•
Philip had wished to notify me about the new love of his life because we would all be seeing each other on Sunday, when the Cranes—she a lifelong Republican and he a ditto Democrat—were throwing one of their big bipartisan bashes. Nobody understands how Drew and Blake Crane have stayed married for almost thirty years when on every political candidate and every political issue they publicly and passionately disagree. Nevertheless they have been together since 1964, when her Goldwater Buick sideswiped his Johnson VW. And once a year they pay back a great many social obligations by filling up their house with wall-to-wall (and sometimes truly off-the-wall) people.
The food is always terrible, but that’s okay with me. I think of the Cranes as a diet opportunity.
That night I not only watched my weight, I also watched Philip and back-from-Belfast Adrienne. He was fawning and drooling all over her. She was treating his adoration with cool disdain. My (admittedly childish) annoyance about their relationship began to fade, however, when I heard Philip say, “May I bring you a fruit tart, queridas,” and she said, “Phillip, can it with the queridas,” and he, having brought her the fait tart, said, “It is always a pleasure to serve you,” and she, having taken the fruit tart, said, “But it doesn’t make up for centuries of oppression.” I figured that if Philip had chosen to move from seasoned me to PC Adrienne, the man was going to get what he deserved.
I also decided that I deserved to be spared any further discussions with right-wing Republicans, one of whom seemed to be advocating death by lethal injection for welfare cheats.
It was time to go home.
The next morning, as I considered—and rejected—lethally injecting Mr. Monti, another fax message warned that the end was near.
NO MORE DELAY
DEATH’S ON ITS WAY
THANKSGIVING IS EXECUTION DAY
THANSSGIVMG DAY THE TURKEY TURNS INTO DEAD MEAT
I realized that I was reading an ultimatum.
I needed a murder plan, and I needed it soon.
I went to Potomac Video and rented And Then There Were None, where many people are killed—one by one—on an island. No useful ideas.
• • •
During the second week of November, Wally returned to school, having made a fast and full recovery. He also seemed to be making his peace with Josephine’s “trial separation,” especially since—to his thrilled surprise—she actually was attending conversion classes.
As Jo explained it to Wally in one of their occasional phone conversations, all she was really doing was keeping her options open. “I could convert and marry you,” Wally told me she told him. “I also could not convert, and still marry you. I also,” she continued, “could neither marry you nor convert. And I also could even convert and still not marry you.”
She did, however, warn Wally that if she both converted and married him, he’d damn well better know about Tu B’Shevat and Tisha B’Av, not to mention Brith Milah and Pidyon Haben.
“I think it’s looking good,” said Wally who—with no Jo to turn to—found himself turning back to his faithful ma. “And I think I’m going to look up Tisha B’Av.”
• • •
I went to Potomac Video and rented Monsieur Verdoux, where many wives are killed by Charlie Chaplin. No useful ideas.
• • •
On Wednesday, a gray and drizzly day, I walked over to Carolyn’s house for some biking and bitching, beginning with my complaints about Jeff as we pedaled side by side in her sumptuous bedroom.
“Everyone else in our family,” I said, “feels some duty to mankind. But Jeff’s always been this wheeling-dealing hedonist.” I wiped my brow with the back of my hand. “I was hoping these real estate problems of his would have prompted some agonizing reappraisal. But he’s still dating women with hair twice as long as their skirts. And he changes the subject whenever I bring up the Peace Corps.”
Carolyn laughed indulgently. “I’ve always loved your Jeff. But he always gets into trouble. And he never agonizingly reappraises.”
“Then it’s time, for him to start,” I said. “I wish the were more like—”
“Wally. And that,” said Carolyn, puffing hard, “is the problem. Wally’s already the designated saint in the Kovner family. Why would Jeff even try to compete with that?”
The timers dinged, releasing the two of us, sweating and wheezing, from our metal steeds. “Anyway,” I said, “he’s not sitting still for advice from me. And Jake, well, you know Jake. He says our kids aren’t kids anymore and we have to let them make their own mistakes.”
Having mentioned Jake, I moved on to assorted complaints about him, while Carolyn showered and I emery-boarded my nails. “He’s expecting me to forgive and forget and to keep on working on being less controlling. I’m the one who’s supposed to do all the changing. But what exactly do I get in return?”
“Love and sex and companionship,” said Carolyn, shouting through the stall-shower door. “And he’s basically one of the good guys. And, you’ll never meet anyone else who owns a gorilla suit.” She laughed. “So he’s still having trouble finding your G-spot. Hey, nobody’s perfect.”
