A Circle of Wives (13 page)

Gerald and Joyce lived one floor down. They were about the same age as John, and, instead of having one child in nursery school, one in diapers, and one in the womb, they had two who were in the campus nursery school across the street. I used to walk with Gerald and our kids over there in the morning. Joyce was also a resident, in OBGYN, and between the kids and her job had a pretty grueling time of it. Gerald wasn’t one to do much of the dirty work.I wasn’t working and I was exhausted all the time. God knows how Joyce did it on a resident’s schedule.

I disliked early childhood parenting. My character wasn’t suited for it. I overheard a couple of other mothers talking about me once.
She has no sense of whimsy, no sense of play,
said one.
And no sense of humor,
said the other. I wasn’t hurt. What they said was the truth.

I wasn’t well suited for pregnancy, either. Mine were difficult—not healthwise, but I was nauseated throughout all three trimesters for all three children. People complimented me on not gaining much weight, that’s the way people thought then. But it was simply that I couldn’t keep anything down. And even in the privacy of my own bathroom, I hated the indignity of retching into the toilet, the foul taste in my mouth afterward. I’d brush my teeth vigorously and then scrub the toilet bowl to erase any hint of what I considered my weakness. John honestly didn’t notice. He’d pat my tummy affectionately the way men will, not seeing how much I despised that.

But Gerald. We were actually thrown together quite a bit. I was president of our apartment association, and he was on the management committee. He was poised to grow into one of those doctors who sit on the boards of the symphony and the ballet—civic-minded, and, once comfortable financially, looking to expand and enrich his mind. As it was, you’d hear classical music playing whenever you went over to Joyce and Gerald’s apartment. He subscribed to some sort of record collection series,
the world’s greatest music
, and was listening seriously to each track as he read the notes. Even I recognized the music, it had the familiar tunes from the Boston Pops concerts my parents used to love. But Gerald thought it was High Art.

He wasn’t a handsome man, Gerald. Not like John. He didn’t command a room, either. If anything, he was shy, and hung back from social encounters. I would have dismissed him as soft if it wasn’t for a streak of cruelty in him. A less-than-endearing habit he had was to catch flies—he was amazingly dexterous and swift with his reflexes—and pull the wings off, almost absentmindedly. He mostly repressed this streak, though, and refused to let it color any of his words or actions. This was, in my opinion, highly commendable. Unlike someone with a natural wellspring of kindness like John, Gerald had to work at it. He was also studying to be a surgeon, but with a cardiovascular specialization, and, he confided in me once when we were both a little tipsy at a party, that the biggest thrill of his life was cutting through the breastbone, opening the rib cage, and seeing a beating heart underneath, knowing he could stop it if he wished. “I make a point of studying my patients’ records, meeting with them more frequently than other surgeons, not because I’m more caring, but because I need that to cushion me from my instincts. I’m tempted, every time, to end that life, just because I can,” he told me that night. He was a much more admirable man than my husband.

The night I’m remembering lately, I was babysitting Joyce and Gerald’s children while they went out to dinner. They were loud children, even for three and four years old. I disliked their clamoring for story after story, but they knew they had the upper hand with their vocal chords, and I ended up reading until they finally went to sleep. I was quite pregnant by then, at least seven months along, and felt huge and clumsy as I walked around Joyce and Gerald’s tiny apartment, too restless to settle down and read or watch television, just willing them to come home so I could go to my own bed. When they arrived, Joyce was uncharacteristically drunk—usually she only drank soda water—and Gerald steered her straight to the bedroom. I wanted to leave, but felt it would have been rude to just disappear. As he left the room, Gerald said to me, “Stay for a moment, Deborah.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“I want a couple moments alone with you,” he said. “Is that all right?”

But when we sat there he didn’t seem to have much to say. Suddenly he reached over and took my hand in his. He didn’t appear to have been drinking, and Joyce was always a stickler about having a designated driver. “Are you flirting?” I asked him as a joke, but he didn’t smile. “You are!” I said, and laughed, pointing to my belly. He still didn’t smile. But I saw that calculating look that I’d glimpse when he was operating on flies, and he reached out with his free hand, pulled my face to his and kissed me. It was a hard kiss. Just a hint of tongue and enormously erotic. I was astounded. I had genuinely thought passion was behind me.

Then Cecilia stumbled out of the bedroom and whatever might have happened stopped cold.

Whether or not things would have progressed further turned moot a week later. Gerald was in a head-on collision on University Avenue. Both he and Cecilia were killed outright. We heard the sirens that night, heard them keep coming, so many, so near to us, we knew it had to be bad. We listened to the shrieking and the silence that followed. John crossed himself, something he’s never been able to shake from his youth, and said “God help them.” We found out later it was Gerald and Cecilia, their car had gone over the yellow line and straight into a delivery van. They didn’t have a chance. The kids got spirited off by one of their grandparents, there was a quiet memorial service at the medical school, and that was that. But I often wonder what might have happened, had Cecilia not disturbed us, or had death not taken them.

Death. Always interrupting things.

21
Samantha

ALIBIS. JUST LIKE IN THE
cop shows, almost everyone has one. There’s MJ’s—she was indeed accounted for at both Trader Joe’s and Walgreens.
That odd-looking chick with the hat
, was how one Walgreens employee remembered her, and she had in fact knocked down a cereal display at Trader Joe’s, shortly after 7
PM
. Even if she had responded to John Taylor’s text at 6:47, she would hardly have been able to get to Palo Alto, much less there and back by the time one hundred boxes of Honey Nut O’s got knocked over.

Deborah was at a meeting of the Women’s Auxiliary for the children’s hospital, in Menlo Park. She had arrived at the house of the vice chair promptly at 6:25. “Deborah? She’s always five minutes early,” the vice chair had said.

