Bryce wrote: “Kyrgyzstan. Mineral wealth includes gold. 95% within Tien Shan mountain range. Capital: Bishkek.” Then he put his pen on the pad and turned pages in the book open before him on the table, looking for more about the Tien Shan mountain range. It sounded rugged, a good setting.
Around him in this research section in the Mid-Manhattan Library were dozens of other solitaries, studying books, making notes. It felt comforting to be among them.
A whisper at his ear: “Mr. Proctorr?”
Oh, well, he thought. Duty calls. He looked up and there he was, young, mid-twenties probably, skinny and pale, his face too small for those big eyeglasses, his smile tentative, afraid of rebuff: “You are Bryce Proctorr, aren’t you?”
Bryce nodded. “That’s me.”
“I love your books, Mr. Proctorr,” the fan said. “I don’t want to interrupt—”
“That’s okay.”
The fan’s lined notebook and ballpoint pen were extended: “Would you—? I’ll tape it into my copy of Double in Diamonds when I get home.”
“Well, fine, you do that,” Bryce said. He took the pad and pen. “What’s your name?”
“Gene.”
They agreed on a spelling, and Bryce wrote, “To Gene, All The Best, Bryce Proctorr.”
“Thank you, sir, thank you.”
“My pleasure.” He felt as though he were asleep through this, watching through closed transparent eyelids. Gene went away, and Bryce tried to search again for the Tien Shan mountain range, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t care about the Tien Shan mountain range.
This wasn’t working. He knew he was spinning his wheels, but he’d thought, to do some research, even to do some pretend work, would be better than to just sit in the apartment, watch old videotapes, certainly better than to go back to the empty house in Connecticut on a weekday. But he couldn’t feel himself, he was here but he wasn’t here, this crap he was doing was crap. There was no story in this.
He felt restless, a little lonely, as he moved through the library toward the exit, and then his eye was snagged by something familiar. Someone familiar, a familiar face, in profile, bent over a thick book, seated before a thick book, copying addresses into a small memo pad. A familiar face, out of the past. Bryce slowed, and the name came: Wayne Prentice.
He almost walked on by, but then he thought, Wayne. Whatever happened to Wayne Prentice? Twenty-five-year-old memories riffled, like a book of postcards, always groups, at parties, crowded into cars, at Jones Beach, in bars, the small living rooms of small underfurnished apartments. They were never close, but always friends, and then there was a day they didn’t happen to meet, and now it’s twenty years, more than twenty years, and whatever happened to Wayne Prentice? Didn’t he publish some books?
Wayne’s hair was thinner and neater than Bryce remembered, his face in profile fleshier; but I’ve aged, too, he thought. Both men were in chinos, Wayne’s tan, Bryce’s black, Bryce in scuffed big sneakers, Wayne in shabby brown loafers. Wayne’s windbreaker was dull green cotton, Bryce’s buff suede. We look like old friends, he thought.
Bryce veered toward the other man, his pen in his left inside pocket, notepad left outside pocket, smile on his face. Now that he was famous, recognized almost everywhere, he found it easy to approach people; they thought they already knew him. And of course Wayne already did.
“Wayne?”
He looked up, and his expression was haggard, eyes morose. He was what? Forty-four, Bryce’s age? Around there, but he looked older.
And of course he recognized Bryce at once, and his expression lifted, film lifting from his eyes, eager smile on his face as he jumped to his feet, losing his place in the book. “Bryce! My God, where did you come from? What are you doing here?”
“Same as you,” Bryce said with an easy grin, hoping this wasn’t a mistake. What if he asks me for money? “Library research. I keep telling my editor, I got into the fiction racket so I could make it all up, but no, everybody wants the details right.” Gesturing at the now-closed reference book in front of Wayne, he said, “You know what I mean.”
“Sure,” Wayne said, but he looked faintly doubtful.
He won’t ask me for money, Bryce decided, and if he does I’ll give him some and see the back of him. “Want to take a break?”
“Absolutely,” Wayne said.
“Let’s go have a drink.”
* * *
The bar was old-fashioned looking, with heavy dark maroon banquettes and fake Tiffany lamps turned low, as though the place had been designed for adulterers, but the dozen people in here at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday were all tourists speaking languages other than English. The waiter was an older man, heavyset, sour, who didn’t seem right in the job; as though he’d lost a more suitable position and this was all he could find. Bryce told him, “A Bloody Mary,” and explained to Wayne, “It’s a food.”
“Then I’ll have one, too,” Wayne decided.
The waiter went away, and Bryce said, “God, it’s been years.”
“I’ve been trying to think how many.”
“At least twenty. I think you’d just sold a novel.”
Wayne nodded. “Probably. I took that money and went to Italy for a year, to Milan, research for the next one. Lost touch with a lot of people, then.”
Their Bloody Marys came, they toasted one another, and Bryce said, “You don’t write any more?” Then, at the twisted expression on Wayne’s face, knew he’d been terribly stupid. “I’m sorry, did I—”
But Wayne was shaking his head. “No, no, don’t worry about it. It’s a good question. Am I writing any more?”
Bryce wasn’t used to feeling awkward, and was regretting this reunion. “I just, I don’t think I’ve seen your name for a while.”
“No, you haven’t.” Suddenly, Wayne gave him a beaming smile, as though the sun had come out. “By God,” he said, “I can tell you the truth! For the first time, I can tell the truth.”
Bryce’s regret grew more acute. “I don’t follow.”
“This won’t take long,” Wayne promised. “I didn’t write one novel, I wrote seven. The first one, The Pollux Perspective, did—”
“That’s right! I’ve been trying to remember the title.” And the subject; that part hadn’t come back yet.
“Well, it did better than anybody expected,” Wayne said. “So then I got a two-book deal at a much better advance, and both of those books did great.”
“This is all fine so far,” Bryce said, and wondered what the disaster would be. Drink? A bad marriage?
Wayne said, “Let me tell you the world we live in now. It’s the world of the computer.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“People don’t make decisions any more, the computer makes the decisions.” Wayne leaned closer. “Let me tell you what’s happening to writers.”
“Wayne,” Bryce said gently, “I am a writer.”
“You’ve made it,” Wayne told him. “You’re above the tide, this shit doesn’t affect you. It affects the mid-list guys, like me. The big chain bookstores, they’ve each got the computer, and the computer says, we took five thousand of his last book, but we only sold thirty-one hundred, so don’t order more than thirty-five hundred. So there’s thinner distribution, and you sell twenty-seven hundred, so the next time they order three thousand.”
Bryce said, “There’s only one way for that to go.”
“You know it. As the sales go down, the advances go down. My eighth book, the publisher offered twenty thousand dollars.”
“Down from?”
“My third contract was the best,” Wayne said. “Books four and five. I got seventy-five thousand each, with ad-promo money and a little publicity tour, Boston and Washington and the West Coast. But then the sales started down . . .”
“Because of the computer.”
“That’s right.” Wayne tasted his Bloody Mary. “My editor still believed in me,” he said, “so he pushed through an almost-as-good contract next time, sixty for the sixth book and seventy-five for the seventh, but no promos, no tours. And down went the sales, and the next time, twenty grand. For one book only. No more multi-book contracts.”
Bryce could comprehend all that, as something that might have happened to him, but had not. “Jesus, Wayne,” he said. “What did you do?”
“What other people already did,” Wayne told him, with a glint of remembered anger. “I got out of their fucking computer.”
“You got out? How?”
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Wayne said. “All over this town, people are writing their first novel again.”
It took Bryce a second to figure that one out, and then he grinned and said, “A pen name.”
“A protected pen name. It’s no good if the publisher knows. Only the agent knows it’s me.” Wayne had a little more of his Bloody Mary and shook his head. “It’s a complicated life,” he said. “Since I did spend that one year in Italy, the story is, I’m an expatriate American living in Milan, and I travel around Europe a lot, I’m an antiques appraiser, so all communication is through the agent. If I have to write to my editor, or send in changes, it’s all done by E-mail.”
“As though it’s E-mail from Milan.”
“Nothing could be easier.”
Bryce laughed. “They think they’re E-mailing you all the way to Italy, and you’re . . .”
“Down in Greenwich Village.”
Bryce shook his head, appreciating that as though it were a story gimmick. Then he said, “It’s worth it?”
“Well, you know,” Wayne said, “there’s got to be a downside. I can’t promote the book or go on tour or do interviews. I can’t develop any kind of personal relationship with my editor, which can be a drag.”
“Sure.”
“But there’s an upside, too,” Wayne told him. “I took that eighth book, the one my first publisher would only offer twenty thousand for, I switched it around enough so it wouldn’t be recognized, my agent sent it out, a different publisher offered sixty thousand.”
“Because it was a first novel.”
“Because it was good,” Wayne insisted. “It was an exciting story, and the writer didn’t have any miserable track record in the computers. So they could look at the book, and not at a lot of old sales figures.”
Bryce grinned. “I love a scheme that works,” he said.
“For a while, it went fine,” Wayne said. “One-book deals, because I wasn’t a pro, I was some antiques expert off in Italy. But the second book went up to seventy-five, the third to eighty-five. Sales on the third were slower, the fourth we went back down to seventy-five.”
“It’s happening faster,” Bryce said.
“Three weeks ago, the publisher rejected book number five. No deal at any price.”
Bryce could sympathize with that pain, though nothing quite like it had ever happened to him. “Oh, Wayne,” he said, “that’s a bitch.”
“My agent made some phone calls,” Wayne said, “but everybody knows everybody’s track record, and everybody has to sell through the same computers. Nobody wants Tim Fleet.”
“That’s you?”
“It used to be.”
“Wait a minute,” Bryce said. “The Doppler Effect?”
“That was the third one.”
“Your publisher sent me the galleys,” Bryce said, and offered a sheepish shrug. “I don’t think I gave you a quote.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Wayne looked past Bryce at nothing and said, “I’m not sure anything matters.”
“Well, what’s going to happen with the new book?”
“Nothing. I said to my agent, why don’t I put my real name on it, see what happens, and he said, the computer still remembers me, nobody’s in a hurry to bring Wayne Prentice back, and besides that I’ve been gone for seven years. The computer will remember me, but the readers won’t.”
“Jesus Christ, Wayne, what a shitty situation.”
“I’m well aware of that,” Wayne said. “Shall we do another round?”
“Not another Bloody Mary.”
“Beer is also a food.”
“You’re right.”
They called the waiter over and decided on two Beck’s, and then Bryce said, “What are you going to do?”
“I made a resumé,” Wayne told him. “I’m gonna try to get a teaching job somewhere. That’s what I was doing in the library, getting addresses of colleges.”
“Well, at least it’ll keep you going for a while.”
“I suppose.”
The beers were brought, and they sipped, and Bryce looked at Wayne’s unhappy face. He doesn’t want to teach in some college, he thought. He wants to be a writer, the poor bastard. He is a writer, and they’ve shot it out from under him.
What a stupid joke, to meet him at this point, when I’m not even a writer any more, when it’s dried up and I’m—
And he thought of it. He thought of the story, he thought of it as a story. For the first time in over a year, he thought in terms of story.
That had been the first element in his love for and fascination with the work of the novelist, that slow but unstoppable movement through the story, finding the story, finding each turn in it, each step forward. It was a maze, a labyrinth, every time, that you constructed and solved in the same instant, finding this turn, finding this turn, finding this turn.
That’s what had been missing from his brain for the last year, more than a year, the tracking through the story, discovering the route, surprised and delighted by himself at every new vista, every new completed step forward. His life had been frustrating and boring and interminable the last year and a half because that, the motor of his existence, had been missing from it. He hadn’t had that pleasure for such a long time, and now, just this instant, it had come back.
But not exactly a story, not something he would go home and write. Something else.
Wayne was looking at him, curious. “Bryce? What is it?”
“Hold it a minute,” Bryce said. “Let me think about this, let me think this through.”
Wayne waited, his brow furrowed, a little worried on Bryce’s behalf, and Bryce thought it through. Could he suggest it? Could it work? Was it the answer?
He thought yes.
“Bryce? You okay?”
“Wayne, listen,” Bryce said. “You know how you—You know, you’re working along in a book, you’re trying to figure out the story, but where’s the hook, the narrative hook, what moves this story, and you can’t get it and you can’t get it and you can’t get it, and then all of a sudden there it is! You know?”
“Sure,” Wayne said. “It has to come, or where are you?”
“And sometimes not at all what you expected, or thought you were looking for.”
“Those are the best,” Wayne said.
“I just found my hook,” Bryce told him.
“What, in the book you’re working on?”
“No, the life I’m working on. Wayne, the truth is, I haven’t been able to write in almost a year and a half.”
Wayne stared at him in disbelief. “You?”
“That’s how long I’ve been involved in this shitty shitty divorce. I should never have left my first wife,” he said, and shook his head. “I know how stupid that sounds, believe me, Ellen was Mother Teresa compared to Lucie. Lucie’s out to get everything, everything, it’s wearing me down, lawyers, depositions, accountants. She has half the copyright on everything I published during the marriage, and she wants a hell of a lot more, and it just won’t come to an end.”
“That’s awful,” Wayne said. “There I’ve been lucky. Susan and I are still together, no problem. I’ve known other people got into that kind of thing, and I really think it’s usually more the spite and the bad feelings than the money.”
“With Lucie, it’s the money,” Bryce assured him. “It’s the spite and the bad feelings, all right, but it is goddam well the money.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“Thank you. I’m almost a year past my deadline on the next book, the editor’s calling me, little gentle hints, I’m lying to him, it’s coming along, wanna be sure it’s right. And meantime the lawyers and all the rest of it are eating up what money I have, and I don’t get the next big chunk until I deliver a manuscript.”
“You’ve got to have some kind of cushion.”
Bryce grinned at him. “You think so? Three kids in college at the same time, none of them with Lucie, thank God, plus the lawyers and the accountants and the alimony to Ellen and the house in Connecticut and the apartment in the city and the maintenance she gets every month.”
“Well, every divorce has to end sooner or later,” Wayne said. “This is only temporary.”
“Well, it seems permanent,” Bryce told him. “But now I’ve got my hook, my narrative hook. All of a sudden, I’ve figured it out. I know how to get past this place. And you’re getting past it, too.”
Wayne shook his head. “What do you mean?”
“You have a book and no publisher,” Bryce reminded him. “I have a publisher and I don’t have a book.”
“What?” Wayne half-grinned, saying, “You’re joking, you’re putting me on.”
