‘I think there’s one thing I should probably make clear,’ says Paul Casey, waves of anxiety emanating from him like heat haze on a city street. As soon as Claire set eyes on him, in the tan polyester suit with the pens and propelling pencil set in the top pocket and the thick-soled shoes and the rayon tie, she thought there was probably going to be something he would want to make clear all right. That he had worn a cheap suit for a bet, say, because he got such good odds he would be able to front up for lunch. But the longer she looked at him, the more she realized that the suit was right; it was she who had been wrong. Where last week she had seen the sunken cheeks and dark haunted gaze she remembered from twenty years ago, today, in the crush of the Twin Anchors, she sees dry, pasty skin and tired, watery eyes, and that mouth she had thought delicate, but had come to know as weak by the end of their relationship first time round. What had she been thinking? Had last week been spent entirely in the dark? Counting the number of bars and restaurants, parties and clubs, the answer was probably yes. And the hotel room, Claire – don’t forget that, she was going to say, but that’s the problem, isn’t it, or one of them: she can’t remember exactly what happened in the hotel room.
‘Couple of things, in fact,’ Paul says, and he does his half-laugh, the one which is supposed to be ironic, all isn’t-life-strange, but simply comes across as nervous. ‘When I said I was divorced …’
Claire, who has been in a hurry to get to her stuff, is almost relieved by the diversion, the simple human relief of knowing that someone is a greater idiot than she is.
‘When you said you were divorced, what? You forgot that you weren’t?’
‘Kind of. Thing of it is—’
Claire can contain herself no longer. ‘Paul, what are you wearing?’
Blotches of red appear on Paul Casey’s cheeks and he looks down into his Diet Coke.
‘I’m wearing … well, my dad likes to keep things traditional, and he insists everyone wear a collar and tie, all the guys on the floor included. And he has his preferences. “No one wants to buy nails from some dude in a fancy East Coast sissy suit,” is how he puts it.’
‘Your dad.’
‘Sixty-seven and no sign of lying down.’
‘Your dad … runs a hardware store.’
‘That’s right. On West Montana, remember. You can see the Biograph Theater from—’
‘Your dad runs a hardware store.’
‘Well. I’m glad we’ve got that straight.’
‘You’re working for your father?’
‘I’m not ashamed of it.’
‘I never said you should be.’
‘Your tone said just that.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean … I just … I’m surprised, I guess I thought you were still …’
‘Flying the flag.’
‘But last week … I mean, we hung out with all the old crowd, a lot of them are still acting, or directing, they’re on the scene one way or another, I thought …’
‘I see them very seldom, Claire. I … the whole scene is pretty insular, obsessed with itself. That’s not a criticism, it has to be like that, it’s a … a parallel world, its own private eco-system: The Theater! I don’t really—’
‘Weren’t you running that acting school on Schiller?’
‘For a while. But eventually, it began to feel like a scam, you know, taking money from deluded people without enough talent or determination to make it in the business. It felt like we were exploiting their haplessness. So I quit. School’s still going, I might add, and every so often, someone goes on from there to have a career, or at least, to get a part somewhere. So maybe I overreacted. Maybe I just wanted to be done with the theater once and for all. I was gonna say I don’t really have what it takes, but I’m not gonna run myself down like that. Truth is, I didn’t want to be involved, except the way we were. You know, doing it for real. We gave it a shot, and then we—’
‘Gave up. I gave up. But still, I teach. Sometimes, I feel like I’m still involved, still doing it. More often it’s like I’m taunting myself every day with my own failure.’
Claire holds Paul Casey’s gaze now, wanting him to say something, although she doesn’t know exactly what. To tell her she didn’t fail, and make her believe it? To tell her he wants them to be together, so she can kindly and gently reject him? There’s nothing he can say, nothing she wants him to say, really. She looks away. This is how it is, twenty years on: disappointment and regret, and the worst thing is, they don’t even hurt that bad.
