The Brutal Tyranny of Fact
When Amy arrived, the whole class, minus Dot, was already in Carla’s living room. Dr. Surtees was standing in front of the fireplace, leaning on the mantel. “We told Dot we were starting at eight o’clock,” said Carla, handing Amy a glass of wine and a sheet of paper.
“This is what we know,” said Surtees, reading off the top line of the paper. Clearly he had written the thing—his letterhead was at the top, followed by “This is What We Know.”
1. The Sniper is sufficiently tech-savvy to play e-mail pranks
2. The Sniper is sufficiently agile to grab a mask out of Carla’s bag on Halloween, and then put it in Tiffany’s car during break
3. The Sniper is sufficiently strong to push Frank off a cliff
4. The Sniper is clever, quick, and not necessarily insane
The class nodded, as one, after every point, except the very last one. “Is that your professional opinion, Doc?” asked Chuck. “And anyway, so what?”
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Harry B. “Nobody in class is a drooling maniac, so whether or not the guy is insane is beside the point, except later, in court.”
Tiffany spoke up. “We know a lot more than that. The Sniper isn’t just clever. He—or she—is a brilliant writer.”
Syl snorted. “Have you seen what he wrote on Marvy’s story?”
“Yeah,” said Marvy mournfully. “‘Way to go, Dickwad.’ Oh, gee. I’m sorry, Edna!”
“I have taught high school children for forty years,” said Edna.
“‘Dickwad’ is just what I mean,” said Tiffany. “The same person wrote ‘Way to go, Dickwad,’ and those clever e-mails.”
Carla looked sharply at Tiffany.
“Nice point,” said Chuck. “I’m not sure that he’s brilliant, but he’s a real writer.” Chuck looked right at Amy. “Do you agree?”
Amy sank back in her chair. “He’s creative,” she said. “He has more than one voice. He’s a chameleon. He’s funny.”
Actually, the Sniper’s sense of humor frightened Amy more than anything else. The parody of Carla’s poem had been witty, the rudeness of Marvy’s critique outlandish, and she was still, for some reason, fixated on that “youse” in the Sniper’s counterfeit email. “Youse” was like a spectral elbow to Amy’s ribs. Dangerous, malevolent people should not be amusing. In order to be humorous, you had to have perspective, to be able to stand outside yourself and your own needs and grudges and fears and see yourself for the puny ludicrous creature you really are. How could somebody do that and still imagine himself entitled to harry, to wound, to kill?
And there was something else—something missing from “This Is What We Know.” Some aspect of the Sniper that they were forgetting, and it nibbled at the far edges of Amy’s mind.
“And why,” asked Tiffany, “are we using the masculine pronoun?”
Syl and Dr. Surtees, spiritual brothers, rolled their eyes, but Ricky Buzza supported Tiffany, pointing out that it didn’t take great strength to push somebody, at least from behind; and Marvy said, “And anyway, if we think it’s a guy, why did we tell Dot, who’s not a guy, to come an hour late? What are we doing here, people?”
As Marvy asked this reasonable question, Amy was looking at Pete Purvis, who hadn’t said a word, and who looked disturbed. The baby in the group, Pete came across as a gentle soul, averse to even mild conflict. Whenever the class would argue the merits of a piece, Pete would stare tensely down at his notebook, and sometimes directly at Amy, clearly wishing she’d do something to calm the waters. Amy couldn’t imagine Pete as the Sniper. “What do you think, Pete?” asked Amy. “Why did you guys give Dot the wrong starting time?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it.” Pete took a resentful breath. “In fact, I think it’s kind of mean. Nobody likes her, because she’s—she doesn’t fit in. She’s out of the loop.” One of the men muttered something, and another one snickered. “Yeah, okay, loopy,” Pete said, over his shoulder. “But mainly she’s just not in the clique. That doesn’t make her the Sniper.”
“Look at that story she wrote,” Carla said. “Doesn’t that creep you out? The devoted wife poisoning her husband?”
“As I recall,” said Amy, “nobody called the story creepy at the time. Half of you thought the wife character was going to commit suicide.”
“Right!” said Pete. “But now you know her a little better, and you’re all ganging up on her because she’s different.”
Amy, remembering the Murphy Gonzalez story, guessed that Pete knew quite a bit about being different.
“We’re ganging up on her,” said Harry B., “because, as far as anybody knows, Frank went to her house that night. Alone. At the Sniper’s invitation.”
“Which we know about, how?” asked Chuck. “The same way we know about the other misdirections that night. The Sniper left an easy trail to follow, in Amy’s inbox.”
What a horrible term. “Chuck makes an important point,” said Amy. “You’ve all just agreed that the Sniper is clever. How clever is it to leave a line of breadcrumbs right to your door?”
“But you could turn that around,” said Dr. Surtees. “The breadcrumb trail could be the most brilliant misdirection of all.”
Everybody started speaking at once, except for Amy, who poured herself another glass of red. They were still, most of them, treating this as an exercise, or worse, as though they had fallen into a TV script. Surtees especially seemed to relish a kind of detective role, as in a rousing game of Murder. She had arrived at Carla’s this evening expecting a somber, fear-chastened group, and here they were, squabbling over procedure. “Let’s talk about writing,” said Amy.
Everybody shut up.
“When I was a child,” she said, “I loved to read mysteries. Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen. I even went through a John Bradford March period, where every mystery involved somebody getting throttled behind a deadbolted door.”
“Ah,” said Dr. Surtees, nodding wisely. “Yes. The Locked Room—”
“In other words,” continued Amy, “every murder was physically impossible. That was the fun of the whole thing.”
“Precisely,” said Surtees.
“When you’re fourteen years old. If you try to read one of these books now, you’ll be amazed at how preposterous they are. I’m not only talking about the mechanics of the murder. I’m talking about the characters themselves. They’re all robots, willing to take human life for the silliest reasons. And worse, they don’t just shoot them when nobody’s looking. They set up the most elaborate Rube Goldberg strategies, where even the tiniest mistake would bring the whole edifice down on their heads. They plan murders the way real people plan weddings.”
“Yeah,” said Chuck. “We’re talking as though the Sniper were some Machiavellian genius, with nothing but time on his hands.”
“Her,” said Tiffany. “Her hands.”
Somebody, one of the guys, muttered, “Oh, can it.”
“What other reasons do you people have for suspecting Dot?” Amy asked. “Besides the breadcrumb trail thing.”
There was a protracted silence while they all tried to recover the moment when Dot had distinguished herself, suspect-wise. “I think it was the last time we were here,” said Marvy, “and she came late and she acted kind of strange. Like she had this secret.”
“And I heard her say something to you about how fun it was, about the Sniper,” said Tiffany.
“‘Exciting,’” said Amy. “Not fun. Exciting. Which did not at the time distinguish her attitude from everyone else’s.”
