Poe Page 14

  “For Christ’s sake, Lisa, I’m not Daniel; I’m really not. I would never, never hurt you. Is that what you’re scared of, that I’m going to go crazy and try to kill you?”

  “Daniel is not crazy. He has a disease—”

  “A disease that made him think stabbing you was a good idea.” Instantly I’m filled with regret as her face goes a whiter shade of pale. “Look,” I add more gently. “All I’m asking is for you to explain. One minute you say he has a disease—that he’s schizophrenic, and that’s why he attacked you—and then the next minute you’re scared I’m going to end up like him just by reading some book. By taping notes on my wall. As far as I know, reading and organizational skills aren’t big risk factors for psychotic breaks.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she says tentatively. She sits back down in the egg-shaped chair but holds her purse in her hand, like at any moment she might still leave. I settle on the couch and let her think for a minute.

  Finally she says, “To Daniel it was all a big game at first, a challenge. He looked at my grandfather’s numbers like they were an interesting puzzle, and then, it’s like the more time he spent with them, the more they seemed to hold him. Possess him.”

  “I thought your mom said she’d thrown all that stuff out.”

  Lisa sighs heavily. “She did. But I wanted some privacy and decided to move into the basement. Daniel helped me rip up the old carpeting, and the numbers were there on the cement floor in white chalk. I washed them away, but Daniel jotted them down in a notebook first.” She stares intently at her hands.

  “You can’t think this is your fault.”

  “Sometimes I’d be sitting across from him,” she says softly, “just like I’m sitting across from you, and I knew he was thinking about them. Repeating them in his mind over and over. He was so sure of himself at the beginning. He kept saying there was a reason we’d found the numbers, that he could figure out what they meant… He was so convincing that he convinced me. But he didn’t figure it out, because there was nothing to figure out. And a part of me wonders… What if I’d done something different? What if I’d said something?… Stopped him?” She twists the straps of her bag between her fingers, and for a moment we’re both silent.

  “Look,” I finally say, “there’s a big difference here. No family history of mental illness. Okay, maybe my mom was on the OCD side when it came to cleaning, but no schizophrenia.”

  “But why take the chance?” she asks in a small voice. “Why not just leave it alone?”

  A good question.

  Two candles also borrowed from Doug burn low on the table, flickering weakly, almost about to go out in a pool of melted wax. A cold wind blows through the eaves of the house, rattling the windowpane. It’s a lonely sound.

  I pull at some loose thread where the couch is worn away. “My parents died. One minute they were here, calling me to let me know they were coming out for the weekend, and then a few hours later they were gone. Forever. No warning. I had no bad feeling; no black cat crossed the street—it was a completely normal day. I was worried about my novel; I was planning on going to the corner store to pick up some flowers for my mom; CNN was on; there were kids playing on the street. I went to a party. Then, when I got the call, it was like, what the fuck? Because the next day nothing changed. The sun shone, the kids played baseball, CNN was covering the same news. My whole life disappeared, and the world went on as usual. That scared me. It scared me more than anything. Because then, what’s the point? There is none.”

  “But that’s just it,” says Lisa. “It’s random. It’s all random and there is no point, so you’ve got to take your happiness where you can find it. You almost died but didn’t. So now enjoy what you’ve got.”

  “What’s happening to me now is not random. The symbol on my father’s ring is the same symbol in the book.”

  Lisa shakes her head dismally. “Dimitri, a dollar sign is a symbol. Ever see that in more than one place? It doesn’t mean—”

  “But it could—”

  “This is all about your father, isn’t it?” A statement more than a question.

  I swallow. “No. Okay, maybe. But let’s look at this logically. Hypothesis A: Daniel is completely off-his-rocker nuts. Then there can’t possibly be any harm if I read the book, right? Insanity isn’t communicable.”

  Lisa gives me a guarded look. “Well that’s Hypothesis A.”

