The Hand That Feeds You: A Novel Page 15

  I wanted to be the kind of listener he was for me. No judgment. No easy consolation. I let him talk.

  “I even looked for a reason in books. A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis—he wrote it after his wife died, but it was about his loss of faith in God as much as his grief at losing his wife.”

  I told him what I knew about C. S. Lewis when he was a boy, how when he was four, his dog, Jack, was killed by a car. The future author would only answer to the name of Jack after that, and even as an old man his closest friends and family called him Jack. I hoped McKenzie did not think I was equating a boy’s loss of his pet dog to a man’s losing his wife. Then I saw that I didn’t have to worry about that.

  McKenzie laughed. “Finally, a reason to like C. S. Lewis.”

  “Could you eat something? Do you have time? If I ordered macaroni and cheese, would you share it?”

  “I’d love to, but I have to be somewhere at seven.”

  I glanced at his watch and saw that we had about fifteen more minutes. I thought he might be going to meet Billie, but I wouldn’t ask. Instead I said, “So C. S. Lewis didn’t help, but did you find someone who did? Either on or off the page?”

  “I don’t know that this helped, but soon after, I was trying a case in which an elementary school in Connecticut would not allow a ten-year-old girl with cerebral palsy to bring her helper monkey, a little capuchin, to school with her. The monkey was perfectly behaved, wore a diaper so as not to soil anything in the classroom, and was pretty much a model citizen. The girl needed this helper monkey’s assistance in fundamental ways. The other parents and the school board were afraid of diseases they thought the monkey carried, though there was no evidence of this, and the monkey was up-to-date on its vaccinations.

  “Turned out, the girl left me little to do in court. She gave an eloquent description of her life before she got Maddie and then told the court what she was now able to do with Maddie’s essential help. One of the most moving examples was also the simplest. She told the court that before she got Maddie, no one ever talked to her at school. Since she started bringing Maddie, she had become popular. All the kids wanted to meet the little helper monkey. She said, ‘I didn’t feel sorry for myself after that.’ And neither did I.”

  “You didn’t feel sorry for the girl, or for yourself?”

  “Both.”

  The irony was almost too much for me, that McKenzie was opening up to me in ways more intimate than when I thought he might be interested in me. Maybe he felt safe enough to confide in me this way now that he was with someone else. But why did it have to be Billie? And why shouldn’t it be Billie?

  McKenzie put on his coat and asked me to call him when I had made my decision about Cloud. In parting, he did not offer his hand. He put his arms around me, and we stood like that for too brief a time.

  I stayed at Crown Vic’s and, this time, had no interest in finding a man to waste a night with. I finished my drink and glanced up at the TV above the bar. The news was on, and I could barely hear the reporter over the music. But I recognized the woman whose photo appeared on-screen: Pat. The next photo was of a Hispanic man, identified as a migrant worker on the East End of Long Island. According to police, he had just been arrested for the murder of Pat Loewi. The reporter used what had entered the vernacular and referred to the murder as the “Heartless” case.

  I was grateful to be in a place where no one knew me, or what I had been thinking. The anonymity obviated the need to feel embarrassed. All this time I had been sure that Samantha was responsible for Pat’s murder. Now I could choose to believe the police, who, after all, were good at their job. The news felt like an invitation to drop what had become, I saw, an obsession, this certainty of Samantha’s guilt. But why couldn’t a migrant worker have been responsible? I thought back to the Christa Worthington murder on the Cape a few years back. The whole town thought they knew who the killer was, and there was a second suspect, too, but, no—three years later, a sanitation worker named Christopher McCowen was arrested and, a year later, convicted for the murder.

  I had been a fool to press detectives to investigate a connection between the murders of Pat and Susan Rorke. I had been a fool to suspect Samantha.

