The Last Worthless Evening (13 page)

This town has an old custom: a lot of stores close on Wednesday afternoons, and no doctors work. Neither do I.

“The receptionist doesn't know. Maybe his wife will tell you.”

“Then he smiled”

“They're separated, right?” I said.

“Why do you say that?” He smiled again.

“Because the receptionist found him.”

“Archimedes,” and he reached out and laid his big hand on my shoulder, smiling that mischievous way, and said: “They're not separated.”

“Where was she? In Moscow?”

“About five miles from here.”

“So you went Thursday morning and told her why her husband didn't come home last night?”

“Kind of grabs you, doesn't it?”

“What did she say?”

“She designated a funeral home.”

Roberta was nodding.

I drove to the address Dom gave me. It was a clear February day, with deep snow bright on the ground in the sunlight. The downtown part of our city, on the riverbank, is ugly, and there's nothing more to say about that. They tell me this place used to thrive; that was back when my uncle brought us over and put my brothers to work in his factory. They made parts for women's shoes: bows, and an arrangement of straps called vamps; these vamps and bows, when attached to an arched and high-heeled sole, formed an absolutely functionless shoe. My uncle shipped the bows and vamps my brothers helped make to another factory in another state, and there they were attached to soles.

There are neighborhoods of big, old houses that prove someone was making money, but I don't believe this town ever thrived; I think people mean the shoe business was good and the factory-owners made a lot of money and most of the poor were employed poor. They still are; there are no union factories, and unskilled workers—many of them Greek and Hispanic and now, since the war, some Vietnamese—work for minimum wage. Our better neighborhoods have many old trees, and these places are lovely when the leaves change colors in the fall. As I drove under them on the way to Lillian Clark's, there were enough pines to scatter green against the blue sky, and sometimes the sun glinted from ice on the branches of naked trees. I skirted a frozen lake bordered on one side by a public woods that has a good running road under its trees, following the bank of the lake. I entered countryside: woods, and fields of snow with tufts of brown dead weeds. Dr. Clark had a rural mailbox at the road, at the entrance of a paved driveway that curved up through evergreens. I shifted down and went up it, thinking of the good smell he had had in spring and summer, when a breeze went from the pines into his house. It was not an old one but one he had either built or bought from its first owner: two stories of stones and brown wood and A-shaped peaks enclosing windows. The garage was built onto one side, its door was raised, and inside, in one of the two spaces, was a fucking Porsche. The little bastard got excited by that sculpted-looking piece of steel that could feed a family across town in the tenement streets for five years or more; he liked knowing that the big surprises of pain and death infiltrated so impartially. I told him to show some compassion for Christ sake, and got out and pressed the cold button for the bell.

Lillian Clark had bags under her eyes, and they were not the recent kind that let you know someone's had a bad night. They were permanent knolls on the landscape of her face. She was a thin woman who could have been dissipated in her forties or poised in her fifties for a final decline. There was gray in her brown hair; her eyes were brown and angry, so that I apologized and felt my cheeks flush as I introduced myself and asked if I could speak with her; then I realized the anger was permanent too. Or guessed it, because of the rest of her face, its lines in her cheeks and about her eyes, that appeared set in some epiphany of bitterness. You have seen them, when you spy on people in airport lounges or pedestrians walking toward you: their eyes focus on things, and you wonder what they could be looking at to cause such anger; then you know it is being fed to them from inside their skulls. Her skin was the pallid tan of Dom's, but hers was not genetic; this was a woman of the sun who had probably had a winter vacation a month ago in Florida or the Caribbean. Wherever it is they go. Her voice was soft, though a bit crisp at the edges, and probably that was permanent too, a chord telling the world that was all the control she could muster. In the living room I sat in an armchair that was too deep and soft, so only my toes touched the floor. She sat opposite me; our chairs were half-turned toward a cold fireplace with ashes between the andirons. She drank sherry from a stemmed glass, and flicked a hand, as though backhanding a gnat, toward a bottle of Dry Sack on the table beside her, and asked if I wanted some. There was no question mark in her voice, so the invitation had the tone of a statement like: Your socks don't match. I said no and repeated the condolences I had offered at the door, while she sipped and gazed at the fireplace. I offered to light a fire, and she said: “I can make fires.”

