American Appetites

  Beyond the noisy splash of the water in the bowl he heard a telephone ring in Ottinger’s outer office, heard Ottinger’s secretary put the call through to him, heard, through the wall, Ottinger’s voice, a voice brotherly yet distant: close, familiar, intimate, yet muffled and indistinct. He felt a thrill of something very like passion, to realize that, at another time but in that room and at that desk, Nicholas Ottinger might have been speaking with Ian’s own wife over the phone; while Ian McCullough, in blissful ignorance of being cuckolded, was at the Institute, knowing nothing of what they planned, what they did, with no recourse to him. How it fascinated him, even as it horrified him: the appetite and happiness of the lovers’ lovemaking, the play of their bodies, without conscience or sentiment, mouths hungry for each other, hands grasping, clutching. . . . He remembered Glynnis’s legs locked about his hips, her ankles snugly crossed; the quick tight hard rhythms of her body; the heat of her flesh: breasts, belly, thighs, vagina. At the peak of orgasm her body arched, convulsed, tightened frantically about him, racking him with pleasure so intense he could not bear it.

  Yet he’d borne it; of course he’d borne it, so far as he could, in manly silence. Glynnis had screamed and screamed, but Ian had not.

  On those occasions, that is, when he hadn’t been impotent. When Glynnis had not turned aside from him, in hurt, or disappointment, or unarticulated rage.

  OTTINGER WAS PROMISING Ian that he would get him through the arraignment in the morning as swiftly and as painlessly as possible. “Then Graham and I”—Graham was one of Ottinger’s assistants, a young Harvard Law graduate—“will check you and Bianca in at the Sheraton. I’ll put it on my Visa card; I’ll take care of everything. Including a guard at your house, to protect your property.” He walked Ian to the door, brisk, spirited, smiling, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened a few minutes before; as if Ian had not suddenly broken down. He said, cheerfully, “It’s expensive, of course, but it’s worth it. Believe me, it’s well worth it.”

  As if reluctant to give Ian up just yet, or doubtful of his ability to get down the stairs, Ottinger accompanied him out into the street. In the midday sun the smartly restored Georgian townhouse, muted “redbrick,” with black shutters and black wrought-iron grillwork, was striking as a stage set. Ian could not have said, staring at perfectly budded wax begonias in the window boxes and at the mica glint of the brick façade, why, on this warm midsummer day, he was here, on Chase Street, in the company of a man whom he did not much like; whom he’d always, for no reason he could name, distrusted.

  “May I give you some final advice, Ian?” Ottinger asked. “At the risk of seeming presumptive? I would not, if I were you, try to contact that young woman, Sigrid Hunt, however tempting it might seem to do so. You have told me several times that you don’t know where she is, that you have not spoken with her in months, and I believe you. But, still, it’s crucial that you understand you’d be making a serious error if you try to contact her, or succeed in contacting her, and the prosecution finds out. They will subpoena the telephone company for your toll calls from your home or office, as I’m sure they already have, for past calls. Keep that in mind. If Lederer fails to locate Hunt to serve her a subpoena, we will hire a private investigator to see if we can’t find her. But leave her to me!”

  “Yes. Fine,” Ian said indifferently. But thinking: Toll calls! The telephone company! Subpoena!

  “And try not to become obsessed with your case, as, so often, men of your temperament do—our temperament, I should say; perfectionists, I mean: men who are accustomed to controlling their lives, not to being controlled. Remember that as your attorney I am going to ‘defend’ you; that is not your responsibility. My defense is an utterly simple one: no crime occurred, the death was an accident, purely and clearly an accident, as you have told me. So far as it’s humanly possible, you should try to continue with your life and your work. You should not resign from the Institute. If you do so, that will be a victory for Lederer. Mors tua, vita mea—as the Romans said. ‘Your death, my life.’”

  “Yes,” said Ian. “I know the Latin.”

  “But do you know the sentiment?”

  Ottinger had the lawyer’s instinctive habit of counterpunching: with him, you would never get the last word.

  “The case, you know, may go on for a considerable period of time. It’s in our interest to delay, until the excitement has quieted down. This inane Hazelton notoriety,” Ottinger said.

