I saw Sara’s screenplay through the music room door.
Saw Sara arriving at LAX, saw her standing at the Hertz counter, saw her driving to West Hollywood, to the bungalow she’d found at the last minute. I saw the car dealerships on every corner and their huddles of repossessed Porsches. Saw the walled-off fortresses and the street-level billboards hawking stars. Saw Sara writing at someone else’s desk, in someone else’s house, harking back to Maine.
Twice I lost her, three times she left me: to California, to death, and now to this.
Dan’s starfish necklace lay on the coffee table. I hung it around my neck. It was a real starfish, with a piece of hemp cord cinched around the middle. On the table was a wadded-up piece of Kleenex. I held it to my nose, smelling the used condom inside. Dan rustled in his sleep and adjusted his arm, like an oar reaching out over water. Cornelia responded, turning to spoon against him. One of them farted.
I dressed for work, grabbed my briefcase off the dining table, and tossed it in the trunk.
It clattered against the antlers.
Cornelia was snoring when I tiptoed back inside and delicately placed the rack above their heads. I collected the screenplay, drove down to the beach, and read the first thirty pages in my car.
The movie was a thriller that began with a dinner date: a single, childless writer in her forties living in Bar Harbor is set up by her best friend with a widowed doctor newly arrived to the island. He’s perfect husband material, says the friend. Must be some reason he’s still on the shelf, the writer says. Still, she shows up for dinner, and waiting at the bar is an older Bruce Willis type: handsome, tall, and quietly projecting confidence. He tells her about his work as an infectious disease specialist. He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s self-deprecating. She can sense he’s good in bed, and her research that evening proves her out. They fall in love and marry three months later at Otter Cliffs. In her toast, the writer thanks her friend for tracking down the perfect husband, and in coastal Maine, no less.
Unfortunately, the honeymoon’s cut short a few weeks later when an oddball cousin the writer met at the wedding, the one her husband referred to as his family’s black sheep, urges her to investigate the previous wife’s death. Wasn’t it odd, the cousin says, that she died from the same disease the doctor made his specialty?
I left the car unlocked.
The sky was pale. Down on the beach, the air was warm and tinged with wood smoke. The surface of the bay was perfectly flat out to the ocean. I swam at an even chop past Rockefeller Island, went another five minutes, stopped, and doggie-paddled. The clarity was exceptional. I took a deep breath, took another, and dived, striking the water, and released the air slowly as I pulled myself down, kicking for probably twenty feet until my lungs were empty and I stopped. I touched seaweed on the bottom, and the wildfire started. I focused my attention on listing the alphabet backward, though by the time I reached K, I couldn’t continue. I thrust my hands into the seaweed to find rocks. I tried holding on to whatever my hands could grasp, pulling up plant stalks and fistfuls of muck, but I needed air—the inferno was burning my body inside out.
See the perfect human enter a park. He finds a peak to climb. He climbs for two years through winter blizzards, across rushing creeks in spring, an alpinist on an island full of humpbacked mountains, the summits mostly bare. A deserted island, but he prefers it that way, to be alone and unobserved. Mourning as the best way to meet nature, dust to dust. Perpetual mourning. Occasionally he hears sounds from town, the hum of cars like animals prowling around the base of a canyon, but he sees no one, not a single person on the trails.
The perfect human climbs. He never tires. He is ceaseless in his state, where it never occurs to him that it should be any different.
Why should it?
The bay was full of sailboats. The closest to me was a sixty-foot cruiser with a kelly-green hull. A ladder hung off the stern near a small American flag with thirteen stars. I pulled myself aboard. Near the bow was an anchor and some loose chain. On a cabin door was a padlock someone had forgotten to latch. I laughed and quickly made myself a belt.
My hands were shaking.
I cinched the chain around my waist and clicked the lock closed.
Then I grabbed the anchor and almost dropped it from shock. It was a decoration. I’d thought it might weigh two hundred pounds, but it was as heavy as a crowbar. As a flute.
I had to piss.
I pulled off my trunks and kicked them overboard, opened the cabin door, and pissed down the chute, waving my penis around, urinating everywhere .
Then it came back to me finally, the name of the movie Sara and I had seen that first night we met in New York: the fucking
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
.
Darling, it’s
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,
a pleasant little French musical. There’s not much fucking involved.
Go away.
You just peed on someone’s boat. You’re naked with a starfish around your neck. Victor, you haven’t had your coffee yet. Allow me to play Poirot: You thought a toy anchor would pin you down?
Spur-of-the-moment decision.
Please, you’ve been working on this for weeks. How many sleeping pills did you obtain? And yet you left them in the glove compartment. So you could soberly attempt to drown yourself in a cove that’s twenty feet deep.
I was going to—
It’s barely sunrise. You’re standing on private property. You’re trespassing, you’re degenerating, but one thing you’re not is suicidal. Nice belt.
I wasn’t the one who refused to wear a seat belt.
Oh, don’t say this is about me. This is melodrama. Except in developing countries, melodrama is never by accident.
Nice. Tell me about the screenplay.
What about it? You found it. Congratulations.
It’s the fifth card, the fifth change in direction.
What? Says who?
Not only am I a workaholic, I’m capable of homicide?
Darling, slow the horses. First, it was a rough draft.
You and Bruce weren’t able to get it into development in time.
You really think it’s about you? About us?
You wrote it, you tell me.
Well, it’s not autobiographical, I’ll start with that.
Sara, why couldn’t you pick up the phone?
Why didn’t you come after me? You bought a ticket.
I apologized a hundred times.
You’re constantly apologizing, Victor. After a while, it sounds more wistful than sorry.
What should I have done?
