Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (3 page)

I cringed at this, but I kept my discomfort with the final words of Morty's opening argument to myself. Still, the sentimental language rankled because it turned our house into a Hallmark card. Sure, there'd been love at 237 Crescent Road. Years of love, as a matter of fact. But has anything in a marriage ever been that simple?

In my mind, I saw Sandrine's hand lift from the bed and stretch out into the gloomy air. For a moment I'd thought it a gesture intended to draw me back to her after having hurled that cup. But then that same hand had violently grabbed the white sheet and pulled it over her as if I were no longer entitled to see her body. Oh, of course there'd been love in our house on Crescent Road. But what else had been there?

Seeds of discontent?

Seeds of infidelity?

Seeds, at last, of murder?

As Morty headed back toward the defense table at the close of his argument, I thought of Sandrine when we'd first settled into the house in which, some twenty years later, she would die. It had been a bright spring day, and she'd worn a brilliantly colored sundress, and for a single, exquisite moment she'd seemed gloriously happy. “Oh, Sam,” she said as she flung herself into my arms. “Let's be careful.” She stepped back, looked at me quite seriously, then added, “Let's be careful not to change.” Then she'd kissed me very sweetly and gently, a kiss that had been made one hundred percent of love, and which had probably bestowed upon me, as I realized quite suddenly, the single happiest moment of the life I'd shared with her.

Oh where are they, I asked myself, recalling what Sandrine had believed the saddest sentiment in all poetry, and which she had first read to me in French:
Mais, où sont les neiges d'antan
?

Oh where are the snows of yesteryear?

Strange, but as Morty resumed his seat beside me at the defense table and picked up some document or other, then rose again and headed toward the bench, it struck me as rather curious that, although Sandrine had quoted those lines many times over the past two decades, I had not felt their dreadful warning, time's ever imminent peril, until then.

As if returned to that bright day, I was on the lawn with her again, her body pressed against mine as we walked to the front porch and sat down in the swing, her voice soft but firm, as if talking back to time. “Nothing will go wrong, Sam, if we don't let it.”

How quietly they can begin, as I would starkly realize on the last day of my trial, the journeys that return us to our crimes.

Motions

They came in flurries after the opening arguments, a host of motions that flew out of the current proceedings like butterflies emerging from the long incubation of pretrial activity. Motions to dismiss the charge. Motions to reduce it. Motions to exclude this or that. There'd been a good many motions before then, of course. So many I'd already lost track of all save the one that had actually had some merit, at least sociologically, a motion for change of venue that Morty had expected to be rejected, but the denial of which might serve to buttress my case in the event I needed to appeal.
And besides, Sam, he once told me, it's pretty clear that the people here in Coburn don't like you very much.

I knew this was true, of course. In addition to the dreadful things I'd done to their children, the people of Coburn no doubt resented the fact that I'd done it while living a very privileged life, at least some of it paid for by the exorbitant tuition required to send their children to Coburn College. But this hostility had remained more or less mute before Sandrine's death. After it, the media had gone on a feeding frenzy, the result of which was that by the first day of my trial I'd become a person much despised in this little town. To them, I was a man who'd had a great job, if you could even call it work, what with summers off and sabbaticals at full pay and holidays for every religion known to man. I was a tenured professor, which to the people of Coburn was a free ticket to a carefree and semiluxurious retirement. I couldn't even be fired—so the locals assumed—no matter what I said in class, or even if I failed to show up in class at all. But this Samuel Joseph Madison character had wanted something more, they said to themselves and to each other. A cushy life had simply not been enough for the esteemed professor, expert on Melville, Hawthorne, and God knows how many other lesser-known literary figures. Here was a man who'd lived high on the hog despite the fact that he conceived nothing, built nothing, invented nothing, maintained nothing, sold nothing. Here was a man who lived high on the hog by . . . talking.

The townspeople had considered all the professors at Coburn College similarly pampered, of course, but Sandrine's death had put the spotlight squarely on me. She was beautiful, which is probably what had fueled the initial media interest. The local paper had published pictures of her in her twenties, most of them taken during our one great trip to Europe and the Mediterranean. In the most provocative of these photos she was in a bathing suit, her skin alabaster white against the black sands of Santorini, those long, perfectly shaped legs.
In another, she posed seductively among the flowers of Giverney, and in their midst she seemed equally in exquisite bloom. How, these photos asked, could so gorgeous a woman have come to such a sad, despairing end? To die alone? To die in a dark room? Perhaps to have been murdered by her scheming husband? And if she'd been murdered, these photographs demanded, then what kind of man was I to have wanted such a woman, so bright and beautiful, dead? For God's sake, those pictures said, could this woman's husband not have known how lucky he was to have her?

But what could such people know of Sandrine's long hours, the endless private sessions she had with Coburn College's eternally mediocre students? Had they ever felt neglected? Had they ever felt abandoned? Had they ever felt secondary to an ever changing cast of hopeless, uninspired students? Yet Sandrine had seen these students differently. To her they'd been so in need of help that they'd come to take the place of the poorer ones it had been her earlier and quite idealistic dream to teach. Worst of all, by devoting herself to teaching, she'd completely lost interest in the great book I'd expected her to write.

I remembered a night when she'd come home particularly late and quite exhausted, so that I'd said, rather irritably, “Another night you've squandered when you could have been working on your book.”

She swept past me, then stopped, whirled around, and said, “I'm never going to write a book, Sam. Not even a small book, much less that great one you think I should write.” Then she'd pointed a finger at herself as if it were a pistol. “I am my book.” Her gaze sharpened. “And just for the record, it's not my unwritten book you resent, Sam, it's yours.”

