The Last Good Night (21 page)

“I went to work in the store.”

“The one thing you never wanted.”

“I didn't have much choice, really. I couldn't leave town, and people weren't exactly lining up to hire me. Anyway, my father died of a heart attack six months after I got out. He was never really the same after what happened to me. So my mother needed the help.” He rubbed his chin with his forefinger. “In the end, I couldn't even save that for them. Most of their savings had gone to my defense, and then there were the taxes, and the malls were moving in. I just couldn't hold onto it.” He rolled over, got a drink of water from the nightstand, and rolled back.

“After my mother died three years later, I sold the store for back taxes, pocketed the rest, and went to the community college.”

“What about law school?”

His mouth turned down at the corners. “You can't go to law school if you have a criminal record.”

“Jack, I…”

“It didn't matter to me anymore,” he interrupted. “The law
was bullshit to me then. I saw how easily it could be perverted. So I got a job drawing for the
Record,
I got married, I tried to build a life. I did what people do. But you know what it was like? It was like playing house.”

“You mean with you and Carol?”

“Yes. It never felt, I don't know, real. It never felt like it mattered. Not really, not the way it did with you.”

“You're going to divorce her?” I asked.

“I'm working on it. We've been separated for eight months, but I'm having a hard time getting Carol to accept that it's really over. She's being treated for depression and her shrink thought it would be helpful if I attended some sessions with her, so I'm spending ninety dollars a week sitting in some stranger's office trying to get Carol to face the truth as painlessly as possible.”

“Is it working?”

“I thought we were making some progress, but lately she's gotten it into her head that if we adopted a baby it would make everything okay.”

“Would it?”

“No. It's too late for that now.” He pulled on a loose thread at the end of the blanket. “She claims she's loved me since high school. Ironic in a way, wouldn't you say?”

“Did you tell her you were coming here?”

“No. I was supposed to meet her for a session the morning I left. I called to tell her I would have to miss it, but I didn't tell her where I was going.”

We both lay completely motionless.

“I'll tell you what my life is like,” Jack said. “After Carol and I split up, she kept the house on Hibiscus Drive. Do you remember the weird little pink stucco house we used to laugh at?”

“You lived there?”

He smiled. “Yes. Anyway, she stayed there and I moved into a two-bedroom Mediterranean at the end of Kinney Drive that used to be the servants' quarters to a large estate that slipped
into the ocean long ago. I spend half my waking hours fighting the sand that's creeping through the yard. And the rest of the time, I go around recording the events of the town for the paper, the political campaigns, the church bazaars, the swim meets. I'm quite good at it, actually. The
Miami Herald
asked me to come work for them. There would have been a shot at national syndication.”

“Why didn't you go?”

He shrugged. “There have been other offers that would have meant more money, higher circulation. All the things I'm supposed to want. And Carol wanted to move. God, did she want to move.” He licked his dry lips, went on. “But I just never could. I thought after the probation was up and I could finally leave, I'd go as far away as possible. But something happened, I don't know. I'd get so nervous whenever I left town, it was almost like a case of vertigo. I couldn't quite seem to feel my feet outside of Flagerty. That must seem ridiculous to you.”

“No.”

“It's funny about the work. People can't wait for me to draw them, but then they're always disappointed with the results. I guess I don't make things look pretty enough. They tend to think my depictions are so accurate about other people but never about themselves. I suppose no one ever really sees themselves clearly. Anyway, that's over now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I lost my job two months ago.”

“You didn't tell me that.”

“Didn't I?” he responded flatly.

“No. What happened?”

“They decided to go with a syndicated guy out of Chicago with a ‘broader view.' That's what they said, a ‘broader view.' In the end, I was just too microscopic even for them.”

“Now what?”

“Now what?” He laughed, but it was only half a laugh, really, the other half was lost in an abyss. “I'll tell you. Now, I only buy one day's food at a time just to make sure I get up and dressed every day. Which, for some reason, I actually think is important. As you know, I've always had a ridiculously heightened sense of discipline and duty.”

“Do you wish you didn't?”

He snorted. “Of course I wish I didn't. What good has it done me?” And then, softly: “I've tried not to. I've actually tried to shut off the valve that controls that particular blood flow. But I can't. It seems I'm stuck with it. I'm not sure it's something you can change.”

We lay in silence for a few minutes.

“You think I don't understand about fame?” Jack continued. “I'll tell you what it's like. When I went back to work in the store, people used to come in just to take a look at me. All our old classmates, their parents, they all found some excuse to come in that first week I was back to see if I had tattoos on my forehead or numbers on my arm. They still whisper about me. Even the ones who don't quite remember why whisper about me all these years later. Of course, I never quite hear it. All I hear is the silence when they stop at my approach, the silence just before they speak in these conscientiously regular voices. I'm a goddamned expert on silence.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You seem to be saying that an awful lot.”

“Maybe I'm hoping for some kind of cumulative effect.”

He propped up on his elbow, looking down at me. “All those early years stuck in Flagerty when I couldn't leave, I used to remember how obsessed you were with moving to New York. I knew if I could only come here I would find you. I used to study every picture of the city in magazines looking for you. Even in movies set in Manhattan I used to scour the extras looking for
you. So many times I'd spot girls with your long wild hair but I could always tell they weren't you even before they turned around. None of them had your walk.”

“What walk?”

“You used to bend forward at the waist as if you were leaning in to get wherever you were going even faster. You don't have it anymore. You even managed to change your walk.” He shrugged. “Anyway, they were just movies. I used to try calling information to get a phone number for you. I used every name I could think of. I tried Marta Deuss, because I remembered that was your mother's maiden name, I tried Marta Clark.” He stopped abruptly. “I don't want to talk about all that. It doesn't matter anymore. None of it does. All that matters is that we're finally together again. Where we belong. I always knew we would be. That's all I care about now.” He swept his finger round my skin in circles. “We can start all over again,” he said softly. “It can be just the way we thought it would be. The way it should have been.”

