The Hand That Feeds You: A Novel Read online

  • • •

  I landed at Dorval just before rush hour, got a cab, and gave the driver Bennett’s address in the Quartier Latin, on rue Saint-Urbain, Montreal’s equivalent to Bedford Avenue, the hipster epicenter, a half mile from where I lived. Although the houses in the Quartier Latin were the same as row houses found in Williamsburg, the French had painted them pale blue and adorned them with the wrought-iron balconies you find in New Orleans; in Williamsburg, the houses were ornamented with shrines to the Virgin and high-kitsch tributes to Italy.

  We started down a commercial street. It was early fall and already freezing, but people were still sitting at outdoor cafés.

  Another couple of blocks and the driver slowed down to read the street numbers. There was no forty-two. “Are you sure you have the right address?”

  “Is this Saint-Urbain Street? Is there a north or south?”

  “It should be right here.”

  I paid the driver and got out. I wondered if I had reversed the number and walked back two blocks, but twenty-four was a Laundromat. Bennett had told me about this little restaurant below his apartment where the owner made him the best omelet he’d ever tasted, Deux something. I walked up and down the block but saw no restaurant at all. I typed Bennett’s address into my phone’s GPS and waited for directions, but the window showed there was no such address. “Oh, come on,” I said aloud. I went into a shop and asked if there was a restaurant nearby called Deux something.

  “This is Montreal. Everything is Deux something,” said the clerk.

  I retraced my steps as though the numbers would magically change and my mounting sense of unease would vanish. Had I ever written him at this address? No, we’d only e-mailed and Skyped. I tried to remember anything else he told me about his neighborhood or his friends, but all I could remember were the musicians he represented. He was a music agent for Canadian indie bands. Maybe one of them was playing in town. I bought a newspaper from a kiosk and a bag of Smarties. I found an outdoor café around the corner and took a seat despite the cold. I took a few deep breaths and opened the paper to the Arts section. There were no band names I recognized.

  I noticed the café was filling up and people were ordering dinner. My plane home wasn’t leaving until midnight. The streetlights went on. The waiter came over again and this time I ordered something—poutine and a small Diet Coke.

  “Is Diet Pepsi okay?”

  He brought over a petite bottle. Unlike in America, the small was actually small, and I felt cheated.

  I felt I should know what to do next. I’d spent the last two years memorizing procedures and methodologies, examining crime scenes, interpreting incident reports, investigating missing persons, all manner of victims. Yet I could think of no model to follow here. I had a funny thought: Could I file a missing person’s report on a dead man? Why had Bennett given me a false address? What had he been hiding? A wife? A family? Was he in trouble with the police? So this is why he always came to me. So the B&Bs with their prying hosts and too-sweet breakfasts were about secrecy, not romance. What else had he lied to me about?

  Whom was I mourning?

  Steven’s apartment, where I was camped on his sofa bed, was walking distance from the Manhattan coroner’s office on First Avenue. This was where all bodies were brought. I found myself in full-blown anticipatory anxiety. The coroner’s office had called again last night; they needed me to come in. I tried to convince myself that it would not be as bad as I imagined. I thought back to the first time I had seen a cadaver in an anatomy class. I had to will myself to look, after conquering the fear that I would be sick or faint. In fact, scientific interest had carried the day. I had been fine. But I was not about to have to view an ordinary body. Bennett—or whoever he was—was no longer identifiable. They couldn’t expect me to look at his body, could they?

  I had expected Steven to get angry when I told him about Montreal, and he was, but he was also angry at himself for not having voiced his suspicions when Bennett kept finding excuses not to meet him. As if I would have listened if he had.

  I had not been back to my apartment since leaving Bellevue, so my choice of what to wear was limited: yesterday’s jeans and ankle boots, the ribbed turtleneck I had worn to Montreal.

  Steven had a meeting with the Afghani consulate: Avaaz was fighting for Afghani translators to be offered asylum. He had asked me to wait until the afternoon when he could go with me, but I had assured him that I could manage this by myself. He said it was not as if I were going for a driver’s license. I insisted, needing to know the form my changing view of Bennett would take when I saw his damaged body. The body I knew had been someone else’s body, after all.

  A mobile boiler-room trailer fronted the monolithic, gray building. I would have expected a refrigerated trailer. I walked over the flat wooden bridge covering the electrical cables and entered a lobby.

  I gave the woman at the front desk my name and told her I was expected on the fourth floor. She asked me to take a seat while she confirmed my appointment. I noticed an odd assortment of magazines on a couple of tables—Sports Illustrated, Parents, Garden & Gun, and the weirdly existential Self. A few minutes later, a young man in a lab coat came out of the elevator and asked if I was Morgan Prager. He invited me to follow him to another waiting area; this one smelled of formaldehyde and had no magazines.

  “Do I have to see the body?” I asked, knowing in that moment I would not be able to look.

  “We normally do IDs by photo, but I’m not going to ask you to do that. I do have some questions for you. I understand you were engaged to the deceased. Did your fiancé have any tattoos, birthmarks, scars, or deformities?”