“No!” said Carla. “It was before that night. Remember, when we were trying to regroup after the Halloween thing, with Tiffany and the Bundy mask, and nobody could get her on the phone, and later she said she’d been busy, or something.”
“Well, case closed!” said Pete. “Call the cops! Jeez, you people are cold.”
“I’m inclined to agree with Pete,” said Amy. “Dot Hieronymus doesn’t fit in. But why does this make her a suspect? Why, while we’re at it, isn’t anybody talking about Ginger Nicklow? Ginger disappeared from the group the night Frank died. Why isn’t that a big honking coincidence?”
“I’m way ahead of you! Because I talked to her two days ago,” said Carla, “in person, at her house in North Park, and she had definitely moved on. She told me she’d taken the course for fun, and she stopped having fun even before the Sniper screwed everything up. She said she hadn’t written anything, and she couldn’t think of anything to write, and now was as good a time as any to bail. She says Hi.” Carla waved to everybody.
“Why did you go to her house?” asked Chuck. “How did you manage that?”
“Mapquest,” said Carla, “plus I needed to look her in the eye, to make sure. She’s got three kids and a husband.”
“So what? Dot’s married, too,” said Pete.
“Yeah, but Ginger’s husband is a Presbyterian minister.” Somebody snorted. “And anyway, you should see the books in her house. Wall to wall non-fiction. Theology, history, saltwater fish. There’s a whole bookcase full of gardening guides. The only fiction I could see was The Da Vinci Code, and they were using that to prop up a piano bench. She’s not the Sniper, guys.”
Amy sighed. “So, let me get this straight. We’ve decided, as a group, that the Sniper is a somewhat gifted shape-shifting male or female who’s not nuts.” She took a long sip of wine. “And who isn’t married to a clergyman.”
“Shape-shifter?” asked Syl.
Nobody bothered to answer Syl. They sat still for a long while, listening to the fire, looking down at the floor.
Finally, Harry B. cleared his throat. “Motive, means, opportunity,” he said. “We can’t begin to discuss means and opportunity, at least as far as Frank is concerned, until we know more about the t.o.d.”
“Well, we know something about the t.o.d. already,” said Dr. Surtees.
What the hell was the t.o.d.?
“We saw them carry away the body at midnight, in full rigor,” continued Surtees. “And we know that under normal conditions a body doesn’t reach that state before at least six hours.”
“Full rigor?” asked Amy.
“They couldn’t get him to lie down in the stretcher,” whispered Carla.
“Perhaps if they’d asked him nicely…” Amy was gratified to hear Edna Wentworth chuckle.
“Which means,” said Ricky, “that Frank couldn’t have died after six o’clock.”
“So he was killed around suppertime,” said Carla.
“Not necessarily,” said Dr. Surtees. “The latest he could have died is six p.m. But he could have died much earlier that afternoon. Rigor doesn’t descend on the body all at once. It takes as much as twelve—”
“Yes,” said Carla, “but earlier in the afternoon it was daylight, and somebody would have seen the body, probably. So it had to be suppertime.”
“Which means,” said Chuck, “that we’re all on the hook. Because we didn’t begin to congregate at Carla’s until seven.”
“And I wasn’t even there,” said Carla. “I was all by myself, tooling around Escondido. Which I can’t prove.”
“So nobody has an alibi,” said Harry B.
Almost everybody spoke at once, because almost everybody had an alibi for at least part of the time between noon and six on the day Frank died. Except Edna and Amy didn’t, because Edna and Amy were loners. And then it turned out that nobody had the entire six-hour period covered, rock solid. Most had managed to be alone for ninety minutes here and there, and only Marvy claimed to have actually had supper, with his family. The rest had apparently counted on Syl’s chips and dip. Carla’s alibi before she left for Escondido was her own mother, with whom she hadn’t exchanged a word or glance for weeks. “I mean,” said Carla, “if I’d actually driven off, she should have heard the motor, but chances are she was watching the soaps or Montel anyway. And even if she’d heard me,” she continued cheerfully, “she’d probably claim she hadn’t. Ma wouldn’t alibi Mother Teresa.”
All this time business was giving Amy a headache. She had always hated dealing with timelines in her fiction, often ignoring them altogether and counting on copyeditors to fix any mistakes, which usually they did, although in Monstrous Women she had managed to graduate a character from high school at the age of eleven and kill off another in the Korean War in 1946. No one had noticed until the birth of the Internet and the emergence of blogs, more than one of which were manned by obsessives intent on illuminating every inconsequential error ever committed to celluloid or print. “Why should I care about this novel,” one of them asked, “when the author cares so little about it herself?” Amy had responded with a three-page letter advising the blogger to spend her time scouring the classics for timeline errors, which, “though plenteous, have magically failed to prevent readers from caring about them.” Actually, Amy had no idea if Tolstoy and Dickens and Proust were slobs like herself—the Count probably had serfs to check his facts—but it was fun, for a while, to imagine that they had been, and the letter, when finished, was the best writing she had done in a long time. She decided against sending it, in case the blogger actually took her up on the challenge; and in the end she threw it away when she realized that as a matter of fact she had not cared all that much about Monstrous Women.
Amy thought about alibis, good and bad. “Alibi” itself was such an odd-looking word, a tall, slim marble slab of a word. What was the value, really, of an alibi between lovers, friends, or family members? Except for Carla’s awful mother. Idea for a greeting card: “Will You Be My Alibi?”
“Amy, what do you think?” asked Chuck.
“I think Dot will get here in five minutes, and then we can get on with the class.”
“You’re no fun,” said Chuck. Chuck often looked right at her, as he was doing now, with what seemed to be interest, and something else—appreciation? Fondness? Chuck liked her. Amy couldn’t imagine why, but she was beginning to respond in kind. She knew nothing about Chuck except that his mother had given him that absurd name for religious reasons, and even that was probably not true, a joke, well worn. Maybe she just had a thing for Charlton Heston, who had been a kind of male pinup in his day, undressed in his most illustrious roles, his chest burnished to a high gloss. Or maybe she was a prescient gun nut.
“So, most of you come to class without eating supper?” Amy asked. “Why? No wonder people are fainting in class.”
“I think better on an empty stomach,” said Syl, of all people, “and anyway, now that we’re not meeting at UC, there’s always something to eat during break.”
“Tonight, for instance,” said Carla, “we’re having three kinds of pizza, courtesy of—”
“Pizza!” shouted Amy. “That’s it! I knew there was something missing!”
Understandably taken aback, Carla said she could heat it up now, if Amy was hungry.
“No! I mean, when we were listing all of the Sniper’s attributes, we forgot something. Something important. The five hundred personal pizzas! It bothered the hell out of me at the time, and then, with all that happened afterward, I just forgot about it. But the pizza prank—it’s significant. It was a radical departure from everything the Sniper had done before, and it in no way foreshadowed what he—or she—was about to do.”
