The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 16
On somewhat more detailed questioning Ellen had been forced to admit sulkily she’d never actually seen the man at all. “Well, Black or White?” the guard asked again, as if without some basic description there was really not much that he could do. We all seemed agreed it was a man – just from the sense of him and armed with this minimalist description, the security guard promised, in a way that failed to inspire much faith, to make a report to the police.
“We’ll do our best, Ma’am,” he assured to me mildly as we stood outside Winslow’s office. The guard tried the door, announcing, “It’s locked,” and looked at me as if he wondered if I’d seen anything at all. Maybe I was just a lady spooked by a big empty office at night. I was the only one who’d actually seen anything.
“He must have had a key.” It sounded lame and implausible even to myself. Jeremy Bennett was smiling at Ellen in a half-witted sort of crush-induced stupor.
“We’ll keep you posted.” The undertook half-heartedly as he began to walk away.
I waited for another half an hour, but there was still no sign of Starr.
“What are you really doing here?” Ellen asked again as they passed my office and there seemed no use in lying.
“Starr was going to tell me something about Winslow to pass on to the police,” I was saying, “but she didn’t show.” As I talked I began to worry, wishing I knew where she lived so I could at least check on her. Six years Starr had worked for me and I’d never asked her.
Ellen squeezed her boyfriend’s shoulder. “Jeremy can tell you.” Apparently everything that went into a Whytebread computer, Jeremy Bennett was able to extract: documents, e-mail, phone lists.
At that he’d puffed himself up just a little, rather sweetly and presumably for Ellen’s benefit. “All you need is a password. You want to know how to tell who’s logged into their computer?” I watched over his shoulder as Jeremy expertly demonstrated the status command after which we had found Starr’s phone, looked at everyone’s salary and/or bonus information, and read Herb Symon’s personal e-mail. Jeremy would likely have been content to have shared computer tricks all night, but there was still the issue of Starr whose phone just rang and rang with an apparently vacant and troubling persistence when we called.
“We need to go over there,” Ellen had decided, insistently concerned in a way I wasn’t able to understand and of course whatever wanted Ellen, Jeremy Bennett appeared only too happy to accommodate.
There was nothing to do but go along for the ride. I’d intended to merely follow them in my own car, but when I got to the garage someone had put a long ugly slash in the light brown canvas of my convertible top.
“Aw shit.” It was the second time that year.
Jeremy was making a sympathetic clucking sound that nonetheless I found unaccountably annoying. “You know you ought to get a hardtop.” I’d had that conversation before. I’d had that conversation a lot – with Emily, with Naomi, with my mom and my insurance agent. I was looking ruefully at what I had imagined when I bought it would be a harmlessly frivolous car, which had already cost me double its price in repairs and replacement canvas.
Jeremy ran his hand along the jagged tear in the ragtop and made a low appraising whistle that I found almost as irritating as his clucking. Walking around to the front of the car, he whistled some more, surveying the carnage. “Your front tire’s flat too,” he observed with a maddingly objective helpfulness. The vandals had thoughtfully left the car door unlocked and there was an empty hole in the dash where my stereo had been. More of a hassle to replace, my office and garage access cards were gone as well.
“Want to call the police from my cellular phone?” Jeremy offered perkily. I had my own, but was unfortunately unable to dissuade he and Ellen that they needn’t wait with me for the police.
After I’d made my report we were still all obliged to drive over to Starr’s in Jeremy’s SUV; I would let AAA wait for the morning. Truth told, I would have been much happier to let my little visit with Starr wait until the morning. It was nearly eleven o’clock, a little late based on my understanding of universally serviceable ideas of etiquette to be calling on anyone you weren’t sleeping with. More than that, I would have preferred to hear whatever it was Starr intended to tell me in private, but when we got to Starr’s place the police were crawling all over her renovated studio loft. It was the sort of space to which real estate agents affixed attractive adjectives: open spaces, high ceilings. Certainly they would have featured the big airy windows from which Starr had reportedly taken a disastrous, if as Ellen was characterizing tearfully to the policeman that stopped us at the door, perhaps intentional, fall.
