Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“I still felt things,” he said, “but the need to act on them seemed to have passed. I might be struck by the physical appearance of one of my students, say, but I’d never do anything about it, or even seriously consider doing anything about it. I told myself my admiration was aesthetic, a natural response to male beauty. In youth, hormone-driven as one is, I’d confused this with actual sexual desire. Now I could recognize it for the innocent and asexual phenomenon it was.”

Which was not to say that he’d given up his little adventures entirely.

“I would be invited somewhere to attend a conference,” he said, “or to give a guest lecture. I’d be in another city where I didn’t know anyone and nobody knew me. And I would have had a few drinks, and I’d feel the urge for some excitement. And I could tell myself that, while a liaison with another woman would be a betrayal of my wife and a violation of my marital vows, the same could hardly be said for some innocent sport with another man. So I’d go to the sort of bar one goes to — they were never hard to find, even in those closeted days, even in provincial cities and college towns. And, once there, it was never hard to find someone.”

He was silent for a moment, gazing off toward the horizon.

“Then I walked into a bar in Madison, Wisconsin,” he said, “and there he was.”

“Robert Paul Naismith.”

“David,” he said. “That’s who I saw, that’s the youth on whom my eyes fastened the instant I cleared the threshold. I can remember the moment, you see. I can see him now exactly as I saw him then. He was wearing a dark silk shirt and tan trousers and loafers without socks, which no one wore in those days. He was standing at the bar with a drink in his hand, and his physique and the way he stood, the stance, the attitude — he was Michelangelo’s David. More than that, he was my David. He was my ideal, he was the object of a lifelong quest I hadn’t even known I was on, and I drank him in with my eyes and I was lost.”

“Just like that,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he agreed. “Just like that.”

He was silent, and I wondered if he was waiting for me to prompt him. I decided he was not. He seemed to be choosing to remain in the memory for a moment.

Then he said, “Quite simply, I had never been in love with anybody. I have come to believe that it is a form of insanity. Not to love, to care deeply for another. That seems to me to be quite sane, and even ennobling. I loved my parents, certainly, and in a somewhat different way I loved my wife.

“This was categorically different. This was obsessive. This was preoccupation. It was the collector’s passion: I must have this painting, this statue, this postage stamp. I must embrace it, I must own it utterly. It and it alone will complete me. It will change my own nature. It will make me worthwhile.

“It wasn’t sex, not really. I won’t say sex had nothing to do with it. I was attracted to David as I’d never been attracted to anyone before. But at the same time I felt less driven sexually than I had on occasion in the past. I wanted to possess David. If I could do that, if I could make him entirely mine, it scarcely mattered if I had sex with him.”

He fell silent, and this time I decided he was waiting to be prompted. I said, “What happened?”

“I threw my life over,” he said. “On some flimsy pretext or other I stayed on in Madison for a week after the conference ended. Then I flew with David to New York and bought an apartment, the top floor of a brownstone in Turtle Bay. And then I flew back to Buffalo, alone, and told my wife I was leaving her.”

He lowered his eyes. “I didn’t want to hurt her,” he said, “but of course I hurt her badly and deeply. She was not completely surprised, I don’t believe, to learn there was a man involved. She’d inferred that much about me over the years, and probably saw it as part of the package, the downside of having a husband with an aesthetic sensibility.

“But she thought I cared for her, and I made it very clear that I did not. She was a woman who had never hurt anyone, and I caused her a good deal of pain, and I regret that and always will. It seems to me a far blacker sin than the one I served time for.

“Enough. I left her and moved to New York. Of course I resigned my tenured professorship at UB. I had connections throughout the academic world, to be sure, and a decent if not glorious reputation, so I might have found something at Columbia or NYU. But the scandal I’d created made that less likely, and anyway I no longer gave a damn for teaching. I just wanted to live, and enjoy my life.

“There was money enough to make that possible. We lived well. Too well, really. Not wisely but too well. Good restaurants every night, fine wines with dinner. Season tickets to the opera and the ballet. Summers in the Pines. Winters in Barbados or Bali. Trips to London and Paris and Rome. And the company, in town or abroad, of other rich queens.”

“And?”

“And it went on like that,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap, and a little smile played on his lips. “It went on, and then one day I picked up a knife and killed him. You know that part, Matthew. It’s where you came in.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t know why.”

“No, that never came out. Or if it did I missed it.”

He shook his head. “It never came out. I didn’t offer a defense, and I certainly didn’t provide an explanation. But can you guess?”

“Why you killed him? I have no idea.”

“But you must have come to know some of the reasons people have for killing other people? Why don’t you humor an old sinner and try to guess. Prove to me that my motive was not unique after all.”

“The reasons that come to mind are the obvious ones,” I said, “and that probably rules them out. Let me see. He was leaving you. He was unfaithful to you. He had fallen in love with someone else.”

“He would never have left,” he said. “He adored the life we led and knew he could never live half so well with someone else. He would never fall in love with anyone else any more than he could have fallen in love with me. David was in love with himself. And of course he was unfaithful, and had been from the beginning, but I had never expected him to be otherwise.”

“You realized you’d thrown your life away on him,” I said, “and hated him for it.”

“I had thrown my life away, but I didn’t regret it. I’d been living a lie, and what loss to toss it aside? While jetting off to Paris for a weekend, does one long for the gentle pleasures of a classroom in Buffalo? Some may, for all I know. I never did.”

I was ready to quit, but he insisted I come up with a few more guesses. They were all off the mark.

He said, “Give up? All right, I’ll tell you. He changed.”

“He changed?”

“When I met him,” he said, “my David was the most beautiful creature I had ever set eyes on, the absolute embodiment of my lifelong ideal. He was slender but muscular, vulnerable yet strong. He was — well, go back to the San Marco piazza and look at the statue. Michelangelo got it just right. That’s what he looked like.”

“And then what? He got older?”

He set his jaw. “Everyone gets older,” he said, “except for the ones who die young. It’s unfair, but there’s nothing for it. David didn’t merely age. He coarsened. He thickened. He ate too much and drank too much and stayed up too late and took too many drugs. He put on weight. He got bloated. He grew jowly, and got pouchy under his eyes. His muscles wasted beneath their coating of fat and his flesh sagged.

“It didn’t happen overnight. But that’s how I experienced it, because the process was well along before I let myself see it. Finally I couldn’t help but see it.