The Throat

Millhaven.

A month after he began working at Arkham under Brookner, he had met Brookner's daughter, April.

John thought that he might have fallen in love with April Brookner the first time he had seen her. She had wandered into the study to borrow a book while he was helping her father organize a collection of essays for publication. A tall blond athletic-looking girl in her early twenties, April had shaken his hand with surprising firmness and smiled into his eyes. 'I'm glad you're helping him with this muddle,' she had said. 'Left to his own devices, he'd still be getting mixed up between Vorstellung and vijnapti, not that he isn't anyhow.' The incongruity between her tennis-player looks and allusions to Brentano and Sanskrit philosophy surprised him, and he grinned. She and her father had exchanged a few good-natured insults, and then April wandered off toward her father's fiction shelves. She stretched up to take down a book. Ransom had not been able to take his eyes off her. 'I'm looking for a work of radically impure consciousness,' she said. 'What do you think, Raymond Chandler or William Burroughs?' The title of Ransom's dissertation had been The Concept of Pure Consciousness, and his grin grew wider. 'The Long Goodbye,' he said. 'Oh, I don't think that's impure enough,' she said. She turned over the book in her hands and cocked her head. 'But I guess I'll settle for it.' She showed him the title of the book she had already selected: it was The Long Goodbye. Then she dazzled him with a smile and left the room. 'Impure consciousness?' Ransom had asked the old man. 'Watch out for that one,' said the old man. 'I think her first word was virtuoso.' Ransom asked if she really knew the difference between Vorstellung and vijnapti. 'Not as well as I do,' Brookner had grumped. 'Why don't you come for dinner next Friday?' On Friday, Ransom had shown up embarrassingly overdressed in his best suit. He had still enjoyed dinner, yet April was so much younger than he that he could not imagine actually taking her out on a date. And he was not sure he actually knew what a 'date' was anymore, if he ever had. He didn't think it could mean the same thing to April Brookner that it did to him—she'd want him to play tennis, or spend half the night dancing. She looked as if she relished exertion. Ransom was stronger than he appeared to be (especially when he was wearing a banker's suit). He jogged, he swam in the college pool, but he did not dance or play tennis. His idea of a night out involved an interesting meal and a good bottle of wine: April looked as if she would follow a couple of hours of archery with a good fast run up one of the minor Alps. He asked her if she had liked the Chandler novel. 'What a poignant book,' she said. 'The hero makes one friend, and by the end he can't stand him. The loneliness is so brutal that the most emotional passages are either about violence or bars.' 'Deliver me from this young woman, Ransom,' Brookner said. 'She frightens me.' Ransom asked, 'Was virtuoso really her first word?' 'No,' April said. 'My first words were senile dementia.'

About a year ago, the memory of this remark had ceased to be funny.

There had been a courtship unlike any Ransom had ever experienced. April Brookner seemed to be constantly assessing him according to some impenetrably private standard. April was very sane, but her sanity transcended normal definitions. Ransom later learned that two years earlier she had backed out of marriage with a boy who had graduated from the University of Chicago with her because—in her words—'I realized that I hated all his metaphors. I couldn't live with someone who would never understand that metaphors are real.' She had recognized the loneliness in the Chandler novel because it echoed her own.

Her mother had died in April's fourth year, and she had grown up the brilliant daughter of a brilliant man. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Chicago, she moved back to Millhaven to do graduate work at the Millhaven branch of the University of Illinois. April never had any intention of teaching, but she wanted to be near her father. Ransom sometimes felt that she had married him because she couldn't think of anything else to do.

—Why me?, Ransom had asked her once.

—Oh, you were obviously the most interesting man around, she said. You didn't act like a jerk just because you thought I was beautiful. You always ordered just the right thing in Chinese restaurants, you were kind of experimental, and my jokes didn't make you mad. You didn't act like your mission in life was to correct me.

After they married, April left graduate school and took a job in a brokerage house. Ransom had thought she would quit within six months, but April astounded him by the speed and pleasure with which she had learned the business. Within eighteen months, she knew minute details of hundreds of companies—companies of all sizes. She knew how the division presidents got on with their boards; she knew which factories were falling apart; she knew about new patents and old grudges and unhappy stockholders. 'Really, it isn't any harder than learning everything there is to know about sixteenth-century English poetry,' she said. 'These guys come in drooling with greed, and all I have to do is show them how they can make a little more money. When I do that, they give me a chunk of their pension funds. And when that does well, they fall down and kiss my feet.'

'You have corrupted my daughter,' Brookner said to him once. 'Now she is a money machine. The only consolation is that I will not have to spend my declining years in a room with a neon sign flashing outside the window.'

'It's just a game to April,' Ransom had said to him. 'She says her real master is Jacques Derrida.'

'I spawned a postmodern capitalist,' Brookner said. 'You understand, at Arkham it is an embarrassment suddenly to possess a great deal of money.'

The marriage settled into a busy but peaceful partnership. April told him that she was the world's only ironic Yuppie— when she was thirty-five, she was going to quit to have a baby, manage their own investments, learn to be a great cook, and keep up her elaborate research projects into local history. Ransom had wondered if April would ever really leave her job, baby or not. Certainly none of her customers wanted her to abandon them. The Millhaven financial community had given her their annual Association Award at a dinner April had privately ridiculed, and the Ledger had run a photograph of the two of them smiling a little shamefacedly as April cradled the huge cup on which her name was to be inscribed.

Ransom would never know if April would have left her job. Five days after April had won the hideous cup, someone had stabbed her, beaten her, and left her for dead.

He still lived in the duplex he and April had rented when they were first married. Twenty-one Ely Place was three blocks north of Berlin Avenue, a long walk from Shady Mount, but close to the UI-M campus, where April had once been enrolled, and only a ten-minute drive to Millhaven's downtown, where he and April had both had their offices. April's money had allowed them to buy the building and convert it into a single-family house. Now Ransom had a book-lined office on the third floor, April an office filled with glittering computers, stacks of annual reports, and a fax machine that continued to disgorge papers; the second floor had been converted into a giant master bedroom and a smaller guest room, both with bathrooms; the ground floor contained the living room, dining room, and kitchen.

5

'How is your father-in-law handling all this?'

'Alan doesn't really know what happened to April.' Ransom hesitated. 'He, ah, he's changed quite a bit over the past year or so.' He paused again and frowned at the stack of books on his coffee table. All of them were about Vietnam—Fields of Fire, The Thirteenth Valley, 365 Days, The Short Timers, The Things They Carried. 'I'll make some coffee,' he said.

He went into the kitchen, and I began to take in, with admiration and even a little envy, the house Ransom and his wife had made together. Extraordinary paintings, paintings I could not quite place, covered the wall opposite the long couch that was my vantage point. I closed my eyes. A few minutes later, the clatter of the tray against the table awakened me. Ransom did not notice that I had dozed off.

'I want an explanation,' he said. 'I want to know what happened to my wife.'

'And you don't trust the police,' I said.