All Things Cease to Appear

  Well, I don’t.

  That’s not the impression I get. You just won’t admit it.

  I just said I don’t, and I mean it.

  She turned away to grab her clothes but he pulled her back, hard.

  You pulling away like this just makes me want you more.

  He held her down; he was a cannibal, eating her, biting and prodding, consuming her.

  He told her she’d conjured the monster inside him. This is your doing, he said. He made it all her fault.

  —

  HIS WIFE WORE Chanel No 5, same as her dad’s girlfriend, but Portia was racy and wore high boots and short skirts and had this curly red hair she’d tie up in scarves. Portia was a real New Yorker and Catherine Clare was a hick from upstate. My wife is from modest circumstances, was how George put it. Her getting a full scholarship to college was a big deal. She’d done better than him in school. That doesn’t mean smarter, he was quick to point out, then admitted, as if being generous, that his wife could have done much more with her life if he hadn’t gotten her pregnant. Things sort of changed when we got married.

  Weirdly, Willis admired her for sticking it out with him for the sake of their kid. Her parents hadn’t done that. You had to admire a person who could make a decision even if it was for somebody else’s benefit, unlike her own mother, who couldn’t make decisions about anything and would stew over certain choices, only to change her mind at the last minute, even if it was something dumb like taking a pottery class.

  Back home, when her parents were still together, her father usually slept in his study when he was working on a case. Often, very late at night, she’d hear the sound of the cassette player, her father listening to his clients’ statements as he prepared his arguments. They were her strange little bedtime stories. The voices of the bad people, she often thought, putting her to sleep at night.

  There were things she noticed about these statements, how they spoke and the stories they told. There were certain consistencies. Phrases repeated. Particular manners of speech.

  Her father had told her that a true sociopath has the ability to convince himself that he’s innocent. So everything that comes out of his mouth rings true to him, and usually to everyone else. They separate themselves from the event. Like they’d never been there. Like it never even happened.

  They get so good at it they can pass a lie-detector test, her father had said.

  Although those results weren’t admissible in their state anyway, it still made the prosecutors uneasy—a soft spot in an otherwise muscular case.

  These people—people like George—were predatory. They had skills of perception that regular people lacked. Maybe because, unlike most people, they knew what they needed and weren’t afraid to admit it. Survival skills. So they could go out and do it again.

  —

  THESE MORNINGS IN San Francisco, she goes to the library to keep up with the case, to know where he is, to work on feeling safe. She reads the articles on microfiche and every day there’s something new. Not just details of the investigation, but things about George and Franny. They were living with his parents. He was working for his father in one of the furniture stores. There was a quote of him saying, Parenting was kind of my wife’s job before and now it’s mine. It’s something I think I owe her.

  She wonders bitterly what Catherine would think of his assertion that mothering had been kind of her job and that he thinks he owes her, as if he’s not really sure. And why does he owe her in the first place? What does he owe her for?

  His tentative sentiment gives her the chills.

  Sickened, she almost doesn’t finish the article, but then something at the bottom catches her eye, a surname she recognizes. Hers.

  On impulse, she goes outside and finds a newsstand and gets some quarters to make the call from a phone booth on the corner. She knows her father’s office number by heart and dials it now, determined to warn him about George Clare and tell him what she knows. Taking his case was a mistake—a travesty. But when the switchboard picks up she’s promptly put on hold and kept waiting and waiting, and in these moments of concentrated anticipation she is gripped with a sense of terror as a realization takes shape in her mind.

  Good afternoon, Todd Howell’s office, a woman says. Hello? Is anyone on the line?

  She hangs up.

  Tears fill her eyes with such force that she’s momentarily blinded as the full picture of what George has done finally sinks in.

