26
“. . . couldn’t possibly matter less, darling, really.”
It was my mother’s voice for sure. The sound quality was wretched, crackling and hissing through the dusty plastic pores of the speaker in my old handheld tape recorder. But I was absolutely sure. That was my mother’s voice. Her arrogant, alto, elocutionary voice alive again in my ears.
After I pounded the entertainment center good and hard—there wasn’t a salvageable circuit left—I did what Robin expected me to do. All the pieces in place. I went right upstairs to my bedroom, to the drawer in the far bedside table, the disused one, where all the other artifacts of boyhood lay untouched in a grave of junk. There it still was, under the reporter’s notebook with the miniature pen shoved straight through the spiral binding, under the pile of medals with their threadbare ribbons still attached: gold, silver, bronze; tennis, hockey, track and field. There, just where I had left it so many years before, was the Sony microcassette recorder that Robin knew I would still have, a pair of ancient AA Rayovacs still wedged into it.
I went to the fridge for new batteries. For courage, I went to the case of Jameson in the garage. I inserted the tape, side A, and pressed play. For the first time in thirteen years, I heard my mother’s voice.
Six words.
Pop.
That’s all it took.
And I was shaking all over.
I stopped the tape.
I took a long drink, and then another.
I leaned down, fished my earbuds out of my gym bag, and plugged them into the receptacle on the side of the recorder. I rewound the tape to the beginning, lowered the volume, and pressed play again.
“. . . couldn’t possibly matter less, darling, really.”
Another voice then, high and thin. A child’s voice, startlingly sure and precise. Peevish, too.
Robin. It had to be.
“It matters to me.”
Mom, again, exasperated:
“Why on earth would he possibly matter to you? I don’t see—”
A loud sigh.
“. . . Oh, honestly, I refuse to argue about something so immaterial, especially with you.”
Robin, shouting:
“Are you deaf? I just said it matters.”
A long pause.
Mom, beseechingly:
“Darling, would you?”
She must have been raising her glass.
“You’ve had enough. It’s barely seven.”
“Don’t chide,” she said exasperatedly.
“All right,” said Robin, more calmly. “But then you’ll listen?”
“Yes, then I’ll listen.”
With an abrupt click the recording stopped; then with another click and the shushing, scraping sound of the recorder being moved, perhaps into a pocket or under a book, it began again.
My mother, again, midspeech:
“. . . us, darling. Join us. Your paramour and I have just been going over your leavings.”
There were the distant sounds of someone—my father, presumably—coming into the house, and the sound of rustling paper closer to the mic. There was a long pause full of more rustling and shuffling, then my father’s voice in the room. He sounded rigid, as usual, precise and distant, but underneath there was a strain of something else. Fear? Surprise? Brewing rage? I couldn’t say.
“My leavings?” he said.
Mom, knowing she has the upper hand and enjoying it immensely.
“Yes, yes. Your compositions, dear.” More paper rustling. “Here.”
Nothing from Dad.
“You really are a dark one, Jimmy. I had no idea you were a poet”—snorting—“an execrable one, but—who knows—you might have given Lord Alfred Douglas a run for his money. Your very own love that dare not speak its name, and all that.”
A long silence. Excruciatingly long.
Finally, Dad, sighing hugely: “Oh, Christ . . . Christ.”
Mom: “I should say so.”
Another long silence.
Mom, enthusiastically, clapping her hands: “Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?”
Dad, woundedly, almost under his breath: “Why? . . . Why?”
Robin sobbing.
Mom: “You leave her out of this. She’s said all she needs to. You do this with me now. Me. Your wife. Your equal. She does not have to defend herself any—more.”
Pause.
Dad, meekly: “I can’t.”
“You will. If it takes all night. If it takes the rest of our lives, by God, you will.”
“Please, Diana. I beg you. Do not pursue this.”
“Pursue this? What? Are you completely out of your mind?”
“It’s a mistake.”
“Oh”—laughing bitterly—“it’s a lot more than a mistake, little man. Believe me.”
“No—this. This conversation is a mistake. Can’t you ever just know when you’re out—”
He faltered.
Mom, in disbelief: “Out what, precisely? I hardly know. Is there a word, a phrase for it? Outdegraded? Outshocked? Out of my pathological depth? Tell me. I’d really like to know. Which ‘out’ am I?”