Carla’s hand shot up. “It wasn’t five hundred. It was seventy-six.”
“What difference does that make?” The class was responding oddly. Most, like Chuck and Harry B. and Tiffany, looked puzzled, but Syl and Marvy and Dr. Surtees were staring down at the floor, while Carla continued to wave her hand. She didn’t so much wave it as punch the sky with it, the way little kids do. Amy wondered if Carla had ever had a boyfriend, or even a sexual thought. “The point is, this Sniper, who had been up to this moment—and afterwards—malevolent, hurtful, ingenious, unpredictable—suddenly plays a frat-house prank, no more frightening than a midnight call for Prince Albert in the can.
“I believe,” said Amy, warming to the subject of the Sniper’s identity for the first time that evening, “that the night of the personal pizzas could have been a turning point for the Sniper. He was ready to quit. The personal pizzas were a kind of white flag. (There, by the way, is a perfect example of a mixed metaphor!) And then something must have happened after that night, something that enraged the Sniper all over again. What was it? Any thoughts?” Amy sat back, feeling rather like Ellery Queen, her favorite detective, back in the day.
“That’s such a really, really great idea,” said Carla.
“Hardly,” said Amy. “I should have thought of it sooner. Now, what we have to do is—”
Marvy stood up. “I have something to say,” he said, and it was clear from the look on his face that it wasn’t going to be easy.
“Is anybody else confused?” asked Tiffany. “What was the Night of the Personal Pizzas?”
“It was a seventies drive-in flick,” said Chuck, “with Sam Jaffe and Diane McBain.”
“I did it,” said Marvy.
“Not by himself, he didn’t,” said Dr. Surtees.
Syl stood up next to Marvy. “We all did it,” he said.
Amy couldn’t process this. She felt as she had the evening that Bozo the Clown fainted and Houston, we have a problem. Apparently these three men had done it, but she couldn’t get her mind around what exactly they had done. To what were they confessing? Surely they hadn’t killed Frank?
“They sent me the pizzas,” said Carla. “That was what I was trying to tell you! I figured it out a couple weeks ago, because I know this kid Austen who works at Mikey’s Wood-Fired? And Dr. Surtees used his credit card there to buy some of the pizzas. And then I forgot to tell you. In all the excitement.”
“We just thought it would be funny,” said Syl.
Amy stared at the three of them long enough to fluster even Dr. Surtees. She felt like an idiot. Everyone was instantly subdued, their eyes studiously not focused on her own, with the exception of Chuck, who looked as though he actually did think it was funny. He was probably the only one not embarrassed for her. Well, good for him. Amy rose and took her goblet over to the sideboard for a refill. She stooped and peered through her own reflection in the window. “I suggest,” she said over her shoulder, “that you all get out your scripts.” The doorbell rang then, a new seasonal tune: We Gather Together, as, almost simultaneously, Carla’s mother thumped on a distant wall and shrieked like Medea.
“Here’s Dot,” said Amy.
Dot came outfitted in an ancient silk middy blouse, a pleated navy wool skirt, and Topsiders. She blew into the room, flustered and happy, laden with a stack of brand-new scripts. “You can throw your old ones away,” she announced. “I’ve had to revise, given our recent change in personnel.” She carried a small stack of Grizzly Mystery Cruise pamphlets, which she passed out to everyone, along with the new scripts, her wafting Youth Dew blanketing the room like ground fog. The pamphlets looked homemade compared to the usual glossy foldouts. Grizzly Mystery Cruises apparently were conducted in British Columbia. Their logo was a jocular bear in a deerstalker hat. Dot explained that she and Harrison had taken their first cruise on their honeymoon, and a second one on their last anniversary. “And that’s when I got the idea,” said Dot, “to write one of my own plays for their next cruise. They’re always on the lookout for new scripts!”
“How much?” asked Carla, and when Dot didn’t answer, repeated, “How much? Per script?”
“Oh, not for money,” said Dot, waving at the pesky notion of pay as if it were a fruit fly. “Just for a lark. And the experience, of course.”
“I’ve heard of these affairs,” said Edna, “but I’ve never been able to figure out how they work.”
“Yeah,” said Marvy. “On the one hand, there’s supposed to be audience participation, and on the other hand there’s a script? I don’t get it.”
“It’s a series of setpieces,” said Dot, “and they’re played out all over the ship at different times. At dinnertime, of course, there’s a lot of drama, but it’s continued later on deck, and in designated staterooms.” She went on to explain that although it was scripted, there was a lot of improvisation, too. “Usually, the murder happens on the first night, and on the last night, the murderer is revealed. It’s great fun!”
“But in your own play,” said Amy, “there are references to three earlier murders.”
“Four, actually,” said Dot. “I wanted to try something different: a serial killer mystery cruise!”
After a dead pause, Tiffany asked, “Is it a coincidence, then, that there are just enough parts for everybody in the class? Or at least, there would have been, before Frank and Ginger—”
Dot laughed. Her laughter, in that hushed room—for no one had so much as shifted in his chair after her entrance—reminded Amy of some particularly unpleasant and notorious event which she couldn’t quite place, except that it had something to do with New England. “Of course it’s not a coincidence, Tiffany,” Dot said, leaning just a little on the name. Dot didn’t like Tiffany, who, Amy recalled, had been really snippy during the critique of Dot’s piece. “I adapted this especially for us. The original has only a cast of eight. And this second revision has twelve, not fourteen. And I’ve made some fairly extensive changes. It’s practically a brand-new play!”
“Well,” said Edna, “but you personalized these characters to fit each one of us. And surely the original play isn’t about a writing class.”
“Oh, but it is!” said Dot. “You see, I’ve taken many, many writing workshops. You’d be surprised how many.”
No I wouldn’t, thought Amy, although she would be surprised if any of the other classes had actually encouraged critical reading. Dot was ideal prey for the sort of writing guru who praised everybody’s use of metaphor whenever a metaphor, however exhausted, was actually used. No doubt Dot had been told more than once that her work was publishable, and Dot, hearing identical assurances given to others, had believed in her heart of hearts that she was the only one not being patronized. There was a local industry devoted to Dots: weekend writing conferences, during which the Dots could pay extra to have a real-live literary agent actually read one of their paragraphs; expensive weeklong retreats in Anza-Borrego or Julian or Ensenada, where the Dots could locate their inner voices; and at least three annual fiction-writing contests which the Dots could enter at will, for a hefty fee. Amy was willing to bet that in Dot’s living room an entire wall was devoted to framed literary awards, including Third Runner-Up Best Unpublished Romance Manuscript.
