All the Things You Are Page 19

  And what about the fifth investor? On top of Gene, and Ralph, and Dave, and Danny? Claire Bradberry? There was no way that could be Claire herself. What could it have been though? Some kind of cruel private joke? Whoever invested under that name must have known the truth about Danny and Claire. It all pointed to Gene.

  And then there was the thing Dee St Clair had told him, back when they had their … what would you call it, less than an affair, little more than a fling. That was what he called it, he knew Dee had felt differently, but that was just the way it went sometimes between two people. Would he have taken it further if Claire hadn’t called from Chicago and asked him to take her back? It’s not a question he can answer, or even contemplate. He simply can’t imagine not spending his life with Claire. It had always been a bit awkward between Danny and Dee after that, but Dee had never said anything to Claire, and neither had he.

  On the other hand, Claire had never said anything about her time with that guy Casey, that fucking guy, Jesus, how long has it been back on between them? Was it just a fling, a one-time thing, or has she been missing him, loving him, all this time? He knows the marriage had been light on thrills for a while, but it had never collapsed into coldness, let alone hostility. Just a certain distance now and then, the silences longer than they used to be, the flame guttering maybe, but never doused completely. Passion was still there. They’d had sex the night before the barbecue, for fuck’s sake, and not just dutiful let’s-get-it-done-because-we’re-married sex; they had fucked like horny teenagers – better than that, horny teenagers who knew what they were doing.

  Claire’s trip to Chicago. He knew it was a crucial week for her. He had encouraged her to go since way back. She had avoided the site of her so-called failure for fifteen years until it loomed so large it had become an obsession; any time the city was mentioned on TV or the radio, he’d steal a look at her to gauge how she was taking it. He’d think twice even of renting a DVD or buying her a novel set there, in case it sent her into days of dreaminess and melancholy. It got so he would lose his patience with it all; what kind of narcissist thinks an entire city exists just to hold a personal meaning for her? Unless of course what she had been mourning (for that is what it seemed like to him, a deeply held, impenetrable grief he could neither pierce nor alleviate) was not so much the collapse of her theatrical career as the break-up of her relationship with Paul Casey. That, coupled with the integrity of a woman who would never dream of cheating on her husband, for Claire was straight about those things, for all her drama. She had not gone back because she didn’t want to be tempted, and was realistic enough to suspect she would be. Lead us not into temptation. What had Jonathan Glatt said? They didn’t make that prayer up without a reason. And – savor the irony – Danny had, not just persuaded her, he had practically goaded her into making the trip. He had led her into temptation. Had she fallen?

  He had missed her desperately. He hadn’t wanted to discuss Ralph’s visit the night of the barbecue because Claire was so hyped about her trip, told her it was just some Halloween drunk who’d got lost in the Arboretum. But that night, after she left, and the next morning, hungover and lonely, the fear began to kick in. And then someone sent him an email with a link to a Facebook page. Claire’s Facebook page. Even though she claimed to despise Facebook. There was nothing incriminating on the page itself. She was ‘friends’ with Paul Casey, but she was friends with a whole bunch of people. Although not Brogan’s, he noticed: the bar had what he considered a deeply tedious Facebook page full of chirpy announcements about specials and cocktail recipes and so forth, Danny couldn’t see the need for it, business hadn’t been dwindling. But it seemed to keep the younger staff amused, and committed. Shouldn’t Claire have been friends with the business that put food on her table and clothes on her back? The shrill petulance of the thought had embarrassed him then, and embarrassed him still.

  Then a second email arrived. Attached was a screenshot of explicit Facebook messages between Claire and Paul Casey, messages that left little to the imagination. He tried hard to see them as flirtation, but the fact was, she had been making all the running. She was offering herself to him. It was hard to see it any other way.

  That’s what drove him to Chicago on her trail.

  He had rung her room, had got the room number by insisting the room was, he can’t remember now, maybe 790, repeating her address; he had tried this twice or three times with different receptionists until one of them had said, ‘No, Miss Taylor is in Room 435’. He remembers the thrill he felt when he got the room number, like he was a private detective on a case, and then the foolishness that followed: what the hell did he think he was doing?

