Ten

The strange thing was, he had no problem sleeping. When he was awake, Wayne was troubled by quick images of what had happened in Lucie’s apartment, sharp shocking instants kept exploding suddenly like flashbulbs in his mind, and he’d physically recoil, or make a sudden muffled shout: “Huh!”

But at night, in his sleep, apparently there were no bad dreams, or at least nothing he remembered the next day, and Susan assured him he was sleeping heavily, almost too heavily. If she awoke during the night, no movement or sound by her would disturb his deep sleep. And then he would feel rested in the morning, physically fine. It was as though he were drugging himself, creating some secretion in the brain that kept him tranquil at night, that kept the bad things at bay.

They hadn’t talked about it at all, it, since he’d come home Wednesday night. Every morning, they got up as usual, behaved as though everything were normal, and Susan went off to work in the regular way. Wayne usually bought just the Times, but this week he was buying the News as well, in case for some reason the Times didn’t carry it, and he was reading both papers much more extensively than usual.

In the evenings, now, they’d go out for dinner and a movie in the neighborhood. By unspoken mutual consent, they didn’t watch any television news, morning or night; maybe they didn’t want to face anything more graphic than newsprint.

What amazed him was the work. Thursday and Friday, immediately after the murder, he’d done phenomenal amounts of work on The Shadowed Other, and kept thinking about those characters and their story in the times when he was away from his desk. It was as though the land inside The Shadowed Other were his real life, and this out here was make-believe.

But when would it start?

* * *

Finally, it was in Saturday’s paper.

Both papers. Of course the Times would carry the story, it was on their own best-seller list that Lucie’s husband had become famous.

The News devoted more space to the story, with two pictures, one of the building on Broadway on the Upper West Side where Lucie had died, the other a shot of Lucie and Bryce arm-in-arm, smiling at the camera in front of their Connecticut house; probably from the same photo session as the picture in People.

Both papers had the same meager details of the murder: beaten, no evidence of a break-in, no neighbors saw or heard anything, police were working on it. The building itself was meant for transients, none of whom had known Lucie, who had moved there after filing for divorce.

Both papers reminded their readers who Bryce Proctorr was, the News mentioning the actors who’d starred in the movies made from his books, the Times mentioning their own best-seller list. The News said that Lucie was beautiful; the Times did not.

Both papers mentioned the divorce proceedings, and both reported that Bryce had been in Los Angeles at the time of the murder, there in connection with potential movie projects. The News had found a scene in one of Bryce’s novels, Twice Tolled, that was vaguely similar to Lucie’s death: “In the novel, the husband is a suspect at first, but is proved to be innocent.” That was enterprising of them.

Susan was home today, it being Saturday, so when Wayne brought the papers back to the apartment they sat together in the living room, she on the sofa, he in his regular chair, and read both pieces, trading back and forth. Then Susan said, “No one heard anything.”

“I saw that,” Wayne said. “That’s good.”

And it was good they could let the story into their lives now because it wasn’t exclusively their lives any more; Lucie Proctorr was dead in everybody’s life now.

Susan at last put the News aside and said, “We should go out today, somewhere outside.”

“It’s cold.”

“We shouldn’t just stay in here all day,” she said. “Cooped up in here.”

They didn’t own a car; what did they need a car for in New York? Just another expense, and the constant fuss of moving it from place to place. Those rare times when they went out of town, they’d rent a car. So Wayne said, “You want to get a car? You want to go away for the weekend?”

“We could do that.” The News was open on the sofa beside her, to that page. Looking at it, she said, “I’d like to see that house.”

“What, Bryce’s house? What for?”

“I don’t know, I’d just like to. It’s a sunny day, even if it is cold, it might be nice to drive around Connecticut, maybe even up to Massachusetts, spend tonight in a bed-and-breakfast up there, drive back tomorrow.”

“I’ve been working—”

“Too much,” she said.

He smiled at her, comfortable with her. “Too well, I was going to say. The book is moving along.”

“You can take a day off from it.”

Suddenly his mood changed, he felt lousy, and he flopped back in his chair. “I could take forever off from it,” he said. “It isn’t going anywhere.”

“Wayne, no,” she said, “you’ll find a publisher.”

“Sure.”

“No, you will,” she insisted. “You can make Bryce help you.”

“Make him?”

“Of course. He owes you now.”

“I’m getting money from him,” Wayne said. “If he doesn’t stiff me.”

“What do you mean, stiff you?”

“Just take my book and thumb his nose at me. What am I going to do, take him to court? ‘I killed this man’s wife for him, and now he won’t pay me.’ Sure. And he could switch the book around so I wouldn’t even be able to prove it was mine.”

Susan sat forward on the sofa, leaning toward him. “Wayne,” she said, “Bryce doesn’t dare cross you. He owes you now, and he knows it, and he’ll do whatever you want. Don’t you know why?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“You don’t see it because you know who you really are,” she told him. “And I know who you really are. But he thinks you’re the person who did . . . that, on Wednesday night. He talked to you in the library in the first place because he thought you were a desperate man, and now he’s sure you’re a desperate man, and he’ll do anything to keep you happy.”

He looked at her, not liking what she was saying. “Or I’ll beat him to death, too? Maybe all his children?”

“No, Wayne. If you’re desperate, he can’t predict you, and he can’t control you. I know who you—”

“Listen, wait a minute,” he said. “Wait a minute. I don’t want to talk about, you know . . .”

“Of course you don’t, and you don’t have to.”

“But just one thing,” he said. “I didn’t plan it that way, I wouldn’t plan a thing like that, it wasn’t supposed to happen Wednesday at all, not for who knows how long, and certainly not brutal, not, I was as, as, as surprised and scared as she was when it started. I didn’t know it was going to start—”

“Wayne, stop.”

“—and then it started, and there was no way—”

“Wayne, please stop, you’re crying, Wayne, stop!”

“—to stop it, I had to keep on—Oh, Jesus Christ, Susan!”

She came over and knelt and held him for a long while, until the shaking and the crying stopped, until he took a long deep breath and said, “Okay, now.”

“All right?”

“It’s over now,” he said, and he could feel that it really was, that some balled fist inside his chest had finally unclenched itself. “I’ll be all right now,” he said.

She continued to kneel beside his chair, and now she leaned back, still holding his arms, to study his face. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said, and smiled at her. “Let’s go for a drive.”

* * *

They couldn’t find the house. There weren’t enough clues in the stories in the newspapers nor in the photo in the News. They knew the house was somewhere near Bethel, but all the country roads looked the same, meandering through patches of woodland, charming in the sunlight even with their leaves down. The old low stone walls undulated with the land along the roadside, and Wayne made random turns at the intersections in the little red rental Saturn. There wasn’t much other traffic, and the mere fact of driving around was pleasant.

But they couldn’t find the house. The large houses and estates around here were mostly set well back from the road, in among trees, hard to see, sometimes impossible, and most of these people didn’t put their names on their mailboxes. After a while, they were just looking at attractive houses for their own sake.

He only raised the taboo subject once, when they were on a rare straight stretch, black and white dairy cows in a large open field on their left, tangled brushy woods on their right. “I’m just glad,” he said, “I’m not dreaming about it.”

“That’s kind of a surprise, really,” she said.

“And a relief. What if I had nightmares?”

“You don’t think you will?”

“No. If it hasn’t started by now, it won’t.”

“Good.”

A little later, Susan said, “I don’t really need to see his house. I just needed to get out of the apartment for a while.”

“I’m glad you talked me into it.”

“So what do you want to do now?”

He said, “We’ll go on up to Massachusetts, like we said.”

“We can go antiquing.”

“Why not?” he said. “We’ll be rich soon.”

 

 

Eleven

The funeral was Sunday, so they flew back on the late afternoon plane Saturday, getting into Kennedy at midnight. They traveled together, because there was no reason to hide any more, no more private detectives lurking around. Everything had changed now. The burden was gone.

There was a message with a phone number from Detective Johnson on the machine when they arrived. It was a black man’s voice, calm and gentle, not tough-sounding at all, which was a surprise. In the morning, before leaving for the funeral, Bryce phoned that number, spoke briefly with Johnson, and agreed to meet with him at the apartment that afternoon.

Isabelle had stayed with him Saturday night, but she wouldn’t come to the funeral. While he was there, she’d go to her apartment way east on Thirty-first Street and pack some things, enough so she could be comfortable in his place.

Bryce hadn’t thought ahead of time about how terrible the funeral would be. Everybody there knew he and Lucie had been going through that endless miserable divorce, so nobody could quite treat him like a grieving husband. On the other hand, nobody could offer him a big smile and a hearty “Congratulations!” either. Generally, people behaved toward him as though they had a toothache that they vaguely blamed him for.

Not that there were so many people present, maybe twenty in all. Lucie’s parents had flown in from St. Louis, and did their best to avoid Bryce entirely, since of course his legal battle with their daughter had made him their enemy, and they couldn’t figure out any other way to react to him now.

His own family was no better. All three of his children were present, but none sat near him. There was twenty-three-year-old Betsy, a postgraduate architecture student at Brown; twenty-one-year-old Tom, studying engineering at MIT; and nineteen-year-old Barry, an English lit major at Rutgers. With them all away, in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and New Jersey, he rarely saw them or spoke with them. His accountant paid their bills, and that was the extent of the relationship. They’d sided with their mother, Ellen, in his first divorce, and had never liked Lucie, who had coldly disliked them in return. The estrangement was not deliberate on anybody’s part, but by now it was habitual.

Their mother, Ellen, was there, too, which surprised Bryce, accompanied by Jimmy Branley, the architect she lived with in Connecticut. She solemnly shook Bryce’s hand, saying, “I hope you find happiness, Bryce, after all this.”

“Well, thank you,” he said, and thought again that he really should have stayed with Ellen, not only because Lucie had been so much worse. There was an honesty in Ellen that could have anchored him, if he’d let it.

Also at the funeral were ten or so women friends of Lucie’s, all her age, all looking more or less like her, women who found it easy to wear black to a funeral because they wore black all the time anyway. Lucie’d always been more comfortable with women than men, and had always had a lot of girlfriends; they’d chat endlessly on the phone and buy little gifts for one another.

The setting was an upscale funeral parlor on Park Avenue, with quiet efficient dark-suited men moving it all along. The service was muted and nondenominational, vaguely religious without committing anybody to anything. Three people spoke, the first being Lucie’s father, who’d written out what he wanted to say on two sheets of lined yellow paper, which trembled like leaves in his hands. He could barely get through it, gulping and weeping and choking up.

Then one of Lucie’s girlfriends, a woman named Janet Higgins, spoke about the last time she’d seen Lucie, which happened to be at the premiere of a play she’d directed, and how supportive Lucie had been then, and had always been, and how hard it was to believe that wonderful friend wouldn’t be around any more. Bryce realized with sudden shock and unease that the play must have been Low Fidelity, where Wayne and Lucie had met. He found himself trembling, thinking of what he’d started, what he’d destroyed. Why couldn’t the two of them have just gotten it over with?

His mind drifted, and he thought, why not just leave New York for a while? Leave New York and Connecticut and everything.

Spain. He could move to Spain for two or three years, take Isabelle with him, maybe he could help her get her children back. At that thought, he couldn’t help but look over at his own three, clustered with their mother, isolated from him. No, he was isolated from them, wasn’t he?

He’d never met Isabelle’s children. He’d met her father a few times, thought he was stuffy but all right, wouldn’t mind being around him for a while.

But they wouldn’t live in Madrid, where her father lived. No, they’d go east, over to Barcelona, find a nice villa outside the city, toward the Med. There were a dozen beaches you could go to there, a different one every day. He could find a story set in Spain, set up an office there in a sunny corner room, do his research in Barcelona. He could see the office, dark wood gleaming in the sunlight, a tiled terrace outside the large office windows. He wished he were there now, instead of here. Seated at his computer writing his Spanish novel, seeing Isabelle on the sunny terrace outside, with her three children.

The business with Wayne had to be gotten out of the way first, that’s all. Wayne and Two Faces in the Mirror. Next Monday he could send Joe Katz, his editor, the manuscript, maybe call him this Thursday or Friday to say, “I’m almost done, at long last!” He smiled at the thought, then stopped himself from smiling.

In the funeral, the worst was saved for last: another Lucie girlfriend, who wanted to tell them all the funny things she remembered Lucie saying, most of which had probably not been that funny in their original context and were just ghastly here. The woman had no sense of her audience, but just prattled on, and Bryce found himself thinking, I should have Wayne kill her, too.

At last she finished, and the funeral parlor men wheeled the closed casket away for cremation, and it was over. People stood in small hushed murmuring groups, none of which included Bryce. Nobody in this place, he realized, is on my side. Feeling very alone, he left there and hailed a cab.

* * *

The interview with Detective Johnson was brief and easy. He was a tall rangy man, not burly like the cops in Los Angeles, and he seemed to have no suspicion of Bryce at all. He began by going over much the same territory as the two detectives in Los Angeles, Bryce’s reason for being out there, but in shorter form, since clearly he’d already talked with Detectives Grasso and Maurice.

Then he wanted to know what Bryce knew about any men Lucie had been dating since their separation, and he said, “I’m sorry, I’m probably the last person who could help you on that.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Johnson agreed. “But we have an Identikit picture that might be the guy. I’d like to show it to you.”

“Okay,” Bryce said. He was thinking, How can I claim I don’t recognize Wayne? But I can’t possibly say the killer looks like Wayne Prentice, not even remotely. And how did Wayne manage to get himself seen?

Taking a tan manila envelope from his coat pocket, Johnson said, “We potentially have two witnesses, but the truth is, we’re not sure they’re both identifying the same man.”

“I don’t follow,” Bryce admitted.

Johnson seemed reluctant to show the picture, but went on holding the envelope in both hands. “One witness,” he said, “is the doorman in Ms. Proctorr’s building. He saw a man come for her, go up to the apartment, come down with her, go out, come back with her later, and then go out again alone.”

“Saw him four times,” Bryce said. “That’s a lot.”

“You’d think so,” Johnson said. “But not everybody’s as observant as we’d like.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“The man told the doorman his name was Wayland,” Johnson said. “Does that ring a bell?”

Oh, clever Wayne, Bryce thought, realizing at once what he must have done. Shaking his head, he said, “I don’t know anybody named Wayland. No first name?”

“No, unless that is a first name.”

“I suppose.”

“Ms. Proctorr definitely knew him,” Johnson said. “She told the doorman to send him up.”

“Wayland,” Bryce said. He shook his head.

“It seemed as though they might have gone to dinner,” Johnson said, “in the neighborhood, given the time they went out and how long they were gone. So we canvassed local restaurants with Ms. Proctorr’s photo, and we’ve got a waitress at a place called Salt on Columbus Avenue who thinks she might have seen Ms. Proctorr that night. She’s not absolutely certain, and she didn’t notice the man that much.”

“But maybe,” Bryce said.

“The man paid cash, so we don’t get a name from a credit card,” Johnson said. “The witnesses disagree on several points, so this is limited to what they could agree on.” And at last he brought out the artist’s drawing.