Carolyn and I have always been staggeringly frank about our sex lives, frank in a way that men—I’m convinced—can’t even begin to imagine that women can be. But then Carolyn and I have always been staggeringly frank about virtually everything. Everything, that is, with one recent exception.
For although I had told her plenty about the Kovner difficulties with Mr. Monti, I had never Set her know that I believed he was homicidal or that I intended to be homicidal first. Supportive, though she could be, I knew she’d undoubtedly try to stop me, as she always tried to stop me whenever I planned to do something that she deemed deeply dumb.
“We’re trying to make up,” I said, “but every time things improve, I get to brooding about that night with Sunny.” I closed my eyes and sighed. “I mean, I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.”
Pearly Carolyn stepped from the shower, wrapped herself in a towel, and cleared her throat to prepare for a pronouncement.
“And here’s what I think, Brenda,” she said, her blue eyes opened wide. “Get over it.”
“Get over it?”
“Yes, like right away.” Carolyn shook out her glorious hair. “Look, you’re the one who kept telling me that you only had twenty-three—now it’s fewer—years left. You don’t have any time to waste. So, get over it.”
• • •
I went to Potomac Video and rented Kind Hearts and Coronets, where Alec Guinness dies many unnatural deaths. No useful ideas.
• • •
On Thursday, November 12, I got a call from Birdie Monti.
“I met with Joseph last night,” she said. “We had an interesting talk.”
“Anything you’d like to share with me?’
“Not at the moment,” she said. “Except I heard about all those real estate tricks and also about Jake’s two malpractice suits. And I’m calling to apologize for the not-nice things that Joseph has done to your family.”
Not-nice things, I said to myself. What about vicious? What about reprehensible? Aloud I merely inquired, “Is your husband joining you in this apology?”
“Not at the moment,” she said, “but we’ll be having another interesting talk real soon.”
• • •
I went to Potomac Video and, just to relax, I rented Mary Poppins.
• • •
That weekend Jo told Wally that among the options she was keeping open were becoming a rabbi, becoming a psychotherapist, becoming a lesbian, and/or applying to medical school. She said she was calling to tell him all this so he wouldn’t be taken aback if he heard that she was dating Vanessa Pincus.
Wally, quite agitated, brought me this news on Sunday morning, while I was setting the table for a dinner party we were throwing next Friday. (As I often tell my readers, one certain way of making a dinner party go smoothly is to do as much as you pan well in advance.) “I’m worried about that shrink,” Wally said, as he helpfully placed two forks on each cream-colored napkin. “I think she needs to set some limits with Josephine.”
“Maybe,” I said carefully, laying a cream-and-green plate beside each napkin, “Josephine needs to learn to set her own limits.”
Wally, stormy-eyed, threw down the rest of the forks. “You don’t think she’s overdoing it with these options of hers?”
“She probably is,” I told him. “But she’ll calm down. And when she decides who she wants to be and what she wants to do, she’s going to feel that they’re her decisions—not yours and not her father’s and not her psychiatrist’s.”
“And I’m just supposed to wait around and hope she decides on me, not Vanessa Pincus?”
“Don’t think of yourself as waiting around,” I told him. ‘Try to think of yourself its poised for action. I mean, things happen. Jo could hit a rough patch, a disappointment, a loss—even a serious loss. And then you’ll be there, coming through for her, providing support and comfort in her grief.
Wally gave me a baffled glance. Her grief? What kind of grief?”
“I haven’t any idea,” I replied, stepping back to admire my gorgeous table. “But it wouldn’t hurt a bit to be poised for action.”
I wasn’t telling the truth when I told Wally I had no idea. I had two ideas. My first idea was that Jo would turn to Wally in her grief when she lost her father. My second idea—which had come to me as the result of a major new insight into myself—was how to arrange for Jo to lose her father.
• • •
The next day, in addition to making my soup for Friday night and writing a column entitled POISED FOR ACTION, I swung into action on my murder plan. I rented a P.O. box. I purchased a dowdy tweed suit and a dowdy brown hat and a dowdy brown wig that curled just below my ears in one of the less felicitous styles of the 1940s. Dressed in my matronly duds, I hailed a cab, went off to Jeff’s block of buildings in Anacostia, and stopped at the one I had visited back in September. There I reached into my purse, where I had placed a note and two thumbtacks, and tacked up my note on the badly splintered front door.