  “Right. Then we have Hypothesis B, which is that Daniel is not crazy. Instead something is going on that has to do with Aspinwall, or the numbers, or my father, or something else we don’t understand. But if we go with that assumption, then Daniel spending the rest of his life in an asylum isn’t going to help him, because he’s not insane.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “What I’m saying is that the only way to help him would be to understand what’s wrong. There are too many coincidences for all this to be random. I feel like there’s a thread that’s connecting it all, that there’s a direction, a path.”

  “A thread, a path,” murmurs Lisa. She looks at me with an expression I can’t quite read and then leans over, placing a hand over one of the candles. The delicate skin between her fingers glows an incandescent red. “Let’s say Hypothesis B is right, and it is all connected. What’s at the end of that path?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit.

  “I do,” says Lisa. “And it’s not good. For anyone.”

  “That was the end of Daniel’s path. And I’m not Daniel.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  For a moment we don’t talk—we just sit there silently. An obvious impasse. There’s no way for either of us to win.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen if I really start to pursue this,” I finally say. “But I know that I need you, Lisa.” I twist one of the couch’s threads around my finger. “I need you to tell me if I’ve gone too far. I need you to throw me a line.”

  “My track record as a lifesaver is not that great,” she says bitterly.

  “You’ll know,” I say. “You’re maybe the only one who will.”

  Lisa doesn’t answer. Instead she slowly passes a finger through the edge of the dying flame, making it ripple, playing with it. “You know, Daniel always used to do this when we were kids. I’d wonder why he never got burned. He said it was magic. But there’s no such thing as magic.”

  “Is that a no, then?” I ask softly.

  “I didn’t say that.” She pulls her hand back from the candle, looks me in the eye. “Okay, I will throw you one, and only one, line. If I say pull back, pull back. If I say run, you run. Will you promise me that?”

  I swallow and nod. The magnitude of this concession is not lost on me.

  “Because if you don’t… I can’t be there with you when it ends. Badly.”

  The flame dies, and smoke curls from the burnt wick.

  I stand—hold my hand out to her. “I wouldn’t want you to.”

  Around ten, at a reasonably decent hour, I give Lisa a ride home.

  “You want to come in?” she whispers, her breath hanging in the cold air. Of course there’s not much point in whispering; Buddy has announced our arrival with a fit of barking that could wake the proverbial dead, or worse still, an anxious mother. A light pops on in Elizabeth’s second-floor bedroom.

  “Yes,” I say, “but then I won’t want to leave.”

  “Hmmm,” she says, nuzzling my neck while she places a hand on my thigh. “And is that a bad thing?”

  “Hey,” I say, gently pushing her away. “Don’t start the engine unless you’re going for a ride.”

  She eases out of the car and smiles. “I thought writers needed to suffer for their art.”

  “Well thanks to you I’m going to be taking a cold shower as soon as I get home.”

  “That’s not suffering, that’s dating a tease.”

  She puts her hands in her jacket pockets, and I watch her go up the front steps, slightly hunched against the cold,
illuminated by the Mustang’s round headlights. She looks smaller somehow, more vulnerable. At the top she gives Buddy a gentle pat but doesn’t look back before opening the front door, which briefly casts a warm light on the porch.

  It’s a long and lonely ride back home alone. The ghostly streets are empty and deserted, except for the liquor stores and bars—today is Friday, the day for cashing welfare and social security checks in these parts. I pass a dirty middle-aged man sitting on the curb in front of Ace Liquor; he drinks from a bottle in a paper bag, swaying slightly. I wonder if he’s someone’s father. There was about a month in high school where I seriously wondered if my continuously absent father was leading some kind of double life, if maybe he was an alcoholic. I’d seen a television special outlining the signs, unexplained absences being one of them. So I’d ride my bike to the bars, find an inconspicuous spot, and watch the door, imagining myself a detective on a stakeout. I did see other people’s fathers, like Mr. Sprague with some woman, not his wife. An occasional teenager would try to get in, but they’d be escorted back out on the sidewalk five minutes later with one less fake ID. But not my father. Never my father.