Which didn’t look at all like Wayne! Astonished, Bryce held the picture and stared at this stranger, trying to see, if not Wayne, someone he knew in there. This was some sort of tough guy, with thinner lips and flatter ears and a higher brow and darker, bushier hair than Wayne. The high forehead could have come from the waitress, seeing him from above.

Staring, Bryce could finally see Wayne’s eyes, they’d got that part right. Wayne’s eyes, in a stranger’s face. Wayne in a mask. “No,” he said. “I’d know if I’d seen this man before.”

“Well, it was worth a try,” Johnson said.

Handing back the picture, Bryce said, “So this is the guy, anyway, you’re sure of that much.”

“Well, no,” Johnson said. “It looks like a date rape that got out of hand, but it could be something else entirely.”

Bryce shook his head, showing bewilderment. He was feeling hollow, more and more hollow, as though a cavern were in his chest. A high cavern, with cold sharp stalactites. He said, “What else? What else could it be?”

“Well, it could be robbery,” Johnson said. “Those buildings over there are pretty secure, all in all, but it’s possible someone got in, saw this man leave Ms. Proctorr’s apartment, waited till he got into the elevator, then went and knocked on the door, pretended to be the man coming back.”

Save Wayne, Bryce thought. He said, “You think that’s possible?”

“Possible, yes,” Johnson said. “Some jewelry was taken, drawers left open, that sort of thing. But it had a kind of stage-set look. And apparently she had a week-at-a-glance type datebook, and that’s gone missing, too.”

“Ah,” Bryce said.

Johnson smiled at him. “No burglar’s gonna be in the datebook, is he?”

“No, I guess not,” Bryce said.

Johnson shook his head. “But then,” he said, “you turn it around, let’s say the burglar took the datebook so we’d blame the fella she had the date with.”

“Tricky,” Bryce said.

Johnson nodded. “A lot of them look tricky at first,” he said. “Sooner or later, most of them turn out to be simple.”

* * *

An hour later, Bryce and Isabelle were seated quietly in the living room, both reading magazines, when the phone rang. He answered, and the voice said, “Hi, it’s Wayne.”

Coldness ran through Bryce’s body. How dare you call me? he raged, inside his head. How dare you speak to me, how dare you show your face? He said, “Oh, hi, Wayne, hold on a second.”

“Sure.”

Putting the phone down, standing, he said to Isabelle, “Business. I’ll take it in the office. Hang up this one when I pick up, okay?”

“Of course.”

He went to his office, sat at the desk, and picked up the phone there. “Okay, Isabelle.”

There was a click, and Wayne said, “Isabelle. That was fast.”

“You probably want to talk about the book,” Bryce said. He didn’t need Wayne to tell him that it was fast to have Isabelle here.

“I sure do,” Wayne said.

“I thought I should wait a week,” Bryce told him. “The funeral was this morning.”

Wayne said nothing. Bryce waited, then said, “Next Monday, or maybe this Friday, I’ll call Joe Katz, he’s my editor, I’ll say the book’s finally done, then send it over.”

“That’s terrific. Thank you, Bryce.”

Bryce couldn’t help himself, he had to say, “How are you?” Meaning, how are you now that you’ve beaten a human being to death?

“Oh, fine,” Wayne said, but then gave a little laugh and said, “Shaky for a while there.”

“I suppose so.”

“Things don’t happen the way you think they’re going to happen, you know what I mean?”

“I guess I do,” Bryce said.

“Well, I’ll be here, Bryce,” Wayne told him. “I’ll wait for your call.”

“Okay.”

Bryce hung up, and looked grimly at his computer, silent, unforthcoming. Wayne’s there, he thought. He’ll be there, right there, from now on. Forever.

 

 

Twelve

Wayne wished they’d all just leave it alone. The story was as dead as Lucie; why wouldn’t they let it die?

What they had was skimpy enough. Somehow, they’d traced Wayne to Salt, and they had an artist’s drawing of the suspect that was ridiculously off. Laughing at it in the paper, Susan said, “Is that the man I married?”

But after that, nothing. No new leads, no clues, no suspects, no changes or additions of any kind. But the newspapers and the local television news programs had to rehash the same damn empty details day after day. Even the networks touched on the story in their news broadcasts.

It was the usual, and Wayne knew it was merely the usual, and that it shouldn’t bother him, but it bothered him. The usual was the mix of sex and celebrity, but to Wayne’s eye this was a pretty watered-down version of both. It’s true Bryce was a best-selling author, a commodity, a name brand, but he wasn’t O.J. Simpson, for God’s sake. And the police kept saying there was no sign of sexual attack, but the media didn’t care, they went with it anyway. If a beautiful blonde has been bludgeoned to death, there’s got to be sex involved in it somewhere.

“Beautiful blonde bludgeoned” was the nicely alliterative phrase most of the media had settled on, though Wayne could have told them they’d got that all wrong. It hadn’t been like that at all. Bludgeoning a beautiful blonde hadn’t in any way been what it was about; more like beheading a snapping turtle.

He and Susan had started watching the TV news again, once the story went public, but Wayne was regretting that now. Still, he could see Susan was as caught up in the story as if she didn’t know what was actually going on. She’d become another spectator among all the spectators of the bludgeoning of the beautiful blonde.

There was something else also building in Susan, he could tell, but he didn’t know what it was. They were having sex more frequently, and during it she was clinging to him more, as though he were a floating timber from the shipwreck and she in a raging sea. But she seemed to like it, whatever was coursing through her mind in those moments, so he knew better than to question it.

Then, Wednesday night, as they were about, Wayne thought, to go to sleep, she asked him, in a very low, almost little-girl voice, “Can I ask you a question?”

Of course, she didn’t have to mention the topic. I’m not going to like this, he thought, but there was no way out of it: “Sure. What do you want to know?”

“Was it a turn-on?”

“No!” He was appalled she could ask such a thing. “How could it?” he cried. But then he realized that the bald denial wasn’t enough, it wouldn’t quiet her doubts or change her mind or alter whatever picture she’d formed in her head, so, with the disgust he still strongly recalled, he said, “She shit her pants.”

“Oh!” A shocked silence from her side of the bed; and then, “I’m sorry you told me that.”

“I’m sorry you asked.”

Another longish silence. Then, in the little-girl voice once more, “I won’t do it again.”

“It’s all right, Susan,” he said, sorry he’d been harsh. “I know it’s natural, you want to know and at the same time you don’t want to know.”

“I don’t want to know. Not now. Maybe some day.”

“Yes, I’d like that,” he said. “I’ve been thinking that, hoping when it’s, when it’s all calmed down and long over, we could sit down someplace and I could tell you the whole thing.”

“But not yet,” she said.

“No, not yet.”

He knew part of the problem, for both of them, was this empty period of waiting. There was always suspense when a novel manuscript was submitted to its editor. Even after years of writing, and however much success, there was always that blank tense period between handing in the manuscript and getting the editor’s reaction.

And this time, it was so much more complicated. It wasn’t even his manuscript, not any more, and it wasn’t his editor, and he had no control over the submission. He just had to wait, and wait, and that’s why the continuing crime-of-the-moment attention from the media was getting to him so much.

It was affecting his work, too. He’d done damn little this week on The Shadowed Other. Last week, before they’d gone away for their driving weekend in New England, he’d been racing through the book, but this week it was coming hard. The characters resisted him, refused to let him know how they would act and react, and more important, why they would act this way and not that way. He didn’t necessarily have to explain all the motivation to the reader, but he had to know. He had to know them well enough to be absolutely certain how they would react to any possible stimulus, and he was just having trouble, this week, seeing his people clear.

And then, Thursday afternoon, as he sat glooming at the computer, wondering how this one important character in the book—not the lead, but still important—would behave in response to a piece of bad news he’d just received, the phone rang, and it was Bryce. “I just wanted you to know,” he said, “the book’s gone in.”

“Oh, Bryce, that’s great!”

“I phoned Joe Katz this morning and told him it was done, and he sent a messenger up this afternoon, and he’ll read it over the weekend.”

No one had ever sent a messenger to pick up a book of Wayne’s before. That detail pinged off him like ironic revelation, and made him smile. “Oh, I hope he loves it,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t he?” Bryce said. “We both gave it our best.”

Wayne beamed from ear to ear. “Yes, we did, didn’t we? Bryce, on Monday, I’ll be waiting right here by the phone.”

“We both will,” Bryce said.

 

 

Thirteen

Joe Katz called just after eleven Monday morning. “Well, Bryce, it’s terrific,” he said.

Until that instant, Bryce hadn’t realized just how worried he’d been. Scenarios had run through his head, and he’d squelched them, in which Joe would call this morning and say, “What is this crap, Bryce? You didn’t write this,” or, worse, “Bryce, I hate to tell you, buddy, but you’re slipping.” It’s a cuckoo’s egg you’ve got there, Joe, but which the cuckoo and which the foster parent?

He’d been hiding all these doubts from himself, but now that Joe had said those wonderful words—“Well, Bryce, it’s terrific”—he could let all those goblins out of their cupboard, let them all fly away out of his head and into the air as he beamed into the phone and said, “I’m glad to hear it, Joe.”

“And this has some of the best writing in it you’ve ever done.”

Bryce’s beam faded slightly. “Thanks, Joe,” he said.

“As always, you know, I’ve got to pick a few nits.”

“Oh, sure, I’m ready,” Bryce said. “I trust your nits, Joe, you know that.”

“Thanks. You’ve got the manuscript there? We could go over a few points, I don’t need answers now, we could do lunch later in the week, or whenever you’re ready.”

“Sure, wait a second, just pulling it out of the drawer here, okay.”

For ten minutes, they discussed the story and the characters and the pacing, with smallish problems that Bryce could usually fix right away, over the phone. But then Joe said, “Here on page three twelve, Henry lashes out at Eleanor and storms out of the diner. Later on, here, page three forty-seven, they seem to be back together again, no problem. I suppose we could figure out what happened in between, but I just felt as though you might have left a scene out there that we could use.”

In fact, Bryce had added a scene, Henry’s departure from the diner. In Wayne’s version of the book, Henry’s rebellion against Eleanor had been all internal, not turning into action at all, and Bryce had found that just too undramatic, particularly in a section of the book where not much else was moving forward. He’d thought the reader would understand that a gesture of independence from Henry at that point would be no more than a gesture, and wouldn’t need to be told why Henry was still under Eleanor’s thumb the next time they appeared. Leaving out Wayne’s original version, he tried to explain his approach to Joe, but Joe just didn’t see it.

“Henry was building toward something all along through there,” Joe said. “I could sense it. So when he finally spoke up, I really expected some sort of follow-through. I mean, he can wind up at the status quo ante, that’s fine, in fact he has to for what happens later in the book, but I just need to see the step that turned him around again. You know, if on three twelve he didn’t explode, if he kept it all internalized, then I could see that that’s where the fuse is getting wet, the spark is going out, and Henry’s stuck forever.”

Wayne’s version, in other words. “I felt,” Bryce said, “we needed something dramatic at that point in the book.”

“Oh, I agree with you on that,” Joe told him. “I’d hate to lose that little moment of rebellion. But then you’ve got to bring him back down again, I think, show us how it fizzled out. If it doesn’t fizzle out before he makes his move, then it has to happen afterward.”

Joe was right, and Bryce knew it, but he couldn’t help resisting, because he also knew that only one reader in a thousand would ever even notice the problem. Henry wasn’t the hero of the book, he and Eleanor didn’t constitute the main story. “I felt,” he said, “that we would know why he was back with Eleanor, that even when he was leaving, the reader would say to himself, ‘He’ll be back.’”

“Yes, but that just makes Henry a joke then,” Joe said, “if we don’t see the process of the turnaround, and he’s too important later on to turn him into a joke at this point.”

“Joe, I’m gonna have to think about that one.”

“Fine, fine. Let’s move along.”

They had another five minutes or so, Bryce taking notes, continuing to do the smaller changes immediately, and then he hung up and spent the rest of the day trying his damnedest not to think about Henry and Eleanor.

The fact is, he didn’t know how Henry had managed to succeed with his rebellion, even briefly. The way the man was written, he’d do what Wayne had suggested in his version of the book, he’d plan to escape and then he’d fail. When Bryce had changed that, his own motives had been plot-driven, not character-driven, and damn Joe Katz was good enough to have picked up the glitch.

How had Wayne worked it? Bryce had thrown away the original manuscript, not wanting anything around here that would suggest the true origin of this novel, but now he wished he’d held on to it a while longer. But it was gone, and all he had was his own version, and it was a connect-the-dots spot where the dots simply refused to connect.

Well, he was supposed to call Wayne anyway, so at four that afternoon he did, saying, “I just heard from Joe Katz.”

“I just about gave up for today,” Wayne said. “I figured you’d hear from him tomorrow.”

“I think Joe had editorial conferences most of the day,” Bryce said, feeling vaguely guilty for not having phoned Wayne immediately, this morning. “Anyway, he thinks the book is terrific. That’s the word he used.” He didn’t see any reason to mention the “some of your best writing” remark.

“That’s nice,” Wayne said. “That’s a real relief. You don’t know what a help this is.”

“Well, I think we helped each other,” Bryce said, because it seemed to him that somehow Wayne was leaving out the other part of their collaboration.

“I know we did,” Wayne agreed, “and I’m glad we could, you know?”

“I do know,” Bryce said. He wanted to say, How could you have done it, Wayne? But that was the one question that would never be asked. “Well,” he said, instead, “we’ve got this book to think about now, and I need to ask you something about it.”

Sounding surprised, Wayne said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

“Joe had some little problems,” Bryce said, suddenly awkward, because he was going to have to admit this one lumpish revision he’d made in the book, “and we dealt with all but one of them, but on that one I’m kind of snagged.”

“Something I got wrong?”

“No, as it turns out,” Bryce said, “something you got right, and I got wrong.”

“Oh. Some change you made.”

“You know where Billy almost leaves Janice?” Using the names from Wayne’s version of the book.

“In the diner? Yeah, sure.”

“Well, I felt we needed a dramatic scene there, more—”

“Oh, no, you didn’t. You had him walk out?”

“Yeah.”

“He wouldn’t do that!”

“I thought he could have this one little moment—”

“No, no, Bryce, that’s the whole point with Billy, that’s how I use him later on, with him it’s all internal, he never translates it into real-world action, that’s not who he is.”

“Well, I made the change,” Bryce said, “and Joe caught it that it was a glitch—”

“Of course he did.” Wayne sounded very upset over this.

“But now, the problem is,” Bryce says, “he agrees with both of us. He agrees with me that we need more drama at that point, an event, but then he feels we have to have a scene to show Billy go back to what he was before.”

“You mean, he violates character, then notices it, then rushes back.”

“I guess so. Anyway, that turnaround scene is what Joe feels it needs. The book needs.”

“You can’t just put it back the way it was?”

“You can’t take a dramatic scene out of a book after the editor’s seen it.”

“Shit. Goddam it, Bryce, I wish you’d talked to me about that move. Are there other things like that?”

“I made little changes, you know I did, but that’s the only one Joe had problems with.”

“So you’ve got this internal guy suddenly makes an external act, and then what? I mean, the way you have it.”

“Then the next time we see them, they’re back together. Like you had it.”

“No explanation.”

“No.”

“Jesus, Bryce, what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know, I was hoping you’d have an idea.”