Dad, shouting: “Just out. Out, damn you. There is nothing to say. There is nothing clever you can say.”
“Do you think I’m trying to be clever? Do you really think that this is some kind of—of contest?”
Silence.
“My God. You do.”
Dad, almost whining: “You see? Already you have misunderstood everything.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No, of course you don’t. You never have. You never do.”
There was the banging, crashing sound of something being overturned, and the splintering of wood. The coffee table? A chair?
“Oh, fuck, Jimmy. For once in our dreary, clawing, petty life together this is not about who is more intelligent.”
Pause.
Faintly, a bottle being unscrewed, poured. Dad’s first drink? The coroner’s one of many? Or just a few very large ones? More shuffling of the tape recorder being moved again. Out of his line of sight? Or hers?
Dad, determined: “Listen, Di. Just listen to me. You do not want . . . you do not want to do this.”
Mom, reenergized: “Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong, dearest. After all this time, don’t you know me any better than that? Why, I’m just now engaged.” Laughing. “This is my sweet spot. This is where I live.”
A huge sigh from Dad, the humph of him sitting down. Then, resignedly:
“Yes. This is where you live, isn’t it?”
A pause. Dad resuming angrily: “Don’t I know you well enough? Yes. I know. I know . . . The tidy life was never enough for you. No, not you . . . The four walls and the square meals and the ease of never having to worry about anything practical . . . because I was doing it . . . none of that was good enough for you. You wanted this. You wanted to see the guts on the table and everyone ruined.”
“Oh, come, come, Jimmy. You can do better than that. A transgression of this magnitude requires a more forceful deflection.”
“You little bitch.”
“Yes, that . . . and?”
Dad, in disbelief: “And? What are you saying, ‘and’?”
“The rest, love. The rest. We know what I am. We have that. But you? Where are you in this demonology? Surely you rate now. Perhaps not before, I agree—straight man, company man—but now, now that you are . . . sharing yourself. Well, you’ve graduated to a whole new circle of hell, wouldn’t you say? Or is that unclear? If it’s unclear I could—”
Dad, sobbing: “Oh, God, Diana . . . please.”
Mom, resuming, acidly: “Oh, all right then. Since you can’t bring yourself to articulate. Let’s see. How shall I put this for you? The tried-and-true ways of tearing up a marriage—is that it? . . . Yes, the usual thing, making a housemaid and whipping post out of your wife, cheating, whoring, lying, stealing—that—all that—just wasn’t nearly the right kind of kinky for you. Not enough for me, you say? Ha! I’ll give you not enough. You couldn’t just be the husband who’s absent and emotionally obtuse and fucking his secretary or the babysitter. You had to be the husband who’s fucking the baby . . . I suppose I should count myself lucky that it wasn’t ours.”
“Don’t you even think of bringing Nick into this.”
Mom, hugely: “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it. Our son? I can barely remember who he is. You’ve managed that beautifully. I see him twice a year at holidays if I’m lucky, and in the summers he’s practically a stranger—sullen, evasive, hostile to everything I’ve tried to teach him, banging around with that Alders creature, systematically erasing everything that’s original and worthy in him. Yes, you’ve made a model man out of him. He’ll be as bland as bread when you’re through with him.”
“When I’m through with him? It’s you who’s done the number on him. Sending him away to school might just barely have saved him—might. If he survives you, and that is by no means a given, it will be a miracle if he can ever look a woman in the face, let alone take one to bed.”
A barking laugh from Mom, then:
“You really are something. By all means, blame me. Blame me for filling the void, when it was always, always you he wanted and adored. God help him, he thinks you’re God. To this day. He really does.”
Dad, ignoring her: “Do you have any idea the effect you have on men? Do you? Because it’s not what you think.”
Mom, appalled: “This—none of this—has anything to do with me. Do not—”
“No, really. Do you? It’s quite—how did your father put it on our wedding day?—withering? Yes. ‘She can be a bit withering,’ he said, ‘but you’ll be all right, I expect.’ Priceless . . . You’ll be all right, I expect . . . Jesus, he knew.”
