American Appetites

  Asked, afterward, about Vick’s probable motive, Ottinger had said indifferently, “Who gives a damn? The witness is gone, dead, finito.”

  IN THE REAR of Ottinger’s elegantly cushioned car, returning to Hazelton and to home, Ian lay back and shut his eyes, made an effort not to sleep, for sleep was out of the question, but simply to clear his mind of that day’s accumulation of griefs. The others, including Bianca, were talking about the trial; of course they were talking about the trial; there was nothing else to talk about but the trial; there would never be anything else to talk about, in Ian McCullough’s life, but the trial. The prosecution would be closing its case in another day or so, and then the defense would present its case. And then, and then. The summations, the judge’s instructions to the jury, the jury’s deliberations, the verdict. And then.

  Ian thought of that day, that day of such extravagant innocence and recklessness, in Bridgeport: the wood-frame duplex in which they’d lived, painted its bright inappropriate blues; the old neighborhood streets; the elementary school and the junior high school; the melancholy little park. He had felt a yearning so palpable as to be almost physical, like sexual desire. And for what? And why? It had brought him to this, a stranger’s Mercedes-Benz speeding along a country highway, in the dark of an interminable winter, toward the house he could think of in no other terms than home.

  He thought . . . not of Glynnis, who was after all dead and could not help him . . . but of Meika Cassity: approaching the defense table, not altogether prudently, at the end of that afternoon’s session; rising pertly on her toes to kiss his cheek, and squeeze, with a schoolgirl’s passion, his hand; whispering in his ear (which burned and must have turned bright red), her splendid dark-burnished sable coat slung over her shoulder and her jeweled earrings flashing. Meika’s skin was pale but heated; her eyes were unnaturally bright. Seizing Ottinger’s hand in hers she congratulated him on the afternoon’s performance: “You are going to save Ian, aren’t you? Prove his absolute innocence to all the world, aren’t you?”

  He adored her. He was terrified of her.

  4.

  By ignoring it, they said, when asked how they dealt with the publicity.

  Of the trial coverage in the daily newspapers, in one of the two major news magazines, even, to their chagrin, in the Sunday supplement of the Newburgh Times, Ian and Bianca took no account: Ian on principle (for in fact he’d never wasted his time reading such things in the old days of his anonymity, thus why now?), Bianca because her capacity for outrage, indignity, and hurt was finally exhausted. A glossy New York magazine, part fashion and part scandal, approached her with an offer of $50,000 to write “your father’s story from your point of view.” When she declined they returned with an offer of $75,000.

  Bianca was preparing material for publication, however: Glynnis’s American Appetites. She had taken the spring semester off from Wesleyan to be with Ian during the trial; the rest of the time she worked on the manuscript, sitting at Glynnis’s place at the kitchen table, industriously typing up notes, collating recipes, talking on the telephone with friends of Glynnis’s who had shared her interest in cooking and with Glynnis’s editor in New York City. It was now March: the publisher hoped for a more or less complete manuscript by the first of June. “I had never realized there was so much to cooking, to food,” Bianca told Ian, and others, in his hearing. “If you want to do things correctly, it’s a lot of work.” And: “I really enjoy doing this, I would never have thought I would.” And, over the phone, to an unidentified friend: “I really feel close to Mother, for the first time I guess since I was a small child.” The air of happy conviction in his daughter’s voice struck Ian as insincere, though he hoped of course that it was not.

  The actual cooking, begun tentatively, took up more and more of Bianca’s time. Glynnis had left variants of certain recipes, as many as six for a single dish, for instance, and Bianca could not decide which was the preferred one. A lentil soup from Pennsylvania Dutch country, with cumin, garlic, ham hocks, and fresh spinach. A heavy stew, pozole, from the Southwest, made with chilies, pork loin, chicken, and hominy. Texas hash, with Tabasco sauce; classic American meat loaf, with chopped olives, mushrooms, thyme, toasted wheat germ; Maryland fried chicken; Charleston chicken hash; New England Indian pudding, with cornmeal, dark molasses, and cinnamon. In the semihysterical aftermath of a trial day Bianca even attempted sauce velouté, fillets of sole en papillotes, paella à la Valenciana. The more ambitious meals were likely to be served as late as eleven o’clock, at which time Bianca would seek out her father (who might have fallen asleep, fully clothed, on top of his bed, having meant “just to rest my eyes”), excited, nervous, apologetic beforehand: “I don’t think this has turned out absolutely perfectly, Daddy, and I’m terribly sorry to have taken so long, but—” Ian, sleep-dazed, mildly hung over from the several quick drinks he’d very likely have had earlier that evening, smiled and took his place at the dining room table, where candles were burning, their delicate flames trembling with his approach.