“I had an idea. You replaced it.”

“I just can’t think of a scene,” Bryce admitted, “where Billy undoes it.”

“Neither can I,” Wayne told him. “I can’t imagine Billy outside that diner, alone.”

“Let’s,” Bryce said, “both sleep on it, and I’ll call you again tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Wayne said, but he sounded doubtful.

* * *

That evening, eating dinner at Gaylord’s with Isabelle, Bryce said, “I was thinking, once the editing of Two Faces in the Mirror is done, I’d like to leave town for a while, leave my whole life for a while.”

She looked at him with some amusement. “Leave your whole life?”

“All except you,” he assured her. “In fact, what I was thinking about, what if you and I moved to Spain for a couple of years?”

She reacted with astonishment, but not, he thought, with pleasure. “Spain! For God’s sake, why?”

“It’s a beautiful country,” he said. “I could set my next novel there. I don’t like the city right now, the reminders, or Connecticut either. Just to take a break from all this. And maybe I could help you to get your children back, it might make a difference if you were there.”

She turned very cold at that. “I think we leave that to my father,” she said. “I don’t believe I should mess in it, and I don’t think you should get into things you don’t understand.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “So you don’t want to go to Spain.”

“I left Spain,” she said. “I like New York.”

“Fine,” he said.

“And you know, Bryce,” she went on, “this would not be a good time for you to leave the country, don’t you realize that?”

He had no idea what she was driving at. “No. Realize what?”

“You’re a suspect!”

“What? You mean in—”

“I mean,” she said, “the husband is always the main suspect, and you were in the middle of a very bitter divorce, and wasn’t it a nice coincidence you just happened to be in Los Angeles when Lucie was murdered?”

“But I was there.”

“You’re a rich man,” she told him. “You could have hired somebody. Don’t you think the police are investigating that? To see if you spent any extra money recently, if you had any meetings with strange people.”

“Well, I didn’t,” he said. “Neither of those.”

“If you try to leave the country,” she said, “they will be sure you paid to have Lucie murdered, and they will harass you unmercifully.”

“The point is,” Bryce said, not at all wanting to think about what she was telling him, “you don’t want to go back to Spain.”

“Not for one minute.”

“Fine. We’ll stay here.”

And, irrelevantly, he thought, this is where Henry got up and left Eleanor. Wayne was right, and I was wrong.

* * *

In the morning, he called Wayne, but Wayne had no suggestion for him on how to smooth over the glitch in the story. Bryce said, “Normally, if I have a problem like this, I go in and do a head-banging session with Joe, and we’d come up with something, but this time, I just don’t think that’s gonna work. I’m realizing, those people are yours more than they’re mine. You can tap into them, keep them consistent.”

“Not once Billy is off the rails, Bryce, I’m sorry.”

“I had a brainstorm this morning,” Bryce said. “You could meet with Joe, the three of us meet, I know for sure we’d work it out.”

“Me? How could I meet with your editor?”

“I have a story I can tell him,” Bryce said. “You and I knew each other years ago, you were a successful novelist, he’s probably heard of your name, but then it all kind of dried up for you. I was having a hell of a time with the book, couldn’t concentrate on it, because of the divorce, and then we ran into each other again, and I hired you to be my editorial consultant.”

“Editorial consultant. That’s what it says in that contract.”

“Exactly. I’ll tell Joe, I want to keep it quiet, because it could be publicly humiliating if there was any suggestion I couldn’t do my own books all by myself.”

“Jerzy Kosinski,” Wayne said.

“That’s just precisely it,” Bryce said. “Kosinski never got his reputation back, not completely, after all those rumors that other people wrote his books.”

“So I’m your undercover editorial consultant,” Wayne said. He sounded a little insulted. “How does that get me into a meeting with your editor?”

“You understand these characters,” Bryce told him. “Better than I do myself sometimes. And in fact, and I’ll explain this to Joe, when I was working on that part of the book, you argued against Billy walking out of the diner. You can tell Joe all that internalizing stuff you told me, I couldn’t tell that to Joe and get it right.”

Wayne said, “But haven’t you switched the book around since I saw it? Changed the character names, moved some chapters, all that? How could I talk about the book?”

“I’ll messenger a copy of the manuscript down to you this morning.”

“Messenger. That’s nice. Who are Billy and Janice now?”

“Henry and Eleanor.”

“Henry and Eleanor,” Wayne echoed, as though tasting the names on his tongue. “Sure. Why not?”

“You’ll see when you get the manuscript, I tried to keep your ideas, not do a Frankenstein’s monster here, I think this is the only real glitch.”

“Fine. So I’ll read it, and you’ll set up this appointment, and I’ll go in with you as your sort of pre-editor editor—”

“The guy who helped me through the bad patch caused by the divorce.”

“I certainly did. But then the three of us all sit around and solve the . . . Henry problem, and then I go back into the shadows, like the Phantom of the Opera.”

Bryce was reluctant to say this, but he thought he had to: “If you and Joe get along,” he said, “and I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t, you might pitch him a story idea of your own.”

“Oh.” A short word, but quick with interest.

“Not right away,” Bryce said. “When we get this book put to bed, then take your shot.”

“I will,” Wayne said. “Thank you, Bryce.”

 

 

Fourteen

It was very strange to read your own book after it had been taken over by somebody else. It wasn’t even a matter of whether Wayne thought the changes made the book better or worse, it was simply the otherness of it. Like a dream in which you’re in your own house, but the details are all wrong, the furniture’s different or in the wrong place and the doors lead to rooms you don’t know. Disorienting, disturbing, almost frightening; and yet, fascinating. A parallel universe.

He had to read it through twice before he could see it clearly; the first time had been just too through-the-looking-glass. With the second run-through, though, he saw that this was a valuable learning experience, a wake-up call for some sloppy habits he’d developed over the years. Also, some of Bryce’s changes struck him as brilliant. Moving the third chapter up to begin the book was just exactly the right thing to do, for instance. Other changes Bryce had made, though, struck him as pointless. What was wrong with “winced”?

Susan read Two Faces in the Mirror as well, and insisted she liked the original better, which he knew was more loyalty than critical comment. She did agree with Wayne that the Henry-Eleanor scene was a mistake, but had no more idea than he did how to solve the problem.

Susan had always been his first reader, and had been valuable to him just because she was not a literary or artistic type, but was a solid realist. She didn’t admire good writing or clever plotting for themselves, but enjoyed his books for their approximation to the truth. Whenever she did find fault with his work, it was because some striving for effect had left plausibility behind. A more artistic type, say another writer or a painter, would have forgiven such flaws or not even seen them, but Susan needed to feel solid ground beneath her feet, and he’d come to rely on her judgment to give his work ballast.

They joked sometimes about opposites attracting and absolute opposites attracting absolutely, but they knew it was true. They were devoted to one another and dependent on one another because they were so foreign to one another, so close together because they were so far apart. It was the very depth of their differences that made her his perfect reader; she admired his ability to create entire worlds out of the merest air, and he admired her ability to find the real world not boring.

The appointment with Bryce’s editor, Joe Katz, had been set for ten-thirty Thursday morning. Bryce’s publisher, Pegasus-Regent, was one of those who’d moved their offices down to the Madison Square Park area in the early eighties, when midtown office rents went through the roof. The firm had most of an old building now, on Twenty-sixth Street off Park, with a ground-floor luncheonette as the only other tenant. It was an easy walk from Wayne’s apartment, though the early December day was cold and windy and overcast. But Wayne liked the weather, it gave him the impression of having a little struggle on the way to victory.

That other struggle, last month, he seldom thought about any more, though during the half-hour walk across and uptown the scene did keep coming into his mind; probably because this meeting was one more result of it. But these days, when he remembered that night in Lucie’s apartment, it wasn’t as though it had been anything he himself had done, but more like a scene from a particularly grisly movie. He remembered the experience the way you remember something you’ve seen, not something you participated in. It was as though, in his memory, he were three or four feet behind the attacker, observing from up close, but not a participant. However, like a scene from a particularly powerful movie, the memory did stay with him.

The entrance to Pegasus-Regent was unprepossessing; the loss of elaborate office-building lobbies was one of the trade-offs when the publishers moved south. A glassed door with the firm’s name on it stood to the right of the luncheonette. Inside were a narrow hall with an old mosaic-tile floor, a steep metal staircase leading back and up, and two elevators.

Editorial was on six, the top floor, the closest hope to a view in this neighborhood. Wayne rode up, and when the elevator door opened he might as well have been in midtown after all. Editorial had a very modern, very elaborate large reception area with two separate clusters of sofas and magazine-laden coffee tables to left and right, and a receptionist at a broad multimedia desk straight out of Star Trek.

Wayne was two or three minutes early, but Bryce was already there, reading a recent Economist on a sofa to the right. He jumped up when Wayne walked in, waved to him, and called to the receptionist, “Okay! Tell Joe we’re ready.” Then, as she turned to her control panels, he came over toward Wayne, hand out, smiling, saying, “Good to see you, Wayne.”

He looks feverish, was Wayne’s first thought. Then Bryce was shaking his hand, and Wayne felt electric tension in Bryce’s hand, and saw that the feverishness was deep in Bryce’s eyes. And he’s lost weight, Wayne thought.

This was the first they’d actually seen each other since that day in the library, the day Bryce had suggested this substitution plot. It was strange to think about that, to realize how much had happened since then. They’d talked a number of times on the phone, Bryce had arranged for him to go see that play, he’d signed the contract, he’d done . . . what was required of him, now he’d read Bryce’s version of The Domino Doublet—he didn’t care for the title change, but let it go—but in all that time they hadn’t actually been in the same room together. A month, a little more than a month.

“Mr. Proctorr,” the receptionist called, “Mr. Katz says to please give him ten minutes.”

“Okay, fine, fine,” Bryce said, and to Wayne, “Come on, sit over here.”

They sat catty-corner on the sofas, and Wayne said, “Good, I wanted to talk to you about something else today anyway, this gives us time to do it.”

Why did Bryce look so worried? Though all he said was, “Sure. What?”

“Well, money,” Wayne said.

Relief from Bryce; what had he expected? “Oh, sure,” he said. “It’ll be coming to my accountant as soon as Joe puts through the okay, and that’ll be after I do the changes based on the meeting today.”

“So in a week or two.”

“At the longest,” Bryce said. “You know, it isn’t even a check any more, it’s an electronic transfer straight to my accountant. Then he pays my agent’s commission, pays my bills, puts money in my checking account every month, and takes care of everything else. He can transfer your part to your accountant or however you want to do it.” With a shaky grin, he said, “It’s going to be a little too much to just deposit in your checking account.”

“Oh, I know that,” Wayne assured him. “What I was thinking, Bryce, I’m not all that tied to my accountant, I’ve changed accountants three times the last eight or nine years, I’m never a big enough deal for them. If you wouldn’t mind, why don’t I switch over to your guy? You could introduce me, and then they just keep the whole thing in the one firm. Fewer people to know about it.”

“That would be perfect,” Bryce said. “My guy there is Mark Steiner, I’ll give him a call this afternoon, explain the situation, tell him you’ll call.” He pulled out a pen, ripped off part of a page of The Economist, and wrote “Mark Steiner” and the phone number on it. “Wait till tomorrow,” he advised, “so I’ll be sure to have talked to him.”

“Thanks, Bryce,” Wayne said, and pocketed the scrap of paper.

Bryce gave him piercing sidelong glances, faintly disturbing. “Well?” he said. “What did you think of it?”

“Oh, the book?” Wayne felt awkward all at once. How do you react to the man who ate your book and regurgitated it as his own? “I liked a lot of the stuff you did,” he said. “The new opening is absolutely right.”

“Oh, thanks,” Bryce said. “I really think the Henry-Eleanor thing is the only time I thoroughly messed it up.”

“Absolutely,” Wayne assured him. “It’s fine.”

“Mr. Proctorr, could you go in now?”

“I sure could,” Bryce said, and jumped to his feet, then waited for Wayne.

They went down what would have been a wide corridor, except that secretaries’ desks stood out perpendicular from the left wall, next to office entrances, and crammed bookcases covered the right wall; there was not quite room left for two people to walk abreast. Wayne followed Bryce to the end, where a half-open door showed part of a window showing sky.

This end room was Joe Katz’s office, he being the senior editor. It was a large corner space, with big windows facing north and east; buildings and a bit of Madison Square Park to the east, building roofs and a bit of sky to the north. In addition to a massive dark-wood desk and four large soft armchairs—no sofas—the room was as cluttered as an attic. An Exercycle, a pinball machine, a doctor’s office balance scale, an English-pattern dartboard, a spinet, a TV plus VCR, all elbowed one another for space along the walls.

Joe Katz came smiling around the desk to greet them. A short man, he was slender except for a surprising potbelly, as though he’d swallowed a lightbulb. Above a hawknosed face he’d mostly borrowed from Leon Trotsky was a tangle of black-and-white Brillo hair. His glasses were rectangular, black-framed, and halfway down his nose, so that usually he looked over them rather than through them. His hand was already out in greeting.

“Joe Katz,” Bryce said, “may I introduce the skeleton in my closet, Wayne Prentice.”

“I knew you had one,” Katz said, grinning, grasping Wayne’s hand. His handshake was strong, affirmative. “Everybody does.” Peering over his glasses at Wayne, he said, “Don’t tell me yours.”

“I won’t,” Wayne promised.

Katz released his hand and patted Bryce on the shoulder, having to reach up to do so, and the gesture reminded Wayne of somebody patting a favorite horse. “Come on and sit down,” Katz said. “What have you and your alter ego figured out? No, first—Sit, sit.”

They all sat in the armchairs, turning them to make a group, Katz ignoring his desk. Leaning forward, hands clasped together, elbows on knees, small feet just touching the gray carpet, he said to Wayne, “I don’t think I ever read anything of yours, remiss of me.”

“You’re not alone,” Wayne assured him.

“Well, I looked you up, found The Bracket Polarity.”

The fourth of Wayne’s novels under his own name, and the beginning of the downhill slide. The first downhill slide. “Oh?”

“Well, it was terrific,” Katz said.

Wayne was delighted. “You think so?”

“I had no idea Louie was a mole! Usually I see those things coming. I mean, my God, I’m an editor, I’m supposed to see those things coming, but I absolutely did not! And it was fair, too, you didn’t cheat. How’d the book do?”

“Moderate,” Wayne said. What else was there to say?

Katz shook his head, disliking that. “Shitty marketing, it must have been,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“I don’t,” Wayne told him.

Katz sat back and his feet came off the floor. “Now,” he said, “turning to today’s disaster. Bryce tells me you never did want Harry to leave that diner.”

“Not without Ja—Eleanor.”

“And there are ways in which you are right,” Katz told him. “If he’d never left, it wouldn’t have bothered me. But now I see we can goose that part of the book, make it better, give it a little jolt from the thruster, if we can get Henry and Eleanor back together without bending ourselves out of shape.”

Doubtfully, Bryce said, “Maybe he could phone her the next day, apologize, grovel.”

“Too late,” Wayne said. “By the next day, she’s cement, she’s hardened, she won’t even answer the phone.”