Their lunches arrive. They’ve both ordered ribs, because that’s what you do in Twin Anchors. The restaurant is not usually open for lunch on weekdays, but they’ve made an exception because it’s Halloween, and judging by the fact that the place is still jumping at three-fifteen, it looks like they made the right call. The nautical theme of the decor is offset by Halloween lanterns and witches on broomsticks, giving the room an eerie, Ship-of-Fools aspect. Voyage of the Damned. Claire looks toward the street, notes the yellow flare of autumn light outside, the last blaze before nightfall. I should be getting the girls ready for Trick or Treat, she thinks. I so should not be here.
‘I’m happy enough not to be involved any more,’ Paul says. ‘At least, I think I am. Most of the time.’
‘I don’t understand … why didn’t I find this out last week? What were we talking about?’ Claire says.
‘Well … about old times. And about, of course, The Theater. How good is Tracy Letts, really, or Tony Kushner, or Martin McDonagh. Who the new voices are, is Broadway fucked, what about London, what about Dublin. You were pretty high most of the time.’
‘I was out of my mind.’
‘Yeah, but not, like, drunk, or not necessarily. More like, like someone who’d just got out of jail, total adrenaline surge. And you were kind of seeing and hearing what you wanted to see and hear.’
‘So what, it was all my fault?’
‘No. That’s why I said—’
‘Because I have this card here, Paul, this card you put in my bag, with some pretty heavy stuff written on it.’
‘Which is why I said, I needed to … hey, I was pretty high myself. Seeing you … all our yesterdays. I took so much time off work I nearly got fired. By my own dad. Had to explain to him, you were in town, first time in fifteen years. He always had a soft spot for you.’
‘Does he think you’re divorced as well?’
‘That’s funny.’
‘But seriously. Do you remember how divorced you are? A little? A lot?’
Paul Casey frowns, and purses his lips until they disappear. He looks around the room, catches the bartender’s eye, fits his hands one above the other to the height of a pint glass.
‘Honkers Pale,’ he calls, and turns back to Claire.
‘I’m separated. Have been separated. But we’re trying to get it back on track. Of course, bouncing round the Old Town with your ex-girlfriend probably doesn’t help on that score.’
‘Probably not. Neither does writing that I was the love of your life on a card, or that no one has ever made you feel the way I did,’ Claire says, the words coming out shriller and more recriminatory than she intends.
‘Well. It’s the truth. But then again, you didn’t strike me yourself as a brochure for the joys of married life last week. “Let’s not talk about Danny.” If you said that once, you said that, uh, more than once. Thank you.’
A pint of pale ale has arrived in front of Paul Casey, and he takes a deep draft of it. The waiter checks on Claire and her empty greyhound glass, but she shakes her head. Jesus, what is she doing here? She wants to retort to Paul’s crack, but she has no right to the moral high ground.
‘Look, I wrote what I wrote,’ Paul says. ‘It was kind of a wild night. I … well, I didn’t know what to make of it. But I certainly didn’t expect you to be back here within the – is it even a day? I mean, I only dropped you at O’Hare—’
‘Oh. Do you think that’s why I’m here?’
‘Well. If you’re not, that’s fine. But yes, I kind of assumed, the things you had been saying … that you’d left Danny. And here you are. And so …’
‘And so you thought you’d better make a few things clear.’
Claire puts her head in her hands. Clarity, isn’t that what they call it? A moment of clarity? She’s having one now, big time. It’s as if the hangover from her trip, plus the shock of what happened when she got back, formed an impenetrable, blinding cloud, and she’s finally emerged from it, and can breathe, and, more to the point, see.
‘What was I saying? What did we do? Did we …?’
‘No. No, we didn’t. All right?’
‘Because I remember the Tuesday, there was just some fooling around in the room, and then you left. But the Saturday, after shopping at Macy’s …’
‘There were drugs involved on Saturday. There was coke. And E.’