  Though Bianca fussed over her mother’s recipes and spent hours in the kitchen, she had very little appetite for the meals she prepared; oddly, Ian thought, and worrisomely. Nothing seemed to please her, for, as she said, watching Ian eat (these evenings, he ate slowly, seemed to lose concentration even as he chewed and swallowed), Glynnis would certainly have made it better: had made it better. Bianca messed her food about her plate, trying a few mouthfuls, frequently murmuring, disappointed, “Not quite, not this time,” and making a face, which rather exasperated Ian, who recalled (for, dear God, how could he not recall) those many hours at the dinner table when, balky and pouting, Bianca found her mother’s superbly prepared food not to her taste. Those meals had begun in hope and ended in strain, wounded feelings, intemperate words. Now it was her own food Bianca was refusing.

  And she was losing weight steadily, Ian saw. Even in the midst of his own self-absorption, he saw. Her clothes swung loose, her cheeks were becoming hollow. A grim sad satisfied look to her face in repose.

  So he said, with a father’s chiding smile, a father’s smiling frown, Why don’t you eat, and Bianca said quickly, Oh, I am, believe me I am, but sometimes I can’t keep it down.

  5.

  He spoke with Meika at least once a day, whether in person or on the telephone, but dared not see her in private, to make love with her, more than once a week in the evenings. Depending upon Vaughn’s schedule—whether he was in Hazelton, in New York City, or elsewhere—they met, or tried to meet, on the weekends. On both Saturday and Sunday. For as many hours as they dared.

  Did Vaughn know? Ian wondered. And, knowing, did he care?

  That strange, sad, mysterious man. My friend of so many years, whom I don’t know.

  MEIKA SAID, LAZILY, “Vaughn and Glynnis—you know they had something going, once, don’t you?—so this is tit for tat.”

  Ian said, “Vaughn and Glynnis? Are you serious?”

  “They were serious. But nothing came of it.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Your wife, my husband. Didn’t you know?”

  “When was this?”

  “Don’t get so excited, Ian,” Meika said, smiling her sweet sly slanted smile. “As I said, nothing came of it.”

  Ian started at her. She was lying with her arms behind her head, the hollows of her underarms exposed shaved and powdered, so intimate a sight, for all their present intimacy, Ian felt it wrong of him to look: as if he were taking advantage of a child. He said, more calmly, “Are you serious, really, or are you teasing? When did this all take place?”

  “I don’t think we should talk about it,” Meika said. “Since it seems to upset you so.”

  “Of course it upsets me,” Ian said, laughing angrily. “To be told so casually that my wife—”

  “Oh, ‘my wife’—that sort of thing is anachronistic too,” Meika said, sitting up abruptly and reaching for her cigarettes on the bedside table. “‘My
wife,’ ‘my property’—the very usage is outmoded.” Moving, as she did, her small yet rather flaccid breasts swung: as if the delicate, slightly puckered envelope of skin contained jelly, or water, and might be easily punctured. The first time they had made love, on the eve of Christmas Eve, some weeks before, Meika had drawn Ian’s fingers across a thin sickle scar on the outside of her right breast, where a cyst had been removed—“Don’t worry: benign”—a few years ago.

