“What can I offer you, darling?” she asked him.
They had come now into the broad main room, an open living room and dining room combined. The furniture was all dark stained wood and floral upholstery, meant to look both rustic and as expensive as it was. There was the sofa on which they’d drunk their wine last time. There was the little corner of wall against which he’d held her while he thrust inside her. There were rows of mullioned windows on two sides, showing the garden to the east and the forest to the south out back. The autumn colors of the leaves were just beginning to grow dim with the coming twilight.
Zach had changed out of his church clothes. He was wearing black jeans and a cowboy shirt and a tan windbreaker. He was looking not at Margo, but at the forest view, brooding on its mysterious depths with his hands jammed in his back pockets. It was a moment before he heard what she’d said.
Then he murmured, “Nothing, thanks.”
“A glass of wine?”
Was that mockery in her voice? The glass of wine was what they’d started with the last time. He couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. He faced her. “I’m not going to be here long, Margo. I’m going to have my say and go. I don’t want you to threaten me anymore.”
“Threaten you? Zach, I haven’t—”
He cut her off. “The e-mails, the calls, showing up at my church. They’re all threats, when you get down to it. You’re threatening to tell my wife we had sex if I don’t pay attention to you or engage with you in some way.”
She started to speak but stammered and fell silent, thrown by his directness, just as she had been in his fantasies driving up.
“I’m not gonna do it,” he said. “Any of it. I’m not gonna answer you, talk to you, anything. This is the last time. I don’t want you in my life. I don’t want you anywhere near me. I’m sorry as hell I had sex with you. It was weak, stupid. I love my wife more than anything and if she finds out about it, it’s gonna hurt her. It’s gonna really hurt her. I don’t know if she’ll get over it. I don’t know if we’ll get past it. We might. Or I might lose everything that matters to me. But that’s on me. My choices, my actions, my fault. You do what you want.”
Margo had now recovered from her first confusion. She stood very still while he spoke, listening politely with her hands clasped in front of her breasts, and the faintest trace of a smile on her lips—like a teacher patiently listening to a prized student’s book report. Zach knew, even as he went on talking, that she was regrouping, gathering herself for a response. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter how she responded. He meant to say what he had to say and go.
“But if you think . . .” he went on. “If you think I’m going to hide and creep and crawl for fear of you—if you think I’m going to turn myself into something small and squirrelly you can chase from corner to corner like a rat you’re torturing in a maze, you are living in a dream world, ’cause it’s not gonna happen. Tell my wife. Don’t tell her. Do your worst or go away. You and I have nothing more to say to each other.”
It was that hour of the day when the fall of darkness accelerates so that even during the moments Zach was speaking, the air in the room had dimmed, and the details—of the furniture and appointments, of the people’s figures and faces—had lost some of their clarity. Still, Zach saw Margo tilt her head forward in a majestic nod. And, “Well!” she said. “That’s quite a speech.”
Her heels clapped on the wood floor as she moved to the wall. She pressed a switch and brought the top light on so they could see each other better.
“Manly, direct, full of bluff integrity,” she continued. “It’s all bullshit, of course, but then so much polite conversation is.”
“It’s not bullshit, Margo. I mean it.”
“Oh, I know you do, darling. I didn’t mean to suggest you didn’t. All I meant was: it’s none of it true, strictly speaking.” He started to protest, but it was her turn to cut him off. “Oh, I believe you. Don’t get me wrong. I believe you’re fully prepared to toss me out of your life like a cigarette out of a car window.” Her heels clapped again—then stopped clapping—as she came toward him, stepping onto the braid rug. She stood close enough for him to smell her perfume and her money, her self-certainty and her barely hidden rage. “It’s the part about you being sorry about what happened, that’s what I don’t buy. The part about your family being what matters most to you. About how much you love your wife. Those are things a person says, of course. What an awful bastard you’d be if you didn’t say them. Still, I expected a little bit more depth and insight from you. I mean, the way you tell this little story—it doesn’t even make sense when you think about it, does it?”