Five years ago Amy herself had by invitation entered one of these contests, under the impression that the event was genuine, and at the “awards banquet” her own short story—the last she had written; probably the last she would ever write—came in second, behind some excrescence entitled “If It’s Tuesday, Why Am I Wearing My Saturday Panties?” The banquet itself she recalled in bitterer detail than the ceremony: not a banquet at all but a buffet of stale cheese cubes, Brazil nuts, carrot sticks, and large breaded mushroom-shaped objects, and she had endured one of her Moments there when, as she hoisted one of these toward her mouth, a large piece of raw chicken liver dropped from the bottom like a bomb and slithered across her paper plate, its surface so shiny that she could see herself in it. She had instantly committed it all to memory, the pattern on the plate, the color and sheen of the liver, the color and texture of her own disgust, the whole tableau, so that she could tell Max about it later. This was, absurdly, the first and last time that Amy forgot he was dead—as though the insult to her dignity had been so brutal as to rip out a wide swath of memory—and all that had kept her from bolting to her car, thus missing the award ceremony, was the thought of Max laughing his ass off.
“Dot,” she said now, “you do realize that we can’t perform this whole thing tonight.”
“We’ll see,” said Dot.
What was that supposed to mean? “This is fifty-plus pages. We’ll be lucky if we can do twenty.”
“I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised,” said Dot, “at how fast the time goes by.”
“Let’s just get started,” said Marvy, nervously clearing his throat and rising once again to his feet, to mumble, “Georgie, put that confounded comic book away.”
“No, no, no!” Dot flew toward Marvy, almost toppling him. “You must be seated at table!”
“But aren’t we just reading—” said Marvy, continuing to regard Dot, as they all did, slightly askance, as though he’d get a more accurate assessment out of the corner of his eye.
“The entire room must be rearranged,” announced Dot, and Carla, to Amy’s surprise, decided to go along with this. In three minutes, with the help of all the men, two dining tables had been improvised and around them arrayed her mother’s bridge chairs. At the longer table Dot seated Marvy, Dr. Surtees, Tiffany, Pete Purvis, Amy, and Dot herself, right next to her. Edna, Carla, Syl, and Harry B. squeezed around the smaller table. “I don’t have a chair,” said Ricky Buzza, and Dot assured him that he and Chuck wouldn’t need them.
“Now,” said Dot, keenly surveying her stage, “now we begin!”
Marvy sighed deeply. “Georgie,” he said, “put that confounded comic book away.”
“Say it like you mean it!” said Dot.
“Dot, we’re not actors,” Amy reminded her. “All we’re doing here is a read-through.”
“Who’s Georgie?” asked Harry B.
“GEORGIE! PUT THAT CONFOUNDED COMIC BOOK AWAY! Sorry, everybody, that was way too loud,” said Marvy.
“Stay on script!”
“Gosh, Uncle Melvyn,” said Pete Purvis, “this isn’t a comic book. It’s the illustrated classic King Solomon’s—”
“Begin again,” said Dot. “This time without the extra comments, and remain in character.”
“Give me a break,” said Syl.
“Georgie, put that confounded comic book away!” Now Marvy actually made eye contact with Pete, a.k.a. Georgie Rumbelow.
“Gosh, Uncle Melvyn, this isn’t a comic book! It’s the illustrated classic King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard, and it’s way cool.”
Dot—Persephone Darkspoon—laid a cold, plump hand on Amy’s forearm and chuckled. “At least it’s a book, and not a video game. Eh, Professor Scribner?”
Amy declined, in spite of the stage directions, to chuckle back. “My sentiments exactly,” she read.
“Dr. Merriwether,” said Dot. “What is your considered medical opinion on the subject of video games and the development of young minds?”
Dr. Surtees stared balefully at his script. “It all depends, Mrs. Darkspoon, on the game itself and the frequency of play. And of course the quality of the young mind to begin with. Young Georgie here has already demonstrated a great verbal acuity in the first two volumes of his science fiction trilogy, The Archives of Corinthia.”
“Ha ha ha,” said Tiffany, deadpan. “Doctor, I beg to differ. Verbal acuity in outer space. As if. Georgie’s got a fine imagination, I’ll grant you, but surely it would be better applied to real people in real settings, tackling real problems.” She was rolling her eyes like a fifteen-year-old.
“Speaking of real people,” said Edna, “how is your historical novel on Lady Jane Grey coming along, Zirconia?”
There was an extended silence, during which Tiffany was supposed to say “Actually, Miss Makepeace, it’s a novella,” but sullenly did not, until Amy, partly as a matter of principle and partly to head off Dot, shot her a dirty look.
Johnnie “Ricky Buzza” Magruder strolled in from the hallway and announced that Zirconia’s book was brilliant. “Next to Grey Lady Jane, my own puny efforts are seriously paltry,” he said.
“Don’t sell yourself short, kid,” said Syl. “I’m a big fan of your woik.”
Now, at Dot’s italicized stage direction, everybody leaned stage right, and after a two-second pause, straightened in their chairs again. The rolling-ship effect was marred by the fact that half of them didn’t know where “stage right” was. “Whoa!” said Pete Purvis. “That was some wave!”
Again, everyone leaned one way or the other. “I say,” said Dr. Surtees, “we might be heading into a real—”
“Stage right,” said Dot, pointing toward the hallway, “is over there.” Her color was high. “If you don’t all lean the same way, you’ll spoil the illusion!”
This time they all leaned in the same direction. “I say, we might be heading into a real nor’easter!”
Captain Manley—Chuck Heston—strolled onstage from the hallway, past the diners, toward the far corner of the room. “Not to worry, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “The Aurora Queen could shrug off a force ten gale!”
Ricky, standing center stage (between the two tables), for some reason pretended to fiddle with a pipe. “So—you’re a regular reader of my column in the Daily Eagle, eh, Mr. Lasagna?”
“Yeah,” said Syl. “And I hear youse are writin’ somethin’ special, on the hush-hush. Yeah. A crime novel, or so my spies tell me. Starrin’ a real gangster type.”
“Yes,” said Harry B./Jake Wiseman, “and you should be advised that my client here, Mr. Vito Lasagna—”
“I have a question,” said Tiffany. “This is supposed to be a writing class. It meets regularly. They all know each other. So why does Jake have to use Vito’s last name, or remind everybody that he’s Jake’s client? It’s blatant exposition in dialogue.”
“You’re wrong, dear,” said Persephone Darkspoon. “This is a performance piece. The rules are different for performance pieces.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Edna.
“Well, I am. Characters in Shakespeare always find a way to let you know who they are, and what their backstory is. If you look at Hamlet, for instance, you’ll see that.”
“I’ll also see,” said Edna, who usually stayed above the fray but was obviously irritated now, “that Shakespeare’s exposition is accomplished with a certain degree of skill.”
Pete Purvis joined in, objecting that nobody, including Dot, should be held to such a high standard, at which point Amy wadded up a napkin and lobbed it at the other table, bouncing it off a surprised Harry B. She locked eyes with him and pointed at her script. Harry looked down at his own and found his line. “…my client here, Mr. Vito Lasagna, made his wishes known at the beginning of this class. To wit: What happens in writing class stays in writing class.”