  She was just some girl, she imagines him telling her father. Some girl from the inn. For him it was a regrettable fling—but the girl became obsessed and wanted him to leave his wife, his child. A real mess. A girl with problems, serious issues. She’d flunked out of school. Once, she even tried to jump off a building. He’d tried to end it but she simply wouldn’t let go. Her father would only have to establish that this unstable, pathetic wreck of a girl might have, in a jealous rage, done this awful thing to poor innocent Catherine. Worse, once her father discovered it was her, should that regrettable disclosure come to pass, he’d be obligated to hand the case over to one of his partners. Even if she revealed all the sick and fucked-up things about George, they could, based on her psychiatric history, easily persuade a jury that she was making it up. They’d call in her shrink as an expert witness, who’d expose her mother’s gayness, her father’s girlfriend—it would be downright ugly. Even with no real evidence against her, their job would be done and George would seem as guileless as a choirboy.

  A week later, she’s wiping down the counter when a man comes into the restaurant. He sits down and drinks a cup of coffee and orders a piece of pie with a slice of cheese on top. She’s seen his type before, hanging around her father’s office, only this guy’s even sleazier. Thank you, Willis, he says pointedly, and walks out. She’s thrown a minute until she remembers her name tag. He’s left his money on the counter, no tip but something else, a manila envelope bound with a red string. It’s slow, so she asks for a break and goes outside, lights a cigarette, sits down on the old metal chair, opens the envelope and slides out the photographs. They’re of her and George having sex, and show a lot. There’s a note attached in George’s twiggy handwriting: Don’t make me send these to Daddy, is all it says.

  12

  SHE GETS MOODY, distracted. Burns her poetry in the kitchen sink. Works from noon to closing at the restaurant and comes home stinking of fried fish and grease, slippery with sweat. He has to do everything, play in the band, fix the meals, haul their dirty clothes down to the Laundromat. She hardly talks to him, just skulks around the apartment holding a drink and pushes him away in bed.

  What’s wrong with you?

  Nothing.

  Then, lying in bed one night under the fluid shadows of passing trolleys, she tells him about George Clare. I got caught up in something, she says. I couldn’t get out of it. He had this power over me.

  He tries to listen carefully, to be open to her, but her confession only makes him angry. He turns away from her.

  She presses her naked body against his back and cries. I’m better now, she tells him. I’m over it.

  You lied, he says in the darkness.

  I know, I’m sorry. I was afraid. I hated myself.

  That’s not why.

  I don’t know why, she says. I honestly don’t.

  He turns to look at her, her wet, dark eyes, her lips, and suddenly feels nothing.

  I’m moving back to L.A., she tells him. I’m going back to school. They said I can come back if I do an extra semester.

  That’s good. You should.

  What about you?

  I’m sure I’ll think of something.

  When will you hear from Berklee?

  Soon, he says. May, I think.

  Will you go? If you get in, I mean.

  He nods. I have to see.

  Boston’s nice. I want to go to law school there. I want to study law, she blurts. To put people like him away.

  You’ll make a good lawyer, he says, and
means it.

  You’re going to be famous.

  I don’t care about that. I just want to play.

  He sits up on the side of the bed and lights a cigarette. He doesn’t want her to see his face.

  She puts her hand on his back. I’m sorry, Eddy. I never meant to hurt you.

  People always say that.

  But I really mean it.

  You broke my heart. Just so you know.

  It’s not broken, she says. It’s broken in.

  He looks at her and she smiles in that crooked way of hers and suddenly being mad seems pointless. She’s just a girl trying to grow up, he thinks. He still loves her, always will. He holds her in his arms and they lie awake all night long, listening to the songs of the city, the walls alive with shadows, knowing that, come morning, she’ll be gone.

  A Scholarly Temperament

  AT FIRST there’s the continual assault of cameras, the abrupt contortions on strangers’ faces when they realize who he is. He rarely leaves the house. He spends whole days up in his room, staring out at the Sound. He feels trapped inside the wrong life, where even escape offers no peace, no deliverance.

