“It wasn’t always like this,” he said. “I mean, women killing women.” We were at the Canyon having coffee, and he was in a reflective mood. What started it was both the scene of the crime and the sensational story about it that disturbed so many people in town that morning. Jealousies and passions have always been with us. Here in the midwest we seem to have fewer breaks on lunatic behavior--given how much of it there is and how few we are. It’s due, I suppose, to the isolation and to so many living on the edge, and the pulsing presence all round us of the national media exhibiting the glamors of wealth and sophistications of society. But then, that’s probably not true. What’s true is that on average we’re saner than city people. Being saner, the little things like shoplifting and stolen cars disturb us more than they would people who live in metropolitan areas. And when really sensational crimes occur--and we’ve had our share of these recently--they leave us soul-scarred, since they go so much against the life we live that we are almost incapable of imagining them. We tend to be realists. It’s hard not to be, when you know almost everybody, and most people know you. Even though our town has grown a lot--we built thirty-seven new homes last year--and traffic has become heavier, and new businesses have opened, bringing employees in from out of state, eventually the percolating surface of things calms down, and the newness rubs off, and we add a few names to our address books. Winters are still midwestern winters, long, cold, and dreary, and summers are long and hot, and there’s never enough of spring and fall.
For a small town on the northern prairie, though, we’ve had quite a few incidents in the last several years. More than our share. It’s only three years now since that woman’s body was dumped on 37 South, with the revelation, coming shortly after, that she had been killed in Minnesota by her own sister and dumped on the roadside only after she began to smell. Then, the same year, there was the incident in the trailer park involving two teenage girls fighting over a guy, and the one getting her father’s shotgun and coming back and blasting her rival. And then the kidnapping. That one was a real horror, involving torture and, when it was all done, a girl killing her mother, her two best friends, and herself. And then there was that woman from the packing plant turning up missing, and her baby girl left in the apartment and found on the edge of starvation and dehydration, and the woman’s head turning up in the house of her lover’s ex-wife. Jealousies and passions. The same things happen everywhere. But twenty years ago, when I first came here, our town prided itself on not having a case of rape or murder for twenty-five years. And this in spite of the Kongo Klub defying church leaders and our regular moral police by exhibiting nude dancers nightly. Oh, there was an incident once, in those first years, of two guys brawling in one of our run-down motel parking lots over one of the out-of-town girls, and her getting beat up in the melee. But that was pretty innocent stuff and predictable, if you think about it. What came to light yesterday wasn’t either. Most of us are pretty sick over it. Comer was downright dazed, being one of the cops on the scene, and his mood was touched with sadness, too.
“This was more than a crime,” he said, fingering his cup. “I don’t know what it means, I can’t seem to get my arms around it.”
“Some things don’t mean,” I said. “Best not to dwell on it. It’ll take its course, like these things do, and we’ll just get over it.”
That, I knew, was not going to be the case. Not soon, anyway. Comer is not a gentle man, and having been a cop for twenty-five years, he’s seen what cops see. Our lives, our souls, our bodies, all those things on which we build our fantasies and from which we derive our collective sense of purpose--our religions, myths, philosophies--and with which we exalt ourselves, all these things look very different from certain points of view. I mean, the coroner and the forensic pathologist, the oncologist, the epidemiologist, the case worker in the department of social services, the cop, take all these views together--with any others of like kind you might want to throw in--and one gets a rather different picture of humanity than the one we get from Genesis, or the Koran, or the intricate and complex but no less holy image of life among the Hindus. Comer is no stranger to the reflections such meditations arouse. But more than that, he knows people. He knows how they think, what drives them, what they’re going to do, sometimes, even before they do it. Yet he’s no cynic. It comes from thinking that way, fathoming people’s motives everyday, connecting evidence to behavior. It’s his work. So his reactions to what has happened have left me feeling a little hollow in my stomach, too.
Comer finished his coffee and left, walking into the cold morning sunshine, squinting up the block towards the supermarket before turning in the other direction and heading for Charlie’s shoe repair shop, where he was going to pick up his leather jacket. Its right sleeve was torn off by a stranger traveling north from Nebraska, going God knows where, who was being marched into the station for driving drunk in town. Comer, on his way home from the cinema, his wife sitting in their car out front, was just standing there talking with the dispatcher, when this guy blows his top. Thinking about that only made me feel worse.
The walls of the Canyon are decorated with petroglyph images, those squiggly lines, arrows, circles, stick figures of men and animals, palm prints, and what not, that one finds now and again chipped into the outcroppings of Sioux quartzite scattered over the prairie. These were taken from rubbings of the petroglyphs near Pipestone. Nobody knows how old they are, but they made me feel odd, those palms-up hands, those arrows in mid-flight to who knows what targets, those circles, representing, perhaps, the sun. So I left with both that hollowness in my stomach and that unaccountable feeling of oddness.
This is the story, so far as we know it. As time goes on, more details will come out, I’m sure. But these won’t mitigate the horror, the sense of sin, the depravity of it all. More details, I’m afraid, will only make what is already unbearable worse.
Bob Dump--now that’s a funny name, some of us are blessed and some are cursed by our names, and I often wondered why Bob didn’t change his but never had the effrontery to ask. Bob is a reporter for our daily newspaper, and he spent days with this woman. She told him her story and then went to the police. During the night she hung herself in her cell. So the police were done with her, and the county was saved the cost of her prosecution. But Bob’s story in the newspaper spread a chill over a cold winter morning.
The woman came to his desk at the Daily. Bob’s desk is one of six that sit in an open hall, all facing each other, and all surrounded with computer terminals, file cabinets, waste baskets, and chairs, and access to which is blocked by a kind of counter at one end, behind which a woman sits at another desk ready to take classifieds, remittances, and subscriptions. One has to get by her to get to any of the reporters working at their desks, and this woman didn’t ask any questions or ask for anybody in particular. She just wormed through and came to Bob as the first person handy. She said to him her name was Etta Johnson and did he know who she was. Well, of course he knew. She was a local woman who had been missing for about a year. He didn’t work her story himself, but he sure knew of her. She looked nervously around to see if anybody was listening. She leaned in to him, then, and said, “I need to talk with somebody. You. I need to talk with you.” Bob said, “OK, where? Here? Is it OK here?” “No,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere private.”
So Bob told his editor he was leaving, motioned to the woman, explained she had a story that might prove interesting, and left with her. She really wanted private, so Bob took her home. His wife was the director of the local art museum and would be gone all day, and, having no children, he had all the time he would need, he thought, to get her story.
Etta Johnson was a small woman, a person of no account in a small town of people much like her. None of us here, after all, are movers and shakers. We’re decent people, though Etta was perhaps a little more invisible than most. She didn’t go to church, she wasn’t a registered voter, and she lived at home with her parents, who opened the first video store in town, which prospered quickly, and in which she worked till eleven every night. She was nearing thirty when she disappeared. Her disappearance had all the air of mystery about it. When she didn’t come to work one afternoon, her father drove home and found the house empty. Since her car was there, he didn’t think any more about it. But next day, when she still hadn’t shown up, he called the police. All this was in the papers at the time. The police found her closets full, her dresser drawers untouched, her things, as usual, lying about her room and the house. The only thing that was missing was her, and her coat and purse. And for months, nothing turned up, no calls came in, no sightings were reported, nothing. The police concluded that she walked away of her own accord, since no strangers were known to have been loitering about and no witnesses of anything untoward came forward. She had no friends whom she might have spoken to about her plans. So it was a mystery that went unsolved.