“Kopisky,” said Syl menacingly.
“Capisce,” whispered Dot.
“Yes,” said Amy, “and you’ll recall, Mr. Wiseman, that I cautioned you at that time against making any such assumptions. This is a writing class, not a confessional.” Amy was startled to realize that Dot, like Carla, actually paid attention to her in class, at least often enough to swipe her own words and use them in this silly play.
“But you understand, Professor,” said Harry B., “that my client—for reasons of his own, which shall remain nameless—likes to play his cards, as they say, close to the table.”
Chuck Heston’s piggish snort emanated from behind a divan in the corner of the room, where he was apparently waiting out his reentry. “Sorry, Dot,” he called out, “but what they say is ‘close to the vest.’ If you played your cards close to the table, you’d be hunched over like Quasimodo.”
“Bing-bing-bing-bing-bing!” sang Carla, in a high register. “I’m tapping my glass with a spoon!”
“No improvising,” said Dot, waving off Chuck’s advice. Dot was starting to look disappointed by the read-through.
Carla stood up. The group’s only professional actor, she was at ease with herself, and actually seemed enthusiastic about what she was about to do. She didn’t put ironic quotes around her lines, like Amy and Tiffany and Dr. Surtees, and she didn’t plod through them like the rest. Amy wondered if Carla secretly missed the spotlit life. “Before we all dig in,” she said, “to our fantastic nine-course meal on our first evening of this fantastic three-day cruise on the Aurora Queen, courtesy of the generous Dr. P. T. Merriwether, we need to take a moment to commemorate this occasion. We’re all here, on this wonderful evening, for one reason—to honor Professor Clementine Scribner, who, in her brilliance, generosity, and wisdom, has guided us all through the perils and pitfalls of bad writing—past the whirlpools of purple prose, far from the rocky shoals of cliché, braving the typhoons of mediocrity, ever ready to do hand-to-hand combat with the pirates of overextended metaphor.”
“Excuse me!” said Dot.
Carla grinned. “Ever ready,” she amended, “to do hand-to-hand combat with the pirates of poor taste.”
All said, “Hear, hear.”
“Hold on,” said Edna. “Someone’s missing. I count ten, and there should be eleven. Ten class members and Professor Scribner.” Edna, apparently neutral in the Dot Wars, simply read her lines without fuss.
“Yes, where’s Hester? Hester Spitz?” asked Marvy.
“I left her lying down in her stateroom with a slight case of mal de mer,” said Carla, “but she promised to be here at seven on the dot, with a brand-new story for us all to read. It’s nonfiction this time, and she said it was going to knock our socks off!”
“Well, she’s not there now,” said Edna, “because I looked in on her before coming down for dinner.”
“Captain Manley!” called Amy, toward the divan. “Would you mind doing us a favor?”
Chuck crawled out of hiding and laboriously got to his feet. His face was flushed, and obviously not from exercise. Chuck was enjoying himself way too much. “Yes, Professor Scribner?”
“Could you possibly initiate a search for our missing friend? I’m so sorry to trouble you. Meanwhile, who’s got Hester’s cell phone number?”
“I’m on it, Chief,” said Carla, ad-libbing the “Chief,” whipping out her own phone and punching in seven numbers actually specified in the new script.
“I’ll return shortly,” said Chuck, swaggering toward the hallway with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, looking more like a pint-sized John Wayne than a cruise ship captain. He had just disappeared from view when a cell phone went off from some distance, probably on the outside of the front door. They could barely make out the theme from The Pink Panther. Dot must have planted the phone there before she came in: Carla, as scripted, had dialed the number of that phone. Amy would have been impressed at Dot’s farsightedness, except that she was distracted by the idea of the phone abandoned and ringing, like Frank’s in the sand at Moonlight Beach. Hester Spitz had clearly bought the farm—and again this was a smart move for Dot, given that Ginger herself had dropped out. Dot could have as easily murdered Frank’s character, the unnamed steward; she’d been tasteful enough, just, to avoid doing that. Still the obvious parallels she’d deliberately incorporated into the play—the missing class member, the worried calls to Frank, and the phone itself, ringing all alone, a few feet away from the corpse—were nasty. Amy was always telling her classes that fiction is written in cold blood, and here was Dot, of all people, doing just that. Or worse.
Chuck reentered, holding up Hester’s cell phone. “I’ve just had a disturbing conversation,” he said, “with Mrs. Spitz’s spouse.” He managed to say this line straight-faced, only to lose his composure immediately afterward. To his credit, he bent down, pretending to fuss with the laces on his running shoes. His shoulders shook rhythmically.
“Where did you find her phone?” asked Dr. Surtees.
“In the companionway, near her stateroom. Her husband’s been trying to contact her for an hour. He says she never goes anywhere without her cellular phone, and he’s quite anxious.” Chuck managed this muffled, gasping speech from a crouching position.
At this point Dot’s mystery narrative began to unfold predictably, over the course of fifteen dialogue-choked pages. Everybody in the room voiced a lengthy opinion on Hester’s whereabouts, and, given the wild pitching of the boat, a growing concern about her safety. Much was made of the mysterious socks-jettisoning manuscript she had planned to spring on the group. Finally Edna wondered aloud if, as Hester had been so unwell, she might have gone on deck to clear her head and fallen overboard. The class then managed, on cue, to lean first stage right and then all the way stage left; then half of them rose as one and followed Captain Manley offstage to “investigate this possibility.” They were supposed to lurch as they did so, but only Carla was able to do this convincingly. Marvy and Pete staggered with their arms straight out to the side, as though walking a tightrope; Tiffany defiantly slouched out ahead of the pack; and Ricky, following close behind, attempted to stumble and right himself but was only partly successful, knocking over a large silver plate of crudités. Those remaining onstage attempted to reassure themselves that Hester was perfectly okay.
Only Persephone Darkspoon was pessimistic. She delivered a somber speech about fate and bad things happening to good people. “We want to believe that life is fair,” she said. “That the righteous are rewarded and the guilty punished. Hester Spitz is a fine woman, a nice person, a good mother, a faithful wife. She’s a decent soul, and surely she deserves the best that life has to give her. And that, my friends, is why I fear the worst.”
Carla screamed, from the hallway wings, “She’s dead! Oh, Dear God! She’s dead,” making no attempt to modulate her cries, so that her mother’s distant imprecations followed the group as they rushed back into the room. “Poor Hester!” sobbed Carla, collapsing in Chuck’s arms, as Marvy and Pete assumed masks of grief and Tiffany announced in a bored monotone that Hester had indeed gone overboard, but “not all the way. She’s hanging from a rope off the stern.”
“Well, haul her up, for pity’s sake,” said Dr. Surtees. “She may still be resuscitated.”
