Voices in the Dark (17 page)

“I’ll bounce back, you’ll see.” He was a lawyer who directed his energies toward loopholes, went into deals with a vision of endless returns, and cooked the books of paper companies he had helped form. “You believe me, don’t you?”

She neither believed him nor loved him but had affection for him and was loyal. Picking up the tray of clinking glasses, she saw the moon emerge through the dark of distant trees. Rising, he followed her into the house, where he trod softly on a floor meant for sound.

“You ought to call Gunner,” he said, his voice as low as he could make it.

“She doesn’t want me to.”

“You don’t have a choice.” Seams showed in his face, hope in his eyes. “And while you’re talking to him, you might mention — ”

“No, Myles.”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“I’m going to look in on her,” she said.

Beverly Gunner lay on a bed in a guest room, her head on two stacked pillows, her ruined shell of hair radiating its spill. Myles’s robe consumed her. “I feel like such a fool,” she said in the feeble light of a bed lamp. “And I’ve wrecked my watch. Paul paid a fortune for it two birthdays ago.”

“Maybe it can be repaired.”

“He buys me everything. Should I be grateful?”

Phoebe seated herself on the bed’s edge. Shadows in the room hung still. Beverly Gunner’s face was high red, as if dramatic necessity had brought them together.

“He never fights me with words, only cold silences. That’s why he always wins. Where’s my bag, Phoebe?”

Phoebe gave it to her and watched her bring forth the color snapshot she’d seen before. This time she got a better look at it. The eyes of the child were shallow yet inexplicable, the smile madcap yet tender. The face bespoke Beverly’s, except for the chin, which lacked precision. “She was beautiful, Bev.”

“He said my best thoughts were for her, not for the boys. He claimed she wasn’t worth it.” The picture went quickly and safely back to the bag. “She was an embarrassment to him.”

“Shouldn’t you phone him, tell him you’re here?”

“I don’t know. What time is it?”

Phoebe told her and received a puzzled look, as if the hour belonged to another day, the day to another year. Myles could be heard in another room.

“I live an interior life, Phoebe. Paul’s not a part of it.”

“Would you mind if I call him?”

“It’s not clear what I want, but you do what you wish.”

Phoebe used the phone in her own bedroom. Myles approached her from the side and stood much too close until she edged him back with an effortless movement. “At least tell him I’m the one pulled her out,” he whispered.

“She did what?” Paul Gunner’s voice rose to preemptive volume, slicing Phoebe’s explanation short, demeaning his wife’s worth. Phoebe suspected he never used his entire brain when listening to women. He said that the foolishness at the pool was beyond him. How could anyone have been so clumsy? “All I know,” he said, “is the boys and I had to eat at Burger King.”

“Paul.”

“What?”

“She’s staying here the night.” She spoke quickly so that he’d get it, and then she waited because nothing was coming from him except the sound of his labored breathing. She pictured his eyes shuttered, his pink lips pursed. Suddenly he responded.

“Somebody better come over here and explain.”

The line went dead, and, still holding the receiver, wondering how she had gotten into this, she looked at Myles, who had heard everything. Myles said, “You go.”

• • •

Sergeant Avery, told to be discreet, searched for Dudley behind the stores on the far side of the green. Hank Brody, who owned the hardware store, poked his head out the back door and asked whether he was scavenging. The droll and stylish white-haired woman at Roberta’s Ladies Shoppe asked whether he’d like to step in and try on an ensemble. She thought he might look chic in a short-sleeve patterned jacket with black shorts, which she had been saving for a customer from the Heights.

Officer Floyd Wetherfield reconnoitered book aisles at the library, pausing to examine an art folio someone had left on a reading table. He slapped the cover shut when the librarian, Holly Pride, came upon him and asked whether she could help him.

Later he parked his cruiser near Pearl’s Pharmacy, slouched behind the wheel, and kept his eye on the green until the approach of darkness when Fred Fossey, commander of the local Legion post, stood in respectful attention among Boy Scouts for the lowering of the flag. A bugle sounded. The flag cascaded down the pole like paint.

Chief Morgan drove to Pearson Grammar School, behind which men, young and not so young, were acting out fantasies in a slow-pitch game of softball, each assuming the mannerisms of Crack Alexander in his prime. Another time Morgan might have joined them.