“Dear Billy or Elton Jr.,” the note said. “Your talents are sought for a short-term, high-paying job A.S.A.P. Time is of the essence. If you are interested, write immediately to”—here I provided my P.O. box information—“with the day and the hour you can meet me at”—here I named the location—“to work out our business arrangements.” I read my note over and added a P.S. “You won’t know who I am, but fear not, I will know you.” Then I added a P.P.S.: “Dress discreetly.”
That evening I borrowed ten thousand dollars from Carolyn (for such a small sum she does not have to ask her trustees), making up a fib about how I needed it to pay off one of Jeff’s debts. I certainly couldn’t tell her that I needed it in order to hire a hit man.
I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, ‘This woman has lost it.” I recognize how you could see it that way. For, tossing caution to the winds, I was planning to violate my cardinal rule: Never use an accomplice in a murder.
Billy and Elton Jr.? What was I, crazy?
No, not exactly.
I wasn’t crazy because I’d decided I couldn’t do this alone—that I’d never kill Joseph Monti without assistance. This astonishing conclusion flowed from the aforementioned major new insight into myself. I had been watching Mary Poppins when I suddenly under stood that my failure—three times!—to murder Mr. Monti was due not to ineptitude but to some kind of stubborn psychological block. Hadn’t I pulled that radio plug from the socket—a Freudian slip—when I’d tried to electrocute him in the tub? Hadn’t I failed to poison him by means of a strawberry Daiquiri because I unconsciously knew (he had pushed them aside when he ate my lemon sorbet back in August) that he didn’t eat strawberries? And hadn’t I deliberately—though unaware I was doing so—wound up stuffing the wrong Monti twin in the closet? I mean surely, when I had looked at my victim’s feet instead of his face, I had seen that he was wearing something that Joseph Monti would never wear—shoddy shoes!
In other words, while my mind was screaming, “Kill the s.o.b.,” my superego was Whispering, “Murder is wrong.” In other words, I unconsciously was sabotaging my efforts to kill Mr. Monti.
And so I wasn’t crazy to seek an accomplice to help me outwit my superego. Nor was I crazy to seek Elton Jr. and Billy. Look, I desperately needed a hit man, and how many people with hit man potential does a woman like me get to meet in the course of her life? It struck me that my September hallway encounter with these two bad dudes was, if not preordained, a stroke of good fortune.
Nor—final point—was I taking the major risks that most people take when they use an accomplice. I wasn’t risking blackmail or betrayal. Why? Because my accomplices were never going to know that I was me.
On Wednesday I went to my P.O. box and found a letter from Elton Jr. and Billy. Having forgiven each other for past transgressions, they were happily working together once again. They wanted to hear my proposal and would meet me where I requested—on Thursday, November 19, at 10 A.M.
On Thursday, at 10 A.M., Prudence Gump was waiting for them.
Our meeting place was Union Station, surely one of the world’s great railroad stations, a grand historic pile that had gone from beauty to schlump to ravishingly renovated, a building I always do the honor of pausing to admire—even on my way to confer with hit men. I love its combination of columned majesty and mall, its stately halls and bustling buy-me shops, its arching ceilings and movie theaters and sleepers to Chicago, its statues and fountains and restaurants galore. I’ve had dinner there. I’ve bought blouses there. I’ve seen a couple of movies there. I’ve taken Metroliners from there to New York. I once met Rosalie there—she was coming to visit for the weekend—and we got into such a fight before we even left the station that she turned right around and took the next train home. A few times a year I lunch there with Nan, who works for a senator known as The Fool on the Hill, and decide what she can do to help him along. The fact that Union Station is so versatile, vast, and anonymous, plus so easy to get to by Metro from Cleveland Park, made it, in my opinion, the ideal meeting place at which to plan a murder.
And there, as instructed, were Billy and Elton Jr.—in pinstriped suits! with attaché cases!—browsing among the hats at The Proper Topper, and quick to follow me, when I had identified myself, to one of the station’s less populated locations.
With my dowdy duds, droopy hair, and splendid upper-class British accent, I made a truly persuasive Prudence Gump, briskly describing to an attentive Billy and Elton Jr. the kind of high-paying job I had in mind for them.
“So how come,” Elton Jr. inquired when I had finished my spiel, “you know about us?”
“Yeah, right,” said Billy, “Like, who told you our names?”
“I say, that’s a jolly good question,” I said. “You chaps are veddy clevah. It’s immeedjitly cleah that you chaps are too clevah by hahff. I’m teddibly pleased to be working with a criminal element of such high caliber.”
