“Ronnie and the Nerd! Perfect! Hell on earth! I can’t think of any two assholes who deserve it more!” was what Daphne, on the telephone with her best friend and, as usual, doing most of the talking, said of the engagement news. Daphne had once been married to Maynard, it had lasted less than a year, a miserable time spent away at law school in a grad student flat, far from home, drunk most of the time or fucking around helplessly while that drudge hit — and hit and hit — the books. Later she would marry Nikko the golf pro, the one who ran away a few months later with the orthodontist’s teenage daughter in her psychedelic warpaint, and after that it would be old Stu the car dealer, whom Daphne generously called Old Stud, at least for a while. But back at the time of Harriet’s death and Duwayne’s deranged assault on the paint store, Daphne’s “current steady,” as she called her second husband when she wasn’t calling him Eric the Ready, the Rude, or the Rod, was the town’s new surgeon and resident oncologist, caught by her before he’d even got his bags unpacked. “Speaking of which, honey — assholes, I mean — I hope Ronnie’s isn’t as tight as it used to be, it’s in for some heavy drilling. Mange likes the back door, you know. Did I ever tell you about his enema routines? Talk about sloppy sex! Peeyoo!” The person on the other end of the line, the mother of a one-year-old by then (which had aroused strong but ambivalent feelings in Daphne, who longed to have children only so long as she did not have to be a mother), was probably not interested in this intelligence, there was some other reason Daphne had called her, but for the moment it had flown her mind, which in truth caged very little, even when soberer than she was now. “Still, it was about the only time old misery-guts ever let himself go, so to speak. That’s not Eric’s problem. You couldn’t ask for a more relaxed guy, so relaxed he’s asleep most of the time. Honest to God, I greet him in nothing but a dab of perfume when he comes home from the hospital, and all he does is give me this sweet sad smile and fold up like dropped pants. Hey, I know they’re working him too hard out there, but they’re not working that part of him, are they? Well, let’s face it, they probably are, it’s the only answer, isn’t it? He’s out there taking the temperature of all those hotpants nurses all day, dip-sticking himself to exhaustion, poor boy, nothing left for his house calls. They do the scoring, I get the snoring. So what’s a girl gonna do? Well, Colt was back in town a couple of weeks ago, that bastard, you know, for his aunt Harriet’s funeral. This is just between you and me, honey, not a word now — but Eric had the duty that day, so Colt and I skipped the burial part afterwards and went to have a drink together at the downtown hotel where he was staying. We sat there at that old wooden bar, not saying much, feeling nostalgic about that old place now that they say it’s going to be torn down, and while we were in that mood, he suggested we go to his room and get laid just for old times’ sake. What—?! Old times was a goddamned rape, for Christ’s sake, was he crazy? That’s what I told him. Still, forgive and forget, water under the britches and all that, right? Besides, he was looking pretty good, now that his hair was long. And he did say he was sorry, he was just a dumb little shit back then who didn’t know any better, he said, so I asked him what it was worth to him, now that he was a grownup shit. He kind of sneered and said, ‘You doing it for money now, Daph?’ and I said, ‘No, come on, you prick, you abused the hell out of me when I was just an innocent kid and now you come back here and I’m a happily married woman and you think you can just have me for a shot of gin or two? How cheap do you think I am?’ He studied me for a moment, and then he grinned and said, ‘Okay, how much?’ I didn’t blink an eye, honey. I just grinned right back at him and said: ‘A thousand bucks, sweetie. In cash. It’ll buy me my cherry back.’ I clinked his glass with mine, he stared at me for a minute, then he shrugged, winked, went off to the bank. And let me tell you. The sonuvabitch got his money’s worth. So did I. I’d forgotten it could be so good. Not since — well… Never mind.” She was about to say, not since the red, red robin came bob, bob, bobbin’, but having almost no friends left in this town, decided against it, a rare moment of prudence. “When it was over, I gave him half his money back. No kidding. Sheer gratitude. It was in small bills, so he flung it onto the bed and we fucked on that, pardon the French, it was like being a kid again and rolling around in autumn leaves. Except you don’t get dust up your nose. Oh, speaking of the French — hello? are you there, honey? yes?” Daphne asked, recalling at last the reason she had phoned. “That was terrible news about your friend, Marie-what’s-her-name, so sudden and all. I’m really sorry. No, really. I noticed she was looking a little green around the gills when she was visiting here last month, but who would have guessed, hunh? It’s crazy! What a world! How is John taking it? I mean, they’d got pretty close, hadn’t they? Speaking loosely, I mean, her love of flying, and all that. Well, hell, good old unflappable John, straight up as always, no doubt. What do you suppose it was that made her do it? Still carrying the torch for Yale, you think? Or …? Hello—?”