On Summer Street he slowed at Dorothea Farnham’s house, viewed the porch Dudley had desecrated, and spotted Dorothea chinning with a neighbor over a dividing hedge recently barbered. At the end of the street, vaulted by maples, he made a U-turn and found his pulse beating abnormally from an anxiety he hoped was unwarranted. On his shoulders was a burden he felt he had put there himself.

It was dark when he finally quit looking and returned to the station. The nighttime dispatcher, Bertha Skagg, a large woman whose floral dress shouted attention to her unfortunate size and shape, was ensconced behind Meg O’Brien’s daytime desk with her usual air of being put upon or of being left out of things, grievances that had put a permanent twist to her mouth.

She said, “You let the tramp go?”

Fiddling with papers on Sergeant Avery’s desk, he sort of said yes.

“Good, it was creepy having him here,” she said. “Eugene called in. He said to tell you, ‘No luck,’ whatever that means. I guess you know, ’cause I don’t.”

“How about Floyd?”

“Floyd doesn’t tell me anything. You got a call from a Mrs. Bodine. The number’s on your desk.”

He entered his office, shut the door behind him, and looked at the number. Brookline. The first Mrs. Bodine. She answered immediately, and when he identified himself she said, “What kind of man are you?”

The agonized voice was raw enough to freeze his ear and arrest his other senses. He ripped a page from his calendar block, on which he seldom wrote anything, a dental appointment perhaps, a reminder to pick up dry cleaning.

“You had no right,” she said. “It was cruel what you did.”

What had he done other than his job, or what seemed his job? One did not do what was necessarily right but what seemed poignant. A rule, he supposed, every policeman followed.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re having an affair with Har-ley’s wife? Is that supposed to be your secret?” Her voice was a needle with no thread, simply an instrument of puncture, nothing worth stitching. “You tried to use me, Chief.”

It seemed pointless to defend himself. Expostulation seldom, if ever, worked. Besides, she was no longer on the line.

A while later, with a rumbling effort, her heaviness a burden on her legs, Bertha Skagg heaved herself up, poked open his door, and looked in. “I thought you were sleeping,” she said. “Don’t you have a home?”

This was more of one, his choice since his wife’s death. At times he could not remember his wife’s face, as if time had burned the memory to ash. Other times it was more vivid than when she had been alive. “Where do we go from here, Bertha? Where do we go when it’s all over?”

“You asking me?”

“It’s a reasonable question.”

“I have no lofty thoughts,” she said, resuming a frown. “My mind is like my legs. It can’t climb stairs.”

He looked at her in a warmer light, remembering when she had lost her cat and for a solid year sought its return through a boxed ad in
The Crier
, Offered a reward. Signed herself
Heartbroken.
Meg O’Brien offered one of hers, but it wasn’t the same. He said, “Close the door after you.”

He picked up the phone and called the second Mrs. Bodine. He heard someone lift the receiver and immediately replace it. He repunched the number, and his eyes fainted shut when she answered.

“This is James.”

“Yes, I know your voice.”

“Anything the matter?”

“I was undecided,” she said vaguely.

“Can we talk?”

“All night if you wish.”

• • •

An hour back from the beach, a plate of cold chicken and tomato wedges consumed, Anthony Smith was flopped in one of his bedroom chairs and reading Chaucer when Patricia, her un-scraped face moistened with a lotion, stepped in uninvited. “Prithee, get the fuck out of here,” he said.

“Don’t talk to me that way, you prick.” Her cheeks glistened, her nose was a dab of light, her eyes flashed. “My chemistry teacher would murder for what you get.”

“Your chemistry teacher, huh? Man or woman?”

“A man, you asshole.” She plunked herself into the other chair, her legs thrown out, and stared at him with undeflectable eyes. “What are you reading that shit for? It’s archaic.”

“It’s on my list.”

“Anais Nin’s on mine. What do you think of that?”

“Never heard of her.”

“Figures. Do you love me, Tony?”

He flipped a page. “Why do you want to mess it up?”

“Because five years from now you’ll wish you’d said yes.”

He lifted his eyes, but with his grip firmly on Chaucer. “You know I do,” he said, the wallop of truth in his face.