I said something about chimney drafts and the trick of holding a torch of burning paper up the chimney to start it drawing, and I began telling her about a bricklayer I knew who built a chimney for a man with a bad reputation for paying bills, and halfway up the chimney he laid a plate of glass across it, but her head jerked toward me, and this time her eyes glared. I liked the story and had believed it when I heard it, though it was one of those I stopped believing the first time I told it; still, I wanted to tell her about the man calling to complain about the smoke backing up in his living room and the bricklayer telling him he would fix it when he got paid for the chimney, in cash, and driving to the man's house and, with the money in his pocket, going up his ladder with a brick in his hand and dropping it down the chimney. But I said: “Can you tell me why your husband was at his office on a Wednesday night?”

“He took Wednesdays off.”

“The afternoons?”

“Yes. He went to the hospital in the morning.”

She was looking at the fireplace. So did I. I kept seeing George in prison, suspended in dismay, but not one sentence, not one word, came to me.

“Why did he do it?” she said.

I looked at the side of her face, and an attractive streak of gray above her left ear.

“George didn't do it.”

“You don't think so?”

“No.”

“Would you defend him if he had?”

“No.”

“Really? Why?”

“I couldn't enjoy it.”

“You couldn't enjoy it.”

“No.”

Now she did look at my socks, which matched and were folded over the tops of hiking boots. Her eyes moved up my legs, or slacks, and shirt and coat to my face.

“I like you with a mustache.”

I was about to ask when she had seen me without one, but caught that in time and said: “He didn't know Dr. Clark.”

“He could be angry at him without knowing him.”

“Is that why your husband had a gun?”

“Probably.”

“Did he see patients on Wednesday nights?”

“That's what he said.”

She was looking at my eyes, and I wished she would turn to the fireplace again.

“Because they needed him?” I said. “Because of the afternoons off?”

“Some. He said.”

“So why not work on Wednesday afternoons and take the evenings off?”

She was watching my eyes. I had heard or read about recent widows being angry at their husbands for dying. I had not understood it, though I recognized that it must have something to do with grief; but those were widows of husbands who had died of what we call natural causes. Their husbands had not been murdered. Yet there was nothing of sorrow, of memory, in Lillian Clark's eyes.

“For the receptionist?” I said. “So she could have time off? Or did she work on Wednesday nights?”

“You could ask her.”

“You don't know, then?”

“I never phoned the office on Wednesday nights.”

“Was she a nurse?”

“You mean is she. Francis was killed, not Beverly. Yes, she's a nurse.”

“She would have to be there, wouldn't she?”

“Would she?”

“For female patients. Doesn't there have to be a nurse in the examining room?”

“I suppose.”

“All this is very strange.”

Finally she looked away, back at the fireplace. So did I.

“Did he ever talk about trouble with a patient?”

“Trouble?”

“Someone who might have got angry and hit him. I think it was an accident. His death, I mean.”

“Depends on what you call an accident.”

“I suppose it does. Are you the executrix of the estate?”

“That's funny.”

“What is?”

“My new title. Yes.”

“Could I look at his files?”

Looking into the fireplace she called Teresa, with Spanish pronunciation, and my thighs jumped taut. I looked behind me, stretching to see over the back of the chair, at the sounds of footsteps. Teresa was young and too thin.

“Bring my purse down from the bedroom.”

She left, and I listened to her climbing stairs and walking above us, and I looked around the room. A model of a yacht was on the mantelpiece. In one corner was a small bookcase with a glass door; the corner was dark, and I could not read the titles. More furniture was behind us and against the walls. The floor was carpeted, and Teresa crossed it now with the purse, then was gone. Lillian took out a key ring, and worked one of them to the top.

