Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“Money seems to be a recurring theme with Jane.”

“Not only with her. Before Dad was gone, I didn’t realize how poor we were. But by thirteen, you start to notice. Material things are part of high school snobbery. Clothes and shoes, what kind of car you have, your house. Mom wrecked our car, and after that we didn’t have one. She drank more and more, and it seemed like the power company cut our electricity every other month. It was embarrassing. One day, prowling through the attic, I discovered three footlockers filled with old camera equipment. Mom told me that when she got pregnant with us, she persuaded Dad to open a portrait studio, to try to make their lives more stable. I don’t know why he went along with her. It never came to anything, of course. But he kept the equipment. A Mamiya large-format camera, floodlights, a background sheet, darkroom equipment, the works. Mom wanted to sell it all, but I threw a fit and she let me keep it. Over the next few months, I taught myself to use the stuff. A year later, I was running a portrait studio out of our house and shooting snaps for the Oxford Eagle in whatever spare time I had. Our lives improved. I was paying the light bill and buying the groceries, and because of that, I could pretty much do what I wanted.”

Lenz nods encouragement. “And what did you want?”

“My own life. Oxford’s a college town, and I rode all over it on my ten-speed bicycle, watching people, shooting pictures. Sony introduced the Walkman in my junior year of high school, and from the moment I got one, I lived with a soundtrack pouring into my ears and a camera around my neck. While Jane and her friends were dancing to the Bee Gees, I listened to homemade tapes of my father’s records: Joni Mitchell, Motown, Neil Young, the Beatles, and the Stones.”

“It sounds like an idyllic childhood,” Lenz says with a knowing smile. “Is that what it was?”

“Not exactly. While other girls my age were riding out to Sardis Reservoir to fumble around in backseats with guys from the football team, I was doing something a little different.”

A deep stillness settles over Lenz’s body. Like a priest, he has heard so many confessions that nothing could surprise him, yet he waits with a receptivity that seems to pull the words from my mouth.

“The first week of my senior year, our history teacher died. He was about seventy. To fill his shoes, the school board hired a young alumnus named David Gresham, who was teaching night classes at Ole Miss. Gresham had been drafted in 1970, and served one tour in Vietnam. He came back to Oxford wounded, but his wounds weren’t visible, so the school board didn’t notice them. After a few days in his class, I did. Sometimes he would stop speaking in midsentence, and it was clear that his mind was ten thousand miles away. His brain had skipped off track, jumped from our reality to one my classmates couldn’t even guess at. But I could. I watched Mr. Gresham very closely, because he’d been to the place where my father vanished. One day after school, I stayed to ask him what he knew about Cambodia. He knew a lot – none of it good, except the beauty of Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat. When he asked why I was interested, I told him about my father. I hadn’t meant to, but when I looked into his eyes, my pain and grief poured out like a river through a broken dam. A month later, we became lovers.”

“How old was he?” asks Lenz.

“Twenty-six. I was seventeen and a half. A virgin. We both knew it was dangerous, but there was never any question of him seducing an innocent child. Yes, there was a void in my life because of my father’s death; yes, he was a sympathetic older man. But I knew exactly what I was doing. He taught me a lot about the world. I discovered a lot about myself, about my body and what it could do. For me and for someone else. And I gave some peace to a boy who had been broken in some fundamental way that could never be corrected, only made less painful.”

“It’s amazing that you found each other,” Lenz says without a trace of judgment in his eyes. “This did not end well, of course.”

“We managed to keep our relationship secret for most of the year. During that time, he opened up about Vietnam, and through his eyes I experienced things my father must have seen as well. Seen, but kept out of his letters. Even out of his photographs. In April, one of David’s neighbors saw us kissing at the creek behind his house – with my flannel shirt open to the waist, no less – and took it on himself to report it to the school board. The board called a special meeting, and during something called ‘executive session’ gave David the option of resigning and leaving town before they opened an investigation that would destroy both our futures. To protect him, I denied everything, but it didn’t help. I offered to leave town with him, but he told me that wouldn’t be fair to me. Ultimately, we were incompatible, he said. When I asked why, he said, ‘Because you have something I don’t.’ ‘What?’ I asked.”

“A future?” Lenz finishes.

“Right. Two nights later, he went down to the creek and managed to drown himself. The coroner called it an accident, but David had enough scotch in him to sedate a bull.”

“I’m sorry.”

My eyes seek out the porthole again, a round well of night. “I like to think he was unconscious when he went under the water. He probably thought his death would end the scandal, but it only got worse. Jane had a breakdown brought on by social embarrassment. My mother just drank more. There was talk of putting us in foster homes. I went back to school with my head high, but it didn’t last. My Star Student award was revoked. Then my appointment book went blank. No one wanted me shooting their family portraits. I’d done a lot of the senior pictures, but people didn’t even pick them up. They had them reshot elsewhere. When I refused to abase myself in contrition, various mothers told the school board that they didn’t want their daughters exposed to a ‘teenage Jezebel.’ They really called me that. Before long, the ostracism bled over onto Jane. She was cut dead a hundred times on the street by parents who thought she was me. At that point, I did what David should have done. I had three thousand dollars in the bank. I took two thousand, packed my clothes and cameras, rode the bus to New Orleans, got a judge to emancipate me, and scratched up a job developing prints for the staff photographers at the Times-Picayune. A year later, I was a staff photographer myself.”

“Did you continue to support your family financially?”

“Yes. But things between Jane and me only got worse.”

“Why?”

“She was obsessed with being a Chi-O. She thought-”

“Excuse me? A what?”

“A Chi-Omega. It’s a sorority. The apogee of southern womanhood at Ole Miss. Blue-eyed blondes raised with silver spoons in their mouths. Like that song, ‘Summertime’? ‘Your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good-lookin’…‘”

“Ah.”

“Several of her cheerleaders friends were going to pledge Chi-O. Their sisters were already in, or their mothers. Like that.”

“Legacies,” says Lenz.

“Whatever. Jane really thought she had a chance. She thought I was the only obstacle to her getting it. She claimed active Chi-Os had seen me around Oxford on my bike, looking ratty and saying whatever I felt like, and thought I was her. That probably did happen. But the truth was, she never had a chance. Those bitches wouldn’t have given her that. They got their self-esteem from excluding girls like Jane, who wanted it terribly but had some flaw. And Jane had several. She had no money – therefore no high-end clothes, car, or any of the other trappings; her father had been a celebrity, but not the right kind; and then there was me. Jane was prettier than all of them, too. You hear beauty is its own aristocracy, but that’s not always true. A lot of attractive women fear beauty.”