“Oh, my dear, is that our euphemism now? Withering? Is that the story line? The all-conquering member withers before the terrible breasts of Boadicea?”
Dad, bewildered: “What are you babbling about? Who are you playing for?”
“Oh, myself, as always. Myself. Someone has to do something to raise this beyond— God, I am standing in front of a man, for all intents and purposes, a man of resources and breeding and middle-class pretension, and we are talking about the faulty mechanics of his penis. Again. Why he can’t get it up unless the victim is bald below the belt. Is there anything else? Is there ever anything else? Is there any stage of evolution beyond which a man’s virility, and his harridan wife’s fanged deflation of same, is not the great exoneration for all his troglodyte crimes? Forgive me if I had hoped to give this a loftier gloss, but the cliché is killing me.”
“Listen to yourself, Di. This is why— Oh, Jesus, are you incapable of responding to anything directly—as yourself—to me, as myself? We are not one of your poems. We don’t scan. You can’t cite your way out of this. This is real, people to people, life as it is. It doesn’t shine.”
“Well, well, the night bard instructs.” A gurgling scream. “You make me sick. You think because your prick is hard and you can put pen to paper and scribble, that you can make this . . . this violation stand up and declare itself legitimate. No, you are right enough in that. It doesn’t shine. It shames. Reading this, tasting it, sour and stinking as it comes up in my throat, I am ashamed of every word in the English language. You have accomplished that. How can you have? . . . Oh, that’s why you did it, of course—to destroy the thing that you could never touch, the love and living drive in me that you could not approach because you are so incapable, so artless, so utterly without sensibility. You can’t . . . Oh, it’s so much worse than ignorance. You don’t even stand under the same sky.”
“You arrogant—”
“You have deliberately, methodically—how else for you?—defiled what is beyond—no, more than that—what is beyond beyond you—what is so far outside your box-trap subsistence as to be only dimly available as some kind of sore on your procedure. The flannel man cannot feel awe in the presence of the sublime, and so he howls at his inadequacy.”
“Shut up. My God, shut up, you pompous bitch. Do you really still think that anyone cares about all that useless academic slush that’s splashing around in your head? You’re nobody. You have always been nobody. Same as me. A big, towering second-rate mind in a paddock full of idiots. If we’d stayed in New York you would have found that out very quickly, darling. You’d have been laughed out at the door. But here you could stew in all your thwarted ambition, talking down to all the animals. Well, that’s over. No one’s listening anymore, if they ever were. Well, no one, that is, except your ripe acolyte over here.”
Mom, showing her first signs of weariness: “And we’re back to your excuses. The siren nymphet, too plump to resist. How original.”
“Yes, I know. My defense isn’t worthy of you. My reasons are the same as everybody else’s.”
“Every sick—”
“No, not sick. That is unworthy of you. You, of all people, should be able to grasp this, should be able to talk about it in a more sophisticated way. Do you think your feminist outrage is any less imaginative than my transgression?”
“Feminist? We’re talking about the seduction of a child, Jimmy. What could it possibly matter the sex? Hers or mine, or yours, for that matter? She and I are not allies because we are women, and you are not the enemy—nor are you to be excused your . . . indiscriminate humping—because you are a man.”
“It was not indiscriminate, any more than your taking on the role of her tutor was indiscriminate. What did you see in her? . . . Hmm? . . . What? . . . Do you even know? . . . I’ll tell you what. You saw sensitivity, intelligence, beauty, promise, safe harbor, the possibility of love without judgment. Isn’t that right? Well, that is what I saw, too. That is what I hoped for. Maybe I sexualized it, yes, because I am a man—that is what we do—and maybe I tried to ennoble it with borrowed language because I was ashamed of my inability to express the enormity of what I felt, but how could anyone not see and adore, not want to touch and possess this marvelous, pure—”
He broke off again, unable to find the word.
Mom, softly: “Image.”
Dad: “What?”
Mom, repeating pensively: “This image. She is an image, Jimmy. That’s all. The image of what we have lost. You cannot possess it.”
Silence.
Dad, crying now—or I think it’s crying—awkwardly, jaggedly, coughing almost. He does not know how.
“Oh, Di. Help me. I am so afraid.”