  The Allegro was a mid-price tourist place that catered to weekend visitors and groups in town for theater and shopping trips. He rode the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the corridor past Room 435. It was six-thirty in the evening. Maybe she would be there, changing before going out for the evening. He thought about knocking on the door, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so, in case she was in there doing something else. Back by the elevators, there was a kind of lounge area in a recess by a window with a yucca tree and a couch and some magazines. As he sat there pretending to read the Tribune and surveying in what he hoped was a casual way everyone who entered or exited the elevator, his feeling of foolishness intensified.

  He had never been jealous before, had always considered it an absurd, undignified, unmanly emotion. If your lover loved someone else, let her go, he reasoned, and had said as much to the countless lovelorn bar staff in Brogan’s over the years. All of which amounted to this: he had never felt jealousy before, and was imaginatively incapable of understanding it. For when jealousy came, its venom was fast-acting and mind-altering, and the fear attendant on it (jealousy being fear plugged into the mains) – the fear of rejection, of betrayal, of humiliation – those fears cut deep and reach way back, back to childhood, to every moment he felt unloved, passed over, excluded. Danny couldn’t bear to feel this way, like a neglected child, and yet he seemed powerless to do anything about it.

  After an hour, he rode down to the lobby. It was Tuesday night, and his plan was to position himself at a table in full view of the door – Claire might have brought her key with her, and so watching reception wouldn’t be enough. The problem was, the entrance was a floor below reception, which was where the bar was situated. He began to feel like he was being watched after spending ten minutes assessing various tables for their views, so he left the hotel and decamped to the bar across the street. He found a stool by the window. You could see the door clearly, although taxis and buses sometimes obscured it. This was probably as good as it was going to get. He sat there from about seven forty-five, first drinking coffe, then eating a burger and fries, not as good as Brogan’s but not bad at all. The food revived his spirits; the coffee gave him the jitters. Around ten, he cracked and ordered a double Woodford, water back with a Honkers Pale to chase. The Honkers was a mistake, or at least, the second was, as it meant he needed a trip to the bathroom. He held out as long as he could. When he got back to his perch, it was twelve-forty, and three taxis were pulling away across the street, and he saw a flash of auburn hair in the revolving door of the Allegro Hotel, arm in arm with a dark-haired guy. He wasn’t certain it was Claire, she moved so quickly, but he wasn’t certain it was not. And if it turned out to be a false alarm, he would take it as a sign and call it a night.

  He took the same route as before, wondering if he could smell Claire’s scent – Cristalle by Chanel – in the elevator, praying she was alone, persuading himself there’s nothing to worry about. He slowed down as he approached Room 435. Should he knock on the door? He could hear a TV, sounded like an old movie. The hotel walls were like cardboard. The TV was coming from 435, Joan Crawford, it sounded like, one of the old Warner Brothers ones, Possessed, or The Damned Don’t Cry, that’s totally what Claire would be watching, they’re both addicted to old black-and-white movies. Better living through
TMC. Except now, it was as if they were trapped in the middle of one. He was right outside the door, a big blast of Franz Waxman strings shrieking, his hand poised to knock.

  But something clicked inside his head, and he didn’t knock. He breathed deep, and bit his lip, and turned and walked away. He rode the elevator down to the lobby, crossed the street and ordered a Woodfords in the bar he had spent the evening in. He gazed across the gantry at the range of bottles and taps and drank his whiskey and knew he’d had a narrow escape.

  Because what were the alternatives? If she was with somebody, with Casey, what could he have achieved by walking in on them? If she wasn’t, what kind of creepy, stalking, controlling motherfucker would he have been? He didn’t knock because he wanted to trust his wife. And because all he got to be in charge of were his own actions. If she felt she needed something else, something she’d had before, well maybe that was up to her. Maybe she had a right to cheat. Maybe the marriage had never had a chance in the first place; maybe it was doomed from the day of the fire, doomed because of what he had done. Why couldn’t he just tell her the truth? And then it would be over, one way or the other. She could leave him – she would leave him, of course she would, or … he’s dared hope a hundred, a thousand times, that she could, in time, forgive him, he was just a boy, a child, the same age Barbara is now. But how long would it take to fathom: the depth of it, the scale of it, that her entire family was destroyed, and that it was his fault: months? Years?

