CHAPTER

forty-eight

That there were detectives lurking behind a two-way mirror was improbable, fanciful, the stuff of films, the stuff of craziness. The constant eavesdropping in Hamlet coupled with my guilt at listening in on Garrett’s conversations was weighing on my mind, causing a bizarre paranoid delusion which might be related to a panic attack. I shook a Xanax, a small round antidote, into the palm of my hand, but decided to wait till I got home to swallow it.

I was nervous when I left the parking lot, anxious as I drove, shoulders hunched, hands clutching the wheel. I considered pulling over, phoning Melody Downstairs to inquire whether she’d actually called Detective Snow, but I decided against that as well. We didn’t have that kind of relationship, didn’t enjoy much of a relationship at all. She was a stuck-at-home, stay-at-home victim while I was a woman temporarily trapped in an inadequate and subpar dwelling. She would always live on Bay State Road, but Bay State Road was a way station, a blip on the radar for me. I hadn’t realized how much the apartment cramped my style, how little air permeated its tight walls, how colorless its surroundings were. I was far more at home at Cranberry Hill.

I was at home in my work, so it was work I turned to as a Xanax alternative. At a red light on Route 6A, I grabbed the first tape that came to hand and stuffed it quickly into the recorder on the seat beside me. Casually, I pressed the play button, expecting the sweet velvet of your voice, Teddy. Instead, I found myself confronted by my own. My groping hand had selected the tape of my first, no my second, session with Garrett and my own voice, familiar and yet different, grated harshly, my tone reedy and hollow, my esses sibilant enough to be called a lisp.

I hit the fast-forward button reflexively, then changed my mind and forced myself to listen as the scene swam slowly into focus. I remembered how frightened and eager I’d been, how overwhelmed by the lofty dimensions of the Great Room, with its spectacular painting of Claire Gregory and panoramic bay of windows.

Garrett’s taped voice: “Do you mind waiting on the patio? If it’s too cold—”

My taped voice replied, “It’s fine.”

The French doors clicked as I left the Great Room, but the tape kept rolling. Inexperienced, I’d forgotten to stop it. I’d ignored the machine perched on the little side table, and Garrett must have forgotten about it, too.

I heard him lift the receiver and say a smooth hello.

“Yes, delighted to hear from you.” His tone said he was anything but delighted. Such a well-trained voice. “No, not yet. Don’t trouble yourself about it. I can act without Jenna. Of course I can. Don’t be a fool.”

After a long pause, the quality of Garrett’s voice changed, tightened. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it, I only asked whether it was his screenplay or yours.” Angrily, he bit the end off each word.

The taped silence was punctuated by an occasional grunt, a few muttered noises indicating reluctant agreement. Then Garrett spoke again: “I wouldn’t say inspired, I’d say far-fetched and ridiculous. I’d go so far as to call it sci-fi.”

My hands gripped the steering wheel during another long stretch of silence. The engine purred and the wheels bumped along the potholed roadway.

“Look, this isn’t a good time. I’ve got somebody here, a girl. No, not a tart, and not an actress either; just some homely little dull-as-dirt girl, but I can’t get rid of her. Have to humor the damned publisher or I’ll wind up with a lawsuit on my plate.”

Dead air was followed by laughter, the kind of raucous boys-will-be-boys laughter that set my teeth on edge.

“Hey, cuz, give me a day or two to charm the pants off her first. No, really, I didn’t mean it like that. Oh, come on, it wouldn’t be worth it. Well, if you’re going to issue a direct challenge, I’ll add her to the directory. You want her when I’m done?”

Another long pause. Another comment made, no doubt.

“Oh, please, I’m more than willing to share. She’s earnest and drab as a pigeon. Yes, Teddy Blake’s little girl Friday. Makes you wonder how he managed. Right. Look, we’ll hash it out later, talk it over, work something out.”

On it went, on it played, a one-sided conversation from hell. I clung to the wheel and Garrett’s voice filled the car, squeezing out the air till I could barely breathe. Garrett and the unheard listener on the phone discussed me, dissected me, and stuck their fingers in the bloody ooze of my entrails.

While I, all unaware, had stared eagerly over the smooth and beautiful sea, contemplating from the terrace my new, spring-blossoming career. I was a fool, worse than a fool, ten times a fool.

“Well, don’t worry about me,” Garrett said. “It’ll make a change till the actresses turn up. Yeah, we signed some beauties. Fast and easy.”

Hamlet plays the fool, but it’s a feigned madness, north-northwest: when the wind is southerly, he can tell a hawk from a handsaw. Hamlet only feigns insanity; ironically, it is Ophelia who truly runs mad.

I scrabbled at the recorder with clumsy fingers, snapped it off. But I couldn’t help it, couldn’t help myself. As I pulled into the estate, neared the soaring roof of the Old Barn and turned into the broad driveway of the Big House, I pressed rewind. And listened again, each word a fatal hammer blow resounding in my skull.

I swallowed one Xanax; then another, to no effect. The words stayed etched by acid in the circuitry of my brain. A shiver shook my body, and no wonder: The engine ran, but I hadn’t turned on the heater and I had no idea what time it was, how long I’d sat motionless as a stone. My toes ached with cold. I stared through the windshield and recalled the invisible glass tunnel I’d constructed on my purposeful stroll down Fifth Avenue so long ago. I felt hemmed by the same tunnel now, a wall of glass that shut me out, exiled me forever.

The Prince of Denmark only pretends, pretends ignorance, pretends to turn a blind eye to the ghostly apparition of his poisoned father, pretends he doesn’t know his stepfather murdered the sleeping king, his mother betrayed his father. But I’d believed Garrett implicitly, believed in the promise of his bed.

I sat in the car and replayed the tape again. I patted my eyes with a tissue, tried to pull myself together.

“‘… whether it was his screenplay or yours.’”

There was a pile of screenplays on the corner of Garret’s desk. The corner of Mister Malcolm’s desk. A little snooping might be in order.

Hamlet snoops: He overhears; he lays traps; he pries. And what is it he says?

Act One, scene 2. A room in the Castle, the end of the first major soliloquy: “But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.”