The Humbling (8 page)

P
EGEEN'S FATHER
hadn't helped things any when he had come to see her in New York on the Saturday following her mother's visit. Asa picked up where Carol had left off in citing the dangers of their liaison, moving from her lover's perilous age to his perilous psychiatric condition. Axler's strategy remained the same, however: tolerate whatever you hear; don't rush to challenge the parents so long as Pegeen doesn't yield.

"Your mother was right—that's a wonderful haircut," she'd reported her father's telling her. "And she was right about your clothes too," he'd said. "Yes? Do you think I look nice?" "You look terrific," he'd said. "Better than I used to?" "Different. Quite different." "Do I look more like the daughter you would have liked to have had?" "You certainly have an air you never had before. Now tell me about Simon." "After the hard time he had at the Kennedy Center," she'd said, "he wound up at a psychiatric hospital. Is that what you want to talk about?" she'd asked. "Yes, it is," he'd said. "We all have serious problems, Dad." "We all have serious problems but we don't all wind up in psychiatric hospitals." "While we're at it," she'd said, "what about the difference in age? Don't you want to ask about that?" "Let me ask you something else: are you starstruck, Pegeen? You know how certain kinds of characters carry around their force field, an encircling electric force field? It comes, in his case, with being a star. Are you starstruck?" She'd laughed. "At the beginning, probably. By this time,
I assure you, he's just himself." "May I ask how committed you are to each other?" he'd said. "We don't really talk about it." "Maybe you ought to talk about it with me then. Are you going to marry him, Pegeen?" "I don't think he's interested in marrying anyone." "Are you?" "Why are you treating me as though I'm twelve?" she'd said. "Because it may be that where men are concerned you are more twelve than forty. Look, Simon Axler's an intriguing actor, and probably to a woman an intriguing man. But he is the age he is, and you are the age you are. He has had the life he's had, with its triumphant ups and its cataclysmic downs, and you have had the life you have had. And because those downs of his worry me greatly, I'm not going to talk about them as glibly as you do. I'm not going to tell you that I'm not going to try to bring any pressure to bear on you. I am going to do just that."

And that he did—unlike the mother, he didn't end the day shopping with his daughter but instead he phoned her at her house every night around dinnertime to continue, in much the same strong vein, the conversation that had begun at lunch in New York. Rarely did father and daughter speak for less than an hour.

In bed, the evening after she'd seen her father in New York, Axler had said to her, "I want you to know, Pegeen, that I'm flabbergasted by all this stuff with your parents. I don't understand the place they are coming to play in our lives. It seems entirely too large and, all things considered, a little absurd. On the other hand, I recognize that at any stage of life there are mysteries about people and their attachments to their parents that can be surprising. This being so, let me make a proposal: if you want me to fly out to Michigan and talk to your father, I'll fly out to Michigan, and I'll sit and listen to every word he wants to say, and when he tells me why he's against this, I won't even argue—I'll side with him. I'll tell him that everything he's concerned about makes perfect sense and that I agree—it is an unlikely arrangement on the face of it, and there are, to be sure, risks involved. But the fact remains that his daughter and I feel as we do about each other. And the fact that he and Carol and I were friends as youngsters back in New York is of no relevance whatsoever. That's the only defense I will make, Pegeen, if you want me to go and see him. It's up to you. I'll do it this week if you want me to. I'll do it tomorrow if that's what you want."

"His seeing me was quite enough," she replied. "There's no need for this to be carried further. Especially as you have made it clear that you think it's already been carried too far."

"I'm not so sure you're right," he said. "Better to take on the raging father—"

"But my father isn't raging, it isn't in his nature to rage, and I don't think there's any need to provoke a scene when there isn't a scene in the offing."

He thought, Oh, there's a scene in the offing all right—the two upstanding squares you have for parents are not through. But he only said to her, "Okay. I simply wanted to make the offer. It's finally up to you."