“I am not. I remember The Doppler Effect, it was good, I remember thinking, this guy writes kind of like me. Suspense, action, but with the big picture. This manuscript of yours, what’s the story?”
“There’s a businessman,” Wayne said, “he’s had some dealings with a senator. Nothing shady, nothing important. But now a special prosecutor is investigating the senator, and his staff keep sniffing around the businessman, thinking he has something for them. He doesn’t, but he does have shady stuff elsewhere, environmental shit he’s pulling, and he doesn’t want them to find that when all they need is the goods on the senator, which he doesn’t have. He has to make the investigation go away.”
“So what does he do?”
“He kills the senator,” Wayne said.
Bryce shook his head. “That’s a short story.”
“It’s the first hundred pages. There’s a lot more, a lot about Washington, about deep-sea pollution, and Wall Street. Your book Two of a Kind, if you described the setup on that, anybody would say it’s just a short story.”
Bryce smiled. He knew it was going to be all right. “You see? We can make it work.”
“No,” Wayne said. “You aren’t serious about this.”
“Of course I am. Who’s seen your manuscript?”
“My wife and my agent and my former editor.”
“Send it to me,” Bryce said. “I’ll give you my card. Send it to me, and if it’s what I think it is, I’ll fiddle it around a little, send it in as my next book. Wayne, my advance is a million one.”
Wayne looked impressed, but nodded and said, “I thought it was in that area.”
“I split it with you,” Bryce said. “Before commissions and taxes and all that, we’ll work out all those details, that’s five hundred fifty thousand for each of us. That’s seven times what you would have gotten if your publisher had stuck with you.”
Wayne said, “Bryce, this is crazy.”
“No, it isn’t. Wayne, what does it matter to you what name goes on the book? You were never gonna be able to claim it anyway, it was gonna be Tim Fleet.”
“Yes, but—”
“This way, we both get a breather, we both have money in the bank, we both have time to organize our lives.”
“You’d have a book out there,” Wayne told him, “with your name on it, that you didn’t do.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Bryce said. “It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of publishing that happened, and it won’t be the last, and I don’t give a shit.”
Wayne sat frowning, trying to find objections. “If anybody ever found out . . .”
“That’s my worry, not yours.”
“I suppose, I suppose you could . . .” Wayne frowned and frowned, then shook his head and gave Bryce a quizzical grin as he said, “It could work, couldn’t it?”
“It’ll save my bacon. It’ll save your bacon.”
Thoughtfully, Wayne said, “I was never gonna be a good college teacher.”
“You’ll send me the book.”
Wayne nodded. “I’ll mail it in the morning.”
“And we have a deal.”
“We have a deal.”
“With one condition,” Bryce said.
Wayne looked at him. “There’s a condition?”
“Just one.”
“Sure. What is it?”
This was it, now. Bryce looked levelly into Wayne’s eyes. “My wife must be dead,” he said.
Susan wasn’t home yet, which was just as well. Wayne wanted to think some before he told her about today. He wanted a clear head. He wasn’t used to a Bloody Mary and a bottle of beer in the middle of the afternoon, it left him buzzy, with a vaguely upset stomach. And he also wasn’t used to offers like the one from Bryce Proctorr.
Did I like him, in the old days? He could barely remember the Bryce of back then, because of course he’d been so aware of the changing Bryce over the years. Book after book on the best-seller list, interviews on television, op-ed pieces in the New York Times. He’d done a magazine ad for BMW. So it was hard to remember back twenty years when they’d both been young writers in New York, scuffling, hanging out with similar friends, all of them in that soft world before the triumphs and the defeats.
Wayne hadn’t wanted to say so, but he’d read about Bryce’s marriage trouble in People, about eight months ago. There was a picture in the magazine of Bryce and Lucie “in happier times” sprawled grinning together on a red velvet chaise set out on the green lawn in front of their big white-columned Connecticut home. He’d thought then that Lucie, a narrow-faced blonde, looked beautiful but dangerous, as though she might be slightly unbalanced.
Wayne sometimes talked to himself out loud in the apartment, because Susan worked away and he worked at home, so he was alone a lot in these rooms, wandering around them when not at the computer, saying his thoughts aloud, sometimes surprised to hear what he was thinking, often not even bothering to listen. Now, walking through the apartment toward the kitchen, hoping there was some buttermilk left, thinking buttermilk would ease the jumpy stomach and help clear away the buzziness in his head, he said, “It takes a rich man to think that way. He’s a rich man now. And if you’re a rich man, you find somebody to do your dirty work.”
There was a third of a carton of buttermilk in the refrigerator; he drank it straight from the carton, standing in the middle of the kitchen. It was a large kitchen for Manhattan, in a rather large six-room apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. Susan couldn’t have children, so it was really too big an apartment for them, but it was rent stabilized. If they went anywhere else, they’d pay more. And they liked having the space, having one room that was the equivalent of an attic, another rarity in Manhattan. When times were good, they saw no reason to move to a better place, and when times were bad—were they bad now? or not?—they hung on to this nice inexpensive roomy cave in the city.
Standing in the kitchen, holding the empty carton, looking at the neat array of spice bottles and boxes on the open shelf near the stove, alphabetized by Susan, Wayne said, “Why does he think I’d do a thing like that? He doesn’t even know me. I’ve never so much as hurt anybody, I don’t—When was the last time I even had a fight? Grade school, must be. I’m not the person for this! It’s insulting!”
He threw the carton away, in the bag under the sink, and when he straightened he saw himself in the window there. The kitchen and second bath were the only interior rooms in the apartment, both with windows onto the airshaft, six stories from roof to ground, they on the fourth floor of this walkup. By day, what they saw out this window was grimy black bricks and the window of another kitchen, that one always with its yellowish shade drawn. By night, they either saw the yellow light of that window or, if that other kitchen was dark, they saw themselves, reflected in the glass.
It was just dark outside, no one home in the apartment across the way, and Wayne saw himself. He looked frightened, like someone who’s been almost hit by a car. Or doesn’t know if there’s another car coming.
He turned away from that image. He never spoke aloud when he could see his reflection. Now, his back to the sink, he said, “He doesn’t know he’s insulting me. He doesn’t know or care anything about me. I’m just a tool he might use. What the rich man might use. Five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
He shook his head and left the kitchen and moved on to his office, the smallest of the bedrooms, what the families in apartments like this called the nursery. He liked its snugness, the array of pictures and cartoons and notes and book jackets and oddments on its walls, the desk he’d made years ago out of two low metal filing cabinets and a solid door from the lumber yard.
He sat at his desk, and did nothing at first, simply absorbed the sense of the room. Then he switched everything on, and rested his fingers on the keys.
My wife must be dead.
What? What do you mean?
In order for this to work, Wayne, Lucie has to die. If she doesn’t die, the deal’s off.
Are you asking me—
Wayne, Wayne, no, I’m not asking or suggesting anything. But just this is the situation, Wayne. The divorce isn’t done yet, we’re still married. If I turn in this book, she’ll want half. The law says she gets half. And I’m giving you half. What does that leave me?
But—Why did you suggest it if you—If you can’t do it!
We can do it, Wayne. We can do it. There’s just one simple thing. Lucie has to go.
You want me to—
Wayne, I don’t want you to do anything but send me the manuscript. Then we’ll see if it’s possible to work something out, like I suggested.
But not if your wife’s alive.
There’s no point in it, Wayne, you can see that yourself.
(silence—long silence—Bryce looks at Wayne—Wayne tries not to look at anything)
I have to meet her. I have to talk with her.
Wayne? About what?
The weather. Connecticut. Anything.
Not to say, You know, Lucie, your husband just put a price on your head.
No, no, that’s not what I was thinking at all.
Then what were you thinking?
You say she’s a bad person, spiteful and greedy.
Oh, trust me, Wayne.
Well, no, I don’t want to. I want to know she really is as bad as you say.
You mean, if she’s the witch I think she is, it’d be easier.
Bryce, I don’t even know if it’s possible.
No, neither of us does. I understand this is a brand new thought for both of us, it isn’t easy.
I have to meet her.
I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Why not?
She’s everything I said, every bit the bitch I say she is, but she can come on like something else. Wayne, reflect a minute. I fell in love with her once. Maybe you’ll fall in love with her.
No.
How can you be sure?
Susan.
You’ve never—
Not for a second.
Not even thought about it?
What for? Were you catting around? While you were married to Lucie?
No, I wasn’t. But the instant she left, boy . . .
Susan isn’t leaving me.
You’ve been married, how long?
Nineteen years.
Kids?
No.
Just the two of you.
That’s all we need.
That’s wonderful, Wayne, I envy you that.
Thanks.
That’s what I want, next time. Do it right at last.
I wish you the best.
Thank you. I’ll figure out some way for you to meet her.
Good.
And send me the book.
Oh, I will.
Wayne read the dialogue over and over. Sometimes he read parts of it out loud, both his lines and Bryce’s. He made Bryce sound insinuating, manipulative. He made himself sound innocent, vulnerable. When he heard Susan’s key in the front door, he looked at the wall clock to the left of his desk. Six-fifteen. He’d been in here an hour and ten minutes. He moved the cursor to the X in the upper right corner of the screen, clicked. The boxed message appeared: “Do you want to save changes to Document 1?” Cursor to No: click.
All gone.
* * *
Susan worked for UniCare, a kind of umbrella organization for charities, funded mostly by New York State and partly by the tobacco companies. Not a charity itself, its job was to move the available funds around, to match resources with needs. The people with the money were for the most part soulless bureaucrats, who had no real interest in what they were doing, while the people running the charities were for the most part sentimentalists with their hearts on their sleeves, forever on the brink of tears at the thought of their “clients.” These two groups could not possibly talk to one another under any circumstances. Susan, who could talk to both sides without losing her temper, was invaluable. She’d started with UniCare as a secretary fourteen years ago, and was now assistant director; that invaluable.
She was also invaluable to Wayne. He knew that his life was devoted to fiction, to the unreal, and he thought sometimes, if it hadn’t been for Susan’s solid linkage to the factual, he wouldn’t have survived this long. He believed that might be the reason so many writers fell into drink or drugs; at the end of the day, they just didn’t want to have to go back to that drabber world where everybody else had to live.
“Hi, honey,” he said, appreciating her lithe slenderness as she came down the hall in her office jacket and skirt, fawn-brown hair bobbing at her cheeks.
“Sweetie,” Susan said, and paused in the hallway for a quick peck of a kiss. Her lips were always so soft, so much softer than they looked, that it always took him by surprise. Every day he kissed her, more than once, and every day he was surprised.
He followed her into the kitchen. Even though she had the job outside the house and he was in here all day long, she was responsible for dinner. They’d both grown up in traditional families, where women did the cooking and men famously didn’t know the first thing about cooking indoors but did all the cooking outside. There was no outside connected to a Greenwich Village apartment, so whatever alfresco culinary talents Wayne might have picked up from older male relatives around Hartford had certainly atrophied by now, and he had no interior chef talents at all. Susan too thought of cooking in a gender way, and after a few failed efforts on Wayne’s part, several years ago, to put together something that could look like the evening meal, she’d assured him she didn’t mind taking the responsibility, and apparently she didn’t.
What this meant, in practical terms, was that during the week she would bring home a meal already prepared by somebody else, which only required heating. Fortunately, in the Village there were a number of specialty shops that could provide meals a thousand times better than supermarket frozen foods, so they didn’t have to dumb down their taste buds to get through life. And frequently, on weekends, particularly if they were having friends over, Susan would actually cook, and was very good at it.
Now he followed her as she carried her white and green Balducci’s shopping bag into the kitchen and put it on the counter. Looking at the wall clock, she said, “Dinner after the news?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I’ll put it in during the first commercial.”
He also looked at the clock. The network news would be on in twelve minutes. He’d come into the kitchen with her in order to tell her about the meeting with Bryce Proctorr, the strange proposition he had to think about, but could they cover all that in twelve minutes? He wanted her undivided attention, because he really needed her thoughts on this. I should forget this craziness right now, he told himself, and I know I should, but I won’t be able to until Susan says so.
I’ll tell her after the news, he decided, which was a relief, because in fact he hadn’t figured out how he would tell her. How to lead into it? What spin to put on it? I’ll figure all that out during the news, he thought, and then tell her.
* * *
In fact, he told her over tonight’s cod fillets in cream sauce and broccoli and scalloped potatoes and Corbett Canyon chardonnay in the dining room, another rarity in this neighborhood. Candles were on the table, and only reflected electric light spilled in from the kitchen. “You won’t believe who I ran into today,” he began.
“Mmm?”
“I went to the library,” he explained, “to get college addresses. You know, for the resumés.”
“Mmm,” she said, without looking at him. He knew she wasn’t happy about that idea. She didn’t think a college campus was the right place for him, and she certainly didn’t want to have to give up her job and her home to go live in some small college town in Pennsylvania or Ohio. She’d let him know her feelings on the subject, as she always did, but she’d also let him know she understood he’d only go through with it if he absolutely had to, so whatever happened, she’d go along with him. But she wouldn’t get into animated conversation with him about college addresses and resumés.
He said, “Bryce Proctorr.”
She looked up. “The writer?”
“The famous writer. I used to know him years ago, before I met you. Before I went to Italy. Then I came back from Italy, and there was you.”
He grinned at her, still delighted that she’d entered his life. She knew what he was thinking, and grinned back. That was such a lascivious grin, which no one would ever see but him. He felt himself stirring, but he still had his story to tell, and the thought of the story deflected him entirely.
He said, “Anyway, he was in the library, doing some research. He saw me first and came over and said hello and we went for a drink together.”
“So he’s a regular guy.”
“I suppose. But he’s rich now, you know. He told me he gets a million one per book.”
“He told you.”
“Well, he had a reason.”
“Does he know about your problem?”
“I told him, yeah.”
“And he told you he gets a million one. Rubbed your nose in it.”
“It wasn’t like that, Susan. Let me tell you what happened.”
He described their drink together, and how he went first, telling Proctorr his problems, and then Proctorr telling him how his second marriage was ending in a very messy protracted divorce. “There was something about it in People months ago, remember?”
“Not really,” she said. “But you used to know him, so you’d have been interested.”
“He offered me a deal,” Wayne said. His heart was pounding now, and his stomach muscles were clenched. The food from Balducci’s was good, as it always was, but he couldn’t possibly swallow.
“A deal? What do you mean, a deal?”
“He’s been so emotionally caught up in this divorce thing, he hasn’t been able to work for a year and a half. He owes a book, and he doesn’t have one, and he needs the money. He wants to publish The Domino Doublet under his name. If,” he added quickly, “he thinks it’s good enough.”
