“That was six weeks ago,” I say, feeling dreamier again. “When Buddy went away.”
“And Buddy came home last night,” O’Connor says.
This surprises and pleases me, and yet at the same time makes me nervous and scared. But why should I be nervous and scared? Buddy Pal is my oldest friend in all the world. “Gee, did he?” I ask. “Are you sure?”
“You talked with him last night.”
“I did?” Wherever I look, there are deep black holes. “I can’t remember,” I say.
O’Connor leans forward. This is important to him, for some reason. “Try,” he says.
I try, but it doesn’t help. Sadness, sadness; all I can feel is sadness. I say, “I had a breakdown once, you know. Did I tell you?”
“You didn’t tell me,” O’Connor says, “but I do know. It was after Miriam Croft died.”
Oh, I can feel that, live it again, those terrible moments in the back of the limousine, rushing across Connecticut. She was making such noises. I wanted her to stop making those awful noises, and then she did, and that was worse. “Miriam!” I screamed, trying to reach her, reach her, pull her back. “Miriam, don’t die! Don’t die! Not you, too!”
O’Connor’s voice brings me back. He says, “Why did Miriam’s death upset you so much? Why did it give you a nervous breakdown, so bad that after the funeral you had to be hospitalized for five months? The doctors told you you weren’t to blame for her death, so what was there about it that affected you so strongly?”
“I don’t know,” I say. The nervousness is getting stronger. I don’t want to talk anymore, I don’t want to be interviewed anymore, I don’t like the way this is going, I don’t like any part of it. “I don’t know,” I say, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Could it be, Mr. Pine,” O’Connor asks me, leaning over those huge gray knees of his, that nothing face pressing toward me, “could it be that it reminded you of something earlier in your life? Some other event, involving a woman, and death, and the backseat of a car?”
Rattled, my jaw trembling, I manage to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I think you do.”
“No! I’m Jack Pine! I’m the movie star! I live here in this house and they take care of me! That’s all there is! That’s all there is!”
“Let’s go back, Mr. Pine,” O’Connor tells me, “to the very first time, your very first sexual experience with a woman.”
Shaking my head, shaking my fists, I say, “I don’t want to.
“You were so excited, you lost control,” O’Connor says. “Do you remember telling me that? It was like an explosion, you said.”
I cover my eyes with my hands, but still I can see. My whole body can see it now.
Flashback 1A
Jack, sixteen years old, reared up over the waiting Wendy in the backseat of the car. His feet drummed against the door she’d just made him slam, switching out the light above his head. Wild-eyed, staring in the dark, his nose filled with a suffocating musk, he trembled all over, his body moving in rapid disorganized jerks. “I can’t—” he cried, his voice breaking back to childish falsetto, “It’s so— You’re so—”
“Get with it, willya?” Wendy demanded, half laughing, teasing, poking at his chest with sharp-knuckled fingers. “Come on!”
Jack’s arms flailed around. He beat himself on the head in his mad struggle to get control of himself. The Buddy-facade he’d come in here with had failed him and fled. Grabbing Wendy’s shoulders in his fists, clutching tight, he yanked her this way and that, gibbering in frenzy, shaking her like Raggedy Ann.
“Jesus!” Wendy cried. “Watch it! Hey, the window crank! Look out, you’re— What are you— Gahhh!”
Jack shook and thrust with rhythmic mania, flinging the two of them about so that the car rocked on its springs, and down the road Buddy grinned to himself at the sound of it. But every time Jack lifted Wendy’s body now, though in the darkness and in his own frenzy he didn’t notice, her head merely flopped, back and forth on her shoulders.
“Yes!” Jack cried. “Yes! Yes!” And he collapsed atop her, gasping, shuddering all over, spent.
Slowly, at long last, he lifted himself again onto his elbows, perspiration glinting on his brow and his neck. “Wendy,” he said, low and hoarse and still winded, “Wendy, I’ll never forget you, I’ll never—”
He stopped. He stared. His eyes bulged with horror. His scream filled the car like knives.
“I break things. I break things.”
My lips are loose and blubbery, my eyes are crushed grapes, strings of foul seaweed hang down in my throat, my head is a cavern full of crows, every nerve and sinew in my entire body is untied and aching and trembling. I am like the body of someone who has been electrocuted. This is what it feels like afterward, after the lightning has filled your body and done its work. “Punish me!” I cry. “Punish me!”
I stare from my bleeding eyes and O’Connor is there, still there, always there. He’s plagued me my entire life long. “But you can’t punish me,” I tell him. “I’m a property. I’m too valuable to punish. Nobody can touch me.
“Buddy helped you that night, didn’t he?” O’Connor asks.
“I don’t want to talk anymore.”
“You’ve come this far,” he says. “Buddy helped you get rid of Wendy’s body. That’s why he’s always had such a hold over you, why you could never refuse him anything he wanted. Why you’ve always been grateful to him, and always afraid of him.”
“He’s my-me-my-my old-old-old—”
“It was Buddy, wasn’t it, who thought of what to do that night?”
Yes, I think, while my mouth wallows and drools, sloppy, piggish, revolting... Yes, I think. I nod.
Flashback 1B
Jack trembled and was useless, nearly dropping the girl’s body, but Buddy was strong. He held her ankles in the crook of one arm, opening the trunk of the car with his other hand, while Jack blubbered and shook, his arms around the girl’s stiffening thickening body under the armpits. Already she felt different, heavier and more animal and less real. Already she was less real.
“I always break things,” Jack blubbered.
“You get too excited, Dad,” Buddy told him, the trunk lid rising like a mouth opening. “You got to learn to take it easy.”
Jack moaned. He stood there sobbing and moaning while Buddy eased her legs into the trunk and then had to unclamp Jack’s hands to make him let go of her torso. Buddy stuffed her into the trunk, pushed her hair in after, turned her so the lid would close, slammed the lid. “I’ll drive,” he said.
Jack just stood there, his head shaking, mouth working, shoulders sagging, arms hanging limply at his side. Buddy gazed at him with contempt, then deliberately kicked him on the shin. “Ow!” Jack said, and stared at Buddy wide-eyed.
“Get in the car,” Buddy told him. “Front, passenger side.”
Jack obeyed, and Buddy got behind the wheel and started the engine. Jack said, in a tiny voice, “What are we going to do, Buddy?”
“Get rid of it,” Buddy said, and backed the car around in a half circle.
“We don’t go to the police?”
“Never!” Buddy shifted into park and looked at his friend. “You want to go to prison? Come out when you’re thirty-six?”
“No, Buddy.”
“You can go to the cops now,” Buddy told him, “or never. You don’t change your mind tomorrow. You don’t change your mind ever!”