Gail Bowen - The Glass Coffin

“You were at that party?”

Gabe nodded. “I even have a cameo in this movie. My appearance comes just about… now!”

The image of Gabe was fleeting. The camera moved in on his face, then the shot went jerky as if Gabe had been trying to wrest the camera from the man holding it. Apparently, Evan broke free because the next shots were of Annie running down the hall, punching the elevator button, and stepping inside. Just before the doors closed, she gave her husband a mocking wave.

Scenes from a marriage.

And then the final scene – this one set in the weird hallucinatory dream world of a traffic accident. Marrow-freezing sounds of sirens and screams; lights as pitiless as the glare on a film set; professionals working silently to extract a body from a twist of metal. Then a man’s voice, rough-edged with fatigue and emotion, “Got her,” as a fuchsia rag is pulled from the wreckage. The camera zooms in hungrily, but Gabe Leventhal shuffles out of the darkness and throws his jacket over the body, denying Annie Lowell’s husband the chance to get his money shot. Then darkness, and the sound of a woman moaning.

Gabe leaned forward. The TV screen filled with images of the final moments of a childbirth. The baby’s head crowns; its shoulders emerge, hands reach down to pull the baby from its mother’s body. Oddly, the camera doesn’t linger on the newborn. The focus is on the child’s mother. When the baby is given to her, she turns away, lifts a slender arm, and pulls the surgical sheet over her head, shutting out the kitten-like cries of the newborn, denying motherhood.

Gabe was staring at the screen like a man who had never seen pictures move.

I was the one who broke the silence. “Evan told me tonight he couldn’t save Annie because she was beyond his reach. I didn’t believe him. I thought he was just making excuses, but a mother who rejects her newborn is beyond reach. Poor Annie,” I said. The penny dropped. “Poor Bryn – having irrefutable proof that her mother never wanted her.”

“Bryn was able to spare herself that particular trauma,” Gabe said. “She flatly refuses to watch any of her father’s films. A very sensible decision, in my opinion.”

“I agree,” I said. “She certainly didn’t need to see that scene at the party.” I turned to Gabe. “You were trying to get Evan to stop filming his wife.”

“She was out of control,” he said dully. “Annie never met a drug, a drink, a fast car, or a man she didn’t like. After Bryn was born, it got worse, but the night she died Annie was beyond wild – it was as if she could hear the clock ticking and she wanted to experience everything before it stopped.”

“And you were trying to keep Evan from making a permanent record.”

“There was Bryn to consider – not that either of them ever did. Annie seemed to be taunting Evan that night, trying to provoke him.”

“Why?”

Gabe locked his hands around his cup. “I have no idea. Annie was beautiful and talented and she’d just delivered a dynamite performance in a film everyone knew was going to be a hit. She was on her way… but you know, Joanne, when the phone rang that night and Evan’s answering service said Annie had been in an accident, I wasn’t surprised. Somehow, I had the sense that he wasn’t either.

“I drove him to the accident scene. Annie hadn’t gotten far, but it was the longest drive of my life. As soon as I saw the state of the Porsche, I knew she was dead. There was no way she could have lived. But Evan walked over to one of the cops, introduced himself, and took out his video camera. For all the emotion he showed, he could have been filming a family reunion.”

“The snowman,” I said. “Evan told me tonight that’s what his mother calls him, because he’s doesn’t feel what other people feel.”

Gabe slumped. “Poor bastard,” he said. “Maybe that’s why he’s always been drawn to women with such hot emotional lives.”

“Very Jungian,” I said. “Also very smart for a filmmaker. You get to record the mess other people make of their lives with a clear eye.”

Gabe looked startled. “The ending.” He turned to me. “What did you make of the way Evan juxtaposed Annie’s death and Bryn’s birth?”

“Maybe he was saying that no matter what happens to the individual, life continues.”

“So by reconstructing what we know of reality and time, Evan shows a greater reality?” Gabe’s gaze was piercing: the professor pressing for an answer from a promising student. Unfortunately, the student’s promise was limited.

“I’m out of my depth here,” I said. “I was the only girl in my dorm who didn’t understand Last Year at Marienbad.”

Gabe put down his tea and looked at me curiously. “That’s an interesting connection.”

“Especially since I haven’t thought about that movie in twenty-five years. But just now, when we watched the ending of Black Spikes, I felt the same sense of manipulation – as if the filmmaker deliberately made me lose my bearings.”

“ ‘Always walls, always corridors, always doors – and on the other side, still more walls.’ ” Gabe’s voice was a murmur. Seeing the concern in my eyes, he shook off his reverie and reached out and took my hand. “So what’s been going on in your life since Last Year at Marienbad?”

The grandmother clock in the dining room had just struck eleven when we said goodnight. Neither of us wanted the evening to end. Admitting that my relationship with my former lover, Alex Kequahtooway, was over was proving so painful that I’d pretty well decided there were worse options than going it alone. But Gabe and I had connected with the kind of pizza and Chianti intimacy I hadn’t experienced since college. We had leapt over the mundane to attack the big topics: love, loss, and – the inevitable for anyone in their fifties – death. Gabe read widely and thought deeply. His conversation was shot through with allusions, but when he spoke about death his words were simple. “I don’t fear it, but I hate the idea that everything I’ve ever been will be over. You were smart to have kids.”

“Continuance,” I said.

“An appealing thought,” he said. “Especially for a man without a family.” He put his arm around me and we walked to the door. To an outsider, we would have been nothing extraordinary: two people in late middle age, sagging after a long day. But Gabe and I felt the possibilities, and as we watched his taxi crawl through the ruts towards my house, he turned to me. “So what do you think of our chances?”

“I’d say that so far we’re doing fine,” I said.

“Dashiell Hammett would say that fine is too big a word. We’re just doing better than most people.”

The kiss he gave me was deep and passionate.

“The wedding isn’t till three,” I said. “We could take a walk in the snow.”

“I’ll need your number,” Gabe said. He fumbled in his pockets. “No pen,” he said.

I found pencil and paper in the drawer of the hall table and wrote down my cell and home numbers. Gabe took the paper, slid it into his inside breast pocket, and patted it. “Tomorrow, we get to work on ‘fine,’ ” he said. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if this wedding was the start of a real love affair?” Then he kissed me again.

The day had been jam-packed, but I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. When Jill touched my shoulder and called my name, I had to swim up from the depths.

Her face was close to mine. “Can I borrow your car?” she said. “I tried to get a cab, but the snow’s really coming down, and the dispatcher said she couldn’t promise anything for at least an hour.”

“Of course you can borrow the car,” I said. I squinted at the clock. “Jill, it’s 1:30. Can’t it wait?”