‘I can remember …’ Claire starts, and stops abruptly, her voice too loud, her face flushing now. She would very much like to hide at the bottom of that second drink, but she’s done enough of that. She needs to talk herself down and start again.
‘I can remember rolling around on the bed,’ she says carefully. ‘With you. Wearing not very much.’
Claire has a flash of her reflection in the hotel bedroom mirror. Too vain to take her underwear off, too anxious about what age and gravity had wrought. Maybe too reluctant to go the whole way? Paul Casey raises his eyebrows and nods.
‘What was it? Did we just not want to?’ Claire says, more or less knowing the truth by now but wanting Paul to spell it out.
‘I wanted to. Not sure if you were quite so keen. But … well, as I said, there were drugs involved, and a lot of booze, and when it came to it, you were maybe not quite one hundred percent consenting. And I’m forty-two years old and it simply wasn’t going to happen. We both passed out. And then the next morning, when it might have been actually, physically, feasible, the moment, such as it was, had passed. We both just seemed to know. Or at least, you did.’
‘So … I have all the guilt, without even the sweet memory of the sin,’ Claire says.
‘I don’t know. I think at the last fence, you pulled up. Mostly, you were full of talk, how you were going to change your life, shake it up, how you were tired of being invisible, how Danny and you weren’t equal partners and that was your fault but you were going to change, you weren’t going to be frightened or, yes, like Masha in The Seagull, you weren’t going to be in mourning for your own life any more.’
Claire shuts her eyes tight and makes an anguished, high-pitched sound, as if she has scalded herself. Masha in The Seagull, what did she think she was, fifteen?
‘Coke talk,’ she whispers.
‘Maybe. Not without a core of something real, though. I think the coke talk was where you and me were going to get back together and reform the theater company and, I don’t know, show everyone a thing or two.’
‘I’m sorry, Paul. I’m a fucking liability. I—’
‘Hey. Why do you think I’m separated? Because I woke up one morning and decided I was going to die if I didn’t have sex with one of my wife’s friends, not sure I minded which, just so long as it was the one who would tell her, and they all would have. Why? For the sex? Or just to make something happen? Something happened all right: I had to move back in with my mom and dad and I only see my kids at the weekend.’
‘You have kids?’
‘I did lie about that. Because … I thought you’d be more likely to sleep with me if I didn’t have kids. Less complicated. More fantasy. God, I miss them.’
I miss mine too, Claire thinks, jitters of panic rippling through her. In fact, I need to get back to them as soon as possible. Whatever Danny has done, however we’re going to get out of this, or if we can’t, the best thing – the only thing – for me is to be with the girls. If I leave now, we’ll be in time for Trick or Treat.
‘I need to go, Paul,’ Claire says, gathering her purse, finding some money for the check.
‘Wait a second. If you’re not, you know, Nora leaving the doll’s house, what are you doing here? What’s up?’
Claire breathes deep and stays sitting. Shouldn’t take long. But this is after all why she came.
‘Do you remember that night, I think it was during the run of Aunt Dan and Lemon, when I went off with that guy …’
‘One of Danny’s old school friends. It was during the run of Our Country’s Good. Sure I remember. We all nearly ended up in jail.’
‘Gene Peterson. He turned up in my backyard this morning, stabbed to death.’
‘Get the fuck out of here.’
Claire takes Paul through what’s happened in the last twenty-four hours, insofar as she understands it. When she’s finished, he is staring at her, half astonished, half warily amused, as if she’s suddenly going to mock him for believing such an unlikely tale.
‘And you think, what, this has something to do with that night?’
‘I don’t know. That maybe Danny found out, and killed him?’
‘Because you slept with a guy while you were broken up with him? Why hasn’t he killed me too?’
‘Maybe if you crashed one of his barbecues, he would.’
‘Do you really believe Danny killed anyone?’
‘No. I don’t think so. I don’t know any more. Jesus, if he can keep the foreclosure on a mortgage I didn’t even know we had secret from me, fuck knows what else he’s capable of.’