In his mind-rehearsals, Zach had walked out at about this point. In some of his fantasies, she’d agreed to leave him be. In some she was in tears. In some she screamed her threats and curses at his back as he walked to the door. But in any case, in his fantasies, he figured: since nothing she could say was going to change his own actions, there wasn’t much point in hanging around to listen.
In real life, however—now, standing here—he found that he didn’t walk out, somehow. He just didn’t.
And Margo went on. “Let me put forward an alternate theory. Before you stride out heroically to face the consequences. Let me at least explain how I see it, all right? That’s why I’ve been calling you. Because I’ve wanted to say this. I thought you should hear it before you just decided you could fuck me once and forget all about it.”
Anger flashed in her eyes as she spoke the obscenity. Zach realized that, for all her airs, she was beginning to lose control and he really had better get out of there. But he didn’t get out. He just didn’t. He said: “All right. Say your piece.”
Margo gave another of those majestic nods. She paced away from him a step or two and faced him from a little distance. Now she was standing by a side table decked with crystal candlesticks and an empty fruit bowl. The twilit garden was at her back and so was the little stretch of wall against which Zach had had her. Maybe she’d posed herself purposely so he’d be looking at the place, remembering. He didn’t know.
“I will speak my piece,” she said in that rich, warm voice. “If just for one second, you will lay aside your pieties and platitudes. Yes? Maybe? For just one second? If just for one second, you will see the thing clearly, all right? You say your family’s the most important thing? You say you love your wife? And you know—you know she’s such a small-minded little church mouse that she’ll throw away everything you have together if you so much as indulge in a meaningless fling. And yet, you go ahead and have that fling? Knowing the consequences? What sense does that make, Zach? Would a man throw away what he truly loves for nothing? For something meaningless? What sense—what sense is there in that? Who could ever believe it but the most self-deceived hypocrite?”
This time the anger not only flashed in her eyes, it made her mouth spasm in a twisting sneer. He could see that the rage was like a red force rising inside her, taking her over, possessing her. Once again, Zach thought he should leave. And he didn’t.
“Of course it wasn’t meaningless!” Margo said ferociously now. “Of course it wasn’t nothing! It was you finally being you, Zach. Admit it. It was the real stuff of your life. It was you in your true nature—not in the guise of some upright western lawman from a TV show, and certainly not as some complacent paterfamilias enduring dinner with your squealing kids and your simpering wife—or in that godawful church with its stuffy gray-haired zombies passing around coffee cake and chitchat. God, how can you even stand to pretend that’s what you’re like? How can you stand to go back to all that after what we had?”
“What we had?” In his pent-up frustration with her, the words burst from Zach before he could stop them. “What we had, Margo? Christ, I banged you against a wall for five minutes!”
She swept up one of the candlesticks and casually hurled it at him. “They were the only honest five minutes of your life!”
The moment of violence was so natural, so much a part
of the flow of her argument, that Zach hardly realized it was happening and had no time to duck. The candlestick thumped painfully against his collarbone and dropped to the rug with a thud. Stunned, he watched it roll under an armchair, out of sight.
“You didn’t throw away what you love for something meaningless,” Margo snarled at him. “You threw away something meaningless for what you really love.”
He raised his eyes to her with wonder. “You?” he said, in genuine amazement.
“Me. Yes, of course, me.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“It makes no sense otherwise.”
“But don’t you see how crazy that is?”
She picked up the other candlestick. This time, he was ready and raised his arm in self-defense. She brandished the crystal cylinder a moment. It sparkled in the light. Then her eyes blurred with tears and she slowly lowered the stick back to the table with a trembling hand.
“You say you threw away what you love in exchange for five minutes of meaningless pleasure. I say you cast off a lifetime of hypocrisy for five minutes of real life as you truly are. Which version makes more sense to you?” she said.