“Not with a broken neck,” said Chuck, prompting more bleating from Carla.
“You mean—” exclaimed Harry B.
“Yes!” cried Carla. “She’s hanged herself!”
“I’m afraid not,” said Chuck.
“Her hands and feet were tied,” said Tiffany. “By which I guess I’m supposed to mean that her hands were tied together and her feet were tied together, rather than all four—”
“You mean—” exclaimed Ricky Buzza.
“Murder,” said Persephone Darkspoon, in a deep register, rising to her feet. Everyone turned to face her. Even Tiffany. “Murder most foul!”
Carla and Edna dashed to the kitchen for intermission refreshments while the rest remained more or less as they had been at the end of Act One. With the exception of Tiffany, they had apparently begun to enjoy themselves. Dr. Surtees and Syl were laughing together and the rest were poking through Act Two, as though anxious to start up again, and practicing their sea-rolls and lurches.
Next to Amy, Dot sat as silent as Buddha, frowning, eyes closed, hands folded on the table. Amy couldn’t imagine what was wrong. True, she had taken a certain amount of razzing, but it had been mostly good-natured, and by now Dot should have been pretty happy about the whole thing. Of course, the play was awful, but surely Dot didn’t know that. Amy leaned toward her and spoke. “It’s going well, don’t you think?” Dot opened her eyes and regarded Amy, for a second or two, as if she were a total stranger accosting her on a bus. “You were right,” said Amy, feeling the beginnings of panic. “I’m sure we can run through the whole thing tonight.”
After a long teetering pause, Dot blinked, returning to present company, and gave Amy a polite smile. “That would be nice,” she said.
Nice? Only a short while ago, Dot had swept into this room breathless with anticipation, and now she seemed disconnected from her surroundings and disengaged from Amy’s response, or anyone else’s, to her play. Dot was, Amy realized, an interesting woman.
And she should have known that. It was an article of faith with Amy, with most writers, that there were no uninteresting people. That the dullest aunt at a family reunion, the gabbiest passenger on a plane, had, whether or not they knew it, a thousand stories to tell, each more stimulating, more enlightening, than the one before, and all of them better than true. Amy saw that Dot’s story, the one she was living this very moment, was horribly sad. She was lonely in a way that Amy was not. Amy had Alphonse. Amy even had Carla, and, Edna, and Chuck, and the rest. And the memory of Max. She didn’t know what this meant, but she did know that compared to Dot she was the toast of the town.
But what about Harrison, her husband, who was apparently willing to go on more than one of these grisly grizzly deals? Why, Amy wondered, if this guy was the uxorious type, was the woman so deeply unhappy? Maybe she was bipolar or hormonal or both, and for sure she wasn’t getting enough sleep. There were hollows around her eyes, beneath flakes of pink powder and turquoise eye-shadow. Had she always looked so empty, so fragile? Amy had never looked directly at her before, not from up close. Like everyone else, she had regarded the woman askance, or from a safe remove. Clumsily, she reached out to Dot. Not literally, of course, but she poured two glasses of red and handed one to her. “You should have brought Harrison with you tonight,” she said. “I’ll bet he’d enjoy this! Next class, why don’t you…” She had to stop, because Dot was staring back at her, hard, as though sizing her up; as though Amy had just called her outside to settle things once and for all. There was such a thing, Amy decided right then, as being too interesting. “It was just a thought,” Amy started to say.
“My husband left me four years ago,” said Dot. “On our twentieth wedding anniversary.” She took a sip of wine and made an ugly face. “He ran off with my younger sister, actually, whose name is actually Rose. They’re living happily in Phoenix now. Actually. I want a sandwich and a piece of cheese.” She said this last to Carla, who was walking by with a food tray, and when Carla bent down to present her with choices, Dot gathered up food with both hands and resumed talking once Carla had left. “They’d been at it for years. I had no idea until they told me. I was a total innocent.” For a long moment she focused on the food, taking great bites, as though ravenous, as though she’d starved for a week. “You thought my story was all made up,” she said. “You said it was unbelievable. You were wrong.” She stood up suddenly and bent over Amy, her fists on the table. “You don’t know shit,” she said.
Amy watched Dot Hieronymus stalk off to the bathroom, wineglass in hand, and refused to acknowledge her own emotional response to the moment. She was good at that. It would be a simple enough trick to turn what had just happened into an intellectual dispute. Not entirely wrong, she argued silently. You didn’t actually poison them. You didn’t actually kill yourself. She wanted to say this, not in her own defense, since Dot had really really nailed her, no doubt about that, but in defense of aesthetic fundamentals. Okay, on the one hand Amy stood justly accused of reducing a fellow human being to a cartoon creature. But still. That Dot’s story had been based on fact didn’t make it credible. Fact exerted a tyranny over beginning writers, sapping them of the will to make things up, seducing them into complacency. They didn’t understand: it was the writer’s job to fashion truth out of fact. Dot probably should have killed the bastard, but she hadn’t. Assuming Harrison really was happily living in Phoenix. Dot scared the hell out of Amy. Actually.
Right before ten o’clock everyone assumed his place for Act Two. The tables had been moved away, and Carla’s chairs, pillows, and sofas arranged in a wide arc. Although the actors were still game, their general mood was subdued, partly because it was getting late and their bellies were full, but mostly because now the drama played out like an interminable game of Murder, with the detective—in this case, Captain Manley—stolidly interrogating each person in turn about where he had been at various times, and who could vouch for whom, and it was impossible to keep track of it all, let alone care who was telling the truth and who was lying. Carla and Ricky tried to inject some life into their lines, with uneven results, and the author herself sat in the very middle of the pack exuding such odd, negative vibes that even Syl glanced at her with concern.
Amy wanted to call a halt, send everyone home, get as far away as she could, to be alone with her thoughts about Dot and Harrison and her own colossal cluelessness, but there were only ten pages to go, and the show must go on.
“I hardly knew the dame,” Syl was saying, “and anyways, she seemed decent enough. Why would I want to off her?”
“Maybe,” Carla said, “because she was on to you, and she was about to spill the beans.”
“Exactly,” said Dr. Surtees. “What happened in writing class wasn’t going to stay in writing class. Eh, Lasagna?”
“Why, I oughtta—”
“Sit down, Vito,” ordered Amy. “And the rest of you. You’re all turning on one another like jackals. Don’t you see? This must be part of the murderer’s cunning stratagem: to divide and conquer. Don’t make it so easy for him.”
“Or her,” read Tiffany, and the class was startled into laughter by the wit of this line, which was so very Tiffany.
“Good one!” whispered Marvy, to Dot.
Tiffany glared up at her. “You don’t miss much, do you?” she said, off-script. She had drunk more wine during intermission and was becoming belligerent. Amy tried to catch her eye.
“Kindly don’t improvise, Tiffany,” said Dot, not looking up from her page.
