“Get yourself some help, Densham,” I said.
He laughed or sobbed again. I left him there and strode across the room to the door.
His death made the news, small splashes on the inside pages of the tabloids, likewise small but more stately obituaries in the broadsheets, and then, inevitably, links online. Instapundit was where I found it. They linked to a New York Post story: Satellite Pioneer in Shocking SM Suicide. Densham had been found hanging from the clothes rod in his closet strangled with his own belt and dressed in bizarre leather corsetry and other paraphernalia. A fatal wardrobe malfunction during an otherwise quiet evening of autoerotic asphyxiation-so said the local constabulary.
As murder, it was art-if it was murder. That was the genius of it. How could you know for sure? But I knew. At least, I thought I knew. I read the story with my stomach in a tailspin. I recognized it right away as the end of peace of mind for me, the end of what was left of my peace of mind. What sort of mental breakwater would stand against the flood of paranoia now? No. There was no getting away from it: The bad days had returned.
How awful suspense is! Worse than any actual catastrophe. How often have you heard a cancer patient tell you, “The worst part was waiting for the test results.” Worse than the cancer itself: the waiting, not knowing, afraid. Awful. And there were days of it now, weeks of it, months.
Maybe that was also part of the reason I fell in love with her. Not just what she looked like and how she behaved and what she represented. That was all in the mix, of course. But maybe I was also just grateful-so grateful-that she had finally arrived.
By then, the dark, snowy winter had given way to a spring so mild it seemed a kind of silent music. I forced myself to go out of doors just to experience it, just to feel the air. The wistful air. Truly, just like a strain of half-remembered music. Even in New York with the heat of its traffic, its noises and smells, you couldn’t feel that air without a softness opening in you, a sense of longing for the past-whatever past it was you happened to long for. I, of course, walked the city streets and dreamed of Centerville, dreamed myself into love stories set in the Village. It was the only relief I had from the suspense, the heavy winter cloud of waiting, unknowing and afraid.
I was lost in those dreams even as she approached me. I was in a coffee shop, at the window counter, my hand limp around the cardboard cup as I gazed unseeing at the storefront glass.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” she said. She had a beautiful voice. I noticed it right away. It was clear and mellow with diction at once flowing and precise. It was the way that women used to speak when they thought about how they should speak, when they trained themselves to speak like ladies.
I looked up and she was lovely. Maybe twenty years younger than I, in her thirties. Poised, but not with that brusque, mannish confidence I so often see in women today. Consciously graceful rather, as if her grace was a thing she did for people, a gift she gave them. Her whole style was graceful and vaguely old-fashioned in a sweet, pretty way. Shoulder-length blonde hair in a band. A blue spring dress wide at the shoulders, nipped at the waist, and ending modestly over the knee. I caught the scent she was wearing, and it was lovely, too, graceful and old-fashioned, too. I thought I knew it from somewhere but couldn’t remember where.
“Do you mind if I sit here next to you?”
“Not at all,” I said to her-but at the same time, my eyes swept the room and I saw there were plenty of tables open, plenty of other places she could sit.
She saw my eyes, read my thoughts. “There was a man outside,” she told me. “Following me, making remarks. I thought if I sat next to you, if it seemed as if we knew each other…”
What happened next happened very quickly, my brain working things out, my emotions responding, all in a cascading flash. My first reaction was instinctive, automatic. An attractive woman had asked for my protection: I was warmed and immediately alert to the possibility of romance. But in the next moment-or in the next segment of that moment-it was all so quick-I remembered where I’d smelled that perfume before. It was the same scent I’d caught coming off Densham in the club when he had leaned toward me so I could light his cigarette. I have something to live for now, he had told me. Finally. Something to live for.
My eyes went to her eyes-her pale blue eyes-and I thought, Ah, yes, of course, that’s who they would send, isn’t it? And what was, I suppose, horrible-horrible and yet mesmerizing somehow-was that I saw she saw my thought, I saw she saw that I understood everything, and I saw that she understood, understood that it didn’t matter to me, that it was to her advantage, in fact, because I wanted her, welcomed her.
She was death and the past and my dreams incarnate, and I was in love with her already. I always had been.
You would think what followed would have been more or less bizarre, but it wasn’t. Not to me. Every lover at the start is in a kind of fiction anyway. The restraint, the things held back, the best foot forward. Even this latest generation of whores and boors must have some courting ritual or other before they go at it like monkeys and then wander off to nurse their hangovers. Every mammal has its manners, its method of approach.
So the fact that she and I never acknowledged the reality of our situation didn’t seem to me as strange as all that. We dined together and went to the movies and took long walks in Central Park and took drives into the country to see the spring scenery, just like anyone. We talked more or less at random about what we enjoyed and what we’d seen and what we ought to do. I told her about my business, which offered secure storage and online backup for the computer files of major corporations and government agencies. She told me about teaching English as a second language to visitors and immigrants. That was a nice touch: I was a wealthy entrepreneur, and she was a do-gooder, just getting by. It gave me all kinds of opportunities to take care of her, to play the man. She liked that, being taken care of. She liked for me to open the door for her and stand when she entered a room and hold her chair when she sat down. She accepted these tokens of gentlemanly respect with grace but also with gratitude. She had a way of nestling in my kindnesses, of luxuriating in my protection and the vulnerability it allowed her. She had a way of looking up at me in expectant deference when there was a decision to be made so that I felt helpless to make any decision but the one that would ultimately please and shelter her. She was all softness and beauty, and I found myself tending to her as if she were the last flower left in an otherwise stony world.
As for the past-as for talking about the past: We shared only fragments of it in those first days, fragments at intervals now and then, and if my memories were distortions and hers were lies, how different were we from anyone in the early stages of attraction?
We became lovers in the prettiest way, the gentlest and most graceful way, only after weeks and weeks of courtship and subtle seduction and slow surrender. I wish I had the words to describe the sweetness of her reticence, her modesty, and the measured yielding of her modesty to her passions and to mine. You want to tell me it was all inauthentic? False? A performance? As the kids say nowadays: Whatever! Have such things ever been anything other than a kind of performance, a kind of dance? An art form, if you will. And what’s art but a special sort of falsehood, a falsehood by which we express the inexpressible truth about ourselves and about the human condition?