But was that so? Wasn't it up to him to neutralize them by opposing them rather than by simply leaving things to turn out opportunely on their own? He should, in fact, have accompanied her to New York—he should have insisted on being there and facing Asa down. Despite what Pegeen had said to assure him, he was reluctant to give up the idea that Asa was a father in a rage whom he should confront rather than flee.
Are you starstruck?
Of course that's what he would believe, he who never got the big roles. Yes, thought Axler, that my fame stole
away his only daughter, the fame that Asa himself could never garner.

I
T WAS
in the middle of the next week that he got around to reading the previous Friday's county newspaper and the front-page story about a murder that had taken place in a well-to-do suburban town some twenty-five miles away. A man in his forties, a successful plastic surgeon, had been shot dead by his estranged wife. The wife was Sybil Van Buren.

The two were apparently living apart by then. She had driven to his house across town from hers, and as soon as he opened the door had shot him twice in the chest, killing him instantly. She had dropped the murder weapon on the doorstep, then gone back and sat in her parked car until the police came and took her to the station to be booked. When she had left home that morning, she had already arranged for the babysitter to spend the day with the two children.

Axler phoned Pegeen and told her what had happened.

"Did you think she could have done this?" Pegeen asked.

"Such a helpless person? No. Never. She had the motive—the molestation—but homicide? She asked if I would murder him for her. She said, 'I need someone to kill this evil man.'"

"What a shocking story," Pegeen said.

"This fragile-looking woman built on the frailest, childlike scale. The least menacing person one could encounter."

"They'll never convict her," Pegeen said.

"Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Maybe she'll plead temporary insanity and get off. But what will become of her then? What will become of the child? If the little girl wasn't already doomed because of what the stepfather did, now she's doomed because of what her mother's done. Not to mention their little boy."

"Would you like me to come tonight? You sound shaky."

"No, no," he said. "I'm all right. I've just never known anyone who's killed somebody off the stage."

"I'm going to come over later," Pegeen said.

And when she did, they sat in the living room after dinner and he repeated to her in detail everything he remembered Sybil Van Buren saying to
him at the hospital. He found her letter—the letter that had been mailed to him in care of Jerry's office—and gave it to Pegeen to read.

"The husband claimed to be innocent," Axler explained. "He claimed she was seeing things."

"Was she?"

"I didn't think so. I saw her suffering. I believed her story."

During the day, he had read the article again and again and repeatedly looked at the photograph of Sybil that the paper had published, a studio portrait in which she looked less like a married woman in her thirties, let alone a Clytemnestra, than like a high school cheerleader, someone who as yet had been through nothing in life.

The following day he phoned Information and, easy as that, got the Van Burens' phone number. When he called, a woman answered who identified herself as Sybil's sister. He told her who he was and told her about Sybil's letter. He read it to her over the phone. They agreed she would pass it on to Sybil's lawyer.

"Are you able to see her?" he asked.

"Only with the lawyer. She gets teary about not seeing the children. Otherwise she's unnervingly calm."

"Does she talk about the murder?"

"She says, 'It had to be done.' You'd think it was her fiftieth, not her first. She's in a very strange state. The gravity seems to escape her. It's as though the gravity is all behind her."

"For the moment," he said.

"I've been thinking the same. There's a great crash going to occur. She won't be living behind this placid mask for long. There must be a suicide watch on her cell. I'm frightened of what's coming next."

"Of course. What she did in no way jibes with the woman I knew. Why did she do this after all this time?"

"Because even when John moved out, he continued to deny everything and to tell her that she was delusional, and that put her into a mad frenzy. On the morning that she was going to see him, she told me that by whatever means it took she was going to extract a confession from him. I said, 'Don't see him. It will only drive you over the edge.' And I was right. I was the one who had wanted her to
go to the district attorney and bring charges. I was the one who told her that she should have him put behind bars. But she refused: he wasn't a nobody and the case would wind up in the papers and on TV and Alison would get dragged into a courtroom nightmare to be exposed to yet more horror. Her saying this is why I never dreamed that extracting a confession 'by any means' would involve the use of his hunting rifle—using his hunting rifle might wind up in the papers too, you see. But when she got to John's that Saturday morning she didn't wait for him to let her into the house. She didn't wait to hear him speak a single word. It isn't that they had an argument and it escalated and she shot him. Seeing his face was all it took—right there in the front doorway, she pulled the trigger twice and he was dead. She told me, 'He wanted mayhem, so I gave him mayhem.'"