  Why can’t he just confess? God knows at a certain level it would bring him nothing but relief. Because … because he has no right to tell her who her parents were if she doesn’t want to know. Is that true? Round and round it goes, has always gone, the spectre at every feast, the four a.m. wake-up call he’s lived with every day of their marriage.

  Getting Some Fun Out of Life

  ‘Is Halloween second after Christmas of the holidays?’ Irene says.

  ‘I don’t know. I sometimes think Halloween is actually better than Christmas,’ Barbara says.

  ‘They’re totally the top two. And Easter,’ Irene says.

  ‘But you don’t have to go to church on Halloween,’ Barbara says, making a face at her sister.

  ‘Oh,’ Irene says. ‘Right. I forgot that. Well then. Halloween is definitely the best.’

  They are sitting on the floor by the fire. Barbara is wearing her vampire costume and writing a story about a werewolf in high school. Irene is wearing her kitty-kat costume and drawing a picture of a spaniel puppy with devil ears taking a ballet lesson. Donna is finishing a quilt with a Halloween pumpkin motif, and trying neither to giggle at nor succumb to the girls’ campaign to persuade her to bring them trick-or-treating.

  ‘Because,’ says Barbara, suddenly full of high moral purpose, ‘on Christmas, you can get pretty greedy about all the stuff you want, and the stuff you get and don’t get, and I think it’s wrong to be so selfish in that way. Whereas on Halloween …’ she says, and then lapses into silence. Presumably, Donna thinks, because the purpose of Halloween, as far as Barbara is concerned, is accumulating a major haul of stuff in the form of candy and then scarfing as much of it as her stomach will allow.

  ‘On Halloween, we remember the dead,’ Irene says solemnly.

  Donna makes a noise.

  ‘Bless you,’ Barbara says. Donna is unable to answer.

  ‘That’s true, Irene. On Halloween, we do remember the dead, the … souls of the dead,’ Barbara says.

  ‘Day after,’ Donna barks.

  ‘What’s that, Aunt Donna?’

  ‘Day after. In fact, day after that. All Souls Day. November second.’

  ‘I know this,’ Barbara says, loftily. ‘All Saints Day, November first. I did a project on Halloween last year. The ancient … ways of it. It’s like mythology.’

  ‘Barbara’s a Halloween expert, actually,’ Irene says.

  Donna makes a longer, more complicated noise.

  ‘Bless you,’ Irene says.

  ‘And as well as All Saints and All Souls, Halloween is about the dead too. Doing battle with evil spirits,’ Barbara says.

  ‘Like the death-eaters,’ Irene says.

  ‘No, not like the death-eaters, stupid,’ Barbara says.

  ‘Is too.’

  ‘Is not. And how would you know anyway, you’ve only seen the movies, you gave the books up halfway through Sorcerer’s Stone. Anyway, you were right before,’ Barbara says, modifying her tone from sharpness to sanctimony. ‘At Halloween, and for two days afterwards, we dress up, and light fires, and remember the dead. So that the harvest … to give thanks … for the harvest, and the coming of winter.’

  ‘Why do we want to give thanks for the coming of winter?’ says Irene.

  ‘We light fires, and give thanks … and in the night, on the night, the … the border between the … there are spirits in the air. Spirits abroad in the air.’

  ‘That’s good, Barbara,’ Donna says. ‘Spirits abroad in the air. I like that.’

  ‘And the border, the veil between the … the living and the dead becomes—’

  ‘See-through,’ Irene says.

  ‘Transparent. That means—’

  ‘See-through,’ Irene says.

