“Mr. C-C-C-Carl?” said Bobby. “D-d-d-do you have a moment?”
“Sure,” I said, “so long as you don’t mind my informal dress.”
“I don’t mind,” he said, and his gaze dropped from my face, down past my tee shirt, to my pants and lingered there long enough for me to assume I was unzipped.
“Come on in, then,” I said, “and call me Victor.” When he was past me in the room I quickly checked my zipper. It was closed.
He sat on the edge of my bed. There was an overstuffed reading chair in the corner and I switched on the lamp beside it before sitting. I could feel each spring distinctly beneath me and the cloth underneath my forearms was damp. The light coming through the faded lampshade cast a jaundiced yellow upon the walls and Bobby’s face. He was a tall thin man, shy and stuttering, who slouched his chin into the shoulder of his gray suit as if he were a boxer hiding a glass jaw. His hair was red and unruly and his lips were pursed in an astonished aristocratic sort of way. He kept mashing his hands together as if he were kneading dough. We had talked some at the cocktail gathering before dinner, each of us with a bitter glass of champagne in one hand and a stick of some sort of roasted gristly meat in the other. He had asked me about my art and I had described for him my imaginary oeuvre.
“I wanted to t-t-t-talk to you about Jackie,” Bobby said as he sat on the edge of my bed. He avoided looking at me as he spoke, his gaze resting over my shoulder, then to the side, then again quickly on my crotch before moving up to the ceiling. “Caroline said you knew her.”
“That’s right,” I lied. “I met her at the Haven, where we used to meditate together.”
“Poor Jackie was always searching for some m-m-m-measure of meaning. I expect that place wasn’t any better than the others. She tried to get me to go with her once.”
“Did you?”
“No, of c-c-c-course not. Jackie was always looking outward, away, certain wherever she would find the answers was someplace she had never been. I think it’s really sad that she was looking so d-d-d-desperately for something, when all along the answer was right under her nose.”
“Where?”
“Here. In this house, in our history. I think m-m-m-meaning is in devoting yourself to something larger than yourself, don’t you? That’s what our Grammy taught us.”
“And what do you devote yourself to, Bobby?”
“To our investments, our money. I go downt-t-t-town and watch the family positions on the monitors at the stock exchange building every day. And I have a hookup here, also. While most of the family money, of course, is in the company stock, we have other investments that I watch and trade.”
“That must be exciting.”
“Oh, it is, really,” he said as he looked me straight in the eye. As he spoke of money and finance an assurance rose in his voice and his gestures grew animated. “But it’s more than just exciting. See the thing, Mr. Carl, is that we’re all going to die, we’re all so small. But the money, it just goes on and on and on. It’s immortal, as long as we care for it and tend to it. It’s the only thing in the world that’s immortal. Governments will fall, buildings will crumble, but the money will always be there. My role in life is caring for it, keeping it alive. Every moment as I watch it percolate on the screen, watch the net value go up and down by millions at a stroke, I feel a flush of fulfillment. That’s what was so sad about Jackie, she was looking for something else when she should have been looking right here.” He paused, his eyes dropped to my chest and then my crotch, and then he began to clutch his hands once more. “But w-w-w-what I wondered, Mr. Carl…”
“Victor.”
“All right, V-V-V-V-V…” His face closed in on itself as he tried to get the word out and I struggled with him. I was about to spurt out my name again, to get him through it, when he stopped, breathed deep, and smiled unselfconsciously. “Some letters are harder than others.”
“That’s fine, Bobby,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“W-w-w-what I wondered was why do you think she k-k-k-killed herself, if you have any idea. She almost seemed happy for the first time. She was engaged to be married, she said the meditation was helping her. Why do you think she k-k-k-killed herself?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought she was doing well too. So well, in fact, that I’m not certain that she did kill herself.”
“N-n-n-no?”
I looked at him carefully as I spoke, looking for anything that would clue me that he knew something he shouldn’t have known. “No,” I said. “There are some things that seem suspicious about her death, little things, like even the way she died. In a group meeting at the Haven she once admitted to having a cache of pills in her apartment. They were there, in her bathroom, at the end. I don’t see why she hung herself if she had the drugs.”
“That is strange. But Jackie was always m-m-m-most dramatic in her despondency, m-m-m-m-maybe she wanted to m-m-m-make a statement.”
I shrugged, noticing that he had seemed more nervous as he talked about her death. “I don’t know. It’s sort of comforting to think that maybe she was happy and was murdered rather than her being so depressed at the end as to hang herself.”
“That w-w-w-would be nice, yes, but who w-w-w-w-w-w…”
“Would want to kill her? You tell me.”
He shook his head. “No, Jackie was always unhappy. Even as a b-b-b-baby she was c-c-c-colicky. If she was going to die she would do it herself. Grammy used to say the c-c-c-curse got hold of her from the start.”
“Excuse me,” I said.
“The c-c-c-curse. Didn’t Jackie tell you about it?”
“About a curse? No.”
“We have a family c-c-c-curse. Doesn’t every family have one?”
“Probably. Ours was my mother. Tell me about your family curse, Bobby.”
He stood up and started pacing as he spoke, his hands working on each other as if out of control. “It’s from the c-c-c-company. The c-c-c-company wasn’t always named Reddman Foods. That name came in only when our great-grandfather gained control. Before that it was called the E. J. P-P-P-Poole Preserve Company. That was before Great-grandfather’s special method of pressure pickling took the country by storm, when they mainly canned tomatoes and carrots and other produce. Apparently Elisha P-P-P-Poole was a drunk and the company wasn’t profitable before he sold out to Great-grandfather, but as soon as the company started selling the new pickles and turning a profit P-P-P-Poole turned bitter and accused Great-grandfather of stealing the company from him. He made a couple of drunken scenes, wrote letters to the police and the newspapers, threatened the family, and made a general n-n-n-nuisance of himself. But it never got him any stock back or affected the company’s profits. Eventually he killed himself. Great-grandfather did the charitable thing and took care of his family, giving the widow an annuity and her and her daughter a place to live, but he always denied stealing the company. Said P-P-P-Poole was drunk and deluded, that the lost opportunity drove him mad.” Bobby shrugged. “Supposedly, before he died, he c-c-c-cursed Great-grandfather and all his generations.”
“How did Poole kill himself?” I asked.
“He hanged himself from the rafters of his tenement,” he said. He looked at me with his eyes widening. “M-m-m-maybe it really was the curse that got her.” And then he laughed, a scary sniveling little laugh, and as he laughed his eyes dropped down from my face to my crotch again before he turned his head away. I looked down at my fly. Still zipped.