How easy it had been to want such a woman dead, I thought suddenly, relieved, as I glanced at the jury, that such thoughts couldn't be read.

Why had this brutal exchange returned to me so suddenly, I wondered, as Morty and Mr. Singleton continued to argue their motions before the bench. Was it the sheer idleness imposed by endless courtroom procedures that had opened up that floodgate, or was I still responding to Morty's earlier admonition that I must, simply must remember every­thing because in a murder investigation, as he'd warned, it is almost as bad to misremember as it is to lie.

So had I recently fallen into the habit of obsessively reliving my life with Sandrine simply in order to cover my tracks? I couldn't tell. I knew only that I'd think of something she said, then rifle through my memory in a desperate search for the specific occasion, the exact circumstances, where and when it had been said, what my response had been.
Wisdom, Sandrine once remarked, is the comprehension of context.

This quotation sent my mind off on yet another chase. Had Sandrine made this remark when we were young? Before or after we were married? Had we been in some foreign country when she said it or were we mired here in Coburn?

Mired? It surprised me that so unforgiving a word had surfaced in my mind. And yet it was true, I admitted. I had felt mired in Coburn, a man going through the motions, with no sense of anything bubbling underneath, no lurking secret needs until that afternoon in the park when I'd stared into those famished eyes. Not Sandrine's eyes. Not dark and searching as hers had been. But small, watery blue eyes that had given no hint of anything sinister, of a woman lurking in dark corners or hatching grim plots.

I suddenly realized that it is a slow process, the numbing of a life, and that at the end of that process the road not taken must come to seem no better than the one you took.

Perhaps it was this numbness I'd wanted to escape. I saw my fingers tapping out fanciful mentions of faraway places, of “escaping” Coburn, of “breaking chains,” of the unspecified “desperate measures” that would be necessary in order to break them, all of which had at last met the eyes of Detective Alabrandi.

Another of Sandrine's comments hit me suddenly, this one said only a few days after she'd first revealed the forbidding nature of things in the no less forbidding darkness of our bedroom:
You only notice the little things you think you lost, not the great one you really did
.

What the hell had she meant by that? And who was
you
? Was it all mankind? Was it us? Or just me?

It was on the heels of that question that I suddenly saw Sandrine as clearly as I'd seen her on the night I'd found her alone in the backyard, moving slowly in the swing that hung from the great oak there.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She was dressed in a white blouse and long dark-blue skirt that lifted slightly as she drifted forward.

“Sandrine?” I said, when she didn't answer.

For a time she remained silent, then, as if it were a hard-won truth, she said, “The problem with regret is that in the end it's always pathetic.”

Had that been the moment, I wondered now, had that been the moment, as I'd lingered in the cold eddies of that hard-won truth, when I'd first reached for the rapier in my gown?

I looked at the judge's bench, the opposing lawyers in my case still debating the merits of the latest motion. From the judge's expression I got the feeling that he was denying one after another of Morty's attempts to make some legalistic end run. His arguments were no doubt characteristically Talmudic, but they wouldn't fly in down-to-earth Coburn. The charge against me would not be dismissed, as I well knew. Nor would it be lessened. Khayyám's moving hand has written, and that was that. I would be tried for Sandrine's murder by a jury of my peers in the presence of my daughter and anyone else who happened to find a seat in this crowded courtroom. No evidence would be excluded. My life would be dissected like a body in the morgue, my glistening innards spread across a steel table, everything displayed for all the world to see. That is the true horror of my current situation, I realized at that moment, the brute fact that nothing is too intimate to be exposed because, simply put, a trial is an evisceration.

Strange as it would later seem to me, I had never actually thought it possible that my life might be so mercilessly probed until the first day of my trial. With surreal insistence, this unreality had maintained its iron grip upon my otherwise discerning consciousness. For weeks I'd acted as if this were just a long nightmare, one from which I would eventually awaken. But the nightmare had not ended, of course, so that I'd come to feel like Kafka's baffled Joseph K, on trial, yes, but uncertain of the actual charge. Oh, sure, the charge was murder. But there was more to it than that. It had taken a long time for me to realize this but that morning, on the first day of my trial, I'd looked at the faces of the jury and, behind their expressionless stares, I'd seen quite clearly that I was charged, more than anything, with the crime of being me.

Realizing this I also realized that no motion in the world could save me from this rising tide.

And so the mystery that gripped me was how in the world, before now, I had failed to understand just how dire my situation was. Alabrandi had been right in what he'd said to me many weeks before. I was not going to get away with it, a fact that should have been clear the minute I'd seen the names on the prosecution's witness list. And yet somehow I'd made myself believe that at a certain point it would all go away. Mr. Singleton would realize the thinness of his evidence, and being sensible, as well as politically astute, he would finally concede that though he suspected me of murder he lacked the evidence necessary to charge me.

But just the opposite had occurred. With every rumor whispered in his ear, with every photograph of bright and beautiful Sandrine, with every report from the vigilant and highly competent Detective Alabrandi, Singleton had grown more certain of my crime and more determined to make sure that I would not get away with it. So you think you're so goddamn smart, Professor Madison, he must have said to himself at some point during the investigation, well, let's just wait and fucking see.

The circle broke and Morty and Mr. Singleton made their way back to their desks. The judge looked thoroughly put upon and aggravated, a man eager to go home, put all this legal business behind him, a man already looking forward to his beige little den and leather easy chair, and who, even as he prepared to hear the first witness in my case, was probably considering whether tonight's dinner would be surf or turf.

“It's just what we thought,” Morty said when he returned to his seat at the defense table.

I had long ago noticed that with Morty everything was always “just as we thought.”