This new mildness, in sharp contrast to her earlier vehemence, was alarming to Amy, who would have gone off-script herself to defuse the looming confrontation, but Chuck saved the day. Instead of speaking his next lines from a standing position, he squeezed in between the two women on the couch. “I’m intrigued, Miss Cummings, that you say ‘her,’ because I have every reason to believe that you are correct. And how, I’m beginning to wonder, did you know?”
“I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree, Captain,” said Edna. “Our Zirconia can’t abide sexist language, even when it works to her advantage.”
“I must second Miss Makepeace on that point,” said Harry B., “it’s really just a matter of principle with Zirconia,” and the rest chimed in, piling on Tiffany, and apparently enjoying it, too. Even Edna smiled, just a little, at Dot’s clever little revenge.
“What did you mean just now, Captain?” Tiffany asked. Steam was not literally shooting out of her ears, but it might as well have been. “Whom do you suspect?”
“It’s really quite simple,” said Chuck. He rose and began to pace in back of the seated crowd. “You see, when Young Georgie here returned to the stateroom he shares with his father, in quest of his dog-eared copy of King Solomon’s Mines, it was four bells—six o’clock in the evening, to you landlubbers—and he passed three people on the way back: Mr. Lasagna, Dr. Merriwether, and Mrs. Darkspoon.”
“Yes, we know that,” said Amy, “and I fail to see what that has to do with—”
“Be patient, Professor Scribner. The gentlemen were answering calls of nature, and Mrs. Darkspoon was on her way to the ship’s library, where she had left her asthma medication. Within fifteen minutes, all three had returned to the table, and after that point no one left until we sent out the search party for Mrs. Spitz.”
“We’ve been over this before, Captain,” objected Dr. Surtees.
“But,” said Chuck, neatly stepping on the doctor’s line, “we’ve failed to notice the one piece of the puzzle that doesn’t quite fit! You’ll recall that, according to Mr. Rumbelow, the billiard room on deck two had been locked between noon and, to the best he can recall, three forty-five. And Miss Makepeace has assured us that within fifteen minutes two cigarettes were smoldering unattended in an ashtray on the third-deck promenade…”
Kill me now, thought Amy, who had begun to count numbers as they rolled by: three, fifteen, one, two…If she made it through the evening intact, she planned to add a footnote to her short list of fiction-writing homilies: Arithmetic is the death of story. Six more pages and it was all over. Six was a cheerful number.
“So it’s inescapably obvious,” said Chuck, “that the only one among you who could possibly have left Musky Rose lipstick on that smoldering cigarette—the only one with a genuine motive for shutting up Hester Spitz once and for all—the only one clever enough to frame Lasagna—was also the single person with dark eyes that beckoned to me every evening as the meddling hussy flaunted that obscene snapshot, threatening to sell it to the tabloids and leave me and my darling baby daughter twisting in the wind!”
Chuck’s momentum had been such that he made it all the way to the end of this extraordinary speech without stumbling. Now he stopped and stared at the page, and flipped to the previous page, and back again. The room was silent, almost reverent, as they all held their breath in wonder. Which, in a way, was appropriate, since without miraculous intervention Dot could never have written such a sentence. She was a surprising woman, but not, unfortunately, a surprising writer, and Amy opened her mouth to point out the obvious—that there must be a page out of place or missing in Chuck’s script—and instead, unpardonably, Amy laughed. It wasn’t so much the obscene flaunted snapshot or the baby in the wind, or even the echo of Chuck’s stentorian, impassioned nonsense; she got stuck instead on the mental image of framed lasagna, and she lost it, and so encouraged the rest to lose it along with her. Even Pete.
Too bad for Dot, who had almost gained entry to the clubhouse, who had come so close to being one of the gang, and who now jerked to her feet, her script sliding from her lap onto the carpet, and walked out into the middle of the room, her back to them all. Amy made herself ready for what was bound to be a wicked confrontation. “Come on, Dot,” said Marvy. “We’re not laughing at you! Chuck just lost his place, is all.”
“Yes,” said Amy. “Come back. Let’s finish this.”
Dot turned around and faced them. Her face was a terrible dark color, almost maroon, and her eyes bulged white.
“Dot?”
Dot hugged herself tight and fell to her knees, shaking the room, the tip of her tongue protruding between her lips, in sharp pink contrast to the eggplant hue of her skin.
Dr. Surtees, shouting “Call 911,” embraced her from behind, the Heimlich maneuver, but Dot wasn’t choking, at least not mechanically. She stared straight at them unseeing and toppled sideways, slowly, as he eased her on her back. She didn’t flail, she didn’t gasp, she just went down, and as he worked on her all that moved were her hands, clenching, opening, and clenching again into fists, until, just before the ambulance came, they opened for the last time and stayed that way, in permanent bloom. It all happened very fast, and it took forever.
Howdy, Amy!
Depending upon when you notice this, I slipped it under the door either before class or later last night, whilst you slept, or perchance in the a.m. on my way to work at ____________, but you didn’t hear me because you were in the shower. Actually, no, I figure you for a sandalwood bath beads kind of lady.
Say, maybe you could ask your neighbors to describe my automobile, or my actual person? That’s assuming I parked on the street and didn’t stroll up to your door in heavy disguise. Maybe, on the other hand, you don’t know your neighbors well enough to ask. You’re not the sociable type, are you? And what’s with the “Buzz Off” doormat? Are you really plagued with unwanted visitors?
Anyhoo, about Frank. Basically it was an accident, but then so was Velcro, so there you go. Frank was a decent enough chap, but too curious for his own good. Instead of spending his time profitably, Making Stuff Up, Finding his Inner Voice, and Avoiding Exposition in Dialogue, he decided to Spillane his way to the truth about what you people are calling The Sniper. Turns out he had an old friend who’s an assistant pooh-bah for one of the more infamous literary snotrags (you’ll forgive me if I don’t name it here), and he was shooting the shit with this guy (or gal) one evening and happened to mention the antics of Moi, and before you could say Jack Robinson the gal (or guy) said, “Hey! That kind of sounds familiar!” (Lit snotrag assistants are nothing if not blindingly articulate.)
And wouldn’t you know that a week or so later Our Frank got an actual letter from this creature, the gist of which I will reproduce here:
Frank—
It was so fabulous to hear from you!
Thanks for sending that writing class list (sorry, it went it to the wrong department, so it took awhile), and sure enough, I recognized the name of this whacko1 I was telling you about. _____ _______ 2 used to send us a story a month, back in the day, when I was a lowly unpaid reader. Every first Monday, you could set your watch.3 Not a bad writer, actually, though rather conservative for our taste—psychological realism, linear plots, and so on—but _______ sort of knew _______way around a sentence, and I always figured that sooner or later we’d take one.4 Then we got this incredibly vomitous thing in the mail.
