existed. I was supposed to get down on my knees and weep for the girl, I suppose.
'I did weep, off and on for a couple of weeks. Then I couldn't stand it any longer. I called the girl's father and told him about Taps. He disappeared within a day of two, and I blamed myself for his suicide. I decided I would never speak out about anything.'
Again she seemed to be listening to her own words. Their meaning seeped into her eyes and spread like darkness. 'Do you think my husband killed Mr. Fablon and Mrs. Fablon?'
'We'll have to ask him, Bess.'
'You think he did, don't you?'
Even as she asked the question, she was nodding dolefully. 'Her mother phoned here the other night.'
'Which night?'
'Monday. Wasn't that the night she was shot?'
'You know it was. What did she say?'
'She asked for Taps, and he took the call in the house. I didn't have chance to listen. Anyway, it didn't amount to anything. He said he'd talk to her, and went out.'
'He left the house?'
'Yes.'
'What time?'
'It must have been quite late. I was on my way to bed. I was asleep when he came in.'
'Why didn't you tell me this before?'
'I wanted to, yesterday morning. You didn't give me a chance.'
Her eyes were wide and blind, like a statue's.
'Was anything else said on the phone this morning?'
'He said he loved her, that he had always loved her and always would. I said something into the phone then. It was a dirty word: it just came out. It seemed so terrible to me that he could speak like that to another woman with our three children sleeping in the house.
'I went out to the study in my nightgown. It was the first time I'd gone to him since our little one was conceived - our last happy time.'
She paused, listening, as if the three-year-old had cried out in his sleep. But the house was so quiet I could hear water dripping in the kitchen sink. 'Since then our life has been like camping on ice, on lake ice. I did that once with Daddy in Wisconsin. You find yourself thinking of the ice as solid ground, though you know there's deep dark water underneath.'
She looked down at the worn rug under her feet, as if there were monsters swimming just below it. 'I suppose in a way I was collaborating with them, wasn't I? I don't know why I did it, or why I felt as I did. It was my marriage, and she was breaking it up, but somehow I felt out of it. I was just a member of the wedding. I felt as if it wasn't my life. My life hasn't even started.'
We sat and listened to the dripping silence. 'You were going to tell me what happened when you went out to the study early this morning.'
She shrugged. 'I hate to think about it. Taps was sitting at his desk with a gun in his hand. He looked so thin and sharp-nosed, the way people look when they're going to die. I was afraid he was going to shoot himself, and I went to him and asked him for the gun. It was almost an exact reversal of what happened the night that little one was conceived. And it was the same gun.'
'I don't understand.'
She said: 'I bought the gun to kill myself with four years ago. It was a secondhand revolver I found in a pawnshop. Taps had been out night after night with the girl, pretending to be tutoring, and I just couldn't stand it any longer. I decided to destroy all three of us.'
'With the gun?'
'The gun was just for myself. Before I used it I called Mrs. Fablon and told her what I was going to do and why. She'd known of the affair, of course, but she didn't know who the man was. She'd assumed that Taps was merely Ginny's tutor, a kind of fatherly figure in the background.
'Anyway, she got in touch with Taps wherever he was and he rushed home and took the gun away from me. I was glad. I didn't want to use it. I even managed to convince myself that Taps loved me. But all he had in mind was avoiding a scandal - another scandal.
'Mrs. Fablon didn't want one, either. She made Ginny drop out of college and go to work for some clinic near the hospital. For a while I thought that the affair was over. I was pregnant again, with our third child, and Taps would never leave me, he promised he wouldn't. He said he threw my suicide gun in the ocean.
'But he was lying. He'd kept it all these years. When I tried to take it away from him this morning, he turned it on me. He said I deserved to die for using a filthy word in Ginny's hearing. She was absolutely pure and beautiful, he said. But I was a filthy toad.
'I took off my nightgown, I don't know exactly why, I just wanted him to see me. He said my body looked like a man's face, a long lugubrious face with pink accusing eyes and a noseless nose like a congenital syphilitic and a silly little beard.'
Her hands moved from her breast to the region of her navel, then lower to the center of her body.
'He ordered me out and said he'd shoot me if I ever showed myself in his private room again. I went back into the house. The children were still sleeping. It wasn't light yet. I sat and watched it grow light. Some time after dawn I heard him go out and drive away in the Fiat. I got the children off to school and then I started cleaning. I've been cleaning ever since.'
'You say he isn't at the college?'
'No. The Dean's office called this morning to see if he was ill. I said he was.'
'Did he take the revolver with him?'
'I don't know. I haven't been in the study, and I don't intend to go in. It will have to stay dirty.'
I made a quick search of the study. No gun. I did find in a desk drawer about twenty versions of the opening page of Tappinger's 'book' about French influences on Stephen Crane. The most recent version, which Tappinger had been working on when I first came here on Monday, was lying on top of the desk.
'Stephen Crane,' it began, 'lived like a god in the adamantine city of his mind. Where did he find the prototype of that city? In Athens the marmoreal exemplar of the West, or in the supernal blueprint which Augustine bequeathed to us in his Civitas Dei? Or was it in Paris the City of Art? Perchance he looked on his whore's body in the massive cold pity of Manet's Olympe. Perchance the luminous city of his mind was delved from the mud of Cora's loins.'
It sounded like gibberish to me. And it suggested that Tappinger was breaking up, and had been breaking up when I first walked in on him.
Besides the hopeless manuscript lay a rough draft of the five questions he had devised for Martel:
1. Who responsible for Les Liaisons old and new?
2. `Hypocrite lecteur'
3. Who believed Dreyfus guilty?
4. Where Descartes put soul? (pineal gland).
5. Who got jean Genet out of jail?
Seeing the questions as they had occurred to Tappinger, I realized their personal significance. He had used them, perhaps unconsciously, to speak of the things that were driving him close to the edge: a dangerous sexual liaison, hypocrisy, guilt and imprisonment, the human soul trapped in a gland.
If the questions had seemed oddly one-sided to me, it was because they were answers, too, forced out in a kind of code by Tappinger's moral and emotional conflict. I recalled with a slight shock that the answer to the fifth question had been Sartre, and wondered if, in Tappinger's queer complex academic code, it referred to the night at the play seven years before.
34
THE ABSENCE of the gun probably meant that Tappinger was carrying it. I went outside and got my own gun and harness out of the trunk of my car. Because there were children in the street, I retreated into the house to put the harness on.
'You're going to kill him,' Bess said. She looked widowed already.