She straightened. She put her hands together before her skirt as she had outside the church that morning. She composed herself. And when he didn’t answer her, she went on with restored dignity, “Well, then, have it your way. But no, do not think for a minute I’m going to allow you to keep all this theoretical. To be noble in theory. To do the right thing in theory. No. If you’re going to throw away a woman as valuable as myself, if you’re going to throw me over for Saturday cartoons and coffee cake, then, so help me, I’m going to make you live out the logic of your lies. I’m going to make every kind of trouble for you, Zach. With your wife. With your children. With your employers. With the news media who made you a hero. Go ahead. Tell them I seduced you. I’ll tell them you took me. I’ll tell them you wanted me so much, you wouldn’t listen when I said no. I’ll set my lies against yours, and see which ones make sense to the rest of the world. I have money and powerful friends, and I promise you I will lay waste to your kabuki marriage and all the rest of it. I’m doing you a favor, Zach. Really. I care about you too much to let you throw your only life away on all that . . . fraudulent sanctity.”
When she finished speaking, the room was silent, except for a clock ticking somewhere. Neither of them moved, but instead they stood regarding each other steadily, she with haughty defiance, he with his broken heart showing in the slump of his shoulders and his weary frown. He didn’t know how much trouble she could really make for him, but he didn’t kid himself: it would be enough. If she only told Grace—if only the children found out—it would be enough.
He drew breath, and his forlorn gaze shifted to the windows. Dusk had shaded to the edge of night outside. The trees beyond the garden were turning black against the dark blue sky. A dazzling burst of silver was just now appearing on the horizon. It caught Zach’s eye and he gazed at it, thinking: She saw me coming from a mile away. She saw that picture in the paper and she wrote this script and played it out. She saw something she couldn’t have and she set out to ruin it—and I let her do it.
He went on gazing past her out the window. The silver dazzle behind the trees resolved itself into a silver arc. The silver arc bloomed into a magnificent circle of white and silver light. The silver circle rose like the music of an overture into the twilight sky.
Musing distantly, Zach realized that, with all the troubles on his mind, he had forgotten Imogen Storm’s warning that this would be the first night of the full moon.
PART III
A STRUGGLE WITH TRUTH AND LIES
18
MONSTER
He woke up half naked and covered in blood. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t imagine what had happened. The transition was so sudden that, for a moment, he thought he must be in his bed at home. For one blessed moment of sweet relief, he thought his confrontation with Margo must have been a dream.
Then the smells of the woods overwhelmed him. The smells of the dead leaves and the dirt, of the spoor and tree-life and water and fish and scrabbling frightened fur-creatures in the underbrush—their various odors swept into his nostrils on an inhalation and overpowered his senses like sunlight blinds the eyes. He felt twigs and stones pressing into his flesh. He sat up fast. He found that he had been stretched out on the forest floor.
Shocked, he looked around him. He was at the bottom of a gorge, on the narrow muddy strand of a lake, forest rising around him on three sides, the expanse of water at his back. The full moon had breached the meridian and was now shining over the water. It cast a splash of light into the middle of it, threw a sparkling line across the surface ripples and laid a soft blue-gray glow down over everything.
He gaped at the scene. Then he looked down at his nakedness, his clothes hanging off him in tatters, his stained hands. He understood the smell before he saw it clearly: blood!
He scrambled to his feet, breathing hard. He didn’t dare to think, but his mind was black with foreboding.
“Oh, God.” His first words. His voice hoarse and guttural. It made him aware of the noise all around, the steady cricket call and the frogs like ancient car horns and the whispering undulations of the lake water and small paw-steps skittering over the leaves.
What had happened? What could have happened? His memory had never been so blank . . . or, wait, yes, once. On the operating table, when he’d had his appendix out. That’s what came back to him. They’d put the anesthesia mask on him, and the next instant he was in the recovery room. It was a blackout so complete, it made him doubt the immortality of the soul. This was just like that. There was that thorough a blackness between Margo’s last words and this. But at the same time, even though he remembered nothing, thoughts were rushing in from the edges of his mind to the center of it, unthinkable thoughts about Gretchen Dankl and Peter Stumpf and the Black Forest and Dominic Abend and those waterbugs. . . . He was thinking about all that—and only the fact that it was all so unbelievable kept him from putting things together and fully realizing the truth.
