Kissing the Beehive (10 page)

"How did you know she was in Los Angeles? How did you know where we were?"

"She had lunch today with a mutual friend. She told me." She kept looking toward the
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bathroom. Tough as she looked, she was clearly apprehensive. Was it a crazy face? Mean? Maybe it wasn't her face at all that was so disturbing: maybe it was the incredibly negative, mad-mouse-running-in-a-wheel energy she shot out in all directions. "Ask Veronica about Gold. Ask her what happened with her and Donald Gold."

"The writer?"

"That's the guy." Once again she looked toward the bathroom, saw something, and without another word walked quickly out of the restaurant. I

watched her go. Once outside, she paused on the street, looked at me, mouthed, "Donald Gold," and took off.

Veronica returned a moment later and asked coolly, "Was that Zane?"

"Yeah. Strange woman." I hesitated, then thought, what the hell and said, "She told me to ask you about Donald Gold."

"Good old Zane. Still Miss Terminal Toxic Nastiness. Did she think that was going to ruin things between us? Before I met her, I lived out here with Donald. We were bad for each other. We fed on each other's weaknesses. He threw me out and was right to do it."

"That's all?"

"I was lost then, Sam. Maybe a little more than is safe. I was living a life that if you read about in a book, you'd say, 'How could she let that happen?' But here I am now and you seem to like that me, right?"

Taking her hand, I kissed it and intoned pompously, "_Omne vivum ex ovo_."

"What's that?"

"The only Latin I remember from school. 'Everything alive has come from the egg.'"

I don't remember what television shows we watched as kids on Saturday mornings, but all of them were sacred. Television itself was sacred then. That big square altar in the middle of the living room that held you captive anytime it was on.

I was watching TV that Saturday. My parents and sister were off shopping. I was sitting on the living room floor eating a doughnut when the doorbell rang. White powdered sugar was all over my fingers and mouth. The only thing I did to prepare myself for whoever was waiting was to rub an arm across my mouth, then my hands over my filthy jeans. Unhappily I went to the door.

When I opened it and saw Pauline Ostrova facing me, looking gorgeous and scared, I didn't know what to say. Of course I knew who she was. I was in lowly junior high while she lived in the upper echelons of high school, which would have given her godlike status even if her unprecedented reputation hadn't preceded her.

When she saw me she smiled a little. I almost peed my pants. "Hey, I know you! You're Sam, right? Listen, I ran over your dog."

"That's okay." I said cheerfully. I loved Jack the Wonder Boy but so what compared to Pauline Ostrova knowing my name.

"He's all right, I guess. I took him to the vet. The one on Tollington Park, Dr. Hughes?"

"We use Dr. Bolton."

"Yeah, well, I thought he was going to die from the way he looked, so I took him to the vet closest."

"Okay. You want to come in?" I had no idea what I was doing. She'd just run over our dog.

Shouldn't I be frantic? What would I do if she came in? Just the idea of Pauline Ostrova breathing the same air made my heart race around my chest.

I was twelve, so she must have been sixteen then. At school even I knew she was all things to all men -- adult, whore, scholar, artist . . . A few years later they would have called her liberated, but
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in those black-and-white

Dark Ages before Betty Friedan and feminism, Pauline was only one word --

weird. Everyone knew she slept around. That would have been acceptable if it had only been that. Then we would have had a category for her, ugly and simple as it was. But she made everything complicated by also being so smart and independent.

Waiting for her to say something else, I suddenly remembered the doughnuts I had been eating.

Frantically, I rubbed my mouth in case any crumbs were still there.

"Don't you want to know more about your dog?"

"I guess." I leaned against the door, then stood up straight, then tried leaning again. In her overwhelming presence there was no comfortable position on earth.

"He ran out in the street and I hit him and broke one of his rear legs.

Actually, it was kind of cool because the vet let me stay and watch him put the leg in a splint."