These stories were backed up and verified by multiple persons who would have no reason to lie.

Helen was the exception. She didn’t have an ironclad alibi for Friday night. She’d gone home sick from work at noon on Friday—a fact verified by her administrative assistant—and stayed home the rest of the evening, she said. She wasn’t seen again until the next morning at 9, when she bought a cappuccino at her local Starbucks. The barista remembered her because she was a regular: showing up promptly at 6:30
AM
on weekdays, and 9
AM
on weekends for the same drink. “She always gives a two-dollar tip,” he told me. Yet between noon on Friday and 9
AM
on Saturday certainly left enough time for Helen to get on the plane for an hour and a half flight to San Francisco, rent a car, and get to the Westin in time to inject John Taylor with potassium chloride. In fact, she’s the most likely candidate to have known about the effects of a potassium overdose, and to have had access to a supply of it. Hell, she could even have driven from LA to San Francisco and back in that time.

I’ll have to make the rounds of the airlines and car rental companies. I’ll enlist Mollie for that. Yet Helen is so small. Could she have caused such bruising? And then her personality: so cool, so level and logical. Would she really be capable of murder? And what would be her motive?

Yet it’s MJ’s name that remains underscored in my notebook. There was something skittish about her in our most recent interview that went beyond what I thought was her typical scattiness. And the brother, this Thomas. I didn’t like the sound of him, not one bit. And there was a weak link in MJ’s alibi: a gap of approximately two hours between her coming home from work and being seen at Trader Joe’s.

So with the possible exception of Deborah, the wives remain in the running. I still have lots of work to do.

22
MJ

YOU CAN’T GROW UP IN
Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and be unappreciative of either beauty or the grotesque. We’re the self-proclaimed Gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains, and have the very special distinction of being home to one of the oldest Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditoriums in the country. I was six years old when it opened in 1970, but long gone by the time of the Great Fire of 1992 that destroyed the mummified cat and Abraham Lincoln’s death mask, and the other wonderful and terrible objects of my childhood.

My brother and I were entranced by that Lincoln death mask. One hot summer day when we were bored, we decided to make our own. We oiled our faces with Crisco, and slathered them with plaster bandages we’d saved up our allowances to get from the Buy-Rite pharmacy on Main. I was thirteen, Thomas was eleven, and we were astounded to see from the masks that without my long blond and his short dark hair, our different clothes, and other superficial distractions, our faces were almost identical. Mine was perhaps constructed on a slightly larger scale, but we shared the same long cheekbones, the same bump in the nose, the same heart-shaped face.

Shortly after that, I lost him to the parish priest. We were close, but I was no match for the pot and pornography that could be found every night at the rectory. I was the one who blew the whistle, after Thomas broke down and confessed what went on there. My mother was furious at me for spreading lies. “My cow died last night, so I don’t need your bull,” is what she said when I told her,. Eventually she grew to believe me, and wrote to the diocese headquarters. Eventually the priest was transferred without punishment. But not before a generation of Gatlinburg boys had been ruined.

Thomas had changed. I never knew whether the priest had gone as far with him as with some of the other boys, but I lost my little brother and an angry stranger took his place. I hung his death mask on my wall, its sweet expression forever banished now from its living owner, but infinitely precious to me, especially as Thomas grew older and got into his various troubles.

What were his troubles? Oh, the usual for Tennessee teenagers of a certain class. By which I mean
lower,
as my family wasn’t exactly high on the social ladder in Gatlinburg. Petty shoplifting. Possession of marijuana, of course, but small amounts, nothing to get him jail time. Thomas came home wired and irrational a couple times, and admitted to me privately that he’d gone out to the country with some friends and bought some meth (easy enough to find around there). Luckily, he didn’t take to it, preferred the gentle dullness of weed to being hopped up to the point of bursting. Then he did some significant vandalism to the church, breaking the large stained-glass windows behind the altar. He and a friend accumulated a wheelbarrow full of large rocks and stood in the woods behind the church and hurled them upwards, until the tall windows were completely shattered. He got caught (go figure), the shards of glass in his clothes that he hadn’t bothered to wash, but by then he was on the list of usual suspects for this kind of thing anyway. It’s a relatively small town, after all. Poor kid. He didn’t have much of a chance.

I watched Thomas throw his life away and knew there was nothing I could do to help while I was on the inside. I was smart, and knew it, and determined to get through school and out of Gatlinburg, but got entangled with a local boy when I’d barely finished my second year at Carson-Newman Junior College over in Jefferson City. Our two children were born when I was twenty and twenty-one, and when I was twenty-two I packed them up while their father was working the afternoon shift at the Odditorium. I turned the car away from my parents’ house and headed straight west. My only goals were to put my feet in the Pacific Ocean, make sure my babies didn’t have the Tennessee twang—and help Thomas escape one day as well. How I ended up in Northern rather than Southern California was the result of a wrong turn onto the I-5 outside Bakersfield. The babies were squalling, it was two in the morning, and I got on the ramp heading north rather than south to LA like I’d intended. Nevertheless, it worked out okay.

San Francisco blew my mind. I remember arriving at Ocean Beach at about four on a Sunday afternoon in June. I didn’t know it then, but it was one of those rare sunny days over on that side of the city, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I stuck my feet in the frigid water for about two seconds, splashed a little on my babies’ faces to make them laugh, and set out to build us a new life. Three years later, after bartending nights at various local joints while subjecting my kids to a series of mediocre babysitters, I finally had both my divorce and my degree in accounting from San Francisco State. People tell me I still have a bit of the Tennessee twang, especially when I get tired or excited. But both my boys talk like the native Californians they almost are.