(I won’t belabor the point, but I hope you’re hearing Queen Elizabeth and Julie Andrews, with just a little Winston Churchill thrown in.)
“However,” I continued, the rule of Her Majesty’s Secret Service is to never identify another agent.”
“You’re doing a job for Her Majesty’s Secret Service?” Billy inquired.
“Not this time,” I answered. “This is personal. It’s a seamy private matter involving financial as well as sexual indignities.”
Billy nodded knowingly. “He dissed you.”
“Dissed you is American,” Elton Jr. translated, “for showing you some real bad disrespect.”
“Perhaps,” I stiffly replied, “you could put it like that.”
“He dissed you,” Billy said, “so you want us to kill him?”
“Five thousand dollars for each of you. Half in advance. Half upon completion.”
“I like it,” said Elton Jr.
“Hold it,” said Billy.
He drew Elton Jr. aside for a sotto voce conversation which, because of my finely honed eavesdropping skills, I could hear while appearing tweedily unconcerned.
“Something funny here,” Billy told Elton Jr.
“What’s so funny?” Elton Jr. inquired.
“Me or you I can understand—we get dissed, we smoke the mother. But a la-di-da English broad like that, she gets dissed, she cries in her crumpets. Am I right?”
“Used to be right,” Elton Jr. replied. “But you’re not reading the papers. All the morals in England, they have declined. The Queen’s son Charles—the heir—he’s fooled around. Her horsy daughter Anne—she’s fooled around. And both her daughters-in-law—that Princess Di and that Fergie of York—they’ve fooled around.”
“Fooled around?’
“Yeah, fooled around. You’re not supposed to say fuck when it’s the royal family. Anyway,” Elton Jr. continued, “if that could happen right up there in the palace, this English broad and the common people gonna be doing all kinds of crazy shit.”
It was clear from Billy’s “uh-huh, uh-huh” that this lecture on the demise of British morality had been persuasive. When they rejoined me, both were prepared to go over the details of my murder plan. Everything could be settled, I said, except for deciding the night of the murder itself. This item of information would depend, I explained to Billy and Elton Jr., on the victim-to-be’s response to a decoy dinner invitation from my associate.
“Who is this here associate?” asked Billy.
“A woman who has already made herself known to the v-t-b,” I replied. “Her code name is Elizabeth Fisher-Todd.”
We went ever the plan.
1. Elizabeth Fisher-Todd makes a dinner date with the v-t-b and arranges for him to pick her up downtown.
2. She pretends she forgot something urgent at her (fake) apartment building, to which they drive so she can pick it up.
3. She tells him to wait in the parking lot of her (fake) apartment building, and saying, “I’ll just be a minute,” she disappears.
4. Billy and Elton Jr. join the in his car and drive him to a location of their choice. There, in a manner they solemnly swear will be both swift and painless, they murder him.
“As soon as Elizabeth Fisher-Todd makes the dinner date,” I said to my accomplices, “I’ll ring you chaps with all the final details. You’ll find the second half of your payment beneath the passenger seat of the v-t-b’s car. The first half’—I opened my purse—“will be paid right now.”
High fives were exchanged, by which I mean I gave each gentleman twenty-five hundred dollars. After which I took the Metro back to Cleveland Park, climbed up the hill, and telephoned Joseph Monti.
• • •
In the honey-toned drawl of Elizabeth Fisher-Todd, I invited Mr. Monti to join me for dinner. Since Jake would be off at a conference from Saturday until late Sunday and tied up with meetings on Monday and Tuesday nights, I could offer my prey a choice of four different evenings. To guarantee his acceptance I made it lubriciously clear that the dinner I was proposing would be but the appetizer of long and very satisfying, feast. I knew that I was making him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
He refused.
“You’re a beautiful woman,” he told me, “and I won’t deny that I’m tempted. But I have to say no. I am a married man.”
Since when did that ever stop you? I wanted to ask, but Instead I drawled mildly, “Why, honey, I’m quite perplexed. I thought you told me you were a separated man.”
Mr. Monti astonished me by conceding that although this was the case, he was hoping it wouldn’t be the case too long. He said he missed his family; most particularly his wife, to whom, he further conceded, he had done wrong. He said he was mending his ways and that forsaking women like me was number one on the list of the ways he was mending. And when, in desperation, I urged, “How about one final fling before you tread to the paths of righteousness?’ I was—I could hardly believe this!—given a lecture on the sanctity of marriage. A sanctimonious lecture from the very same brutal beast who had violated my body and who intended to kill my boy in exactly one week!