Katz nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right about that,” he said, and scratched his chin. “I used to have a beard,” he explained, “and I shaved it off last year, and I still feel the damn thing. What was the point shaving it off ?”

Bryce said, “Grow it back.”

“Then I’d have to look at it, too,” Katz told him. “It’s bad enough to have to feel it.”

“Anyway, you don’t have to trim it,” Wayne said, feeling they’d wandered into some conversation from Alice in Wonderland.

“That’s it,” Katz told him. “Always look on the positive side. For instance, what can we do about our suddenly impulsive Henry?”

“I was thinking about that on the walk up,” Wayne started, because that was the other thing he’d been thinking about.

Katz said, “Walk? From where?”

“West Village.”

“Where?”

“We’re on Perry, between Bleecker and Fourth.”

“My God,” Katz said, “I’m around the corner from you on Fourth. I do my best thinking on that walk, back and forth, every day.” To Bryce he said, “Two people live in the same neighborhood a hundred years, walk all over the place, never meet once. That’s New York.” Back to Wayne, he said, “So what did you think, on our walk?”

“I think he gets as far as the car,” Wayne said. “Bryce has it that he leaves the car for her to use and takes a taxi, and she stays in the diner and broods about the relationship, and then drives off. We can keep all of her thoughts, that’s the good part, but I think he only got as far as the car, and then got into the car on the passenger side.”

“Oh, nice,” Katz said.

“That’s the apology right there,” Wayne said. “She pays the check, she’s mad, she steps outside, he’s submissive. In the car on the passenger side, ready for her to take over.”

Katz said, “She gets into the car. Eleanor doesn’t make flamboyant gestures like hailing a cab.”

“No no,” Wayne agreed, “she gets into the car.”

“And what does he say?”

“Nothing,” Wayne said.

Bryce said, “Wouldn’t he apologize?”

“He won’t do anything at all until she gives him permission,” Wayne said.

“That feels right,” Katz said. “So what happens?”

“She puts the key in the ignition,” Wayne said, “but she doesn’t start the engine. She looks at Henry, he’s in profile, he just keeps looking out the windshield, waiting. She says, ‘Feel better now?’ He says, ‘No.’ She says, ‘Good,’ and starts the engine, and drives them home.”

Bryce said, “We don’t have to go home with them.”

“Bryce, you’re right,” Katz said. “They drive off, and then, when we meet them again, we know everything, we understand everything. Wayne, you’re a very productive walker.”

“Thank you,” Wayne said.

“Now,” Katz said, bouncing forward to get his feet on the floor so he could stand, “we still have a few more little pleats in the fabric. Bryce? Did you share these with Wayne?”

“I didn’t feel he needed to sweat them,” Bryce said. “I figured, let him think about Henry and Eleanor.” He grinned at Wayne and said, “I know you didn’t like what I did there, but you made it come out just perfect.”

“Thanks,” Wayne said. “So we were both right, it needed the action, but it also needed to be undone.”

Katz had gone over to his desk, and now he came back with a clipboard with several manuscript sheets on it. Bouncing into his chair again, feet off the floor, he said, “Let’s begin.”

The next half hour contained little for Wayne to do. It was his novel they were discussing, and yet it wasn’t, and he was expected to have either no input or at best the occasional kibitzer’s remark. It was a strange position to be in, so after a while he got to his feet and spent his time instead studying the various artifacts with which Katz had filled his room.

At one point, Katz called to him, “Shoot a little darts, if you feel like it.”

“I’m very bad at darts,” Wayne told him.

Katz said, “Take a look at the holes in the wall. You won’t be the first duffer we’ve had. I’m not that great myself.”

So Wayne pulled the darts out of the board, and had added a few more holes to the wall by the time Bryce and Katz were finished. Then they both rose, Katz bouncing out of his chair again, and Katz said, “Twelve-twenty. How about lunch?”

“I can’t, Joe,” Bryce said. “I’m supposed to meet Isabelle, we’re moving more of her stuff over to my place.”

“By God,” Katz said, “it’s nice to see things finally begin to turn around for you, Bryce. A good woman, a good friend”—with a gesture at Wayne—“and at last a good book. How about you, Wayne? You on for lunch?”

“Sure,” Wayne said.

Although you couldn’t see anything on Bryce’s bland surface, Wayne knew he wasn’t happy to leave these two alone together. Wayne was ecstatic.

* * *

Over lunch, Wayne found himself telling Joe Katz his secret. They were in Union Square Cafe, one of the trendy lunch places that had sprung up once the publishers moved into the neighborhood, and their conversation was interrupted from time to time when Katz had to return a hello from some other passing diner, but still, in this crowded noisy public place, Wayne found himself telling another person his secret for only the second time. Bryce had been the first.

Katz had trouble getting it. “Wait a minute, you’re Tim Fleet?”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve read you, you’re very good. But what’s the big secret? It’s a pen name.”

“The publisher doesn’t know,” Wayne said. “My editor didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know it was you.”

“Didn’t know it was a pen name.”

Katz shook his head. “I’m not following this,” he said. “Pitch it to me like an outline.”

“Writer has successful novels,” Wayne told him, “sales begin to slide. The big chains’ computers turn against him, cut orders, sales get worse, finally he can’t get a decent advance, nobody wants him. He rigs up a phony identity that only his agent knows, claims to be living in Italy or wherever, submits the next book as a first novel by Tim Fleet. The computer doesn’t know Tim Fleet, so it can’t put the hex sign on him. But after a while it does know Tim Fleet. End of story.”

“And you’re telling me your publisher has no idea it’s you.”

“They’ve never met me,” Wayne said. “For all I know, they’ve never heard of me.”

“That’s fantastic,” Katz said.

“Joe,” Wayne said (they were on a first-name basis by now), “it’s happening all over town. It’s like the blacklist, writers hiding behind fronts, except, instead of Commie hunters, it’s the computer they’ve got to hide from. What was tragedy the first time comes back as farce.”

“It can’t be happening all over town,” Katz said. “How many people could pull a thing like that?”

“Joe, do you have any writers you’ve never met? They live in some remote place, you communicate by E-mail, everything comes strictly through the agent, you don’t really have a useful address for them?”

“Well, two or three,” Katz said, “but, you know, not everybody can live in New York.”

“More than you know can live in New York.”

“You’re creating terrible doubts in me,” Katz said. “But why go through all that? Why lie to the publisher? Why not just do a pen name?”

“Because of the sales staff,” Wayne told him, “and publicity and advertising, all those people you need behind you. If they know Tim Fleet is Wayne Prentice, even though it’s supposed to be a secret outside the publishing house, it has that stink of failure on it already. But if they think Tim Fleet is Tim Fleet, really think that, and he’s brand-new, and he’s never failed because he’s never been tested before, they can be excited. They can do wonders, when they’re excited.”

Katz nodded. “You’re right about that,” he said. “I’ll tell you truthfully, Wayne, if I have a reconstituted virgin somewhere on my list, I’d rather not know about it. I’m sorry you told me as much as you did.”

“It’s probably not as prevalent as I think,” Wayne reassured him. “I’m aware of it, you know, because I did it.”

“And what of Tim Fleet now?”

“Dead,” Wayne said.

Katz was startled. “Really? But he’s very—you, I mean—you, he, whoever you are, you’re very good.”

“Sales aren’t.”

“You have a new book?”

Wayne almost said, I did have, but you have it now. Instead, he said, “Part of one. But my publisher doesn’t want it.”

“Let me not promise you anything, Wayne,” Katz said, “but this afternoon, when I get back to the office, let me crunch some numbers, talk to some people in sales, see if there’s anything we can do.”

“That’d be great.”

“No promises,” Katz said. “You know, I can’t argue with the computer, either.”

“Why did we give up autonomy, do you suppose?” Wayne asked.

“I hate to say it,” Katz told him, “but it’s too late to ask that question.”

* * *

When he walked home, Wayne felt as though he were floating above the sidewalk. What a great guy Joe Katz was! And how many good things he’d said about Wayne’s own work! If there was any way at all to get around the computer, Wayne knew, Joe Katz would be his next editor. He could hardly wait for Susan to come home, tell her about his fantastic day.

The answering machine light was blinking. He pressed the button, and heard, “This is homicide Detective Arthur Johnson, trying to reach Wayne Prentice.” He left a phone number, and said he would try again.

 

 

Fifteen

Isabelle had changed her mind. When Bryce got to her place, a one-bedroom, elevator building, third floor, no view, furnished minimally and decorated with travel posters, she was seated on the sofa, drinking coffee, and had done no packing. “We have to talk, Bryce,” she said.

He said, “Don’t you have to get back to work?”

“Eventually. But first we have to talk.”

He looked around the room. “You haven’t packed anything.”

“It isn’t working out,” she said.

“What isn’t working out?”

“You and me. When I thought about actually moving over there, out of here, I realized it. It isn’t working.”

He sat beside her on the sofa. She looked at her coffee rather than at him, and he tried to think of what he should say.

It was true, they’d been growing farther apart, but he had no idea why. She seemed to be holding herself aloof from him, in a way that hadn’t used to be true. He said, “Is it because I talked about moving to Spain?”

She smiled, sadly, and shook her head, still not looking at him. “It’s nothing at all,” she said. “It’s you and me, it’s everything.” Now she did look at him, and he saw that she was sad but also remote. She said, “It stopped being good when Lucie died. I know it should have worked the other way, but it didn’t. The . . . whatever it was we had, it seemed to need Lucie to keep it going.”

He knew at once that she was right, though he hadn’t realized it before, had very successfully managed not to notice, and couldn’t begin to understand why it should be true. He said, “Isabelle, we can’t let Lucie come between us now.”

“But she is between us. You dream about her, lying in bed with me.”

“I do? No, I don’t.”

“In your sleep,” she told him, “you moan and you make muttering sounds, never words, and you thrash around as though you were hitting somebody.”

“Me?” He hadn’t been aware of that. He’d known he was feeling more tired lately, less alert when he woke in the mornings, but he didn’t remember bad dreams. He’d known they were there, really, the dreams, but he never remembered them. He said, “Why do you say it’s about Lucie? If I don’t say words.”

“Who else would you be beating?”

“Beating?” He sat back, as far from her on the sofa as he could get. “Isabelle,” he said, “you know where I was when Lucie died.”

“Detective Johnson thinks we were there on purpose.”

“Johnson? He talked to you? When?”

“Tuesday. Day before yesterday.”

“I thought he was done, I thought that was all over.”

“I think it’s just starting, Bryce.”

“But why? You know I didn’t have anything to do with Lucie’s death!”

“But I don’t know it,” she said. “Nobody knows it, because nobody knows what really happened. They’ll find out, the police will find out, and then maybe it’ll be all right again. But now . . . Bryce, you’re frightening, with those dreams, your shoulders moving, punching under the covers, muttering, frowning. And when you’re awake you’re depressed, there’s no joy in you. Not since we came back from California.”

“That’s why I want to go away for a while,” he said. “Somewhere warm. It doesn’t have to be Spain.”

“I can’t go away with you,” she said. “I can’t live with you. I’m sorry, Bryce, I’ve been thinking about this all week, and I think about moving into that apartment with you, and it’s like I’m moving into a grave.”

“Oh, God, Isabelle, don’t say something like that.”

“It’s what I feel.” She put down her coffee cup at last and held his left hand in both of hers. “We have to stay away from each other for a while,” she told him. “There’s something you have to work through, I don’t even know if you know what it is yourself but you have to work through it, and I can’t be there. Later, when you feel better, when Detective Johnson knows what really happened, then maybe we can get back together. I’d like to. We had fun a lot of times. The weekends . . .” She trailed off, looking away from him, but still holding his hand.

He’d never told her he loved her, because he wasn’t sure he did, and he was afraid of what the word might entail. He almost said the word now, but stopped himself, knowing it wouldn’t be real, it would only be a tactic to try to hold on to her. And knowing, too, that she would see it for what it was, and turn away from him even more.

He said, “Isabelle, the idea of not seeing you—”

“For a while.” She looked at him again, squeezed his hand. “I hope, for just a while.”

He looked around the small characterless room. This is where she preferred to be. He said, “We were going to have lunch.”

“I’m not really hungry, Bryce, I’m sorry.”

He smiled a little and shook his head. “I don’t think I am, either. First time in my life, I bet, I’m not hungry for lunch.” He looked at her again. “I’m going to miss you.”

“I already miss you,” she told him. “The you from before.”

Suddenly restless, realizing he was becoming angry, not wanting to be angry, not wanting Isabelle to know he was angry, he pulled his hand from hers and abruptly stood. “I miss the me from before, too,” he told her. “God knows I don’t want Lucie back, but I want something back. Is it okay if I phone you sometimes?”

“I hope you will,” she said.

He nodded. “Maybe we could date, after a while. Dinner and a movie.”

“And a kiss goodnight,” she said.

He laughed. “Oh, I think just a handshake at first.”

She stood. “I wish you’d kiss me now,” she said.

He kissed her, holding her too tight, aware of her struggle to breathe, and finally forced himself to let go. Her eyes looked frightened, but she still smiled as she said, “I’ll see you.”

“See you,” he said, and left, knowing, at the end there, he’d wanted to hit her. The way Lucie was hit.

* * *

Three-thirty. He sat at his computer, in the apartment, trying to think of a story. Two Faces in the Mirror was virtually finished now, once he did the little Henry-Eleanor insert and a few other things. Half a day’s work, he’d probably do it in Connecticut this weekend. Alone in Connecticut this weekend, but to be alone here would be even worse. He had weekend friends, sometimes dinner invitations on the Saturday. Nothing this weekend, but somebody could still call. And in the city, on the weekend, nobody would call.

What he had to do now was think of the next book. It had been over a year and a half since he’d written anything—the rewriting of Wayne’s book didn’t count—and he felt all those muscles were stiff now. He had to get limber again.

Most books began for him with a character abruptly being put into motion. Sometimes the setting was important, too, but the main thing was to find a character, somebody he could stay with for six hundred pages, and give that character a reason to get moving. So what he was doing at the computer now was trying to find that character, the entry, the starting point.

A doctor? He’d have to do an awful lot of research, but that was all right. He’d never written about a doctor before.

A doctor who finds a disease where it shouldn’t be, something that’s only found above the Arctic Circle, say, and his patient has never been north of Tarrytown, and . . .

Not a doctor.

He hadn’t known he was dreaming about Lucie, but Isabelle must be right about that. Beating Lucie in his sleep. And then the dreams were always gone in the morning, leaving nothing but a sense of heaviness, weariness, sorrow.

Life was supposed to be better without Lucie, that’s what it had all been about. And it was better, the financial crunch was over, the aggravation was over, the book deadline had been solved. He was the only fly in the ointment, he was the only reason things weren’t better. He was doing it to himself.

A real estate salesman finds drug money hidden in the basement of a house he’s offering, and the drug dealers want it back. No; older money. Prohibition money from the thirties, a third-generation private eye has been looking for it, like his father and his grandfather. Yesterday and today, linked. Neither of them has any right to the money, so both of them have the same right. But the private eye is tough and ruthless, and the real estate agent is just an ordinary guy, trying to keep from being swallowed up.

Is the real estate agent a woman? No. Bryce didn’t think he’d ever successfully written from a woman’s point of view, not for more than a few pages at a time. He’d get too many things wrong. He didn’t even want to think about the sex scenes.