Susan put down her fork and cocked her head, to hear him more plainly. “He wants to take your book? As though it’s his?”
“It’s a kind of a compliment, in a funny kind of way,” Wayne told her. “I mean, he already knows my work. He’s read The Doppler Effect, some of the others.”
“But Wayne, why would you want to do that?”
“For five hundred fifty thousand dollars.”
She sat back. “Oh.”
“I’m supposed to mail him the manuscript,” Wayne said. “If he thinks it’s good enough, he’ll put his name on it—his title, too, I suppose—and send it in as his, and we split the money. And nobody ever knows, not even his agent or his editor.”
“Oh, Wayne . . .”
“You know,” he said, “The Domino Doublet wasn’t going to be by Wayne Prentice anyway, it was another Tim Fleet.”
“But it seems so . . . strange,” she said.
“Famous writers have been ghostwritten before,” Wayne assured her, “when they had writer’s block, or they were drunk, or whatever. Publishing is full of the rumors, always has been.”
“Yes, I know about those,” she said, since she’d been around the publishing world for years, through him.
“So this is just that again,” he said. “I can’t get The Domino Doublet published myself, under any name. This way, instead of not being worth a nickel, it’s worth half a million dollars.”
“I guess . . . I guess you should say yes.”
“But there’s one extra kicker to it,” he said.
She waited. “Yes? What?”
“Something he wants.” It was very hard to actually say it in words.
“Something he wants?” That little leering smile again, and she said, “What does he want, droit du seigneur?”
He laughed, suddenly realizing how tense he’d become, as rigid as crystal; tap me, and I’ll shatter. “No, that would be an easy one, I’d just tell him to go to hell.”
“Good,” she said, still smiling.
He didn’t feel like smiling. He looked at his uneaten dinner in the candlelight, pale cod, pale potatoes, acid-green broccoli. “He wants me to kill his wife.”
“What?”
Now he looked at her astounded, disbelieving face. “Essentially, what it is, that way, I’d be getting her half of the money.”
“Wayne, what are you talking about?”
“If she’s alive, she gets half his advance for the book. If I get the other half, there’s nothing for Bryce, no reason for him to do it.”
“He’s paying you to kill his wife.”
“Yes.” Wayne shook his head. “And for a book.”
They were both silent, neither eating, she frowning at him, he miserably looking everywhere around the candlelit room except at her. The wall clock in the kitchen was battery-operated, and the minute hand clicked at every second’s jerk forward, a sound they almost never heard, but which both could hear now, as loud as a metal spoon being tapped on the table between them.
“What did you tell him?” Said so softly he barely heard it, above the ticks.
“I said I had to meet her.”
That surprised her. “Meet her? Why?”
“Well, he was describing how awful she was, greedy, nasty, a real bitch. If she was that bad . . .”
“It would be a little easier. Oh, Wayne.”
“I know, I know. But the point is, he agreed. He’s going to figure out a way for me to meet her. In the meantime, I’m supposed to send him the manuscript. Tomorrow.” He shook his head. “I’ll send out some of those resumés at the same time, might as well get back to reality a little bit.”
“No.”
He looked at her. “No? What do you mean, no?”
“Don’t send out any resumés,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t say anything. He watched her, waiting, and she said, “Wait till you’ve met her.”
His breath stopped. They gazed at each other, both unblinking, and he thought, she wants me to do it! He’d been so sure she would pull him back from the brink, sure of her solidity, her disdain for fantasy. They stared at each other, and he read the grim set of her jaw, and he said, “And if it turns out he’s wrong? She’s a decent woman, someone we’d like?”
“Then you send the resumés,” she said, and looked away from him, and said, “You’re not eating your dinner.”
“Neither are you. Susan, why do you want me to wait?”
She nodded, still looking away, then faced him again to say, “I’ve been feeling awful about this college idea.”
“I know you have. I have, too.”
“Wayne, it’s the end of the marriage, I know it is, but what could I say? What was the alternative? You can’t live on me. Of course, you could, but you can’t. The life you had for twenty years just dried up, and it isn’t your fault, I know it isn’t. The markets change, the rules of the game change, everybody knows that’s true, nobody ever thinks the ax is going to come down on him. But it comes down on someone, and this time it was you.”
“Not the end of the marriage, Susan.”
“We’d hate each other in Fine Arts Gulch, sweetie, you know we would. We’d hate ourselves, and we’d hate each other, and one day I’d pack up and come home, and you wouldn’t be able to.”
“But what we’re talking about doing here, I mean, you know, this is—”
“You don’t have to say the words, sweetie,” she said. “We know what we’re talking about.”
“Susan, I thought you’d—”
“I want us, Wayne. I want this apartment and this life. I want my job, I want what I do. I don’t want the world to be able to kick us apart like some sand castle.”
He looked down at his plate. He picked up his fork, but didn’t do anything with it. Then he looked up again, and Susan was watching him, impassive. He said, “What if she turns out to be a nice person?”
Her eyes glittered. “We’ll see,” she said.
The Ambien wasn’t working. Bryce didn’t want to open his eyes, didn’t want to acknowledge that he was still awake, but finally boredom and exasperation and worry all combined in him with sufficient force to drive his eyelids up, and the red LED letters on the bedside clock read 4:19. Oh, damn.
If Isabelle could have stayed over, surely he’d be asleep now. With her beside him, somebody beside him, a warm and companionable body, the insomnia would not come back. But Lucie had hired private detectives—he’d have known that even if lawyer Bob hadn’t warned him about it—and there was only so much he dared do before the divorce was complete. He could date Isabelle, have dinner with Isabelle, but sleep alone, or not sleep, but alone, night after night.
Sometimes he got up and read, sometimes he got up and drank, sometimes he got up and watched a tape, but usually he just lay in bed and worried or raged or felt sorry for himself. Sometimes the sleeping pills worked, and then he would get up in the morning feeling fine, almost his old self. Sometimes they didn’t work. Tonight it wasn’t working.
And tonight he had a fresh worry to rasp and grate inside his brain, claw at him in the dark. What stupidity it had been to make that offer to Wayne Prentice! How could he have exposed himself that way, made himself so vulnerable to somebody he barely knew, didn’t really know at all?
What if Prentice talks? What if he were to go to Lucie? What if he were to decide the way to kick his career back into life was with publicity, telling everybody in the world that Bryce Proctorr had offered him half a million dollars to kill his wife? The theory of rocketry: you go up by pushing down. Wayne Prentice goes up by pushing Bryce Proctorr down.
It was as though he’d been plotting a story, making something up he could use as part of a book; but not a very good book. Prentice must have thought he was insane, and maybe he was. This sudden little scheme pops into his head, and he acts as though it’s real, for God’s sake. Plays out a scene. Behaves as though fiction could ever be fact. Leave that stuff in your office, he told himself, but it was too late.
Could he deny it? If Prentice went public, could he say, “What a stupid idea. I’d never make a suggestion like that, and certainly not to somebody I don’t even know, haven’t seen for over twenty years. The man’s just a publicity hound, that’s all, and if he repeats his accusations I’ll have to make a complaint with the police.”
Be stern, be confident, be outraged. I’m the star, he told himself. Who is Wayne Prentice? Nobody. Less than nobody. Not even Tim Fleet any more.
When the clock read 5:04, he got up and roamed around the apartment, turning on all the lights. From the spacious living room, decorated by Lucie and Bloomingdale’s, he could look out and down at Central Park, and the buildings of Fifth Avenue over on the other side. The dining room, at the southeast corner of the apartment, had the Central Park view as well, but also had the terrace on the south side of the building, fifteen stories up, looking down toward midtown.
He stepped out there, dressed only in his gray robe, barefoot, but there was a mean wind coming over from New Jersey, and tonight he didn’t like the sense of height, the proximity of empty air hundreds of feet above the pavement. If I ever kill myself, he thought, I’ll do it here, dive over that rail.
He wouldn’t kill himself, he had no need to, he never would, but tonight he could feel that draw, almost tidal, the tugging on his arms, the gentle push in the middle of his back. You’d sleep, he found himself thinking, and went back inside.
It was very bad to be this alone, for this long. It made him afraid of himself on his own terrace, a place he normally loved. It made him blurt out foolishness to a stranger, leaving himself open to God knows what.
The “study” was what he called the room that was part library and part entertainment center. His big-screen TV was hidden behind antique-looking mahogany doors, flanked by shelves of books, but the giveaway was the leather sofa against the opposite wall. Bryce wandered into the study, after coming in from the terrace, and opened the mahogany doors. Then he stood dull-eyed awhile, exhausted but not sleepy, looking at his dim reflection in the TV screen. Finally, he stooped to pull open one of the drawers under the TV where the tapes were hidden, and chose Singin’ in the Rain.
Partway through, he fell asleep.
* * *
For two nights after his blunder with Wayne Prentice, the insomnia was worse than ever, so that he roamed around all day feeling logy and sapped of energy. These were the times when he felt, Give her everything, bring it to an end, sign anything, agree to anything, let her have it all, the past and the future, I’ll start over with nothing, what do I care? But it couldn’t work that way, the lawyers and the judges wouldn’t let it work that way. The grindstone had to turn at its own slow pace.
Then, on the third day, he got two pieces of mail that changed his mood. The first was the manuscript, in a big manila envelope. Wayne had actually sent him the manuscript. Six hundred twenty-three pages, The Domino Doublet, by Tim Fleet. Dedication page: For Susan. That would be the wife. And an unheaded unsigned note on a blank sheet of typewriter paper:
He’s going to do it.
Bryce sat at the dining room table with his mail, sunlight on the terrace to his left, which had lost its menace. He’s going to do it, he thought, and saw that he had been astute, he’d chosen his man well, he’d made a brilliant move.
The other piece of mail that mattered was an invitation to the premiere of a play, off-Broadway, a little theater downtown on Grove Street. The play had been written by Jack Wagner, who was mostly a magazine journalist. He’d interviewed Bryce ten years ago, and they’d been casual friends ever since. This was Jack’s first produced play, about which he was very excited, though it was unlikely that so many as a thousand people would ever see it, and there was certainly no profit to be had from it, not for Jack and probably not for the theater either. But Bryce understood Jack’s pleasure and pride; profit wasn’t why you did it.
It was nice to get this invitation, but Bryce didn’t at first realize it was significant, nor that it was linked to the manuscript that had also come in today’s mail. Then he noticed that, in addition to the phone number printed on the invitation with its request for an RSVP, there was a hand written different phone number and note: “Bryce, Please call me before you reply. Jack.”
Now, why would that be? The nearest phone was in the kitchen. He went in there, pulled one of the ash-blond stools over from the island, and made the call: “Jack? It’s Bryce.”
“Oh, good. Listen, I don’t know if this is awkward or not, but I thought you ought to know.”
“Yeah?”
“Our director, Janet Higgins, is a friend of Lucie’s.”
The idea that Lucie could have friends never ceased to amaze. Bryce said, “Oh. You mean, she’s invited.”
“I’m sorry, Bryce, you know I want you there, but if it’s a problem . . .”
“Well, yeah, it is,” Bryce said. “I’ll come the second night, all right?”
“I’m sorry, I know what you’re going through.”
No, you don’t, he thought, but then he had another thought, and sat up straighter on the stool as he said, “Wait. Jack? Will you wait a second? I have to go get something, I’ll be right back.”
“Sure.”
Leaving the phone, he dashed next door into the dining room, grabbed the manila envelope the manuscript had come in, with its Priority Mail stickers on it, and carried it back to the kitchen.
“Jack?”
“Here.”
“There’s a guy I’d like to see the play, I think he’d be interested in it. He doesn’t know Lucie, so there’s no problem there. Could I ask you to invite him instead of me?”
“Well, sure, if you want.”
“Not instead of me, I don’t mean it like that. I’d just like you to invite him.”
“Fine. Who is he?”
“He’s a writer, a novelist, named Wayne Prentice.” He read Jack the return address from the envelope.
Jack said, “Do I know his work?”
“Maybe from some years ago. He’s been blocked for a while, poor guy.”
“Ooh.”
“Maybe you’ll inspire him.”
Jack laughed. “You mean, he’ll say, Christ, I can do better than that, and there he is, unblocked.”
“That’s it. Thanks, Jack.”
“No problem.”
“And thanks for the warning.”
“May you have better days soon, Bryce.”
Bryce looked at that name and return address on the envelope. “Maybe I will, Jack, thanks,” he said.
There was a Manhattan White Pages kept in the kitchen, under the phone. Wayne Prentice was in it, at the address on Perry Street. He dialed, listened to Wayne’s voice on his answering machine, and after the beep he said, “You’ll meet her. Accept the invitation to Low Fidelity.”
That night, the pill worked. He slept through until morning.
When Susan came home, Wayne kissed her, but he was distracted. “I want you to hear something,” he said.
“What?”
She followed him into the kitchen, where they kept the answering machine, while he said, “I went out to the deli to get some lunch, and when I brought it back there was one message.”
He pressed Play: “You’ll meet her. Accept the invitation to Low Fidelity.”
“That’s Bryce Proctorr,” he told her. “That’s his voice.”
“Play it again.”
He did, and she listened with pursed lips, narrow eyes. “He sounds arrogant,” she decided.
“He isn’t arrogant,” Wayne said. “He could be, with his success, but he isn’t, not really. He’s just sure of himself.”
“Play it again.”
After the third time, she said, “It isn’t arrogance, it’s nervousness. He’s tense, and trying to hide it.”
“He doesn’t know if I’ll do it or not. He should have The Domino Doublet by now, that’ll tell him, at least, that I’m thinking about it.”
“What’s Low Fidelity?”
“I looked it up in New York,” he said, and gestured at the magazine he’d left on the kitchen table, propped open with a carving knife. “It hasn’t opened yet, it’s going to be in this neighborhood, over on Grove Street, opening next Thursday.”
She stood over the magazine to read the pre-opening notice. “A new comedy. Never heard of Jack Wagner.”
“Around three-thirty,” he told her, “I got a phone call from the theater. Nu-Arts, it’s called.”
That surprised her. “They called you?”
“I guess she was the cashier or a secretary, I don’t know. She said I’d been added to the guest list for the opening night at the request of the author, and I’d be getting an invitation in the mail, but since time is short they wanted to be sure I knew about it.”
“Bryce Proctorr waves his magic wand, and you get invited to the opening of a play.”
“Off-Broadway.”