  He was smiling and squinting in the bright sunny air. The tiny scars around his eyes were clearly visible now: like stitches, thorns. The trauma to his head, Ian thought, and the bleeding must have been considerable.

  “The fundamental thing is not to despair,” Ottinger said. He shook Ian’s hand, hard. “Not in private, and not in public.”

  As Ian turned away, he added, “Especially not in public.”

  2.

  HAZELTON-ON-HUDSON SCHOLAR INDICTED IN WIFE’S

  DEATH. INSTITUTE FELLOW TO STAND TRIAL

  SECOND-DEGREE MURDER CHARGE

  AWARD-WINNING HAZELTON SCHOLAR

  INDICTED IN WIFE’S DEATH

  Ian McCullough, 50, to Be Tried for Second-Degree Murder

  UPSTATE PROF INDICTED

  IN WIFE’S BATTERING DEATH

  ‘Other Woman’ Missing,

  Believed to Be Motive

  Some were loose clippings; others were complete newspapers, spread out, with care, on the table in the hotel suite: gathered by Bianca for reasons, as she said, of “personal history.” The Hazelton Packet, and the Cattaraugus Monitor, and the Poughkeepsie Journal; the Newburgh Times, and the White Plains Herald; the Hudson Valley Shopper; the New York City Tribune; even, its article prominent on the front page of the Metropolitan section, The New York Times . . . that brooding conscience, or consciousness, of the region from which there could be no escape short of death. (“Since academic and professional reputations cannot be made outside the pages of The New York Times it does seem just, and surely poetically just, that reputations are unmade there too,” Ian told Bianca in a bemused voice.)

  It was the tabloid New York Post that headlined the terrible words BATTERING DEATH and provided, in stark unequivocal print, the name “Sigrid Hunt”: describing the “flame-haired dancer and model” as a “mystery woman” in her late twenties whose “current fiancé” knew nothing of her whereabouts, “not even whether she is living or dead.” In the accompanying photograph, which had the sleek synthetic look of a publicity still, Sigrid Hunt faced the camera with her hands on her hips, torso slightly turned, hair dramatically, if not quite convincingly, windblown; she looked about twenty years old, if not younger: wearing no glasses of course, her makeup stylish and bold, particularly around the eyes.

  The photographs of Glynnis most frequently used by the press were those taken for the jackets of her cookbooks, in which, too, she looked much younger than she’d been at the time of her death. The photograph of Ian most frequently used was the one taken by the Boston Globe, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January, on the occasion of his award from the National Association of Social Scientists; in it, Ian smiled uneasily at the camera, his eyes narrowed against its incandescent flash. He was a tall lean-jawed man of indeterminate age, youthful but assuredly not young, with dark-rimmed glasses and fair, filmy hair and a murderer’s mock-innocent face.

  A few days later the Post printed a lengthier feature, SCANDAL AND TRAGEDY IN “THINK TANK” PARADISE, with numerous photographs, not only of Ian, Glynnis, and Sigrid Hunt but of former Hazelton-on-Hudson residents who had brought shame, ignominy, or, at the very least, unwanted public attention to the Institute. These included the “world-renowned specialist in European economic policy” who had been charged with child molestation in 1959 and had duly resigned his post; the former assistant to the director of the Institute who had been suspected, if not formally charged, of embezzlement, in 1965 and was discharged from his post; and the “chronically depressed” wife of one of the sen
ior fellows who had committed suicide, in a spectacular manner—driving her car into the Hudson River in a November snowstorm—in 1971. Hazelton residents who “asked not to be named” gave their candid opinions of the Institute, which was viewed with a good deal of suspicion as a tax dodge, a “Communist stronghold,” and a harboring place for cranks, nuts, and the occasional genius (“who thinks he’s above the law”); and of Ian McCullough, who was said to belong to a “prominent social circle” notorious in Hazelton for its parties, its alcoholism, its adulteries and promiscuities and divorces.

  “It is all happening to other people,” Ian said, appalled, fascinated, “but those other people are us.”

  Bianca said quietly, “They are killing you and Mother. Again and again. And there is no way to stop them.”

  WHAT WAS THE name of the Greek goddess of shame?