He and Isabelle hadn’t had sex for almost two weeks. He hadn’t even noticed, not till this second. Nothing in Connecticut last weekend, nothing here since, nothing here last week. Connecticut, two weeks ago. Her idea. And he hadn’t noticed.

These characters weren’t characters, they were wallpaper. He breathed on them, and they failed to stir into life.

Maybe he should just take the train to Connecticut today, not wait till tomorrow, see if the change of scene—

The phone rang. Isabelle, he thought, though he knew it wouldn’t be. He picked up, and it was Wayne. “Oh, hello,” Bryce said.

He’d felt strange today in Joe’s office, with Wayne, almost as though he were jealous, as though he didn’t want them to get along. It was irritating they lived in the same neighborhood, he wasn’t sure why.

Wayne said, “I just got home, and—”

“You and Joe got along great, I see.”

“—your Detective Johnson was on my answering machine!”

Oh. Isabelle was right, Johnson wasn’t finished. Bryce could hear panic in Wayne’s voice, and panic was the last thing Wayne should do right now. Making himself sound calm, unconcerned, Bryce said, “Yeah, he’s making the rounds, Isabelle told me, he talked to her on Tuesday.”

“But what does he want with me? Why does he even know about me?”

“Well,” Bryce said, “my guess is, he talked to Janet whatever her name is, who directed that play—”

“Higgins.”

“—and from there to Jack Wagner, and Jack would have said he’d introduced you to Lucie at the play, so now he wants to know what you and Lucie talked about, and did you ever see her again, and you never did.”

“I never did.”

“Have you called him back?”

“Not yet, I wanted to talk to you.”

“It’s not a big deal, Wayne,” Bryce said. “He’s following every lead, that’s all, that’s what his job is. You won’t give him any reason to look twice at you, and he won’t look twice at you.”

“I guess so.”

“Call him now, Wayne. If you don’t call him back, he will look twice at you.”

“All right. I’ll call him now.”

They hung up, and Bryce continued to sit at the computer, but he’d stopped trying to think of a character. He was thinking about Wayne instead.

Wayne had done what Bryce had sent him out to do, and it was supposed to stop there, but it wasn’t stopping there. Wayne kept moving, acting, and Bryce didn’t like the ways he was going. Cozying up to Joe Katz. And now, going into a panic, just because a cop wanted to talk to him. Cops had talked to Bryce, cops in Los Angeles and cops here, and he’d handled them all with no problem, no problem. Why can’t Wayne do the same? Johnson’s just following his leads.

But Johnson was a good detective, Bryce was sure of that. Would he smell something on Wayne, see something, sense something? Don’t the good detectives begin with that sixth sense, the feeling that something’s wrong, not yet knowing what?

Wayne had a power over Bryce that Bryce hadn’t truly appreciated until now. When they’d made their agreement, that day they’d met at the library, they’d put themselves in each other’s hands, they were absolutely dependent on each other’s solidity and reliability. Bryce was solid, Bryce was reliable, God knows he’d proved that.

Is Wayne going to be a problem for me? Bryce wondered. If he’s going to be a problem for me, what do I do about it?

 

 

Sixteen

The appointment with Detective Johnson was for eleven the next morning. Normally, Wayne didn’t like to dose himself indiscriminately with drugs, but this morning, after Susan left for work, he took half a Valium. It was her prescription, rarely used, for those times when her job became too stressful. Wayne had almost never taken one, and didn’t want to be zoned out when Johnson got here, but that would be better than being hopped-up, manic.

He hadn’t mentioned Johnson to Susan yet, because what was the point? She’d have all day to worry about it, for no reason. When it was all over, he’d tell her what had happened. With, he hoped, a relieved laugh.

Johnson was exactly on time, and when he came in he didn’t seem threatening at all. A moderately dark black man, tall and not too heavy, mild in his manner, he seemed more like somebody who worked in a bank or for some bureaucracy than a homicide detective. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Prentice,” he said, as though Wayne had had a choice in the matter.

“Anything I can do,” Wayne assured him. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Johnson smiled. “Oh, I better not,” he said. “I drink coffee all day long sometimes, I think I’m putting the people at ease, the end of the day, I got the heebie-jeebies.”

Wayne grinned, liking the man. “Then I guess we just sit down,” he said.

They sat in the living room, and Johnson said, “You know what this is about.”

“Lucie Proctorr.”

“You met her fairly recently, I believe,” Johnson said. He wasn’t taking notes, seemed just to be having a casual conversation.

“I guess it must have been the weekend before she died,” Wayne said. “Or the Thursday, really.”

“It was at a play?”

“Yes. The playwright introduced me. I asked him to.”

Johnson was interested in that. “You asked him to?”

“I’m an old friend of her husband’s,” Wayne said. “Bryce. We knew each other twenty years ago, more than twenty years ago, here in the city, we were both trying to make it as writers.”

“You did some novels yourself,” Johnson suggested.

“Yes, sure,” Wayne said. “When the first one was published, I went to Italy for a year, research for the second book. When I got back, I’d lost touch with some of the people I knew, including Bryce. Then he became famous, and I didn’t”—Wayne shrugged—“it seemed awkward to get in touch with him, after a while.”

“But you did it, finally.”

“No, he called me. What I think it was,” Wayne said, “when his marriage broke up, I think maybe he was lonely, or the friends they’d had were mostly her friends. I think he looked up people he hadn’t seen for a while, including me. We met a couple of times, we had coffee—” Wayne broke off, and laughed, and said, “Not too much coffee.”

“No, that’s good,” Johnson said, and smiled. “But how did you get from there to this play?”

“Well, Bryce really talked against Lucie,” Wayne said. He’d been working out this story in his mind since yesterday afternoon, and thought it was solid now. “Any time her name came up,” he explained, “there was more from Bryce about how rotten she was. You begin to wonder, can anybody really be that bad? I finally said it to him, I’d like to meet her, see for myself, he said be my guest.”

“So he’s the one who knows Jack Wagner, the playwright.”

“I don’t know any of those people,” Wayne said. “I went there, I didn’t know a soul. Usually there’s at least somebody you know vaguely, but not there, no. Bryce couldn’t go because Lucie was going, because the director was a friend of hers, so Bryce called Jack Wagner and asked if I could go instead, and Wagner said yes. I don’t think Bryce said I wanted to meet Lucie, but I told Wagner that myself, at the party.”

“And that it was curiosity.”

“Sure. An old friend’s horrible marriage, what does it look like?”

“Like rubbernecking at an auto crash,” Johnson suggested.

Wayne laughed. “Guilty,” he said. “That’s just what it was. You know, like when Tom Sawyer charged his friends to look at his wounded toe. Everybody wants to see the really icky things.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Johnson said.

“Which in this case,” Wayne said, “was Lucie Proctorr.” And without warning there came into his memory, as clear and vivid as a movie poster, that final moment when Lucie Proctorr had been the icky thing. It stopped his breath, it stopped time, it almost destroyed the flow of the story he was telling, but then, desperate, afraid Johnson would see something, guess something, he used it, sitting back, letting the shock show on his face, crying, “My God, what am I saying? That’s horrible!”

Soothing, Johnson said, “That’s okay, Mr. Prentice, I know what you mean. The question is, what did you think of Lucie? As bad as you thought?”

“No,” Wayne said. “She couldn’t have been as bad as Bryce was saying, nobody could, but she wasn’t very good, either.”

“You didn’t like her.”

“Not at all. I’m sorry to talk about her like that when she’s dead and all, but I thought she was just negative, and a put-down artist. I mean, it was her friend who directed the play, and she’s there as a guest, drinking their wine, and all she wanted to do was talk about what trash the play was, and how her friend Jane deserved better than that, she should be directing at the Public Theater.”

Johnson smiled. “I take it you didn’t talk with her for long.”

“Maybe five minutes. Then I thanked Jack Wagner for inviting me, told him what a great play it was—it wasn’t really very good, but you don’t say that—”

“No, you don’t.”

“And I came home and told Susan about it. My wife.”

Johnson looked interested. “She didn’t go along?”

“No, she didn’t want to,” Wayne said. “She wasn’t interested in Bryce’s ex-wife, in fact she’s never met Bryce. And she didn’t care about the play, and she has a full-time job, so she didn’t feel like coming out with me. She had dinner that night with a woman friend of hers, and was home before I was.”

“When Lucie left the theater that night,” Johnson said, “do you have any idea who she was with?”

“Not at all,” Wayne said. “I was gone by then. I was probably the first one to leave the party.”

“You didn’t know anybody,” Johnson suggested, “and the mission was accomplished.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you discuss Lucie with Bryce Proctorr, later on?”

“Not really. I mean, just a little bit. I told him what I thought, what I just told you, that I more or less agreed with him that she wasn’t a very nice person.”

Johnson nodded. “I guess Bryce must have felt Lucie mistreated him quite a bit,” he said.

“I guess so.”

“Did he ever tell you he wanted revenge against Lucie?”

Startled, because everything had been so easygoing, Wayne said, “Revenge? No, all he ever said was he wanted it over with, the lawyers were dragging it out.”

“But he wanted it to end.”

“He sure did.”

“Did he ever suggest there might be any kind of shortcut to end it that he might take?”

“You mean, like killing her?”

Johnson grinned. “Well, that’s one way, sure,” he said. “But I was thinking, some of these rich fellas, they just pack up everything and leave the country, and tell the wife, ‘Catch me if you can.’”

“I don’t think that idea ever even occurred to Bryce,” Wayne said. “He’s got his life here. Besides, whatever money he gets paid, that’s here, too, in New York. I don’t think it would do him any good to go to Europe or anywhere.”

“That’s probably true.” Johnson seemed to consider for a minute, and then he said, “Do you think of Bryce Proctorr as a good friend?”

“In a funny way, yes,” Wayne told him. “We hadn’t seen each other for years, whenever I thought about him or saw his name in the paper, what I mostly felt was jealousy, because he was so much more successful than I am, but now that I’ve seen him again for a while I like the guy. He isn’t stuck-up or anything like that. I don’t say we’re close, but we get along. Yeah, I like him.”

“You didn’t mind his success.”

“It’s his. He isn’t stealing anything from me.”

“Well, that’s true,” Johnson said. “And what are you doing these days, Mr. Prentice, if I may ask?”

Acting surprised, Wayne said, “Still writing.”

“Really? Novels, like before?”

“Sure. I’ve been using a pen name, the last few years,” Wayne told him, “but I’m thinking of going back to my own name with the new one.”

“You’re working on a book now?”

“I’m always working on a book.”

“To tell the truth, Mr. Prentice,” Johnson said, “I’m something of a wannabe writer myself. I won’t inflict anything of my own on you, don’t worry about that, but I wonder. Could I take a look at what you’re working on?”

“Sure,” Wayne said. “Come along.”

As they left the living room, it occurred to Wayne that he might actually be a suspect in the case, even if just in the way that everybody is a suspect at first. Or had Johnson recognized some element from that drawing of the suspect in Wayne’s face? Susan had finally seen some similarity in the eyes, but not enough, she thought, to lead anyone else to the likeness.

But asking to see his novel in progress. Wasn’t it likely that Johnson wanted to know if Wayne could support himself with his writing, or if he was somebody who needed money, maybe needed it enough to kill a pesky ex-wife for an old friend? You won’t get me that way, Detective Johnson, Wayne thought.

They went into Wayne’s little office, which Johnson admired, calling it “compact” as though that were a synonym for “efficient,” and then Wayne had him sit in front of the computer while he booted in the disc of The Shadowed Other. It didn’t have a title page, because he wasn’t sure of the byline yet, but began with Chapter One.

“Well, look at that,” Johnson said. He read the first paragraph, then scrolled a dozen pages or so, read another paragraph, then sat back and shook his head in amused wonder. “You professionals make it look so easy,” he said. “That’s why I know I’ll never get anywhere.”

“Everybody started,” Wayne told him. “No one was born a pro.”

“That’s very nice of you to say,” Johnson told him, and got up from the computer. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Prentice,” he said.

And that was that.

 

 

Seventeen

Bryce couldn’t seem to get out of his temporal confusion. He usually took the train up to Connecticut sometime on Friday, spent the weekend, left Monday. This week, the New York apartment had just become too oppressive by Thursday, so he’d taken the train up shortly after Wayne had told him about the message from Detective Johnson, and now it was Friday morning, and he was already here, and he just couldn’t keep the day straight in his mind.

He phoned several weekend friends, wondering what if anything might be doing, this early in December, not yet massively Christmas, but of course none of them were here. Today is Friday, he had to keep reminding himself, and they are in New York. They work in New York. They live in New York. This is their weekend place.

And me? Where do I work? Do I work? Where do I live? Where do I call to find me?

He still didn’t have his new story, and he needed it, he needed it now. Story ideas had never been a problem for him, there’d always been more ideas than time to write them, he’d reject one perfectly good notion because he felt more simpatico toward a different one. But of course he could never go back to any of those ancient story stubs, they wouldn’t still have juice in them.

For him, creating a novel was like gardening: you choose your seed, you treat it exactly the way the package says, and gradually a thing of beauty—or of sturdiness, or of nutrition—grows up and becomes yours. The seed you don’t nurture doesn’t wait to be doted over later; it shrivels and dies.

One seed, that was all he needed. Of course, also this weekend he had to do the tiny remaining revisions on Two Faces in the Mirror, but that was no problem. No matter when he turned the work in, Joe Katz surely wouldn’t read the pages until after the holidays. Two Faces in the Mirror was scheduled now for June, which was tight, in publishing terms, but Bryce Proctorr was a known quantity—and a known quality, too—so there was no doubt in anyone’s mind the manuscript would be ready in time. And it had been too long since a Bryce Proctorr novel had been published, so the sooner the better.

Meaning the sooner the better, as well, for whatever was to come next. He should already know what it was by now, so he could do some preliminary plotting out, so he could spend the winter months in whatever travel and research might be necessary, spend the spring writing the book, turn it in in June just as Two Faces was being published. That was the kind of scheduling a publisher liked; the new one comes into the shop as the old one goes out the door.

Bryce thought on the train Thursday afternoon, he thought in front of the television set Thursday evening and in his waking hours in bed Thursday night and at the computer Friday morning, between useless phone calls to absent weekend friends, and he never got anywhere. A character in motion. Every character he thought of, whatever profession, age, nationality, residence, sex, economic status or relationship with the law, every single character, arrived already carrying its body bag.

That’s when he thought maybe the thing to do was go away for part of the winter, somewhere different, somewhere warm. The Caribbean, maybe, or Hawaii, or southern Europe. Not Spain; Capri, maybe.

He was entering into the computer:

James Bond arrived on Capri with his right arm in a sling. I recognized him from the surveillance photos, and approached with my left hand out. “Chris Dockery,” I said. “What happened to the wing?”

“It got winged,” he said.

Breep breep, went the phone. Bryce frowned at what he’d just typed. A novel from the point of view of a James Bond sidekick? An ambiguous fellow, without Bond’s Queen and Country stuff. An ironic contrast, a way to contemplate the issue of patriotism in a world where history has ended.

Breep breep.