I didn't say anything. I didn't move.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Close your eyes and we can be back on the island. Just close your eyes, Marta,” he whispered.

I shut my eyes.

In a little while, I heard his breathing grow regular.

When I glanced at my watch, it was close to one
P.M.

Gently, I lifted his arm and placed it back on the mattress.

I dressed quietly, watching him sleep.

And then I walked down the six flights of stairs and back out into the afternoon.

 

I
DO KNOW
this about betrayal: Once committed, it is not something you can erase.

I smelled Jack on me when I took Sophie to the park that af
ternoon, smelled him on me when I kissed David goodnight and then good morning, smelled him on me the next day, no matter how much I showered, no matter how much I scrubbed.

Remorse, when you come right down to it, is meaningless.

It changes nothing.

Unless the one who has been betrayed is so deeply in love that he will find a way to excuse anything. It is usually the provenance of women, that kind of love that refuses to recognize action—
I understand you
.

It was Jack's kind of love. At least he said it was.

I did not think that it was David's.

 

B
UT LOVE IS
a difficult thing to calibrate or predict. Especially someone else's. It is, rather, an easy thing to be mistaken about, to underestimate or overestimate. It's rare that we ever truly discover the precise nature of another's love. I'm not sure we would want to if we could.

Why didn't I tell David about what happened that night twenty-one years ago?

The truth is, I tried, or at least I think I tried.

We lay in bed one early night in that sweet twilight period of an affair when no decision has been made yet but you are deep enough to know one will be. It was summer and we were drinking a carton of orange juice, passing it back and forth, still amused by the sloppiness of it, the wet sheets, the dribbling chins. It felt so much like intimacy.

“There's something I need to tell you,” I began uncertainly, though I had been carefully rehearsing the words for hours, days, weeks.

David leaned forward with such a tender expectancy, waiting to hear of—what? Past lovers? Eccentric relatives? The most benign of confessions that he would magnanimously forgive. The
flaw that becomes incorporated into the love itself, at least in the beginning.

I looked at him, so trusting and so earnest.

I paused.

And I froze. “Never mind.”

I felt the moment, the opportunity slip out of reach, gone forever.

I never told him about Astrid and her low-cut dresses and her loose breasts and her money.

I never told him about Garner.

I never told him about the motel rooms or the ropes or those blue nights when I went diving into the very worst in myself, fearing it, loathing it, courting it. The nights that I finally ran so desperately from, the nights I am running from still.

I never told him that Laura Barrett was a name I made up my first day in New York twenty-one years ago, when I walked the unknown streets on a sultry late summer afternoon, a shell, hollowed out by guilt and terror and exhaustion.

It was dusk when I found a grimy hotel on Eighth Street that rented by the day or week, walking by its entrance three times before I finally went in and asked for their cheapest room, giving them a made-up name. Laura, after a soap opera character. Barrett, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning. An embarrassing cliché, yes. But I was seventeen, remember. An age when we are ripe for mythology, particularly our own.

I huddled on the lumpy mattress of the single bed in the dimly lit narrow room, wrapped in blankets despite the heat, unable to stop shaking. Radios and sirens blared from the streets and I jumped at every piercing sound as the night deepened and the city swelled threateningly about me. Eventually, I must have shut my eyes, for it came to me then, the dream that has haunted me ever since….

Trapped in the heat, the wet Florida twilight heat, the gnats so thick they form an impenetrable sheath swarming angrily about my face, my arms. I am swallowing them, choking on
them, gasping from them. Someone is coming toward me, a shadow man, and I wave the gnats from my eyes trying to make him out but they are everywhere, blinding, suffocating. He's on top of me now, his arms multiplied, omnipresent, a noose of octopus arms, tightening and tightening about my throat. I open my mouth to scream but the gnats swarm inside my lips, my tongue, my nostrils. My lungs, heart, stomach, collapse in and in. There is no air, no escape. Xavier's eyes bore into me like neon, like fucking lasers through the gnats as I gasp. And then, somehow the brick is in my hands and in one final effort to break free I slam it down, slam and slam and slam, feeling it crash, sink, melt into his skull. But when I finally stop and look down it is Jack on the ground, Jack bloodied, Jack open-eyed and still, Jack staring up a me, and it comes then, the scream, ratcheting out, ripping my throat, out and out and out….

I woke on the other side of the hotel room in a crouch gasping frantically for air, sweat pouring down my face, my heart banging so hard and fast against my chest that I thought I was dying.

I spent the next four days and nights in the room, shivering, sleepless, living on Cokes and candy bars from the vending machine down the hall, counting and recounting my diminishing money, washing my hands until the skin was cracked and bleeding, terrified to leave, to move, to shut my eyes.

The only time I went out was to go to the pay phone in the lobby, carrying pocketfuls of change, to call Astrid. I believed her when she said Jack would be let go. “Everyone knows it was just an accident,” she said. “You stay right where you are until this blows over, sweetie. That's what everyone wants.” She was cheery, as if I was on vacation.

“Jack?” I asked.

“Jack is going to be fine. He's with his family. They're taking care of everything.”

“Tell him I…Tell him…”

“I know.” She brightened. “You be good now.”

Astrid, holding both hands against the world, keeping it out, almost winning.

I did not tell her where I was. She never even asked.

Her voice, vague, dreamy, unattached, hovered in my ears long after I had hung up.

And everywhere, too, was Jack. Jack the way he looked when he ran track, untethered, omnipotent, free. Jack, his eyes fluttering when he came. Jack, calling out to Mrs. Patrick, “There's been an accident.” Jack, alone, a universe away.