“Maybe he’ll escape from a cage.”
“Not his thing, as far as I can tell. Expect a magician, not a gorilla.”
“You know what I mean: like Houdini. Handcuffs, chains, underwater.”
“We’ll see.”
“Think he’ll saw a woman in half?”
“Oh, we are so over that,” I told him, shaking my head. I meant to laugh ever so slightly, but in my head it sounded a little raucous. I imagined myself prone. In a box. Then a bed. I saw Gavin atop me. I knew how long it had been since I’d had sex.
“Levitate someone from the audience, maybe?” he asked.
“If someone from the audience is levitated, it will be a confederate.”
“Southerner?”
“Accomplice,” I corrected him reflexively.
He nodded. I realized after I spoke that he had been kidding. I found myself looking at his mouth. His smile. “Well, Jasmine will be a tough act to follow,” he told me.
“Hah! I think you are about to be dazzled.”
“Maybe. But I keep telling you: you were fun to watch. And the toughest act to follow will be dessert here.”
“The chocolate mousse?”
“The chocolate mousse. We’re not talking pudding.”
“I like pudding.”
“Pudding’s for kids. This is adult.”
“NC-17?”
“Depends on how you eat it, I guess. You want coffee? Cappuccino?”
I motioned at my wine. I had planned to just wave at it with my fingers and tell him I was fine. But did it really matter if I got a little rickety on my feet? I’d gone with the boots, not the heels. Boots. Not heels. I’d be okay. I was in Montreal with a guy who was, I remembered from the moment he had appeared outside my family’s house that awful August morning, handsome. Hot. A hot cop. I chortled, saw him raise his eyebrows. And so I reached for my glass by its stem and polished off the last of the Riesling. Then I smiled and spoke: “Yes. Coffee would be perfect with the mousse.”
When a busboy and the waiter once more had come and gone, clearing the table and taking our dessert order, he started to ask me something about etiquette in a magic show. Something about whether I would tell the performer I was a magician if he happened to ask me—no doubt, he added, the most beautiful young woman there—to come to the stage to be part of a trick. He was sitting back against the rear of the settee, his right hand on the cushion no more than four or five inches from my thigh. I was feeling adult; the wine had made me daring, desirous of doing something I’d never done before. I took his hand and placed it underneath the tablecloth in my lap, spreading my legs and pressing his fingers against me. Then I leaned into him and curled my lips over my teeth, sucking for a brief second on his earlobe. When I pulled his fingers from between my legs, I kissed them—locking my eyes on his—before returning his hand to the settee.
The magician was too big and too good for the club, but I loved watching him work. There were seventy-five or so people scattered around the small tables, but there was room for at least twice that many. I hoped for his sake that his next show was sold out. The performer almost—though not quite—took my mind off the desire the alcohol had unleashed. I felt myself starting to sober up, and I didn’t want to, and so I ordered a glass of wine, and then another one after that. I kept Gavin’s hand in mine as the performer chewed up and swallowed Canadian and American paper money and restored the bills in the different owners’ wallets, and as he put an ice pick through his forearm. I only released Gavin’s fingers when we would applaud, which we did a lot. The guy was good. Inspiring. I knew how he did about two-thirds of his show, and probably could add half of that to my repertoire if I wanted. But it would take a lot of work and a lot of practice.
When we were walking to the parking garage, while Gavin was telling me that he still preferred watching Jasmine perform, I interrupted him. “I don’t want to go home tonight,” I said.
“Well, if you do go home, I’m driving you. There is no way I’m allowing you behind the wheel of a car.”
I had hooked my arm through his, and now I stopped him in his tracks. “No, I wasn’t just wishing or worrying about having had too much wine.” I repeated myself, speaking as clearly as I could: “I don’t want to go home tonight. I want to be with you.”
He gazed down at me for a long moment and then, as I knew he would, he kissed me. He put his hands on the small of my back and pulled me against him there on the street and—his face almost grave, I thought before I closed my eyes—bent down and pressed his lips against mine, and the world around me went quiet. Except for my heart. When I opened my mouth and felt his tongue (a tentative probe at first, but then it was mirroring my own wanton playfulness and need), I heard my heart in my head. An idea came to me: This is why I am here. This was meant to be. This is really why I stayed home in Vermont.
And yet we didn’t make love that night.
I awoke alone in the morning beneath a quilt in his bed. At least I presumed it was his bed. I discovered I was still in my dress. I was still wearing my bra. My underwear.
My head was throbbing and my breath was toxic, even to myself, and I lay with my brow burrowed deep into the pillow, astonished at the disabling spikes of pain that accompanied just rolling my eyeballs. How was that even possible? Carefully I rubbed at my temples and pieced together what had happened after I had climbed into Gavin’s car. Mostly, I realized, I had slept. I had fallen asleep—passed out, if I was going to be precise—and slept all the way home. Here. Not home. Here. I vaguely recalled parking in Burlington and the elevator to his apartment. The paneling on the elevator walls and the bronze plate from another era with the numbers for the floors. I called home, expecting I would just leave a message on the answering machine, but of course my father had picked up. I had lied—badly, I presumed—that I was safely at my friend’s family’s house in Montpelier. Had he said he was just glad I was safe? I thought so, but the whole conversation was fuzzy.
