Compliments of a Friend (2 page)

I tried to come up with a piercingly clever rejoinder to counter her argument, but I finally said, “Doesn’t he work there? Chairman or president or something?”

“Supposedly, he runs the company. Except he spends two months in Vail skiing. And two months up in Maine sailing. And two months someplace warm golfing, plus everyone knows that if Stan actually did run the company the only place he’d run it is into the ground. He was born to enjoy, not to think.”

I’d once overheard one board member telling another: Stan Giddings stood on all the right lines when they were handing out the assets. Looks, money, charm.

“And FYI,” Nancy added, “he’s hung like King Kong.”

“How do you know that?”

“How do you think I know?”

In Nancy’s mind, Mount Sinai was the place on which God handed Moses the Nine Commandments. In her thirty-one years of marriage, at least fourscore lovers had come—and gone.

“You slept with Stan?”

Her head moved slightly: an acknowledgment.

“I can’t believe you! How could you not tell me about someone like him?”

I sometimes felt as if Nancy was relying on me to be her official scorekeeper.

“It must have been when you were writing your doctoral … thing. Thesis,” Nancy muttered.

“Dissertation.”

“You were already overstimulated. How could I burden you? Besides, everyone in town knows about his equipment.”

“I don’t.”

“You! You can name every member of Roosevelt’s cabinets from whenever …”

“From 1933 to 1945. Yes, I can.”

“… but anything truly interesting always comes as a surprise. ‘Golly! You mean Stan Giddings has a foot-long hot dog? Gee whiz!’ By the way, he knows what to do with it, too.”

All I could say was “Yikes!”

“But as they say,” Nancy added, “ ‘God is good.’ No one gets it all. There’s always a glitch.”

“What’s his?”

“He’s an ultraconservative. That might be tolerable except he simply cannot stop droning on about it. It was like fucking Bill O’Reilly, though Stan doesn’t have that repulsivo bisected nose.”

“So if he’s that tedious, his leaving wouldn’t have sent Vanessa over the edge.”

“I heard something about other reasons,” Nancy muttered to her wine.

“Like what?”

I probably sounded a tad overeager because she responded with an elegant flaring of her nostrils. I leaned forward, rested my hands on the annoying, chic sheet of butcher paper the restaurant was using instead of a cloth, and demanded: “What other reasons?”

“Vanessa was having serious business reverses.”

“Where did you hear that?”

She took a slow sip of wine.

“I suppose as I wafted through the city room.”

“How serious was ‘serious’?”

Nancy peered into her glass once again. She seemed taken aback to find it empty, as though someone had sneaked over and slurped it up while she was talking. Shrugging, she poured herself another glass. I took my third sip of the night and, for the umpteenth time in the thirty-three years since we’d been in college together, worried about her liver.

“Nancy, how bad were Vanessa’s business reverses? She did get through the recession in one piece. Why was she having reverses now?”

“Why are you so interested?” she demanded.

“Something’s fishy,” I said. “I can practically smell it.”

“Nothing’s fishy.”

“I don’t buy this suicide story.”

She gripped the stem of her glass.

“You’re not thinking of doing a little detecting, are you, Judith?”

“Please!”

I tried to act amused, but the derisive chuckle came out as if I were having some esophageal unpleasantness involving excessive phlegm.

“I only did the detecting thing once. Twenty years ago. A blip on the radar screen of my life. It’s just …”

“Just what?”

“Hear me out. I value logic. Suicide doesn’t make sense. Say you want to kill yourself. But your whole persona is being cool, elegantly put together, always in control. Someone like that wouldn’t do it violently because violence is messy. Can you imagine her leaping off an overpass into rush-hour traffic on the Northern State and getting smashed by a BMW X5?”

“She didn’t,” Nancy said.

“Precisely. She was so meticulous I can’t even imagine her willing to risk breaking a nail hooking up a hose to the exhaust of her car. No. Her kind of woman would probably check out the old-fashioned, ‘ladylike’ way—by taking sleeping pills. Right?”

“Most likely,” she conceded, although reluctantly.

“And what would happen then? She might just go to sleep forever. But she could also upchuck and choke on her own vomit.”

“No need to be so vivid at the dinner hour, Judith.”

