Mortal Fear

  “Was she involved with other men during these years?”

  “She dated. But it never worked out. I don’t think she ever meant for it to. When Drewe didn’t put out after a few dates, the guys usually went elsewhere.”

  “But you weren’t holding to a similar code of abstinence.”

  “Didn’t even try. It was the classic dilemma. She wanted total commitment from me before giving up what she held precious. I wanted what she held precious as proof of her love.”

  “Smart woman.”

  “Okay, okay. Cut ahead a few years, to when my last band self-destructed. Where do you think I ran to lick my wounds when that happened?”

  “New Orleans.”

  “Naturally. Drewe was entering her final year of residency at Tulane. My career was in flames. It was start over or get out for good. What do you think happened?”

  “She started sleeping with you.”

  “You’ve heard all this before, I guess.”

  “Not quite in this way. But I’m starting to feel as though I know your wife.” Lenz allows himself a smile. “I like her.”

  “I asked Drewe to marry me, but she said we had a year before real life started. She said we should use that time to make sure we were sure. What she really meant was, I had a year to make sure I was sure.”

  I reach down to the drink caddy and take a long swig of Tab. “I did a repeat of what I’d done after high school. Packed up my clothes, twenty grand I’d saved from gigging, and headed north to Chicago. I was going to relearn everything I ever forgot about the markets and earn our stake for the future. I took a tiny apartment near the Board of Trade. A bed and a TV. No guitar. Books stacked waist-high everywhere, even in the bathroom. Drewe and I had planned to see each other as often as possible, but we only managed it twice. The timing was too tough. But we talked on the phone constantly.”

  I feel a last flush of anxiety, but I force myself to go on. “And then it happened.”

  “Erin appeared magically in Chicago.”

  “Standing in my hallway in the dead of winter without even a coat. She was flying cross-country with some actor, had a layover in Chicago, and she just walked off the plane.”

  “As beautiful as ever?”

  “More so. White linen blouse buttoned to the throat, black jeans, plain silver earrings, sandals on her tanned feet.

  “You slept with her that night?”

  “No. We just talked. I lent her a ski jacket and gloves and took her out to dinner. We took a cab up and down Michigan Avenue, rode the elevator to the top of the Hancock like a couple of tourists. I was lonelier than I knew. I found myself holding Erin’s hand as she looked out over Lake Michigan. The intimacy of it was . . . I don’t know. Thirty seconds of connectedness in a winter when my only connections had been with greedy assholes and numbers. She didn’t look at me while we held hands, but she squeezed hard before she let go and walked back to the elevator.”

  I stop talking for a moment and watch the constellations of headlights around us, racing toward us, overtaking us from behind. “You want details, or just the Jack Webb version?”

  “Oh, details, please. But for the details, Mourning Becomes Electra would be no different than the Oresteia.”

  I grope for the allusions, but all I come up with is an absurd image of Jack Nicholson trying to get Diane Keaton to sleep with him in Reds. “We talked some more at the apartment. Sitting on the floor and drinking coffee laced with bourbon to keep warm. We talked about Erin’s time in New York, her getting clean, my giving up music. She seemed surprised Drewe and I had only seen each other twice. She had no grasp of the demands of medical school. When she fell asleep, I tucked her in my bed, then slept in an easy chair I’d bought thirdhand from another tenant.

  “The next morning I forced myself out of the chair, brushed my teeth, and got in the shower. I felt like hell. I turned the water as hot as I could stand it. Then I felt a quick draft of cold air. The bathroom door had opened and closed. I heard Erin say, ‘I couldn’t wait.’

  “I pulled the shower curtain away from the wall and saw her sitting stark naked on the commode with her elbows on her knees and her chin propped on her hands. She shooed me away with one hand when she realized I was watching. I let go of the curtain and started washing my hair.