XVIII
Starr had left no note to prove or disprove Ellen’s worry of suicide, but in searching her house, Cassandra told me later, there had been a number of sundry items that suggested Starr’s precarious state of mind – a long, brown-haired wig in her bedroom closet, some black cat-eye sunglasses in a drawer, and an Avis receipt on her dressing table which solved the mystery of who had tried to run me down. Starr’s craziness had sent her through the fourth floor window and onto some poor neighbor’s parked car, apparently motivated by jealousy over me and Justin. At Wes’s funeral they’d been talking intently, and in a way that certainly could have been an argument. So who was to say that our discussion that evening would have held any relation at all to Winslow’s death? The way things looked, I was beginning to think that Starr had just wanted to tell me off for monopolizing the object of her affections. Whatever she had to say, I would never know now because the only certain thing was that Starr D’nofrio was dead.
Cassandra and I were chewing this over as she drove me north to my apartment, making a perfunctory apology for her general post-seduction neglect.
“Sorry I couldn’t meet you tonight, but I guess we wound up together anyway.” Her phrasing rankled me as did her vaguely accusatory tone. “Why didn’t you tell me you were talking to Starr?”
“I didn’t know.” It felt good to lie to her, satisfying in a kind of passive aggressive way. Cassandra’s face relaxed. “I didn’t know I was meeting her when I talked to you.” I said, “you should call more often.”
What I wanted to tell her was how hurt I was that there had been no tribute, no intimate phone calls, no cute little cards, or flower deliveries since the night we’d spent together, but Cassandra’s demeanor did nothing to invite such confessions. She’d stared mainly at the road in front of her while I’d talked about Starr, turning only occasionally in my direction at points of professional importance, and only with a mild, professional kind of interest that did nothing to invite at all, which to my mind was the crux of the problem with the way our relationship was developing. After I had told her everything I knew about Starr and that evening, the conversation had sagged for some time under the weight of my issues, before Cassandra finally thought to ask if there was something wrong.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She had delivered the question with the same passionate sentiment you’d expect to share with your dry cleaner over a bad ketchup stain. I said, “I thought we were going to see each other,” an undertaking to which Cassandra was nodding, encouraging some elaboration as if there might be parts of this proposition she didn’t fully understand.
“See each other. You know? Do something together after we spent the night.” It seemed that we had completed that strange lesbian mating cycle of delight and dissolution in a fraction of the time it usually took, and I suppose I felt I’d been cheated, out of romance, out of future expectations.
“I had class.” Cassandra managed to make this sound as if it were a chronic condition, as if in fact Wednesday was a very long time ago and the other side of the car was very far way. “I have to go to class. What do you want from me?”
I couldn’t say exactly, maybe just for her voice to sound a little closer. Certainly I wanted for us to talk about it but I couldn’t seem to articulate a more specific request until Cassandra found my hand and squeezed it briefly, a satisfying gesture even if she never even shifted her eyes from the windshield. In the end Cassandra spent that night with me, but in the morning I found I was more relieved than wistful when she’d gone.
After I’d heard the front door locking with a comforting click, I got up and turned the deadbolt behind Cassandra. Then I went back to bed for a couple hours. At ten o’clock, I called in sick, even Pamela sounded somewhat sympathetic and I wasn’t the only one. She said Jeremy, Ellen and The Irishman had called in as well. I waited until eleven o’clock and phoned Camille to postpone our talk. Whatever the story with her check was, I didn’t think I had the energy to hear it, but Camille wasn’t at her desk, so I left a message emphasizing my desire to give her back her money, and hoped she wouldn’t be too concerned. Then I took a shower, put my pajamas back on and spent the rest of the day on the couch, crying to Naomi over the phone, watching Oprah and drinking way too early in the day.