But the police were right. There was one piece of evidence that might have told Etta’s story, if anyone only could have known. But to recognize it would have required knowledge of Etta’s heart that not even her parents had. The daily on the day of her disappearance ran a story about a local woman who made good in life by moving to Ohmaha, starting a small business which rapidly prospered, marrying, and through dint of hard work had become a kind of celebrity. She was being feted for a major contribution to a local area safehouse for battered women that would secure its future for the next two years. This woman was Etta’s only friend in high school. Her name was Amy Markley then. She married an Omaha businessman named Earl Kiewel, who helped her expand her own business--retail photo finishing--into several shops in choice locations around the city. The news that tripped Etta’s wire, though, was about the coming of her second child.
That news came to Etta hard, and, for reasons she couldn’t have explained to herself, made her own life seem utterly hopeless. Etta had never really thought about her life. She lived it half unconsciously, not really suppressing her urges, denying her dreams, keeping herself “realistic,” as people say around here when the young dream about their futures. She just didn’t seem to have urges, dreams, ambitions, and seemed content to work till eleven every night. Her parents didn’t dream for her, nor did they try to urge ambitions of any kind on her--they were content with regular and dependable help. But life was living itself in Etta, despite her lack of awareness of it. Up until this time, Etta’s story was really two stories. The one was lived out in her daily routines, and the other was living itself out in her monthly cycles, upwelling into expression through the daydreams and reveries that often made Etta seem stupid and slow to her parents and to customers in the store. Etta never acknowledged these reveries, dismissed them when the world impinged upon her, and always came back to them as soon as she was unoccupied. But she had always been like that, even in high school. And she never spoke about the contents of her reveries, not to her parents, not to Amy, and even not to herself--that is, in asking herself what they meant for her.
Reading about Amy, the local self-made girl now a celebrity in Omaha, shook Etta to her fundament. Her reveries seemed to vanish like smoke from a match struck out of doors. And what she saw in the suddenly cleared atmosphere of her mind was horrible to her. She saw her life as a succession of empty spaces disappearing into the dawn of her earliest recollections and as an unbearable succession of emptinesses stretching all the way to the dark horizon of her future.
She didn’t know what she was doing when she left the house. She had no plans--she wasn’t really capable of making any. She wanted to walk. So she walked. And she kept her head clear, forcing away her reveries--she didn’t want them anymore. She had a kind of revelation sitting on the living room couch, reading the newspaper, drifting off and coming back as she always did. She realized she was weak, timid, and cowardly and that her reveries only reinforced those things about her and made her only more afraid of daily life, of its boredoms, its routines, its unchangingness, so that she couldn’t confront these things, even if she wanted to. She realized for the first time that her parents didn’t love her and perhaps never had. But worse, she realized that she didn’t love them. At that thought she laughed, because, for the first time, she realized she felt nothing for them at all. She didn’t love them, she didn’t hate them, she didn’t resent their use of her, she had no feelings at all concerning them. “How can this be?” she thought, and hugged herself in desperation.
“Amy Kiewel,” she said to herself, “Amy Markley Kiewel.” Gradually, a need came over her, the need to see Amy Markley Kiewel. And when she realized she was walking on 37 South, she stopped and turned round to look back. At that moment, an approaching car stopped and the driver asked her if she wanted a ride. Impulsively, she said she was going to Omaha. The man invited her in. He was not going to Omaha but could take her as far as Yankton. “That’s fine,” Etta said, “Yankton’s fine.” And thus began what was to turn into an unrelieved nightmare, for Etta, for Amy Markley Kiewel, her three-year-old daughter, and the infant waiting in her womb--for a fate, perhaps, the most horrible of all.
***
When I left the Canyon, the morning’s strong sun had begun to warm things up. I looked down towards Charlie’s and, there being no signs of life there, turned north and walked towards the supermarket. In that direction was my office. I had no need to go there, since I have been retired for almost a year, but I still work, erratically, and only when I am really in the mood. Others have taken over my accounting firm--my clients being mostly retailers and independent businessmen in town, as well as a few farmers, those who drift around looking for people with new angles to save them money. Some stick and some don’t. And over the years you grow and hire help and move to bigger quarters. I work now when I feel like it, but mostly I give advice. Keeping the office gives me a place to go when I want to think, and walking there keeps me fit. I have never felt stifled by my work, nor by my home life, and only lately have I become a dreamer.
What I learned of Etta was not in Bob’s story. I learned those things about her from the tapes. Bob’s wife and mine both work in the museum, and the little world of aesthetic vision they have created has absorbed us both, and we know each other well, so when he was prompted by Comer, he called me, too.
Later that morning Comer called him, unofficially, to ask how he could listen to her story like he did for three days, and why he didn’t call the police sooner, or take her to the mental health center, or do something besides sit and listen. So Bob called me, like I said, and the three of us met at his house and sat and began listening to the tapes. It seems to me, now as I think over it, that Bob’s long piece in the paper that morning caught those parts of Etta’s story that, separated from the context of her continuous narrative, made her seem a deranged monster. Not that she wasn’t, or, at least, hadn’t become one. But Bob’s instincts are those of a journalist, and his story was good journalism. But her story is more complicated and stranger than one gets a notion of from the events themselves.
There is, first of all, her voice. She’s gone now, and all we have of her is her voice. We couldn’t break in and ask her questions, or change her line of thought, or ask her to back up and reconsider something she just said, so, listening to her subtly altered our sense of relationship. She became an authority, beyond our reach, impassive to our feelings, going on, in an almost day by day reckoning, with a kind of fatedness and knowingness that couldn’t help but to carry us along. She would sometimes drone in a long monotony of aimless reverie and then suddenly pierce you with a sharp emotion or an observation that left you mystified, not for its incongruity so much as for its accuracy, suggesting that she was thinking and seeing, that she was aware and cunning.
She recounted, for example, at great length what she was feeling in the car with that man who took her to Yankton. She was obsessed with those first moments of her break with life as she knew it. She must have run that first journey often through her mind. The ice on the marshy pools at the edges of the fields going south towards Wagner reminded her of herself in her parents’ house. Here and there withered and stiff tufts of brown cane grass stuck up out of the ice and the wind’s ripples on the low water were frozen in motion, and she looked at them as they drove by, and they made her feel like the world had stopped and she stepped out of time. The slowly darkening sky filled her with a sense of doom, a sense of what lay ahead of her, which she was determined to meet, and she thought how even if she died, she didn’t care. In like manner, speaking as though she were dreaming, she recounted what seemed like every impression during that drive. Then she noted how the driver’s lower lip protruded up to nibble at his mustache, and she knew he was thinking about her, and this made her both excited and cold, but she also knew by his lip that he was shy, and she felt safe, disappointingly, regretfully safe.