“Still.” She looked at the notice in the magazine again, then gave Wayne a quirky smile as she said, “Do you suppose that’s his pen name? Jack Wagner?”
“Who, Bryce?” Wayne laughed. “No, why would he?”
“It sounds like a pen name.”
“Bryce Proctorr doesn’t use a pen name,” Wayne said, certain of that. “Besides, if it was something he wrote, she wouldn’t be on the guest list.”
“I suppose.”
The pre-opening notice offered very little, no plot summary, no previous history of the author or anybody else connected with the play, but Susan kept going back to it, as though it contained the answer to a problem that was puzzling her. Wayne watched her, then gestured at the answering machine: “Do you want to hear it again?”
“No. You’d better erase it.”
“Right.”
That was a strange feeling. You always pushed the Delete button to get rid of old messages, but this time it felt different, like being in a spy movie. Or a murder story, getting rid of the evidence.
Beep, said the machine: Your secrets are safe.
She was still frowning at the magazine, but after that beep she transferred her frown to him. “It’s so weird,” she said, “that he can just do that. Reach out and pluck someone.”
“He knows people, that’s all. Susan, we know people, too.”
“Well . . . You told her you’re going.”
“We’re going. The invitation’s for the both of us, or, you know, I can bring a guest, so I said I would.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “You do this on your own. Next Thursday? I’ll have dinner with Jill.”
Jill was a longtime friend, now divorced, a sweet, rather vague woman, with many small unimportant problems. Whenever Wayne had to be away or wasn’t available, Susan had dinner with Jill. Wayne’s equivalent was a friend from college called Larry, who’d been a crotchety old bachelor from the day of his birth, but whose sardonic sense of humor made him fun to be with, in small doses. Wayne and Susan had kidded a few times about getting soft Jill and hard Larry together, and what a disaster that would be!
But Wayne didn’t like the Jill idea now. “Why?” he asked. “Don’t you want to see this famous Lucie?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “And I don’t want to meet Bryce Proctorr, and I don’t want to know any more details about what you’re, what you’re going to do than you absolutely have to tell me.”
“What is this, deniability?” he asked. He was grinning, but he wasn’t amused.
“No, of course not,” she said. “Wayne, this is your decision, because it’s your burden, whichever way you choose. If I’m part of the decision, it isn’t yours any more, and you’ll never trust it. Years to come, you’ll still have doubts.”
“But you are part of the decision. You say our marriage won’t last if I take a teaching job at some college, and goddam it, you’re probably right. So you are part of it.”
“Not the decision making,” Susan insisted. “I’m not copping out, Wayne, but I don’t want to have my own opinion of Lucie Proctorr, or whatever she calls herself. My opinion doesn’t matter. My opinion could only complicate things for you, and if I go see her, you’ll have to ask me what I think, and I’ll have to tell you, and I don’t want us in that position.”
He said, “So you want me to go on my own.”
“You have to. In this, you are on your own.”
“But we do everything together, Susan.”
“Not everything,” she said.
Early Friday afternoon, before leaving town for the weekend, Bryce stopped in to see his lawyer, having called for an appointment. Not lawyer Bob, the divorce man, but his real lawyer, Fred Silver. Fred and lawyer Bob—who thought of himself as Robert Jacoby—were both with the same firm, with offices in the Graybar Building, upstairs from Grand Central. Perfect for Bryce, who’d be taking Metro North into Connecticut.
Fred Silver’s hair was silver, and everything about him seemed to flow from this conflux of name and hair. Smooth, gleaming, controlled, expensive. He gave Bryce the same smooth handshake as always, gestured with his clean plump hand at the leather chair where Bryce always sat, and took his seat across the desk from him to say, “Bob tells me things are moving along.”
“Now ask me,” Bryce said.
Fred chuckled. “The client always thinks these things take too long. Wait till it’s over, you’ll be glad Bob dotted the i’s.”
“What a lot of i’s you have, grandma,” Bryce said. “But that isn’t why I’m here.”
“No, of course not.”
“I need a contract written,” Bryce said. “I need it as soon as possible, and I need it in absolute secrecy.”
Fred gave him a startled and curious look; Bryce Proctorr was not a client who normally came up with surprises. “Whatever you tell me, you know,” he said, and waved a hand to suggest the rest of the sentence.
“Yes, naturally. Is private.” Bryce rubbed his left hand over his face, as though brushing away cobwebs. It was a gesture that had become frequent with him this last year, though he wasn’t yet aware of it. “You know,” he said, “this divorce, all this dotting of i’s, it’s been a real distraction.”
“Of course it has.”
“I haven’t been able to work.”
“I know it’s hard to concentrate with—”
“No, Fred, I haven’t been able to work. Not at all.”
Once more, Fred was surprised. “You haven’t said anything.”
“I haven’t exactly been lying,” Bryce said, “but I haven’t been admitting the truth either. Joe asks me—you know, my editor—how’s the new book coming along, I say slow. Well, zero is slow, isn’t it?”
“Zero? Bryce, honestly, you aren’t working at all?”
“I don’t like to go into the room with the computer,” Bryce told him. “I’ll let a week go by without even looking to see if I have any E-mail.”
Fred now looked very worried. “Are you seeing anybody?”
“What do you mean, therapy? Fred, I know what the problem is. I have this buzzing in my ear and it’s called divorce, and until it goes away I can’t concentrate on anything else. All therapy would do is give me one more thing to be impatient about.”
Fred, who naturally believed there was a professional of some sort to be hired for every one of life’s many problems, spread his hands, saying, with palpable doubt, “You’ll know best, Bryce.”
“I hope I do. Anyway, it can’t go on. I owe a book, and I need money. So what I’m doing is, I’m taking on a collaborator.”
“You? Bryce, everything you say to me today is out of character.”
“I have to do something, Fred. This guy, I’ve known him a long time, he’s a good writer in his own right, he’s published some books, but he’s hit on hard times. So he’s gonna plot the new one with me, and write it with me, but it would be very bad news commercially if the word got out. So it has to be absolute secrecy.”
“And you can trust this other fellow.”
“Completely. He wants this as much as I do. And it wouldn’t help his career if the word got around he was becoming a ghost. It would be like people finding out he was writing novelizations.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Fred admitted.
“Oh, the paperback form of a movie, written from the screenplay.”
“And it’s not considered a very high level of occupation, I take it.”
“Hackwork.”
“I understand.”
When Fred was getting down to business, he would lean forward and put both forearms on the desk, right hand near his pen and yellow pad, and that’s what he did now. “You’ve worked out the details of the agreement with him?”
“The contract will say he’s being hired as an editorial consultant,” Bryce said, and paused while Fred wrote that down. “It won’t say anything about his doing any writing or plotting. It says his work is confidential, and that if he breaks confidentiality the contract is null and void and he doesn’t get paid.”
“And if he does get paid?”
“Five hundred fifty thousand dollars, out of the first earnings of the new book.”
This time, Fred was absolutely astonished. “That’s an amazing amount of money, Bryce!”
“It’s half the advance,” Bryce pointed out. “I told you, it’s a collaboration, so he has to get half. But after that, any future moneys, foreign sales, movie sales, anything like that, he gets a quarter.”
“Not half ?”
“No, a quarter.”
“Will he agree to this?”
“I’m sure he will,” Bryce said, because he wanted to be sure. “He’ll understand, any additional income like that, it would all be coming in because of my name anyway, not because of any specific thing he might have put into the book.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” Pen poised, Fred said, “And what is this collaborator’s name?”
“Tim Fleet. Like the street.”
Fred wrote it down. “And who is representing him?”
“No one. This is just between the two of us.”
Fred put down his pen. “Are you sure, Bryce? He really should have representation. If there are questions later—”
“There won’t be questions,” Bryce assured him, knowing this was merely once again Fred’s liking for everybody to be surrounded at all times by a magic circle of professionals. “Tim and I worked it out,” he said, “and we shook on it, and now we just need it done in proper legal format.”
“And what’s the time frame?”
“As soon as possible. Some time next week?”
“No,” Fred said, “I meant the term of the collaboration. Deadline, you call it?”
“Oh, no, we’ll leave that open,” Bryce said. “Neither of us wants to add pressure.” Grinning, he said, “The book doesn’t even have a title yet. It’s just being worked on.”
* * *
It was being worked on, in fact, and so was the title. In the Danbury train, on the way to his stop, Bethel, the last before the end of the line, he found a dual seat to himself, since he was leaving early enough in the afternoon, ahead of the real rush, and settled down to read the book again, make notes, and think about titles.
The book was good, certainly good enough to become his own. This weekend, he’d scan it into his computer and start the rewrite. He’d keep the basic storyline, but there would have to be changes. There needed to be alterations in tone and mood, differences in language to make the book read like a Bryce Proctorr novel, and also a general tightening to increase the tension, since it seemed to him that one of Wayne’s failings was a tendency to write flat, as though it were just a report he was making and not incidents ripe with drama.
Also, the main characters would have to be recast. The senator, for instance, who was our hero’s main problem, would have to become someone else entirely. Wayne had written him sort of like a college dean, academic, tough but with gloves on, while Bryce would make him more of a movie director type, more obviously tough and self-assured, and a showboat as well. He’d be fun to write.
The first time through the manuscript, though, he’d concentrate on language. He noticed, for instance, whenever the characters reacted to something they didn’t like, they “winced.” “Winced” wasn’t a word he liked, nor would ever use, so an early order to the computer would be to change every “winced” to “twinged.”
The other question was the title. Even if he liked The Domino Doublet, which he didn’t at all, he wouldn’t be able to use it, because Wayne’s agent and his former editor had both seen the work under that title. His own third book had been called An Only Twin, which would be perfect for this one, given the relationship between the businessman and the senator; too bad he’d already used it up.
A lot of people got off at the two Wilton stops, and then the countryside in the late afternoon light began to look more and more familiar, more and more comfortable. Isabelle would already be there, at the house, when he arrived, and they’d have the weekend.
He felt himself relaxing. He wasn’t even thinking now about whether Wayne Prentice would do, he was only thinking about whether his novel would do, and the answer was yes.
Two Faces in the Mirror. He made a note.
Wayne had been trying to work on a new novel. He had an idea about a man whose brother disappears in Central America, and he goes looking for him. The brother was supposedly a stockbroker in New York, but as the hero searches, more and more ambiguities arise. Was his brother really CIA? Was he a money launderer for the drug cartel? Was he involved with right-wing generals? Wayne hadn’t decided yet, and felt the character of the hero would eventually lead him to the character of the missing brother. He was calling it The Shadowed Other, but he was having a hell of a time getting into it.
In the first place, what was it for? Who was it by? Would he spend all the time and research and effort, and then sell it to some minor house for five thousand dollars? Or to nobody at all? Would he try to create a third name? The effort seemed too much, and what good would it do?
Was he a hobbyist now? Was he one of those people who do their writing on weekends and spend ten years finishing a novel and then nobody cares? Even if . . .
Well. Even if he got the money from Bryce and The Domino Doublet was published under Bryce’s name, what good would that do him in the long run? Bryce wouldn’t be blocked forever, and wouldn’t need a ghostwriter any more. Sooner or later, the money would be gone, and then what would Wayne do?
The money wasn’t the point, anyway, the writing was the point. He wanted to sit at his computer, the same as ever, unreel the stories, but he didn’t want it to be meaningless, spinning his wheels, a mockery. He didn’t want to be foolish in his own eyes.
And the other problem, of course, was Lucie Proctorr. He started The Shadowed Other on Monday, but Thursday just kept looming in his mind, distracting him, forcing him to invent scenarios about Lucie Proctorr rather than Jim Gregory, the hero of his novel.
By Wednesday, he was pacing the apartment more than he was seated at his computer, and Thursday was worse, made even more so by the fact that Susan wasn’t coming home from work. She was going directly to Jill’s place, up on Riverside Drive, and they’d go to dinner from there.
The invitation to Low Fidelity had come in Tuesday’s mail, and it had said there would be a cocktail buffet following the performance. The opening night would begin an hour earlier than usual, at seven, so Wayne fed himself leftovers out of the refrigerator at six. “There’s good and bad in everybody,” he told himself, as he paced the kitchen. “What’s my grudge against her? That’s the problem.” He felt more and more tense, and had one glass of white wine to calm himself, but was afraid to drink more.
It was a cool night in early November, not cold enough to need a topcoat. He wore his blazer, a blue shirt, and a red tie, and walked down to Grove Street, arriving at ten to seven, to see the usual cluster of people on the sidewalk out front. He didn’t know any of them, and was the only singleton there. He recognized Lucie at once, from her picture in People. She stood talking and laughing with two other women, all three of them fortyish and very good-looking, in a Don’t Touch The Merchandise way. The other two women were smoking, Lucie was not.
The only reasons to stand outside were to smoke or chat or wait for friends. Wayne had none of those reasons, so he went on inside and showed his invitation to a girl at a folding table set up just to the right of the door. She checked him off on a list, and gave him his ticket and the program.
He went on into the auditorium, which was small, under a very high black ceiling, with steeply raked seating up to the right from the entrance, the stage to the left. There was no curtain fronting the stage, and the set was a busy one, a living room and a kitchen and a staircase, lots of furniture and lots of doors. The stage lights were off, so that the set was faintly mysterious and faintly threatening.
The theater was less than a quarter full, and he saw that in here there were a few other loners like himself. His seat was the last one on the far side, two-thirds of the way up. He crossed between the seats and the stage, aware of people who glanced at him and then away when they didn’t know him. Would it matter, later on, if people remembered he’d been here tonight? No, it couldn’t.
The program was the off-Broadway version of Playbill, full of chatty news about a world very different from his own. The writers he knew were novelists or short-story writers, or they had moved to California to be screenwriters and would occasionally come back to tell their horror stories. Theater people lived in a parallel universe.
The Playbill contained the usual pocket biographies, so he read the one about Jack Wagner, the playwright. This was his first play, it seemed. He was a journalist by profession, came from Missouri, had graduated from Antioch, lived near Rhinebeck with his wife, Cindy, and two sons. He had been nominated three times for journalism awards Wayne had never heard of.
More people came in, the theater filling, and then a cheerful older couple claimed the seats to his left. They wore lots of coats and scarves, and she carried a big black leather clunky purse, so it took them some while to get settled, during which Wayne read the list of individuals and organizations that helped support this theater, and then read the biography of the director, Janet Higgins, a native Floridian, who had directed half a dozen off-Broadway plays Wayne had never heard of and had considerable experience as well in “regional theater.”
