“Just driving around.”
Mother: “Honey, somebody’s waiting on the phone.”
“Just driving around?”
“Thinking about her. Molly. I really have to go, Mr. Dwyer.”
“Honey!” his mother called again.
5
This was the kind of neighborhood college professors always lived in in the movies of my youth, a couple blocks of brick Tudors set high up on the well-landscaped hills. The cars in the driveways ran to Volvos and Saabs, and the music, when you heard through the occasional open window, ran to Brahms and Mahler. At night, the professors would sit in front of the fireplace, blanket across their legs, reading Eliot or Frost. Even if life here wasn’t really like this, it was nice to think that even a small part of our world could still be so enviably civilized.
A knock and the door opened almost at once. A heavy woman in a green sweater and a pair of too-snug jeans stood there watching me with obvious displeasure. She wore too much makeup on her fleshy, bitter face. Women who lived in these houses were supposed to look dignified, not like aging dance club babes. “Yes?” she said. Her mouth was small and bitter. She’d sucked on a lot of lemons, at least figurative ones, in her time.
“I’d like to see Bob Meacham.”
She did something odd, then. She smiled with a kind of nasty pleasure. “Oh, God, you’re another cop, aren’t you?”
“Sort of.”
I showed her my license.
“Well, come in, Mr. Dwyer. Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
I couldn’t figure out why she was so happy to see me suddenly. Why would the presence of a private detective bring her such pleasure?
She flung an arm to a leather wingback chair that sat, comfortably, near a fireplace. An identical chair sat just across the way.
“I’ll be right back.”
She didn’t go far. The floor creaked a few times and then she said, “So it’s all over, is it, you bastard? Well, guess who’s here to see you? Another cop. Your little girlfriend must think you were the one who cut her up.”
When he appeared, moments later, he kept looking over his shoulder at his wife, as if waiting for her to put a knife in his back.
He came over and said, “I’m Bob Meacham.”
“Jack Dwyer. Nice to meet you.”
We shook hands.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Dwyer?”
“I wanted to ask you some questions about Molly.”
“Oh. I see.”
His wife, who stood to the side of him, smirked at me. “When we first got married, Mr. Dwyer, I used to worry that my husband was secretly gay. I guess I should be happy he just has this nice heterosexual thing for underage girls.”
Meacham obliged her by blushing.
Seeing that she’d scored a direct hit, she said, “I’ll go back to my woman’s work now, and leave you two to discussing the wages of sin.”
“I know what you must think of her,” Meacham said softly as his wife left. “But it’s my fault. I mean, I’ve made her like this. I’ve... I’ve had a lot of affairs over the years. We should’ve gotten divorced a long time ago but — somehow it’s just never happened.”
He didn’t fit the professorial mould, either. He was a little too beefy and a little too rough in the face. He’d probably played football at some point in his life. Or boxed. His nose and jaw had the look of heavy contact with violence. He wore a chambray shirt and jeans. His balding head didn’t make him look any more professorial, either. It just added to the impression of middle-aged toughness. He didn’t belong in a Tudor house with a Volvo in the drive and T. S. Eliot lying open on his knee.
“You said you’ve had some affairs.”
“Yes.”
“Were they with young girls?”
“Youngish.”
“Meaning?”
“Always of consenting age, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Molly isn’t of age.”
“Molly’s the first. A fluke. Being that young, I mean.”
“You realize that hustling her has opened you up to several legal charges if the cops want to press them.”
“You may not believe this, Mr. Dwyer, but I wasn’t hustling her. We haven’t slept together. I don’t plan to sleep with her till we’re married. I know people laugh at me, I mean I know I’m not much better than a dirty joke these days, but I don’t give a damn about anything or anybody other than Molly.”
He looked at me.
“You’re smiling, Mr. Dwyer.”
“Are you seeing a shrink?”
“No.”
“You should be.”
“I’m in love with her.”
“She’s fifteen.”
“She’s also the most spiritually beautiful creature I’ve ever known. That’s why I say I’m not hustling her, Mr. Dwyer. That’s why I say we won’t make love till we’re married.”
“Or at least till he gets out of prison,” Mrs. Meacham said, walking back into the room.
For the first time I saw the sorrow Meacham had hinted at. Saw it in the slump of her shoulder, saw it behind the pain and anger of her gaze. She looked old and sad and slightly adrift.
“He’s going to lose his teaching job — the school is already seeing to that — and then the district attorney will charge him with contributing. He brought her over here one day while I was gone and they drank wine together. Isn’t that sweet?” She hovered at the back of his chair. The smirk back.
“He said he’s going to leave me everything, when he runs away with her. Probably Tahiti, is what I’m thinking. He’s always been obsessed with Gaugin. He even got sweet Molly interested in him.”
She started wandering around the living room. We watched her with great glum interest.
“He’s going to leave me everything, Mr. Dwyer. The mortgage. The car that has nearly 175,000 miles on it. The bank account that never gets above $2,000. And the cancer. I’ve had three cancer surgeries in the past four years, Mr. Dwyer. And I’ll know in a few weeks if I need another one.” This time there was no smirk, just grief in the eyes and mouth. “And you know the worst thing of all, Mr. Dwyer? I still love him. God, I’m just as sick as he is but I can’t help it.”
After a moment, Meacham said, “Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down? You sound tired.”
She looked at me. “I’m sorry for all this, Mr. Dwyer.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“That’s why we don’t have friends anymore. Nobody wants to come here and hear all this terrible bullshit we put each other through.”
Then: “Goodbye, Mr. Dwyer.”
After she left, he said, “I suppose you’re getting a bad impression of me.”
I almost laughed. He was pursuing a fifteen-year-old, cheating on his wife with cancer, and thinking of running away and leaving that same wife with all the bills. Gee, why would that give me a bad impression of him?
“My opinion doesn’t matter.”
He stared at me a long time. “I’m a romantic, Mr. Dwyer. I believe in the ideals of art and beauty. That’s why I was so drawn to Molly. She’s beautiful in an idealistic way — perfectly — a virgin of body and mind. That’s why I want to take her away — to save her so that she doesn’t become corrupted.”
I thought of Brad dumping Linda for Molly; and Paul dumping Susan for Molly, and taking her picture all the time, and following her around obsessively; and I thought of how I’d been all summer, meeting perfectly fine women whom I rejected because they didn’t fit my ideal. A dangerous thing, beauty. It brings out the best and the worst in men. The trouble is, sometimes the best and the worst are there at the same time — Meacham here loving Molly in the pure way of a college boy dumbstruck by the beauty of art; and yet at the same time willing to hurt a wife who was sick and needed him. The best and the worst. Beauty has a way of making us even more selfish than money does.