William Lashner - Fatal Flaw

“Leila,” I said, wanting to change the topic, “Guy is pretty shaken. He says he needs to get out of jail until the trial, but it looks like he won’t have enough assets to put up for bond if bail is set.”

“I thought there was money?”

“There is some, yes. We’re in the process of tracking it down, getting an exact figure, but, from what we can tell so far, there were apparently some bad investments and some unaccounted-for withdrawals.”

“Bad investments and unaccounted-for withdrawals.” She repeated my words, as if to imprint the new idea in her consciousness. “No money? There’s no money?”

“We haven’t tracked down the exact figure yet.”

The exact figure apparently didn’t matter. She started laughing, as if some great practical joke had been played for her benefit. “Well, you don’t have to bother. I can guess all right. There’s no money. So much for my lawsuit.” Her laughter continued, ratcheted up in intensity. “So much for Juan Gonzalez.”

“Who? The ballplayer?”

“Forget it. Nothing.” She kept laughing until she noticed me sitting there glumly and regained her composure. “But, Victor, if there’s no money, how are you getting paid?”

“I don’t know.”

“The loyalty of an old friend?”

“Something like that.”

“I wonder if Guy knows how lucky he is to have you.”

“The point is, Leila, that Guy wants to know if you’d put up the house for his bail. It might not be enough even if you could, but he wanted me to ask, and I said I would, even though I-”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, I would put up the house to get him out of jail. Will it be enough?”

“I don’t know.”

“The mortgage is pretty high, and I don’t know how much equity there is, but whatever I can do I will do. I also have some investments we could use.”

“You know he was trying to run when they arrested him. He could try to run again.”

“He won’t. His life is here.”

“And he might have actually killed her.”

“If he did, he had good reason. Is there something I have to sign?”

“You might want to talk to a lawyer before you do anything. If he runs, you could lose the house. You might want to talk to your father.”

“I know what my father would say and I don’t care. You bring to me what you want me to sign and I will sign it. And you tell Guy I’m still waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“He’ll know.”

“You’re waiting? For him?” My eyes opened wide with my incredulity. “You’re waiting for him to come back?”

“This is his home, too.”

“You still love him, even after all he did?”

“It’s not like a faucet, Victor. You don’t just turn it off.”

“You ever think he’s not worthy of it?”

“Every day.”

“And that if he does get out, he might not choose to live with you again?”

“Victor, everything you say makes a great deal of sense, and thank you for your sage advice, but I’m willing to take my chances. Sometimes in the middle of our lives we don’t realize that our dreams have come true. It’s only after it all disappears that we know. I want it back the way it was before ever we heard of Hailey Prouix. I want my husband back, my children’s father back, my life back. I want everything the way it was.”

“It can never be that way again, Leila. Whatever it is, it will be different.”

“Maybe better, who can tell? She’s dead, isn’t she? You bring me the paper, I’ll sign what I need to sign.”

I hadn’t thought of it before, it hadn’t seemed a possibility before, but now how could I avoid it? Even knowing what I knew, even with all my certainties, how could I avoid it?

“On the night Hailey was killed,” I said, “where were you around ten o’clock?”

“That’s funny, Victor. The police asked me the very same question.”

“They’ve been here?”

“Two detectives. An athletic woman, who might have been a swimmer herself. She did most of the talking. And another, an older black man, a Detective Breger, I think it was, who spent the whole time pacing the room, snooping into every corner. I’ll give you the same thing I gave them.” She stood, walked to the phone table, wrote down a number. “His name is Herb Stein, a very nice man. We had dinner in a Belgian place by the library that night. The mussel sauce splashed all over his tie. He wiped it spotless with a napkin.”

“Don’t be a snob, Leila, I wear polyester ties myself.”

“Well, then, Victor, you can date him. Or Ted Jenrette, with his nose hairs, or Biff Callender and Chip Cannon. What is it, Victor, with men who keep their nicknames from summer camp? My friends are so eager for me to start a new life, when all I want is my old one back. Not very Buddhist of me I know, but, hell, I was raised Episcopalian.”

“Did you ever think, Leila, that your current love for Guy, being completely unrequited, is as solipsistic a delusion as you said was his love for Hailey?”

“I have an appointment, Victor, that I just can’t miss. May I show you out?”

“I know the way,” I said. “I don’t mean to keep you. Can I ask one more thing?”

She glanced at her watch and nodded.

“What made you think that Hailey had enough money to be worth suing?”

“I just supposed. I guess I supposed wrong. You’ll bring those papers for me to sign.”

“I’ll bring the papers. But can I give you a word of advice, as a friend?”

“No.”

“Be careful what you risk on him, Leila.”

It was the best advice I could give, but she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t listening. All she wanted was for me to take my truths out of her life so she could pursue a past that had receded into fantasy.

Nostalgia is a fire fueled by failures of memory.

DRIVING HOMEthrough the narrow suburban streets, I wasn’t smelling the freshness of newly mown grass or marveling at the variety of roadside flora blooming with a fertile exuberance, azaleas and dogwoods, cherry blossoms, forsythia. Something blocked the sun of the afternoon from my sight, something turned the brightness into a gray murk that spread out from me in dusky waves. And in the midst of that gloom the memory that had invaded me at Leila’s returned to work its black magic in my consciousness, and this time I didn’t blink it away. This time, as I drove, I let it overwhelm me. I am smelling her perfume and tasting the salt of her shoulder, feeling the striae of rib beneath her breasts. She is in control, pressing her knees against my sides, licking my breast, her dark hair tickling my chest.

“Do you love him?” I ask.

She raises her head just quick enough to answer,”No.”

“Then why are you with him?”

“Must we?”

“Yes.”

“I needed him.”

“And now you’re going to marry him?”

“It’s what he wants. Suck my thumb.”

“No.”

“Just do it.”

“It’s because you don’t want to talk about him, isn’t it?”

She places her thumb in my mouth, scratches my tongue with her nail, fish-jerks my head to the side and bites my neck.

“How can you marry him if you don’t love him?” I ask later. She is facedown now on the bed, her knees beneath her. I am atop her, moving slowly, methodically, waiting for the train to come through and take control. It has become something akin to an addiction, that train, that strange locomotive of primordial emotion that roars through us and speeds us along on its frenzied uncontrollable ride.

“Last thing I ever want to be again is in love,” she says. It is a shocking statement. It stops short my rhythm.

“You’re lying. The whole world wants to be in love.”