  “A few seconds later she stepped into the shower. I’d seen her naked once before, in high school, skinny-dipping, and her body looked no older than that in Chicago. Her skin was much darker than mine, her hair almost black. Long and thick falling over those shoulders, and the same . . . you know. Lots of it. She looked up and smiled, then hugged me and laid her cheek against my chest, as if she meant to go back to sleep standing there in the spray. I didn’t hug her back, but I wanted to. I’m sure it all sounds calculated now, but then it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Unavoidable.”

  Lenz makes no comment.

  “She was so casual about it. Like walking in to pee as if I wasn’t there. Like we’d been married for years. She just didn’t worry about things like that. Propriety. That affected me. Seeing her on the commode like that affected me. Weird maybe, but it’s the truth. And she . . . she just wasn’t like other women. She kissed my nipples before she ever kissed my mouth. She seemed to sense it had been a long time since I’d had a woman, long enough that any serious lovemaking would have to wait until she’d gotten that first release out of the way. She used her mouth for that, and her hands. She knew before I did where I was, you know? And when I started to finish, she didn’t pull away. She just . . .” I trail off, unable to find words to communicate the experience.

  “Afterward, she stood up and hugged me again. She didn’t speak, but I saw she somehow knew her sister didn’t complete that act in the way she just had. I thought of Drewe then, but she seemed removed from all this, wholly apart from it. It was as though Erin and I were meeting in some place where Drewe didn’t exist. The way it might be if Erin found herself in grand rounds at the hospital with Drewe. In that environment, Erin simply would not exist. The analogy isn’t perfect. Drewe certainly has a sexual identity of her own, but—”

  “I understand.”

  “You want me to skip ahead?”

  “It’s you or the radio,” Lenz says in a strangely thick voice. “Just keep going. From the shower.”

  A bleak image from Fahrenheit 451 suddenly passes behind my eyes: I see myself driving through its wooded film location, a living book spouting my soft-core text for Lenz’s strange pleasure.

  “Look, I can’t explain what made Erin so unique. What I said before about exploration, crossing thresholds . . . even that fails with her. I doubt there’s any erotic space she’s never been. Except maybe pure love. But her sexual presence, her magnetism . . . Jesus. Bottomless eyes, scalloped collarbones, small dark-nippled breasts that made a mockery of all the surgically enhanced architecture I saw every day at the Board of Trade. I think she realized I was being overcome by her beauty for the first time, and she was determined to give me access to all of it. She must have seen a lot of men get lost in her like that, but I could tell this meant more to her.”

  “For more reasons than you could imagine, Cole.”

  “The first time we made love in the bed, she came about ten seconds before I did. Then she cradled my face in her hands and—I still remember what she said.”

  Lenz turns to me, his eyes tiny points of light. “I love you?”

  “No. She said, ‘It’s so easy, isn’t it?’ And then she smiled when I emptied into her. A Mona Lisa smile. No other way to describe it. Like she knew all the secrets of creation.”

  “How long did she stay in Chicago?”

  “Four days. We hardly left the apartment. The most she ever wore was one of my shirts. She watched movies without comment, unless laughter or tears is comment. Once we saw an eyeliner commercial that had used her eyes. I never once looked up to find her watching me. Yet when I caught myself staring at her, she would turn to me with a half smile that to
ld me she knew I was watching. It was like living with a wild creature. She never once put on a spot of makeup. She seemed to stay perpetually wet. I mean she never got—”

  “She was a fantasy lover,” Lenz says softly.

  “No. She was real.”

  “I meant in the sense that the erotic activity was directed toward your satisfaction rather than hers.”

  I consider this for a few moments. “I don’t think that’s true. She got her share of surprises as well.”

  The car seat groans slightly as Lenz repositions himself. “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes—at the moment of orgasm—she passed out. I mean out. We weren’t drinking at all, but she would literally lose consciousness. It only happened three times, but the first time I was actually dialing nine-one-one when she woke up.”

  Lenz chuckles softly. “Your reaction isn’t unique.”

  “It happened to you?”