  Though Ian was Meika’s lover, and, in an outmoded style of speech, Meika Ian’s mistress, he had yet to become accustomed to her ease in her flesh: or her indifference. He thought her body dazzlingly lovely, though so thin, rather epicene: the narrow boyish hips and long legs charmingly knobby at the knees; the flat smooth stomach and belly (for Meika had never, of course, been pregnant); the small breasts; the collarbone and ribs upon which her skin seemed so tightly, even nervously, stretched. Away from this body he was apt to dream of it, even, fiercely, to will his thoughts upon it: that he might be shielded from thinking of other things. And when, as now, he was with Meika, her presence so flooded his senses, the curious authority of her soul so crowded his own, Ian found it difficult to think at all. Repeatedly he told her, “You are so beautiful, Meika. So beautiful,” in a voice of wonder, and Meika seemed to accept such homage as her due; yet teased. “If I’m so beautiful now, why not until now? Why did you never see me before? I loved you, you know, for years,” she would say, accusingly, dreamily, “and you never knew; never cared to know; looked through me; cruelly snubbed me,” kissing him and caressing him as she spoke, and, as she spoke, as they began to make love, Ian had the uneasy sense that Meika was improvising, inventing, creating for the two of them, now they were lovers, and given an imprimatur of a kind by the physical act of loving, a fictitious but univocal past by which the present, so vertiginous in its forward movement, might be explained.

  Most of the time, most of their times, were spent in Meika’s bedroom—that is, Meika and Vaughn’s bedroom—a spacious, airy, beautifully furnished room with a skylight of glazed, or milky, rather than transparent glass. Though this room was in the older part of the house Vaughn had redesigned it considerably: there was a small dressing room, mirrored, for Meika, and a wall-length closet for the Cassitys’ many clothes; a shelf of books, most of them oversized art books and photography books; an enclosed sun deck, opening from a louvered door at the rear, roofed with a specially tinted glass that withheld the sun’s more corrosive rays. In this room, with its potted and hanging plants and cushioned white wicker furniture, Meika frequently, on sunny winter days—as Meika had, earlier this morning, demonstrated for Ian—lay nude on a lounge chair, covered by a thin muslin cloth, in order to both absorb the sun’s rays and to be protected from them. Her skin, she said, was too fair and thin to tolerate much sun: like, she guessed, Ian’s own.

  “I realize that Vaughn and Glynnis liked each other a good deal,” Ian said, reasonably. “I know Glynnis admired Vaughn, as an architect, and spoke of having him build a house for us some day—”

  Meika interrupted. “No, it was to be an addition to the house you have.”

  “But, still, I find it difficult to believe that—”

  “Glynnis loved that house, as you must know. She wanted never to leave it.”

  “—difficult to believe that it was anything more serious.” “Perhaps then it wasn’t,” Meika conceded, smoke streaming thinly, yet luxuriantly, from her nostrils. “It becomes increasingly difficult, with time, to know what ‘serious’ means.”

  Meika asked if Ian would like another glass of wine, more of the freshly opened Bordeaux she’d brought upstairs with them, and Ian shook his head no, but may have meant yes; so Meika poured him another glass, which Ian drank down, distractedly, as if it were water. She asked would he care for another of the cocktail sandwiches—smoked salmon with dill on crustless white bread, pâté de la campagne thickly smeared on pumpernickel—she’d brought up on a platter, delicious though slightly stale; they were leftovers from a party of the previous evening. (Ian had come to the Cassitys’, as he’d rather falteringly told Bianca, for Sunday brunch: so very coincidentally, since he’d come there for Saturday brunch only the day before.)

  Meika had changed the subject and was talking, complaining rather, of the trial: its many interruptions and delays; the interminable slowness and opacity, not to say obfuscation, of certain of its procedures; the collective disappointment felt by onlookers when, so seemingly willfully, Judge Harmon stopped proceedings and adjourned with counsel to his chambers. She seemed to think that the trial, Ian McCullough’s trial, was an entertainment: or intended to be so. And while she admired Nick Ottinger immensely, she did not like Lederer: did not like him at all. “Isn’t it a sobering thing, to realize the power a public prosecutor has, under our system,” she said. “To haul perfectly innocent people into court. To make them prove their innocence. And to say such things about them: the fucker.”

