.

She nodded again but said nothing.

“But it's a bad deal,” I added softly. “Isn't it?”

She nodded yet again, and like a seducer in a pulp novel tugging at the button of a maiden's bodice, I drew that garishly striped lawn chair from April's arms.

“A very bad deal,” I said. “For you.”

She looked up and her eyes turned liquid, and right there, right then, as she pressed her face into my chest and began to sob, I thought,
She's mine,
and felt as heartless a surge of vanity and power as I had ever known.

Alexandria knew nothing about this, of course, so I kept silent and simply watched as she ate her sandwich in the same pleasureless way she'd been doing since her mother's death. Like me, she'd lost weight as well as a good deal of her sparkle.

“You don't have to come to court every day, you know,” I told her.

She took a small bite of her sandwich. “It would make a bad impression if I weren't here. It would look like I thought you did it.” She smiled but not warmly. “Don't worry, Dad. I'm loyal.”

I couldn't help but wonder if by this profession of loyalty Alexandria was hinting at her moral superiority to me, one she has a right to feel. After all, in betraying Sandrine I'd also betrayed her. It is part of the old problem of parenthood, the need to be hypocritical, to espouse values you do not practice because not to do so will expose your children to the withering winds of moral ambiguity. And who can stand in those?

I didn't say any of this, of course, because it would open up the deep wounds that have not healed in my daughter, and probably never will. Instead I asked my usual question. “How do you think it's going so far today?”

“Okay,” Alexandria answered. “Nothing Morty can't deal with when the time comes to defend you.”

“That part about my calling it a suicide note, you don't think that was damaging?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It's hard to know. You were under a lot of stress. And Mom had done it, hadn't she? It was a suicide, so why wouldn't you think the last thing she wrote would have been a suicide note?”

“Of course, they're saying it wasn't a suicide,” I reminded her. “That's why there is a trial in the first place. They think it was a murder.”

She stared at me with unwavering eyes. “But it wasn't,” she said, in a way that made it clear she had no wish to discuss it further.

And so we moved on to other subjects. I told her about an earlier exchange with Morty, how I'd mentioned the narrator of
The Stranger,
the fact that he'd then warned me away from such pedantic literary allusions. After that, we briefly fell silent, and then she talked a little about her work, first her job at the literary agency then, to supplement that income, a second job in which she churns out what she calls “content” for an online magazine devoted to celebrity mishaps and malfeasance. She has lately been following the descent of an aging female rocker, a former flower child whose Haight-Asbury antics and girl-with-the-band beddings had once been chronicled in
Rolling Stone
magazine but whose present troubles are of interest only to the invisible online readers of
sleeplesseye.com
. Rumor has it that either a botched plastic surgery or a reaction to some drug has emulsified her nose.

“Creepy stuff like that,” Alexandria told me. “We're read mostly by insomniacs. It's not great literature.”

“Don't be so sure,” I said. “There is a letter from a girl who has no nose in
Miss Lonelyhearts.
And that's great literature.”

She stared at me silently.

“It's by Nathanael West.”