  I could usually tell about a week before he left that he would be going on one of his unexplained trips. My mother would get into a mood. The first bad signs were the dust bunnies under the bed. Next came the envelope with cash for me to buy lunch at school. I was the only kid in my class with an industrial stainless steel lunchbox and four-course gourmet meal, but each day leading up to my father’s departure, my mother would get up later and later in the morning, leaving me to fend for my own with cereal for breakfast, or if she wasn’t looking, chocolate chip cookies. Frozen items would make an appearance at dinner, peas and french fries, and I knew things were really bad when I’d come downstairs to find a tinfoil-wrapped TV dinner at my place at the table.

  When he was gone I tried to keep self-contained, not be a burden. I’d take out the trash without my mom having to ask me three times; I’d wash what few dishes there were and put them in the dishwasher, adding my mother’s favorite brand of detergent. I folded my clothes and made my bed before school. Tried to make it up to her in my own way.

  Which of course made me hate him just a little, my father. He wouldn’t call while he was gone and left no way for us to reach him. It was like being periodically and inexplicably abandoned. But what made me hate her just a little was the fact that when he finally came back unannounced, appearing one day at the front door with his suitcase in hand, she’d act like he’d never been gone, even if it’d been weeks. Suddenly the vacuum would be buzzing, we’d have roast duck for dinner, and I’d find my underwear starched into near-cardboard perfection. Was he having an affair? Did he have another family stashed away, or was he involved in something illegal, like the Russian Mafia or maybe a Colombian drug cartel? Whatever he was up to drained him completely; he’d stay in bed for at least a week, with my mother carrying his meals on trays to their bedroom. Eventually I realized that whatever he was doing, my mother must have known, or if she didn’t know, she didn’t care. So to a certain degree I stopped caring, which created a distance between us—my mother and me.

  I park the car and head up the creaking stairs to my apartment. Walking in I find the candles have gone out, so I run them under the water for a second to make sure the wicks aren’t smoldering, then toss them in the trash. Maybe I’m not different than my dad—here I am abandoning Lisa in a way to chase down some long-dead mystery. Maybe I’ll never learn more about my father, his “thing.” Maybe she’s right, it’s all random and there’s nothing to learn.

  The book is on the couch where I left it. I sit down and pick it up. The leather cover is soft in my hands; it has a smooth sheen, and the corners are bent with obvious signs of wear—this wasn’t a book that sat unread on a shelf, gathering dust. I open it in the middle, randomly flipping through some of the yellowed pages. It’s amazing to think someone carefully traced each line of each letter; it must have taken years for the Greek text alone. But what does it mean? What does the symbol on my ring mean? Why do I care?

  “What the hell am I doing?” I say, tossing the book on the floor. “Can you tell me that, Poe? Can you tell me what the fuck this is all means?” My voice echoes through the empty apartment.

  There is, of course, no response. There never is when you want one.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: AMELIA

  There is the glow of a party in the distance and a live band. Not the kind of music I’m familiar with: it’s an old-fashioned warble, a woman’s voice, rising out to a night sky filled with stars.

  There’ll come a time when you’ll regret it,

  There’ll come a time you’ll want to forget it,

  ’Cause I’m gonna haunt you so,

  I’m gonna taunt you so,

  And it’s gonna drive you to ruin.

  A bright staccato laugh rises out above the murmur of a small crowd. I look down and find that I’m wearing a black tuxedo, with black leather shoes polished to a high shine. A cigarette burns in my hand. I toss it to the gravel driveway and crush it with the edge of my heel. Gold cuff links in my shirt sleeves catch the light of small round headlights coming toward me, and I step aside as a Packard, black with a round hood, roars by. I watch as it pulls up to Aspinwall, where a butler smartly steps forward to open the car door.

  I must be dreaming. Or I’m in a really, really bad cliché of an MGM film. I half expect to see Fred Astaire tapping by with Ginger Rogers on his arm.

  From behind me a tiny woman in a white silk gown glittering with embroidered crystals approaches. Her platinum hair cascades down her back in highly styled curls, and she grips my arm lightly.

  “Are you coming?” she says, her voice like a bird’s.