  “Alas, no. I’ve never seen it personally. La petite mort.”

  “Does that mean ‘little death’?”

  “The little death. Yes. It’s a phrase from French poetry.”

  “That’s what Erin said. She told me it had never happened to her before, but I didn’t believe her. I mean, how would she have known about it otherwise? She’s not the type to read French poetry.”

  Lenz makes a noncommittal sound. “In her circle she might have heard it described. Did you enjoy la petite mort after that first time?”

  “I’m not sure. But I saw how right the expression was. At the moment of greatest intensity, when her chest was mottled red and her face flushed, she just snapped right out of the world. The last time, when she came out of it, she told me that she’d felt pure peace, one of the only times she’d felt it in her life. As if she had just been spit out of the womb, whole and new. And—”

  “Yes?”

  “She said she thought being dead might not be a bad thing. She was serious. Later she even talked about her funeral, how she wanted it to be. There was this song of mine she’d heard on a tape I made for Drewe. She’d dubbed a copy for herself. It’s called ‘All I Want Is Everything.’ She said it was about her and that she wanted me to play it at her funeral.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said sure and changed the subject.”

  Lenz purses his lips and cuts across two lanes of traffic. The lights of suburbia are almost continuous now, so we must be getting somewhere.

  “How long did this erotic interlude last?” he asks.

  “Drewe called on the fourth night.”

  “Ah.”

  “Erin was lying beside me in the bed. In the time it took Drewe to explain that she was calling from the hospital and that a patient she was close to had just died, Erin became her sister again. Not some ethereal being—Drewe’s little sister.

  “She’d risen up and was mouthing Is that Drewe? while Drewe said something about a pulmonary embolism. I don’t remember what I said to get off the phone, but I knew I had failed Drewe in a time of emotional crisis. What I do remember clearly is what Erin said the moment I hung up.”

  “What?” Lenz asks.

  “ ‘How are we going to tell her?’ I wasn’t sure I’d heard right, so I asked what she meant. She leaned back against the headboard, exposing those perfect breasts, but for once I wasn’t looking at her body. She said, ‘How are we going to tell Drewe about us?’

  “I was in shock. I climbed out of bed and said something like, ‘Jesus, where did this come from?’ ‘Where?’ she asked me. ‘What have we been doing the last four days? Shaking hands?’

  “Before I could answer, she said, ‘Fucking?’ Then she jerked up the covers and let me have it. ‘I thought you were different. I thought you understood some things. About women. About me. What do you think I came out to the frozen wastes of Chicago for? Sport sex? I can get all of that I want anywhere on the planet, thank you very much.’ And so on.

  “I was more stunned by the pain in her voice than by her venom. I thought she’d come out because she was at a place in her life where she needed a friend. After hearing how dumb that sounded, I said, ‘What did you come out here for?’ She let the covers fall, stood up naked on my hardwood floor, and said, ‘To marry you, you asshole.’ ”

  “How unfortunate,” says Lenz, as if commenting on some distant village destroyed by a typhoon. With a smooth motion he exits from the interstate and turns into a broad avenue. “So, you had an affair with your wife’s sister while you were engaged.”

  “We weren’t engaged. Not technically.”

  “You’re splitting hairs. You had committed yourself to Drewe.”

  “Yes.”

  “But she never learned of the affair?”

  “No.”

  Lenz shrugs. “I’m missing something. This betrayal weighs heavily upon you? On a daily basis?”

  “Oh, you’re definitely missing something. That night, Erin left Chicago. Two months later I heard she had married a guy named Patrick Graham. He’s an oncologist now, but he went to high school with the rest of us. Everybody knew Patrick had been in love with Erin since we were kids. And by a seeming miracle, his dream girl had suddenly decided she loved him. Erin lost no time getting pregnant and plunging into a domesticity that would shame Martha Stewart. A few months later, I left Chicago and married Drewe. We weren’t sure where we wanted to settle, so we moved into my parents’ farmhouse in Rain. They were dead by then.”