Hot tears sting Claire’s eyes and she blinks and breathes deep to keep the panic at bay. ‘I need to be with the girls, Paul. I need to protect them.’
‘But not from Danny.’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Well then. If the knife is his knife, he’s being set up. Someone is fucking with him. And with you, if burying and then digging up the body is anything to go by.’
‘And the only people I could think of who might be capable of that were those guys we met that night, remember?’
‘The night you took that guy back to your place, and then called me to come and get you because he was freaking you out? I remember that night all right.’
‘Not my finest hour.’
‘That was Gene Peterson?’
‘Yes. That was the guy; he turned up at the barbecue, and now he’s been stabbed to death, the cops think with Danny’s chef knife. Which Danny had when he went down to see him at the gate.’
‘OK. So what I remember is, you ringing, waking me up, “Oh, Paul, I’m so scared,” and my having to get dressed and come over and rescue you, and this guy, who’s understandably pissed about the situation, and then a whole pantomime about having forgotten this party—’
‘That warehouse party in Wicker Park.’
‘And we were split up at this time, one of many splits, always instigated by you—’
‘I was not a good girlfriend, I concede that.’
‘You were a total bitch, and what’s worse, I let you away with it. As in this night, where we go to the party, it was that tech guy we hired the lighting rig from who was throwing it, the fat guy with the ponytail and the black T-shirt?’
‘All the tech guys were fat, dressed in black and wore ponytails.’
‘And your friend Gene was being a total dick. What was the deal with him anyway? Having come to your rescue you refused to explain any more about it, as if somehow your fucking the guy was my fault.’
‘I didn’t fuck him. I might have, but he … had a dose of your trouble. He couldn’t get it together.’
‘Him as well. Maybe it’s not us, it’s you.’
‘I’m just too much woman for you to handle.’
‘Or something. Anyway, what was up with him? Did he hit you?’
‘No, he was scary, but not that way. He was obsessed with Danny. He couldn’t stop talking about him … we’d be, like, fooling around, and then he’d go, “Did Danny like it like that?” Or, “Is that the way Danny did it?” Which started out funny, and then got pretty creepy. And he kept talking about this family in Madison that got burnt in a fire when they were kids, the Burnabys or the Bradfields or something, how it was a mystery and how nobody knew what really happened except him and Danny and the other guys.’
‘What was that all about?’
‘No idea. And then when we got to the warehouse, he wouldn’t leave us alone.’
‘He wouldn’t leave me alone; you escaped to the toilets.’
‘Or, the recreational drug use cubicles. Hey, I came back. And Peterson was really creepy, he was … he started getting kind of angry …’
‘Was he drunk?’ Paul asks.
‘I don’t know. I know I wasn’t. I had some ecstasy as well, but I was too freaked out to take it, I wanted to keep a clear head. I was just trying to dance and ignore the guy. And then he started in on Danny again … I don’t really remember what he said, more that it was just … very bitter, you know? That Danny was very lucky, everything he ever wanted had been served up to him on a plate, but people would think again if they knew the truth about him. And you know, it wasn’t even what he said, more the way he said it, this resentful, bitter tone, this rage.’
‘And the tech guy—’
‘Anthony Vasquez.’
‘Anthony, that was him, he came to the rescue.’
‘Because I asked him to, I went up to the decks and I yelled in his ear and he said, “Get out on the street and I can arrange that you lose the guy. Walk down the alley toward Division Street.” And he got on the radio, he had a two-way radio. So we left, Peterson still tagging along, and we’re going down the alley—’
‘Which was not a great idea anyway: Bucktown was beginning to gentrify back then but Wicker Park was still a fucking zoo.’
‘And Anthony’s guys appear, these three no-neck Latino bodybuilders, and they go, “Which is the guy?”’
‘I remember that. We both went, “Him!”’