  She looked at Ian, who had not quite been following her line of thought. “He’s ruining all our lives,” she said. “And yet, he has made them all so . . . significant. Did you read that thing in the Times? That sort of personal-interest feature, I guess you would call it, really quite well written, and in its way insightful, the townspeople’s vision of the Institute, and of us—‘American elite’ we are called—the whole thing linked up, I think totally unfairly, in fact outrageously unfairly, with ‘white collar’ and ‘corporate’ crime. The rise in statistics or some such thing. But you don’t read the newspapers, do you?—I just remembered.” She made a sympathetic gesture, pursing her lips in a kiss, of the kind one might offer a person who has suffered a very minor, if not comical, hurt. “You’re much better off, not.”

  Ian felt a sharp pain between his eyes. He said, setting down his wineglass, “I think I had better go home.”

  Meika said irritably, “You are always saying that.”

  “Not always, surely. But it’s nearly three o’clock. Nick Ottinger is dropping by today, to go over some sort of argument, or motion, or brief on my behalf he wants to present to—”

  “I think, you know,” Meika said, sliding back into bed, her wine-glass balanced precariously as she kicked at the covers, “that men like you are terrified of intimacy, of any sort of public acknowledgment of intimacy. Basically you are terrified of something happening to you outside of the properly defined contexts of your lives.”

  “Meika, don’t be cruel,” Ian said jokingly, as if Meika’s very real capacity for cruelty were only play. “It isn’t at all flattering to hear an expression like ‘men like you.’ It suggests—”

  “Having a heart attack, for instance, in someone else’s bed. Another man’s bed. His property: like his wife. And, dear God, how proprietary he is, about his wife! As if butter wouldn’t have melted in Glynnis’s—”

  “Meika,” Ian said, flinching. “Please don’t.”

  “—vagina, then. To maintain our elite vocabulary.”

  Ian stared at her, really quite baffled. It was not the first time in recent weeks that Meika had become so suddenly, and, it seemed, so inexplicably, furious with him. And there was a nerved-up glow, even a sort of glare, to her skin, and to her pewter-colored eyes, that suggested her extreme pleasure in such fury.

  “One of the Rockefellers died that way,” Meika said, resting her head back on the pillow and half closing her eyes, as if dreamy with memory’s effort, “I forget which. Not Nelson. (Or was it Nelson?) And I knew a woman, an old pal,” she went on, regarding Ian with amusement, “—having a love affair with a man not unlike you, a straitlaced professional man, very distinguished in his field, very properly married—‘happily’ as the saying invariably goes—and she adored him, and he claimed to adore her, and this went on for years, a sort of stalemate on both sides, both of them (did I say this?) married, of course. And one day, in a Manhattan hotel—I think it was the Plaza actually; the two of them took it all quite seriously and romantically, though, as I said,
it had been dragging on for years—one day, the poor man had a heart attack . . . a coronary thrombosis . . . and died, actually died, right there in the hotel room, in the hotel bed, in the very act, I suppose, of making love. Jesus! Can you imagine! My friend panicked, she said; had a kind of blackout, or delirium; threw her clothes on and left the hotel and took the train back to Greenwich, where she and her husband lived, and their children, she was happily married too; and her lover was left behind—his body, I mean. And when she got home she telephoned the Plaza and said, ‘Something has happened to a man in room’—whatever. And she hung up the phone. And that was the end of that love affair.”

  Ian, dressing, rather clumsily, a salmon sandwich stuffed in his mouth, laughed; and, thinking how intensely he hated this woman, said, “Meika, darling, you are impossible.” It seemed to him precisely what a lover of Meika Cassity’s, dressing clumsily, a salmon sandwich stuffed in his mouth, under her bemused and critical scrutiny, would naturally say.

  “Yes,” Meika said, “but you don’t love me, do you.”

  “Of course I love you. It’s just that I must leave; I really must. Nick is—”

  “Oh, the hell with Nick. And Bianca. And Vaughn. And—the rest. The fact is, you hate me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You hate us all.”

  “Meika, for God’s sake, please. This has been such a lovely day for me, such a—”

  “Tell me: did you hate Glynnis when . . . when it happened?”

  “When what happened?”

  “The accident. That night. Did you hate her, then?”

  Ian felt the pain, sharper now, between his eyes. He said, “I’m going. I’ll call you tonight.”

  “But did you? I can keep a secret; really I can.”

  “I never hated Glynnis; please don’t say such things,” Ian said, “and I don’t hate you.”