  ‘Stop interrupting, Irene. That means we feel very close to those who have gone before. And just because we’re – even though we’re – afraid, we … we just say, no. That’s why we dress up as ghosts and demons and vampires and everything, to …’

  ‘Confuse them,’ Irene says.

  ‘To conquer our fears. Or something like that.’

  ‘You got an A-plus, I hope,’ Donna says.

  ‘I got an A-minus. Because the layout wasn’t right. And my handwriting—’

  ‘You should have typed it,’ Irene says.

  ‘I like my handwriting. Anyway, Megan and Susie got A-pluses and their moms typed theirs. Their moms wrote theirs. Megan’s was on Halloween and it was word for word from the Internet, I know, I read those pages too. And Susie’s was on Holyween.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Donna says.

  ‘Holyween. Because they’re Christians, she said they don’t believe in Halloween. So she was allowed do it on Holyween. Which is what Christians have instead. I think.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Donna says.

  ‘And it isn’t fair that if you do all your own work, you get marked down, but if you let your mom do it all, you get an A-plus.’

  ‘No one said life was gonna be fair,’ Donna says.

  ‘That’s what Mom always says. And to be fair to Susie and Megan, I did try and get Mom to do it for me, but she said no, that it was better to do my own work, that’s the only way I would learn.’

  ‘Good for her.’

  ‘We’re Christians too,’ Irene says. ‘At least, we are at Christmas and Easter. Aren’t we?’

  ‘There’s a difference between being a Christian and being nuts,’ Donna says tartly. ‘Holyween. Jesus Christ Almighty.’

  ‘That’s exactly what Mom said,’ Barbara says. ‘Those exact words. “Holyween: Jesus Christ Almighty.”’

  ‘I miss Mommy,’ Irene says tearfully. ‘Mommy always has the best costumes, makes the best costumes, and she brings us to a Halloween House when it’s getting dark, and then to one of the local neighborhoods for Trick or Treat—’

  ‘Last year we went somewhere off Nakoma—’

  ‘Mandan Crescent, my friend Holly lives there. And then we went to Daddy’s office and had burgers and fries and blonde Karen sang “Goldfinger” and threw her shoes in the crowd, which wasn’t really about Halloween but Mom and Dad thought it was hysterical.’

  ‘All right, all right, all right,’ Donna says, unable to stand it any longer. ‘There’s a subdivision called Ripley Fields, we can walk along the river bank to it, so long as we bring flashlights.’

  ‘And? What do we do when we get there?’ Irene says.

  ‘We trick or treat, baby, we trick or treat!’

  How Long Has This Been Going On?

/>   Jeff Torrance’s mother was willing to concede that Jeff had gone somewhere, and taken his car, but where he’d gone and who went with him she either didn’t know or refused to say, nor would she give Ken Fowler any details of the vehicle’s make or registration beyond that it’s red, so Fowler is running Torrance’s name and address through the DMV to get the make and plates. Meanwhile, Detective Nora Fox is in the library at Monroe High, which is on the fifth floor, and commands spectacular views of Lake Wingra. Having closed the call with Fowler, she looks out the window in the direction of the Brogan house, but all she can see is the wind creasing the oak prairies of the UW Arboretum, the trees flickering in the last of the afternoon light. Maybe it’s the proximity to all these books, maybe it’s being back in high school after all these years, but she remembers a line from a poem, something about ghosts being driven out like leaves in the wind: ‘Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red.’ Nora hasn’t retained much poetry by heart – hasn’t retained any, truth be told – but that line sometimes comes back to her in the Fall, and each time she wonders if all the adjectives apply to the ‘red,’ and thinks that they should: yellow-red, black-red, pale-red, hectic-red. The leaves are like a fire about to expire, she thinks: one last blaze and then they’re blown asunder like embers on the wind.

  ‘Detective Fox?’

  Nora turns with a start to Ms Johnson, the librarian (‘call me Doreen, Detective’), aware that her name has been spoken more than once, and a little embarrassed, as if her thoughts could be read. A cop quoting poetry, like some English detective in a book: who does she think she is?