  “I guess the scar on his eyebrow is moot.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to ask.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I just can’t believe I’m here. Bennett had no tattoos. But I don’t even know if his name was Bennett. What’s going to happen to the body if no one can identify it?”

  “The body will be kept here for six months and then buried in the city’s cemetery on Hart Island. It’s off the Bronx.”

  I could not identify the body but could I claim it? Did I want to?

  The detective said that the body had been brought in without any personal identification, and none had been found in my apartment.

  “What about his cell phone?” I asked. “He always had it with him.”

  “We hoped you would know where it was. And his wallet.”

  “Are you saying someone took them?”

  “I’m saying the police didn’t find them.”

  I felt that he was criticizing me for not knowing the whereabouts of Bennett’s phone and wallet, that this detective was exasperated with my inability to aid in the investigation.

  I was surprised to find myself in tears. “Look, I don’t know who he was. I thought I did, but I didn’t. When you find out, please tell me, okay?”

  • • •

  I took the L train back to Williamsburg, to the Metropolitan pool off the Bedford stop, a 1920s public bathing house. A skylight ran the length of the pool. You could see sunlight on the tiles as you swam in the eighty-degree water. If I squinted, I could pretend I was floating in the Caribbean.

  Swimming had been my routine—five days a week, summer and winter—and my passion. Actually, swimming wasn’t the correct term. I deep-water ran. I used an AquaJogger, a simple flotation device that fits around your waist so that you are suspended in the water. Some people jog, but I ran as fast as I could. The water slowed me, stilled me; the sensation was like trying to catch a train in a dream.

  The locker room, with its broken fans and hair-clogged drains, smelling of ammonia and hairspray, didn’t prepare you for the beauty of the pool, a seventy-five-foot, three-lane lap pool, shimmering with light.

  I used the slow lane, designated for the sidestrokers, kickboarders, and gossips who paddled and chatted. The lane was about the width of a subway car and peopled with the same assortment of strangers.
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  I normally entered by the ladder, but today I plunged in—I needed the silence and compression of water, the few seconds where nothing above the surface mattered. When I came up for air, I began running with an urgency that surprised me. I ran past the blind lady doing jumping jacks in the shallow end, past the old ladies who wore shower caps instead of swim caps and kept their makeup on, past the obese boy who treaded in place. If I were on dry land, I would have been running a six-minute mile.

  I ran from the body of my former lover in the coroner’s office, from my own gullibility, from shame. The more I strained against the water, the better I expected to feel, but what I was up against was so large my body didn’t know if it was relaxed or just tired.

  When I finally got out of the pool, I felt gravity again. Deep-water running is how astronauts learn to maneuver while weightless.

  I got out of the pool just as Ladies’ Only Swim was starting, a two-hour period in which only women, mostly Hasidic, could use the pool. Curtains were drawn over the glass windows that looked out to the lobby, and the lifeguard was female. In the locker room, a dozen women of all ages were getting into their swimsuits, long dresses made out of bathing-suit material. I swam in a Speedo, yet I never felt contempt from them. In truth, they treated me as if I didn’t exist. Except for Ethel, who was as curious about me as I was about her. She said she lived a staid life with her husband’s Satmar family in Williamsburg, except during the summers, when she proudly sat in as a lifeguard at a kosher girls’ camp in the Catskills. She told me about Aqua Modesta, the original kosher swimwear dealer, an online shop that sold “modest” bathing suits. In the summer, though, she wore Aqua Modesta’s latest bathing-suit fashion: “capris.” “As long as your elbows and knees are covered,” she had explained.

  I toweled off in the shower area and then walked into the crowded dressing room. For a moment, it looked as if scalps were hanging on hooks in the lockers. The ladies’ wigs!

  • • •

  “Did you have to look at the body?” Steven asked.

  “Mercifully, no.”

  “They tell you who he was?”

  “No fingers, no fingerprints.”

  The flippancy did not reflect my state of mind. It was more an attempt to level off a mounting hysteria.

  I waited for Steven to call it a night and then signed on to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a database open to both the public and the police. Everyone in my Psychological Autopsy course had to register with NamUs. I clicked on the case number that the man at the coroner’s office had given me: ME 13-02544.

  Minimum age: 20

  Maximum age: 40

  Race: white

  Ethnicity:

  Sex: male

  Weight: 148

  Height: 68, measured

  Body parts inventory (check all that apply):

  All parts recovered

  Head or partial head not recovered

  Torso not recovered

  One or more limbs not recovered

  One or both hands not recovered

  Notes on body parts recovered: Canine teeth marks are visible on all limbs and partial limbs, torso, and neck.

  Body condition: face avulsed.

  Next I entered the Missing Persons database. Someone must have contacted the police when Bennett, or whoever he was, didn’t come home—a wife or his real mother, not Mme. Marie Vaux-Trudeau.

  I went to their advanced-search page and entered Bennett’s physical description, the date last seen, the age when last seen. Three missing-persons cases in the tristate area matched his general description and the date he went missing.

  I hesitated, both wanting and fearing the results. None of the photos remotely resembled Bennett.