“Good evening.”
It was the woman to his left. Her husband was next to Wayne, so she had leaned forward to smile past him.
“Evening,” Wayne said.
“Isn’t this wonderful for Jack?”
“From journalism to playwrighting,” Wayne said, with admiration, as though describing some difficult acrobatic performance. “Quite a leap.”
“No one deserves it more,” she said, which Wayne thought a non sequitur, but he agreed anyway. “You’re right.”
“Fred Gustav,” the man said. “My wife, Molly.”
“Wayne Prentice.”
“Wasn’t the traffic terrible tonight?” Molly asked. “I couldn’t believe it.”
“I walked,” Wayne told her. “I live nearby.”
They both looked at him as though he were an interesting freak of nature. Molly said, “You live in the Village?”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, that must be fun,” she said.
“It is.”
“We live in Yonkers,” Fred told him. “Our boy Perry went to school with Jack.”
“At Antioch.”
“That’s right!”
Some people a few rows down called to Fred and Molly, who called back, and farther down below Lucie Proctorr came in by herself and took a seat toward the right end of the first row. Her blonde hair glittered like gold shavings in the direct beam of one of the ceiling spotlights. The gray unlit set beyond her looked like a grave.
Wayne felt a little sick.
* * *
He had no idea what the play was about, except doors were slammed a lot, people stood four-square to shout at one another, and there was a great deal of laughter and even some applause from the audience along the way. Wayne was mostly aware of that blonde head down there, picking up light from the stage.
The odd thing was, he mainly thought about The Shadowed Other. Details about Jim Gregory, the people he would meet when he got to Guatemala, how he would go about his search, all these things ran through his head, which they hadn’t been doing all week.
Wayne suspected there was more applause at the close tonight than there would be at subsequent performances; everybody here, after all, was connected to somebody involved in the show. The actors got sustained applause, and then “Author!” was called several times, and a beaming bookish man in pebbly brown sports jacket and navy blue turtleneck came out to receive a standing ovation. He had dark-framed eyeglasses that bounced the stage lights at the audience and a neat Vandyke beard. He held his hands together in front of himself as though he were handcuffed, and bobbed his head a lot, and smiled and smiled.
Then, at what Wayne thought was just the right moment, the man on stage raised his hands for the people to be quiet, and they were, and he said, “None of this could have happened if it wasn’t for our wonderful director, Janet Higgins!” and she came out, and was one of the women Lucie had been talking to in front of the theater. There was another standing ovation, during which Lucie, excitedly jumping in the front row, clasped her hands over her head to let Janet Higgins know she was the champ.
Janet Higgins gave a brief laudatory speech, and introduced the founder and general manager of the theater, a rumpled man in a sweater, who gave one more laudatory speech, and then invited everybody up on stage for “drinks and goodies.”
It was strange to be at a cocktail party on a stage set. You were in a living room, and yet you weren’t. People chattered happily, Fred and Molly seated themselves comfortably on the audience-facing sofa, and a number of people sat on the staircase, which didn’t actually go anywhere. The kitchen counter became the bar, complete with tuxedoed bartender, and tuxedoed waiters and waitresses circulated with platters of finger food. Wayne nursed a glass of white wine, wandered between living room and kitchen, and wondered how he was going to meet Lucie Proctorr, who was always in the middle of some conversation.
At last he saw that Jack Wagner was free, so he went over, stuck his hand out, and said, “Congratulations.”
“Oh, thanks,” Wagner said. “Thanks.” He was very bright-eyed, and his hand when he grasped Wayne’s was vibrating. His other hand held a glass of white wine with wavelets in it.
Wayne said, “I’m Wayne Prentice, I’m the guy Bryce foisted off on you.”
“Oh, that’s who you are!” His expressions kept swerving, a kaleidoscope of different kinds of joy. “I’m so glad you could make it,” he said.
“So am I. It’s a terrific play.”
“Thank you.”
Looking around, Wayne said, “Bryce’s ex-wife is here someplace, isn’t she?”
“Oh, Lucie! Sure, she’s a buddy of Janet’s. You don’t know Lucie?”
“Bryce and I hadn’t seen each other in years, until just recently. I guess he started looking up old friends after the marriage died. Listen, I’d love to meet Lucie Proctorr, but I don’t know how to go about it.”
“Easiest thing in the world,” Wagner said. “It’s just, I tell you what, we won’t mention you’re a friend of Bryce’s.”
“Good idea. What if I know you,” Wayne suggested, “because I called you one time to get some background about journalism for a novel I was writing.”
“Perfect. Come on.”
Lucie was in the kitchen, in a little cluster of people by the refrigerator, next to a door that had a stub of porch outside it and beyond that the darkness of offstage. Wagner waited his moment, and then said, “Lucie, I want you to meet somebody.”
She had a bird’s alertness, Wayne noticed, in the way she turned her head, and in the brightness of her eyes. She stepped out of that conversation like stepping out of a tub. “Yes?”
“Lucie Proctorr, Wayne Prentice.”
“How do you do?”
“Wayne’s a novelist, but he’s all right.”
“Oh, some novelists are all right,” she said, and grinned slightly at Wayne as she said, “Are you a famous novelist, Mr. Prentice?”
“Oh, no,” he said, “I’m just a door-to-door novelist, I sell books out of the trunk of my car.”
“You must be a very persuasive salesman.”
“I try to be.”
“Sell me,” she said.
He didn’t follow. “What?”
“Sell me a book,” she said.
“Excuse me,” Wagner said, being called away, but neither paid any attention.
“Sell me your latest book,” she said.
That would have been too complicated. He said, “No, I’ll make it easy on myself. I’ll sell you my first book.”
She watched him with amused keenness. “Why is that easier?”
“I was very enthusiastic then.”
“Aren’t you enthusiastic now?”
“Sometimes. My first book was called The Pollux Perspective, and it was about two army men whose job is to safeguard a doomsday machine. One of them decides it’s a manifestation of God, and has to be protected at all costs, and the other decides it’s Armageddon, and its release should not be thwarted. They both think of themselves as the good guy.”
“Very arty,” she said.
“Actually,” he said, “I was trying to be very commercial. Blowing everything up, you know.”
She looked thoughtful. “What did you say that was called?”
“The Pollux Perspective.”
“But I’ve read that book!”
Astonished, he said, “You have?”
“My husband had it. Ex-husband. Had it, probably still has it. Do you know him?”
“Your husband?”
“Ex-husband, or at least eventually. Bryce Proctorr.”
“Oh, he’s famous,” Wayne said. “I don’t think he sells books out of the trunk of his car.”
“No, it might be better for him if he did,” she said. “Would you fill my wineglass?”
“Delighted,” he assured her, and carried it away, and filled both glasses.
When he got back, she was in a different conversation, but she left it immediately, took her glass, and said, “Thank you. The Pollux Perspective. Why aren’t you famous, Mr. Prentice? You’re as good a writer as my former. Don’t you push yourself ?”
“Maybe not enough,” he said.
“Well, you’re never going to get anywhere being a shrinking violet,” she told him. “How many books have you published?”
“Twelve.”
“And still among the great unwashed. I think you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“It might not be entirely my fault.”
“All the losers say that,” she commented.
He could not let her see him become annoyed. “Have you been around a lot of losers?” he asked her.
“Not for long. What are you working on now?”
“A man whose brother disappears, and he goes looking for him. I think it’ll turn out, what he’s searching for is himself.”
“Arty but commercial again?”
“Lots of skulduggery,” he said. “South American generals.”
“Oh, don’t we know all that?”
“We don’t know my guy and his brother.”
“I’m not sure we need to know them,” she said. “Sell it to me.”
“Not here. Too much distraction.”
Again, that sharp bird look; a bird of prey? “Are you asking me for a date?”
He hadn’t been. She was so aggressive, so fast, that all he could do was struggle to find immediate answers. Being with her was like being in a tennis match, not having known you’d be expected to play.
“Sure,” he said, because closer to her was where he would have to be, no matter what happened next. He remembered Bryce warning him that he had fallen in love with this woman once, and mightn’t Wayne do the same? No. He’d said no before because of Susan, but now he could say no because of Lucie; she wasn’t restful enough to fall in love with. You might lust after her, to see if it was possible to pin down with your cock that quicksilver quality, but that wouldn’t be love.
He said, “Dinner next Monday?”
“I’m busy Monday. Why not call me Tuesday?”
“Because I don’t know your number.”
“Oh, you’re about to know my number,” she said, laughing at him, “and I do believe I’m about to know yours.”
* * *
Susan was waiting up when he got home.
“I met her,” he said, and went to the kitchen for another glass of wine, and found Susan expectant in the living room when he got back. He sat down and said, “Susan, I don’t think I ought to talk about this from now on.”
“Just tell me,” she said, “did you like her?”
“She’s interesting but repellent,” he said.
“Good.”
He said, “I think, Susan, it’s time for us to go to bed and have a sexual encounter.”
Amused, she said, “So Lucie turned you on, did she?”
“She reminded me how much you turn me on,” he said, which was almost the truth.
And later, after Susan fell asleep, he lay thinking how that kind of woman could be a strong draw for a confident, high-powered personality like Bryce. She’d be a challenge to him, and he would never give up believing he was up to the challenge. But she would be relentless, there would never be any cease-fires with her, there was no way to bring that war to an end.
Well, one.
* * *
Next day, in the mail, came four copies of a contract, between Bryce Proctorr and Tim Fleet, resident at this address. The wording was careful but straightforward. It described exactly the agreement Bryce had offered when they’d met. “I notice,” he told himself, “I get a quarter of any future earnings, subsidiary rights. Movie sales, see that? But that’s okay. This is merely a passage through hell, that’s all, like Jim Gregory’s passage through Guatemala. If The Domino Doublet, or whatever Bryce changes it to, if it makes millions and millions of dollars, so what? Let him have three-quarters, let him have it all. It wouldn’t make a penny, if it didn’t have Bryce’s name on it in the first place. And after all, one way or another, it isn’t about money anyway, is it?”
Along with the contract had come a note on Bryce’s small stationery:
Dear Tim,
Please sign all copies, keep one, send the other three to me. Send them when you think the time is right, and I’ll carry them with me when I leave for California for a couple of weeks.
I’m sure this collaboration will be a success for both of us.
Yours,
Bryce
Bryce
“California for a couple of weeks,” he echoed. “Of course, to be a continent away when it happens.”
In his office, Wayne had a four-drawer gray metal filing cabinet, man height, beside his desk. He took from its second drawer a fresh unused manila folder and inserted the four copies of the contract and the note into it. Then he took from his wallet the torn-off piece of Playbill on which, last night, Lucie Proctorr had written her name and phone number and address uptown on Broadway. He copied all that onto a card on his Rolodex, and then the Playbill scrap also went into the folder.
He considered the folder for a while, trying to decide what heading to put on the tab, then at last left it blank. He slid it into the drawer between “LEGAL” and “MAGAZINES.” He’d know where to find it: “LUCIE.”
For a week and a half, Bryce worked contentedly on Two Faces in the Mirror. It wasn’t that he forgot his troubles, merely that they felt far away.
Structurally, the book was quite good, though there was some time-frame business in the middle that could be plainer; he made it plain. Changing the tone and feel of the book from a Wayne Prentice novel to a Bryce Proctorr novel wasn’t hard; instantly he knew how to phrase Wayne’s thoughts in his own words.
The third chapter, a very powerful mountainside near-death scene, was now the first chapter, with the rest adapted to fit, which was partly because Bryce thought it read better with that strong opening and partly because, if one of the few people who’d seen the book in its original form were to pick it up and start to read it, the story wouldn’t seem instantly familiar. If it felt familiar later on, that would be all right; most novels remind us of other novels.
On the weekend, he could be with Isabelle. A divorced woman of thirty-four, soft and round with lustrous black hair, she was the daughter of a Spanish diplomat who’d retired back to Spain not long ago from some sort of long-term post at the United Nations. Isabelle’s ex-husband was Spanish, had divorced her in Spain, and had custody of their three children, all under twelve. This was Isabelle’s ongoing agony and struggle, the way Lucie was Bryce’s, and they could find temporary respite and forgetfulness and comfort with one another. In Madrid, Isabelle’s father was doing his best to get the case reopened, but for some reason the Catholic Church seemed to be on the ex-husband’s side; Bryce thought it smarter not to delve too deeply into that situation.
They traveled separately to and from Connecticut every weekend, she driving up Friday morning and back Monday afternoon. She was a copywriter for an ad agency, working mostly on catalog copy for manufacturers of faux country-style clothing. Her arrangement with her boss was that she could work at home—at Bryce’s home, actually—Fridays and Mondays, so long as she was available to have material faxed to her and to fax copy back. Otherwise, it was merely expected that her long weekends would leave her refreshed, with new copy in hand.
Bryce took the train. He used to drive, used to love it, but three winters ago he and Lucie had been a minor part of a multicar pileup during bad rain on Interstate 84, and the sight of the much greater destruction just beyond his own battered BMW—the one he’d gotten for doing the ad—had left him fearful for a long time. He was enjoying too good a life to want to throw it away. And he wasn’t a commuter in the normal sense, he didn’t have a job with time pressure at the New York end, so why not conveniently, comfortably, safely take the train?
Monday morning he took the train, a later one than the rush-hour people, and again he had a dual seat to himself, so he could continue to go over Two Faces in the Mirror. Occasionally, on the train, somebody would ask him for an autograph, but most riders on this line were more sophisticated than that. He could see them recognize him from time to time, but they left him alone.
He had done almost all he could with the manuscript. It had been a good novel to begin with, and he felt he’d made it better. Really, all that was needed now was for Wayne to return the contract.
He had. Bryce got home just before lunchtime, and Saturday’s mail was waiting for him, and there was the envelope with “Prentice” on the return address. Manila envelope, manuscript size, not too thick. Priority Mail sticker.
He saw it, on the table just inside the front door where Jorge, the doorman, always put his mail when he was away, and he felt an instant of terrible fear. He’s done it! he thought. She’s dead!
He didn’t open the envelope then, nor look at the rest of his mail, but went beyond it, feeling weak, knees shaky, and sat in the living room, his back to the view of Central Park. He was trembling, and his throat felt constricted.
No, she isn’t dead, he told himself. Calm down. He knew what I meant when I mentioned California in the note. She’s still alive.
When he had himself convinced that the only reason he’d experienced that moment of dread was because he’d thought Prentice might have killed her before Bryce could establish his California alibi, he got up and went to the kitchen and found in the refrigerator an open container of plain yogurt. That would settle his stomach. Lucie hadn’t liked it when he’d eat yogurt directly from the carton, then put the carton back in the refrigerator, but there was no one around to complain now.