“Where's the other car?” I said”

“He had a Mercedes. I gave it to my daughter.”

“What was his practice?”

“Internal medicine. Here.”

I took the key and thanked her.

“Mrs. Clark?” I stood up, looking down at her face gazing at the fireplace. “Did you call anyone when he didn't come home Wednesday night?”

“I was asleep.”

“What about next morning?”

“I slept late. I always do.”

“So Detective Schiavoni woke you up?”

“No.”

“I don't understand.”

She looked at me.

“You don't understand what?”

“Why you didn't know.”

“I always woke up alone. He got up at seven.”

“You couldn't tell he hadn't slept there?”

“How?” She was still looking at me.

“The blankets. The way the pillows were. Teresa must make a tight bed.”

“Why are you upset?”

“I'm not.”

“Yes, you are. I suppose I didn't look.”

I thanked her, told her I'd bring back the key, and left. In the car I felt I had a hangover: the weariness, the confusion. On the way to my office I bought two meatball subs and four half-pint cartons of milk. My office is small, the waiting room no larger, and the receptionist's desk was empty, its surface bare save for a covered typewriter. I did not have a regular secretary, and was using interns from the small college in town. I gave them work to do and even taught them, and the college paid them with credits. My intern was Paula Reynolds, a lovely girl with healthy skin and long blond hair. I opened the office door. She was lying on the leather couch my brothers gave me. She wore a sweater, and jeans tucked into high boots, and was smoking a French cigarette.

“Jesus,” I said, and opened the window behind my desk. A pack of Gitanes was on the floor beside her. Sometimes she does this, shows up with Gauloises or Gitanes, and I accuse her of affectation; but the truth is she spent a year in France before college, and now and then she has the urge. While she finished smoking I told her about my morning, then she took her milk and sandwich to the couch, managed to eat daintily, a good trick with a meatball sub, and she was smoking again as we left the office and I drove us to Dr. Clark's.

He was either a yachtsman or simply loved boats. What had been a model of a yacht, painted white, was on his desk, the bow split and crumpled, the masts snapped in two and held together only by sails; it looked as though a storm had driven it against rocks. I thought of all the concentration he had put into it and the one on his mantelpiece at home. Then I imagined the ocean rushing through the hole with its splinters, unpainted on the inside, and I looked away. On the wall were three color photographs of the same yacht, at anchor. Paula stood beside me, looking down at the yacht, and when I turned our arms brushed, her sweater and my jacket and shirtsleeve padding our muscles and bones. I unbuckled her belt, turned her toward me, and, kissing her, slipped her jeans down her hips. Her pants were pale blue and already moist. We undressed and, as she lay on the floor, she said: Isn't this where—and I said Yes, and was in her.

We dozed for half an hour on the carpet, then dressed and stood at the filing cabinets against one wall. Paula started with the As, on my right, and I crouched to the Zs, three of them, and sat on the floor and read about a man named Zachary who was fifty-eight years old, had seasonal allergies, got an annual physical, and since five years ago, when he had asthmatic bronchitis, had either not been sick or had treated himself at home. Paula went to the reception room to look for an ashtray and came back empty-handed except for her unlit cigarette and said: “Goddamn doctors.”

“Just chew it. Then I can breathe.”

“Goddamn joggers.”

“I'm not a
jogger
.”

“Goddamn runners then. Why don't you put pictures of running shoes on your office wall? And a bronze pair on your desk.”

“My bronze pair is between my legs.”

Then she was bending over me, her fingers coming like claws at my crotch, and I quickly shut my legs. She put the cigarette between her lips, untied my hiking boot, pulled it off, took it to her end of the cabinets, and set it on top of the As. I put away Zachary and opened Zecchini. Florence Zecchini was not doing well: she was sixty-three and had high blood pressure, bursitis in the left shoulder, and every year, from November to April, she contracted a mélange of viruses.