  The momentary feeling of relief was supplanted by a dark and damning fact I did not want to face. I had fallen for Jimmy Gordon, a small-time, small-town delinquent who grew up to be the kind of predator I studied; my insider knowledge not only failed to protect me, it had led me straight to the predator, and I fell in love with him!

  Etta James was singing “At Last.” I moved one barstool closer to the fireplace and ordered the macaroni and cheese.

  I was three months behind on my thesis and hoping that Leland, my adviser at John Jay, would cut me some slack, given the reasons I was late. I had chosen him to work with based on his books, which were not only fascinating, but beautifully written. His were the kind of books I would like to write—if I could not write poetry, I could still write well.

  The requisite cartoon taped to his office door was by Gary Larson, in which a psychiatrist facing his patient on the couch has written only one note on his pad: Just plain nuts!—underlined three times.

  Leland’s office was a throwback to the sixties—with a lava lamp and dream catchers on the walls. His parents had been hippies before finding a home in academia, he’d told me. He had eschewed their early leanings in favor of a rule-bound academic life. He said he liked to see his mother’s handiwork on his walls. His partner, whom he called by his last name of Emory, had given Leland a large exercise ball, and Leland was trying to stay upright on it instead of sitting in his comfortable desk chair. It was comical and his struggle made me laugh.

  “I hope this trend is short-lived,” he said, giving up and returning to his chair.

  I took a seat across from his desk and began by apologizing.

  He cut me off, saying he was just glad to see me and was sorry about what I’d been through. He had said as much in a note right after Bennett died, but I had not answered any of the large-hearted notes people had sent, even Leland’s.

  His kindness set off what I had hoped to keep from him: tears. There was no point in trying to pretend that I was capable and on track; anyone could see I was utterly unglued. Leland told me to take care of myself first. When I asked how much he had heard about Bennett, he said he knew Bennett was an impostor suspected of murder. Leland would support my taking a leave if I needed it. But he made a case for work as a daily practice that could get me through this, even if I only worked an hour a day.

  Could I rally for an hour a day given what my days were like? Did I believe in my thesis any longer? “This isn’t end-of-thesis doubt. I’ve been forced to make a profound reevaluation of what I thought I knew. When I started, I thought I could identify a new victim typology. I believed that compassionate women attract a certain type of predator. I thought I had the data. But now that I have been involved with one, where is my objectivity, my credibility?”

  “Who better to examine the phenomenon?”

  “That’s the thing. The online profile I created that attracted ‘Bennett’ was designed to draw a control group, not a predator.”

  “What would you say about a cop who’s been robbed? I’d say maybe he’s going to be a better cop. Look at your whole hand, not just what you thought was your strong suit. You’ll find a new way to interpret the material.”

  I told Leland how much I appreciated his understanding and his guidance. When I closed the door behind me, I hoped he had not written in his notebook, Just plain nuts!

  • • •

  I had scheduled appointments that day as though I were running a relay race. I went directly from seeing my thesis adviser to Cilla’s office, passing the baton, as it were. I had not spoken with her since my return from the funeral in Maine the week before. I had thought we’d be talking about that, but since talking to Leland, Maine was no longer the priority.

  Cilla offered me tea, which she tended to do when I arr
ived looking upset, which tended to be every week.

  “My thesis adviser was sympathetic, but I still think my profile sent a very different signal than what I intended. In the profile, all my favorite novels were variations on a theme: things are not as they seem. I listed my favorite song as Jack White’s ‘Love Interruption.’ ”

  “I don’t know that song.”

  I sang the first few verses.

  “Holy God.” Cilla’s laugh shaded into a cough. “Is that why you went home with the Cajun?”

  “ ‘Swampthing.’ But Swampthing wasn’t in charge.”

  “That could have overturned itself in an instant.”

  “I had an audience in the other apartments. Very Rear Window.”

  “But having exposed yourself to anonymous neighbors, you then walked home alone late at night, in an industrial neighborhood.”

  “I did indeed.”

  “Honey, I have to say that that is the behavior of a potential victim.”

