The Unwitting (25 page)

I had stayed away from the news accounts. It had taken me weeks
to be able to read the obituaries. I don’t know why it upset me now. Charlie was dead, and the words they used about the fact made no difference, but the idea of Charlie being the body and this tragedy a catchy headline struck me as unconscionable.

“According to the drug dealer,” Elliot went on, “a friend turned up flush with money the afternoon Charlie was killed. When the dealer asked where he’d got it, he told him about mugging a man in Central Park.”

My head swiveled away from Elliot. It wasn’t his fault that he was the bearer of news I did not want to hear, but I still couldn’t look at him. I put down my glass, and stood.

“I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

“I’ll take you home.”

But I was already on my way to the coat check, and he had to stop to pay the bill.

He caught up with me outside the restaurant and took my arm. I wrenched it away. He stepped to the curb and lifted his hand to hail a cab. A taxi swerved up. He opened the door.

“I’d rather walk.” I started down the block.

He told the driver to go on and fell in step with me.

The rest of the night is a broken mirror, jagged fragments of untidy behavior. When we reached Central Park West, I crossed the street to the park and turned in to it. I had it in my mind that I would walk there. That was where Charlie was.

Elliot took my arm to stop me. I shook him off again.

“You can’t go into the park,” he said quietly. One of us, at least, would avoid histrionics.

I turned away from him and started down the sidewalk on the park side of the street. He caught up with me again. I told him I wanted to be alone. He stopped. I kept going. I couldn’t hear his steps over the noise of the cars and buses, but I knew he was there, keeping pace behind me.

I’m not sure how long we walked that way, I with my shoulders
hunched forward, burrowing into the darkness, Elliot, upright and watchful, I knew without turning to see him, shadowing my steps. Gradually, I became aware of the physical discomfort. I was wearing high heels. The situation was ludicrous. Twenty minutes, half an hour, however long ago, I had been unhinged enough to court disaster in the park. Now I was brought down by a blister.

I sat on a bench, worn out by the endless unraveling of misery and injustice. Charlie was dead. Why did they have to keep exhuming the horror of that morning? Why couldn’t they let me grieve for him in peace?

“Do you mind if I sit with you?”

I shrugged. He sat. A rat darted out from beneath the bench into the park.

“I think I ought to walk you home,” he said.

We got up from the bench. He was careful not to touch me but stood waiting until I began to walk, then fell in step beside me, keeping several inches of cold night air between us. If he noticed that I was limping, he didn’t say anything. We reached a corner and stood waiting for the light to change.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The light turned. He did not take my arm as we crossed.

“I didn’t see how I could keep it from you.”

“You couldn’t. It’s not your fault.” We walked on for a while. “I just needed someone to blame.”

I saw his hand begin to go to my elbow. Then it returned to his coat pocket. The delicacy of the gesture touched me.

A FEW DAYS
later, I told Abby about the new suspect. By then the police had been in touch with me about reopening the case. His name was Roberto Vega, and his life story was a translation into Spanish of Randall White’s.

Abby took the news better than I had. I think she even found some comfort in it.

Eighteen

A
FTER THE NIGHT
I fled the restaurant, Elliot gave me time to calm down, then called and suggested dinner again. I chose the Friday night of a long holiday weekend. Abby was going skiing in Vermont with Lauren and her family.

At a little after six, she and I stood under the awning of our building in the chill February evening waiting for them. When a car swerved out of the line of traffic and pulled up to the curb, I stretched my mouth into a crescent of a smile, thanked Lauren’s parents for inviting Abby, and hugged her. She felt as fragile as porcelain.

I remained under the canopy, waving, as my daughter disappeared into the ribbons of swerving lights streaming up and down Central Park West. When I could no longer make out the car, I turned and started back into the building.

Upstairs, in the silence of the empty apartment, my loneliness bumped against the high ceilings like an untethered helium balloon. I went down the hall to the bathroom, stripped off my clothes, and stepped into the shower. I would keep moving.

Elliot was waiting at the bar. The restaurant was not the one where he’d told me about Roberto Vega, but his stance was the same. He was not a heavy drinker, or at least no heavier than everyone else I knew, but he looked at home at a bar. Then again, he looked at home most places. Before he could ask if I wanted to go straight to the table, I slid onto the barstool beside him. Something about sitting
high on a stool, legs crossed, one stiletto heel caught on the rung, a long-stemmed martini glass in hand, struck me as appropriate to the business at hand.

I had only a moment’s pause about what I was up to. It came on the way out of the restaurant. As Elliot was helping me on with my coat, I suddenly thought of Frank Tucker. For years Frank had made passes at me, because he was conditioned to make passes at women. But he also liked the idea of screwing Charlie by screwing his wife. I don’t mean to suggest that he disliked Charlie. On the contrary, I think he admired him enough to compete with him. Perhaps Elliot felt the same way. Perhaps the rotten underbelly of Elliot’s loyalty to Charlie was a need for beyond-the-grave one-upmanship. My suspicions faded when we got into the taxi. He suggested we go to his apartment, though mine was empty. If he’d wanted to trounce Charlie, the best place to do it would have been in Charlie’s bed.

My fears about fetishes or even quirkiness turned out to be unfounded. Nothing that happened with Elliot that night would make the pages of Krafft-Ebing’s catalog of sexual pathology. Nor did I disgrace myself with untidy emotion. Perhaps because he’d been a bachelor for so long and had never grown accustomed to one woman, he was attuned to women. The sex was accomplished, not a word I usually associate with the act. I didn’t think of Charlie more than half a dozen times.

