I didn’t say anything to that, I just stared at my own jagged diamond in the heart.
“He was so sweet, so sensitive. The part of myself that loved him was the best part of me,” she said. She wasn’t really talking to me anymore, she was talking to herself, her younger self, trying to justify all that she had given up. “When I hear the word ‘love,’ it’s his face that comes to mind.”
“Then why aren’t you together forever and always?” I said, interrupting her reverie.
“You sound so bitter.”
“I’ve been here before,” I said. “I’ve heard the violins.”
“If only you knew the truth, you wouldn’t feel that way. You wouldn’t act so threatened. He’s not like other men.”
“He showed me.”
“What?”
“I asked him what was keeping you two apart. Why you didn’t just be with him. I asked him if he was gay, and he laughed, and then he asked me if I wanted to see.”
“So you know.”
“It’s not that big a deal.”
“To him it is. And it was to me, then. And the way I reacted.”
“You were sixteen.”
“And so was he. Imagine what it did to him. What I did to him. When he wouldn’t do anything, no matter how forward I was, I did something terrible. To push him to action, to make him jealous.”
“You screwed Sherman, the quarterback,” I said, my voice flat with the matter-of-factness of it all, “and Terry found you backstage before rehearsal.”
“I wanted him to find me. And he did. But I didn’t know about his condition then. You should have seen his face, Victor, cracked in pain. I can’t forget it. Ever. I can’t stop imagining it. Our love was real and impossible at the same time. I suppose that’s what made it so perfect.”
“Worth lying for? Worth betraying me for?”
“Worth everything,” she said. “Still. I have no choice but to save him.”
“You can’t.”
“But I can’t stop trying either, don’t you see?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t. Listen, Julia. That tape is our last hope. I don’t know if we could ever make each other happy, but that tape is the only way to find out. Since you’ve come back into my life, we’ve been bouncing like Ping-Pong balls from emotion to emotion. Bitterness to lust to suspicion to fear to paranoia. But now there’s hope, it resides in the truth, the truth on that tape.”
She tossed the tape player back onto the table. “I don’t want it,” she said.
“If I turn it in, you’ll hate me forever. If you turn it in, our future opens wide.”
“Don’t make me.”
“I could never make you do anything. But I can make you choose.”
A slight sneer stained her lips. “Between you and him?”
“Between truth and nothing. From the moment you stepped in this door, you’ve been lying. You’re pretending to care about us, but it’s an act. All you care about is saving him.”
“That’s not true.”
“Another lie.” I stopped for a moment, thought about that strange room in which Terrence Tipton now lay, that tomblike room concocted solely out of Julia’s fantasies. “In fact,” I said, slowly, as revelation dawned, “everything we ever had was a lie, because the biggest truth, your love for Terry, was always hidden. But now there’s a line. On one side is the end of lies. On the other side is the end of hope, any hope you might have for something, anything, that’s worthwhile in your future. Because if you can’t face the truth now, that hope is dead.”
“It died fifteen years ago.”
“Stop it. You and he are both blathering idiots. So he’s got no cock. Find a surgeon, for God’s sake. You screwed the quarterback to get him jealous. It happens every day – why do you think high school quarterbacks are always smiling? And the tragic dénouement was a stupid high school play, nothing more. Shakespeare being mangled by high school kids is bad theater, but it’s not a tragedy. Get off the damn balcony and move on.”
She looked at me with something implacable warping her features. Then she stood up and grabbed her bag. “I need to use your bathroom.”
I waited for her to desperately snatch the tape recorder from off the table. I expected that she would take it to the bathroom, pull out the cassette, yank the tape free, and flush it down the toilet. She eyed me for an instant as if she were calculating the odds of her actually getting her hands back on the tape before I grabbed it. But if she wanted to destroy the tape, I wasn’t going to stop her. All I really wanted was an answer, finally, and her grabbing the tape like that would ring as clear as I could hope for. But she didn’t grab the tape. Instead she glanced at it, glanced at me, and then went off through the bedroom door, leaving me both confused and just the slightest bit optimistic, which in my experience has always proved to be fatal.
It took her a long time to return. She was thinking it through. I sat in the darkness and thought it through myself. I wondered if possibilities still existed. I wondered if we had a future. I wondered if that’s what I really wanted. As the minutes ticked by, my neck tensed, my heart beat a little faster. What had I gotten myself into? I had been fighting all this time to keep something alive, and suddenly, with the tape still on the table and the possibility for survival rising all the while, I began to think it would have been better to let it die, long ago. Better had it shriveled like a leech covered in salt and suffered an excruciating death than to let it attach back onto my heart.
I’m not much good at romance, I’m afraid, but I am the master of ambivalence.
“Okay,” she said, back now, her face clean, her brow strangely untroubled. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Take the tape player,” I said. “Go to the Roundhouse. Ask for Detective McDeiss. He’ll probably be at home, but they’ll find him for you. Give him the tape, along with the address in Kensington where Terry can be found.”
“McDeiss?”
“That’s right. He’ll make sure the arrest is done clean, by the book and without any shooting.”
“And what happens to Terrence?”
“I’ll find him a lawyer. He’ll make a deal and will have a chance to clean himself up in prison.”
“You make it sound like I’ll be doing him a favor.”
“Buying drugs for him, shooting him up when you visited, letting him live like a tick sucking off Wren’s wealth, enabling his self-destruction, and protecting him every step of the way, that was no favor. There is an infection in his body that is chewing him to pieces, and he’s doing nothing about it. He’s killing himself. Prison might be his only chance.”
She looked at me for a moment, a harsh emotion rolled across her features like a rough ocean wave, and then she smiled wanly. “You’re a bastard.”
“Yes, I am.”
She stared down at the tape player on the table, as if she were staring at betrayal itself, and then she picked it up, dropped it into her bag, whirled around.
“Call me when it’s done,” I said to her back.
“One step at a time,” she said, and then she was out the door.
I gave her a minute, in case she quickly changed her mind and came back in, and then I rushed over to the window and watched her leave as I took out my cell phone and made a call.
“I see her, bo,” said Derek from the other end.
“Don’t lose her. She’ll be in a dark blue BMW.”
“She got the tape?”
“Yes.”
“What she going to do with it?”
“Call me when she gets to the Roundhouse.”
“And what if she goes the other way?”
“Then keep following.”
“Just so you know,” said Derek, “I think you got some visitors.”
“Who?”
“Two men. They was waiting for her to leave before they popped in.”