Mom, sternly again, but with a strain of softness left: “I can’t help you. I can’t help any of it. It’s done. It’s all done.”
Dad, strangled: “Is it? Is it really?”
“Yes.”
“Done?”
“Yes.”
More crying.
“Please, Di. Don’t give up on me. Not now. I need you.”
“You have never needed me, except as cover.”
Dad, begging: “That’s not true. You know that’s not true.”
Nothing from Mom. Just the sound of Dad whimpering.
Then, at last, Mom, resolute: “You’ve ruined her.”
Pause.
Dad, incredulous: “What?”
Nothing.
Dad again: “What did you say?”
Mom, nastily: “I said you’ve ruined her.”
“What do you mean, ruined her? How can you say ruin? What a terrible word. Can you possibly mean that the way it sounds?”
“I don’t know, Jimmy. How does it sound?”
“Like she’s a soufflé or a pair of suede shoes. My God, Di.”
Again, nothing from Mom.
“Like used up, trashed. No longer pristine.”
Still nothing from Mom.
“Jesus, you’re not even going to contradict me.”
Mom, finally, feigning control: “Jimmy, stop. Really. You’re making a fool of yourself.”
Dad, on the offensive at last: “No, no. That’s it, isn’t it?”
A pause with Dad puffing and laughing mirthlessly.
“You know what I find incredible? Unimaginable? After all this, yes, I’ve just now realized it. You’re not angry. You’re not even shocked. You’re—what is that expression on your face? Jealousy? No. That would be human . . . My God, you’re disappointed.”
A loud guffaw.
“Don’t be absurd, Jimmy.”
Dad, almost whining with disbelief: “‘Ripe’ is not the wrong word. Or it wasn’t until— Jesus, your private delicacy has been spoiled, hasn’t it? And now you don’t want it anymore.”
“I couldn’t expect you to—”
“Yes, that’s it. Your all-consuming vanity has been pricked. The prize stolen right out from underneath you. Good God. You really are a monster. Well, my withering wife and partner competitor, standing so proudly under your own sky, I’ve had her. I’ve had your little dumpling protégé. And now you don’t want her.”
Dad, laughing hideously: “I’ve had her. How do you like that? Over and over and over and—”
Robin, screaming: “Stop it!” Sobbing. “Please stop it.”
Mom: “You absolute bastard.”
Loud shushing and scraping again. The tape recorder being moved. The sound of running footsteps and the rhythmic brush of fabric on the mic, a slamming door, sobbing, fumbling. Click.
There wasn’t much left on that side of the tape. It was all blank—I checked. I turned it to side B, saw that it was fully rewound, and pressed play, hoping and dreading that there was more.
Click.
Door opening. She must have been in the downstairs bathroom. Nothing else is that close except the front door, and she was obviously still in the house. The brush of fabric again. The recorder is in her jacket pocket, maybe, a loose linen thing with room. Must be. The fabric brushes slowly as she moves. Back and forth with her hips. Standing, walking, sliding past.
Robin: “Let’s go.”
Mom: “We don’t have to do this. Not ever.”
Robin: “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Darling, I’m so sorry you’ve had to hear—you must disregard—people say things—this is about us. This is a very old argument.”
“And this is my life. I won’t ever forget any of this. Ever.”
Nothing from Mom.
More shushing.
Robin: “I’m going back in.”
Mom: “But what for?”
“To try to understand.”
“But you can’t. I can’t.”
“I have to try.”
Shushing and rustling, in the background my mother’s low block heels on the floor crossing the foyer, echoing flatly.
Shushing. A gasp.
Dad, stage-whispering sharply: “Forgive me.”
Footfalls stopping.
Mom, booming: “Jesus, Jimmy. What are you doing? Have you utterly lost your mind?”
Nothing from Dad.
Robin, her composure lost, crying again.
Mom, tremblingly: “Jimmy. Let’s just—”
Dad, firmly: “No. You were right. It’s done. There is no going back.”
Mom: “Not this way. Not with the chil—”
“Yes. This way. With. We always said this, Di. With. This was always the choice. The choice, not the resignation, remember?”
“Not like this, Jimmy. Not like this. The child. Think of the child.”