Artificial, juvenile, unsustainable; and a mare’s nest to clear the rights.

Breep breep.

“Yes.”

“Oh, there you are. I left a message on your New York machine.”

It was Wayne. James Bond’s sidekick, the more ruthless one. License to kill. “Hello, Wayne.”

“Detective Johnson just left.”

Bryce heard the tone of self-satisfaction in Wayne’s voice and was reassured by it. “It went okay, I guess.”

“No problem at all,” Wayne said. “Only, I should tell you what I told him, so we both have the same story. In case he checks back with you.”

“Very good,” Bryce said. He imagined he was on the phone with Chris Dockery, receiving some plot point information.

“I told him we knew each other more than twenty years ago, drifted apart when I went to Italy. I figured you were calling old friends after your marriage ended, you called me.”

“How did I know where you were?”

“I’m in the phone book, Bryce,” Wayne said. “No reason for me to have an unlisted number.”

“Oh, sure, sorry.” He felt embarrassed, as though he’d made some sort of faux pas with a member of the lower classes. And of course he’d found Wayne in the phone book once, to leave that message: “You’ll meet her.” Yes.

“Anyway,” Wayne said, “you called me, and we met and had coffee a few times, and—”

“Coffee?”

“I don’t know, it just came out that way.”

“We sound like an AA meeting.”

“You could give us a few drinks, if you want, it isn’t important.”

“Good.”

“Anyway,” Wayne went on, “you said so many negative things about Lucie that I got interested to meet her just once, see if she could possibly be that bad. There was a play opening that you couldn’t go to, because she would be there, and I asked if I could go, and you—”

“You asked?”

“I was curious.”

“All right.”

“You called the playwright,” Wayne said, “Jack Wagner, and I went, and I asked Wagner to introduce me to Lucie. I talked with her maybe five minutes, didn’t like her, left the party early. First one to leave. Which I was, by the way.”

“He have any problems with any of that?”

“None,” Wayne said. “He told me he was a wannabe writer, and—”

“Oh, God.”

“No, it’s okay, I think he was lying. I think he wanted to know if I had any way to support myself, or if I’d become a contract killer. So I showed him the book I’m working on—”

“A new one?” Bryce felt a twinge.

“Didn’t I tell you? Yeah, it’s coming along pretty good.”

“That’s nice,” Bryce said. “I figure I’ll get started on my next after the holidays. You know, it’s tough to get stuff done in December.”

“Try impossible,” Wayne said. “Anyway, the point is, Johnson came and left and I think he’s satisfied. I think that’s the end of it.”

“Let’s hope so,” Bryce said. “And thanks for letting me know.”

“Well, sure, of course.”

Bryce sensed that Wayne would have liked to prolong the conversation, but he did not. “Talk to you soon,” he said.

“Sure,” Wayne said.

Off the phone, Bryce deleted Chris Dockery and his friend Bond, and entered:

When my marriage ended, I was feeling kind of lonely and adrift, so I tried looking up old friends from my first days in the city, and there was Wayne Prentice in the phone book. I called him, and we met a few times, had coffee or drinks, and I guess I unloaded my dissatisfaction on him because he got curious about my ex-wife and wanted to meet her. There was a play premiere I was invited to but I couldn’t go because she would be there, so Wayne asked if he could go in my place. I arranged it, and he went and met her and I guess he didn’t much like her. We haven’t talked about it since, obviously.

Bryce read what he had written, and he didn’t like it. In the first place, there was the fact that Wayne had no trouble saying Lucie’s name, talking about her, while Bryce found it increasingly difficult to refer to her as a real person. Shouldn’t Wayne be feeling this? But clearly he was not.

But that wasn’t the main point. There are moments in almost any novel when it’s necessary to move a character from one position to another, so that you can go on with the story, and this was like that. Once the character is moved into the new position, everything is fine, but in order to make the transition the writer has to bend something out of shape. Some behavior is wrong, some reaction is wrong. It’s a rip in the fabric of the novel, but it’s necessary to get the story where it has to go, so the novelist merely sighs and shakes his head and does it. Other writers, reading the book, might notice the lump in the batter, but most readers won’t.

This was one of those junctions. Once we get Wayne to the premiere of Low Fidelity, everything’s fine, everything moves along as though on rails. But the flaw is before that.

Under no circumstances, never, would Bryce Proctorr, after the breakup of his marriage, be feeling lonely enough and nostalgic enough and sentimental enough to start looking up people he’d known twenty years ago, for God’s sake. Utter strangers to each other, by now. And who else did this Bryce Proctorr look up and phone? Just Wayne Prentice?

A novelist would see through this, he thought. Would Detective Johnson? Probably not. Even if he felt something was just a little off in the story he’d been told, there wouldn’t be anything there to get hold of, nothing concrete. And in any case, he probably wouldn’t even notice the false note.

So long as the New York Police Department doesn’t hire a lot of novelists to track me down, Bryce thought, I should be okay.

 

 

Eighteen

Christmas, which at least in theory should be the best season for a charitable organization like Susan’s, was in many ways the worst. All of the needs were increased, all of the problems were magnified, all of the requirements became more urgent, and people who could keep their egos in check very nicely the rest of the year suddenly became vastly important in their own eyes.

Every evening, now that Detective Johnson had come and gone, now that the whole Lucie episode seemed to be finished with and fading from their minds (as well as from the media, thank God), now that Wayne’s rejected novel had found a good home (however anonymously) so that soon a great deal of money would be coming their way, Susan was spending the dinner hour each evening telling Wayne the latest horror stories and comedies and comedic horrors from her days at UniCare.

There was rich material here. If Wayne weren’t already at work on a novel, and if in fact it weren’t the case that he had no market for any novel at all, he’d certainly try to find a story in the varied stories Susan was telling him. The setting was both Dickensian and very modern, sentimental but still ironic; perfect.

Finally, for the hell of it, he sat down one morning after breakfast, the week after the visit from Detective Johnson, and banged out a six-thousand-word non-fiction piece on the subject of the economics of organized charity. He welcomed the irony, and wallowed in the sentiment. He had no idea what to do with such a thing, but wrote it anyway, because it was fun, because he preferred to be writing than not to be writing, and because he seemed to have bogged down in The Shadowed Other.

He knew what that was all about, and he wasn’t made anxious by it. There’d been a moment, very briefly, when he’d realized The Shadowed Other was grinding gradually to a halt, that he’d wondered if this were a delayed reaction to the Lucie thing. (He called it that in his mind now, the Lucie thing, knowing what he meant, all the details and the surroundings and the circumstances, and he didn’t need any further definition for himself.) But the Lucie thing wasn’t bothering him, wasn’t incapacitating him. He regretted it, of course he did, he regretted the necessity of it, and God knows he regretted the messiness of it, but it was over now, and whatever his regrets, whatever the horror of the incident itself, it was finished and they were now in the post-Lucie world, which was a much better world for Wayne.

Also, he had begun to suspect that the only way he could have done the Lucie thing was the way it had happened, by surprising himself, forcing the issue, creating a situation where there was no way to turn back. His vague plans about traveling to some southern state to buy a gun, then track Lucie anonymously through the canyons of New York, had all been a fantasy, a daydream. He couldn’t have done it that way. Shock himself into action; that was the only possible route he could have taken.

So it wasn’t the Lucie thing that was blocking The Shadowed Other, it was Joe Katz. After the holidays, Joe Katz would have a conversation with Wayne about his potential future at Pegasus-Regent. If it were thumbs-up, The Shadowed Other would spring immediately back to life. If not, not.

That evening, Wayne showed “Charity Begins in the Out Basket” to Susan, who had a couple of small corrections to suggest but otherwise thought the piece terrific. So he made the changes, and the next day he called Willard Hartman, his agent, with whom he had not spoken since the dooming of The Domino Doublet.

“Wayne! Good to hear your voice, my friend. Happy holidays.”

“And you, Willard. I thought I should warn you . . .”

“Yes?” Said in jolly fashion, but with wariness underneath.

“I seem to have descended into the sinks of fact,” Wayne said. “I’ve done some sort of article about the charity biz, based on stuff Susan told me.”

“Aimed where?” Willard asked, sensibly.

“I haven’t the vaguest idea,” Wayne admitted. “I don’t know that world. I just want to mail it to you, Willard, and if there’s no market for it, you’ll know better than me.”

“Well, I’ll certainly enjoy reading it, Wayne, I know that much,” Willard told him. “You know I’m a fan of your stuff. I just wish there were more of us out here.”

“Me, too, Willard,” Wayne said, and the next day sent him a copy of the piece, with a note reading, “Think of this as a Christmas card.”

 

 

Nineteen

Early in December, Christmas settles over New York City, and refuses to permit anything else to be talked about or thought about. Bryce took the train in to the city three times in search of Christmas presents for his kids, and for Joe Katz, and for Jerry Mossman, his New York agent, and for Gregg, the groundsman who mowed the lawns in Connecticut in the summer and kept an eye on the place the rest of the year, when Bryce—and before that Bryce and Lucie—were less often there.

But this year he was more often there. He found the apartment uncomfortable, didn’t like to spend the night there, but twice he had to, once after Pegasus-Regent’s Christmas party, an annual event he had no choice but to attend. The probable reason that he drank too much at the party this year, a thing he didn’t normally do, was because Wayne was present.

He hadn’t expected Joe to invite Wayne, who wasn’t after all a Pegasus-Regent author. (In a way, of course, he was, but not in a way Joe Katz could know about.)

“Well, hello,” Bryce said, walking over to where Wayne stood, a plastic glass of pink punch in his hand. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Wayne was very happy, maybe a little high. “To tell you the absolute truth, Bryce,” he said, “I feel like Cinderella. This isn’t my real gown, and that isn’t my real coach outside, and I wasn’t really invited to the ball.”

“Don’t tell the prince that,” Bryce advised him, “and things could work out for you.”

Wayne was tipsy enough to be sincere, in a way Bryce found crude, almost ghoulish. “I want to thank you, Bryce,” he said. “You made all this possible.”

“You made a lot possible, too,” Bryce reminded him.

But Wayne was off on a voyage of his own, looking past Bryce, gazing at all the people at the party, book people chatting about books. “God, I love this,” he said.

Bryce knew what he was thinking. This is his world, he belongs in this world because he doesn’t belong in any other, doesn’t fit anywhere else. The teaching-in-college fantasy had been just that, a fantasy, and one way or another it would have ended badly. This is the only pond in which this fish can swim.

And so, he has to be telling himself, whatever I had to do to be here is all right. To stay here where I belong, not to strangle in some alien world, simply to get what I deserve, the bare minimum I deserve; to be in my own world. Nothing is too much to do, to get that.

I did this to him, Bryce thought. I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. If no price is too high to pay, then the price I charged him wasn’t very high at all, was it?

Bryce too looked around the room, trying to see it through Wayne’s eyes, but knowing his own eyes saw differently. He did belong in this world, his bona fides were proved, and he had not done anything. Yet he felt he was the outcast. Why should that be? Why should the loser be lapping this up like cream, while the acknowledged winner feels like the interloper, the nobody, Caliban, the bumpkin rubbing elbows with his betters?

“Maybe this is a masked ball,” he said, but was immediately glad that Wayne was inattentive and didn’t pick up on that. Because he knew at once what would be beneath Wayne’s mask: openness, eagerness, sincerity. But what would be beneath Bryce’s mask?

“Oh, I want you to meet Susan. Susan? Come here, meet Bryce Proctorr.”

Bryce turned, and she offered him a cool hand and a cool smile. “How do you do? Wayne has told me so much about you.”

Has ever a stock bit of dialogue contained such gross subtext? Jesus Christ, Bryce thought, what a horrible secret we three share, in the middle of this party, we three and nobody else.

He and Susan Prentice took an instant dislike to one another, and Bryce could see her recognizing it as much as he did. She was a good-looking woman, he supposed, but too controlled, her light brown hair too much of a helmet to her head, her body too neatly trim, as though it had been pruned like a Christmas tree, her movements all too small and careful.

“Merry Christmas,” he said, and showed his party smile, and toasted her with his glass of punch.

“This is really a lovely party,” she said. “Much better than Romney.”

Romney had been Wayne’s first publisher, years ago. Tim Fleet, Bryce knew, had been published by Antelope, but of course if Antelope hosted any parties—not all publishers did—Tim Fleet could not have attended. What a strange thing it must have been to be Tim Fleet.

Bryce said, “Pegasus is the only publisher I’ve ever had, so I have no basis for comparison.”

Surprised, Wayne said, “Is that true? Most writers switch sooner or later.”

“Jerry, my agent, did some saber rattling a couple times,” Bryce told him, “but Pegasus always came through. And I’ve been happy here. My first editor was great, and when he retired Joe took over, and that’s twelve years, and I’d never leave Joe. If he ever went, I’d go with him.” If I had a book to give him, he thought.

Turning away from that thought, he said to Susan Prentice, “What was wrong with Romney? Their Christmas parties, I mean.”

“They were very cheap,” she said, “and it was always in their offices, and it didn’t really work, and they’d just order deli stuff and the cheapest possible white wine, and all their A-list writers stayed away in droves.”

Wayne laughed, though shrilly, and said, “That was it, right there, if only I’d noticed. If you found yourself at Romney’s Christmas party, you knew you weren’t A-list. You knew you were mid-list.” Grinning at Bryce, he said, “You know my definition of mid-list? No pulse.”

Lucie! Crumbling backwards to the ground, punching, punching: no pulse. Bryce closed his eyes, and opened them. “I’ve been lucky,” he said, “and I know it. And I’d better circulate, if I want to go on being lucky. Nice to meet you, Susan.”

“And you.”

Bryce wandered the party, but found no one else to have a good conversation with, and soon left. Looking back from the door, he saw Wayne deep in happy conversation with, among others, Joe Katz.

* * *

There were as many parties up in the country in December as in the city, and he felt more comfortable at the country parties. The people he knew there were much more diverse, not all writers and editors and agents. The weekenders in the hills around him, who’d become casual friends and party hosts over the years, included lawyers, advertising workers, doctors, the owner of a chain of garden nurseries, a newspaper columnist, even a couple of actors. He felt at ease with these people because they cared more about pool services and deer repellents than about publishing mergers and the vagaries of the New York Times Book Review.

The actual holidays he expected to spend home alone in the country, but a week before Christmas he got an unexpected phone call from his ex-wife, Ellen. “The kids are all coming up the afternoon of Christmas Day,” she said, “and we’ll have early dinner, because everybody has to get back. We were wondering if you’d like to join us.”

This offer had never been made before, and was clearly being made now because of the death of Lucie. Bryce’s immediate reaction was to say no, was to continue with the idea that he’d stay alone for the holidays, but as he said, “Well, Ellen, I—” she said, “Are you seeing anyone? You could certainly bring—”

“No no,” he said. “There was a, I don’t know if you knew about Isabelle—”

“I don’t know your life now, Bryce.”

“Well, there’s nobody,” he said.

“So drive up. Oh, around one or two.”

“All right,” he said, and was glad he’d already bought presents, which he’d intended to mail. Since they wouldn’t be entrusted to the Post Office after all, he gave them much more elaborate wrappings, with big bows, and large cardboard cutouts of angels declaring the name of the gift’s recipient.

