It embarrassed me now to hear Jamie talk about personal matters he would otherwise have kept to himself. The bartender was facing the television screen, but there was something about the erectness of his head that told me he was alert to every word Jamie uttered. Across the room, one of the young men stacking the chairs said something in Spanish, and the one mopping the floor began laughing. The laughter was soft, it echoed guitars and fans and black lace shawls. The waitress looked at her watch. There was no one left at the tables to serve, I wondered why she simply didn’t go home. It occurred to me that she was waiting for the bartender.
“Fell in love with her the minute I saw her,” Jamie said, and blew his nose again. “I knew this was my second chance, Matt, the first marriage had been dead from day one. Maureen walked into that office, she’d been sent by the registry, the nurse I’d had before her was pregnant and had to leave the job. She walked in there, Jesus, I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I knew this was it, I knew I had to have her. I’d been playing around with other women for almost six years by then, but this was something else, this was... I don’t know. I’d never believed in anything like this, but it was happening, she was there, she was suddenly in my life.”
I signaled to the bartender for another drink. I didn’t need another drink, I didn’t even want another drink, but I was hopeful that a break in the conversation would turn Jamie in another direction. I truly did not want to hear about his affair with Maureen. When I was still living in Chicago, I used to see men walking along Michigan Boulevard, talking to themselves. Big cities do that to people. Once you’re reduced to anonymity, it doesn’t matter if you go around holding a spirited conversation with no one but yourself. Anybody noticing you will shake his head and say, “Crazy,” but he won’t know who’s crazy. Just some faceless lunatic ambling along in private solitary discourse, arms waving. Jamie was like that now. Ostensibly, he was talking to me; on the surface, this was a dialogue. But it was more like a monologue that flowed from somewhere in his unconscious, as if the brutal fact of murder had rendered him anonymous, the weight of the tragedy granting him both license and sanctuary.
I felt like an eavesdropper.
“My first wife was frigid, I told you that, didn’t I?” he said. The bartender was standing not a foot away from him, pouring Scotch into my glass, openly interested in Jamie’s words. Jamie seemed not to notice him. I looked up into the bartender’s face, directly into his eyes. He turned away and walked back toward where Bogart was talking to the brunette with bobbed hair.
“She was in analysis for four years, wait, five years I think it was. Yes. Woman in Tampa. Yes. You begin to think it’s your fault, do you know what I mean? Begin to think there’s something wrong with what you’re doing, she lays there like, you know, like a...” His voice trailed, I had the impression he’d been about to say “corpse.” He nodded, sipped at his drink, put the glass down again. “She came home one night, must’ve been six o’clock, a little after. I forget what time her hour was, three-thirty, four, something like that. She came in all smiles, six o’clock. Took my hand, led me into the bedroom. This was ten years ago, she was a few years late with her precious orgasm. I’d been through half her close friends by then, and was already involved with Maureen. Few years too late, my darling wife with her glorious orgasm. Too late.”
Just last month, I’d had a telephone conversation with his former wife. They still owned as joint tenants a piece of land in Sarasota, and they’d had an offer for it that was ten thousand higher than the minimum specified in their separation agreement. Betty Purchase had agreed to the deal and then abruptly backed out of it when Jamie missed sending his usual monthly alimony check. I did not know at the time that Jamie had no intention of ever paying her another cent. He mentioned that to me only after I’d had my conversation with her. On the phone, I told her if she didn’t go ahead with the sale, the real estate agent was well within his rights to sue her for his commission. She said, “Fuck you and the real estate agent.” I warned her that my client was intent on making the sale, and that if she would not agree to it as earlier promised, I would sue for a partition sale. She said, “Go ahead and sue, Charlie,” and then hung up.
“I met her at U.C.L.A.,” Jamie said. “I was going to medical school there, she was an undergraduate. You know my son Michael...”
“Yes, I do.”
“He’s got the same coloring as his mother, black hair, brown eyes. Karin’s different, she’s got my blond hair, but Michael’s the image of his mother, you couldn’t possibly mistake him for anyone else’s son. Tore him apart, the divorce did. He told me one night, he was crying in my arms, he said I’d lied to him all his life. Said that whenever his mother and I used to argue and he asked if we were getting a divorce — he used to ask that even when he was six years old — we’d always tell him, ‘No, no, people argue, that doesn’t mean divorce, that’s a healthy sign, Mike. People who don’t fight are people who don’t really care about each other.’ I used to believe that, Matt, but it’s bullshit, it really is. People who fight all the time are people having trouble.”
He sighed, drained his glass, and signaled to the bartender for a refill. The bartender was starting down the bar, collecting his tabs. The chairs were stacked, the floor was mopped, the Bogart movie had ended. The waitress in the short black skirt was tapping her foot impatiently.
“Took us eighteen months to reach a settlement,” Jamie said, “eighteen months, can you believe it? She got two hundred thousand in cash, plus the house we were living in, and thirty thousand a year in alimony. I’m a doctor, Matt, I’m not a millionaire, what she got represented everything I’d ever worked for. She sent Michael away to military school right after the divorce. Twelve years old, she sent him away. A school in Virginia. He wasn’t even there for my wedding, I couldn’t get him out of that damn school for the weekend. Betty sent him away on purpose, you can bet on that, to make sure I wouldn’t see him too often. Her whole idea was to alienate the kids, make them hate their father for the terrible thing he’d done. She succeeded with both of them.
“I once heard Karin and Michael talking together — this was Christmastime, Michael was home from that goddamn concentration camp and the kids were spending the afternoon with us. Betty had dropped them off after they’d already celebrated the holiday at her house, this was maybe three or four in the afternoon. That was her pattern. Keep the kids for herself, keep them thinking forever and always that I’d committed a heinous crime. Maureen and I were living in a small house on Stone Crab, she was already pregnant with Emily by then, this was seven years ago.
“There was a deck on the house, overhanging the beach, and when it was high tide the ocean would come right in under the pilings and the house would shake. We never could keep the sheets dry in that house, everything was always damp. The kids were out on the deck, looking at the ocean, their backs to me, I guess they didn’t hear me slide open the glass door. I heard Michael say, ‘Did you see the necklace he gave Goldilocks?’ and I realized he was referring to Maureen. That was what Betty called her. Goldilocks. And of course, the kids picked it up. There was such bitterness in Michael’s voice...”