It’s futile, I know, to meditate what might have been. But had that man a romantic streak in him, or even a gift for gab, Etta’s life might have been different. She might not have become a monster. What lies latent in us only needs right circumstances to come forth. Or right circumstances to lie always buried.
Most of us live our lives pretty mechanically. We do what we do, we get our satisfactions, we reap our rewards, and we don’t think much about the hard things, except, perhaps, when we are forced to out of desperation. Who was it that said the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation? I don’t believe that, I believe just the opposite--the mass of men are quite content, and only the really unusual among us live lives of quiet desperation. It takes a certain humanness to know one isn’t happy, that life isn’t what it should be. One has to have a sense of that “should be,” and most of us don’t. Hearing Etta talk and think out loud on those tapes impressed me with a feeling that she was a seeker, one of those people for whom life is too much of a mystery for them to believe that their place in it is not meaningful, if only they could understand it, and seekers need only an inkling of an answer to become positive, constructive people, even movers and shakers, but Etta had got no answers, no inklings, not from anything she thought and not from anyone she knew, and her seeking brought her to an abyss.
“‘I come home at night it’s nearly midnight, and I can’t do anything but go to bed, and out of stubbornness I turn on the t.v. and sit down and fall asleep right away and wake up two hours later and then go to bed. But now I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight. I like that. I don’t know even where I am going to be at midnight. And I don’t really care.’ That’s what I was thinking, and I couldn’t say anything to him, never even asked him his name, and he didn’t offer it. I said, ‘My name’s Etta.’ He looked at me and smiled and then looked back at the road and I said to myself, nice guy. Anyway, he took me to Yankton.”
She had no money to speak of. Only six dollars in one dollar bills in her purse. She had her checkbook and her credit cards. But she threw these away when she got to Yankton, feeling that if she used them, she could be traced, and she wanted to disappear. She had no plan yet, but she knew she didn’t want to be found. Nobody knew her in Yankton, so she didn’t fear being seen. She didn’t really think what she was going to do, trusting that when the time came to do something, she would figure it out.
“I wanted to give that man a little kiss on his mustache when he stopped at McDonald’s to let me out. But I knew he would be embarrassed. That’s what I thought. Maybe he would have liked a kiss. But I would have been embarrassed if he didn’t want it. He was a perfect stranger and would always be one, I would never see him again, so what’s the big deal? I thought. But I couldn’t do it. There were all kinds of things I couldn’t do till that night. I wasn’t hungry but I wanted a cup of coffee, and I wanted a place to think. So I went in and he drove off, looking at me as he did, and I twisting around looking at him, like we were saying goodby. It was goodby. Something was over. I had a feeling like I was going to cry. Thinking back, if I could have seen what was coming I think I would have killed myself in Yankton. I couldn’t have known.”
She spoke in a calm, lilting voice, saying what she said matter-of-factly, which often lent a surreal air to her talk and chilled us at times, when Comer would look at me with an eyebrow cocked. It wasn’t like she was telling a story at all so much as talking to herself, and since she knew it already, it held no surprises for her. And yet, her voice was lovely--soft and uninsistent, with intonations that suggested she lived her life in the interrogative mood.
I don’t recall ever seeing Etta in town. I never went to her father’s video store, and so I don’t know him either. I don’t know anyone who knew her personally. A picture of her in the newspaper showed a rather nice looking woman with what Bob said was light brown hair, thin-framed tortoise-shell and gold eyeglasses, and clear skin. She had large eyes. I could imagine her at the video store daydreaming behind the counter, looking slightly out of touch and having to be spoken to loudly to get her to focus on you. She was, as she herself says, a dreamy lost soul. But I imagine she lost that quality of dreaminess after setting out for Yankton, and a kind of hard determination took its place in her eyes. But I may be wrong about this. She had too much help along the way, and people tend to stay away from those with hard eyes. And her voice, her voice had that upward pitch which made her sound like she was always asking questions, and I took that pitch to be the equivalent in sound of the dreaminess in her eyes.
“All I knew is I was going to Omaha and I was going to see Amy Markley again. I kept repeating that to myself while I sipped coffee so I wouldn’t get cold feet and call my father to come and get me. He would float up in my mind and I had to struggle to get him out. His face would come at me and his fidgety hands would dance around as he tried to say he needed me. And that’s when the first anger came. It came like a wave, a hot wave, and flushed me all over and I had to suck in air and keep myself from falling because of dizziness. And then another wave. I didn’t know that about myself. I never felt anger. I never knew what it meant and how hard it was. It scared me. And the anger put all thought of going home out of my head permanently. That’s settled, I thought. And then I thought, I’ve got five dollars and some change and how’m I going to get anywhere on that? And that’s when I thought about my checkbook and credit cards. I thought about them a good deal, they were not only cash, but identity. And I didn’t want that, I wanted to be gone. So I took them out, and my driver’s license too, and stuffed them in my coffee cup and dropped them in the trash. I did that before I could think twice about it. I thought I might regret throwing them away. But I didn’t know what a relief it was going to be when the cup dropped from my hand and the little door swung back. It was like..., it was like...like the last day of school at the beginning of summer, and getting out of class, and coming into the sunshine with the whole summer ahead of me. I felt that much freedom. Now I think about that feeling, and I know it was a bad thing. Nobody should ever feel that free. Not at my age. It was bad, all right. It set me free to do what I did.”
At that, Comer let out a breath, and Bob punched “stop” on the recorder. We had been listening for a little more than an hour. We were, of course, fascinated. We knew the end of the story, and hearing her talk like that was morbid and creepy, and we would have let the house burn down rather than stop. Comer said, “That’s the first murder, right there. It was as sure an act of violence as the killing of Amy’s girls.” And I said I thought not.
“Everybody has moments like that, they are threshold moments, like graduation, marriage, getting out of the army, any moment that marks an end and a beginning. Etta was finally doing what she should have done ten years ago. It was no murder, it was self-discovery.”
“If her life had turned out different,” Comer said, “that might be so. But this was the act that led to the others. Even she knew it. She must have felt it was true. You could hear it in her voice.”
“What do you think, Bob?” Comer said. He had been, earlier this morning, more than usually reflective, more than usually disturbed, most unlike himself. And he was most unlike himself now. Comer was making me nervous. I wanted to give Etta some benefit of the doubt. I wanted to find something redeemable in her. And Comer was intent on not letting that happen. Bob shrugged his shoulders.
“She was a monster. Bonafide,” he said, stressing the last syllable. “I sat there and listened to all of this once. I watched her tell how she killed that three-year-old girl. I saw her expressionless face, like she was reciting a recipe. No. She was, if not already dead, as Comer says, so spiritually empty she might as well have been.”
“Come on, now. ‘Spiritually empty!’ You say that like you know what it means. Etta was just a lonely woman. She was exploited by those who should have helped her, and, worse, unloved by those who should have loved her. She compensated for her lack by dreaming. She had to shake herself out of that life. There’s more to Etta than meets the eye. I hear it in her voice. She was no monster. Something happened that should come out as we listen, something that makes what she did intelligible.... I’m not excusing her or dreaming myself, I have nothing at stake in any of this. It’s gut feeling. That’s all.”