“So tell me,” I quickly regrouped, “will you and your family be getting together for Thanksgiving?”
“No,” Mr. Monti replied. “My wife isn’t ready for family occasions yet, she says.” He sighed. “They’ll all be eating turkey together. And I’ll be eating turkey all alone.”
Without really thinking it through, I jumped in with, “Why eat turkey alone? I’m invited to the home of”—I named a major figure in government—“and you’re more than welcome to come with me, I’m sure. Strictly,” I hastily added, “as a friend.”
Mr. Monti pondered my new and safely nonsexual offer. “It depends on what time,” he finally replied. “There’s something important I have to do—something I have to do personally—in the evening.”
And I know what it is, you murdering monster, I said to myself, Aloud I said, improvising frantically, “Well, they”—the So-and-So’s—“will be serving their meal mid-afternoon. It should work out jes fahn.”
But how could it work out jes fahn when fifteen people were dining at my house on Thanksgiving? How could I be with them if I had to be in a car with Mr. Monti too? Well, I couldn’t be in that car, so there was only one thing to do and—resourceful type that I am—I promptly did it. I changed the plan.
“Our hosts,” I told Mr. Monti, “will send a limo to pick us up. And I guess”—I pretended to calculate—“they should probably stop to fetch you before they fetch me. So let’s see.” I pretended once again to calculate. “You should look for their limo and drivers around one o’clock.”
“Their limo and drivers?” asked shrewd Mr. Monti.
“That is right,” I drawled. “Their regular driver and their driver-in-training. All of the better people”—I spoke in my surely-you-know-this voice—“have a spare.”
• • •
Billy and Elton Jr., when I chatted with them on the phone, did not love Plan B.
“We’ll have to steal a limo,” said Elton Jr.
“How will we get our final five grand?” asked Billy.
“I’ve got my own Thanksgiving dinner to go to” said Elton Jr.
I promised them that it all would work out—except I was speaking British, not Southern—jes fahn.
• • •
On Friday morning I unexpectedly ran into Josephine at Elizabeth Arden’s, where my very own Lawrence had slicked back her rich red Botticelli curls into a sleek, straight, somewhat . . . masculine hairstyle. Her clothes—she dressed as I disrobed—worked well with her new do: a gray pinstriped pants suit, a buttoned-down shirt, a pale silk paisley tie, and a soft slouchy hat. “You’re looking very . . .” I paused for a moment and then came up with the obvious word—“very handsome.”.
“Thank you,” Jo said solemnly. “I appreciate the adjective. I’ve been getting in touch with the masculine part of my psyche.”
“How interesting,” I murmured, as I hung up my blouse and wrapped a green robe around me. “And how does it compare”—I slipped my feet into paper slippers for my pedicure—“with your feminine part?”
Whoosh—it was as if I had pulled out the cork in a bottle of champagne. Jo was burbling, bubbling, effervescing. “Stronger. Braver. More independent. Less eager to please, to compromise, to sell out, to—” She stopped, ducked her head in embarrassment, and then continued at a calmer pace. “We need to become aware of the full spectrum of our sexual identity before we can make an informed sexual choice.”
Elisa, ready to wash my hair, peeked into the dressing room. “One sec,” I told her, hating to break away. Surely, I thought, before we part I could come up with something to say that would help Wally’s cause.
I could. And indeed I did. I sometimes astonish myself.
“I think it’s great you feel stronger, braver, more independent, and all that good stuff,” I told Jo. “But why do you call these masculine characteristics? Isn’t that sexual stereotyping?” Josephine looked abashed. “I mean, why can’t we call these feminine characteristics. Feminine characteristics that any good, decent man would embrace in the woman he loved.”
Jo was chewing her lower lip, chewing on what I said. She straightened her shoulders and tightened the knot on her tie. “I see what you’re saying,” she told me as she buttoned up her coat. “I’ll discuss it next week with my friend Vanessa Pincus.”
• • •
Who has a dinner for twelve six days before she’s serving turkey to fifteen? What can I tell you? I am an overachiever. My Friday night fete was a smash and the very next day I was setting the table for next Thursday, this time with place cards to artfully mesh my more disparate-than-usual Thanksgiving guests, which included Rose and her daughter Miranda, who planned to fly in from L.A. and who’d already let me know that she wished to be seated as far away from her mother as possible.
It was going to be a very intense Thanksgiving. Nevertheless, I was feeling completely relaxed.