  “Is that how you see me?”

  “You went home with a woman you’d just met on a Greyhound bus and got raped by her boyfriend. You’ve been putting yourself at risk for a long time. I don’t see you as a victim—not at all—but I see a pattern of self-destructive behavior. Either you learned it from living with your tormented mother, or you have a neurological predisposition to it. The latter requires some form of external activation—such as the rape you endured.”

  “You’re saying I was ‘asking for it’?”

  “No one asks for what happened to you.”

  “Are you saying I’m the kind of woman I study?”

  “At the risk of sounding like a Freudian, do you think you are?”

  I felt snappish, but sat quietly for a moment. Then something occurred to me. The issue was not or, it was and. I was this way and that way. I was a woman who studied victimology, and I was a woman whose actions had contributed to being victimized. Didn’t this duality make us human? And wasn’t it less damning to think of myself as both, instead of just the one?

  • • •

  On my way back from Cilla’s, I passed the Delacorte Theater. I had last been there to see Meryl Streep in Mother Courage, a rousing performance, a first and last date. You wouldn’t think you’d feel like having sex after seeing Mother Courage, but my date and I found ourselves groping each other as we walked past Belvedere Castle after the play. We turned into the maze that is the Ramble, and my skewed logic allowed me to follow him down a rocky, unlit path, skewed because I actually believed myself safe, given that so much homosexual coupling was likely to be nearby. That’s what the Ramble was known for, after all. Yet what did I think? That if I found myself in trouble, gay men having intercourse would stop to come to my rescue? Straight men having intercourse would not.

  McKenzie would not have led me into the Ramble. Oh—hello! Here was McKenzie, back in my thoughts. Cilla and I had finished the session discussing why I had so many Swampthings and no McKenzie. If I got what I wanted—the bad ones—then how did a person change what she wanted? What she wants. But I did want McKenzie. And he chose Billie. Billie offered to help him, while I had wanted him to help me.

  I continued on to the ice-skating rink. I didn’t feel like skating, but it had the best hot chocolate in the city. One winter I’d skated there two or three times a week, feeling like a kid, loving the gliding across the ice, even though it was crowded. I’d finally been driven off by the music—it seemed that whatever time I skated, the sound system was playing a Lionel Richie medley.

  I saw a homeless man bundled up and sitting on a bench, reading from a paperback copy of War and Peace. A vendor selling roasted chestnuts was warming his gloved hands under the heat lamp keeping the nuts warm. Dogs wearing coats from tony stores were walked on braided-leather leashes. A well-dressed man wearing different-colored gloves saluted me as he passed. Nice, or nuts, I couldn’t tell.

  The salt on the paths left a white ring on my black boots; I would have to oil them when I got home. As I approached my apartment building, I thought of the study that had been done on the moment a dog knows its owner is coming home; film had been made of dogs moving to sit by the front door when their owners started home after work, even when their schedules were irregular. I hadn’t yet unlocked the downstairs door when I heard Olive begin to bark. Hysterically. I raced up the stairs to quiet her before the neighbors complained.

  I took Olive for a perfunctory walk, having had such a long one myself. She didn’t seem to mind. She seemed glad for it. After, she curled up at my feet as I waited for water to boil for tea. I heard the murmur of the people in the next apartment, and I liked the vague sounds—it was company without having to have company. It was the hour when the lights inside turned the windows into mirrors, the time when you can no longer discern color in the sky. I turned off the kitchen light so that I would not see my reflection. It was the opposite of my performance in the Cajun’s apartment. Standing in darkness allowed me to look inside others’ apartments, though I saw nothing like what I had done, just strangers making dinner.