“If there is something, I don’t know what it is. I didn’t hear it,” Bob said.
***
We listened for another hour or so. Etta hitched a ride to Vermillion with two girls who sat near her and who were students at the university there. On the way, she told them she was going to see a sick friend in Omaha, and that she had no car, and decided to trust in God to help her find her way. They were kids, and gullible, I suppose, and together they decided the best thing they could do was to take her to the rest stop on I-29 going south, and there she could ask for a ride to Omaha. It was a good plan, for Etta got her ride.
She left her father’s house just before three that afternoon, and it was nearly half past nine when the couple who had taken her let her out on 20th Street, just south of 680. Etta had no idea where she was, and no idea where Amy Kiewel lived. She walked for awhile, aimlessly, keeping her mind clear, her hands in the pockets of her coat, feeling like she had really achieved something, feeling good, liberated. The unfamiliarity of the place where she walked filled her with excitement. And she was filled with a sense of wonder, too. How could I be doing this? But this mood soon began to pass as questions she tried hard not to ask began thundering in her head. What if Amy isn’t home? What if she doesn’t remember me? What if she does remember me, but doesn’t want to be bothered? After all, why should she? What if Amy says she’s too busy, or doesn’t have time, or is going out for the evening and call her tomorrow? What if...? What if she has an unlisted number? That thought spooked her, and when it occurred to her, she was beside a little cafe called Franko’s where people sat and smoked cigars and drank cappuccino, and looked carefree and happy. She went in and asked if they had a phone and city directory. She found Amy’s number with a sigh of relief and called her. Amy remembered her. She was delighted to hear from her and was coming to get her, living only a few miles north of where she was, not far from the lake.
It was here that we stopped for the day. These were the first really upbeat moments in her monologue, and she had a tone of wonder or amazement in her voice as she spoke.
For Comer, the time we spent listening was work, for although Etta was dead, and a confession had been given to the police and signed, and for all practical purposes the case was closed, Comer needed her account. As much for himself as for his documentation. Her confession, which she dictated at the police station, contained only a statement regarding the killings. She refused to answer questions concerning her motivation and what she had done to the bodies and why, insisting only that she was guilty. She refused to see her parents, and she refused a lawyer. All the interest of the case and all the answers that might ever be available were here, in the tapes, and these legally belonged to Bob. Bob had no interest in keeping them from the police and would have turned them over to Comer had he asked for them. But he didn’t. Comer didn’t want them, but he needed to hear them, and he wanted us to listen with him. I don’t blame him.
We put on our coats. It was late afternoon, after four. Tomorrow was Saturday, and Comer, in that strange mood he had fallen into, half reluctant and half obsessed, sad and weary, asked Bob if he could spare the time to hear more of the tapes tomorrow. I said I sure could, I wasn’t going anywhere. Bob, himself weary as hell of Etta, said sure, come over whenever. I didn’t see the scene, of course, that Comer had the day before, though he told me about it that morning. Neither had Bob. And I, unlike him, hadn’t yet heard Etta’s account of what she did. So I wasn’t feeling what either of them felt.
As we left, I asked Comer about the comment he made that morning about women killing women.
“It’s odd that you should think that,” I said. “Etta was just a person, with whatever grief drove her over the top. Are you seeing more in this than that? What does her being a woman have to do with it? I mean, beside the fact that she was?”
We walked toward his car, and when we got there, he opened the door and asked me if I wanted a ride home, or to the office, or anywhere else. I said I’d rather walk, after all that sitting. And he looked at me, holding the door open, and for a moment we stared at each other.
“We change,” he said, finally, his blue eyes going wide and seeming to stare through me. “We’re always changing. Police work was different when I was young. Sometimes, the police are the first to know about changes. The way we change shows up in what we do.” His eyes snapped back as he fished for his keys. “That’s all.”
He got in and I walked up the block, hands in my pockets. That isn’t all. No. That’s not all, I thought, deciding to go home.
Comer called me early, about eight. “Do you want to go to the Canyon for coffee?” he asked. “I already called Bob. He was just dragging himself out of bed. He said come over in about an hour.”
“I’ll meet you there,” I said. May, my wife, works Saturdays, so I get up early with her and we have breakfast together. I hadn’t told her about Etta and the tapes, though last night we did talk about Bob’s story in yesterday’s paper. I asked her what she thought about it, and she said what I had expected her to, “I don’t know what we’re coming to.”
“Don’t you think it’s unusual that such a crime was committed by a woman?” I asked. That was dwelling on my mind all the while we ate breakfast.
“Well,” she said, “you’d better watch your back, old man. Is that what you’re thinking? Well, don’t worry, I’m not in the murderin’ mood.”
“That’s not what I was thinking. Get serious. Think about it. Haven’t we had a lot of terrible crimes committed by women lately?”
“So?” she said, wiping her hands at the sink. “Women are people, too. What’s the big deal?” She fell silent and I could see she was thinking about it as she put the coffee cups back in the cabinet. “Aren’t all crimes ‘unusual?’” she said, emphasizing the word. “A man or a woman? I guess it’s what goes wrong in people’s lives. Are women special in that regard?”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s just that this business disturbs me, that’s all,” I said.
“Killing those people the way she did should disturb you,” she said, in her commonsense way, as she sat down again. “I’d be disturbed if you weren’t. We don’t and shouldn’t take such things lightly. Who knows what drove her to such acts? But why does her being a woman matter? Does that make the crime more horrible? Think of that white haired old man who raped that girl in California and cut off her arms, for God’s sake, and threw her in a culvert to die? The most horrible part of that story is the poor thing lived. People. It’s just people. I don’t know what we’re coming to.”
I told her she could take the car to the museum this morning because I was going to walk to the Canyon to meet Comer for coffee.
May is not the kind to dwell on morbid things. She keeps her accounts with the world, but she closes the book and gets on with living. Everywhere, however, people were talking about Etta. She was the lead story on the nightly news, and NPR had an interview with Bob Dump about her this morning. The Daily had pictures of her mother and father and a story about Etta’s growing up in town. People who knew her or who claimed they did--from the tapes, I knew that nobody ever bothered with her in town, nobody invited her anywhere, tried to make friends with her, or even talked particularly friendly with her at her father’s store--had all kinds of revelations to offer about her character. Etta, I know with absolute certainty, was never motivated by the thought of publicity, by a desire to be in the limelight. But here she was. It sickened me.
I felt something for Etta. I don’t know what, because I can’t describe it. There was something about her voice that slid into me and affected me, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. What I was to hear that day and the Monday that followed would sicken me more than I could ever have imagined, and my feelings about her would change.
I met Comer at the Canyon and had another coffee there. We didn’t talk about Etta. But about ten to nine, Comer said let’s go, and we drove to Bob’s in Comer’s own car, not the police car he had yesterday. We had another coffee while Bob set up the tape recorder and got it ready on the coffee table in his living room. Betty, his wife, knowing what we were going to do, left for the day. She didn’t want to hear, or even overhear, the tapes. As it turned out, she went to the museum and told May what we were doing, and they spent the day together. Later that night, I had to tell May about the tapes. So I told her that they were nothing unusual, that Bob and I were just listening to them to keep Comer company during a dull duty. I told her Comer was just taking notes, trying to confirm the confession she had made at the station--which was true. I certainly didn’t want to talk to May about Etta. I don’t know what I could have said or where I would have begun. Strange.
