“Well, it was a long time ago.”
“And you were really thinking about it? Like, thinking of doing it? Does Karin even know? I guess not, or she might not have been in such a rush to post your bail.”
“It wasn’t Karin.”
“Hello? How many wives have you had, sweetie?”
“Two. I got married right out of college.”
“I never knew that.”
“Well, it’s not a secret, but it doesn’t come up all that often. It was over in less than a year, and not a moment too soon, let me tell you. We fought all the time, and neither of us wanted to be married, and least of all to each other. Nor did we have a clue how to get out of it. I swear I don’t ever want to be that age again.”
“I think you’re safe.”
“We were driving somewhere flat. I want to say Kansas, but it could have been anywhere in the Great Plains. Were we on our way to visit her parents? No, we’d already been to see them, they lived in Idaho, he ran a family-owned lumber mill. Her father, that is. Her mother baked her own bread and smiled bravely. You can imagine what a good time we had there.”
“And then you were in Kansas.”
“Or someplace like it, and in a motel for the night, and we’d been at each other’s throats all fucking day. And the thought came to me that I was going to have this bitch around my neck for the rest of my life. And there was this voice in my head: Unless you kill her.” He frowned. “Or was it Unless I kill her?”
“Honey, it only matters if you’re writing it. An inner voice, who cares if it’s speaking in the first or second person?”
“You’re right.”
“Only a writer...”
“I guess. Point is I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Here was this impossible situation, and only one way out of it.”
“Aside from walking out the door, which didn’t occur to you.”
“It absolutely didn’t, and don’t ask me why. All I knew was I was stuck for life unless she died.”
“You’re not even Catholic.”
“No, and neither was she. Don’t look for this to make sense. In my mind it was ‘til death us do part, and that was beginning to seem like a splendid idea. Here we were, in the godforsaken middle of the country, on our way to a teaching job I was going to take in western Pennsylvania. They were expecting a married guy, but if I wasn’t married I didn’t really have to go there at all, did I? I could tell them my plans changed and thanks but no thanks, and I could come to New York, which was what I’d wanted to do in the first place.
“And nobody knew me in New York, and if I ran into anybody I knew I’d tell them the marriage didn’t work out, that Penny left me and never said where she was going. Of course her parents wouldn’t know where she was, and they’d get to wondering, but I had that figured out, too. I’d beat them to the punch by calling them with an address for them to give to Penny when they spoke to her. In case she wanted to get in touch, I’d say, sounding like a man with a broken heart.”
“Wouldn’t they eventually go to the police?”
“I suppose, but it would just be a missing person, not a homicide, and nobody would know where to look for her. They certainly wouldn’t have any reason to start digging in a cornfield in Kansas.”
“You were going to bury her in a cornfield?”
“I figured that was perfect. If you pick a recently plowed field, and go do your digging at night when nobody’s around, all you’d have to do was make sure you dug deeper than they plow. The body could stay there forever.”
“You had it all figured out.”
“I couldn’t fall asleep. I sat there in that piece-of-shit motel room while she was lying there asleep with her mouth open—”
“Which is always attractive.”
“—and I thought about killing her. I didn’t want to make anyone at the motel suspicious, so I had to avoid getting blood on the sheets, anything like that. I thought about strangling her or smothering her with a pillow, but suppose she put up a fight? What I settled on was I’d knock her out first by hitting her on the head. There was a tire iron in the trunk I could use, and if I wrapped a towel around it there’d be less chance of breaking the skin and causing bleeding.”
“This is getting awfully real, John.”
“Well, how real was it? This was twenty-five years ago, more than half my life. I can remember being in that room, working it all out in my mind, but how accurate is that memory? And how close did I come to flat out doing it?”
“Did you go out to the car for the tire iron?”
“No,” he said, and frowned. “Hold on, I think I did. Jesus, this is weird. I remember it both ways.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Hang on here a minute.”
“What?”
“John, I read this story.”
“Yeah, I wrote about it. Turned it around some, the way you do, but that’s where the story came from. The Yale Review turned it down and then Prairie Schooner bought it. I’m surprised you remember it.”
“How would I not remember it? I published it, for God’s sake, it was in Edged Weapons. Give me a minute and I’ll come up with the title.”
“ ‘A Nice Place to Stop.’ It was the motel’s slogan. In the story, that is, but either I made it up or it was some other motel’s slogan. It seemed to fit the story, but I’m not sure it’s the best title I could have come up with.”
“It’s not bad. In the story—”
“In the story the guy does go out for the tire iron, and he wraps the towel around it and swats her good, and then he realizes he can’t go through with it. Strangling her, like he planned to do. And it dawns on him that he can just leave, he’ll give her all his money and the car and say goodbye and hit the road, and what can she do? So he waits for her to wake up and he’s going to tell her all this. He’d like to just split and let her figure it out for herself when she comes to, but he knows he’d better wait and tell her.”
“But he can’t, because she’s dead.”
“Right, the blow with the tire iron was enough to crack her skull and kill her, towel or no towel. So now he has to go through with it and bury her in a field the way he planned, and he does, knowing it’s all unnecessary.”
“And he gets away with it, doesn’t he?”
“Well, we don’t know that,” he said. “He’s still free and clear at the end of the story, but maybe that’s just because they haven’t caught up with him yet. But even if he gets away with it, what we get is that he’s not really getting away with anything after all, because he’s got her wrapped around his soul the way the Ancient Mariner had the albatross around his neck.”
“Right.”
“Maybe the title’s better than I thought.”
“Yes, I see what you mean. When did you write this one, John?”
“Not right away. Maybe a year, two years after the divorce, I started running it through my mind and it started to turn into a story. And of course I changed tons of things, and the guy in the story wasn’t me and the woman wasn’t Penny. But that’s why I remembered going for the tire iron, and also remembered not going for the tire iron. One memory was from life and the other was from the story.”
“Writers are strange people.”
“You’re just finding this out?”
“No, but I keep forgetting, and people like you keep reminding me. Oops, there’s a call I have to take. Will you be around for a while?”
“Where would I go?”
“Nowhere for the next hour or so, okay? I’ll get back to you.”
How close had he come to killing Penny?
It wasn’t hard to remember the story’s immediate origin, not where it came from but the spark that got him to write it. He was in New York, living in this apartment, and he was seeing someone new, a trainee copywriter at an ad agency. He’d decided he was getting more involved than he wanted to be, and made plans to tell her that he felt they should both be seeing other people. The person he thought she should probably be seeing was a trained psychotherapist, but he didn’t figure he had to tell her that part.