  • • •

  On my incomprehensibly bundled Internet, phone, and cable service a representative had tricked me into getting—the first two months were free—all my electronics were synced, whether or not I wanted them to be. This meant that I could be watching television and the phone number of whoever was calling me would blink in the corner of the screen, interrupting my true-crime shows, which were all I wanted to watch. I used to like them because I couldn’t believe how easily people were taken in, how mundane was the trigger for the crime that followed. Now I watched as one of the taken-in; in the show that most spoke to me, women discovered whom they had really married, after they had married these bigamists, murderers, and rapists.

  A late-night call showed up on the screen.

  “Have you heard from the man you call Bennett? I’ve heard nothing for ten days.” Samantha sounded urgent and scared.

  “Since I just got home from his funeral, no.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “His mother invited me. The funeral was in Maine.”

  “What happened to him?” Samantha’s confusion was palpable.

  I could have jerked her around and fed out information slowly. I could have been sarcastic and made fun of her refusal to acknowledge what I knew to be the truth. But I also knew that this woman was unhinged and desperate, or else someone was pretending to be Bennett and tormenting her. The mature psychologist part of me took over. I told Samantha that when I located his mother, his mother had arranged for her son’s remains to be flown to his hometown of Rangeley, Maine, for burial. His real name, I told her, had been Jimmy Gordon. I told her that he had been killed last September, and that I was sorry to have to deliver this news twice.

  “I never heard of Jimmy Gordon, but my fiancé is in Canada and was e-mailing me up until ten days ago.”

  “Somebody has been contacting you, but not him.”

  “I want that woman’s phone number.”

  “You shouldn’t bother his mother right now.” I tried to keep my voice steady and uninflected. It would be so easy to step wrong, I knew. What would it take to convince her that he was dead? And if I convinced her, then who would she think was pretending to be him? Didn’t this make her a victim twice over?

  “Is the reason you’re being so cruel to me because he left you for me?” I heard Samantha reaching to make sense out of what she was hearing.

  “I’m just telling you what I know. I don’t know what more I can do.”

  “You can call me if you hear from him.”

  In an exercise for a psychology class at John Jay, we students were paired, and one person was instructed to say, “No, you can’t,” to the partner. The partner was instructed to reply, “Yes, I can.” This was to go on indefinitely. I remember everyone getting ready, then the professor announced, “You may start . . . now.”

  Amabile, my partner, faced me in a chair and said, “No, y
ou can’t.” I said right back, “Yes, I can.” He smiled and said, “No, you can’t,” the inflection slightly firmer. “Yes,” I corrected him, “I can.” We did this back and forth a few more times, until the smiles left our faces. We were shocked at how quickly the simple phrases enraged us. I could feel my face turn red. He wasn’t listening to me. Amabile’s voice rose. I was aware that something similar was going on elsewhere in the classroom.

  This was how I felt talking with Samantha. She didn’t listen. I made no impression on her whatsoever.

  I took Leland’s advice and spent the next day in the library at John Jay on the MEDLINE database. I read articles by Laurence Tancredi, MD, on the ways in which brain structure and functioning are profoundly affected by hormones, drugs, genetic abnormalities, injuries, and traumatic experiences. Bad judgment, he argued, could be the result of physiological abnormalities. This was a theory I wanted to include in my thesis, his idea that we are “hardwired” to act as we do.

  I was mostly looking at a phenomenon called mirror cells. The neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran had said, “Mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology.” Mirror cells were discovered in monkeys in 1992. A team of Italian scientists noticed that the same neurons fired when a monkey reached for an object as when the monkey saw another monkey reaching for an object. Ramachandran, among other scientists, believe that mirror cells are the building blocks for a number of essential human skills—imitation, the ability to intuit what another person is thinking, and most important, empathy. Ramachandran’s theory is that autism is the result of broken mirror cells. I was trying to find enough data to confirm my own theory. Sociopaths also suffer from broken mirror-neuron systems.

  The sole message on my machine when I got home was from Billie, calling to say she had found an animal sanctuary with a short waiting list just outside New Milford, Connecticut. She asked if I’d like to drive up together to check it out for Cloud.