News of the sudden violent death of the French penpal, the one who had upstaged and jinxed Daphne at the wedding four years before, reached town by way of Oxford’s boy Cornell, back home from his educational graduation trip abroad in a state bordering on severe shell shock, such that the news itself was rather minimal and had to be imagined, or as Ellsworth, whose task it was to accomplish this feat week after week for the readers of The Town Crier would say, recreated. Selectively recreated, for there was news, intriguing as it might be in oral form, that did not suit the printed pages of the town’s weekly newspaper, the widely rumored events out at the Country Tavern during Marie-Claire’s visit to town the month before just one example, an episode referred to only obliquely in her obituary a few weeks later when Ellsworth wrote that the deceased was known for her “passionate zest for life and happiness, so typical of the natives of that great enlightened nation, and not always understood by simpler, more straightforward prairie folk.” That got him in a bit of trouble with the locals actually, but Ellsworth brushed it aside in his usual lofty manner, remarking to his friend Gordon, who had mentioned some of the complaints he had heard, that, suffocating as he was in the bloated provincial crassitude of this bumpkin town, he felt obliged to put the needle in from time to time, simply to survive. Ellsworth’s sympathies were perhaps affected by the fact that he was at this time hoping to season his own existence with a touch of French zest, his ancient dreams of the bohemian life having been revived that summer when his photographer friend suddenly took in a live model, a pretty little uninhibited gamine from the trailer camp. Ellsworth, foreseeing the delightful possibility of an old-fashioned beaux-arts ménage à trois, as Marie-Claire herself might have put it, once again took to wearing his beret and a kerchief tied round his neck (it was still too hot for the cape) and began paying regular visits to Gordon’s studio, having assisted in previous photo sessions and, for the sake of art and friendship, offering to do so again. Gordon, however, was less generous with Pauline than he had been with his mother, may she rest in peace, and did not seem enthusiastic about Ellsworth’s suggested new arrangements, which caused a certain distance to grow up between the two men for a time, though Gordon did show Ellsworth a few of his photos of the girl and asked him to witness his marriage to her the following year. About all Ellsworth got out of the whole affair was a paragraph for his novel-in-progress (at that time, several years before the crisis provoked by the death of the car dealer’s wife, a novel with only one character and as yet untitled, though perhaps to be called The Artist’s Ordeal), an aesthetic meditation on the teleology of models, which he read aloud at a meeting of the Literary Society at the public library (only John’s wife understood in the least his artistic intentions, he read for her alone) and then abandoned, the larger project as well, and not for the first time. At times, Ellsworth stepped forth onto the international stage to accept the world’s accolades for his innovatively designed yet classically structured masterpiece of creative fiction, and at other times he recognized that he had only managed to write about fourteen pages and probably only three of those were keepers, and gave it up. His journalistic recreation of the final hours of the French artist-friend of John and his wife, his primary sources being either incoherent or inaccessible, he also abandoned, limiting himself in the end to a brief obituary which remarked on the “shock and sorrow that rippled throughout our community when the tragic news, like a thrown stone, fell upon it,” and an “I Remember” column supplied graciously by John’s wife and published a few months later.