“Yes. We knew it would come. We knew it would come when we didn’t want it, and we always said we would choose it then, when it was hardest. That was how we would know, you said—when it was hardest—and we would make no excuses, because there would always be excuses to be made, always last appeals that would seem so sweet in the terror of finishing. But resist, you said. And I agreed. Resist the temptation to run when the temptation is strongest.”
“I was wrong.”
“The gun within reach, you said. Live life to the fullest with a loaded gun within reach. Do you remember how often we said that? How many times we clinked glasses over those words and laughed and shouted that our life was recklessly complete because the way out was right there, lying on the table, and we chose not to take it. Until we did. Well, we are there now, my wife. We are at the point of picking up the weapon that has always been in full view. We put this here for that.”
“We were kids, Jimmy. Stupid, arrogant kids full of high ideas we didn’t understand. We were drunk. We were alone in the world.”
“We weren’t kids when we put this here.”
“We didn’t put it there. How long have you had that?”
“Oh, Di. Don’t back away now. You have always been my courage.”
“Jimmy, stop this. Now. Stop it.”
“I will stop it. It will all . . . just . . . stop.”
“Jimmy, listen to me. Listen, will you? Just take a few minutes and let me tell you—”
“Tell me what? What can you possibly tell me now? That’s an escape. We have to take what we have chosen.”
“We will. All right? We will. But let me tell you—”
“What?”
“About—”
Dad screaming: “About what?”
Mom, chillingly calm: “About Robin.”
Long pause. She has hit the mark.
Mom, slowly: “I want to tell you about Robin. And I want you to tell me about her, too. And I will listen. And she will listen. Here. Right here. Between us there is everything to say.”
The pause then was so long I could hardly bear it. I thought several times of turning off the tape. Turning it off and burning it so I would never be tempted to listen to this again. What you hear once now, said the voice in my head, you will hear for the rest of your life. And I knew that it was true. Pieces of this would be with me forever, thrown language splattering the walls of my mind indelibly. But I could not stop. I would not. I had heard too much already. And too little.
Finally, Robin’s tiny frightened voice broke the silence, and when I heard what it said and remembered that I had seen those same words on a computer screen just days before, it was like the last heavy bolt of a combination lock sliding out of grasp and the strongbox opening.
“Talk to me,” she said.
And then more softly, “Please?”
All we want is an explanation. Some way to understand. Still and always that. After we have pulled the trigger, somehow, or let it be pulled for us, maybe a little on our behalf, after we have witnessed something unspeakable, we want to understand what we have seen and known, because seeing and knowing are never enough when the shock is so strong. It cannot penetrate, and it cannot dissipate, either. It does not even seem real. It is only pain—illiterate, dumb pain that we are desperate to disintegrate with words.
Mom, terrified, trying to be strong: “Robin, sweetheart. Look at me.”
A pause.
“Please, darling. Look at me.”
A longer pause and the slightest break in my mother’s voice as she begins:
“You have been my precious gift. Always . . . Talking with you has been like talking to a better vision of myself . . . like seeing and walking beside and sharing perfect language with someone I would have hoped to be . . . I have never been your teacher. You have been mine—my example, and my admired friend. Yours is the most expansive and supple, quick and capacious mind I have ever known. Feed it. Promise me, darling. Feed it every day and cherish it. It belongs to you, and nothing—not I . . . not Jimmy, nothing bad that has ever happened or will happen to you—can ever take that away. It is all just more experience . . . Nothing is either bad or good. Remember?”
Robin, mechanically: “But thinking makes it so.”
Mom: “Yes, darling. Yes. That’s it. Keep that. Keep it close always and it will comfort you and free you from all of this. I promise.”
Robin, crying: “But I don’t want you to go.”
“I know, darling. I know. But this is your freedom.”
Robin, crying harder: “I don’t understand.”
“I know. But you will. You will. And you will thrive in the only possession you will ever need. Your home is in your mind, your gorgeous mind. You will need nothing else. Anything else would be a hindrance. We—we are in your way, just as everyone else will be in your way . . . Every weak loser clawing for a piece of you . . . every adoring lover and friend and teacher and pupil . . . all of your inferiors . . . You must shut out all of them—shut it all out with sentimentality. It has no place in you.”
Dad, gruffly: “That’s enough, Di. You’ve said enough.”