  “Quite a detail to omit.”

  “Nothing Oedipal about it. Anyway, Drewe and I still live in Rain, while Erin and Patrick and Holly, their daughter, live in Jackson. That’s the state capital, seventy miles away. We see them a good bit, usually at Drewe and Erin’s folks’ place in Yazoo City.”

  “Did you resume your affair with Erin?”

  “God, no. I felt queasy from guilt whenever she was around. She seemed stable, but I knew she was capable of anything under stress. I thought she might even blurt out the truth one day in an argument with Drewe or Patrick, just for spite.”

  “Did she?”

  “No. But if I’d known the real truth, I wouldn’t have been afraid of that. You see, her child—Holly—is my daughter.”

  For once Lenz has no comment. He rubs his chin for a few moments, takes a deep drag on his cigarette, and blows out the smoke. “That is a serious problem.”

  “Try catastrophic.”

  “How long have you known this?”

  “Three months.”

  “Does Patrick know the child is yours?”

  “No.”

  “Does he know the child is not his?”

  “Yes. Erin told him she was pregnant before she agreed to marry him. But she made him promise never to ask who the father was. Patrick was so blinded by love that he agreed.”

  Lenz makes another turn, this time onto a wooded two-lane road. “But as time passed, the question began to prey upon his mind.”

  “That’s my guess. Who knows what their problems are? With Erin it could be anything.”

  “And for the last three months, you’ve lived in terror that their imploding marriage will spit your dark secret up into the light.”

  “You got it.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m surprised you haven’t developed hives.”

  “I’m having some pretty bad headaches. Drewe wants a baby, and she doesn’t understand why I don’t.”

  “You don’t want a child by your wife?”

  “Of course I do. But . . . I feel like taking that step while this other situation is unresolved would be the worst betrayal of all.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you’re married, right?”

  “I have a wife and a son. But you don’t want to extrapolate from my marital relationship.”

  “You’ll know what I mean, though. You know how when you first get married, even though you’re totally in love, there’s still this tacit sense that if you both decided it was a horrible mistake, you could just shake hands and walk away? I
know that sounds shallow, but my wife is as old-fashioned as they come, and I know she feels this too. Having that first child is the final step, you know? That’s the true marriage. It’s irrevocable. The two of you can never be truly separate again. You’re joined in the flesh.”

  “To wit, Erin and yourself.”

  “Jesus, don’t even talk about it like that.”

  “But this is why Drewe so passionately wants to have your child. She’s an intelligent woman. She senses a formless but disturbing threat. She knows a child will bind the two of you against that.”

  “I don’t think she senses the threat. Well, maybe, but not from Erin. No way. I’m sure of that.”

  “I think you would be making a mistake to underestimate your wife in any way.”

  “Hey, I know that better than anybody.”

  Lenz looks lost in thought.

  “Any great insights, Doctor?”

  “Well . . . unlike many psychiatric patients, you have a real problem. In the physical sense, I mean. That child is a living symbol of a secret relationship. You love the child, I’m sure. And the mother must—must—sometimes look at you and wish that you were the man raising her. In my opinion, the truth will eventually come out, regardless of what you do. You can choose the time, that’s all.”

  Lenz states his opinion with the conviction of an oracle, and the catharsis I’d begun to feel with the act of confession dissipates like smoke in a wind.

  “Let me change the subject for a moment,” he says.

  “Would you answer one question about Miles Turner?”

  “It sounds like he answered enough about me.”

  “When I asked him the worst thing he had ever done, he refused to answer. But he did say he would tell me the worst thing that ever happened to him. He said he once spent sixty seconds face-to-face with a pit viper.”

  I feel the skin on the back of my neck prickle.

  “That’s all he would say,” Lenz adds. “Can you supply any details?”

  “That old drug charge wasn’t enough to make him tell you?”

  Lenz looks genuinely surprised. “Is that what he told you?”