"Does the little girl know anything?"

"She hasn't been told yet. That's not going to be easy. Nothing about this is going to be easy. The late Dr. Van Buren made sure of that. The suffering that's going to be Alison's is unimaginable to me."

Axler repeated to himself for days afterward,
The
suffering that's going to be Alison's.
It was probably the very thought that had driven Sybil to murder her husband—thereby enlarging Alison's suffering forever.

O
NE NIGHT IN BED
Pegeen said to him, "I've found a girl for you. She's on the Prescott swim team. I swim with her in the afternoon. Lara. How would you like me to bring you Lara?"

She was slowly rising and falling above him and all the lights were out, though the room was dimly lit by the full moon shining through the branches of the tall trees out back of the house.

"Tell me about Lara," he said.

"Oh, you'd like her all right."

"Obviously you do already."

"I watch her in the pool. I watch her in the locker room. A rich kid. A privileged kid. She's never known a minute's hardship. She's perfect. Blond. Crystal blue eyes. Long legs. Strong legs. Perfect breasts."

"How perfect?"

"It makes you awfully hard to hear about Lara," she said.

"The breasts," he said.

"She's nineteen. They're solid and they're just up there. Her cunt is shaved and there's just a fringe of blond hair to either side."

"Who's fucking her? The boys or the girls?"

"I don't know yet. But somebody's been having some fun down there."

From then on Lara was with them whenever they wanted her.

"You're fucking her," Pegeen would say. "That's Lara's perfect little pussy."

"You fucking her too?"

"No. Just you. Close your eyes. You want her to make you come? You want Lara to make you come? All right, you blond little bitch—make him come!" Pegeen cried, and no longer did he have to tell her how to ride the horse. "Squirt it all over her. Now! Now! Yes, that's it—squirt in her face!"

They went to a local inn one night for dinner. From the rustic dining room you could see out over the road to a big lake emblazoned by the sunset. She wore her newest clothes; they'd gone shopping for them on an impulsive visit to New York the week before: a little clinging black jersey skirt, a red cashmere sleeveless shell with a red cashmere cardigan knotted over her shoulders, sheer black stockings, a soft leather shoulder bag trimmed with small leather streamers, and on her feet a pair of pointy black slingbacks cut to show the cleavage of the foot. She looked soft and curvaceous and enticing, red above and everything black from the waist down, and she carried herself with such casual comfort that she might have been dressing like that all her life. She wore the shoulder bag, as the saleswoman had suggested, with the strap slung across her body like a bandolier and the bag riding her hip.

To try to prevent his back from locking and his leg from going dead, it was his habit to get up and walk around two or three times during a meal, and so after the main course and before dessert Axler stood and for the second time strolled through the restaurant and across the inn's public sitting room and into the bar. There he saw an attractive young woman drinking by herself. She must have been in her twenties, and from the way she was talking to the bartender he could tell she was a little drunk. He smiled when she looked his way and, so as to prolong his stay, he asked the bartender if he knew the ball score. Then he asked her if she was local or staying at the inn. She said she had just taken a job
at the antique shop down the road and had stopped in after work for a drink. He asked if she knew anything about antiques, and she said her parents owned an antique shop farther upstate. She had been working at a shop in Greenwich Village for three years and had decided to get away from the city and try her luck in Washington County. He asked how long she'd been out here, and she said she'd arrived only the month before. He asked what she was drinking, and when she told him he said, "Next one's on me," and indicated to the bartender that he should put the drink on his tab.