Camille never called back, but at about one o’clock Justin knocked on my door, dressed in a faded sweatshirt, his college colors. To see him so informally made me realize the care he usually took with his appearance, the coordination of his work outfits. In those grungy clothes, Justin could have been much younger, his hair ungelled, cow-licked at the crown.
“I heard.” He gave me a hug at the door looking like a sad little boy. Then we sat on the couch for a while, and I told him the story, about going to Starr’s, and about Ellen Borgia and Jeremy Bennett whose romance I continued to consider enthralling gossip even in the light of everything else that had happened.
“Uh-huh,” I could see that Justin was barely listening to me. “Do the police believe that Starr killed herself?” He asked almost guilty as if he wanted to say, “Do you think she killed herself over me?”
* * *
Justin and I took a walk all the way down Halsted Street and over to Clark past the rows of shops. He was saying, “We should get a drink,” when we passed by The Closet, a gay bar with a brazen picture window so anyone passing on the street could see inside. Justin seemed to have acquired a tourist’s enthusiasm for Boys Town as if he were sightseeing on vacation.
Justin bought me a beer at the empty bar, and then another, some beer of a brand I can’t remember now, designer beer in attractive bottles. I’d had two or three when he said: “Sometimes I go through the day without even once remembering I’m queer.” It was almost bragging, but he didn’t seem proud, rather almost like the feelings confused him. “Do you ever forget you’re gay?” He was scrutinizing me as if he thought he could see the answer if he only looked hard enough. “You don’t ever forget you’re Black, do you?”
There were days when I supposed it never really came up, but not many. “That would be a pretty strange thing to forget.”
He said, “Sometimes I wonder why I need this sad little subculture, Virginia, when I’m more like Herb Symon than I am like you?”
I don’t think he meant that any special way, just a matter of fact. He didn’t say it harshly, but it felt like a hard slap, a kind of betrayal, yet I was so oddly numb that it didn’t hurt. The comment was just a data point; I was seeing who he was. “You don’t need anyone, do you?”
Justin stiffened. “What do you mean by that?” But I had hardly intended an indictment, rather just a simple observation of fact. “Everybody needs something,” he said in retort. “Sometimes you just don’t know what it is. For instance, I thought I needed a highbrow company.” His mouth turned up in a self-deprecating smile and he took in the environs of the bar in a kind of sweep-armed gesture. “Apparently that is not the case. You can look for whatever it is so hard sometimes you don’t know when you have it – something pretty good. You can mess it up trying to make it perfect.”
“You miss her don’t you?” It had struck me he was talking about Starr, somehow he had liked her attention a little bit, not as corporate cover, but genuinely. “You miss her.” The thought made me like him a little better.
“Sure.” Justin’s thoughts must have been very far away. Even as he talked he was looking past me into the mirror over the bar, watching the door, waiting for the next thing.
I followed his eyes from the door to the street while we drank. Justin was still drinking when I left him there and went home to have a nap before my evening babysitting a two-year-old.
Sandra, the two-year-old’s mother, was an old high school friend from Blue River – my best high school friend in fact. We had drifted apart after college largely due to my sexual orientation, which Sandra had confided she found a little bit freakish, even if I couldn’t help it. I had likewise found Sandra’s aspirations to marry her then brand-new, jug-headed, wannabe lawyer boyfriend, Andre Rutherford, to be conclusive evidence of her acute tastelessness, a condition far worse than my homosexuality because, I thought, with just the tiniest bit of rational analysis, Sandra could most certainly help it.
There had been a thaw in the ensuing cold war just before my ten-year high school reunion. Sandra’s marriage to Andre (Andy as she called him), who I now rather liked despite himself, and her pregnancy with their first child had mellowed her into almost complete apathy as to the particulars of anyone else’s life.
Sandra and Andre lived a self-absorbed black, bourgeois existence on Blackhawk Street in a modern row house that had been constructed nearly a decade ago in anticipation of the demolition of the Cabrini Green Housing Projects. It was a long patient bet on gentrification that had finally paid off. Now they were looking to trade up to the suburbs, Beverly on the Southside with big old houses, gracious lawns, and wooded tracts of land surrounding the racially integrated enclave. Until then, they were a ten-minute ride away, and I was the baby-sitter of last resort.