Back in the entryway, he glanced at the rest of the mail without opening it or caring about it, then at last opened the manila envelope from Wayne Prentice, and there they were, the three copies of the contract, with an extra blank sheet of typing paper that said only, in computer printout:
There were things to do, the travel agent to be called, other people, packing to do, Isabelle. Could she come to be with him for a while in California? But instead of doing any of that, he put in a call to lawyer Bob, and was told that he was with a client. “Would you ask him to call me as soon as he’s free? It’s sort of urgent.”
She said she would, and he went to the bedroom to lay out the things he’d want to take to Los Angeles with him. Too early to phone people there, and he didn’t yet feel like calling the travel agent.
The thing is, what if it wasn’t necessary? If this divorce thing were going to end soon, then all he and Wayne would have to do would be wait a few weeks, maybe a month at the outside, and then turn in Two Faces in the Mirror without the threat of having to give half the money to Lucie. Once the agreement was signed, everything could work just like before, but without that one dangerous step.
If we don’t have to take that one dangerous step, he told himself reasonably, it would be better. For us. For me.
It was almost an hour before lawyer Bob returned the call. His voice was distinctive, deep but rough and raspy, as though he could almost sing bass in a barbershop quartet except he wouldn’t be quite musical enough. He said, “Helen says it’s urgent.”
“Well, I don’t know about urgent,” Bryce said. “The thing is, I’m going to LA for a while, possible movie deals—”
“I’d hold them up, if you can.”
“Oh, I know, we can do that,” Bryce assured him. “The thing is, before I leave, I was wondering, is there any chance at all we’re gonna see daylight soon?”
“Daylight?” Lawyer Bob didn’t seem to understand the concept.
“I mean, closure,” Bryce said. “Is there any possibility, in the next few weeks, we’ll be signing those papers, getting this thing behind us?”
“Not a chance,” lawyer Bob said. “Next few weeks? I thought you understood, Bryce, it isn’t going to happen this year. Spring, if we’re lucky.”
“Oh, Jesus, Bob, it’s so—”
“Bryce, we’ve still got unresolved issues before the court. State of residency, for instance. Your copyrights exist where you are. If you were a Connecticut resident, and Lucie remained a New York resident throughout, can a New York court distribute Connecticut property? In some cases, yes. In this case, it’s not so clear-cut.”
“I thought we resolved that,” Bryce said. “I used the Connecticut house as my residence because Connecticut didn’t used to have an income tax, and Lucie kept the New York apartment as her residence because it was in her name and they couldn’t go crazy with the rent on us.”
“They’re appealing the decision,” lawyer Bob said. “It’s really very dry and dull, Bryce, you don’t want to hear every gory detail, but believe me, at the end of the day, we’ll prevail.”
“The end of the day.”
“Frankly, I think one reason they’re stalling is because they’re waiting for your next book to be published.”
“Bastards.”
“At some point, not yet,” lawyer Bob said, “we can make that argument to the court, and I believe it will be persuasive. Until then, we just have to go through the process, that’s all.”
“Not this year.”
“Next year. Almost guaranteed.”
“Almost?” He couldn’t believe lawyer Bob was serious, but on the other hand, the man had no known sense of humor.
“These things are unpredictable, Bryce,” lawyer Bob said. “Mostly because people are not at their most rational in a divorce. But my guess on this case, barring anything unforeseen, is sometime in the spring. Thank your lucky stars you two didn’t have children, that would really drag it out.”
Like Isabelle’s children in Spain. There’s always somebody worse off than you, Bryce told himself, and an image of Lucie flashed by, immediately suppressed. “Thanks, Bob,” he said. “I just wanted to know where I stand.”
“Pretty much where you stood, Bryce.”
“Got it,” Bryce said.
While he was looking up the travel agent’s number, he thought, call Lucie? He had the phone number at the apartment she’d taken. Call her, say to her, why don’t we just get this over with, go on with our lives? You tell your lawyer to quit stalling, I’ll tell my lawyer to quit stalling, we’ll just end it, no more bitterness, start thinking about the future for a change.
No. He could hear her voice, he could hear her laugh, he could hear her scorn. Open himself up to her like that? She’d slice him in two.
Besides, there are phone records. There shouldn’t be a record of a call from him to her just before . . .
The travel agent’s number. He dialed it.
I’ll be going out tomorrow night,” Wayne said.
Susan almost asked him where he’d be, he could see it in the light of the candles as they ate dinner together, as usual, that Tuesday evening. He could see the question form, and then see her find the answer on her own, and she looked down at her plate, as though embarrassed, and said, in a low voice, “Will you be late?”
“I don’t think so.”
It was as though he were having an affair, seeing another woman, and he and Susan were keeping the marriage alive by pretending it wasn’t going on, Susan waiting for it to blow over and for him to return to her, he waiting . . .
For what? For Bryce to call and say it was all a joke? You didn’t take me seriously, did you, pal, it was just a bull session, of course that’s what it was, a coupla plotmeisters sitting around scheming.
The contract was real, drawn up by a real law firm. The Domino Doublet had been sent to Bryce and had not come back. He’d returned the contract, with that little note about California. If Bryce wanted to change his mind, this was the time to do it.
And if Wayne wanted to change his mind? But how could he? He’d given away his unpublished novel, he’d signed and returned that contract, he’d managed to meet Lucie Proctorr and now he had a dinner date with her. He was in motion, whatever this motion was, and what was the alternative? He was in the situation he was in right now because there was no alternative.
They finished the meal in silence, and watched something or other on PBS. When they were going to bed, her body looked strange to him, foreign, not appealing. He sensed that she felt the same way about him.
Before they turned off the lights, she said, “Is this the end of it?”
“Oh, no,” he said, startled she’d think it would happen that fast, that easily. “No, this is just—This isn’t the end.”
He wanted to say to her, this is just the reconnaissance, really. I’m meeting her at her apartment, and we’re going to dinner in her neighborhood, and this is to figure out what the possibilities are. I don’t even know what, how I’m going to, what weapon. I think I’ve even been avoiding all those thoughts.
He might have to take a train south some day soon, buy a gun. He’d never owned a gun, never shot one, but maybe.
What else, what were the other possibilities? He’d have to think about it, see if tomorrow evening gave him any ideas. A number of his characters, in his books, had killed other of his characters, in various ways, but at this point he couldn’t remember how any of them had done it, or how it had seemed easy.
He wanted to say, no, Susan, this is just the reconnaissance, don’t worry about tomorrow. But to say that would begin the conversation they’d agreed not to hold. No conversation, not till later. Some time later.
With the lights off, he suddenly thought of the stack of resumés he’d made at the copy shop. They were still atop the filing cabinet in his office, with the partial list of college addresses that he’d stopped, incomplete, when Bryce had spoken to him. What if he were to send them out, just to see?
Not tomorrow, that would hex everything. Thursday, after his first date (!) with Lucie Proctorr. Not even mention it to Susan, just send them out, see what the responses were. Maybe there was a wonderful job out there he didn’t even know about, and some way that Susan could go on with her own career.
I’ll send them, he thought. First the reconnaissance with Lucie, then I’ll send out the resumés.
He couldn’t sleep, was restless. At one time, turning from his side onto his back, his right hand brushed her left hand, and she at once closed her fingers around his. He held tight to her fingers and they lay side by side, on their backs, not talking, grasping hands.
* * *
The reservation was for eight, and they’d agreed on the phone he’d pick her up at her place at seven-thirty. “If the weather’s decent, we can walk, it’s just a few blocks from you.”
“Oh? Where are we going?”
“Salt,” he said, naming a restaurant near her on Columbus Avenue.
“Well, good,” she said, sounding surprised he’d chosen well. “I haven’t eaten there, I’ve wanted to.”
“See you tomorrow,” he said, and at seven-thirty Wednesday evening he paid off his cab outside her building and stood a minute on the sidewalk.
It was a cool evening, late November, but dry. Her building was a modern high-rise, taking up half a block of Broadway in the low eighties, on the west side of the street, a part of the spurt of apartment building construction in this neighborhood a dozen years ago. The facade was some kind of mottled maroon stone, highly polished, and the broad entrance was high-tech, glass doors and wall and chrome verticals, as though it were the entrance to an airport building rather than somewhere that people lived. Inside, to the right, a uniformed doorman sat at a wide high desk of the same stone, reading.
A doorman. That wasn’t a problem tonight, but what about the future? Whatever he did, however he did it, whenever he did it, it would have to be away from here. And even so, would the doorman, sometime later on, be able to identify him as someone who occasionally visited Lucie Proctorr?
Wayne turned away, and walked slowly up the block, looking through the glass wall at the doorman, who remained deeply involved in his reading. It was a fotonovela, a kind of comic book in Spanish that used photographs of actors and actresses instead of drawings.
Wayne walked on to the corner, then turned back, trying to decide what to do. Phone her? Suggest they meet at the restaurant? Too late for that. And what excuse would he give?
It was also too late to leave. His only choice was to keep moving forward, adapt to circumstances.
This time, as he reached the building entrance he turned his coat collar up and pulled his hat a little lower on his forehead; not too much, not to look like an escaped convict. Then he walked through the entrance and immediately held both cupped hands to his mouth, blowing into them. “Getting cold out there,” he said.
The doorman put a finger on his place in the novela, glancing at Wayne with impatience. “Who you wanno see?”
“Ms. Proctorr.”
The doorman kept that finger on the novela, holding it open, as he reached with his left hand for the house phone, laid it on the counter in front of himself, and punched out the number, saying, “An you are?”
“Tell her it’s Wayland,” he said, and turned away to look out at the street, watching the traffic, giving the doorman less than a profile of his face.
The doorman spoke into the phone, then hung it up and was already looking at his novela when he said, “Sixteen-C. The secon elevators, back there.”
“Thanks.”
Wayne walked to the elevator feeling pleased with himself. The doorman’s accent would have conflated “Wayland” and “Wayne” for Lucie, but if he ever had to give a name to the police it would not be Wayne.
He was alone in the elevator. When he stepped out at 16, it was into a smallish well-decorated rectangular space that was shared by four apartments. Lucie stood in the doorway to the left. “Right on time,” she said. “Very good.”
“We aim to please.”
“Come on in.”
She stepped back, and he went through the doorway directly into a large but low-ceilinged living room. The place was furnished tastefully but anonymously by the management, like the living room of a good hotel suite. The primary colors were beige and rust, in the sofas, the end tables, the carpet that covered most of the blond wood floor, even the several paintings on the walls, which were of southern European village scenes, steep streets and old stone walls.
“Sit for a minute,” she said, with an airily dismissive wave at the low sofas. “I’m almost ready. Are we walking?”
“Oh, I think so,” he said. “It’s nice out.”
She said, “Do you want a drink?”
“Only if you are.”
“One for the road. If I’m going to walk, I want wine. Red wine because it’s winter. What about you?”
“Same,” he said.
“I’ll be back.”
She went away down an interior hall, and he looked around, deciding not to sink into one of those low sofas. Instead, he crossed the long room to the wide window and looked out over the roofs of shorter buildings to the black river and New Jersey beyond.
Sixteen stories; quite a drop. Except the window was plate glass, and couldn’t be opened. Would there be an openable window anywhere in the apartment? Maybe in the bedroom.
Not a good idea. A screaming woman dropping through the night, Wayne waiting for the elevator, and the doorman in the lobby.
She came back with red wine in a surprisingly fancy etched glass. “Very nice,” he said, taking it.
She said, “Don’t try to figure me out from the surroundings, I rented this place furnished, absolutely everything in here came with it.”
“Everything?”
“Well, almost everything,” she acknowledged, and gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Why?”
There was a terra-cotta statue of a chunky horse and his bundled-up rider, less than a foot tall, on an end table, too large for the space. Wayne had noticed it on the way in and thought it was probably a copy of one of the thousands of terra-cotta cavalrymen and their mounts that had been discovered buried in China a few years before. He’d read about them in the course of something he was researching. He gestured with the wineglass at the statue and said, “That’s yours, isn’t it?”
The narrow-eyed look became narrower. She turned to gaze at horse and rider as though rethinking her ownership of the piece, then nodded briskly at him and said, “Try, Wayne, not to be too brilliant.”
“That’ll be easy,” he said, trying for a friendly smile, wanting to keep it as light as possible. After all, he’d want to come back here, wouldn’t he? Another time?
“Good,” she said. Moving away once more toward the hall, she said, “I won’t be long. A man wouldn’t notice this sort of thing, but this hair is not ready for public inspection. I’ll just be a sec.”
She was fifteen minutes. He spent part of that time, wineglass in hand, wandering the beige room, thinking these apartments would mostly be rented to corporate people, businessmen assigned for a few weeks or a few months to New York. Lucie Proctorr being here showed that she, too, had put her life on hold, waiting for the divorce, the same as Bryce.
He also hefted various objects in the room, looking for something lethal. Everything seemed too lightweight. Besides, could he do that? Hit someone on the back of the head with a . . . with that ashtray? All that golden hair; wouldn’t it cushion her?
When at last she came out, she looked to his eyes the same as before, but she seemed satisfied with whatever changes she’d made. “All set. Is it windy?”
“No, not really.”
“I’ll bring a scarf,” she decided, and he thought about strangulations with a scarf. Isadora Duncan. He didn’t see how that would work.
He helped her with her coat, and they left the apartment to wait for the elevator. Trying to find conversation, he said, “I was thinking, those furnished apartments like that, they’re mostly rented to corporate types.”
“And divorcing women who live alone,” she said, as the elevator arrived. They boarded, she pushed L, and as they descended she said, “Women who really want to live where there’s a doorman.”
“I guess so.”
“Believe me,” she said, “a doorman is just as good as a husband any day. More reliable, usually.”
“You can feel safe,” he said.
“I always feel safe,” she said.
When they crossed the lobby, he kept Lucie between himself and the doorman, who looked up, recognized the tenant, and said, “You wan a taxi?”
“No, we’re hiking,” she said.
Looking back at his novela, the doorman pushed a button that opened the glass door as they reached it. They went outside and she said, “Which way?”
“Over to Columbus, I guess, and up.”
They crossed Broadway at the corner and headed down the side street. “Oh, it’s a great night,” she said. “I can smell winter, can’t you?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Oh, God, then Christmas,” she said, and made a disgusted sound. “Family.”