  I nod, and she laughs as if I’ve said something funny and pulls me past the paper lanterns hanging from the neatly pruned elms into a courtyard filled with large white tents. Waiters in white jackets drift by, balancing gleaming silver platters filled with hors d’oeuvres. On a small raised stage I see the source of the music, a small orchestra; all the musicians are wearing fake beards and turbans, while the singer sways in front of a microphone, looking like a recent escapee from a harem, gauzy red silk draped over her head. Her eyes are lined with thick black kohl.

  “I just adore jazz,” says the blond on my arm. “My mother says it’s sinful. Isn’t that a gas?” She pulls out a cigarette from her glittering purse, which reminds me of Maddy’s, but with a higher caliber of crystal. I realize she’s waiting for a light, and I search my pocket, which remarkably yields a gold lighter.

  “Thanks,” she says, blowing some of the smoke in my face, a strange form of flirtation. “I’m Alice, by the way.”

  Suddenly the murmur turns to astonished gasps, then a smattering of applause. I turn to see, of all things, an elephant emerge from the woods with a woman sitting on top wearing blousy trousers and a tight-fitting bodice, like an Indian princess from A Thousand and One Nights. Her skin is creamy white, glowing under the paper lanterns.

  “She always makes an entrance,” says the blond bitterly.

  “Who’s that?”

  The woman turns to me, surprised. “Mrs. Aspinwall. You don’t know her?” There’s a hopeful edge to her voice.

  “No,” I say.

  “I’ve never met anyone who didn’t know Mrs. Aspinwall. You must not be from around here.”

  “I’m not.” I leave her side to go get a closer look.

  I push through the crowd, and time seems to slow—I can see every detail, hear every sound. A woman in her fifties holds a martini too tightly, smelling like she took a bath in musky perfume—“How did she get her hands on an elephant? That’s what I want to know.” I pass by a tall, gangly man with thin round glasses—“The market will recover; it always does.” A little girl zips by, chasing a brown puppy. She’s followed by an overweight and much slower maid—“Delia, stop now; time for bed.”—until finally I reach the front, where I find Captain As
pinwall, puffed up with pride, standing at the elephant’s head—“Spent our honeymoon in Bombay; that’s where she got the idea.” Mrs. Aspinwall is still perched on the elephant’s back, looking away. Her long brown hair is curled into a shiny wave, and I hear her bright laugh again; it sparkles high above the music. She turns to the rest of us.

  She has no face.

  “Love, can you help me down?”

  Shock ripples through my body, but no one else seems to notice. Captain Aspinwall gallantly holds out his arms, and she jumps lightly into them, causing another small round of applause. The shoes on her feet are pointed and curl upward at the ends. She runs a delicate hand through her hair. “Don’t encourage me. Next I’ll be swallowing a sword.”

  With what mouth?

  But everyone laughs. A waiter holds up a platter with small shot glasses, and I take two.

  “Well, I don’t know about anyone else,” she says. “But I’m completely famished. Have they started to serve?”

  “Just the hors d’oeuvres, love,” says Captain Aspinwall. “We were waiting on you.”

  “Well tell them to start serving the duck. I hate it when food is served cold.”

  “Yes, my heart,” he replies, heading immediately for the kitchen, and I wonder if everyone here is her servant in one way or another.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she says, turning to me and extending a hand.

  I swallow, look to where her face should be. “We haven’t. I’m Dimitri.”

  “A Russian name? You must be one of Richard’s friends from New York. He doesn’t take me there nearly enough. I’m obviously Mrs. Aspinwall, but you can call me Amelia.”

  A second and apparently visible wave of shock hits me.

  “You don’t like the name? Neither do I. It’s such an old-fashioned name, like Gertrude or Myrna. I thought about officially changing it to Greta, like Greta Garbo, but Richard put his foot down. Come sit with me. We should get to know each other.”

  And just like that I’m now a part of her cadre, under her spell. As I follow she tosses out greetings, clasps hands, works the crowd—“What a darling dress, Sammy; you must tell me where you got it”; “Oh, hello Doug, so glad you could come”; “Edgar, it’s been far too long; you must drop by more often, I insist.” She is, I realize, a born politician.