***
“I knew, I just knew I screwed up when I saw Amy. My knees started to go. I felt weak. And shocked. And scared. And out of place. And dumb. And I could feel the heat rising to my face as I flushed, and my hands started trembling. And Amy could see all that, and she did see, and that made it all the worse. And I reddened even more and couldn’t speak and really started shaking when she held my hand. I was standing in front of the cafe where I called from, and Amy passed by and pulled over about half a block up, where she could park, and got out of the car and came towards me as I started toward her. I could see she was expensively dressed, which I hadn’t thought of but which didn’t surprise me. But as we came close I could see that she was very beautiful, smart looking beautiful. Oh, my God, I couldn’t believe it was her. Her hair was short and dark and shiny and smooth, and her face was clear and perfect, her eyebrows were like etched and her lips were sharp and perfect, and she had pearl earrings, and her dark, navy blue coat, which was a full coat, like cashmere, or something expensive, had large open lapels which showed a red turtle neck covering her throat, and she wore a pearl necklace, and she wore black shiny leather gloves, and navy blue pumps, and as she walked towards me she was beautiful, and I could see she had a belly. And I knew I would never be able to talk with her, not like we were old friends, because we haven’t known each other for so long that we’ve changed into other people, because what I was was dead, murdered almost, and even I didn’t know myself--I couldn’t’ve had a conversation with myself in a mirror.
“Amy hugged me, took my hand and said, ‘Etta, it’s been so long! I was so surprised when you called!’ She could see I was in a state. She got a look on her face that said, ‘Oh, oh.” One eyebrow went up and the other went down a little. And I was just getting redder, so she walked me to her car and didn’t say anymore. She smiled so sweetly when we drove off. I felt like such a hulk. I never was heavy, never. But I felt clumsy and oafish then, and heavy, and stupid. I tried to talk but couldn’t. My chest shook and made gasps come out of my mouth. So I just shook my head at Amy’s questions, and tried not to seem like I was dumb. She asked me if I was married and I shook my head no. She said she was involved with a safehouse, that she always took an interest in that, doing what she could, but that she was going to take me home. It was hard for me to look at her, so I just stared out the window on my side. I don’t know anything about cars, but this was a minivan of some kind, and I was glad I had a separate seat, and snugged myself against the door. Amy finally said, ‘Well, I can see that something has happened. You’re traumatized. I’m glad you came. I can help. Just sit and relax. You don’t have to tell me anything tonight. We’ll talk tomorrow.’ And then she fell silent and concentrated on driving. Traumatized. She could see that in me. I was. But I didn’t know by what.
“‘I’ve only started showing last month,’ she said after awhile, putting her hand on her belly, ‘but, wow, I grew fast. My face is swelling, too, I’m swelling everywhere.’
“‘You look fine,’ I said, glad that she said that, said something I could respond to. ‘Your face isn’t swelling, it doesn’t look it to me,’ I said, and it didn’t.
“We were leaving the city, it seemed, driving through a wooded area and came near a lake, and then we entered a residential section, with very large trees along the avenue, and very big houses, two-story and three-story houses, with large lawns in front, now covered with snow, and long, winding drives, and lampposts, and large inviting doors, and some had brick fronts and some had stone fronts, and it all matched Amy perfectly. And oh, how I wished I had never run, never come here. Amy’s garage was opened when we pulled in, and the door came down behind us, and we entered the house from inside the garage. And it was all very beautiful inside, like one sees in magazines. I don’t know the words to tell about Amy’s home, except every room seemed as large as my father’s whole house, and the furnishings were fine and expensive, and there was plenty of art on the walls, and I was afraid to touch or stand near anything for fear of my clumsiness. Amy ran upstairs for a moment and then came down and took me through the kitchen and through the dining room and took my coat to a closet across the living room by the front door. In my father’s house the carpets are all dark, dark brown, not to show the dirt, my mother says. But here, they were cream colored, and the walls were light, and everything seemed so open and airy it made me dizzy.
“All I could think was, why am I here? What did I do? I should really go. I should tell Amy it was a mistake. Give me my coat back for I have to go, I’m sorry, it was dumb of me, I really, really need to go. But Amy took me by the arm and led me back into the kitchen. She put up water for hot cocoa and made me a sandwich, not even asking me. But I was hungry, so I ate it, and then we sipped the hot cocoa, and I began to feel better.
“‘So tell me what you’ve been doing,’ she said, ‘it’s been so long. Almost ten years!’
“‘No, more than that,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from wavering, ‘we graduated in ‘85, and the last time I saw you was on your first summer home from college. Do you remember, we went to the Sioux Falls Arena to hear that rock group--who were they? Wasn’t it Bon Jovi? I can’t remember.’
“‘Wasn’t it Mick Jagger? No! It was the Grateful Dead! It was, it was! Yes, I remember going! But I don’t remember who we saw that time--I went to a lot of concerts when I was in college, and I can’t remember when I saw who.”
“‘So, what have you been doing all this time? Are you still living at home?’
“‘Yes,” I said, ‘Yes, I’ve been working in my father’s video store.” All I could think was, how can I tell her why I’m here? What can I say, Amy, Amy, I saw your picture in the Daily this afternoon and something came over me--like a black sack coming down over my head, and it scared me to death, so I ran, and ran, and I didn’t know where I was going till I got in some stranger’s car? How stupid! How stupid!
“‘I saw your picture in the Daily this afternoon,” I said. ‘There was a story about you.’
“‘Oh,’ she said, ‘of course! I knew about that, someone from the Daily called me a few days ago and we spent a long time on the phone.’
“I could see she was thinking, but why are you here? What’s happening to you Etta? And I felt desperate again, and I could feel my face getting flushed all over.
“‘Where’s your husband?’ I asked, trying to change the subject, and, ‘Don’t you have a little girl?’
“‘Don’t worry about Earl for now. He’s out as usual with people he does business with. He’s planning to go to Kansas City tomorrow morning. And, yes, my daughter is sleeping. She’s only three,’ she said, laughing like a girl herself. ‘She konks out after dinner, usually, and pretty much goes to bed on her own. She sleeps so soundly someone could pick her up and carry her away and she’d never know it. That’s why I left her when you called. I’ve never done that before. We’ll look in again on her when we go up. Her name’s Sophie, after Earl’s mother.’
“‘What do you do when you’re alone like this?’
“‘Oh, I’m always, always busy. Nights like this are a relief,’ she said, patting my hand. ‘I have an office upstairs, right across from Sophie’s room, and I spend most of my time there. You know, don’t you, that I run a business from three locations now? I have to make out payroll, keep inventory, pay taxes, pay bills, keep records, work up promotions, and on and on,’ she said, lifting her fingers one at a time like she was making a list. ‘It never lets up. My main office is in the Westroads Shopping Center, but I have to take work home almost every night. Oh, Etta, it seems like I have no life anymore. And neither does Earl.’ And then there was this long pause, and she was looking at me, and I could see she began a little to flush. ‘But let’s not talk about me. Do you want to talk about yourself?’