Christmas Eve he spent by himself, but that was all right. He watched television, switching around among choruses and comics and sentimental stories, dipping into three separate filmed versions of A Christmas Carol—now, there’s a property with legs—and thinking how many other people were working or otherwise occupied tonight.

A little after ten the phone rang, and it was Isabelle, the first he’d heard from her since the day she’d decided not to move in with him after all. Several times he’d thought of phoning her, but it seemed too pushy to do, since she was the one who’d rejected him, and also too much trouble. What would be gained by talking to Isabelle?

She was calling from a party; he could hear the crowd noises in the background. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“I was wondering about you. Are you all right?”

“Sure, why wouldn’t I be? I’m spending tomorrow with my kids. Where are you?”

“Some friends of my father’s,” she told him, “they have this penthouse just north of the UN, spectacular views out over the East River, it’s really fantastic.” Lowering her voice, she said, “I’m the only one here under sixty. I think I’m their little match girl.”

“They couldn’t have done better,” Bryce assured her.

“Are you coming to town at all?”

“Not till after the holidays,” he said, knowing she was asking him to ask her out, but perversely refusing. He didn’t want to rebuild the relationship, he wanted it to go on crumbling.

It went on crumbling, and soon they said goodbye to one another, and he went back to Christmas Eve in the world of TV. And early the next afternoon he put the shopping bags in the back of the BMW—they’d replaced the one that had been in the multicar collision—and drove the eighteen miles north and west through blustery wind under a bruised multilayer swirling sky—but not yet snow, which was predicted for a few days farther along—toward the house Ellen now shared with Jimmy Branley, outside Newtown.

Branley was an architect, and had designed his house, which Bryce found ostentatious, all the rooms too large and sprawling, the white clapboard and fieldstone house diffused over the crest of a slope as though poured there, trailing down toward a generous swimming pool on one side and an elaborate black-granite ornamental pond on the other.

The interior was all white walls and massive blond beams and yellow brick fireplaces. Branley’d designed much of the furniture, too, all of it low and wide, as though it were being seen in a funhouse mirror. But the house was at its best, Bryce knew, at parties and festive occasions, when people seemed to flow from area to area, and the sound quality was such that you could always have a private conversation without ever feeling isolated from everybody else.

Since this was a weekend place, and by definition then at least to some extent a party house, and since it was also the showcase for Branley to demonstrate his style and skills for potential clients, Bryce had to admit that, whether he liked the house or not, it did the job Branley asked of it.

Bryce wasn’t entirely sure what he thought of Branley himself, who was a cheerful, amiable man without a bad word for anybody. An ex-wife’s new husband was one thing, but the guy she was living with was something else, even when it had been going on for several years, and when that guy was nearly fifty, with two grown kids of his own. Why Ellen and Branley didn’t just go ahead and get married he didn’t know; maybe Bryce had turned her permanently away from marriage.

The one thing he knew for sure about Branley that he didn’t like was the way the man cheerfully announced, at every opportunity, that he wasn’t a reader. Had never read any of Bryce’s novels, no doubt never would. Too busy, too content with his architecture career, totally uninterested in fiction.

Bryce sometimes wished he could express such total lack of interest on his part in architecture, but that would just sound silly. Of course he was uninterested in architecture; only architects are interested in architecture. But all literate people are supposed to be interested in literature, or at least that’s what Bryce had always believed.

He was the last arrival, and was welcomed cheerily if not effusively. The presents he’d brought were put under the huge tree in the living room with all the other presents already piled there, and he was re-introduced to Kathy and Jack, Branley’s children, both mid-twenties, both doing something in cable TV.

Bryce soon regretted coming. The problem was, everything was normal, everything was fine, everyone accepted him, even his own kids seemed warmer than usual. The early dinner was fine, and he was seated next to Kathy Branley, who it turned out had just read Twice Tolled in paperback, and wanted to tell him how much she’d enjoyed it. And throughout, he kept thinking, I’m not supposed to be here, I’m not supposed to be with these people, I’m not supposed to be around simple pleasures. He didn’t know why he felt that way, and didn’t want to question it. He just wished he hadn’t come.

Still, however much he might feel out of place here, nevertheless he stayed on, and stayed. After dinner, they opened Champagne with the Christmas presents, and then the others started to leave, but Bryce stayed on, not entirely because he wanted to but because some sort of lethargy had overtaken him. And, he realized, too, he wanted to talk with Ellen. He’d been feeling the need to talk with Ellen since he’d seen her at the funeral, and now was maybe his last chance.

Tom and Barry, Bryce’s younger children, having driven up together in Tom’s car from New York, left together around seven, followed shortly by Branley’s two kids, leaving only Ellen and Jimmy, plus Bryce and his twenty-three-year-old, Betsy, who was of course an architecture student and therefore always had a lot to discuss with Branley.

Ellen wound up in the kitchen, and Bryce followed, sitting on one of the chrome-and-canvas chairs at the butcher-block table, listening to Ellen’s small talk, understanding that Ellen simply thought he was lonely and she was trying to fill in a little empty time for him.

But it was more than that. At a pause in her chitchat, he said, “Ellen, there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

“Yes? Sure. What is it?”

“Well,” he said, feeling amazingly awkward, not knowing how to sit with these arms, these legs, “what it is, I feel this need to confess.”

She half-smiled, expecting some sort of joke. “Confess? Confess what, Bryce?”

“Well, I hired somebody to kill Lucie.”

She stopped whatever she’d been doing—putting plastic around a pie remnant, something like that—and turned to stare at him. “You did what?”

“It was going on for so long, you know,” he said, “and I couldn’t work. It was that, more than anything else.”

“You killed Lucie?”

“Had it done. Paid for it done. While I was out of town.”

She strode to the kitchen door, pushed it shut, came quickly to sit at the table opposite him. He’d never seen such a deep vertical streak between her eyes. She said, “You’re telling the truth.”

“Of course I’m telling the truth.” He shrugged, looking away from her. “It was supposed to make things better.”

“How could you have—How could you even think of such a thing?”

“Thoughts like that have been thought before, Ellen,” he said. “I didn’t invent it.”

“No, of course not,” she said, shaking her own head, as though she’d been stupid. “And that’s what you do, anyway, isn’t it? Think up things like that.”

“Usually not quite this . . . effectively.”

“And what now? Is he blackmailing you? The man who . . .”

“No, no, he’s all right, he’s fine, he’s perfectly happy.” This time when he shrugged, it was spastic, like a convulsion. “I’m the problem.”

“In what way?”

“I still can’t work,” he told her. “I’m trying to think of a book, a new story, and nothing comes. And everything’s just drab. I told you, that girl, Isabelle, we were together awhile—”

“I don’t know her.”

“No. When she left me, she said there wasn’t any joy in me any more. And it’s true.”

“My God, Bryce, what a mess.”

“It was a terrible mistake,” he said. “I realize that now, it was the worst thing I could have done. I have to make it right, Ellen. I don’t know, for some reason I need you to know about it first. Be ready for it.”

She gave him a wary look. “Be ready for what?”

“I have to go to the police, of course,” he said. “I have to—”

“Don’t you dare!”

He stared at her, astonished, and she was glaring at him as though he were her worst enemy in the world. “What?”

“Is there no end to how selfish you can be?” Her face was stone, eyes burning ice into him. “I think I’m used to it, how self-centered you—”

“Ellen, what are you saying? I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t,” she said. “You have three children, Bryce, at the very beginning of their lives, all just on the verge of stepping out to become whoever they’re going to be.”

“What has that got to do with—”

“You’re a celebrity, you fool! You’re a famous man! If you drag those children through a murder trial, a media circus, Bryce, I may kill you myself.”

All he could do was gape at her. “I never—”

“Of course you never,” she said. “That’s always true with you, you never never. Bryce, you did a stupid and an evil and an unforgivable thing, but I will not let you make it worse.”

“I thought,” Bryce said, “if I confessed . . .” He wiped cobwebs from his face.

“You ruin your children’s lives,” she finished. “You don’t get off the hook that easily, Bryce, you don’t get to be like the Catholics, just confess everything and it’s all gone, the joy is back in your life. You can’t do that. You have responsibilities.”

“Oh, Ellen,” he said.

“Responsibilities,” she insisted. “For you, Bryce, confession is bad for the soul.”

He managed a laugh, though not a good one. “All right,” he agreed. “You’re right, all right, I see that now, I didn’t see it before, I’m glad I talked it over with you first.”

“Oh, my God, Bryce, so am I.”

“Confession is bad for my soul,” Bryce said, and nodded. His head felt very heavy. “I’ll remember that,” he said.

 

 

Twenty

Susan’s grandparents, the Costellos, used to be truck farmers years ago in central New Jersey, near Hightstown, growing tomatoes for the huge Campbell Soup processing plant, as were most of their neighbors. The plant is long gone, most of the farms have been turned into bedroom communities for New Yorkers, and highways and strip malls scratch the landscape. But Susan’s grandparents, both now in their nineties, were still alive and still owned the farmhouse and outbuildings and twenty-six acres, and every Christmas the whole family collected there, from as far away as Miami and Omaha, filling the house and the two barns converted into guest cottages.

This annual experience combined the wonderful and the horrible in more or less equal measure, and Wayne loved it. He himself had grown up in Hartford, Connecticut, to schoolteacher parents who couldn’t have been more uptight if they’d still worn whalebone corsets. His father was dead now, his mother living in Pompano Lakes, Florida, his three siblings scattered, and they rarely if ever saw one another. Wayne supposed the main reason for that, from his family’s side, was because he and Susan had no children. A lot of people, once they marry and settle down to “normal” life with a “normal” job and “normal” kids, are completely uninterested in anyone who isn’t exactly like themselves. Wayne did not have a “normal” job, Greenwich Village was not a “normal” home, and, most damning of all, they didn’t have their own batch of dirty, loud, sticky, offensive kids.

All of which was fine with Wayne. Susan’s family was enough for him, a large, variegated, tolerant, cheerful, boisterous clan, heavy into ribbing and joking but slow to take real offense. Wayne had a great time every year during those four days on the farm, forgetting completely his other life in New York, and the same thing happened this year. Not a thought about his perilous career, not a thought about Bryce, not a thought about Joe Katz, not a thought about that article he’d somehow written just before they’d left, and certainly not a thought about Lucie Proctorr, who was now, in his mind, not even a gruesome movie he’d seen once long ago but was a story, a horror story someone had told him once that his own vivid imagination had elaborated on but which was nevertheless not quite real.

They got back to the apartment on the twenty-eighth, refreshed, enjoying the accumulation of mail, seeing they now had invitations to three New Year’s Eve parties, and of course they’d go to all three, and did, and met no one anywhere who could trouble their minds.

The Tuesday after New Year’s, Wayne got two morning phone calls. The first was from Willard Hartman, his agent, who said, “Vanity Fair wants your charity piece.”

“Fantastic!” Wayne hadn’t really expected anything from that piece, it had just been something to do, filling the time, writing something because writing something was better than not writing something.

“They have a few questions,” Willard went on, “and a few changes to suggest. And they want to talk about photos to illustrate the piece, they always have to have photos.”

“Oh, sure, we can figure something out.”

“Laurie Simons, the editor on this one, sub-editor, she could just E-mail it to you, or fax it, whichever you prefer.”

Tim Fleet’s life had existed almost entirely in E-mail, putatively sent to and from Milan. “Give her my E-mail address,” he decided. “What do they pay?”

“They’ve offered six thousand.”

“Hah,” Wayne said. “Go figure.” Not bad, he thought, for a morning’s work.

* * *

The second call, half an hour later, was from Joe Katz, who said, “Let’s do lunch.”

Wayne’s heart fluttered. “Sure. When?”

“One o’clock?”

“Oh, you mean today!”

Joe laughed. “Wayne,” he said, “I eat lunch every day. Walk on up, I’ll see you at one.”

They ate at Campagna, on East Twenty-first Street, where Joe was known and they got a table for two with a little privacy, which wasn’t the case throughout the restaurant. They talked about the holidays and Joe ordered a glass of white wine, so Wayne followed suit. Once they’d ordered their lunch, Joe said, “Let’s talk about your career.”

“I didn’t know I had one,” Wayne said.

“I’m sorry, Wayne,” Joe told him, “but you just jumped to the last chapter.”

A cold lump formed in Wayne’s stomach. He was glad he’d ordered the wine. He’d known the news was almost certain to be negative, but he hadn’t been able to keep himself from hoping. Joe Katz was a senior editor, he had clout, he was respected. Couldn’t he tell the computer to go fuck itself ?

Apparently not. Joe was truly apologetic, wishing it were up to him, but the numbers were the numbers. “This is a bad time in publishing,” he explained.

Wayne didn’t really feel like laughing, but he laughed. “It’s always a bad time in publishing.”

“Then this time is worse,” Joe said. “The publishers are merging, more and more imprints under the same umbrella, and the result is, everybody’s publishing fewer books.”

“I know about that part.”

“Of course you do. But on the other side, there’s less room in the media for book reviews, attention to books, because now they’re covering all these new technologies, CD-ROM and the Internet.”

“I knew I was getting fewer reviews as time went on,” Wayne said. “I thought it was me.”

“It’s everybody,” Joe assured him. “Or almost everybody.”

“Not Bryce.”

“No, not Bryce.” Joe shrugged. “Which brings up the other problem. Half a dozen years ago, the book wholesalers consolidated, and that means, even if you get your book published in hardcover, there’s less chance to get a paperback reprint.”

“That happened to me, too,” Wayne agreed.

“I don’t know if you’ll appreciate the irony,” Joe said, “but people like Bryce are seeing slightly better paperback sales, because the people like you aren’t in the way any more.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever appreciate that irony, either, Joe,” Wayne said. “But what it comes down to is, you can’t do anything with me.”

“The only offer I could possibly make you,” Joe said, “is so insulting I don’t want to do it.”

“You might as well try me,” Wayne said. At this point, what could an insult look like?

“I told Carew, the publisher, I really wanted you, and he did all that good-money-after-bad stuff, and then we came to a compromise. You tell me you have a book.”

“Part of a book.”

“If I think there’s something promotable in it,” Joe said, “maybe we can work something out. You know what I mean by promotable.”

“Princess Di should be a character in it.”

Joe laughed, but he said, “It wouldn’t hurt. Promotable is absolutely distinct from quality. I know your work, I know you’ll produce good readable prose, I know you’re good with plots and good with characters, so let’s just call all that a given.”

“Thank you,” Wayne said.

“This isn’t compliments,” Joe told him. “I’m discounting everything we know you’re good at. What I want you to do is go home and look at that part of a book you have, and say to yourself, ‘Never mind Joe Katz. What will the publicity department see here? What will the sales department see here? What’s the hook?’ You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Wayne said.

Joe shook a finger at him. “I’m not asking you to bend your book out of shape,” he said. “In the first place, I wouldn’t be able to make it worth your while. So don’t add Princess Di.”

“Okay,” Wayne said.

“But if you think,” Joe said, “without destroying the integrity of the work, you can find a promotable element in it, call me and tell me. And then I’ll look at the book. And if it’s got all your normal strengths, plus you’re right about it being promotable, I’m permitted to offer you ten thousand dollars.”