She was talking to _me_. I was just a little tool in seventh grade who watched her float by every day with upperclassmen, all of them carrying reputations nine miles long behind them like bridal trains. Yet for the moment, this high honor roll/slut goddess who knew my name was saying words meant only for my ears. The fact she was doing it as a way of apologizing for almost killing our dog was irrelevant.

"Listen, Sam, I really have to go to the bathroom. Could I use yours?"

_Bathroom_! Not only was she admitting she peed like the rest of us mortals, she wanted to use _ours_! Pauline Ostrova's bare ass on our toilet seat!

"Sure. I'll show you." I started down the hall and heard her footsteps behind me. The nicest bathroom in the house belonged to my parents. It was big and light and had thick powder-blue shag carpeting on the floor -- very fashionable back then. But it was upstairs and I didn't think it appropriate to take her up there, no matter how much I longed to show off the carpeting.

So I went toward the smaller one just off the kitchen.

Naturally when she was inside with the door shut, I wanted to glue my ear to it so as to hear every sound she made. But I was equally afraid she'd know and come bursting out of there like a Nike missile, intent on catching me listen to her tinkle. I went into the living room and quickly scarfed down the doughnut I had been eating before she arrived.

She didn't come out. The toilet didn't flush. Nothing happened. She just

. . . _stayed_ in there. For a while I thought maybe she was only taking her time, but that time grew too long and I began to grow apprehensive. Had she had a heart attack and died? Was she having trouble going? Was she snooping in our medicine cabinet?

I grew so nervous that I took another doughnut and ate it without thinking. I wanted to ask if she was okay, but what if that question angered her? What if she had taken sick and for some reason couldn't speak? I pictured her grabbing at her throat, her face cyan blue. With a last gasp, she'd reach weakly for the toilet flush so when they found her, at least she wouldn't be embarrassed by what she'd done before dying.

When I could no longer stand it, I purposely walked to the corner of the kitchen farthest from the toilet and shouted, "Pauline? Are you okay?"

Her answer was immediate. "Yeah, sure. I'm reading one of your magazines in here."

When she reemerged, we drove across town to the veterinarian to get the dog and then she took us home. I wanted the whole world to see me in her car and misinterpret why I was there.

Unfortunately, the only person I recognized on the streets was Club Soda Johnny Petangles, the human commercial.

As I climbed out of her red Corvair with the dog fussing in my arms, she said, "I took that magazine out of your toilet 'cause I want to finish the article. I'll give it back to you in school."

"That's okay. What's the article?"

"It's in _Time_. About Enrico Fermi?"

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"Oh yeah, I read that one."

Enrico who?

I was delighted because something of ours would stay with her and there'd be reason for further contact with her.

Sadly, despite a desultory "hi" from her now and then in the halls at school, I never spoke with Pauline again until I pulled her out of the Hudson

River a few years later.

When the book tour was over, I returned to Crane's View. Working in the old guest room of my childhood home, I continued writing the first pages of the book. That was the easy part -- just letting memories roll in and carry me along, like waves on their way to shore. There was no way I could tell this story objectively, so I decided to tip my hand early and begin it with my personal involvement.

I spent two days at Frannie's writing and talking to people who had been around at the time of the murder. Pauline's father was dead, but her mother and sister still lived in town. I decided not to talk with them for a while because I wanted an overview of things before going to the heart of their matter.

Frannie had kept a good file of the records of both the murder investigation and the subsequent trial of Edward Durant, but I held off reading those too. I pictured my investigation as a kind of circular labyrinth. Entering somewhere on the outer edge, I would inevitably make many wrong turns but hopefully close in on the center eventually.

That meant first finding out who were the peripheral people in her life and seeing them. A couple of teachers were still at the school who had taught her. Two old lizards who had long overstayed their welcome in academia.

Wizened and cranky, they were not the most reliable sources in the world. Yet because they spend so much time with kids for a specific, concentrated block of their young lives, teachers experience them in a singular way no others do.