‘And they started to kick the shit out of him. We ran out on to the street and there’s a cop car, cruising, and you flagged it down—’
‘With you hissing at me not to.’
‘I was afraid we’d get arrested for setting the whole thing up.’
‘I was afraid they were gonna kill the fucking guy – they were seriously heavy hombres, jailhouse tats, gang bandanas, the whole bit – and we were going to end up in jail having commissioned a murder ’cause some guy was really annoying?’
‘I don’t think they say “commission” a murder.’
‘Well, whatever they say. How the fuck would I know what they say?’
‘Anyway, Peterson didn’t die. His attackers took off. And we got back together again. That night.’
‘All drama, all the time. Where are you going with this – that these guys in the alley have been harboring it all these years, this resentment that you sent the cops after them, and finally they snapped and decided to kill your dog in Madison? And happily for them, the night they choose, why, Gene Peterson, the guy they only half beat up in Wicker Park all those years ago, is on the scene, so they get the chance to finish the job?’
‘You’re making fun of me.’
‘I don’t need to. You’re doing fine without my help. Why don’t you suggest it to the cops? You could be like one of those old ladies who used to ring Kojak and tell him if he peels an orange and throws the pieces of skin in the air, they’ll land and spell out the murderer’s name.’
‘They came around the theater looking for me, you know.’
‘They did not.’
‘The cops caught one of them – he had an unlicensed weapon, he got six months or something. The other two made Anthony Vasquez tell them who I was. They beat him up.’
‘And what happened, did they catch up to you?’
‘One night on my way to the theater. I said I didn’t set the cops on them. They wanted money, and I told them what we earned in the theater, and they looked at me like I was a moron, and I privately agreed with them. There was a moment when I thought they were going to try and get paid in kind, but then they just shrugged it off and left. Anthony Vasquez told me I was very lucky, and that I should lie low when their buddy got out. And that was that.’
Paul Casey shakes his head.
‘I know,’ Claire says. ‘It’s just, that’s all I can think of. That’s the sum total of my experience with bad guys. But it’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’
‘It’s more likely Gene Peterson came down to kill your dog himself. Seeing as how he disliked Danny anyway, and probably contracted a strong dislike of you after that evening, I know I would have in his shoes.’
And Claire realizes that yes, of course, this is true, and that Danny had been armed with many good reasons for killing Gene Peterson, she had seen him herself, for God’s sake, advancing on him armed with the knife that was used in the killing. Her hope that somehow it was her fault was a kind of magical thinking, a prayer that her husband was not a murderer. She still prays, but she’s not sure how alive her hope is.
‘You’ve got to go,’ Paul says.
‘I feel embarrassed.’
‘Don’t be. That’s what the cops do all the time, don’t they, check out leads?’
‘Not about that. About … last week. You must have thought I was nuts. Woman on the verge, type of thing.’
‘Well. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been warned.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean … I had fair warning of how you were feeling, or how you thought you felt.’
‘Paul, I didn’t even know you were going to be in the Old Town Ale House until you showed up last Tuesday.’
‘Maybe not. But the messages you sent me were pretty to the point.’
‘What messages?’
‘On Facebook.’
‘I didn’t send you messages on Facebook. I don’t do Facebook.’
‘Well, someone does, with your name, and a whole bunch of shots of you, and links to your website.’
‘And this person, pretending to be me, sent you messages saying what?’
‘Saying … that you missed me, and wondered how I was, and if I was lonely, and … and then they kind of got riper.’
‘Riper?’
‘Yeah. Pretty much … that if I wanted to sleep with you, you’d be into it, no questions asked, no strings attached.’
‘That subtle?’
‘Actually, less subtle than that. Totally not suitable for work.’
‘On Facebook?’
‘Yeah.’
And Claire, who has never even visited her Facebook page, nonetheless must concede that one exists, set up for her by her friend Dee. Could someone have hacked into it? Claire wouldn’t know how you did that. But Dee would.