“You don’t like your family?”
“I like them where they are. And I like me where I am.”
“Where are they?”
“A place called Carmody, outside St. Louis.” She sounded affectedly weary when she said, “You fly to St. Louis, and some relative has to drive and drive to pick you up and take you home, and then four days later they have to drive you all the way back, and you fly in another airplane, and you say, ‘Please, God, never again,’ but there’s no escape.”
“What’s wrong with your family?”
“Oh, nothing, really, nothing,” she said.
They turned north on Columbus, the herds of headlights descending the avenue toward them, one with every cycle of green, and she said, “If I’d stayed in Carmody, married somebody I went to high school with, they’d all be just great, and I suppose I’d be a nicer person, too. But I went away, I’m more than fifteen years away, and we don’t think like each other any more. I can’t stand the television they watch. Their jokes are so stale and old, and they insist on telling them. And they never understand a word I say, of course. I’ve been in New York all this time. I was married to the rat for seven years, and when you’re married to him you go first class, my dear, you meet the elegant and the swellegant. It’s not just that I’m a big girl now, I’m a big city girl now. But enough about me, tell me, what do you think of me?”
“I think you’re funny,” he said, a bit surprised to find that was true. I’m not going to like her, I hope, he thought. I don’t have to make Bryce’s mistake and fall in love with her, all I have to do is like her, and everything’s messed up.
“Funny,” she echoed. “That’s been my goal all these years, to have somebody too cheap to take a taxi think I’m funny.”
Oh, good, he thought, let’s have more of that, and they reached the restaurant. “Here we are,” he said.
* * *
They sat at one of the tables in the raised section at the rear, where they could look out and down at the bar, already half full, the pretty brunette bartender in constant motion. Later on, there’d be live jazz, and the bar would fill entirely, and there’d be a second bartender.
After they’d ordered, Lucie turned to him and said, “So how long have you been divorced?”
Startled, he said, “What?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, “everybody our age has been married, and you’re not a faggot, and if you’re taking me out you’re not married any more, so you’re divorced. I mean, this is not as brilliant reasoning as you and my dynasty horse.”
“I’m not divorced,” he said. “Like you, you aren’t divorced.”
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “En train, the separation in place, the lawyers at the trough. You know, a friend of the rat’s once said he’d never heard of a trial separation that didn’t work, but I say the trial comes before the separation. So who left who? What’s she like?”
What to say? How to handle this? He had to tell some lies, but not too many. He could describe Susan as she was, but give her a bit more of that hard edge she could sometimes have, not with him, but that tough flat voice he’d heard her use on the phone a few times, talking with people about things related to her job. “Her name is Susan,” he said. “Susan Costello.”
“She kept her maiden name?”
“On the job.”
“What job?”
“She works for an outfit called UniCare,” he told her. “They allocate money to charities.”
“What does she do there?”
“She’s the assistant director.”
“Of the whole thing?”
“Yeah, the whole thing.”
“It sounds like a big deal,” she said. “Is it?”
“Yeah, it is. She’s testified before congressional committees a couple times. Mostly, though, it’s just keeping everything running.”
The waitress brought a small dish, then an amuse guise “compliments of the chef”: avocado puree on sesame-crusted salmon with a dab of Japanese barbeque sauce. When they’d admired it and eaten it, Lucie said, “So your Susan makes good money.”
“Pretty good,” he agreed. “Charity work isn’t that great, but pretty good.”
“That explains it,” she said.
The waitress took away the small plates and brought their first courses. Lucie started to eat, and Wayne said, “Explains what?”
She held her fork up to say, wait, my mouth is full, then put it down to sip some wine. “Very good wine.”
“Thank you.”
“And a really good restaurant. You chose well.”
“Thank you again.”
He waited, but she didn’t say anything else. When she reached for her fork, he said, “Explains what?”
“Oh,” she said, as though it hardly mattered. “I looked you up in Amazon.”
“Oh, did you?” She was that interested, at least.
“You haven’t published anything for years and years.”
“Eight years.” No point getting into the tribulations of Tim Fleet.
“And everything’s out of print,” she said. “I clicked for used copies, and there were just a few, for not much money.”
“I’ve never looked myself up in Amazon,” he said. “I suppose I ought to.”
“Don’t,” she advised, “you’ll find it depressing. But I wondered, what were you living on? I mean, you don’t have a job, you go around saying you’re a writer. But now, I guess, the only question is, what will you live on after Susan divorces you? She’s the one leaving, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I’m not living on Susan, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve had editorial work,” he said, “other writing work. I support myself.”
“Well, you don’t have to be defensive about it,” she said, but there was a gleam in her eye.
* * *
Between the appetizer and the main course, she said, “Will you get alimony?”
“What, me? From Susan? No, of course not.”
“Men can, you know. And, God knows, she won’t get any from you.”
“You’ll be getting alimony,” he said.
“You’re damn right I will,” she agreed. “Once the lawyers get finished with their little dance, and I don’t care how long it takes, the longer the better for me, I’m going to be rich, and glad of it. And don’t think I haven’t earned it. Seven years of his ego. And let’s not even talk about sex.”
“I didn’t intend to,” he said.
She looked at him with laughing surprise. “Wit!” she cried. “I had no idea you could be witty! Wit and brilliance. What a catch you’ll be for some solvent girl.”
* * *
He paid cash, to avoid any record in this neighborhood. Walking homeward, Columbus Avenue traffic behind them now, giving the sidewalk ahead of them a shifting dull gray gleam, the sky above them featureless, not black but like a thick black cloth over a faint source of light, she said, “I had fun.”
I’m sure you did, he thought, but said, “So did I. That’s a good place.”
“Do you miss writing?” she asked.
“I write,” he said, but he himself could hear that he was being defensive again.
“I mean novel writing,” she said. “Come on, you knew what I meant. The rat had to do it, I told him it was like an addiction, take him away from it a few days, it was like withdrawal, he turned into an absolute bear.”
“I guess that’s pretty normal,” he said, thinking how much Bryce must have enjoyed having Lucie describe him to himself, time after time. While he was probably trying to get back to work.
“Nothing’s normal with a writer,” she said. “If you swore off, and I guess you must have, left it or it left you, you are no doubt a better person for it.”
“No doubt,” he said.
They were mostly quiet as they walked the side street over to Broadway, crossed, and turned south. Then she said, “You’re very calm, aren’t you?”
What now? “Am I?”
“Oh, I see a little edginess in you sometimes,” she said, “but not a lot. I think you’re basically a calm person.”
“You do?”
“Oh, dear. That sounds dull, doesn’t it?” She pretend-smacked herself on the side of the head. “I didn’t mean dull,” she said, “you’re not dull. I just mean you’re not antsy all the time.”
He had to smile. “Like the rat?”
“Exactly. Why did Susan leave you?”
“Maybe because I was dull,” he said.
“Ouch,” she said, and briefly touched his arm, as though to ask forgiveness. “I really didn’t mean dull,” she said. “Really.”
“Okay.”
“So what was it? Were you playing around?”
“No, of course not,” he said.
“Of course not?” When he glanced her way, he could see her give him a measuring look. He faced front again, as they approached her building, and she said, “I can see you as a very unfaithful guy. Saying, ‘Oh, it doesn’t count because I only really love Susan, but boy, I would like to get next to that one, and that one.’ Do you still love her?”
“I don’t know,” he said, wishing she’d ride him on some other topic. “I suppose we go on loving the person we used to love, one way or another.”
“Are you kidding?” They’d reached her building, and both stood on the sidewalk while she said, “Do you think, do you honestly think, I have any love in me for the rat? My dear, he wore that off me a long time ago.”
“Was he playing around?”
“No,” she said, sounding disgusted. “I don’t think so, anyway. The great love of Bryce Proctorr’s life, you know, is Bryce Proctorr. Why would he need to play around?”
“Well, he should be happy now, I guess,” Wayne said.
“I certainly hope not,” she said. “I suppose you want to come up.”
This was the problem he’d been worrying over since partway through dinner. She was so aggressive, and so fast, that he had come to realize she would expect more from him on a first date than he’d expected, or was prepared for.
I’d kill her, he thought, but I won’t sleep with her, I didn’t come here to be unfaithful to Susan. But what was he going to do? He didn’t want to alienate Lucie, because he needed to be able to come back, to see her again, take her somewhere safe, when he was ready, when he knew exactly how to go about it, when he was armed.
Go with it. For a while, at least, go with it. “I suppose so,” he said, to echo what she had said: “I suppose you want to come up.”
“Well, there’s enthusiasm,” she said.
“I don’t want to push myself on you.”
She tapped his chest with her fingertips. “Don’t worry, my dear, you’ll never do that. But you can come up for a few minutes, if you really want. Just so you understand, I will not go to bed with you.”
He hid his relief by pretending to hide his disappointment with a deadpan, “Okay.”
“We’ll have one more glass of wine,” she told him, “and we’ll have a nice chat, and then I’ll throw you out.”
“It’s a deal,” he said, and would have shaken her hand to confirm it, but she’d already turned away toward the entrance, and the doorman had already seen her and pushed the button to open the door.
Once again, he hid behind that head of golden hair as they went past the doorman’s desk.
* * *
“I’ll just be a minute.”
“Fine.”
On one side wall of the living room stood a glass-doored, glass-shelved cabinet that contained a sparse display of trophies and commemorative plates from the fifties and earlier; some decorator’s idea of what the nomadic businessman would like. Wayne looked at them, the honors and memorials bleached of meaning in this beige room, while Lucie went off down the interior hall again, and soon he heard a toilet flush.
The end table with the Chinese horse and rider was near the cabinet. Wayne studied it without touching it. This artifact did have meaning for her. What?
She came in with two glasses of the red wine, not as good as what they’d been drinking in the restaurant, but in better glasses. “You don’t mind the same glass,” she said.
“Not at all.” He accepted the glass she reached toward him, and she held hers up for a toast, saying, “To divorce.”
“Sure,” he said, grinning, tapping glasses with her. “Why?”
“Because you get to meet all new people,” she said, and laughed, and sipped her wine.
“Like Alzheimer’s,” he said, and drank.
She made a disgusted face. “Oh, don’t be morbid, for God’s sake. What did you think of the play the other night?”
Apparently they were to stand here, a two-person cocktail party. He said, “It was fun.”
Another wrong answer. She made a scrinched-up face, and said, “Did you really like it?”
“I take it you didn’t.”
“What trash,” she said. “Poor Janet, that’s all she gets are these lighter-than-air yuppie comedies; supposed to be all about sex, they’re just about some loser’s idea of witty repartee. She wants to do better work, she wants to direct at the Public, but she has to build a body of work, and all it is is this trash. I told her once, ‘Janet, you’ll have to tie weights to the actors or they’ll float up into the flies,’ that’s how lightweight they all are.”
“I bet you did,” he said.
“Of course I did. I always tell the truth, it’s easier that way. You like the truth, don’t you?”
“Love it,” he said.
“I knew you did. Is Susan any good in bed?”
“Very,” he said, and put his wineglass down on the table next to the dynasty horse, and punched Lucie as hard as he could in the stomach.
They were both astonished. He thought, not now! This is wrong, this isn’t what I meant, this is too messy, this isn’t right!
Her eyes were widening, her arms were moving in slow motion to fold across her belly, her mouth was opening, she was folding forward. He punched her again, hard, this time in the face, and she jolted back into the cabinet, knocking plates and trophies awry, and he moved in after her.
It’s started, it’s too late now, I can’t go back, what am I going to do?
She leaped at him! He hadn’t expected that, either, and his deflection was clumsy, both arms swinging around, thrusting her lunge to his left. He’d thought she would keep falling, back and back, as he would go on hitting her, but her instincts were so aggressive, it was as though they were both acting without thought, even though his brain was full of thoughts, a vast confusion of thoughts, while outside his brain everything was happening too fast.
She came at him with nails, fingers into talons, and he ducked back and away, knowing he couldn’t permit her to scar him, mark him, he couldn’t leave traces of his flesh under her nails. He kicked wildly, hitting the front of her right thigh, half-turning her as he backpedalled.
She came at him again, blood on her face, mouth distorted, not screaming yet, but soon she’d scream, and he couldn’t have that, either. He jumped back a pace, this time aimed, and kicked her solidly, the outside of his right shoe squarely against her right knee. She jerked toward him, and looked astonished as she fell, and he kicked her in the mouth as she was going down.
Loud thump. Let the people downstairs be at the movies. She landed face down, and he dropped heavily to his knees onto her back, reached down, grabbed her jaw in his right hand, the golden hair clutched in his left, and tried to jerk her head around to the right.
He couldn’t do it, whatever he was trying to do he wasn’t doing it, break her neck or twist off her head or whatever it was, it wasn’t working, and he abandoned that and reached out to his left and found the table with the dynasty horse and his wineglass on it, and pulled it to him, horse and glass both flying somewhere.
Rectangular, thin-legged table, but thick solid wooden top. He raised it over his head with both hands and brought the edge of it down hard on the back of her head. And then again onto her neck. And then again on her head.
She wasn’t moving. Her arms were half bent, up beside her head, fingers curled. He reached out to move her right arm, and it waggled. He put the table on the floor, leaned down close to her, to the bloody mess of the right side of her face, and very faintly he could hear the ragged breathing.
Until this instant, there had been nothing sexual in it. The whole thing had been so unexpected, so unplanned, so much the result of the tension he was feeling, the fear, the doubt. She had not been a woman, she had merely been something that moved and made sound and it was his job to stop the movement and stop the sounds.
Now, the smell of her, the warmth of the body under his, that faint sound of her breath in and out of her broken nose, and he became aware of her as a sexual being. Oh, don’t, he told himself, straightening, still kneeling on her back. Don’t be aroused by this, for God’s sake.
He climbed off her, shaky, tottering. He went down that interior hall and found the antiseptic bare kitchen. Her plastic-bag collection was in a plastic bag inside the doored space under the sink. He chose two large bags from the supermarket and brought them back to the living room.
Her bowels had released. No fear any more of being turned on. He knelt beside her, fitted first one bag and then the other over her head, twisted them at the back of her neck to improve the seal. Then he closed his eyes and knelt there, holding the twisted bags.
He stayed there like that for a long time. He didn’t want to think about what he’d just done, he wanted to think about what he had yet to do. Fingerprints. The wineglass, on the floor unbroken. The end table. The doorknob. The door handle under the sink in the kitchen.
Somewhere, she would have a datebook, probably by the phone in her bedroom. His name would be in it, for tonight. Take the entire datebook. Look around for anything else that might have his name on it, or anything about him.
