“What is this—Victorian times or something? It’s not a feminine thing to do? What’s this crap you’re giving me? Come on. Your old man was in the military. What are you going into a swoon for?”
“I just don’t like the damn things, Bert.”
“Fine. Sometimes you need things you don’t like. Suppose some creep breaks in here, comes at you with a knife?”
“I’d probably shoot myself in the foot.”
“I’m talking about the baby now. I’m talking about protecting my kid.”
“Bert, the baby’s not even due yet for nearly six months.”
“People in our position, the world’s full of creeps looking to put the snatch on rich kids. They bury infant babies alive out in the woods someplace and they come after you for two million dollars ransom. You understand? Now pay attention. You get a good grip on the thing and you hold it in both hands—here, like this …”
So she let him teach her how to load it, how to aim it, how to shoot. At Fort Keene, five months pregnant, she was pressed into accompanying Bert and four of his friends on their venison safari. There was Jack Sertic, togged out in professional white-hunter khakis, and the helicopter pilot who was a crack shot, and two guests from Bert’s growing show business coterie of chums. One of them was an actor who three years ago had been modeling in designer jeans commercials and subsequently had become the beefcake star of a hit TV action series; the other was a fat comedian from New York and Las Vegas who had the filthiest mouth she’d ever heard. She’d complained to Bert about it and Bert had agreed with her. “But he’s a funny son of a bitch, you’ve got to admit.”
She did—with reluctance. All the same she found it hard to hide her amusement at the ludicrously grim seriousness with which these presumably grown men crept stealthily through the trees on their sponge-soled boots, stalking in grim slow silence like little boys playing Steal-the-Bacon, behaving remarkably like smirking renegade villains prowling toward their sinister ambush in some horrid silent movie melodrama.
She had a rifle. She knew how to use it. She saw a buck deer—bolt upright and staring right at her—and she just watched it until it wheeled and darted away, the signal spots of alarm showing white on its rump—and Bert came clambering out of the trees to gape in astonishment. “You had him. You let him go. For God’s sake, why?”
She looked him in the eye. “I hate the taste of venison. Didn’t I tell you?” And walked away.
“Jesus H. Christ.” He came after her: gripped her arm and turned her. “Hey,” he said in a different voice.
Then he dropped his rifle and pulled her into the circle of his embrace. “Hey,” he murmured. Then his gentle smile became a sybaritic leer.
It was one of the last times she can recall laughing with him.
An hour or so later she watched him fire a high-powered bullet that tossed a smallish buck right into the air and brought it down in a hideous somersault against the bole of a birch tree with force enough to shake the ground.
She saw the avid excitement in Bert’s face—“Hey, hey guys, you see that? You see that?”—and she turned away.
As she walked off she heard the comedian say, “You sure that ain’t somebody’s cow? Fucker goes hunting, comes up to this dumb-ass farmer, fucker says I’m sorry I killed your cow, man, can I replace it? Dumb-ass farmer goes, I don’t know, fucker, how much milk can you give?”
Male laughter.
She didn’t laugh. She made the excuse of fatigue and made her way back to the cabin, leaning back in that ungainly way to balance her expanding abdomen.
She was changing into another person all the while. It was possible now to look back and see what must have been happening then. Even at the time there was a sense that day by day her life was becoming different but she attributed this to the baby that was growing inside her.
It’s more than that, though. Perhaps it’s a kind of growing up.
From a reasonably strait-laced upbringing she shifted as a young woman, without ever marking the transitions, to a life of self-centered trivialities and meaningless cosmetic surfaces.
Amazing how we fall into traps: how we begin to care—simply because other people, superficial people, purport to care—about so many things that don’t matter. What’s In—what’s Out. Who’s U—who’s non-U. A Triumph? But my dear, that was last year’s car. Wouldn’t be caught dead with a man who drives anything but a Datsun 260Z.
And then she’d gone beyond that into Bert’s world of hedonistic luxury with its power trips and billygoat morality—aspects of which she was only beginning to discover.
In fact, thinking back now, she is distressed by the vastness of her ignorance about Bert in those days. They had been married more than a year. She shared his bed and his life. She didn’t like most of his friends but she knew them—she believed she knew all of them.
She believed she was married to a construction magnate.
It wasn’t until later—less than a year ago—that she found out about the rest of his business operations.
Troubled by her naivete of those days she has tried to reason it out:
I’m not an innocent … I didn’t just parachute in yesterday … How the hell could I remain oblivious for so long? There must have been plenty of evidence. Clues all around …
You don’t see what you want not to see. It’s partly that. And it’s partly that Bert has a compulsive way of compartmentalizing everything in his life. There was always that remoteness in him, right from the beginning: he made you aware that you were only seeing as much of him as he wanted you to see.
For a long time it was more than enough. Living with Bert was exciting: it was like watching a performance by a great actor—the unpredictably explosive kind who radiates danger. There’ve been times when he’s put her in mind of Brando, of Robert Duvall—even when he’s at rest there’s an electric menace that hangs in suspension around him like heat lightning ready to strike.
You never knew whether a night in bed with Bert would be a seduction or a rape.
Not that he ever actually treated her roughly. Once they were married he behaved toward her in an Old World manner that was simultaneously reverential and condescending; always he was a conscientiously generous lover. Yet there was always the feeling that at any moment he might explode.
She remembers Jack Sertic, his mind a stagnant pond, saying to her more than once, “Al lives at the edge. Right at the razor edge.”
She might have been a crystal statuette—an image that defined not only her status but the extent of her influence over Bert’s decisions.
And the longer she lived with him the more she realized how little she actually knew about the nature and range of those decisions.
There were entire compartments of his life about which she knew absolutely nothing. When she first stumbled across clues to the hidden compartments she ignored them; when they persisted she became troubled; finally it was no longer possible to pretend they didn’t exist. There was a world of evil—perhaps Bert inhabited it only part of the time but it dominated him, it described the way he was—it defined who he was. And the more she learned about it the more she feared him for the child’s sake.
By the time the baby was born she knew it was no good: it was out of kilter. As the bureaucrats might say, this was not a suitable environment in which to raise a child.
The baby was hardly a day old when for the first time she saw Ellen in Bert’s arms and the decision grenaded into her mind: I have got to take her away from him.