I saw on the clock on the nightstand that it was already noon and felt a deep stab of remorse. Serious guilt. I remembered my vow to smoke less dope, and told myself that white wine and pear mojitos were ill-advised substitutes. In a heartbeat I would have traded the superfund cleanup site that once was my tongue for mere cottonmouth. I took a deep breath to steel myself against the pain that loomed and then sat up in bed. Gingerly, with the care of the oldest woman in the world—in my mind I saw a shriveled but beatific woman eating yogurt in the Caucasus—I swung my legs onto the hardwood floor and looked around. I saw my handbag beside the nightstand and pulled it toward me with my foot because I was afraid to bend over. I reached for my compact and looked at myself in the mirror, assessing the damage. I guessed I had looked worse, but probably not by much. I popped a couple of Altoids into my mouth.
The bedroom door was shut, and a piece of paper from a yellow legal pad had been slid underneath it. I walked gingerly there and picked it up. Gavin had written that he’d left for work. He explained where he kept the coffee in his kitchen and that there was Advil in the medicine cabinet. He wrote the name of a friend in the building and gave me his number, and said the guy would be happy to drive me to the Sears parking lot so I could retrieve my car. I sighed: I was the embodiment that morning of high maintenance. I was the definition of hot mess.
I reached for the door handle and saw it had a push-button lock on the knob and it was pressed in. Locked. Had I locked him out of his own bedroom after throwing myself at him in Montreal? Didn’t seem likely, but the idea caused me a pang of anxiety. I had no idea if he had slept in the bed with me. It was possible he had pushed the button before closing the door and going to work. I’d have to ask him.
I opened the door and saw a short corridor to the living room and the kitchen. There was a blue blanket and a sheet on the couch. So, he had slept out here. Above the couch was a long black-and-white photograph of a dairy barn in the winter. The snow was fresh and the trees were skeletal. The apartment was sparse, b
ut clearly that way by design. The furniture was sleek and modern: a lot of hard edges and chrome. The only clutter was his skis and boots leaning near the front door, along with a pair of sneakers.
I found the bathroom and peed, popped a couple of Advils, and drank from the faucet. Then I drank some more. I squeezed out some toothpaste onto my finger, spread it onto my teeth and my tongue, and rinsed. I would shower when I got home. I would get some coffee at the nearby diner. Not here. And I wouldn’t call his friend, I’d call a taxi.
I regretted both the way I had drunk too much and the way I had chosen not to ask him more about my mother’s parasomnia—and, yes, about his. I couldn’t do anything other than apologize about the former, but perhaps I could learn a little more about Gavin before leaving. Was it a violation? Of course. But that didn’t stop me. I decided I would explore his apartment, but not ransack it. I understood it was a fine line, and I would try not to cross it.
His home was a one-bedroom on either the sixth or seventh floor of the Vermont House, an eight-story apartment in Burlington. The building was among the taller structures in the city, once the city’s most elegant hotel before its conversion to co-op apartments, and Gavin’s place faced the lake. I opened a random drawer on the credenza below the TV and saw it was filled with nothing but snapshots. I looked at a few, recognizing his sister from the birthday party, and gazing at one of his parents. He resembled his father: same iron cheekbones, same yellow hair. There were a few of him as a teenager or college student with a dog. A springer spaniel. Along an inside bedroom wall was a tall bookcase that was filled with military history tomes and police handbooks, and a couple of novels set in the midst of different wars. There were framed photographs of him fly-fishing, and with his mother and father at his college graduation. There was one of him with either a group of friends or a bunch of cousins—women as well as men—in bathing suits on three great boulders in the midst of a river I presumed was somewhere in Vermont. I peeked into his closet and saw a couple of blazers and a black suit. There were two coat hangers draped with neckties. The floor there was clearly where he piled his dirty clothes. In the back I saw a fly rod, a tackle box, and a hunting rifle. I imagined if I really searched the place, I’d find a handgun.
I went to the window to see the lake and squinted against the sun. Then I closed my eyes and backed away. Too soon, I thought, way too soon. But I had seen enough to know the view was lovely. Romantic. The sunsets over the Adirondacks must have been glorious.
The kitchen was cleaner than I expected, but I wasn’t sure why I thought it would be messy. My mother would have approved of the white cabinetry and slate-colored countertops, and I shivered at the very thought of my mom. Could she have been here, too? God, I hoped not.
I knew I should phone Gavin to thank him. I dreaded it, but wanted to get it over with. So I pushed the blanket and sheet onto one side of the couch, collapsed into the cushions, and called him.
“I am so sorry,” I began when he picked up. “I am so embarrassed and I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be. I feel bad. I should have stopped you when you ordered that second glass of wine at the show. Maybe I should have stopped you when you ordered the first. I had a feeling that was the tipping point.”
“Next time, feel free.”
“I will. You know, I’m older, but I think I was afraid to advertise that. I think it would have felt too, I don’t know, controlling to weigh in. I’m just glad you still want a next time.”