“And why in God’s name would she choose to die in Bloomingdale’s?” I continued. “Why would she be buying shoes in the final moments of her life? Think, Nancy: If you were depressed and hopeless enough to actively consider suicide, would you be worrying about what to wear with your new spring suit?”

“No.” She pushed back the chin-length wave of hair that had fallen over one eye. “Accessorizing is a life-affirming act.”

“Also, if you’re one of these controlled types like Vanessa,” I went on, “are you going to risk dropping down dead over a display of Ferragamos and losing control of your bowels while you’re wearing an above-the-knee skirt?”

With that, I waved the waiter over and inquired how much garlic there was in the ribollita.

But after dinner, back home alone, I was still asking questions. So I hauled in the tied-up newspapers I’d put in the garage for recycling and sat in the kitchen. Intermittently, sleet struck the window, like thousands of long-nailed fingers tapping impatiently against a glass tabletop: Hurry up! Find something! I read and reread Vanessa’s obituary, the paid tributes, and all there was about her death. Then I went online. Nothing much except for the good-byes on the In Memoriam page on the Winston Bowles Funeral Home’s website: “The Puttermans are deeply saddened …” and, from Lila and Don McDougal, “Good night, Sweet Princess, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

On-and offline, I couldn’t find much of substance. She’d been born Vanessa Compton in Rockville Centre, a town near the south shore of Long Island. She’d gone to Hofstra, also on the Island. After a brief stint (though I never heard of a stint that wasn’t brief) working at a gigantic employment agency in the city, she’d founded Panache while still in her twenties.

Her clients ranged from the corporate, like Kluckers and a computer software giant, to individuals, like socialites and professional athletes. By the time she was in her early thirties, she had not only married Stan, but had also gotten him to build her a fifteen-room mansion on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound, a place with such a surfeit of Doric columns it was clear that too many girlhood viewings of Gone with the Wind had caused a slight impairment to the region of the brain that governed her architecture aesthetic.

One of the online pieces had an old Panache publicity picture of Vanessa; she was wearing a coatdress and perched on the edge of her Louis the Something-th desk. She was flanked on the left by a woman in a maid’s uniform and a man in a hardhat holding a clipboard; a man in a three-piece banker’s suit stood on the right and, beside him, another in a one-piece mechanic’s coverall. All four workers looked competent and content, yet Vanessa outshone them. Whether it was some inner glow or simply good lighting I couldn’t tell.

In a long article in the Shorehaven Sentinel, I read: “Her former husband, Stanley Giddings, could not be reached for comment, although a Giddings family spokesman released a statement that said Mr. Giddings was ‘shocked and saddened to learn of Vanessa’s suicide.’ ” The shocked and saddened Stan, the paper noted, had married an artist, who went by the name of Ryn, three months earlier. They’d moved out of Shorehaven many months before the nuptials and were living in dandied-up waterfront warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The place had just been photographed for Architectural Digest.

The next time I glanced up, it was long past eleven o’clock. Shit. Hurriedly, I made a pile of clippings and printouts about Vanessa’s death, arranged in chronological order. Why had I spent the night doing this when facing eighteen first drafts of term papers on New Deal agencies?

Well, Vanessa had called me her friend. On the slim chance she hadn’t been full of it, that she was truly so friendless that she considered a near stranger a friend, maybe I owed her something. Or it could have been my gut reaction: her committing suicide was ninety-nine percent unlikely. Over the years, I’ve learned my gut is right more often than not. Who knows? It simply could have been that after dinner with Nancy, on yet one more bleak night alone, a mystery was just what I needed to put some life in my life.

My husband was gone. True, Bob and I hadn’t had a fairy-tale marriage. Still, even when all that’s left is polite conversation and lackluster marital sex, you have to remember (I’d told myself all those years we were together) that once upon a time it had to have been a love story. I always half-expected the plot would get moving again. Some incident would touch off a great conflict and, lo and behold, not only would the air clear, but there’d be romance in it! Bob and Judith: we’d walk hand in hand into a sunset, happily ever after—or until one of us went gently into the night in our eighth or ninth decade.