The next morning we sat in his dining room overlooking the Park Avenue Brick Church, drinking coffee and trading sections of the papers and observations about the news. Nothing in my life had changed, except where I’d once felt a faint annoying itch, I now sensed a low murmur of well-being. Years ago, in love with Charlie, I would have thought that was the saddest statement in the world. I remembered sitting in Bickford’s the morning after I went to his room for the first time, loopy with love, pitying everyone who was not us. One night together had stood the world on its head. Now I just wanted to keep it on an even keel. Elliot was an expert at that.

We fell into a kind of schedule. That was telling too. In the early days, Charlie and I had stalked each other around the campus, hoping for a chance meeting. Even after we married, the thrill of serendipitous encounters guided our steps. One evening, a year or so into our marriage, I came out of a supermarket on Broadway and found him loitering. “What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?” I asked, and we clung together, the brown paper bag of groceries between us, all the way home. But Charlie and I had been eager to put down stakes in each other’s lives. Elliot and I were determined not to intrude. I cooked dinner for him and Abby. He got tickets for plays and concerts. Occasionally, we were invited to the same dinner party. Gradually, hostesses began to seat us apart. Word was getting out that we were together.

I found the situation comforting, or at least comfortable. I was tired of being the lone woman who skewed dinner table seating arrangements and was unwelcome in certain public places. The humiliation of that second discovery still stung. It happened a year or so after Charlie died. I was on my way home from a meeting at
Compass
. Maybe that was why I wanted to stop for a drink. I still couldn’t bear to see Wally Dryer sitting behind Charlie’s desk. As I walked up Broadway, I felt the hole within me as if the wind were going through it. I didn’t want to visit that on Abby.

I passed a French restaurant with a little zinc bar that Charlie and I used to like, and the memory of being there with him reached out and grabbed me. I turned back and went in. For a moment I felt the ache of coming home. Charlie and the bartender used to talk about the Brooklyn Dodgers, though even then they were no longer in Brooklyn.

If the bartender recognized me, he gave no sign of it. He barely glanced at me when I slid onto the stool. He took a good three minutes to wander over to ask what I wanted. Only when a man came in, sat beside me, and tried to strike up a conversation, and I turned my back, did he become civil, and then only barely.

Sonia was the one who explained the situation to me. “A woman alone in a bar like that is either a pro looking for customers or an amateur looking for a pickup.”

“How do you know something like that?”

“Just be glad you don’t.”

But now I did.

I don’t mean to sound as if Elliot was nothing more than a solution to a social problem and a seductive sexual hum. He was extremely good company. He knew a great deal about a great deal and was articulate and often droll about all of it. And he ran, as I had imagined my mother’s cliché putting it, deep. Every time I thought I had him pegged, he surprised me. In prep school he’d had his heart set on becoming a concert pianist and had been encouraged by the various teachers he studied with, but then he broke his hand in a football scrimmage and decided he’d always be second-rate. “At least the injury was a good excuse for being second-rate,” he admitted when he told me the story, and I liked him for the confession. He was generous. A couple of bright kids from Harlem were going to Yale on his money. And he was infinitely discreet, in the large ways of keeping confidences, and in smaller ways as well. For a man who knew all sorts of important people, he never dropped a name. That may not sound like much, but it is more unusual, and to my mind more admirable, than most people think. Of course, the other side of the discretion was his reserve. Maybe I kept discovering new facets of Elliot because he kept the essential Elliot under lock and key. That was even more intriguing.

ABBY HAD ALREADY
left for school that morning, and I was sitting at the table finishing a second mug of coffee and the front page of the
Times
. Outside the kitchen window, a mouse-gray sky spat desultory rain, though the weather forecast read fair.

I was skimming a piece about electronic spying by the CIA. According
to the article, the latest devices were so powerful and ingenious that soon the world would be bereft of secrets. Even now, part of President Johnson’s bedtime reading of his daily intelligence reports included the latest sexual high jinks of other world leaders.

I was about to close the paper and get down to work when a sentence toward the end caught my eye. It had nothing to do with electronic spying.

“The CIA has also funded organizations of liberal intellectuals such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom.”

The Congress for Cultural Freedom, which Charlie and I had both had dealings with over the years, sponsored artistic and intellectual programs and publications around the world, including
The Thames Review
, a journal to which I had contributed several pieces. Attending CCF-sponsored conferences when Drinkwater paid our way was one thing; writing for a CIA-front magazine was another story.

I went into my office, flipped through my Rolodex, found the number for Hugh Baker, the publisher of
The Thames Review
, and dialed it. The receptionist was cheerful as she told me Mr. Baker was not in today. “I can take a message,” she added. “He’ll be calling in later.”

I asked her to have him phone me as soon as possible.

I spent the next hour paging through back issues of the magazine. It held no answers, and I couldn’t decide whether I had been willfully blind before or was unduly suspicious now. That was when I remembered that Sonia had contributed several pieces of art criticism to the review. I dialed her number.

“Am I interrupting something?” I asked, when she picked up the phone.

“Only an orgy of pencil sharpening.”

“You write on a typewriter.”

“With which I have an even more fraught relationship.”

I asked if she had seen the piece on electronic spying in the morning paper. She hadn’t. I read her the line about the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

“The question is, does that mean
The Thames Review
?” I asked. “Impossible. Hugh would have told us.”

“That was my first reaction, but now I wonder. If you’re taking money from a clandestine organization, you don’t go around telling people about it.”