Dead Cat Bounce
The night of my daughter’s wedding, my husband, William VanDam, broke one of his inviolable rules.
“Persis,” he said to me, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” He had never before admitted such a thing. To do so in his securities business would have meant immeasurable loss of reputation.
The best way to deal with this revelation, I decided, was to do nothing. Nothing spins so well as on its own momentum, I once heard him tell a junior partner. “Dear, why don’t you take off your tux?” I said. I was sitting in my champagne silk charmeuse slip, at the dressing table in the truly hot hotel suite we had rented for the week. By hot I mean designer hot.
Observing Willie in the mirror, I could not help also seeing myself: black hair framing the pale oval face of a Madonna. “It’s what, almost three-thirty in the morning?” I had removed my makeup as expertly as I had applied it hours ago, and was now massaging one of those botanical creams into the skin of my hands.
Because I was a concert pianist, I took extraordinary care of my hands. I confess my one abiding fear was that I would develop arthritis. I never went outside without donning butter-soft doeskin gloves, of which I had pairs in a virtual rainbow of colours. “You must be exhausted. I know I am. It was a truly glorious wedding, wasn’t it?”
The air smelled of evening primrose as I stared at him in the mirror: a big man with a rough-hewn, handsome face. When we had first met, I had felt utterly transported by his commanding presence. He had given me shivers all over.
“I’m not in the least bit tired;”
I could smell his sweat like a halo of rage. He never perspired like this in his office, not even during the excruciatingly complicated corporate mergers his securities firm brokered. It was the details that could kill you, as he had drummed into me time and again. Which was why people came to him: they knew he’d sew up every detail without reaching for the Zantac. He didn’t miss one.
But he looked like he’d missed this one and now he was ready to tear his hair out.
“I may never sleep again. It’s like ants crawling over my skin.”
I swivelled around to face him. I heard the tone in his voice and was instantly warned. He had this wild streak-a volatile temper that had taken me quite some time to figure out. Often enough, he’d cruelly thrown back at me the fact that I was an orphan. “Shape up or I’ll abandon you as quickly as your mother did,” he used to tell me when I disobeyed. He could always make me cry with that, even now.
I knew I needed to be calm. I rose, slipped off his black Armani tuxedo jacket, and hung it over a chair back. Then, leaning in so that my breasts pressed against his chest, I kissed him hard on the lips, the way he liked. “Come to bed now. Whatever’s troubling you, can’t it wait until morning?”
He leaned forward and slipped his left arm around my slender waist. But instead of embracing me fully, he slashed out with his right arm in a vicious arc, smashing my bottles of cream and lotion and nail polish to smithereens. Smears of colours ran down the mirror like blood.
“Does that answer your question?” His voice was acid; the fist he made trembled as nails dug into skin. My smooth surface had inflamed him all the more.
“Willie, for God’s sake, calm down.”
“If you’ve nothing else to contribute to the conversation, kindly keep quiet.” He dropped his arm from around my waist. “Christ, what do you really know about the real world, Perse?” He was always lecturing about the real world, a place I apparently knew nothing about. “I took you out of the mess you had made of your life. I’ve kept you protected, safe from all the evil you were getting yourself into.” He was quite correct in that. My parents had left me in a hospital, and seventeen years later, it was a hospital in which Willie had found me. If I looked at the insides of my wrists in the proper light I could still see the scars, straight as the razor blade that had caused them. By that time, I’d had it with evil. Every form of lowlife imaginable had gotten his claws into me. They were outsiders, and you might think so was I. But you’d be wrong. I wasn’t even that. I was a parasite on the naked butt of an outsider. I have to admit, he had cause to despise what I’d been.
“Caroline is just like you, ignorant of life,” he went on. “You can’t expect me to do less for her.”
“Is it Caro who’s somehow upset you so?”
“In a manner of speaking. She just married that sonuvabitch Eddie.”
My eyes opened wide.
“Oh, I know that look, Perse. You don’t want to hear anything bad about him.”
“He’s Caroline’s husband. Our son-in-law. Eddie’s family now.”
Now he seemed disgusted, impatient to turn away. But I held him to me with my sure and comforting artist’s touch. “They love each other, Willie. I’ve rarely seen two people so crazy in love.
Think of how they danced while I played ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’” I smiled, trying, in my way, to make him mimic me.
“That was Caroline’s request,” he said tightly. “Gershwin always moved her to tears. But what did he want?”
“The same, I’m sure. The look in their eyes while they danced-“
“He was looking at me, Perse. Because he knew.”
I cocked my small, elegant head. I had been told many times that I looked like a ballet dancer, not a concert pianist. But ballet, what could I know of ballet in the filth of my former life? But music, oh, music was my sole escape. “Knew what?” The silence my husband generated was like a sound-damped engine. What remained unheard I felt. I gripped his powerful arms. “Willie, what could he know?”
“It started when Yates found Eddie had a license to carry a gun.” Ross Yates was Willie’s private investigator, one of Willie’s major secrets from the outside world. Even Caroline didn’t know of his existence, but I did. Of course, Willie had had Eddie investigated. “I asked him if he carried and he lied, said he didn’t. And when I confronted him with Yates’s report that showed the receipt for the nine-millimetre pistol he’d bought, he gave me another bullshit story that it had been stolen and he’d never replaced it.”
“Was it bullshit?” I asked. “He seemed sincere.”
“Sincere my ass. I’m the actor, here, Perse. How d’you think I make so much money? I know how to play a part. Just like our dear little Eddie-boy.” Willie’s mocking tone set my teeth on edge. “Yates showed up at the reception an hour ago to give me this.” He broke away from me, slipped a set of folded papers out of the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket.
“Let me see that.” I reached for the papers, but Willie kept them out of my reach.
“No, Perse. I’ll tell you as much as you need to know.”
It was always this way with us. How can I be expected to learn about the real world if Willie keeps it out of sight?
For a moment I stared at the report, blue-white and ugly in the lamplight of the gilt-and-cream-coloured hotel suite. Then I turned and walked away from him.
I put on one of my favourite CDs: Eugene Ormandy’s orchestral transcription of Bach’s majestic Toccata and Fugue in D minor. I turned up the volume so he couldn’t be heard over it. The chords burst in quiet thunder, filling the suite as if with purified air. Bach’s great gift, it seemed to me, was bringing order out of chaos. Whenever I heard his music the emotions that had been tied in knots began to untangle.
Outside, it had begun to rain. Staring out the window at the spiked Manhattan skyline, I thought of the last few moments alone I’d had with Caro before we’d entered the chapel this evening.
“Are you sure this is what you want, darling?”
“Absolutely. God, I love him! Give me some credit, Mother. I’m as sure of Eddie as I am of anything.” Caro, radiant in white, veiled like a vestal virgin, so like my younger self, so beautiful her heart-shaped face made me want to cry. “I just want you and Daddy to be okay with this. I know you disapprove of Eddie.”