It looked like a perfectly good dictionary,5 brand-new—I thought we’d ordered it—but when I opened it up it had been hollowed out with a razor, and then packed with long, coarse, dirty white hair all rolled up in a ball. This was bad enough, but when I took out the hair (yes, I actually took out the hair—what can I tell you, I was twenty-one!) it unraveled, and inside it was a pile of teeth. Gross! The secretary thought they were human (I’m sure they were canine)6 and got so upset that we had to give her the day off.
Of course the package was unsigned, and there’s no way we could legally prove it came from ____. Still, ________ lives in a small town in ________—the only one of our contributors to send us manuscripts from there—and although the package was postmarked in _________, the Whacko (you say The Sniper, and we said The Whacko—let’s call the whole thing off!!7) had forgotten to take the store sticker off the dictionary, and the store was in _________. So we were pretty damn sure.
And then we never heard from _____ again! No more Monday manuscripts.
Now that I think about it, that was the creepiest part of the whole thing.8 The smart move would have been for ________ to keep sending those manuscripts, right? To throw off suspicion? Anyway, we couldn’t prove anything, so that was that.
So you guys have your hands full! You better tell your teacher, and let her deal with it. That’s what she’s paid for.
And let me know what happens! Maybe over dinner, the next time you’re in town? My treat!!
P.S. Are you still with B________? Give her my regards!
Well, turns out Our Frank was a real straight shooter, by which I mean that he couldn’t bring himself to, as he put it, “go over my head” to you without first giving me a chance to explain myself. He called me that morning and said he wanted to meet with me and talk things out. What things, I asked, and he declined to say, except that it concerned the class, of course. It was he, swear to Gawd, who suggested meeting at Moonlight Beach, because it was close enough to his department so he could dart out at lunchtime, have this weird confab, and make it back in time to do whatever it was he did.
I tried to imagine a benign explanation for this rendezvous. Imagination has never been my strong suit.
So there I am, sitting at a picnic table, gazing idly down at the surfers, their wet boards glinting in the winter sun, or maybe it was their wetsuits—no, I tell a lie, it was cold and off-and-on drizzly, and I had the whole place to myself, more’s the pity, and here comes Frank, loaded for bear, and he plunks this stupid letter down in front of me and invites me, with a palm-up flourish, to read it.
Naturally, I try stonewalling. “And you actually believe this?” I ask. “Doesn’t your friend’s conclusion strike you as a bit tenuous? Yes, I did, in fact, submit a number of stories to this journal. I take my writing seriously, Frank. When I finish a story I’m satisfied with, I send it out to a carefully honed list of journals, one of which this one used to be, before this twit came on board. So it’s hardly surprising that ________ recognized my name. And honestly, can you picture me cramming a dictionary with hair and teeth?”
“I can now,” says Frank.
I still can’t figure out what he meant by that. The only thing that makes sense is that just seeing me there made some tumblers fall into place. I all at once looked like the sort of individual who would bombard simpletons with grotesque packages, and make obscene phone calls, and write poison pen letters, and of course he was right, but still it was unnerving. Apparently my mask had slipped.
And I was going to keep denying everything—it works for the politicians, so why not for me—and I got to my feet and fixed him with what I hoped was a baffled, pitying look, and opened my mouth to make my excuses—I’m busy, I would say, and I have a dentist appointment, and if you’re determined to press the issue to the group, I won’t stand in your way, although you’re likely to make an ass of yourself. Sorry, Frank, I would say, then I would make a point of shaking his hand, good sport that I am, but I’ve got to get going, and then I said it, “Sorry, Frank,” and I moved to shake his hand, and he did the most extraordinary thing. He flinched.
Then he stood up and grabbed the damn letter off the table and backed away from me. I had done nothing to provoke this response. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say in all honesty—and I almost never do that!—that I’ve done nothing to provoke any response of any strength from any person on any occasion in my entire life. I am a civilized human. Acquaintances and strangers regard me mildly, and why not? I’m hardly a terrorist. I took another step toward him, my hand still extended, and damned if he didn’t take another step back.
At this point I’ll admit that I began to enjoy myself. In light of what happened, this sounds bad, but imagine yourself suddenly absurdly endowed with a peculiar superpower: you go to lick a stamp and fire shoots from your tongue, or you think about a boysenberry milkshake and one appears in front of you. Could you resist materializing, or incinerating, one damn thing after another, for the sheer hell of it? Of course not, and neither could I stop advancing on Our Frank, in modest increments, my nascent hearty handclasp proffered robotically, because—the look on his face!! He was trying, literally straining, to stand his ground, but he couldn’t do it, he had to move away. From me! What a silly man.
Again I moved toward him, widening my smile, out of simple mischief, I swear. There’s something that happens, though, when you bare your teeth on purpose, your teeth like unsheathed swords, and some ancient memory wakes, and sure enough his eyes widened in reply, and still he moved back. It would have been easy enough to get around me and hotfoot it to the parking lot. Hell, he could have pushed me out of the way. What was I going to do—grin him to death?
Finally Frank backed up against a tallish shrub, a row of which lined the rim of that little park. Beach hibiscus. Past his head and shoulders I could just make out the gray sea, or maybe just the gray mist. Except for the ridiculous expression on his face he made a pretty picture in that delicate gray light, embraced as he was by green leaves and crepey yellow flowers, and I was inspired then to extend my other arm, one last little nudge for the noodge, and then I would clasp his shoulders and give him a little shake and finally speak, breaking the spell. “Frank,” I would say. “What in the world is wrong with you?” Or “How about we get a nice cup of coffee and talk this out?” Or “Get a grip on yourself, man!”
This is what I’m trying to explain to you. The shrub was an optical illusion. It was there, of course, but there wasn’t much to it: more space than substance, really. The shrub was for show.
So when Frank began to disappear into it, in slow motion, the effect was more magical than alarming. I can see it still in my mind’s eye. I’m looking at it right now! Time-lapse, shutter-shutter-shutter, as Frank blends in, becomes one with the hibiscus, his face, those misted leaves, his eyes, replaced, first one, then the other, those pale yellow blossoms crimson at the center, and then just his hand reaches out toward mine, and time stops.
And then he’s gone.
Nobody hears. There is nothing to hear. No cry, no shout. Nobody walking on the gray beach below. No consequences.
Well, until tonight. Because, blameless as I am for Frank’s death, I did cause it, and found in the experience something I could take away. A happy unintended goal, better than Velcro, more like the discovery of penicillin. Okay, I liked it. I stood there in the Frankless vacuum and tried to locate horror, grief, guilt, and up popped joy.
I’m seeing it again now as I write to you, shutter-shutter-shutter, and again right now, as you read this.
Or maybe I’m seeing something else: what happened tonight. Which was not an accident.
You can do it too! Close your eyes and there’s her face, and there, and there again, and gone.
Enough about me. See you soon!
P.S. Love your dog.