I’d arrived at the Rutherford’s early. There was no answer and my cab had already pulled off when I knocked, so after a few minutes on the chilly stoop I’d let myself in with the key Sandra had given me “just in case.” The house was dark and quiet except for the faint bass throb of the stereo which I followed to the living room, listening a moment too long before I’d recognized the unmistakable vocalization of Andre and Sandra on their Ethan Allen sofa.
“Oh my God, Virginia, is it eight o’clock already?” They bolted up dazed and chagrined in the glare of the floor lamp, but I was thankful to note, mostly clothed. “We lost track of the time.” Sandra managed the obvious rather breathlessly. “My God Andre,” she said, “it must be eight.” But Andre was consulting his watch rather dubiously.
“Well it’s close to eight.” I put in my own defense. In fact it was only quarter after seven, but I’d been early hoping to catch a free dinner.
“Well good to see you, anyway,” Andre agreed diplomatically as he tucked in his shirt. Sandra was retightening the belt on her bathrobe.
“Brandon’s asleep.” Sandra made a guilty admission, because both of us knew that if Brandon was asleep right now, there wasn’t a hope in heaven that he was going to stay that way for much more of the evening. Whatever respite from young Brandon was available to the adult world had been squandered on the couch before my arrival.
“It’s just like dogs.” Andre was always unaccountably proud of the frenzied kineticism displayed by his son, a perpetual sound and motion which he took for genius but I was more inclined to attribute to hyperactivity. “Smart dogs are harder to train because they’re smart, see?”
Brandon must have been a future Nobel Prize winner judging from his astonishing talent at running his mother ragged. The brains hadn’t come from Sandra’s side because she’d gone right out and done it again. Now she was four and a half months pregnant with his sister: Eliza. The Rutherfords were efficient parents. They knew the gender, the nursery was already painted, the child was already named, and Andre was putting money in trust for medical school. Why wait?
“We had amniocentesis right away,” Sandra announced when she’d told me they were expecting, “just to be sure she’s healthy.” If I found it disturbingly Brave New World that Sandra and Andre felt a sense of obligation to produce genetically perfect Negro children, an effort to offset the progeny of the underclass who Andre claimed were ruining the race, I’d kept my distaste to myself for friendship’s sake, an agreement to disagree on our respective life choices. The Rutherfords hadn’t much approved of Spike, Sandra lowering her voice tactfully, when she told me, “I hope you won’t mind but we’ve asked one of Andre’s law partners to be godmother to Liza. Spread the joy.”
“We’d better get dressed, honey,” she was admonishing Andre who grunted his concurrence. They went off together in the direction of the bedroom holding hands, leaving the couch cushions warm and maybe even a little sweaty when I sat down there in front of the television set.
I couldn’t help thinking that Spike and I never held hands anymore – not even at the movies. Halfway through The Simpsons, Sandra and Andre reappeared typically dressed, pressed, and shined. They were a tidy couple, firm in their connection to both inward and outward order, a condition I could not help but envy.
“If he screams just ignore him and he’ll go back to sleep after a while.”
Andre took his jacket from a hook of the handsome wooden coat tree by the door, failing to elaborate how long a while would be, but no sooner had I listened to their car pull away did Brandon start bawling.
The master race had a fine set of lungs. Defeated after five minutes, I carried him from his crib out to the couch where we sang innumerable verses of Abba Dabba Honeymoon, verses I didn’t even realize I knew until they came rolling off my tongue.
The good news was the tears subsided. The bad news was despite the musical interlude and a tablespoon of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Brandon was still fully conscious, talking a blue streak.
“Flower,” he said. “Daddy. Boo boo. Kitty cat,” which was no surprise as Andre had proudly reported just last week that the kid had a prodigious vocabulary of over thirty-five distinct words – up by a good five words from the tally of the week before.