Imagine my surprise when he died before my eyes in the emergency room of North Shore Hospital. One minute, he squeezed my hand—a reassuring gesture—but I could see the fear in his eyes. As I squeezed back, he slipped away. Just like that. Gone, before I could say, “Don’t worry, Bob. The nurse told me Dr. Feinblatt—the cardiologist—was one of New York magazine’s Top Doctors.” Or just “I love you, Bob.”

Not only no husband, no prospect of another one. I promised myself no more blind dates, not after the two most recent—whom Nancy referred to as Death Warmed Over and Mr. Piggy. Periodically, I went to the movies, the theatre, and even a couple of baseball games with Bruce, a psycho-pharmacologist I’d met through JDate. He har-har-ed, almost insanely, at the merest suggestion of humor. I suspected he was prescribing too much something for himself. Plus, he flunked my test for basic human decency. He was disrespectful to waiters. If a man needs an item of flatware, he absolutely cannot ask: How long do I have to wait before anyone brings me a salad fork? I should have told him to take a hike, but no one else was knocking at my door.

My son and daughter loved me, but they both were grown, gone from the house, busy with their own lives. So who knows? Maybe I was fixated on murder because it was one of those dark and stormy nights, both without and within, when the notion of suicide—anybody’s—was so terrifying it had to be denied.

I should have felt better the next day. A soft-yellow sun rose into an azure sky. Even in the cold air, I sniffed the first sweetness of spring. Actually, I did feel better. But that was probably not because of the imminence of daffodils.

I was sitting across from Dr. Jennifer Spiros, the number-two pathologist in the Nassau County Medical Examiner’s Office.

“I’m not authorized to give you a copy of the autopsy report,” she said, taking her time with each word.

Her long, shiny Alice in Wonderland hair was tied back with a dainty blue ribbon with rickrack edges. That was the good news. The bad was she had a rectangle of a face, along with such a thick neck that she looked as if her mother had some hanky-panky with a Lipizzaner.

“I understand you can’t hand over the actual report,” I replied. “But this is for Shorehaven Library’s oral history project.”

We both glanced at the red light on the tape recorder I’d set on her desk between us. Dr. Spiros moistened her lips with her tongue.

“It’s not a matter of documentation,” I explained. “What I’m trying to capture here is the reality of a single death, a view from all perspectives, of the passing of one citizen of Shorehaven. From Vanessa Giddings’s friends and colleagues to her minister who gave the eulogy to … well, to the officials charged with investigating that death.”

Naturally, I didn’t add that if news of this little caper I was now on got back to Shorehaven Library’s administrator, Snively Sam, I’d be out of a job. I pressed on.

“I understand she left a note?”

Dr. Spiros pressed her hands together, prayerlike, and held them demurely under her chin.

“I’m not authorized …”

Her nail polish was a purplish orangey-pink: to imagine the color, picture a plastic flamingo at twilight.

I reached out and switched off the recorder.

“On background,” I said boldly, crossing my legs, more Rosalind Russell–His Girl Friday than historian.

Except two seconds later, my heart started to race. It demanded what my brain hadn’t permitted itself to ask: What the hell am I doing here? Each heartbeat was stronger than the one before until my entire chest was filled with what felt like a life-threatening pounding. I want to get the big picture, I was telling her. Am I nuts? Any minute, she’d come to her senses and toss me out on my ear.

“The suicide note said something like ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ ” Dr. Spiros was saying. “ ‘It’s got to end.’ That’s about it.”

“Was it signed?”

“Yes. Signed ‘Vanessa.’ On her personal stationery.”

“Was it handwritten?”

She nodded.

“Was she carrying it with her?”

I got a Huh? look.

“In her handbag or her coat pocket. When she was at Bloomingdale’s?”

“No. It was …”

She glanced at me, too suspiciously. But unable to figure out my angle, she finally went on.

“In a manila folder right in her top desk drawer. I think the report said the drawer was open slightly. The file was marked ‘Personal Papers.’ Her marriage certificate was in there. Her divorce decree. In a sense, she’d assembled her whole relationship with her ex-husband in that file.”

I turned on the recorder again.

“I’d like to go over what’s been released publicly.”

She nodded, then lifted her hair and let it fall back onto her shoulders. Clearly, and correctly, she considered it her best feature.