In my small bedroom, I stripped off my linen pantsuit, kicked off my slingback heels, and undid the French braid from my shoulder-length reddish-brown hair. Then I took out my contact lenses (worn for special occasions like author appearances), placed them next to my black, rectangular-framed glasses on the small wooden nightstand, crawled into bed, and clicked off the lamp.
For some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about Dana Wu’s assertion that Angel Stark was careless. It was that damn Jag, I guess, dragging her through the street then peeling off without a backward glance.
I thought about that big yellow car in The Great Gatsby. How the rich and careless Daisy on a carefree lark of a drive from the Plaza Hotel to a Long Island mansion had run down that poor Queens woman on the wrong side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge—and never even slowed her pace. Just ran her down and kept right on going. How Gatsby had covered up for her, took care of her mess . . . which led to more than a few bullets through his brain.
I might have dismissed Fitzgerald’s novel as pure fiction except my late father had been a Quindicott police officer, and I’d grown up hearing plenty of stories of the wealthy kids around the region getting into trouble—from prankish vandalism to drunk driving and date rape—only to have charges dropped when things were “taken care of ” through payoffs to victims or connections with authorities.
I myself had struggled to get a half-scholarship into a top university, paying for room and board through work-study and the auctioned sale of my late father’s old Black Mask magazines—at the time, through Sadie’s store. I remembered my own earnest approach to classes and grades, remembered the shock of seeing a certain segment of the “smart” set looking down on my seriousness, taking pretty much nothing seriously themselves, blowing off classes without a thought.
Of course, to be honest, back then, I’d had stars in my eyes about the moneyed class, fancied the dream-life of being a part of their afternoons on the yacht and evenings at the country club. As a part of that world, Calvin immediately appeared polished and aloof and intellectual and desirable. My reality check came after I’d gotten accidentally pregnant with Spencer. My late husband and I had married right out of college, and I was instantly thrown under the thumb of his new family. A family with money—lots of it. And used to always getting their way.
And because Calvin’s wealth had made life perpetually easy for him, I found out too late that yes, he may have been intelligent and introspective and had all of those sensitive qualities an impressionable college girl wants in a romantic college boy, but he had a limited capacity for the things that actually mattered in a real-world marriage: patience, tolerance, strength, the capacity to compromise and make hard decisions, or even the discipline to make a consistent, continuous effort.
The ease with which he’d been able to breeze through the years of his life had done nothing to build his character. His father’s early heart attack and his mother’s incessant coddling—accompanied by pulling strings attached to his money when it suited her—left the man a moral weakling.
Of course, that’s my perspective now. Then, I’d been too caught up in it all to understand what was happening in my marriage and why.
It’s been said that anything coming close to accomplishment, achievement, invention, or discovery emerges from an ability to overcome obstacles and roadblocks . . . from a willingness to endure pain. Too late, I deduced that Calivn didn’t actually ascribe to this philosophy.
After years of making excuses for my husband in my own mind, I was forced to admit the bald truth. Calvin had grown so accustomed to letting his family sweep in and solve any childhood difficulty, that the first sign of any roadblock in his adult life sent him off every path he’d begun to travel.
He dropped out of law school, quit job after job with which his mother’s friends had hooked him up. He’d started writing probably two dozen novels and plays, but never wrote past page forty on any one of them. He took to smoking cigarettes and staring out windows. He wasn’t a man who could even muster the requisite vigor to enjoy partying, clubbing, or any other vice, for that matter—having had his fill of them all through his high-society teen years.
The most interest Calvin showed in anything was his own analysis. For five solid years, he sought daily appointments with therapists, but he never kept the same one more than six months. Each, eventually, would be labeled a “quack.” Then, during one stretch, while ostensibly “searching” for a new one, my late husband stopped taking his medications.
And where was I during all of this?
Right there with him, trying to raise a young son whom Calvin took little interest in. Trying to deal with in-laws who refused to see Calvin as deeply troubled. Yes, right there with him . . . to absorb his verbal abuse and mood swings, to take it all because I told myself that my husband was ill and in need of help, right up to the day my hand turned the door knob to our bedroom, just in time to witness his attempt to fly—
Hey, baby. Wanna talk?
“Jack,” I whispered into the dark. “You there?”
I’m always here, sweetheart. Cosmic joke, remember? City slicker forced to spend eternity in cornpone alley.
I smiled. A year ago, I’d forbidden Jack to hang around in the upstairs ether. He told me I couldn’t lay down house rules to a man with no body. An uneasy truce followed. For the most part, he gave me my privacy upstairs, but occasionally, on nights like this one, he’d make his presence known.
Just remember this, Jack added. In the scheme of things, nobody’s got it as bad as yours truly. For me, this isn’t a bunch of gag lines.
“Well . . . look at the bright side,” I told him, fluffing the pillow behind me, “a Rhode Island bookstore in July really isn’t that bad. There are much hotter places you might have been sent.”
Hit me below the belt, why don’t ya?
A long minute of silence followed.
The room had cooled off with Jack’s arrival, but now I felt the summer’s cloying warmth seeping back into the bedroom air.
“Jack?” I silently called, sitting up. “I was just teasing.”
The silence was getting to me. “Jack, please answer. Don’t go.”
Has it ever occurred to you—because it has to me—that this is my eternal punishment?
“No,” I said falling back against the pillow again, “and do you know why? Because it’s beyond insulting.”
What?
“You’re suggesting the fire and brimstone of Satan’s inferno is less of a punishment than running an independent bookstore?”
Lead pipe cinch.
“You really can be infuriating, you know?”
Okay, so we’re back in Miss Prissland, are we?
“Can it, Jack.”
That’s better.
“I don’t want to fight.”
For once we agree.
I sighed.
So what’s eatin’ you?
“What Johnny did to Mina was pretty hard to witness,” I told him. “The kid obviously ran off with Angel tonight and left Mina high and dry. I always liked Johnny, but what he did tonight was pretty rotten. It makes me angry at Angel, too . . . but I’m also sorry for the girl. And furious about that Jag dragging her through the street and then taking off without a backward glance, and all because she dared tell the truth about her privileged circle of friends—one of whom likely committed murder during a party then tried to frame a member of the catering staff.