John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

“There was something strange about the way they were together. He said she was there for work, but it didn’t look like that. I went for a walk and came along the beach at the back of the house. I climbed the dune stairs to take a look.”

Her words brought back the memory of ascending the steps myself after Harry and seeing the rear elevation of the house, with Nora sitting on a sofa reading a magazine. From that spot, you could see anything that was going on inside the house.

“They were in his study. Harry was in a chair, bending forward, his head in his hands. He looked as if he was crying. I’d never seen him like that. She was kneeling in front of him and she had her hands around his head as if she was trying to comfort him. I think she was crying, too. I watched them for a minute and they hardly moved. I went back down the stairs before they saw me.”

“When was this?”

“A month ago.”

A month. One week before Nora had found Harry in that same room with a gun and had brought him to the psych ER. Whatever had gone on between him and that woman must have still been on his mind. What was more, he’d never told me about it, and I couldn’t have known. Harry had lied to me, I realized, but instead of being disappointed I felt a glimmer of relief.

“Does Mrs. Shapiro know?”

“I don’t think she does. She keeps saying how sorry she is for him, what an awful time he’s had. If she only knew. It makes me so angry. You’re the only person I’ve told, Ben. You have to keep it secret.”

Anna stopped walking and put out an arm to halt me, too. We stood in the park under a pale moon, looking at each other. It was an extraordinary intimacy-we were the only ones who knew of Harry’s affair, although lawyers, reporters, photographers, and cops were out seeking any tidbit about him and what he’d done. I felt as if we’d been bound together emotionally, although we’d only flirted with a relationship.

She wasn’t the only one who was upset. Her description of Nora’s faith in Harry had evoked a memory in me of my mother’s refusal to condemn my father. The compulsion she’d had to think the best of him had infuriated me. It was something Anna and I had in common apart from the elusive spark between us. We shared a kind of blind faith in marriage and outrage at it being betrayed by a self-indulgent man.

“Who was this woman?” I asked.

“Do you promise me?” she insisted.

“I promise.” I didn’t want to bind myself, and Anna wasn’t my patient so I owed her nothing, but I couldn’t refuse. She had a hold on me, and I felt guilty about using her.

“All I know is her name, Lauren Faulkner, and that she’d worked with him once. He told me that. She didn’t say much in the car, just hello, thank you. Oh, and she loved being by the sea, I remember her saying. She was there an hour and then I drove her home. At least I didn’t catch them fucking.”

We looped across the park and returned to Columbus Circle, where we stopped on the side of Sixty-first. She looked up at me, and the lights shining off the towers lit her face like a clown’s makeup.

“I’d better go,” she said. “I like talking to you.”

She faced me, placed one hand on my shoulder, and placed her lips briefly on mine. Then she turned and bolted through a gap in the traffic before I had a chance to respond, leaving that sweet memory behind.

I can’t recall everything that happened next, but I know I stood there thinking to myself for a couple of minutes, trying to process both the kiss and what she’d told me. Then I turned back the way we’d walked. I’ll cross the park and get the subway at Fifty-ninth and Lex , I thought. My mind was crammed with emotions-happiness at being with her, excitement at her revelation, and guilt at having deceived her.

I wandered back up to Sixty-third and went through a gap in the boundary wall and down the slope toward the joggers running on the perimeter road. I remember stopping under one of the streetlamps that poked into the branches of a tree and looking at the Art Nouveau ironwork around the lantern, with vaselike shapes cut into each corner. I heard a shuffling sound from behind me, but when I turned there was no one there. It must have been the noise of a jogger approaching down the road, his footfalls refracted off the bushes around me. As I walked farther into the park, those sounds receded and it got darker. The path beneath my feet became gritty as I passed between two softball infields surfaced in sand.

It was quiet there, although the lights of the towers on Central Park South rose over the trees and made a vast stone mound to my right shine in the dark. There weren’t many people in the park, and I wasn’t noticing much. My mind was caught up in what Anna had told me about Harry. I’d learned something about my patient-my former patient-that he hadn’t told me, something that lent a different meaning to all that had happened. It made me feel even sorrier for Nora, who’d been through this torment in ignorance.

I was worried about Anna, too. I could still feel the sensation of her lips on mine, and I touched them with one finger, as if to recapture that moment. Yet our own relationship, if we now had one, had started in the most compromising way. I’d kept her existence secret from my lawyer, and I’d lied to her about my motives for seeking her out. Now she’d told me something Joe would need to know and had sealed my lips with not just a kiss but a promise. She’d given me a choice-whether to betray her or to remain silent.

Cars were passing along a road near the east side of the park, and I walked through a tunnel under it. On the other side, the Wollman Rink had been replaced by an amusement park for children for the summer. It was closed for the evening but a few lights winked in green and red on one miniature aircraft ride and the plastic faces of a pig and a donkey grinned cheerfully from another. I passed to the north and came across a New York scene-a group of dog walkers with their city pooches sniffing one another while their owners stood and talked, in view of the Plaza Hotel. It made me smile, I remember, seeing that gaggle by the rink, then I passed by and walked down into a nook where the reflected light from the buildings around the park was shadowed by trees.

I didn’t hear anything until a split second before he struck me. One moment I was strolling peacefully along the path in a hollow by a small lake, and the next moment I felt his shoulder slam into my midriff, winding me and knocking me off my feet at the same time. He’d charged at me like a man possessed, running down the slope from above. As he hit me, he wrapped his arms around mine and I could do nothing to break my fall. The side of my head struck the ground at the same time as my shoulders.

My temple smacked on one of the pebbles strewn on the ground and my cheek ground in the dirt as we rolled down the hill toward the lake, out of sight of anyone looking down from the rink or the path. A volcanic eruption of pain surged through my brain, and I was half-blinded by dirt scuffed up into my eyes-all I could see through it were jagged lights. As we slithered to a halt, blood spurted down my forehead.

He’d lost his grip on me as we’d tumbled and I tried to shuffle away and run, but I didn’t get far in my dazed and blinded state. I’d managed only a few paces before I stumbled on a stone and he caught me, throwing himself forward and hooking one hand around my ankles. I pitched headfirst into the darkness and he landed on top of me, knocking the breath out of me again. He rolled my body over to face him.

I was on my back, with my legs above me on the slope and my head half resting on a boulder by the edge of the lake. His left knee pressed down on my chest and he pinned me by the neck with one hand as he raised the other arm above my head. I couldn’t hear anything, and his face was a black shape, silhouetted against the white glow coming off the rink. Then he thrust his arm down and struck me on the side of my forehead with brutal force. Later, I would realize that he must have picked up the stone on which I’d tripped and used it as a weapon.