  In May, he gets the interview. The woman’s name is Sara Arnell. They have lunch in the student union, in an area with white tablecloths designated for faculty. She seems young to run the department, he thinks, and refreshingly unassuming. She tells him she’s an ex-nun. He can see this history in her wan, hermetic face, her muscular calves, her peasant hands. A genuine do-gooder, she’d been a missionary for years in Africa.

  I went where I was needed. I did what I could. I suppose, when it comes to people in trouble, I’m too easily persuaded to help.

  He only looks at her.

  Charitable acts, she clarifies. They’re my weakness.

  A kindred spirit, he thinks.

  After lunch she looks again at his CV, as if to remind herself of his credentials. You’re clearly overqualified. Compared with Saginaw, our students are, well, let’s say, variously equipped. We get people of all ages here, all backgrounds.

  Tell me, she says gently. What made you leave Saginaw?

  My wife, he says. He looks off toward the busy street, the blur of afternoon traffic. She died unexpectedly. It was a tragedy. He meets her hazel eyes; she has the face of St. Thérèse.

  She frowns with compassion. I’m sorry for your loss.

  I appreciate that, Sara.

  She watches him, considering, then seems to decide something. We have an opening for a visiting lecturer in the fall. But I’ll warn you, we don’t pay much. This is a community college. Things are a bit different around here.

  As I said, I’m eager to get back to work.

  Well, then, consider yourself hired.

  They shake hands and she says she’ll be in touch. As he is leaving the student union, it occurs to him how good it is to be back on a campus, with its structure and energy. The bright, earnest faces of the students. Their faith in the possibility of a better world. He has truly missed it.

  Heading back to his car, walking the long black path to the acre-sized parking lot, he is stirred by a bitter nostalgia and almost weeps.

  —

  LATER, at dinner, he tells his parents the news. They are old now, burdened. This thing with him has taken its toll. Perhaps it is inevitable that they should feel such guilt. Now it is death they fear most. Everything has changed—even the food on the table lacks flavor. They chew for the sake of swallowing and are glad for their cigarettes at the end of the meal. The taste of death, at least, is honest.

  When do you start? his father says.

  Right after they’d moved in, his father had put him to work at the store. It was, George knew, a gesture of good faith, his father showing George—and the rest of the community—that he trusted him. Mornings, they rode in together. George knew it was somewhat embarrassing for him—the other employees’ awkwardness, the slight elevation of their voices, their patronizing appeals for his favor. You can have this seat, or No, it’s all yours, I was just leaving!

  Of course, he and his father didn’t discuss it. They tried to pretend everything was the same.

  His mother looked after Franny, which was less than ideal. She had the patience of a mosquito, her reactions often startling Franny into tears.

  With him it’s her suspicion, her disdain. She lurks in his presence, following him around the house. She goes through his things when he’s out. Searches his pockets when she does his wash, laying out the coins, matchbooks, toothpicks she finds like evidence, souvenirs of deception.

  Working summers back in high school, overseeing the showroom floor, he’d wander through the designer rooms when it was slow. Urban Oasis was his favorite: two black leather couches, a glass coffee table, a hi-fi stereo cabinet. He would sit there dreaming up a life in that scenario, the music he’d play, the women writhing on the leather cushions in G-strings.

  As it turned out, retail did not come naturally to George. His father would just look at him: Can you possibly be this stupid? They’d been bowled over when he got into Williams. It was the tennis, they all knew—not his intelligence. As an undergraduate, he was reclusive and unexceptional. With the deliberate finesse of a cardsharp, his art-history professor told him that he lacked a scholarly temperament and should consider another career. In defiance, perhaps, he went on to graduate school and suffered through his dissertation, attempting to disprove another devoted critic, the notorious asshole Warren Shelby. None of it had actually made a difference. He’d ended up teaching at a second-rate college.

  Life is full of surprises, that’s for sure, his mother concluded one night, sitting at the kitchen table with her drink and cigarette, ruminating over her spoiled life. Who would’ve guessed we’d have come to this?

