William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“Sorry we’re late everybody. This is Victor Carl. He was a dear friend of Jacqueline’s. He’s a painter.”

All eyes turned to gaze at me in my very painterly black wing tips and blue suit and green tie. And just as they were all giving me the up and down Caroline pulled me close and leaned her head against my shoulder and added:

“And in case you’re interested, yes, we’re lovers.”

Serenata Notturna in D minor

I WAS LYING IN BEDin a dark cell of a room on the third floor of Veritas, lying in my tee shirt and boxers, staring up. The ceiling, illuminated by a dim lamp beside my bed, was made of thick beams, painted with fragile flowers, arrayed in a complicated warren of water-stained squares, all imported, I’d been told, from a famous Italian villa outside of Florence. It had once been a pretty fancy room, that room, with that ceiling. Once. As I lay staring at the ceiling and thinking of the strange evening I had just spent in the Reddman house, an uneven patter of water dropped from that wondrous imported ceiling into a porcelain chamber pot by the foot of my bed. Splat. Splat splat. Splat. And then, behind the patter of those drops, I heard a faint knock at my door.

I bolted to a sitting position and wondered if I had imagined the sound, but then it came again, just a light tap tapping, soft, hesitant. I rose from the bed and grappled on my pants and slowly, carefully, walked barefooted across the mildewed threadbare oriental rug to the door.

“Yes?” I said through the wood, hoping for some reason it was Caroline. Well that’s not really true, I was hoping for very specific reasons that it was Caroline, hoping because of that dress, the shape of her legs in those sharp glossy heels, because of the way she looked feral and dangerous in her cocktail wear. I was hoping it was she because I could still feel the warmth of her and smell the scent of her from when she leaned into me and surprised the assembled throng with her announcement of our sexual engagement. The whole horrid evening I had been watching her out of the corner of my eye, watching her move, watching her laugh, watching the butterfly on her pale neck flutter as she drank her Manhattans, one after the other after the other, a veritable stream of vermouth and whiskey and bitters, and as I watched her I found myself wishing that what she had announced with great ceremony and mirth was actually true. So I said, “Yes,” through the door, and I hoped it was she, but when I opened it whom I saw instead was her brother Bobby.

“Mr. C-C-C-Carl?” said Bobby. “D-d-d-do you have a moment?”

“Sure,” I said, “so long as you don’t mind my informal dress.”

“I don’t mind,” he said, and his gaze dropped from my face, down past my tee shirt, to my pants and lingered there long enough for me to assume I was unzipped.

“Come on in, then,” I said, “and call me Victor.” When he was past me in the room I quickly checked my zipper. It was closed.

He sat on the edge of my bed. There was an overstuffed reading chair in the corner and I switched on the lamp beside it before sitting. I could feel each spring distinctly beneath me and the cloth underneath my forearms was damp. The light coming through the faded lampshade cast a jaundiced yellow upon the walls and Bobby’s face. He was a tall thin man, shy and stuttering, who slouched his chin into the shoulder of his gray suit as if he were a boxer hiding a glass jaw. His hair was red and unruly and his lips were pursed in an astonished aristocratic sort of way. He kept mashing his hands together as if he were kneading dough. We had talked some at the cocktail gathering before dinner, each of us with a bitter glass of champagne in one hand and a stick of some sort of roasted gristly meat in the other. He had asked me about my art and I had described for him my imaginary oeuvre.

“I wanted to t-t-t-talk to you about Jackie,” Bobby said as he sat on the edge of my bed. He avoided looking at me as he spoke, his gaze resting over my shoulder, then to the side, then again quickly on my crotch before moving up to the ceiling. “Caroline said you knew her.”

“That’s right,” I lied. “I met her at the Haven, where we used to meditate together.”

“Poor Jackie was always searching for some m-m-m-measure of meaning. I expect that place wasn’t any better than the others. She tried to get me to go with her once.”

“Did you?”

“No, of c-c-c-course not. Jackie was always looking outward, away, certain wherever she would find the answers was someplace she had never been. I think it’s really sad that she was looking so d-d-d-desperately for something, when all along the answer was right under her nose.”

“Where?”

“Here. In this house, in our history. I think m-m-m-meaning is in devoting yourself to something larger than yourself, don’t you? That’s what our Grammy taught us.”

“And what do you devote yourself to, Bobby?”

“To our investments, our money. I go downt-t-t-town and watch the family positions on the monitors at the stock exchange building every day. And I have a hookup here, also. While most of the family money, of course, is in the company stock, we have other investments that I watch and trade.”

“That must be exciting.”

“Oh, it is, really,” he said as he looked me straight in the eye. As he spoke of money and finance an assurance rose in his voice and his gestures grew animated. “But it’s more than just exciting. See the thing, Mr. Carl, is that we’re all going to die, we’re all so small. But the money, it just goes on and on and on. It’s immortal, as long as we care for it and tend to it. It’s the only thing in the world that’s immortal. Governments will fall, buildings will crumble, but the money will always be there. My role in life is caring for it, keeping it alive. Every moment as I watch it percolate on the screen, watch the net value go up and down by millions at a stroke, I feel a flush of fulfillment. That’s what was so sad about Jackie, she was looking for something else when she should have been looking right here.” He paused, his eyes dropped to my chest and then my crotch, and then he began to clutch his hands once more. “But w-w-w-what I wondered, Mr. Carl…”

“Victor.”

“All right, V-V-V-V-V…” His face closed in on itself as he tried to get the word out and I struggled with him. I was about to spurt out my name again, to get him through it, when he stopped, breathed deep, and smiled unselfconsciously. “Some letters are harder than others.”

“That’s fine, Bobby,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“W-w-w-what I wondered was why do you think she k-k-k-killed herself, if you have any idea. She almost seemed happy for the first time. She was engaged to be married, she said the meditation was helping her. Why do you think she k-k-k-killed herself?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought she was doing well too. So well, in fact, that I’m not certain that she did kill herself.”

“N-n-n-no?”

I looked at him carefully as I spoke, looking for anything that would clue me that he knew something he shouldn’t have known. “No,” I said. “There are some things that seem suspicious about her death, little things, like even the way she died. In a group meeting at the Haven she once admitted to having a cache of pills in her apartment. They were there, in her bathroom, at the end. I don’t see why she hung herself if she had the drugs.”

“That is strange. But Jackie was always m-m-m-most dramatic in her despondency, m-m-m-m-maybe she wanted to m-m-m-make a statement.”

I shrugged, noticing that he had seemed more nervous as he talked about her death. “I don’t know. It’s sort of comforting to think that maybe she was happy and was murdered rather than her being so depressed at the end as to hang herself.”