“‘Maybe not tonight,’ I said, ‘I’m tired and confused, and I probably won’t make much sense. I don’t make any sense to myself,’ I said, trying to laugh, but sounding false. ‘I need to think, Amy. I feel so ashamed.’ I felt like I was going to cry, and she could see that. I said, ‘I don’t think I could bear to meet your husband.’
“‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell him you’re here, and we’ll have a couple of days to ourselves to talk and you can relax.’
“And sweet Amy fixed up a bed for me in a bedroom upstairs, gave me towels and a washcloth, a nightgown of her own, and kissed me goodnight. I couldn’t believe it. She kissed me.
“Later, in bed, the lights out, the curtain drawn, darkness deep as blindness, I lost myself in feelings I couldn’t understand, frightful feelings. I felt alone and empty. And there was this nothingness. And I tried to fill it with Jesus on the cross, but that didn’t help. It gnawed at me, and I tried to fill it with my parents, and that didn’t help either. I tried to fill it with the feeling of dying, and that helped. I tried to feel what dying’s like, to make myself feel it, to lose everything, to close up. And I decided that it’s like feeling this nothing, a nothing just like the darkness is nothing, only more so. And I came to feel like dying is good. Everybody is afraid of it, but that’s because nobody understands it. Dying is good. I thought about being drunk, which I was twice in my life. That was good, too. Being drunk. I knew about being drunk. I didn’t know about dying, but I thought I was right. And when I felt sleep coming on, when my eyes began to burn, and I began to drift, I said softly out loud, die, die, Etta, die now. But that only woke me up, so I didn’t do that anymore.
“And then the whole day, the whole, long, crazy, mad dash of this day came crashing down on me, and the weight of it suffocated me, and I felt the tears coming, and I convulsed and shuddered, and I felt sorry, sorry for my parents, sorry for Amy, sorry for myself, and the tears flowed and flowed, and I fell asleep.
“And when I woke, I could see light coming in from around the curtain, and I sat up and listened. But I couldn’t hear anybody, and I didn’t know if it was early or late. So I got up and dressed and made the bed and went into the hall and went to Sophie’s room and looked in, and she wasn’t there, so I figured they were up already. I had to go down. Oh, God, I thought, I have to meet him, I have to say something to him, explain, and I was all confused. But I had to. So I did. And nobody was there.
“On the table in the kitchen there was a note and a toothbrush and a hairbrush and comb. The note began, “Dear Etta,” and I thought, sweet Amy. Sweet, sweet Amy. And it went on and said the things were for me, and that I should relax all day, and she would be picking up Sophie from daycare about four and coming home after that. I was glad for the toothbrush and the hairbrush and comb, and went to the bathroom upstairs and did myself up.
“And then, I thought, in a panic, how can I stay here? I have to leave. But what am I going to do, where can I go? And in the jangle of bewilderment that came over me, a hunger came, too, a deep, hollow emptiness that sat in my belly like Amy’s baby sat in hers. I never felt hunger like that. My whole body was hungry. So I opened the fridge, found eggs and butter, and then looked around for some bread to make toast. There was a bread bin on the counter that only had some English muffins in it, but these were OK. And I began opening drawers, looking for knives and forks, and opening cupboards, looking for a pan to fry eggs. And when I collected everything, I made breakfast. And as I ate, I saw the knife block on the counter near the stove. And when I finished, I went to it, almost on tiptoe, and I pulled out a long fillet knife, and I held it in my hands for a long, long time, not thinking anything, just holding it, feeling it in my hand. I don’t know how long I stood there. I don’t know what kept me from it. Except, maybe, keeping it out of my mind. Oh, I wanted to. But then I thought about yesterday, and what I felt when I ran. And then I thought about Amy. I could close my eyes and see her face. And I couldn’t bear to see her. I figured I only had a few choices. I could stay and endure the gasps, the red face, the humiliations that I knew were coming when Amy came home. Or I could leave, go away. And since going away was impossible, because I had no money, no car, no ID, no nothing, there was really only one way I could leave, and that was to take this knife and.... And I came that close.
“I went in the living room, which had windows on both sides with their curtains drawn back, and it was very bright and sunny and cheerful, so I carefully edged around the long, glass coffee table, trying not to touch it, and sat on the couch, and then lay down on it. I tried to think, what do I want? What’s wrong with me? And I really didn’t know. After high school, Amy went to college. She knew what she wanted. How come, I thought, she knew and I didn’t, how come she knew then and I don’t even now? What’s the difference between Amy and me? ‘The self-made local girl,’ the newspaper said. Well, I’m self made, too, I thought. Whatever I am, I’m self made. But what do I want? What do I want? And slowly another question began to whisper itself in my mind, not, what do I want? but, who am I? Who is Etta Johnson? She’s self made, all right. Is she a self-made girl?
“I began to get nervous and twitch, and my feet couldn’t be still, and they jumped and bounced and danced on the couch, and I just had to get up. I went back in the kitchen and over to the knives by the stove. I pulled out a different knife this time, a wide-bladed knife. It had a black handle, and a stainless blade, and it was very stiff and really sharp. I slid it back and pulled out a paring knife, a short-bladed little thing, and slid that back. Then I tried the steak knives, taking them out one by one. They all had black handles and shining stainless blades. That was when I knew what I was going to do. I had made up my mind, I knew, now, for the first time in my life, and then everything became clear, and the tangle of nerves I had been feeling passed. I became calm, really, for the first time since I left my own house. What I didn’t know was how I was going to do it, and when, and where. Should I do it this afternoon, I thought? Tomorrow? Next week? I didn’t know. But deciding to do it took a load off me. I had a purpose. I felt like I could stand up, now. Nobody knew it but me. Oh, how glad I felt. I was liberated. I felt like I did when I left home. I spent all day thinking about it. I planned it all out, step by step. I imagined every detail. This is what I planned. And I did it, exactly as I planned it.
“First I went upstairs to Amy’s and Earl’s bedroom. I found her jewelry box, and it was loaded, like I expected. I took this down stairs. Then I went to her office and started going through her file cabinets. I found a file that had her monthly bank statements, and sure enough, next to that was a file in which she recorded her own and Earl’s pin numbers. I figured I had one use of her card, and after that I had to find other ways to get cash. That’s why I took the jewelry box.
“This is what I planned. When Amy came home with Sophie, I would club her hard but try not to kill her. Then I would kill Sophie, right there in the kitchen. I would load them in her car and drive back home. There was an abandoned farm house on the edge of town, not far from the municipal golf course. It was set way back off the road and was so surrounded by trees that someone driving by could only see its roof top and chimney. I had gone there a couple of times. The doors were locked and the windows boarded up. It has sat there like that for as long as I can remember. There was a basement door with a lock on it, too, but I knew it would be easy to kick it down. About a block away, an apartment complex had been built, and it was there that I’d leave Amy’s car, because nobody would notice it. When I needed to leave the house, I would simply walk up there, at night, of course. I would drive to Sioux Falls to buy supplies and things that I needed. Nobody would ever know I was in town, because nobody would ever see me.
