Colin Harrison: The Havana Room

"Like peanut butter!"

"No. There was some grease on my fingers from dinner, maybe."

"What did you have for dinner?"

"I ordered in some Thai food, sweetie, it wasn't-"

"Oh God!" Judith stood rapidly, hand to her mouth. She rushed from the room in horror, and as our lives fell away minute by minutethe arriving EMTs, the police, the call to Wilson's parents, the other boys, now traumatized, crying or chattering nervously, the retrieval of the murderous empty glass (the peanut oil still on its lip, still smellable as the intensified essence of peanuts), the arrival of the other parents- as all that we had known about ourselves crumbled into oblivion, I could not help but recall that drink of milk- the cool glass beaded with condensation, the surface of the milk itself curved upward where it clung to the glass, the satisfying incarnation of liquid love, almost tasteable from arm's length, ample and full, safe and clean. Who would have thought it, who would've thought that I, Bill Wyeth, dependable, tax-paying minivan-man, respected partner in a top law firm, would kill an eight-year-old boy with a glass of milk?

Then I recalled that Wilson was one of the boys I'd wanted invited, for his father was Wilson Doan Sr., a managing partner in one of the city's major investment banks, itself one of my firm's largest clients, a company with offices in 126 countries. His boy had choked to death on my ambition- you could see it that way, you really could.

And an hour later Wilson Doan Sr. stood before me in the hallway of New York Hospital, his only son and namesake still and forever dead. He was a large, strange-looking man in a black coat. His wife had rushed into the hospital screaming, and when the aides explained that her son was not in the emergency room, that he was "downstairs now," she'd collapsed to the floor, growling with grief, writhing as hope left her body. Wilson Doan had seen this. Worse still, he had seen me see this. Now, with his wife sedated, he held his hairy fists at his sides, looking at me directly, and I realized I'd shaken his hand once, years ago, at some function- at Parents' Night at our boys' school, perhaps.

"They said you gave him a glass of milk with peanut oil on it."

"Yes," I said, anxious to apologize. "It was a tragic accidentI'm so sorry."

Wilson Doan was a big man, but what was most noticeable about him were his eyes; slightly crooked, one higher and larger than the other, they gave his face a disturbing complexity; half his expression was public and confrontational, the other private and detached in its scrutiny, the smaller eye coldly noncommittal. This was probably the secret of his success.

"We gave your wife absolutely explicit instructions."

"Yes. She followed them."

"And you didn't?"

"I didn't know."

"Why not?"

"Judith didn't tell me."

"Why not?"

"She didn't expect me home."

He said nothing, his eyes upon me, murderous.

"I flew home as a surprise," I added. "To be with my family."

"I see."

He was trying to retain the skin of civility, yet yearned, I could tell, to hit me, to pound and punch me until I was broken or until, years from now, his rage was extinguished. And I wanted him to do it. Yes, I did. I wanted to be released from my guilt; I wanted the intimacy of his hot fists upon me, for in making my pain I would feel his, and he would know this. He could have hit and kicked me for a long time, and I would have taken the beating as a warm rain. Welcomed, purifying.

But that did not happen. Instead we stood there tensely, he hating me, and me fearing his hatred. Two men dressed in clothes identical in quality and style and even point of purchase for all I knew; two men with wives and real estate and reputations and secretaries and ever longer ears and portfolios and aging parents. He knew too much about me, finally, for him to strike. If he struck me, then he struck at himself, or the idea of himself, for we were that interchangeable, and the fate of it, what had befallen us, was reversible in an instant. My son, his greasy glass of milk. He knew he could've done the same thing.

But there was another reason Wilson Doan Sr. didn't attack me then. It wouldn't have been good for him. Construable as an unseemly display. He was a banker, after all. If he was unable to control his emotions in public, what happened in private? People would talk. (They always do.) The Daily News might run an item. And that was bad for business. But his restraint terrified me all the more because I knew that his impulse must have release sometime, somewhere, and that the further away Wilson Doan's reaction was- the more remote and delayed the detonation- the worse it would be for me. Every minute that he hated me without satisfaction would be another minute in which he gathered his resolve and refined his stratagems. No doubt, too, he understood this, staying his hand with a promise to himself that my eventual punishment would far surpass a mere beating.

Which it did.

I wonder now how Wilson Doan proceeded. Was it by malicious forethought or by organic intuition? Or both, an alternation of ambiguous anger resolving into clear moments of joyfully bitter fulfillment? I don't know. I never asked the man. What is clear, though, is that Wilson Doan did destroy me. Piece by piece, pound by pound, dollar by dollar. And in the end, though not much was left, the result was not disproportionate to the intention, for the intention was great, his grief having no bottom.

People find it difficult to be with a man who killed an eight-year-old boy. Who can blame them? Even though they know it was "a freak accident, one in a million," they wonder, why didn't the wife tell him about the peanut allergy? That just "molecules" would do it? Or did she tell him, and he forgot? After all, husbands always forget things like that. Even I started to wonder if Judith had told me. She could have, on the phone to San Francisco. But she didn't. I was almost sure of it. But I was tired, a thousand details in my head. What if she had told me, in an incidental sort of way? She never claimed she'd told me, but what if she herself didn't remember? How could one forget a phrase like "a chain reaction in the immune system"? Didn't everyone know Thai food often contained peanut oil? (From the article on the death of Wilson Doan Jr. in the metro section of the Times: "Several owners of Thai restaurants contacted by a reporter each confirmed that they used peanut oil in many of their dishes, and each stated they would soon include disclaimers on their menus in an attempt to avoid this increasingly prevalent and occasionally serious malady.") Maybe, people thought to themselves, He'd been drinking. That would explain it. Or maybe He and his wife had been fighting. Maybe anything. And why hadn't I heard? After all, the boy was suffocating! He must have made some noise, no? Hadn't I heard it? Maybe they'd been having sex and didn't hear it for that reason. The wife still has a great rack, the men would think silently to themselves, eyes squinting with wolfish savvy. Or maybe I, the killer, was flat on my back with an empty heroin needle hanging out of my arm. (A surprising number of lawyers are addicted to heroin.) Maybe I was tweezering hairs out of my nose and listening to Louis Armstrong- it didn't matter. The death of little Wilson Doan happened on my watch, in loco parentis. I was responsible. Bill Wyeth, you did it. Yes. You're the bad guy. Yes. You did it, you fucker. Yes. Just me and no one else.

And I was sorry, terribly sorry, though that didn't matter, either. I imagined little Wilson Doan's mother staring disconsolately at her breakfast. Toast, cold eggs. She was said to be dangerously depressed. Losing weight and losing touch. A few years into the future, parents would clone their lost children. Society would decide it was acceptable and let them do it. But not yet. Maybe the Doans would have another baby, but even if they had buckets more kids, there'd always be an ache, a shadow. I had only to think of losing Timothy to imagine their agony. I'd wrecked half a dozen lives, I had not read the list of instructions for each boy, I had sought satiation in the form of Thai takeout and dancing babes, I had somehow not been as vigilant as I could have been. This I told myself. You idiot, look what you did. You and your stupid billable hours and retirement accounts and receding gums. You are revealed as a clown- no, a monster-clown. It doesn't matter if absurdity ravished un-likelihood. There are no complete accidents. All effects have causes. You did it. You suggested the boy be invited. You deserve to die instead. But you won't and you can't; you have a family to care for.