Wayne could think of nothing to say.

Joe finished his wine in a gulp, and signalled for a second glass. Wayne pointed at his own glass, and Joe showed the waiter two fingers. Then he said, “The idea is, if we can get behind this book and promote it, and kick you up above the computer’s expectations, then next time we can offer a little more and try even harder and make another increase in sales.”

Wayne said, “You’re talking about building a career from scratch, the way it used to be, when writers and publishers stuck with one another for the long haul.”

“Except,” Joe told him, “the way the game is played now, we begin in sudden-death overtime.”

Wayne sipped his second glass of wine. There was nothing promotable in The Shadowed Other. You could only promote it as a novel, a story, something you might like to read. He said, “I’ll think about it.”

“Good,” Joe said.

“And I want to thank you, Joe,” Wayne said. He was sincere, and hoped it showed. “I know you did your best.”

“We can only do what we can only do,” Joe said.

 

 

Twenty-one

Bryce had arranged with Linda, the once-a-week cleaning woman in New York, to pack up his mail every week, the stuff she thought he’d care about, put it in a manila envelope, and send it to him in Connecticut. The Thursday after New Year’s, he got such an envelope, and one of the items it contained was a brisk letter from the management firm that handled the building containing his apartment. The letter was addressed to Bryce Proctorr, and it informed him that the management firm had become aware of the fact that the leaseholder of the apartment was deceased. If Bryce cared to negotiate a new lease, he should phone Ms. Teraski at the above number as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it would not be acceptable for him to remain in the apartment without a lease.

What a strange thing to realize, that even though Lucie had been the one to move out at the breakup of the marriage, it was still her name on the lease. Mark Steiner, his accountant, had had reasons of his own why Lucie should be a New York resident and lease the apartment while he should be a Connecticut resident and own the house. It had seemed unnecessarily complex at the time, in the way that tax laws lead to unnecessary complexity, but now it seemed grotesque.

They understood the leaseholder was deceased. That was the most bloodless way yet to describe the circumstance by which the life had been pounded out of Lucie’s body.

He didn’t call Ms. Teraski, not yet, because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He supposed he should call Mark at some point, find out what the tax laws and the accountant thought best for him at this juncture, but he didn’t feel ready for that call, either.

Then, two hours later, Mark himself phoned Bryce. “I just wanted you to know, the Pegasus money is in.”

“Oh, good,” Bryce said.

“I’ll be calling Wayne Prentice next.”

“He’ll be glad to hear from you.”

Mark laughed. “I suppose he will,” he said. “You know, I still think this is the most insanely generous deal I’ve ever heard of.”

“He was worth it, Mark.”

“I bet he would have taken less. If you’re ever tempted to make another deal like this one, Bryce, please talk to me first.”

“It won’t happen again. But I needed him right then. I wasn’t working, it was going on too long, it was going to hurt the career, the reputation. He’s worth the money, Mark, because the truth is, if it weren’t for Wayne, Two Faces in the Mirror would not exist.”

“And you’re sure of him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I know he’s a friend of yours,” Mark said, “and he’s a nice guy, I like him—”

“Uh huh.”

“But what about the future? I mean, he isn’t going to come along some day and claim that book is his, is he?”

“Absolutely not,” Bryce said. “I know I can trust him on that, Mark. I trust him absolutely on that.”

“Well, you usually know what you’re doing,” Mark said. “I’ll call him now, give him the good news.”

Bryce hadn’t asked this before, and it really wasn’t any of his business, but he suddenly wanted to know: “What’s your arrangement with Wayne, anyway? I mean, you’re handling his finances now, right?”

“It’s essentially the same deal I have with you,” Mark told him. “That’s what he asked for, and that’s what he’ll get. I assume he’ll have further income to back it up.”

“Oh, I’m sure he will,” Bryce said, and it wasn’t till after he’d hung up that he realized he’d forgotten to talk to Mark about the apartment.

Well, he knew what that meant. That meant he wasn’t going to keep the apartment. Not negotiate a lease, not live there, fifteen stories up, all alone. He’d move his furniture, what he wanted, up here, throw the rest away. Most of it he wouldn’t want anyway; Lucie’d picked it all out. It was hers.

* * *

The phone call and the decision about the apartment, if that really was the decision, had left him restless, so that afternoon he drove to Brenford, the gourmet grocery store in this part of Connecticut, the place where you went for New York–style foods you couldn’t get in a supermarket. At New York–style prices, too. There were things Bryce could only get at Brenford, the coffee he liked, a salmon dip, some other things, and it had been a while since he’d gone there.

Early Thursday afternoon in midwinter and the parking lot at Brenford’s was half full, mostly of Jeep Cherokees and Toyota Land Cruisers and the like, with here and there a Volvo or a Saab or a BMW like Bryce’s.

When all else failed, it was pleasant to receive this occasional reassurance, these visual signals that one is not alone, one belongs to a tribe, and one is firmly in the territory controlled by that tribe. The license plates were more than half Connecticut, the rest New York and a few Massachusetts. In summer there were New Jersey plates as well, but one knew they were not real courtiers, but merely bumpkins visiting the court.

The shopping carts came in two sizes, plus small hand-carried baskets for those who weren’t really serious. Bryce compromised with a smaller-size cart, and the glass door slid out of the way as he approached, greeting him with a puff of warm air smelling vaguely like a bakery.

Usually he didn’t like shopping, but preferred to hurry into a store, grab the first things he saw that approximated what he wanted, and hurry back out again. Today, though, he felt a kind of underwater stillness inside himself, as though he’d been swimming hard but now didn’t have to any more. Now he could coast.

Everything was finished. Detective Johnson had phoned earlier this week, but only to get the names and addresses and phone numbers of some of Lucie’s relatives in Kansas and Missouri; he was haring farther afield, he had not found the murderer’s spoor. Pegasus-Regent had paid for Two Faces, Joe Katz had accepted it as a work by Bryce Proctorr, the distracting and harrying divorce process was eliminated, Wayne Prentice was content. His relationship with Isabelle had stalled, but maybe that merely meant it had gone as far as it could, that he and Isabelle would never be any closer to one another, that she was not at last the answer to what he would do next in that department.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes?”

An attractive face framed by soft waves of ash-blond hair, and the kind of wide innocently eager brown eyes that suggested plastic surgery. A short dark fur coat open on a dark green blouse and tan wool slacks. She seemed hesitant, but not really afraid of rejection. She said, “Aren’t you Bryce Proctorr?” Her voice was throaty, as though she smoked cigars, or liked to laugh at dirty jokes.

“Guilty,” he told her, with his meet-the-fan smile.

“I thought so!” She extended a slender hand in which the bones were outlined beneath pale skin. “I was told you lived somewhere around here. I’m Marcia Rierdon, I’m a huge fan of yours.”

“How do you do,” he said, taking the hand, which was quick and strong. He’d had encounters like this before, one step beyond normal fandom; the follow-through depended on the circumstances. “I always like to hear positive words,” he assured her.

Smiling, she said, “Well, I have one negative word for you, Mr. Proctorr. Where’s the next book? Your readers are waiting.”

“June,” he promised her. “I guess there’ll be books in the stores in May. It’s called Two Faces in the Mirror.”

“I will buy it at once. I think I have every book you’ve ever written.”

“Well, good.”

“In hardcover!”

“Even better,” he said.

She leaned forward, a sudden hard hand on his forearm, where he was holding his cart. “Could you—” she said. Then she retreated, hand off his arm, shaking her head. “No, it’s too much to ask.”

“Is it?” he asked. “How do I know if I haven’t heard it?”

“I live nine miles from here,” she told him, “toward Amenia, New York.” Looking in his cart, she said, “I don’t know how much more shopping you have to do—”

“I’m almost done.”

A sidelong smile. “Shopping for one,” she said.

He grinned, nodding his agreement. “That’s what I’m doing.”

“I’d think a person—” Then shock changed her face, she pressed carmine fingertips to her mouth, she said, “Oh, my God, your wife!”

“It’s okay,” he assured her.

“Oh, what a terrible thing, I completely forgot, I am so sorry!”

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I forget myself, sometimes.”

“Well, now I’m embarrassed,” she said, “now I can’t ask you.”

“You want to know if I’ll follow you to your house,” he said, “and sign your books.”

“Oh, would you?” Her hand was on his forearm again, tighter than before.

“I’d love to,” he said. “Give me five minutes.”

“I’ll be by the registers,” she told him, and permitted her bright-eyed smile to turn just a little coquettish as she lifted her hand beside her face to give him a tiny ta-ta wave, then turned away.

He didn’t have that much more to find in here. Walking the aisles, finishing the selections, he thought about this as a scene in a novel, where it would always have seemed a little opportunistic and now would seem outdated as well. Twenty years ago, these hills were full of stay-at-home wives during the week, childless or their children away at school, their husbands living and working in New York, coming up only for the weekends, some of the wives on the prowl for ways to make country life more interesting while the breadwinner was away. Most of those wives were gone now, either to jobs of their own in the city—almost all of the couples Bryce knew up here had two jobs and traveled to and from New York together—or at the very least they found life in the city during the week more stimulating than life alone in the country. But there were still a few, a minority, maintaining the traditional structure, the woman tending the fire in the cave while the man was out contending with the mastodon.

And hitting on a famous person only because he’s famous was an evergreen activity.

So this had happened to Bryce before, over the years, though not often; this would be the third time. The first one, he’d been happily married to Ellen, and he’d been polite and friendly, honored by the attention, but unfortunately stuck with an appointment with his wife; a lie, but it doused the fire.

The second time, he’d been sleeping with Lucie but not yet married to her and she was still resisting the idea of spending time with him in Connecticut, so then he’d been happy to follow the lady home, eventually taking her out to dinner, going back to spend the night. She’d given him her phone number, which he’d immediately thrown away, and wouldn’t have been able to find that house again today on a bet. Nor did he remember her name, nor much about what she’d looked like. Oddly, the rejected first one was a little clearer in his memory.

So what was the program this third time at bat? She was attractive, she was intelligent (she did, after all, admire his books), he was completely unattached, and she was unlikely to be a problem in the future, since she already had a man who provided her this place within the tribe. If Bryce didn’t want to see her again, it would be just as simple as the other time.

I’m going to follow her home, he thought, but the frisson that gave him was a strange one, almost a revulsion. Wasn’t she sexy? Certainly she was sexy. Beneath the uniform of the tribe, she would be very fit indeed.

Somehow, he couldn’t imagine forward to that moment. Part of sex, of course, is anticipation, imagining what is yet to be, but his mind was dull, he could only think of the here and now, we have two cars, she’s waiting by the cash registers, I will follow her toward Amenia, New York.

Yes, there she was. She waved as he unloaded his goods onto the moving black belt, and then pushed her cart full of bagged groceries outside. He paid, wheeled his own stuff out, and she was across the lot, standing beside a gray-green Jeep Cherokee with Connecticut plates. Again she waved, and he waved back. She got into her car, he loaded his and got behind the wheel, and their two-car convoy left the parking lot and turned left.

All the roads around here were two-lane, winding, hilly, upscale suburban. The houses were set well back, most of the trees still in place, new plantings, fences, hedgerows, tennis courts, swimming pools, multicar garages angled beside Colonial stone. The Cherokee ahead of him glided like a dream through the landscape, and Bryce followed.

Lucie. This had been Wayne and Lucie, just two people getting to know one another, strangers in that engrossing time before sex when every sense is heightened, every gesture has meaning, every slant of shadow across cheekbone is to be analyzed, the world to be discovered approaches across the universe. And then the explosion.

Why am I thinking about Lucie? he asked himself, and clenched hard to the wheel. Am I going to spoil things? Am I going to go in there and be a pathetic grieving widower, impotent in his sorrow? What sorrow? I don’t grieve for Lucie, I never have, I never will. I hate it that she made it all necessary, but she did make it all necessary, she did that. I did nothing.

He wanted to know. Lucie had been his enemy, his demon, his succubus, and he should have been there, he should have experienced it for himself. It was only to avoid suspicion that he hadn’t been there, that someone else had done what he should have done. He knew, in the dreams he never remembered, he knew he was trying to create the scene, imagine the scene, but it wasn’t working. He wanted to know.

Marcia Rierdon. The looseness of her smile, the brightness of her eyes. What would she look like—

Why can’t I visualize having sex with her? He forced himself to see a white pillow in a dim room, her smiling face, bright-eyed, looking up from the pillow. But where was he?

His fist smashed down. That nose, which has also been fixed, is fixed again. The fist lifts, the wide eyes are wider, but what does it look like? What does it sound like? What is it like?

His eyes snapped open just before he would have driven off the road into an old stone fence. He righted the car, and saw the Cherokee slowing toward a Stop sign ahead, the right-turn signal on. Keep your eyes open, you have to drive with your eyes open.

She stopped at the Stop sign. He switched his right-turn signal on. She turned right. He stopped; he turned right.

Oh, God, is that what I’m going to do? He could feel it coming over him, knowing what it was but not wanting to know what it was. He would never have sex with this woman, this Marcia Rierdon. There was heat for her, but it wasn’t in his loins, it was in his shoulders, the straining muscles of his arms, in his legs.

I wasn’t there because I couldn’t be there because they would suspect me, but I should have been there, it’s incomplete if I’m not there. I don’t know this woman, she doesn’t know me, no one will ever know I was in her house, never know I was this far west in Connecticut, never know anything, at last I can be there because I cannot be a suspect.

Sweat ran down and out from under his hair, onto his forehead, down in front of his ears, into his collar in back. He was panting, his hands were clenching and unclenching on the wheel.

You can’t do this. You don’t need to know. You don’t need to know. You can’t hurt Marcia Rierdon, she isn’t Lucie. She isn’t Lucie.

She’s married, she’s self-indulgent, she’s faithless, she’s evil, she is Lucie.

Is not having the memory worse? Or is having the memory worse?

He seemed to be his own prisoner. He watched helplessly, hoping he could stop himself, hoping he wouldn’t stop himself, hoping he could come out of this, whatever this was, just come out of this with his mind intact. Just not hurt himself.

Her brake lights lit. She turned right onto a blacktop driveway between two square brick posts, with a large dark house back there among towering trees. A black mailbox said, in red letters:

6 8 1 RIERDON

He touched the brakes. He breathed loudly through his mouth. He drove past that driveway, and on.

He stared now out the windshield as though he expected some monster to come up out of the roadway at any second and engulf him, car and all. The way he’d stared just after the multicar collision, before he’d realized he was still alive.

He turned at random, the next intersection, the next. I can go back, he told himself, I can turn around and go back, make an excuse, she’ll still let me in, she’ll still want me to come in.

I’m going to have to resolve this, sooner or later, and I can go back right now.

He kept driving. Nearly an hour later he drove into Amenia, New York, from the south, which would not have been a straight line from her place. He turned right at the traffic light, heading back to Connecticut.

I can still go back, he told himself, though he was no longer sure exactly where she lived. If I come to her house, he told himself, I will turn in. We’ll leave it to fate, or God, or chance, or dumb luck, or whatever. If I see her house, I will turn in. Absolutely, no question. I can always make some excuse.

He drove another hour, and then he drove home and unpacked his groceries.