“Kimmer, come on. Look at the facts. Freeman Bishop is dead-”
“The police say it was drugs-”
“And Colin Scott impersonated an FBI agent to get information on the Judge, and now he’s dead-”
“It was an accident!” So much for soft.
“An accident while he was following me. Following us.”
“Well, it was still an accident. He got drunk and he drowned and he’s dead now, okay? So you can drop it.”
“And you don’t think we should be a little bit worried?”
The wrong thing to say. Absolutely wrong. I know it at once. I feel like a chess player who has just advanced his knight, only to notice, an instant too late, that his queen is about to fall.
“No, Misha. No, I’m not worried. Why should I be worried? Because I’m married to a man who has gone off the deep end? Whose sister has turned into some kind of… of conspiracy theorist? A man who now thinks that the solution to all his problems lies in flying up to Aspen to drop in on a thug who murdered his wife? Inviting that thug into our life? No, Misha, no, I am most certainly not worried. There is nothing to be worried about.”
I try to mollify her. “Kimmer, please. The Judge was my father.”
“And I’m your wife! Remember?” She is holding on to the sides of the doorway as though worried that her anger might blow her away.
“Yes, but-”
“Yes, but! You’re the one who always talks about loyalty. Well, be loyal to me for once! I don’t mean loyal like never even looking hard at another woman so you can feel holier than thou. Than me. I mean loyal like you’re doing something for me. Something that makes a difference.”
“I’ve done plenty for you,” I tell her in the calmest tone I can manage. I like to think I have developed an immunity to my wife’s taunts, but her words sting.
“The stuff you do for me is the stuff you want, not the stuff I want.”
I am trying to remember how close I felt to Kimmer last night as I held her in my arms, stroking her back, listening to her apologize before she fell asleep.
Last night. Last year. Last decade. All equally vanished.
“Kimmer, if-”
“And it’s not like I’ve never done anything for you!”
As my wife’s eyes continue to flame, I am astonished by her passion, magnified in the cramped space of the kitchen. Standing there in her bathrobe, her Afro awry, Kimmer remains the most desirable woman I have ever known, yet I have the eerie sense that if I make a move she doesn’t like she will knock me down. This fury has been percolating ever since my return from the Vineyard. Despite the news about Marc Hadley, Kimmer seems to think her chances of appointment are slipping away. I do not know exactly why she believes this; I do know she blames me for it. As she blames me for much else. I have heard the litany a hundred times, a hundred different tales about how Talcott Garland ruined her life. How she married me to please her parents when there were far more exciting men interested in her. How she left her lively practice with one of Washington’s most prestigious firms to follow me to this deadly-dull New England town. How most of our acquaintances (we have few friends here, Kimmer will note accusingly) are university types who look down their noses at her because she isn’t one of them. How she easily earned a partnership at an unimportant law firm that nobody has ever heard of. How she had a baby to make her husband happy without really thinking about what she was getting into and is now stuck in a bad marriage because of it. How her life ever since has been a slow race between boredom and insanity. Kimmer made all the choices. But I take all the blame.
“I’m sorry,” I say, raising my hands to make peace.
“Misha, please. For my sake. For the sake of our marriage. Our son. Promise me you will not invite that man into our life. That you won’t visit him. Or call him.”
And I discern something else, a version of the same screechy timbre I detected in Jack Ziegler’s voice in the cemetery, as unexpected now as it was then: Kimmer is afraid. Not the physical fear of the soul for its fleeting mortal life, nor the desperate protectiveness of mother for child. No, this is her career fear. She is at the edge of what she has always wanted, and does not want Uncle Jack to spoil it for her-and how can I blame her?
I decide that there is no good reason to feed her fear. Not just now.
“Okay, darling. Okay. I’ll stay away from Uncle Jack. I won’t do anything to… to cause embarrassment. But… well…”
“You’re not going to give up looking. Is that what you were going to say?”
“You have to understand, darling.”
“Oh, I do, I do.” Her smile is warm again. She comes around the counter and hugs me from behind. We have returned to last night’s intimacy, just like that. “But no Jack Ziegler.”
“No Jack Ziegler.”
“Thanks, honey.” Kissing me again, grinning. She hops up to clear the table. I tell her I will do it. She does not object. We talk as though we have no conflict. We have grown quite skillful at pretending that there are no issues between us. So we talk of other things. We decide not to drag Bentley off to his Montessori school today. We will let him sleep late, for once, since I will be at home anyway. She reminds me that we are due for dinner tomorrow night at the home of one of her partners and asks me to confirm the sitter, a Japanese American teen from the next block who enthralls Bentley by playing her flute. I ask her in return if she will swing by the post office on the way in, to drop off two postal chess cards that I finished last night, both of which must be postmarked today. (Each player has three days per move.) When we have completed all the complex negotiations of a typical morning in a two-career family, Kimmer disappears to dress for work. She is back twenty minutes later in a dark chalk- striped suit and blue silk blouse, kisses me again, this time on the cheek, and is off, leaving, as always, promptly at eight-fifteen.
I watch through the bay window in the living room as the gleaming white BMW hurries off along Hobby Road, swallowed almost at once in the sheets of rain. I put both hands in front of me and lean on the glass. Woody Allen once wrote something, tongue firmly in cheek, about loving the rain because it washes memories away, but I still remember the photograph of Freeman Bishop’s bloody hand. I still remember the face of Special Agent McDermott glaring at me from the pages of the Vineyard Gazette. I see him on a boat with his buddy Foreman, and some disagreement, and McDermott/Scott tossed overboard. I see my father, arguing with a cautious Colin Scott a quarter-century ago, trying to convince him to kill the man who killed his daughter.
Yet, in the fresh light of day, even a day as rainy as this one, the images are a lot less scary. Not as scary, for instance, as the thought that one day my wife will drive off down Hobby Road and decide to keep on going.
Gazing out at the empty street, I remember, from a long-ago college course, a snippet from Tadeusz Rozewicz, something about a poet being someone who tries to leave and is unable to leave.
That is my wife: Kimmer the poet. Only nowadays she keeps all the best lines to herself.
Or shares them with somebody else.
CHAPTER 39
Mallory Corcoran calls just past ten with the news that Conan Deveaux has decided to plead guilty to a single count of second-degree murder in the death of Freeman Bishop. He and his lawyer looked at the evidence and decided the stack was too high. Under the plea agreement, Conan will escape the needle, but he will remain in prison for the rest of his life. “He’s just nineteen,” Uncle Mal adds gruffly, “so that’s likely to be a very long time.”
“So he did it,” I whisper, wonderingly. I am at the kitchen counter, where I have been leafing through Chess Life while making hot chocolate for Bentley. How could I have misunderstood Maxine’s hint so badly? A mistake. Could she have meant something else?