Mom: “Then let her go, Jimmy.”
Dad: “I will. I am.”
Mom: “No. Let her go now, and you and I will finish this alone. That is how we said it would be.”
A long pause.
Dad, barely audible: “Okay.”
Mom, confirming: “Okay?”
“Yes, okay.”
“No good-byes, Jimmy.”
Dad, sobbing: “I’m sorry. God, I’m so, so very sorry, dear girl.”
Robin sobbing.
Dad, plaintively: “I only wanted to be near you, to believe that you could—”
Mom: “Jimmy, stop. Leave her be now.”
Dad: “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”
Mom: “Shhhhh.”
Dad and Robin whimpering.
Then Mom again, so tenderly: “Time to go now, my love.”
Robin: “I can’t. I’m afraid.”
Mom: “I know, my lovely girl. I know you’re frightened, but don’t be. You can do this. Do this for me. Go on with words . . . Go on with everything we started . . . You can.”
More whimpering, shushing, her small body moving. The tape in her pocket, circling.
Robin, muffled: “Good-bye.”
Mom, very close, kissing, an embrace: “Good-bye, darling.”
Robin: “I love you.”
A rustling separation, then Robin again, aside: “I don’t . . . forgive you.”
A pause. Nothing from Mom or Dad.
Shuffling, slow, light footsteps in the hall, the heavy, sucking front door opening, swish, closing, pause, tat. Closed.
Rhythmic walking, pocket fabric, breathing, soft shoes, and outside air.
Panic, moaning, deep croaking, throat-drying cry.
Fingers coursing, searching, finding, pressing.
Click.
I am startled by the click, still fogged in their good-byes, still listening. It cannot be over. It cannot. It will go on again. It will, I think, I plead. It must. Please, go on. Please.
I try her words.
Talk to me.
But it does not.
I feel abandoned. Absurdly, childishly, and—again, exactly as before in this house—impotently enraged. I think there must be, there has to be more. Not moving, I listen to the rest of the tape. I listen until it clicks, physically clicks itself off.
Nothing. There is nothing more.
Just a flood of my own questions trying to grab hold.
How much longer did it go on? How long did they wait? Did they watch her walk down the sidewalk and the drive and into her grandparents’ house, just to make sure she was gone? And did she, lying in bed in the room above the garage where the nightlight goes on, did she stop her ears and wait? Or did she listen for the first shot, expecting it, knowing it would come, yet startled still when it did?
Or is that when she left, and why? That night, right from this room, left at their behest, and kept on going? Running as far as she could go, running so as not to hear the shots she knew were coming, not to see the bodies carried out under covers, not to hear the cries and see the gaping faces of her neighbors looking on in horror at what she—or so she thought—had done.
What had she done?
This morning, did she run across the street not for Iris, but to Gruber, hoping for the bullet, the bullet that she thought she deserved? It’s what I did, she said. What I did. And what was it that she did? Telling? Was that the beginning of their deaths to her? Deaths, she thought, that should have been three and not two? Why? Because she told? Because she said something?
The loop of time coming back to the same place. Mrs. B. had said it. Running and running away until you are running back again and into the bullet. At last into the bullet that has been here all the time, waiting for you.
That is the worst of superstition.
The loop of time. The loop of tape.
For me?
Stop it.
Stop this now.
And don’t listen. Don’t think. Anymore.
Burn it.
This has not been deserved.
There is no significance for you.
In suffering.
I popped the tape out of the machine.
Don’t think.
Don’t think.
Don’t answer the fear of what might be.
There is no prophecy in this.
No same place to come back to and die.
I eased a loop out of the cassette and pulled, right arm flinging to the right.
Again, again, again.
Until a pile of shining ribbon was lying on the table.
Scooped it in both hands, dropped it in the trash. Full circle.
The mesh trash where Robin had placed the first note.
All four notes were there on the desk. I threw them in on top of the tape.
And poured on some Jameson for closure.
I walked through the hall, through the kitchen, for matches, then the door.
Sliding out back.
Striking.
Slitch. Whoosh.
I dropped the bright gold match into the bin.
And a sickly blue-green flame leapt up.
Above a scar of melted black plastic bubbling, and the ash of a girl’s diary expiring.