Robbery. This should be a robbery, not a boyfriend, not a crime of passion. Find jewelry, something obvious, anything, something of value, take it away, get rid of it. Rings, necklaces, cascading into the sewer. Not in this neighborhood, he’d walk close to Times Square, Ninth Avenue, where it’s darker, drop the stuff into the sewer, take the subway home from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Planning. Planning, eyes squeezed shut. Slowly, the thoughts calmed down, and when at last he opened his eyes, he felt so drained he could barely move. All his limbs were stiff. The fingers holding the twisted plastic bags were stiff. He moved himself, this way and that, freed his fingers from the bag, then looked down at her, touched her, inspected her.
She was dead.
* * *
As he slid into bed, Susan rolled over in the darkness and said, “Wayne? What’s wrong?”
“It’s over,” he said.
“You aren’t going to do it?”
“It’s done.”
He turned toward her, and she put her arms around him, and he nestled his face in against the warm side of her throat, felt the beating of the pulse there. Her breath was regular in his ear, strong and regular, not weak and ragged.
After a while, she said, “Was it bad?”
“Worse than you can know,” he said.
Friday afternoon, Bryce got back to the Bel Air a little after three. He’d had lunch with an actor, a star of tough-cop roles, who wanted to make a series of films based on the characters in Bryce’s Twice Tolled. Bryce had thought he’d used up those characters by the end of that book, that there was nothing more to say about them, but the actor had a vision.
He kept using the word “franchise,” which out here apparently didn’t mean Burger King but meant a continuing roll in a series of films that the actor could be identified with, so that the audience would want to see him play the part again and again. The actor said the general belief out here was that audiences liked that sense of the familiar, given how much a movie ticket costs these days, but Bryce suspected it was the moviemakers themselves who needed that sense of the familiar—remakes, sequels, series, franchises—given how much a movie costs these days.
He didn’t know if the actor had any kind of studio support behind him for this idea, but saw no reason to throw cold water on it. He wished the actor well, honestly enjoyed the anecdotes, had a very nice lunch, and when he reached the hotel he didn’t go at first to the bungalow but inside to the desk, to say, “Has Ms. de Fuentes arrived yet?” Isabelle was supposed to have been on the morning flight out of Kennedy, which should have arrived at eleven-thirty.
“Yes, I believe she’s in the bungalow,” the clerk told him, and gestured away to Bryce’s left, saying, “And these two gentlemen are waiting for you.”
Gentlemen? He turned, and saw two men rising from lobby sofas, moving toward him, and his first thought was that they were both the actor he’d just had lunch with. A second later, he realized, no, these were the real thing. And a second after that, he knew what it meant.
Poker face, he told himself, though inside he was flabbergasted. Wayne had done it! He’d actually done it! Somehow, even though he’d come all the way out here to get out of the way, Bryce had never truly believed it, that Wayne would actually go through with it, that this story they were making up together would burst into real life.
Wayne’s done it, he thought, and something icy touched his spine.
“Mr. Proctorr?”
“Yes?”
“Detective Grasso,” showing a gold badge in a soft black leather case, “and Detective Maurice, LAPD. We’d like to speak with you for a few minutes.”
“Yes, of course.”
He stood waiting, with a half smile, but Detective Grasso said, “It should be in private, sir.”
“I don’t understand.”
Detective Maurice said, “We’d like to go to your room, sir, if we could.”
“Oh.” Bryce frowned, reacting to the complications. “The problem is,” he said, “my fiancée just arrived from New York, I haven’t even seen her yet, I don’t know if she’s showering or what she might be doing.” Gesturing at the sofas where the two men had been seated, he said, “Couldn’t we talk here?”
“We’d prefer not to be in public, sir,” Detective Grasso said. Both men were polite, but cold, and insistent.
Bryce said, “Let me call the room, okay?”
“Good idea,” Detective Grasso told him.
They waited near the desk, both watching him, not talking together, as he went over to the house phones. Isabelle answered on the second ring, and he said, “Sweetheart, hi, it’s me, I’m in the lobby.”
“Why?”
“There are two detectives here, police detectives, I don’t know what it’s about, but they want to talk to me in the bungalow.”
“Detectives?”
“Could you—I don’t know, could you go to the coffee shop for a few minutes? I’m sorry to do this to you, sweet—”
“Of course, Bryce, not a problem. I’ll leave now.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll be in the coffee shop, burning with curiosity, when you’re finished.”
He went back to the detectives: “She’s leaving there now.”
“Sorry to disrupt things, sir,” Detective Grasso said, but he didn’t sound sorry and he didn’t look sorry.
Bryce led the way along the outside path through the lush green plantings to the bungalow and unlocked them in, then said, “Can I get you anything? Seltzer? Juice?”
“No, thank you,” Detective Grasso said. “Could we sit here, sir?”
“Yes, of course.”
The living room area had two short sofas placed in an L-shape with a large square glass coffee table. Bryce sat on the sofa to the right, Detective Grasso on the sofa to the left, while Detective Maurice brought a chair over from the dining table.
Detective Grasso had a small notebook and pen out now, and he said, “You say that was your fiancée, sir?”
“Yes, that’s right, she just came out from New York.”
“And what’s her name, sir?”
“Isabelle de Fuentes.”
“Is she an Angeleno, sir?”
“No, from New York. Spanish, really, her father was at the United Nations, but she’s an American citizen. Excuse me, but, could you tell me what this is about?”
“I’m afraid it’s bad news, sir,” Detective Maurice told him.
“Bad news?”
Detective Grasso said, “About your wife, sir.”
“My—Oh, Lucie! We’re getting a di—What do you mean? What about her?”
“She’s dead,” Detective Grasso said.
Those four cold eyes looking at him, weighing him. An innocent man would feel guilty! I’m innocent, I didn’t do it! “Dead? But why would she—How?”
“She was beaten to death in her apartment,” Detective Maurice told him.
That was surprising, and horrible, too. He hadn’t known, or wanted to know, how Wayne would do it, but he would have guessed a gun, or maybe poison, something like that. “Beaten? Lucie?”
“Wednesday night, sir,” Detective Grasso said. “That would be the day after you checked in here.”
“Tuesday, yes, but—Wait, please, I’m trying to understand this. Beaten?”
And now he was thinking, it wasn’t Wayne, that couldn’t have been Wayne, it’s an absolutely insane coincidence, never get away with that in a novel, there wasn’t time for Wayne to have done it already, somebody broke in, some drug addict, rapist . . .
“Somebody,” he said, and found his throat dry, and swallowed noisily. “Somebody,” he said, “broke in?”
“There was no indication of forced entry,” Detective Grasso said.
“She knew her attacker,” Detective Maurice said.
“But—why? Was it—was it, you know, rape?”
“No, sir,” Detective Grasso said, and Bryce astounded and horrified himself by laughing. They didn’t react, just both kept watching him.
“She’s dead,” he told them, in explanation, still helplessly grinning, “beaten to death, and I’m worried about rape.”
Detective Maurice said, “Sir, I think you could use a glass of water.”
“I want to hear this,” Bryce told him. “Wednesday. Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
Detective Maurice got up and went over to the kitchen area, as Detective Grasso said, “She was found this morning. She was supposed to see friends last night, go to a movie, I believe, and never showed up. They tried phoning her, and this morning when she still wasn’t around one of them phoned the local precinct there.”
Detective Maurice came back with a tall glass of clear water and extended it to Bryce, saying, “You ought to drink this, sir. A bit at a time.”
“Thank you,” Bryce said, but when he took the glass he almost dropped it, and then had to hold it with both hands. He drank some, and the edge of the glass chattered painfully against his teeth. He put it on the coffee table with a clatter, then held his hands out, palms down, and stared at them. “I’m shaking,” he said.
“Take it easy, Mr. Proctorr,” Detective Grasso said.
Bryce stared at Detective Grasso. He felt he was laughing again, or smiling maniacally, but he didn’t seem to have any control. “We’re getting divorced,” he explained, “we don’t love each other any more, we don’t care about each other, why would I—Why am I shaking?”
“It’s a shock,” Detective Grasso told him.
“If you feel faint, Mr. Proctorr,” Detective Maurice said, “put your head down, or lie down on the sofa there. You don’t want to hit your head on the coffee table.”
“No, I’ll be all right,” Bryce said. “I’ll be all right.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Detective Grasso said, “but there are a few questions.”
“Of course, sure.”
Detective Maurice said, “Would it help you if your fiancée was here, sir?”
“Maybe so,” Bryce said. “Yes. Maybe so. She’s in the coffee shop.”
“I’ll call,” Detective Maurice offered, and Detective Grasso gave him his notebook, in which he’d apparently written down Isabelle’s name.
“I’m just bewildered,” Bryce told Detective Grasso, while Detective Maurice was on the phone over by the kitchen area. “Why would anybody do that?”
“That’s what the NYPD is working on,” Detective Grasso said. “And they asked us to help.”
“Anything,” Bryce said. “Anything I can do.”
Detective Maurice came back and sat on his chair again, saying, “She’ll be right along. She sounds very pleasant, Mr. Proctorr. No accent at all.”
“No, she’s really American,” Bryce said. “She works for an ad agency in New York, she writes copy for clothing catalogues, her ex-husband was Spanish, the divorce was in Spain and he got the children, three children, it’s been very tough on Isabelle, her father’s doing what he can, he’s retired now, back in Spain, he lives in Madrid.”
I’m babbling, he thought, they don’t care about all this, but he couldn’t control the babbling either, any more than the expressions on his face. He picked up the water glass, again with both hands, and this time he managed to drink without hitting the glass against his teeth.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as he put the glass down. “Usually, I’m better than this.”
“It’s been a shock,” Detective Grasso said. Hadn’t he said that before?
They heard Isabelle at the door, and all looked that way as she came in. She had changed into a summer blouse and skirt, from whatever she’d worn on the plane, and looked very beautiful.
The detectives stood, but when Bryce started to stand he lost his balance and almost fell sideways onto the coffee table. Both detectives reached quick hands in his direction, but he found his balance, stood upright, and smiled shakily at Isabelle as she hurried to him, frowning with concern.
“Bryce, what is it?”
“Isabelle de Fuentes,” he said, feeling formal introductions were absurd but necessary, “these are Detectives Grasso and Maurice from the Los Angeles police. They’re here because somebody killed Lucie.”
“Lucie!” Isabelle stared from him to the detectives, and back to him. “They don’t think you did it!”
“No no, I was here already, it was when, Wednesday.” To the detectives: “Wednesday?”
They both nodded, watchful. Isabelle said, “What happened?”
“She was beaten to death—”
“Oh, my God!”
“—in her apartment.”
“Mr. Proctorr,” Detective Maurice said, “I think you should sit.”
“Yes, thank you, yes.”
They all sat, Isabelle now at Bryce’s right, holding his upper arm with both hands. Bryce said to Detective Grasso, “Her apartment. I’ve never seen that apartment. I can’t, I can’t picture it.”
“Just as well,” Detective Grasso said.
Detective Maurice said, “She didn’t live there during the marriage?”
“No, we have an apartment on Central Park West, and a house in Connecticut. She moved out, it was her idea to get her own place, temporary, a furnished apartment, and at the end of the divorce we’d see who’d get what place, what, what we wanted.” Frowning, he said, “It’s a furnished apartment, who knows how many keys there are.”
“The detectives in New York have established,” Detective Grasso told him, “that the management changes the lock code with each new tenant.”
“There’ll be a funeral,” Bryce said, and looked helplessly at Isabelle. “I have to go to the funeral, don’t I? I suppose I have to go to the funeral.”
“Mr. Proctorr,” Detective Grasso said.
Bryce faced him. “Yes?”
“Could you tell me the reason for this trip, sir? Vacation, is it?”
“Well, a working vacation, I guess,” Bryce told him, thinking, they want to know if I did what I did, got out of the way so someone else could do it for me. He said, “I’m a novelist, and—”
“Yes, sir,” Detective Grasso said, “we know who you are.”
“Oh, okay. Well, three of my books have been made into movies, and there’s interest in more, so I’m here to talk to people about them. For instance, I had lunch today with George Jenkins, he has an idea to do a series of cop movies—sorry.”
Detective Grasso seemed amused. “That’s okay, Mr. Proctorr, we’re cops.”
“Okay, fine. Well, anyway, he thinks he’d like to do this series from a book of mine called Twice Tolled. What I do, I come out every once in a while, remind everybody I exist, meet with people, and usually something comes of it.”
“And had this trip been planned for some time?”
“Well, talking about it for some time,” Bryce said, “but didn’t finalize it until the last minute. I ran into a snag in the book I’m working on—Isabelle, you remember, I was working on it last weekend.”
“Yes, sure,” she said. “You seemed very happy with it.”
“I was, until Monday. Then I saw I’d really written myself into a corner, I’m going to have to think about it for a while, so I called Jeff—he’s my agent out here—and he said he could set up meetings this week, so I came out Tuesday.”
Detective Grasso said, “And when do you go back?”
“Well, I planned to be here for another week or so, I’ve got appointments most of next week, but now, I suppose I really do have to go to the funeral.”
Isabelle said, “Oh, Bryce.”
“It’s very hard to believe Lucie’s dead,” Bryce told the detectives. “We didn’t get along at all, the last couple of years, it hasn’t been an easy divorce, but to have her suddenly gone, I can’t fathom it. She’s one of the liveliest people I know. Right now, I can hear her voice.” And he could.
Detective Grasso said, “Do you expect to be back in New York by Monday?”
“Probably sooner, depending on the funeral.”
“A Detective Johnson in New York will want to talk to you.”
“Sure, of course. Does he know how to get in touch with me? I’ll be in the New York apartment.”
“Why don’t I take the address and phone number,” Detective Grasso suggested. “Just in case.”
“Sure.” Bryce gave it to him, and they all stood, and Detective Grasso said, “Sorry to be the bearers of bad news.”
“Thank you. You did it about as well as it could be done, I guess.”
At the bungalow door, Detective Grasso gave Bryce his card, saying, “If anything occurs to you.”
“All right.”
Detective Maurice said, “At least enjoy our weather a day or two more.”
“I will. Thank you.”
They left, at long last they left, and Isabelle folded herself against him. “Oh, Bryce, I feel so badly for you. What a terrible thing.”
“Yes. Yes.”
Arms around her, feeling the trembling in her body, his eyes squeezed shut, Bryce thought: Wayne. He has me now, he has me in his power now.