Darling, what do I say? You could have flown out, bought me a steak, and made some big macho scene. What do you want me to tell you? Do you remember our marriage at the time?
I called Mark. I found his number after I got into your computer. He has no idea.
Trust me, where I’m standing, this is public knowledge. So what?
I don’t have to give it to anyone. I could delete it tonight.
Assuming you get off this boat. But fine, who cares? Victor, you’re not listening. Even if I were alive, it wouldn’t mean that much to me.
Don’t give me that. A scientist in Bar Harbor, married to a writer—
Did it occur to you I might have had other motivations?
Try me.
Frankly, I was just happy to be working again. I went out there with this fantasy of me as David Lynch. You know, writing my art-house opus. Oh, I wrote allegories out the wazoo, but nothing worked. Even I got confused. Each scene was like an extracted dead tooth. Then one morning, when I merely contemplated writing a thriller, something straight Hollywood, suddenly I couldn’t type fast enough. The pages wrote themselves.
Sara, I need to know.
What?
Was there someone else?
Victor, what do you think?
Did Russell go out to California?
Oh, darling, if he had, wouldn’t that fit your reduction so neatly.
You were never vindictive.
Among a hundred things you’ve chosen to forget.
I remember you every day.
But your memories aren’t true. The more you recall something, the more false it becomes, remember? You taught me that. What are the signs of Alzheimer’s? Memory loss, disorientation, poor judgment, problems with abstract thinking
—
Sara, how could you do it?
You sided against me. You wiped out an enormous reserve of trust that night. Imagine Cornelia when she wakes up, penned in by antlers. Though I’ll admit that was charming, in a Russell-y sort of way.
Oh, and that’s a good thing.
You know, after you introduced us way back when, I always did have a slight crush on Russell.
I don’t believe it.
He’s vulnerable. He’s a mess. Girls go for that sort of thing, you know. We like to get our hands dirty.
I never cheated on you.
You think I did?
I don’t know what to think.
Listen to me: Neither of us cheated. We were loyal to a fault. What a perfect union.
I always hated your sarcasm.
Hey, at least I was there. At least I fought for us. What did you do? The fact that you sat on your hands was why we almost did separate.
You don’t know what it’s like to be left behind.
Really? Years ago you loved me, I was everything to you, and then what happened?
You edited me out of my role.
Or you couldn’t evolve within it.
I loved you.
And I you, darling. Now come on, cheer up, wave your penis around the boat again, show it off to the beachcombers. Maybe you can work up an erection for old times’ sake. Though I heard that’s not really your thing these days.
Go away.
Let’s talk about Regina.
Sara, I can’t do this.
Doctor-client privilege? What, she was your bereavement therapy?
You don’t know her.
I know her poetry, at least it’s better than Uncle Bill’s. And you think you’ve got a clue? A dancer and her impotent audience, e-mails and midnight phone calls
,
that’s a relationship?
So we should have been more status quo, then you’d approve.
You called it an affair because you liked sneaking around. Being kinky with no commitment. Deep down, you believed you were cheating on me.
That’s a lie. The deception was hers, it was her wish from the start.
But you fell for it. I’m dead, Victor. You think it’s easy being your belly dancer? Poor girl, trying to figure out what you wanted, putting on a tough face
—
She loves dancing.
She loves you, Victor. Or she did. I think she’s over it by now, post windshield therapy. But imagine, trying to please a man who wants you so badly he won’t sleep with you?
That’s not fair.
What have you learned, Victor? What have you learned? For your clever little questions, what answers have you found?
I’ve done my trials.
Please, you’ve been dating a Ziegfeld dancer. And when that got too heavy, you imported a little girl as your nurse.
You left me. You left me here.
Of course. Me, Ben Lemery. Me, the best of your days, your fugitive, your amorous new body.
How can you—
What, darling?
No one’s perfect.
Says the man who never grieved.
That’s insane. I have grieved more than anyone could possibly—
No, you haven’t. It is the one thing you have not done. You’re like that case study. Me dying was your trauma, I was the hippocampus surgically removed from your life and you’ve refused to deal with the present ever since.
You have no right.
Well, tell that to the police.
What?
There’s a patrol car in the parking lot. Seriously. He’s saying something over the bullhorn.
He says I’m trespassing. He says I have to leave.
Maybe you should put on some shorts.
What should I do?
Get dressed? Victor, do what you want!
What if I don’t know what I want?
Do you remember why we were going to Italy?
A fresh start.
A new ending.
Show me.
Why did I return home from California?
I don’t know. I never knew.
Because I loved you.
You loved me.
Because what we’d done to each other wasn’t due to a lack of love. The point, darling, of that screenplay is that you never know what lurks beneath people, even when they’re perfect on paper. Well, we were different. We knew the depths of each other. It wasn’t about us, because I didn’t need it to be. I sat there at my desk thinking, our last act can still be written together.
How many times have you seen
The Perfect Human
since I died?
I don’t know.
Liar, it’s a fifteen-minute film, you count everything. How many times have you identified with the man in the box?
Twenty-three.
And did you kill Ben Lemery?
I don’t know.
Again.
How am I supposed to know? How can I possibly?
Go back. You were a child, you were watching TV. Why should you have gotten up and gone over to his house?
But I knew what he was planning. I didn’t tell anyone. I’m r esponsible.
Fine, but you’ve never taken responsibility, have you? You’ve held on to this virtue of being unsure, unable to trust your memories when instead of grieving and getting over it, you’ve squatted in the middle, clutching your precious relativity, and now you’ve cracked. Real life isn’t relative, Victor, a chair is a fucking chair, we do things or we don’t, and either way there’s a cause. Did you kill him? Did you kill Ben?