“I do if you do. But I won’t drink.”
“I gather you don’t drink much at college.”
“No, I smoke a lot of”—and I remembered he was a detective and stopped myself.
“Dope,” he said, finishing the sentence for me, almost laughing as he spoke. “Don’t worry, I won’t judge you or arrest you.”
“Thank you. And thank you for last night. I had fun. I had a great time.”
“Me, too.”
“And thank you for, um, putting me to bed.”
“It took about three seconds. I pulled off your boots and you were out like a light. Again.”
“Again. Wow, I was just great company.”
“You were.”
“I gather I locked you out of your bedroom.”
There was a beat I hadn’t expected, a pause. Then: “What do you mean, you locked me out?”
“The bedroom door was locked. From the inside.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You know, I don’t think you would have done that. I don’t think you could have done that. I must have locked it by mistake when I was getting my clothes,” he said, but something had changed in the tenor of our conversation. He sounded at once affable and false. But I couldn’t imagine why he would lie.
“Okay,” I said. I let it go, but I knew my curiosity and confusion about it were going to gnaw at me—like so much else that autumn.
“Have you called my buddy?” he asked. “He’s doing nothing today but watching football. He lives in the building and he’s happy to bring you to your wheels.”
“I’ll just take a cab.”
“No, call him! It’s all good.”
“We’ll see,” I murmured. “I like your apartment,” I told him.
“Thank you. I hope you’ll come back.”
“I will. But don’t bother to chill a bottle of wine.”
“I’ll make a note,” he said.
After we hung up, I called my father and told him that I was on my way home. In the background, I heard Paige singing “Drunken Angel” for my benefit. I folded the sheet and the blanket on the couch. Then I returned to his bedroom to retrieve my boots. I made Gavin’s bed. There was a computer on a small, antiseptic black desk by the window—there it was, the digital knowledge free to be plucked—and for a long moment I stared at it. I knew I couldn’t resist, and so I didn’t even try. I turned it on and watched it spring to life: the cobalt blue of Windows and rows of square icons. One of them, I noticed, was for an art program that came with the operating system, and it reminded me of an armoire or clothing cabinet. Narnia, I thought: I was about to open the wardrobe. I told myself that I should turn the machine off before I had gone too far.
But I didn’t. There was a document on the desktop, and I assumed by its name that it was a case file. I opened it and saw it was about a domestic abuse murder-suicide that had been in the news all week. An unemployed car mechanic in Newport had shot his wife and then himself. Gavin probably was working on it before leaving to meet me yesterday afternoon. I closed it and clicked on his e-mail. I felt bad, but I knew I wouldn’t turn back. Not now. I resolved that I would do one search and one search only. I put my mother’s name in the search bar and pressed the return key. And there they were: a dozen and a half e-mails from her. Maybe more. All were short, but all were clear.
I’m designing a guesthouse on the lake out along Appletree Point. I’ll be there on Wednesday. Up for a cupcake?
No adventures. I slept through the night.
Clonazepam dreams. Not for the faint of heart. You?
Paige will be racing all day Saturday and Warren is entertaining some poet from Scotland. Any chance you’re around for coffee?
I’d love to see you. I need to see you. But I can’t. Not this week. I’m so sorry.
The coffee shop on Tuesday would be great. 11:30?
Perfect. I’m actually at the sleep center that day. See you then.
I read through the chains that led to each final e-mail in the mailbox. There was nothing incriminating in them, though I stared long and hard at my mother’s sentence, I need to see you. The tone of that one unnerved me. But most really were about nothing more than logistics: where and when they would meet. Gavin was more likely to bring up sleepwalking than my mother was, but always as a dark aside or deliberately bad joke.
Yeah, if I believed in God, I’d be a roamin’ Catholic.
Surest cure for my sleepwalking? The night I walk off my roof.
> I know there’s not supposed to be a connection between our dreams and our parasomnias, but I think there is—which is why the sex dreams are the scariest. (Your Honor, my client was only in bed with her because of a very rare parasomnia.)
There were no e-mails in nearly three years. The last one from my mother was an apology of sorts that she couldn’t see him after all, because that Friday was my first Parents Weekend at the college, and she and Warren and Paige would be in Amherst then. I found it reassuring to see that Gavin hadn’t lied to me: based on the dates of the e-mails, at least, he and my mother hadn’t met each other in a very long time. Less reassuring, however, was the realization that my mother must have been deleting the e-mails between herself and the detective as soon as she wrote and received them, which suggested she felt they were incriminating. Or they made her feel guilty. Either way, she didn’t want anyone else to see them.
That is, of course, assuming that it was my mother who had deleted them.
Before I left the bedroom, I stared for a long moment at the lock on the bedroom door, and then tried to see if I could lock it by accident. In the end, I decided it was possible. But it wasn’t likely.
FOR A WHILE, I researched what great minds said about sleep. I learned that both Gandhi and Poe equated sleeping with dying.
Then I collected amazing stories about sleep—about the incredible things people did in their sleep. It made me feel less alone. Less crazy. Less strange.
I only stopped when I realized I was better off alone.
CHAPTER TEN