“I was winning.”
“All right. Then why’d you leave the game?”
“I was tired. It was just what I said. I wanted to go home to sleep.”
“But instead you went to The Innside Out.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Was it a woman?” Frank asked.
“No.”
“Was it?” he insisted.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jamie said, and buried his face in his hands.
“Tell us,” I said.
He began talking.
The clock on the wall of Frank’s office seemed to stop abruptly; there was only the present, there was only Jamie’s story. It was the story I might have told Susan last night had Jamie’s phone call not shattered the moment. As he spoke now, I became all of us. I was Jamie himself, confessing not to a brutal knife murder, no, but to murder nonetheless — the inexorable suffocation of his second marriage. I was Susan listening to the confession I did not make last night, but which Jamie now made for me. And finally, I was the victim Maureen, unable to escape the blade that came at me relentlessly in this fatal blood-spattered cage.
It was a philanderer’s nightmare.
They had arranged to meet at eleven P.M. By a quarter to eleven, he was winning close to sixty dollars. He’d been betting recklessly for the past half-hour, hoping to bring his winnings down to a respectable amount that would enable him to quit without censure. But each foolish risk paid off — he drew to inside straights and filled them, he saved an ace kicker and caught the case ace, he raised with a pair of deuces and the strong hand opposite him abruptly folded. He could not seem to lose — in bed with her later he would whisper that he was lucky in cards, did that mean he was unlucky in love? He did not yet know that this was to be the unluckiest night of his life.
The poker game was his Sunday night alibi. On Wednesday afternoons, his office was closed to patients, and he went to meet her then as well. Maureen accepted his lies without question. But as he left the game on Sunday night, one of the losing players said, “Who are you rushing off to, Jamie? A girlfriend?” He’d thought the game safe until that moment. He said, “Sure, sure, a girlfriend,” and waved good night — but the gratuitous comment bothered him. He was an old hand at infidelity. He’d been cheating on his first wife for half a dozen years before he met Maureen, and then he saw her regularly for another two years before asking for a divorce. He knew that men were worse than women when it came to gossip, and was terrified that his early departure would set them to talking about him. But he’d already left the game, he’d already taken the gamble. He could only hope to win it the way he’d won all the other reckless bets he’d made that night.
He could not understand how he had once again become involved with another woman. Catherine — he named her at last, and seemed relieved to have her name in the open, and in fact expanded upon it at once. Catherine Brenet, the wife of a Calusa surgeon, Dr. Eugene Brenet, a very good man, he said, evaluating Brenet on the basis of his medical skill and not his aptitude for cuckoldry. He’d met her at one of the charity balls, she was his dinner partner, he chatted with her, he danced with her. She was startlingly beautiful. But more than that, she was available. It was this aura of certain availability that first attracted him to her.
He was, after all, experienced at this sort of thing.
He had met this woman before; in the beginning she was only every woman he’d ever transported to clandestine assignations in countless unremembered motels. She was Goldilocks. The bitterly sarcastic name, first applied to Maureen by his former wife, now seemed to be appropriate. Goldilocks — stealing into someone else’s house, testing the chairs and the porridge and especially the beds. Goldilocks, the other woman. She did not have to be blonde, though Maureen was and so was Catherine. She could just as easily have had hair as black as midnight, eyes as pale as alabaster...
We were in the garden of the Leslie Harper Municipal Theater. Frank and his wife Leona, Susan and I. Statues of dwarfs surrounded us, palm fronds fluttered on the languid breeze. There was the scent of mimosa on the air. Leona had just introduced Agatha to the rest of us. Leona described her as a new “Harper Helper.” Frank despised the term. His wife, however, was proud of her fund-raising activities for the theater, and staunchly maintained that the Harper was a very real part of Calusa’s cultural scene. Frank immediately and unequivocally said there was no real culture in Calusa, there was only an attempt to create an ersatz cultural climate. The Harper, he insisted, came close to being vanity theater. He said this within earshot of seven or eight fluttering dowagers who were themselves heavy financial supporters of what was, despite Frank’s biased New York view, a good repertory theater. One of the old ladies sniffed the air as though smelling something recently deceased in the immediate vicinity. Agatha noticed this — and smiled.
I had held her hand an instant too long while being introduced, I had caught my breath too visibly at the radiance of her beauty, and now I basked too obviously in her smile. I was certain I was blushing, and I looked away at once. The warning bells chimed, signaling the end of the intermission. I looked into her pale gray eyes, she nodded almost imperceptibly, and then turned to go, black hair flailing the air. I watched as she crossed the garden to join a tall blond man whose back was to me. There was a lithe, slender, cat-like look about her; she took long strides over the garden stones and climbed the steps to the lobby. A sudden exciting glimpse of leg flashed in the slit of her long green gown, I held my breath and listened to the clicking chatter of her heels on the lobby terrazzo. The warning chimes sounded again. “Matthew?” Susan said, and the four of us went back into the theater. Throughout the second act I tried to locate Agatha Hemmings; the theater was small, but I could not find where she was sitting. Nor did I see her in the lobby afterward. As we walked toward where I’d parked the car, Frank pronounced the play sophomoric.
I called her on Monday morning.
Her husband’s name was Gerald Hemmings, he was a building contractor. I’d learned this from Frank in a supposed rehash of our evening at the Harper together. It was good information to have. There were at least six Hemmingses in the Calusa directory, and I did not have the courage to call each and every one of them to ask if I might please speak to Agatha please. Even then, as the phone rang on the other end, I was ready to hang up if anyone other than Agatha herself answered. She answered on the fifth ring, I had been nervously counting them.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hello... is this Agatha Hemmings?”
“Yes?”
“Matthew Hope.”
Silence.
“We met at the Harper Saturday night. Leona Summerville intro—”
“Yes, Matthew, how are you?”
“Fine. And you?”
“Fine, thank you.”
Silence.
“Agatha, I... look, I’m about to make a complete fool of myself, I know, but... I’d like to see you if that’s possible, for lunch if that’s possible, alone, I mean, if that’s possible. For lunch, I mean.”
There was another silence. I was suffocating in my own air-conditioned office.
“Do we have to have lunch?” she asked.
Jamie was telling us about the first time he met Catherine alone — why had the clock stopped ticking? I did not want to hear about his sordid affair with the surgeon’s promiscuous wife, I did not want this description of their first rendezvous. It was raining, he said. This was February a year ago, it was unusual for it to be raining in Calusa at this time of year. Catherine was waiting where they’d arranged. She was wearing a black raincoat and a floppy green hat that partially hid her face. He pulled the car to the curb and threw open the door, and she stepped inside at once. The black raincoat rode back to expose her leg. He put his hand on her thigh; the touch was electric. There was the aroma of wet and steamy garments in that small contained space. Daringly, he kissed her. The windshield wipers snicked at the rain...