Her French teacher remembered her because good as she was at the mechanics of the language, Pauline could never say the words so they sounded anything like French. "Bonjour" became "Bone Jew" on her tongue, and hard as she tried, it always stayed right there. He remembered her ramrod posture and how she loved the poetry of Jacques Prevert. What I got from him was a picture of every teacher's favorite student -- eager, inquisitive, occasionally remarkable.

The same wasn't true with her English teacher, Mr. Tresvant. I'd had him too when I was in school. He was one of those sanctimonious sour balls who made us read dinosaurs like Hope Muntz's _The Golden Warrior_, and then had the audacity to call them literature. He appeared to be wearing the same brown tie and dead corduroy suit he had three decades before. What was weird and perversely wonderful was that on entering his room again after all those years, I felt my asshole tighten with the same fear I had felt back when his grades meant life or death.

The first thing he said to me was, "So, Bayer, you're a bestseller now, eh?"

I wanted to say, "That's right, you old stump. No thanks to you and Hope Muntz!" But I gave an "aw shucks" shrug instead and tried to look modest.

I asked if he remembered Pauline Ostrova. To my surprise, he silently pointed to a picture on the wall. I continued looking at him, waiting to hear if he was going to say anything about it.

When he didn't -- Tresvant was famous for his menacing, pregnant pauses -- I got up and went over. It was a fine drawing of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Whoever had done it had spent a long time because every possible detail was there.

"Did Pauline draw this?"

"No, of course not. That was, that _is_, the English award, Mr. Bayer.

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Obviously you've forgotten the goings-on here. Every year I give away a copy of that drawing to the best English student in my classes. Pauline Ostrova should have won it because more often than not, she was an excellent student.

But you know something? She turned out to be too excellent for her own good.

She was a cheat."

I reacted as if he had said something obscene about one of my best friends, which was ridiculous because she was dead almost thirty years and I

really hadn't known her. Finally I managed to weakly repeat, "She was a _cheat_?"

"A very adept one. And not always. She read everything. Wayne Booth, Norman O. Brown, Leavis . . . Send her to the library and she took everything she could lay her hands on. But once too often what she read appeared in what she wrote, whole cloth, and she was dangerously _stingy_ about giving credit where it was due."

"That's hard to believe!"

He smiled but it was an ugly thing, glowing with scorn and superiority.

"Did you love her too, Bayer? Much more than the cheating, that was her sin.

She made it easy to love her, but she never loved back."

"Did _you_ love her, Mr. Tresvant?"

"The only thing that went through my mind when I heard she was dead was a mild 'Oh.' So I would guess not. Anyway, the less old men remember about love, the better."

Skin cuts the easiest. Even the thinnest paper resists -- a moment's no before the knife slices through its surface. But a knife into skin is like a finger into water. I was cutting open a package of legal pads when the knife slipped and slid through the top of my thumb. Blood shot out and splattered across the yellow paper.

It was ten at night. Frannie was downstairs eating Mongolian barbecue takeout and watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme video he had rented earlier. I

wrapped my thumb in toilet paper and called down, asking if he had medicine and bandages.

When I explained what had happened, he raced up the stairs with a gigantic orange first-aid kit.

He looked at my finger and wrapped it up like a pro. When I asked where he'd learned to do that, he said he had been a medic

in Vietnam. Surprised he had spent his time as a soldier doing that and not flame-throwing people, I accused him of not telling me much about himself. He laughed and said I should ask any questions I wanted.

"How come you keep calling David Cadmus?"

"Because the fucker's father killed Pauline Ostrova."

"The fucker's father is _dead_, Frannie."

"But the crime isn't. Turn your hand over so I can get the other side."

"I don't understand what that means."

"It means I want someone besides Durant to admit killing Pauline."

"Why? Why's it so important?"

He held my bandaged hand in both of his while he spoke. I tried to pull it away after what he said next, but he wouldn't let go.

"What do you believe in, Sam?"

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly that. What in your life do you believe in? Where do you worship? Who would you give a kidney to? What would you go to the wall for?"

"A lot of things. Should I list them?" My voice went way up on the last word.