“It can never be that way again, Leila. Whatever it is, it will be different.”
“Maybe better, who can tell? She’s dead, isn’t she? You bring me the paper, I’ll sign what I need to sign.”
I hadn’t thought of it before, it hadn’t seemed a possibility before, but now how could I avoid it? Even knowing what I knew, even with all my certainties, how could I avoid it?
“On the night Hailey was killed,” I said, “where were you around ten o’clock?”
“That’s funny, Victor. The police asked me the very same question.”
“They’ve been here?”
“Two detectives. An athletic woman, who might have been a swimmer herself. She did most of the talking. And another, an older black man, a Detective Breger, I think it was, who spent the whole time pacing the room, snooping into every corner. I’ll give you the same thing I gave them.” She stood, walked to the phone table, wrote down a number. “His name is Herb Stein, a very nice man. We had dinner in a Belgian place by the library that night. The mussel sauce splashed all over his tie. He wiped it spotless with a napkin.”
“Don’t be a snob, Leila, I wear polyester ties myself.”
“Well, then, Victor, you can date him. Or Ted Jenrette, with his nose hairs, or Biff Callender and Chip Cannon. What is it, Victor, with men who keep their nicknames from summer camp? My friends are so eager for me to start a new life, when all I want is my old one back. Not very Buddhist of me I know, but, hell, I was raised Episcopalian.”
“Did you ever think, Leila, that your current love for Guy, being completely unrequited, is as solipsistic a delusion as you said was his love for Hailey?”
“I have an appointment, Victor, that I just can’t miss. May I show you out?”
“I know the way,” I said. “I don’t mean to keep you. Can I ask one more thing?”
She glanced at her watch and nodded.
“What made you think that Hailey had enough money to be worth suing?”
“I just supposed. I guess I supposed wrong. You’ll bring those papers for me to sign.”
“I’ll bring the papers. But can I give you a word of advice, as a friend?”
“No.”
“Be careful what you risk on him, Leila.”
It was the best advice I could give, but she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t listening. All she wanted was for me to take my truths out of her life so she could pursue a past that had receded into fantasy.
Nostalgia is a fire fueled by failures of memory.
10
DRIVING HOME through the narrow suburban streets, I wasn’t smelling the freshness of newly mown grass or marveling at the variety of roadside flora blooming with a fertile exuberance, azaleas and dogwoods, cherry blossoms, forsythia. Something blocked the sun of the afternoon from my sight, something turned the brightness into a gray murk that spread out from me in dusky waves. And in the midst of that gloom the memory that had invaded me at Leila’s returned to work its black magic in my consciousness, and this time I didn’t blink it away. This time, as I drove, I let it overwhelm me. I am smelling her perfume and tasting the salt of her shoulder, feeling the striae of rib beneath her breasts. She is in control, pressing her knees against my sides, licking my breast, her dark hair tickling my chest.
“Do you love him?” I ask.
She raises her head just quick enough to answer,”No.”
“Then why are you with him?”
“Must we?”
“Yes.”
“I needed him.”
“And now you’re going to marry him?”
“It’s what he wants. Suck my thumb.”
“No.”
“Just do it.”
“It’s because you don’t want to talk about him, isn’t it?”
She places her thumb in my mouth, scratches my tongue with her nail, fish-jerks my head to the side and bites my neck.
“How can you marry him if you don’t love him?” I ask later. She is facedown now on the bed, her knees beneath her. I am atop her, moving slowly, methodically, waiting for the train to come through and take control. It has become something akin to an addiction, that train, that strange locomotive of primordial emotion that roars through us and speeds us along on its frenzied uncontrollable ride.
“Last thing I ever want to be again is in love,” she says. It is a shocking statement. It stops short my rhythm.
“You’re lying. The whole world wants to be in love.”
“The whole world is wrong.”
“And you know better than the world?”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I know.”
“Were you ever?”
“Yes.”
“And it ended badly?”
“Hiroshima.”
“Who was it? The halfback? The philandering partner?”
“It was the wrong man.”
“Maybe all you need is the right man.”
“Shut up, Victor.”
“Maybe all you need-”
“Shut up,” she says as she rolls away with a loud, sucking thwap and I am left dangling stiffly. “I’m done.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, then,” she says, her back now to me as she walks to the bathroom, “don’t let me stop you.”
Before she leaves the apartment, she stands over me as I lay still naked in my bed. She is fully dressed now, panty-hosed and powdered, buttoned up tight, tall in her heels, glasses on, her face holding the stoic impassivity of a suffering soldier. And she tells me something I remembered with utter clarity as I drove away from Leila’s house.
“I’m sleeping with one man,” says Hailey Prouix, her voice an emotionless monotone, “engaged to another, emotionally entrapped with a third, mourning forever a fourth. I have no illusions about the tragic mess of my life. But I tell you, Victor, everything I have become has been forged by a love so fearsome it has seared my soul. Don’t waste your time trying to understand it, because it is mine and it still baffles me, but don’t for a minute think I want anything like that to happen to me again. Only the deranged want to be struck by lightning twice. In the end you’re no different from Guy, you desperately want love while having no idea what it is. You say love and you think something else, you think of affection tinged with desire, you think of friendship, comfort, you think of someone to cuddle while you watch videos, to help you choose your linens, someone to make you the man you hope to be. That’s all fine, nothing wrong with that, but don’t pretend such watered milk to be love. We fuck and I like it, and maybe I like you better than Guy, and maybe if I were free to choose I’d choose you to watch videos with and help me pick out towels for the master bath, but don’t delude yourself that it is love, Victor, because it is not, thank God. If you knew what love was, what it could do, if you really knew, you wouldn’t want it either. In love there is no choice, no freedom, no dignity, no happiness, no joy, nothing but hunger and burn that eats away at the flesh. Who in their right mind would want that? I’d sooner die than go through it again. I’d sooner you shot me through the heart.”
It was not the kind of declaration you forget, Hailey’s confession of the fearsome love that had singed her soul, but it was not the kind of thing you let get in the way of a healthy sexual obsession either. I wanted Hailey and so I played deaf, assuming her hard stance was merely another attempt to deflect my attempts at intimacy. Who knew better than I all the tricks of the trade in keeping emotional distance? Who knew better than I what soft yearnings lay behind the pose of unconcern? But coming back from Leila’s, after Guy’s wife had spoken to me of the secrets she had learned about Hailey and Hailey’s inability to return Guy’s love, I began to wonder if maybe Hailey had been spilling more of the truth than I had realized. In her lawyer’s garb, in her unimpassioned voice, without the least hint of her cynical smile, maybe she was opening up more than ever I had realized. What had happened in the past, I wondered as I drove through the suburbs and onto the expressway, to wound her so badly? And how did that past intersect with the moment when Guy had aimed his gun and shot her, just as she wished, right through the heart?