“Then say it.”

“No.”

“What are you so afraid of? My mother?” Her eyes were trained on him, her smile tense, disruptive, truant. “You’re scared to death of her, aren’t you?”

“With reason,” he said.

• • •

“This way,” Paul Gunner said, and with the pressure of a thumb on her arm he guided Phoebe Yarbrough deeper into the house, past a mirror that gave a good report. She was wearing black jeans; her legs were ink strokes. Her heels sank in the carpeting; a club chair reared up and possessed her, and in that instant she wished she hadn’t come. He gazed down at her from his bulk, and she guessed that he didn’t want to talk about his wife. “Let her stay the night if that’s what she wants,” he said. “Maybe she’s going through the change. What do I know?”

“It may have been the punch I served,” Phoebe suggested.

“Let’s talk about Myles,” he said, stepping back, sinking into a chair the twin of hers, which he overfilled. “How’s he doing?”

“Since you ask, not well.” Her back was straight, her legs crossed. “But I’m sure you already know that.”

“I could help him, I suppose. Low-interest loan to tide him over. After all, what are neighbors for?”

“Nice of you to offer,” she said, “but Myles can stand on his own two feet.”

His eyes narrowed to nothing, but his mouth was swollen big in a smile, as if his teeth were sunk into the rubber guard of a boxer. “You really think so?”

Stretching her long neck, she glanced about the room, densely masculine with its dark wood, extra-plush drapes, heavy furniture, and brass lamps that produced more shadow than light, all of which made her suspect a trap, one with steel jaws if she was reading him right.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said. “What did you do in New York? Career woman, weren’t you?”

She had been through this before with him, but in a crowd, safety in faces, always others to interrupt. “I did publicity.”

“Ah, yes, you did mention that once. What company?”

“I was free-lance.”

“When I owned my company, I was in New York a lot. Stayed at the Pierre. It suited me.” There was no movement in his face, but his smile was effusive. “Myles says your father was in government. Treasury.”

Her father had stood in a New Jersey turnpike booth and handled money all day, hands beaten and bruised from it. “Low-level,” she said.

“Is he still alive?”

He had had high blood pressure and had been lax about his medication. The day he died his face looked like a flash burn. “No,” she said, aware how drastically the dead fade with the years and distance themselves to a degree she wouldn’t have thought possible. But then in a random dream or the triggering of a memory they return larger than life, more vital than ever.

“My father,” Gunner said, “was a genius.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“And so am I.”

“I’ve heard that too.” She disliked Gunner’s lips. Fatty morsels. That he was brilliant had impressed her but not intimidated her. She sensed something was coming and waited.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

What was he saying? Did she want to hear? Her own silence pressed upon her, along with a boding of danger.

“I had a beard then, and I wasn’t as heavy.” Each shift in his smile was a tactical maneuver. “Funny, I never forgot you.”

With nothing to say, she sat like a cup of tea gone cold, his lip print on the rim. She remembered some clients as series of eager thrusts alternating with pauses recommended by their doctors, some as vulgar voices lining the shell of her ear, others as eyes going awry, no longer true mates, lust putting them at odds. She remembered no faces.

“You were the only woman I know could undress with an air of decorum.”

His voice was intrusive, a key digging in, twisting loose secrets, though she felt nothing other than lightheadedness, somewhat like a forger relieved at being unmasked.

“I remember,” he said, “we smoked marijuana of a particularly heady variety.”

She had done that a few times with men she guessed would be a chore. Or when she felt she might be pitched into a situation she couldn’t handle. Cannabis could calm.

“I reckon you married Myles for respectability. Too bad you picked a loser.”

Respectability had been a major factor, but so had the tender way he had handled her breasts, treating her as a woman first, the other second. Unlocking her thighs, gripping the arms of the chair, she rose. Clumsily, Gunner rose too.

“I’m not the type to spread tales.”

“What do you want, Paul?”

“For myself, nothing. But it’s time my oldest boy learned what it’s all about. He’s got a birthday coming up. I can’t think of a nicer present, can you?”

She saw in his face the fat that runs through steak and the gristle that can’t be chewed but must be discreetly spat into a napkin or casually placed on the side of the plate. Her composure was amazing.