“When I got there I would take care of Amy. I had special plans for her, because of the baby. I knew, now, what to do, every detail. I needed only to wait. Sweet, sweet Amy. We were going to live together. More. We were going to be family. She would be home everyday, and I would be home. And we would be happy. And for as long as I could make it last, we would be happy.”
***
We listened to the tapes most of Saturday morning and part of the afternoon and finished them on Monday. I could see Etta in that old, empty house, walking those rooms, talking to herself, gesticulating to the empty air, keeping herself neat and tidy, and watching after her family like the loving mother she might have been. Mother or father. I’m confused about this point, and neither Comer nor Bob even wanted to talk about it, they both calling me mad as Etta. I think Etta thought of Amy as her spouse. What that made of her in her own mind, that was what confused me.
Etta got to the old house and dragged the unconscious Amy in and carried in Sophie’s body. Amy was badly injured by the blow and never woke up from it, according to Etta. I hope to God Etta was telling the truth about that. She had stopped in Sioux Falls at a crafts store and bought paints and brushes and all the plaster of paris they had and then went to Menard’s and bought more. She also stopped at K-Mart and bought four folding chairs, a card table, and a high chair, and on I-90 she stopped at a convenience store gas station and bought food and water. She unloaded all these things and took the car to the apartment buildings just a little way north of her and left it in their lot.
Then she set everything up in the old house. She encased Sophie in plaster of paris, talking and cooing over her like she was giving her a bath, and set her in a sitting position, placing her on one of the folding chairs at the table. Then she cut Amy’s throat and bled her and opened her womb and removed the baby. She took it to the sink, which was so old the porcelain was worn off in big patches all over it, and the steel base had rusted through, so that the water Etta used just rained down on the floor below. But Etta did her job, pouring water over the baby, rubbing it clean, and wrapping it up in her own blouse, which she pulled out from her pants and unbuttoned. Then she sat down with it on her lap, dropped the cup from her breast, and stuck the nipple in its mouth. She remembered reading not so long ago about how suckling can stimulate lactation in a woman who was not pregnant, even that prolonged suckling could stimulate lactation in some men. This idea had come to her from the beginning, she said. If even in some men, why not in me? she thought. This is the moment when the full horror of Etta’s story finally hit me. Bob had risen from the couch and stalked out of the room, and Comer’s eyes had gone hard and blank. The full horror of an unspeakable crime that the imagination cannot grasp, first with this detail, then with that, came over me like a black wave, as Etta told of these moments--of the tenderness she felt, of the pressure of those dying lips on her breast, of the tiny thing too small and as yet undeveloped to live, not even able to gasp, its mother lying carved open on the floor beside them. Mercifully, it died quickly. And Etta sat there for awhile, rocking back and forth. Then she encased it in plaster, but since it was so small, she kept adding to it, and adding to it, until she made it large enough to sit upright in the high chair. She did the same to Amy, struggling to get her into a sitting position, and then onto a chair. Over the next few days, Etta painted them and made them look like dolls. She even bought wigs, as close as she could find to match their colors and styles. Every morning for the next year, she served them breakfast, sat and spoke with them about life, and planned Sophie’s career. Etta spoke loving things to Amy, and prepared lunches and suppers, and turned in of an evening tired from the day’s chores. Etta came to know the meaning of domestic bliss, though never asking herself, I suppose, if Amy would have found such domesticity blissful. She was ingenious in sustaining the illusion, though, leaving the old house only at night, disposing of trash in various dumpsters around town, even carrying it to Sioux Falls when she went on shopping trips, hauling in water, disposing of her own wastes without leaving traces.
It wasn’t lack of money that finally caused Etta’s roof to collapse. A good bit of Amy’s jewelry was still unpawned. What made it come to an end, finally, was Amy herself. Her arm came crashing to the floor one day, after Etta stumbled into her. The upper arm bone stuck out of the cast on the floor with shreds of decomposing muscle and skin, and the kitchen was suddenly filled with stench. Etta was shaken out of her delusion, then. Or she lost her will to continue it. Almost without thinking, she walked out. That’s when she went to the Daily and found Bob. The rest has been told.
As we listened to Etta speak, Comer did take notes, and every once in a while Bob would cover his face with his hands. Sometimes we would turn off the machine and go to the Canyon for coffee, just to get out and away from her. When the last tape was over, we felt a release, like we had come through an ordeal together. I was wrong about Etta, and Comer and Bob were right. For a good year that pathetic woman lived what she must have known with some part of her mind was a nightmare madness. She must have known it, because that knowledge was present in her voice from the very beginning. I was wrong about that, too. As she told the part of her story that took place in the old house, she lost the interrogative mood that had so deeply moved me. She became, then, declarative, sometimes imperative, and even had a rhetorical air about her from time to time. And that’s when she seemed common to me. Even coarse. She was mad. She was a monster. And I was about as blind as a man can be.
After a while I told May about my blindness and what I had been feeling for Etta as we listened to her tale. May was not her usual commonsensical self in response. She said, “Oh, don’t be so sure you were wrong. I thank God you are the way you are. You know, that’s why I sleep and have always slept so soundly beside you.”
***
About a month has passed now, and I don’t see much of Comer and Bob anymore. The mood has lingered. A sense of distaste has creeped over us for each other’s company. I have been going to my office almost every day, seldom stopping at the Canyon as I pass, though when I look in I don’t see Comer there either. It’s been rainy, breezy, and dim, cloud hung and foggy, much as the season always is, but this year it has pretty much mirrored my mood. May had been busy getting the museum ready for an exhibit for two regional artists, and at the opening last night, a kind of transformation came over me, leaving me free of Etta and looking forward to the coming changes.
I arrived late, as usual, after the crowd had gathered, and after the artists’ talks. I have no tolerance for those talks. What the artists say about their work never squares with what I see in it, and afterwards, I can’t enjoy it any more. And so, as inconspicuously as possible, I sneak in, deposit my coat, blend in at the table where the wine and cheese is served, and make like I have been there all along.
I made a quick tour of the main gallery, keeping that look of live curiosity on my face, though disappointed, as I often am, by the rendering of the typical icons of our region--sunflower fields, weathered barns, old farmhouses, wheat fields, fields being plowed, or harvested, or covered with snow, a great cottonwood standing alone in a pasture, or beside a creek, cows shading themselves, or wading in the water, and on and on, the forever monotonous intruding into the agelong monotony of our lives. I went for more wine.
The artists were besieged by groups of the museum’s patrons, those who out of a sense of duty come regularly to the openings and try sincerely to offer encouragement, hope, and insight to the struggling and unappreciated talents of our time and place. Fortified with a refill, I, also dutifully, charged the east gallery. May would not forgive me if she noticed me drinking too much and avoiding conversation, and not at least making a show of appreciating the work. A small crowd had gathered at the entrance to the gallery and blocked my view as I approached. Among them was the artist, who talked happily, the others as happily if not eagerly listening. I slipped by them, trying not the hear. And as I entered, directly across the room, on the wall opposite, a picture caught my eye and drew me in.
