“Do you think I’m an idiot? Do you think I don’t know what’s going on?”
Pressing her lips together until they lost what little color they had, she leaped to her feet, and then, after she took another drink, began to walk up and down the room.
“What I want to know is why you’re doing this. I know you hated my husband. And yes, I remember you, Mr. Antonelli, from years ago, when I was married to Elliott and he first joined your firm. I can understand why you might feel sorry for him, locked up the way he is. But Elliott is crazy. He’s insane. Why you would help him try to torment me, after what I’ve had to go through, is really quite beyond me, Mr. Antonelli, and I think you owe me an explanation.”
I started to get up. “Perhaps I should go. I really don’t know what to say.”
She searched my eyes and then lowered her gaze. “No, don’t go,” she said after she took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I jumped to conclusions.”
She sat down again and, though her glass was not even half empty, reached for the decanter. When she finished filling the glass, she looked up at me. “Do you know what was in that letter you sent me?”
“I have no idea what was in it,” I answered. “I sent it to you for the reasons I stated in the cover note I sent with it.”
She began to drum her fingers on the edge of the coffee table, but slowly, easily, without any of the rigid, metallic abruptness of before.
“You really don’t know, then?”
“All I know is that I went to see him. I had been meaning to do it for a long time, years, really, ever since that day…”
“When he tried to kill you.”
“I don’t think he wanted to kill me at all, Mrs. Jeffries. If I hadn’t tried to wrestle the gun away from him, I don’t think he would have pulled the trigger.”
With a shrewd, cold-eyed glance, she assured me I was wrong.
“He would have killed you and never given it a second thought.
I knew Elliott. He was crazy, Mr. Antonelli,” she said, drumming her fingers faster. “After he had the breakdown, after what he did in court that day, he blamed everything on you. It was an obsession with him. He thought you were trying to destroy him. He thought-”
“I was sleeping with his wife.”
The drumming stopped. She raised her chin. “I told you. He had become completely paranoid. You’re lucky you’re alive.”
“Perhaps. But tell me, why would he have thought you were having an affair with me? Why would he have thought you were having an affair at all?”
Her long, crooked fingers stirred back into motion, slowly, noiselessly. “Things were never very good with us, Mr. Antonelli.
Elliott was always difficult, demanding. He was under enormous pressure. He always thought he had something to prove because he had not gone to one of the best schools. He blamed me for that. He was always telling me how much easier things would have been for him if he didn’t have a wife and children slowing him down.”
I did not believe her. “He worshipped those kids, and I must tell you, I always had the impression that he worshipped you as well.”
“Why? Because he had my photograph in his office and every so often he’d bring the kids with him when he went into work on a Saturday or a Sunday? It was about the only time they ever saw him.” A look of disdain passed over her face. “Don’t misun-derstand me. I’m not saying Elliott didn’t love the children. I think he even loved me-for a while. But whenever things didn’t go quite right-and for Elliott everything always had to be exactly right-he had to blame it on someone else.”
She still had not answered my question. “But why did he think you were having an affair with me?”
She stared hard at me for a mornent, and then, reaching for her glass, got back on her feet and began prowling the room. She seemed to grow more agitated with each step she took. The ice was banging against the glass and when the clear gold liquid sloshed over the top and dripped onto her hand, she seemed not to notice.
“Have you ever known anyone who went crazy, Mr. Antonelli?
Have you ever lived with anyone who was completely-and I mean completely-irrational?”
She tried to calm herself. Instead of pacing back and forth, she leaned against the chair, and when that did not help, she stood in the middle of the room, one foot crossed over the other, then, a moment later, one turned out to the side.
“The worst part is trying to hang on to your own sanity. What happened that day in court-when they had to bring him home-
had been building for months. He had already started to talk about conspiracies. He kept telling me how each seemingly innocent thing that happened was really a part of it. Do you know what is really crazy? How much of it makes sense. Elliott would say to me: ‘Just for the moment, assume I’m right.’ He was always asking me to do that. He would wear me down. Then I’d listen to him, and, if you assumed he was right, that there was a conspiracy against him, then everything he said was perfectly logical. A woman pushing her grocery cart behind him when he stopped on his way home to pick up a loaf of bread was following him; a camera he noticed on the back seat of a parked car was put there on purpose to let him know he was under surveil-lance. Everything fit, because, once you agreed that there really was a conspiracy, anything that happened could be explained as being a part of it, and, more importantly, became one more thing that proved he was right.”
With a pensive expression, she sipped on her drink, as she thought about what had happened, or what she wanted me to think had happened.
“I wouldn’t do it,” she said as she looked at me again. “I wouldn’t assume-not even for just a moment-that he was right, that there was this terrible conspiracy against him. I was afraid that if I did that he would never get better and I might go insane right along with him. Because, you see, if I had said yes, it makes perfect sense, it all ties together, then I would not have any ground left to stand on, no way to tell what was real and what was not. Insanity is insidious, Mr. Antonelli. It invites you in, and then it closes the door behind you, and after a while your eyes adjust to the darkness and then you don’t think it’s dark anymore.”
She moved next to the window and stared out across the flickering lights of the city and the great flowing river, toward the mountain where the snow glowed blue and purple and gold as the sun slipped away into the night.
“My refusal was seen as a betrayal, and that betrayal, in Elliott’s diseased mind, could only mean that I was part of the conspiracy as well. Not just part of it, either. No, I was the one who had started it all.”
She turned around, just far enough to see me. There was a sense of weariness about her, as if nothing much mattered anymore, a sense that everything that was going to happen in her life had now taken place.
“I didn’t know then how sick he really was. It all seemed like a bad dream, like something that wasn’t really happening. Sometimes when I went to bed I could almost convince myself that when I woke up in the morning everything would be just the way it had been before. Other times I thought he was having a bad dream, and if I just grabbed him and shook him as hard as I could, he’d wake up and be normal again. I just could not believe it was really happening.”
She sat in the bamboo chair and put the glass down on the table. Folding her arms together, she leaned back, stretched out her legs, and crossed one ankle over the other.
“You could almost hear a clicking noise when he put each piece of the conspiracy together. Once he decided that I was the one who had started it, there had to be a reason. And of course there could be only one reason: There had to be another man.”
Her voice was quiet, controlled, as if she were telling a story about someone else.
“You cannot imagine the depths of his anger and hatred. He was screaming at me like I had never heard anyone scream before. I started screaming back. It was self-defense, that’s the only way I can explain it. He was accusing me of everything imaginable, terrible things, obscene things, and I was screaming back, taunting him with everything he said about me, telling him it was all true, laughing about it. He was hurting me, worse than I’d ever been hurt before, and at that moment I was every bit as crazy as he was. And that’s when I said it, that’s when I told him, that, yes, of course he was right, I was out to destroy him, I had done everything he said I had done, I was having an affair, I was sleeping with another man, I was sleeping with his great good friend, Joseph Antonelli.”