  Ian McCullough tried to recall, but could not. Where that name had been—teasing, tantalizing; wasn’t it something like Aurelia, Aurora, Aviva?—there was nothing: an image, if an image suggested itself, of only his own face.

  They were “Jonathan Hamilton” and his daughter “Veronica,” staying, for an indeterminate number of days, though not less than a week, in a top-floor suite at the Sheraton Motor Hotel. A bedroom for each, a bathroom for each, a rather spacious and handsomely appointed parlor; a miniature refrigerator and a miniature bar; three full-sized television sets; a view, in perspective resembling a Dutch landscape, of the Hudson River to the south, beyond the steady streams of traffic on the Thruway. The Hamiltons, who valued privacy, ate most of their meals in their suite and rarely used the hotel’s facilities, except, at odd hours, when few other guests were likely to be around, the swimming pool. “It’s surprisingly nice here,” Ian said, as if he’d expected something very different, and Bianca said, “That’s because, Daddy, in a place like this, you can’t notice the usual texture of how unreal things are. Here, everything is unreal.” She spoke not in rebuke but gently, in approbation, as she invariably spoke now. She alternated her reading, which was intense, as fiercely concentrated as if her life depended upon it, between the newspaper articles and the Bhagavad Gita.

  For the first three or four days, Ian spent a good deal of time lying in, or on, his enormous bed. It was king-sized, of course; so wide he could, if he wished, stretch his arms out on it crucifixion-style. His fingers groped in vain for the edges. The drapes at all the windows were drawn and, being green velvet, gave to the room’s shadows a queer viridescent cast, as if Ian were floating beneath the surface of the sea; the room’s unfamiliar proportions were hazy, like those of an inadequately imagined dream. In this state Ian did not sleep, but neither was he awake, in the usual sense of the word. Nor did he, strictly speaking, think; it seemed rather more that thoughts ran through him—disjointed, staccato, accelerated, or in slow motion—like currents of electricity.

  He spoke with virtually no one except Bianca, who, rising to the emergency, with something of the intrepid goodwill of Glynnis herself, saw to such routine but exhausting tasks as ordering meals from room service, making purchases in the hotel drugstore, dealing with the hotel staff. It was she who answered the telephone when calls came from Ottinger, or his office. (The Grinnells knew where Ian and Bianca were staying, but did not know their incognito.) Bianca had chosen the name “Veronica” because, she said, it was both exotic and saintly; and, as “Veronica,” she made it a point to be courteous, mild-mannered, patient, and uncritical: so self-effacing as to seem, at times, scarcely there. Ian interpreted her behavior as a complicated form of hysteria with which he had not the slightest inclination, at least at the present time, to interfere.

  He had, of course, brought along work to do: a dozen books to read, weeks of unanswered correspondence. Months ago he’d been invited to write an omnibus review of several newly published books in his field for The Times Literary Supplement, to which, from time to time, he contributed, and he hoped to work on that essay, or at least to take notes on it, without wanting to consider whether the editor had written him off and reassigned the books to another reviewer: whether the entire topic might now be dead. But he could not concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time and often found himself, with a zombie’s affable calm, standing at one or another window, staring toward the bluish-gray river to the south. What was its name? He had to think hard, to remember.

  At dusk, he and Bianca drove out into the fragrant countryside and walked briskly, or jogged, in silence, along deserted country roads. What peace! What solitude! Ian went first, Bianca a discreet second, for father and daughter had nothing to say to each other at such times and wished only to forget each other’s existence. After a few days, Ian agreed to come down to the hotel pool, where, to his relief, under no one’s particular scrutiny, he swam slow meditative laps in lovely turquoise water that smelled of chlorine like mouthwash and reminded him of younger, presumably more innocent and happier days. If I die now, he thought, smiling myopically into the sun-splotched water, executing his Australian crawl as, long ago, in high school, he’d been taught, I die happy.

  BIANCA BOUGHT FOR him, in the hotel drugstore, a pair of plastic clip-on lenses, dark green, to affix to his glasses. To give substance to the incognito. Following her suggestion, offered rather more in play than in seriousness—unless more in seriousness, than in play—Ian began to part his hair a bit differently and comb it a bit differently, slightly downward, toward instead of away from his rather high forehead. A subtle transformation but a transformation nonetheless. “Jonathan Hamilton,” businessman, of Boston, Massachusetts.