  He is not to be trusted, that’s what people think. Even the checker at the market, how she avoids his eyes. The librarian. The frigging gas-station attendant. After a few months at the store, his father had to sit him down. People don’t want you showing them around, he told him. It’s just not working out, son.

  He understood, of course he did.

  You know how people are, his father said. Suspicion is more than enough for them. They don’t need to know for sure.

  The Free Wind

  NOTHING STAYED the same in this town after they left.

  The house just sat there. Year after year, the paint Eddy Hale had so carefully applied peeled away. The clapboards went wobbly, the porch floor buckled. Lilacs pressed up against the windows, gangly and fragrant as streetwalkers. The lawn sprawled with weeds. Occasionally, she’d drive over just to see the place, and would gaze up at those awful black windows, imagining that poor woman looking down at her.

  The people of this town were hard on Travis. Never forgave him. But he stayed with it, waiting for George Clare to slip up and tracking his whereabouts from a telescopic distance, as though he was a calamitous weather system whose onslaught no one could survive. He was living in Branford, Connecticut, in an apartment complex near the water, and working at a community college. Travis even knew about the women he found, and there were always women. Mostly of a certain type, coaxed out of bars and into cheap motels.

  As convinced as Travis was of Clare’s guilt, there was never enough hard evidence to indict him. Her husband’s certainty was frustrated by the powerful protections of the law and it flat wore him out. You can’t convince a jury without evidence, he would say, shaking his head. I got nothing but hearsay.

  She watched his face shut down like the circuits were being pulled one by one by one—the bad things he saw in people, the bad things they did, the criminals he couldn’t stop, the people he hadn’t saved. He thought of Catherine Clare daily, and at night he’d lie awake thinking about her, too. Every February, on the anniversary of the murder, he’d pull out that old file and go through it all over again. There must be something here, he’d say. Something I missed.

  It doesn’t matter anymore.

  It does to me. I
guess I’m the only one.

  It’s not your fault.

  Oh, but it is. I take full responsibility.

  Always the same conversation. The same flat-footed defeat. His presumed failure had built a prison around him. Nobody could come in. Not even her.

  Eventually, he stopped trying. Years went by and she witnessed his dedicated transformation, a self-induced oblivion of saturated fats, cigarettes and Wild Turkey. He’d come home from work and plow into bed. His cigarette would wake her in the morning. Their relationship got whittled down to perfunctory remarks in passing, things like who was going to pick up the milk. Weekends, he’d spend all his time at the firing range, practicing, then come home and start drinking and pass out on the couch, watching reruns of All in the Family.

  —

  FIVE YEARS AFTER the murder, on a warm summer evening, Mary got a call at her office. The voice on the other end sounded familiar, but at first she couldn’t place it. Hello, Mary, he said. And then it came to her. It was George Clare.

  Her taking the listing had been the last straw for Travis—the thing that did them in.

  I don’t see how you can do anything for that man, he said.

  I’m not doing it for him. I’m doing it for Franny.

  She probably doesn’t even remember her.

  You don’t forget your own mother, I don’t care what you say.

  The argument escalated into an emasculating treatise on money and the lack thereof and how much good the commission, any commission, would do them.

  It’s just another house, she told him.

  No, it is not just another house. That’s when he left the room.

  Despite her considerable efforts, the house never sold. Every time she showed it she got the same feeling in her bones, a deep, rattling chill, as if someone had opened up her head and poured in a pitcher of ice water. Each year, around Thanksgiving, inspired by a bitter nostalgia, she’d advertise the place in Antique Homes. Shouldered by all those pretty autumn leaves, with mums and pumpkins on the front porch, the house almost looked inviting. There were the sugar-white barns, the sun glinting off the windows of the cupola, the old copper weathervane. The ad always brought in calls. At first her clients always seemed interested, taking in the land and the pond and the barns, just as the Clares had done, but once they wandered through the suffocating gloom of the darkened rooms they’d hurry back outside.