What time was it? His watch was gone. He checked the moon. Had to be midnight or not long after. Grace! And, Christ: Margo. He had to get out of here. He had no idea where he was, how far he’d traveled. But the road was at the brink of the gorge and he was at the bottom of the gorge—so just head up the hill. That would lead him back to the road eventually.
He took a step and grimaced. Of course—he was barefoot. The twigs and rocks bit into his soles, the mud rose uncomfortably between his toes. It didn’t matter. He had to get out of here. Had to. He edged along the narrow strip of shore until he spotted a trailhead in the blue moonlight. Then he headed up into the woods.
It was a half-hour climb. Not easy. Beneath the autumn trees, the moonlight reached him only intermittently and there were long stretches of deep shadow. It was difficult to keep to the trail and, whenever he strayed from it, unseen branches scratched at his face and arms. Sticks jabbed into his feet. Sudden slithering movements in the duff made him pull up short, alert, listening. The cold began to seep into his skin and make him shiver. He had to fight through tangles of thick vines and roots to make his way back to the path again. Then he plodded on—up—out of the gorge—through the moonlight and darkness. Thinking: What happened? What the hell happened? Black-hearted with foreboding all the while, because deep down he understood. He finally understood, but he couldn’t bring himself to face it. He couldn’t see what he could not bear to know.
Finally—there—up ahead: a glow and then a yellow light. A house window through the branches. The ground began to level out. The sky appeared and even though the moon was slipping down behind the forest, the trail became brighter.
Panting from the climb, he edged toward the tree line until he saw the house clearly in the glowing midnight. It was Margo’s place. He recognized its shape against the stars. A few more steps and he could make out her living room thr
ough the lighted window. He stopped at the brink of the forest, holding a branch to keep himself steady. He stared at the place.
He was afraid of what he would find there. He had never felt so afraid.
Slowly, he moved onto the lawn. The grass was soft and cool beneath his feet, easier to walk on. He stumbled toward the house, a man in a daze, carrying his misgivings like a weight against his belly. As he came around the side of the building, he saw something sparkling at the edge of the driveway, where the grass met the gravel. Shattered glass from the window there, the very window he’d been looking through when the moon came up. It must have burst outward violently.
Please God . . . he thought. Please God. . . .
He walked around the glass by sticking to the thin strip of lawn at the edge of the garden. He glanced through the busted window as he passed it—but he only looked in briefly, and all he saw was the living room, all he noticed out of place was an overturned wing chair.
He walked over the gravel drive. The gravel stung but he barely felt it, barely felt anything now. He sleepwalked to the front door and tried the knob. The door was unlocked and swung open. He stepped in after it. Please God. . . . He wanted to turn back. He wanted to climb into his car, naked as he was, and drive away and keep driving. But helplessly he went on, passing through the foyer to the living-room archway.
Aside from that overturned wing chair, the room seemed strangely undisturbed. From where he was, beneath the arch, he could see the crystal candlestick—the one Margo had thrown at him—lying under the armchair. As he came forward, he saw that the other candlestick had also fallen and lay chipped on the wooden floor at the base of the table on which it had stood. He dared to hope that he wasn’t going to find what he knew he would find, but that hope died when he came to the edge of the sofa and saw his clothing on the floor.
The rags of his jeans and his jacket and shirt, the scraps of what had been his sneakers, his wallet, his cell phone, some spare change—it all lay in a weirdly neat circle, half on the braid rug, half on the wooden floor, a hollow at the center. It was, he thought, as if he had exploded, sending his clothes and pocket-stuff in one burst around the spot in which he’d stood.