I stood in front of it for a long time. All the feelings of the past month, Etta’s voice, its loveliness and the depravity it masked, our reliving of her madness, her sometimes minute by minute account, all, all came pouring back with a great rush of feelings and emotions, and I was frozen where I stood. The picture was a midsize oil on canvas, an abstract botch of violent and strident colors that made it seem like a high-pitched scream. Against a dismal background of burnt umbers, blacks, dark hunter greens, and browns, all layered in deep running drips and runnels across the whole canvas from top to bottom, was a striking gash of chromium yellow, on the left side, vaguely suggesting a human form, bowed over and facing a somewhat smaller image on the right that was equally vivid and strident, a blend of scarlet and orange, and shooting out from this image was a streak heavily rendered across the foreground in crimson and dark red, black, and steel gray, that seemed about to pierce the yellow image on the left. In the center background, above the piercing streak, was a rectilinear object, like a heavy slab of wood suggesting a table top seen almost edge on, but angled to the upper right corner, and over it on the left side hovered two small yellow, almost head-like objects, pale yellow, timid and recessive in their places behind the dominating images, nude, fleshy, and feminine.
The picture stood out and demanded attention, fairly shouting at you, and it brought back that hollowness in my stomach, that sense of dread I felt the first day Comer and I talked about Etta at the Canyon. I walked up close, for I wanted to see if it was dated and recent, and, therefore, perhaps, influenced by what was known by the public about Etta’s story. It was dated, and it was painted almost five years ago. It was titled, “Abstract Realities.” Someone came up to me then and stood beside me.
“Does this one appeal to you?” he asked. “Wanna buy it?”
“No!” I said. “I’m just curious about what it makes me feel and think. What do you think?”
He is a math teacher at the high school and comes regularly with his wife to the openings, and over the years I have come to know him pretty well. He looked at the title and laughed.
“I’m pretty familiar with abstract realities,” he said, “that’s what numbers are. But numbers don’t help me get anything from this,” he said, still laughing, taking a couple of steps back to get a better vantage.
“Well, what does it make you think,” I said, trying to see if he saw anything at all in it. “Think of it as a kind of dream image, a disguised or masked communication from the unconscious. What would it be saying to you?”
He burst out laughing, then. “You’ve been reading Freud? I’m told that he has gone the way of the typewriter, nowadays. Old fashioned.”
“Humor me,” I said. “It’s been a long time since I was in college. Besides, I’m interested in the picture, not Freud.”
“It doesn’t communicate to me at all. It seems like pretty colors made to stand out, to be decorative. It wouldn’t fit in my house.”
I’ve been to his house and he’s right about that. His wife makes needle and thread reproductions of impressionist paintings, which are quite beautiful, and they hang these on their walls. I went for more wine, leaving him to visit the other pictures in the room. The mood of “Abstract Realities” was violent and murderous, and it bothered me that he didn’t see it. And it bothered me more when I refilled my glass and stood by the table looking into the gallery and saw others standing in front of the picture, gesturing as people do when they talk about paintings, smiling, nodding, agreeing, adding a thought, pointing to this or that.
The artist, whose name was Hendley, had disengaged himself from a group of women, thanking them for their kindness, and came to the table for wine. So I struck up a conversation, asking him about that painting.
“What I was doing there,” he said, sipping his wine and tossing a cube of cheese into his mouth, “was trying to get a feel for the real meaning of desire, for the intensity of passion that plays out against a world of indifference.”
He had long hair and an annoying habit of tossing his head as he spoke so it wouldn’t fall across his face.
“You mean desire in the sense of sexual arousal?” I said.
“Yes, that. Mostly that. But desire in a more general sense, too. Desire like hunger, you know, people desire all kinds of things, kinky things, too. Do you know Frost’s poem ‘Fire and Ice?’” he said.
I said I didn’t. I was interested in what he said and surprised that he was touching on the matter.
“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire...”
“‘I hold with those who favor fire.’ Yes, I do know that,” I said. “But what about the ice, wasn’t that supposed to mean hatred?”
“We’re such a repressed and frustrated people,” he said, “and I was trying to paint an image that suggested release from that repression.”
“I think we’re not repressed enough,” I said, “and could use a heavy dose of it. Your painting depicts violence and madness, not desire or release. It suggests murder and envy and the annihilation of the soul. It has nothing to do with desire, sex, passion, or any of those things.”
“Really?” he said, “that’s much too complicated! I’m nowhere near those things.” He looked at me like I was suddenly dangerous and took a step back, then smiled, sipped some wine, and said, “There’s no law, you know. That’s what art’s about...”
But I didn’t want to hear what I knew was coming, so I said I had to go and that I was glad to meet him. And I wanted to go. That depression was coming on me again, that sense of bleakness, like I didn’t quite fit in the world, that had been with me for the last month. That’s when I saw Bob, standing right at the entrance to the east gallery, one hand in a pocket, holding a glass of wine with the other, and seeming meditative. So I went up to him and shook his hand. Then I deliberately faced the picture, maneuvering him into the same position, and we had a clear view of it together. He seemed to be looking at it as I said something about the weather changing finally and that I was looking forward to spring. I fell silent then and stared with him at the picture. Then we faced each other and he had other things on his mind.
“I might be leaving town,” he said. “I’ve got an offer from a newspaper in Sedalia, Missouri. Better pay, better weather, bigger paper. Looks good.”
“What about Betty,” I said, “does she want to leave?”
“That’s why I said ‘might.’ She likes it here. But I’m working on her. The pay’s too good. I think she’ll buy into it before long.”
I faced the picture again, and he did too. I looked at him and saw that he was considering it. I said, “Do you like that piece?”
“Not really,” he said, turning away and strolling back to the table.
I walked away feeling even more depressed. I found May by the gift shop and told her I was going home. I must have looked like what I was feeling, because she mixed a look of concern with her usual consternation and irritation when I upset her plans. We were supposed to go out with the artists after the opening for drinks and conversation. I often find excuses for not going along, though tonight I told her that I would definitely go. She’s good at making faces that express three emotions at once. I try to imitate her when I shave in the morning, and I hear her shout from the bedroom, “What are you laughing at?”
So I put on my coat and left, holding the door so it didn’t bang. It was about a half-hour walk, and the weather really had changed. The air no longer had the bite of frost in it and was dry and calm, and the stars were bright. We were well along into spring, and soon the trees would be in leaf, and the tulips would be up. Summer was near, now, too, and it was hard to face it the way I was feeling. I lowered my collar as I began to warm and unbottoned the coat. When it got hot, I would go to my brother’s on Long Island, and May and I would sit in the sand on the beach at Smith’s point, and we would watch the little ones run up the slope with the surf rushing behind, their eyes wide with panic. And as the surf’s edge thinned and spread about their feet and started rolling back into the sea, they would turn and chase it down the slope again until another wave came bubbling and foaming anarchically in, and they would run up the slope with that look of panic in their eyes. Thinking of that, all of a sudden I felt a great heave of gladness, and the gloom was lifted. I put my hands in my coat pockets and whistled out loud and then I was home.
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