  I went to his website, the one he had showed me, for the list of indie bands he represented. Said he represented. The bands were real, but none had a manager named Bennett Vaux-Trudeau. I made a short list of other “facts” he had told me that I could easily verify. Turned out he had not attended McGill, had not won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, had not played bass with Radiohead.

  Was there something Bennett had not lied to me about?

  • • •

  I had been staying at Steven’s for nearly a week before I asked him to come with me to get some clothes and books from my apartment. The yellow crime-scene tape had been taken down by then, but that didn’t keep a couple of my neighbors from coming out into the hallway when my key turned in the lock. Mrs. Szymanski offered condolences that seemed genuine. Grace del Forno closed her door when I looked at her.

  I waited in the living room while Steven, consulting a list I had made for him, went into the bedless bedroom to find what I needed. As in a movie, I looked at a photo, taken in Maine, on the coffee table, Bennett with his arm around me, Lake Androscoggin in the background. For a moment I was confused, thinking the crime-scene cleanup service would have removed that, too. My confusion carried over to the smile on Bennett’s face. Was that a lie? I looked at him objectively. I wanted to find a coldness that would have been a clue had I noticed it sooner, but to my dismay I saw him as I always had.

  Steven appeared in the doorway, holding up two pairs of jeans, a question on his face. “Both,” I said, feeling cowardly for remaining outside my own bedroom. Next, he brought out a short stack of textbooks. I asked him not to forget my laptop. I didn’t want to keep using his. I didn’t want Steven to discover what I planned to look up: Lovefraud.com, the first website Cilla had suggested. Then again, it might interest him as he had recently been blindsided by a new girlfriend.

  Cilla, whom I’d started seeing as an outpatient in her Upper West Side office, had given me the names of websites where I might find others who had similarly been deceived; Cilla had said it helped a number of her patients.

  I knew about these sites. I used them for my research, looking for women who seemed to fit the definition of pathological altruist. Women posted confessions: “He loves, he proposes, he gets money, he’s gone.” “Why do I feel guilty?” “Is his goal to break me?” “The only hope I have is that karma exists.” I’d never believed in pop psychology or communal “sharing.” I was a near professional in this field and felt it was beneath me. But I was desperate.

  I went into the kitchen to get water for the ficus. I passed the rattan hamper that I used for storing dog toys. I lifted the lid and saw that it was now empty. Steven must have okayed their removal by the cleaning service. I looked for the dogs’ bowls. I was also looking for spots of blood the cleaners might have missed.

  After Steven and I returned to his apartment, I pleaded exhaustion. But the moment he went to bed, I opened my laptop.

  Sociopaths make up 4 percent of the population, 12 million Americans. They are not necessarily raging criminals: most of them are charming, intelligent, and know how to mimic concern, and even love. But they lack conscience, do not feel empathy, and feel neither guilt nor shame for their behavior. They are also expert manipulators. During childhood and adolescence, 9 percent of the sociopathic population tortures or kills animals.

  Anyone studying victimology knows the DSM-5’s criteria for antisocial personality disorder, the clinical term for sociopaths:

  Sociopaths lie constantly.

  Sociopaths do not apologize.

  Sociopaths think the rules do not apply to them.

  Sociopaths believe that what they say becomes truth.

  The only people who tolerate sociopaths for long periods are those the sociopath is able to manipulate into doing so.

  Sociopaths do not treat pets well.

  Sociopaths almost always have affairs.

  • • •

  I opened Lovefraud.com. I read about a woman whose fiancé had another woman’s name tattooed on his chest. He had told her it was the name of his little sister who had died at birth. It turned out to be the name of his wife.

  Around four in the morning, reading without full comprehension, I snapped to attention.
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  Posted in: Hooked by a sociopath

  by Lovefraud Reader

  June 5, 2013

  20 comments

  I met him on a dating site for Jewish singles. His first letter to me was so charming. Instead of talking about himself, he asked me questions about myself. What book would you not take to a desert island? What song makes you cry but you’re ashamed to admit it? Do you like animals more than people? Peter L. was a literary agent; he showed me his website, and I had heard of some of the writers he represented.

  I was living in Boston at the time, and he was living in Manhattan. He came to see me, never inviting me to his place. He never introduced me to any of his friends and never wanted to meet mine. He said we had so little time together he wanted to focus on me.

  When we were apart we would Skype intimately. He made me comfortable where I was first self-conscious. His interest in my work, too, seemed genuine. I analyze incident reports for the Boston PD. One night I saw that one of his writers was giving a reading at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. I bought the book, and when I asked him to sign it, I mentioned I knew his agent. “How do you know Harriet?” he asked, reaching for a pen. “No,” I said, “Peter.” He looked confused. “Who’s Peter?” When I confronted Peter that night on the phone, he said, “Why were you spying on me?” Spying? Still, I continued to see him, though I felt he had noticed my new wariness. We met on weekends as before; now instead of coming to my place, we went to romantic B&Bs in Maine.

  Before long he asked me to marry him. I sold my apartment, gave up my job, and arrived at Penn Station where he was supposed to meet me. I got a text from him instead, apologizing for having to work late and telling me to use the key he had given me to let myself into his place. . . .

  You see where this is going. There was no such address.