  Why not a mustache? A beard? Ian had never worn either. Seeing him, no one would know his identity. In which case no one would see “him” at all.

  (ONE OF GLYNNIS’S probable lovers, back in Cambridge, had had a beard: a pirate’s rakish black beard. Gerry Michaels his name, black Irish, a hotshot young economist who would not, as the relentless drama of their lives, careers, fates, unfolded, make it at Harvard. Gerry had been a friend of Ian’s too, or so Ian had thought at the time. The young men had respected each other’s work, and each other. So Ian had thought, at the time.

  Where was Gerry now? Ian wondered. Had he and Glynnis completely lost touch, or had they, from time to time, for sentiment’s sake or, more expediently, for love or lust’s sake, contacted each other?

  I will never know.

  And there had been at least one other probable bearded lover, back in the early 1970s. . . .

  And had not, for a while, Denis himself worn a beard, a goatee . . . ?

  Reverend Ebenbach. Did he wear a beard? Ian could not, for the life of him, remember, and asked Bianca, who could not remember either. I’ve blanked out that entire day, Bianca said.)

  THE “HAMILTONS,” FATHER and daughter, stayed at the Sheraton Motor Hotel for nine days in all, until such time as Ian could not bear his exile any longer. Yet, in that time—it must have been the mysterious influence of “Jonathan”—Ian discovered in himself a keener interest in other people, an anticipation of the unguarded, unself-conscious ways in which they might, to a stranger’s unjudging, often admiring eye, reveal themselves. Reentering the world, by cautious, even timid degrees, swimming in the pool and afterward sitting in the sun, daring to linger in the sun, which seemed so public, hence so forbidden to one of his notoriety, Ian took note, covertly, of those hotel guests who, during the slack hours of the afternoon when most travelers are on the road, stayed behind to swim in the pool, to oversee the play of children, to give themselves up, eyes trustingly closed, skin oiled, to the sun. The children were particularly appealing, Ian thought. Rowdy, noisy, splashing, beautiful. He did not even feel compelled to think of his own child (now grown, swimming in this very pool), or of his own fatherhood, in that other lifetime he could envision now only with an effort of the imagination, as if it had happened to another man, lost to this man in his fallen, contemptible state. He watched the children, and their parents, sporting in the water, laughing, flailing a
bout, playing with miniature life vests and colorful floating toys: yellow ducks, emerald-green frogs, purple alligators. When Bianca was a small child surely Ian had taught her to swim, had frolicked with her, as (for instance) that skinny young father was frolicking with his tiny daughter?—the young mother looking on from a beach chair at the pool’s edge, pretty, in fact very pretty, brunette, curly haired, warmly tanned, in her stylishly abbreviated two-piece bathing suit that had a satin sheen, cupping her breasts tight as a man’s hands might grip them, in desperation or in love. The young father stooped above his daughter and guided her through the water as she “swam” with frenzied arms and legs, kicking wildly and squealing with pleasure, as, a few yards away, another child, no relation, went through the arm motions of swimming, his feet firm on the pool’s bottom. Ian felt a stab of sheer pleasure, in watching. And in the innocence of watching: for no one knew who he was and what he had done. No one noticed him at all.

  Ian was thinking, surely he’d played with Bianca like that; surely he had not, in his concentration upon his work and the ceaseless rumination of his mind, abrogated such play, such effortless and unmitigated delight, to Glynnis.

  He thought of Spinoza’s enigmatic remark: The first and chief endeavor of the mind is to affirm the existence of the body.

  Come off it, friend. The body is all that’s there.

  AND SUDDENLY, IN the middle of the night, he remembered the goddess’s name: Aidos.

  Aidos: goddess of shame.

  And her twin, and perennial ally: Nemesis.

  ON THEIR LAST morning in the hotel, at breakfast, Bianca said thoughtfully, “I’ll miss ‘Veronica’; she hadn’t any soul to contend with.”

  “It is easier, isn’t it,” Ian said. “Without.”

  These many days, he had waited for Bianca to ask about Sigrid Hunt; but she had not asked. This too, he supposed, was a form of hysteria.