So why didn't I ask?
Because she would think me a Neanderthal, a clinging, possessive, antiquated jerk. Instead, I told her of my talk with Nick, and she listened quietly, asking only if I believed he was innocent in spite of the obvious motive.
I didn't know.
Then I mentioned the northeasterly breeze and how today might be a bit cooler, and she nodded in silent appreciation of my meteorological insights. Finally I grabbed a donut from the daggerlike fin, took a healthy bite, and blurted out, "So where the hell were you-?"
She looked away and said, "Is it going to be that way?"
"Sorry, but I'm not used to falling asleep with company and waking up solo."
"And I'm sorry if I deflated your engorged male ego."
"Look, it's not as if I don't trust you, it's-"
She bolted from the rocker, which pitched forward and back even without her. "Trust me! What right do you have to even think about me in those terms? I don't seek your trust. I don't want your trust. If you have some romantic notions about us, let me disabuse you right now, Jake. You and I have gone bump in the night. You have great vigor in your performance, so you may paste a gold star on your report card. You try hard to please, and if you are a bit rough around the edges-you rub my breasts as if you're waxing your car-you are by no means unique in that regard. You are not an unpleasant fellow most of the time, although your penchant for unprovoked violence prompts me to suggest intensive therapy. As for our relationship, you are involved in a most interesting investigation that furthers my research. When it is completed, I seriously doubt that either of us will desire the other's company. So please, Jake, for your sake, face reality."
I sank into the sofa and brooded. Reality. The medication had worn off and my head throbbed. But not as much as my ego. So far I had been wrong about everyone and everything. I ran through the roster. Alex Rodriguez wooed computer ladies because Nick Fox wanted him to. Nick killed his best friend but not the wife who set him up or the girlfriend who would have destroyed him. Tom Carruthers was a charming guy who dated my secretary and hadn't strangled her yet. Mary Rosedahl didn't fit in anywhere. Gerald Prince was merely a drunk who wanted a comeback on the stage. And Pamela Maxson? She was using me to further her research, and the first night I wasn't up to bedtime games under the paddle fan, she hotfooted it elsewhere.
Or did she? She hadn't said. It shouldn't make any difference, but it did. Okay, so I'm not that enlightened.
"Are you saying you weren't with someone else or that I have no right to ask whether you have been?"
"Jake, must you?"
"Yes."
"Very well. I have found a lover."
And what am I, chopped liver?
"I see," I said softly. A look of martyrdom.
"Really, Jake, you're acting very immature. It is not as if we pledged ourselves to each other."
"So I shouldn't have a sense of loss."
"You can't lose what you don't have."
It made sense to my brain, but the rest of me wasn't listening. My eyes were watery.
"Who is he?" I asked. "Do I know him?"
"Oh, Jake. Don't go looking to be hurt."
She was right. No need to look. The pain would find me soon enough.
CHAPTER 33
Professor Gerald Prince thrust his chin forward, and in his best upper-crust Rex Harrison voice intoned: "The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls, in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another." I hobbled to my customary spot in the back row and wondered if I'd get in trouble for not doing the homework. On the stage a young woman read Eliza Doolittle's lines as they worked their way through the final act.
When Prince told the community-college Eliza that he'd grown accustomed to her face, I believed him. He was a damn fine actor.
They wrapped up the final scene and the class applauded politely. "What is Shaw telling us in the play?" Prince asked.
"It's about abolishing the difference between the classes," said an earnest young man up front.
"Perhaps that is the result, but the mechanics of the change?"
"Language, clarity of thought and speech," said the woman next to me.
The class mumbled its agreement. They had learned something since my last visit.
"Quite so," Prince said. "The play is unapologetically didactic. Shaw sincerely cared about the language. He-"
"I don't get something," interrupted a student near me. "In the movie the professor gets the girl. Here…"
"Here, she leaves to marry Freddy Eynsford Hill," Prince said. "And why? Because Higgins is a confirmed bachelor more attached to his work than to a pretty face, even one to which he has become accustomed."
"And his mother thing," the young woman said. "Higgins was a momma's boy."
"A mother thing, indeed," Prince said. "In his notes Shaw discusses the mother as rival. As intelligent and articulate as he was, Higgins was not fully developed emotionally."
Prince looked toward the clock on the wall, nodded his head, and the students obediently closed their notebooks. I gingerly worked my way to the front. Prince was stuffing some papers into an old briefcase.
He saw me and bowed formally. "Did you fancy my reading of Higgins?"
"First rate. Much lighter fare than Edmund Tyrone. Not all that in-love-with-death stuff."
He beamed. Like trial lawyers, actors never hear too many compliments. The professor wore a checked shirt under a blue blazer with a rakish yellow ascot. His eyes were clear. "You were worried about me, weren't you? I am moved by that, Biff. Have no fear. I am sane, stable, and as happy as can be expected. As for Edmund's speech, in drama, if one looks hard enough, there is the antidote to every expressed emotion:
"' No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death. '"
"Good to see you so chipper. And I like the line. Shakespeare?"
"No, Alfred Tennyson."
Him again.
Prince smiled slyly. "Your policeman friend was here yesterday. He apologized for unfairly accusing me. Then he showed me printouts of someone calling himself Passion Prince chatting with Miss Rosedahl and Mrs. Fox. Some very good poetry, if you like that sort of thing, taken badly out of context. I thought I'd get a rise out of you with the reference to Tennyson."
"You did."
"The policeman said you always believed in my innocence. That means a lot to me, Biff. If there's anything I can do for you…"
Of course, there was.
I ordered an iced tea and Prince said make it two. I gave him a look.
"There's a repertory company auditioning in Lauderdale," he explained. " Inherit the Wind. The collision of blind faith with the inquisitive search for truth. It wouldn't hurt me to show up sober."
"Henry Drummond?"
"But of course. Would you care to hear his cross-examination of the self-appointed prophet, Matthew Brady?"
"Maybe later."
He looked great. The silvery hair was swept back and combed. The blazer was either new or freshly pressed, not a gravy stain in sight. Best of all, he was cold sober. He had acknowledged his problem. So few do. A doctor asks a patient how much he drinks and how often he has sex. To get the truth, multiply the former by two and divide the latter by three.
The waiter brought our broiled snapper and fried plantains. We were in a bayfront restaurant two weeks old that tried hard to achieve the dilapidated sea-shanty look. Unpainted, knotholed boards were bolted to walls of sturdy concrete block. Lobster traps and colorful buoys hung from the ceiling, and an old dinghy sat wedged on the roof, as if a hurricane deposited it there. None of that bothered me. I could even tolerate the plastic pelican on a Styrofoam piling. But the snapper had that too-late-frozen, too-early-thawed, four-day-old fishy taste.