My mellowness could be attributed to two different but deeply mellow-inducing conditions: The fact that I was saving the life of my son. And the remarkable improvement in my marriage.
For on Carolyn’s recommendation I had tried to be more forgiving toward my husband, whose response was to be more appreciative of me, which made me even more forgiving and him even more appreciative, and so forth. You could call it, as I did in one of my wittier newspaper columns, AN UNVICIOUS CYCLE. I found my unvicious cycle powerfully soothing to the soul.
But nothing could be more soothing than the certainty that Wally was safe from harm, that—having enlisted the aid of two professionals—I had ensured Mr. Monti’s death. This time there’d be no slip-ups. This time his fate was sealed. I had beaten the beast at his homicidal game. There’s nothing in the world, I thought, reveling in my monumental triumph, that can stop a can-do woman who is propelled by the primitive passions of mother love.
I had won. Yes, won! I had rescued my son. Joseph Augustus Monti was a dead man. My victory had swept away my tensions and anxieties. My victory had left me sweetly serene.
• • •
On Sunday the telephone rang and someone said, “Gobble, gobble, gobble,” and hung up. Unpleasant though this was, I remained serene.
On Monday Jo told Wally that she was going to have a drink with Vanessa Pincus. Unhappy though he was, I remained serene.
On Tuesday Jeff, who’d been trying to sell his Anacostia buildings at what was a truly desperate cutrate price, dropped the price of his buildings even further. Insolvent though he was, I remained serene.
On Wednesday, at lunchtime, Rose arrived. With Hubert.
Hubert announced his doggy delight at being back in D.C. by bounding into the dining room and seizing one end of my tablecloth in his teeth, the tablecloth on which the silver and dishes and glasses and napkins were already placed, along with the candlesticks and the three sets of salt and pepper shakers, plus the centerpiece of Indian corn and gourds.
“Don’t yank!” I pleaded with Hubert as I rushed into the room to avert disaster.
Hubert yanked. I remained serene.
• • •
On Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, sweet Wally was planning to rise before dawn to drive to Dulles, where Miranda, who had taken the 10 P.M. plane, also known as the Red Eye, from Los Angeles, was due to arrive at 5:42 A.M. Well before dawn, however, Wally already was quite otherwise engaged, having received a phone call from Dwayne’s mother.
“You’ve got to come over here right away. He’s acting awfully crazy. He’s acting awfully crazy, and it’s my fault. If only I’d let him keep that snake when he was eight years old, and I took his pacifier away way too early, and I should have—”
Wally interrupted. “Look, I need to hang up and get going. Meanwhile, you should try to make him talk. Talk with him about anything—positive stuff if you can—but just try to keep him talking. I’ll be there soon.”
I’d picked up the extension on the first ring—Jake never stirred—and listened, along with Wally, to the news. Now I went up to his room and said, “I think I ought to come with you. I’ll keep her calm while you are dealing with Dwayne.”
Wally said, “No, I don’t think so,” thought again, and changed his mind. “Yes, okay. She knows you. She trusts you. Come. But, Mom—”
“I know, I know,” I said. “This time, no advice.”
Five minutes later—Wally preoccupied, I planning to give Dwayne’s mom just a little advice—we were on our way.
Dwayne’s mother, her eyes red and swollen, greeted us in one of Victoria’s Secrets, She pointed to Dwayne’s bedroom where, she explained, her son had triple-bolted the door. While Wally tried to gain entry, I gently led her to the couch and whispered comforting words into her ear, to which she replied with a torrent of lacerating self reproach that never stopped until Dwayne finally said to Wally, through the door, “Yeah, what do you want?”
Wally said, “Let me in. Whatever it is, we’ll talk about it. We’ll work it out.”
“It can’t work out,” Dwayne said. “It’s useless. Hopeless.”
“I know it feels hopeless,” said Wally, “but I promise we’ll find a way.”
“No way. No way out,” said Dwayne. “I’m doing it.”
“What are you going to do?” Wally asked.
“Kill myself,” said Dwayne. “I’m going to jump out the window. I’m jumping right now.”
And though we heard the window thrown open, and Dwayne climbing up on the sill, and the thud of his body as it hit the ground, none of us—as we raced outside to despairing Dwayne’s prostrate form—felt terribly panicked. The apartment, you see, was located in the basement.
• • •
It was only after I looked at Dwayne, who’d suffered nothing more than a chipped front tooth, that terror started surging through my veins.
Not because poor Dwayne had jumped out the window.
But because he’d jumped out the window wearing a turkey costume.