It was about what you might expect, an unfinished attic filled with bookcases containing hundreds of paperbacks, everything from Thomas Mann to Leonard Cohen, from e.e. cummings to Gregory Corso.
What I wanted I found with almost no difficulty. I only had to rattle open and rifle through a few file drawers, jerk back and sort through a few desk drawers.
And there it was.
I slid it inside my shirt and went back downstairs.
She must have heard me coming down the steps because she called from the kitchen, "Come on out here."
When I got there, she said, "You know what I made tonight? Gingersnaps. Real ones. Here. Have one."
So I had one and then I had two and all the while we made quick talk of weather and gingersnaps and teenagers these days, and then she said, "Well, find anything?"
" 'fraid not."
"Oh, I'm sorry, Jack."
"It's all right."
She said, "You want another one?"
"No, thanks." I had my hand on the back door. I wondered if she knew. The thing I'd shoved down inside my shirt seemed to be glowing. She had to see. Had to know.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
She laughed. "Well, I hope the next time I see you, it's on a happier note."
"It will be, Susan. It will be."
Then I was gone.
Chapter 28
Ft. Wilson had been built during the final economic boom of the sixties, when so — many dead young Americans over in Nam meant so many live jobs over here, and it had been designed, by an architect who was too tricky by half, with a waterfall between the two main sections of the rambling two-story brick structure, a comic imitation of Frank Lloyd Wright.
It was nearly ten-thirty and people were drifting out to their cars in the lot. They were middle-aged with middle-aged flesh and an air of middle-aged dreams. At forty you don't take night-school courses because you've got an eye on glory; all you've got an eye on is the next rung up in some vast drab institution somewhere. Level Six, as the people in Personnel might say, the exception being classes such as Creative Writing, where glory is still possible, even if said glory does only come in the form of a fifteen-dollar check for your first professional sale to a magazine promoting the likelihood of an imminent alien invasion or the possibility that Liberace has joined James Dean and John Kennedy on an island in the Pacific known only to an ancient race of henna-skinned religious cannibals.
The inside of the high school was almost lurid with fluorescent light and the odor of cleaning solvent. The main hall was jammed with people heading for cars. I asked one of them for directions to Mr. Roberts' room and she told me.
When I got there, he was sitting on the edge of his desk, smoking a cigarette and talking earnestly to a plump woman in a yellow pantsuit that had gone out of style with Jimmy Carter. She was smoking, too.
Watching him, I had the sense that he must be a good teacher, taking everybody just as seriously as he took himself, looking for the same talent in his students he sought in himself, and probably finding it in neither.
He stuck out a Diet Pepsi can for the woman to push her cigarette in and then he said, "All you need to remember, Mary, is that it's better to put in the things about your childhood later on, after you've got the reader hooked on the story line itself. I'd start out right off with the ambulance scene. It's really gripping."
The way she smiled, she might just have discovered the real meaning of life.
"Oh, Gary," she said, "I just love taking your class."
"You're doing very well, Mary. Very well."
She pulled a purse big enough to hold a Japanese car over her wide shoulder, picked up a pile of schoolbooks, nodded good-bye, and left the room. On her way out, she saw me and smiled. "He's wonderful, isn't he?" And he was-patient, caring, taking pleasure in her pleasure.
I smiled at her and her enthusiasm. She was my age maybe, and she radiated a high, uncomplicated passion for life. And that's something I've always only been able to envy, that kind of simple and beautiful enthusiasm for things. I'm always too busy worrying about what can go wrong or wondering what the guy really meant.
Gary still hadn't seen me. He was busy pushing papers and books into a briefcase as scuffed as his shoes always were. I watched him there amid all the empty desks, like lifeboats on a mean vast ocean, his graying hair pulled back into a ponytail, his jeans still bell-bottomed, his eyeglasses rimless. He was the last of the species hippie. At his funeral somebody would probably read something from one of the Doors' songs.
I said, "How long were you having an affair with Karen, Gary?"
He didn't look up. He knew exactly what had been said and he knew exactly who'd said it.
I came into the room. He still hadn't looked up.
I put the manuscript on the desk. The room was painted the dull green of most institutions. It seemed to hush us with its terrible powers to disintegrate personalities. Finally, I said, "I didn't get a chance to read it all. But I read enough of it."
All he said was, "Susan know about this?"
"Jesus," he said. "I really have fucked things up, haven't I?"
"Yeah, I guess you have."
"The only other time I was unfaithful was back in the sixties. At some kind of English teachers' seminar. This woman with a face that reminded me of Cherie Conners. You remember Cherie Conners?"
"Sure."
"I always wanted to screw her. That's sort of what I was doing with this woman at the English teachers' convention. Closing my eyes and pretending she was Cherie. You know she died of an aneurysm a few years ago? Cherie, I mean?"
"I heard that. She was a nice woman."
"It's all crazy bullshit, isn't it, Dwyer?"
"Yeah, it is."
"You going to tell Susan?"
I kept staring at him. He was treating this as if I'd caught him in nothing more than a simple case of adultery. But Karen had been murdered, and so, earlier tonight, had a sad woman named Evelyn.
"What time did your class start?"
"Eight o'clock."
"Little late for night school, isn't it?"
"We took a vote the first night of class. Everybody wanted eight o'clock." He took out his cigarettes. Lit one. "You gave 'em up, huh?"
"Yeah, almost."
He coughed, as if for emphasis. "Wish I could."
"You know a woman named Evelyn Dain?"
For the first time I could see that he was lying. He just sort of shrugged.
"She was killed tonight. Murdered."
"I'm sorry to hear about that. She a friend of yours?"
"She was obsessed with the idea that Karen Lane killed a boy named Sonny Howard. This was the summer we were going into senior year."
He talked with smoke coming out of his mouth. "Well, that's bullshit."
I picked up the twenty-page manuscript. It was sloppily typed, with many strikeovers, many words written in the margins with pencil. "The Autumn Dead. It's about Karen, isn't it?"
"In ways. It's my version of Holly Golightly, too. Very selfish but very fetching. A woman you need to get rid of but can't. She had a story of her own, her own True Life Tale, as she called it. She said we could turn it into a good novel if we collaborated. She said all it needed was a good second draft. She never got around to showing it to me, though."
"Karen tell you everything that happened to her?"
"She told me some of the things."
"Such as?"
"Oh, about her brother. Things like that."
"What about her brother?"
"He's kind of a bastard. She's always tried to help him but it hasn't helped much."
"She ever mention anything about blackmailing anybody?"