Ann Beattie - Another You

The questions they asked him were easy to answer, though they zigzagged backward and forward in time so that eventually he began to assume there must be some underlying logic to the way they pitched the questions that he didn’t understand — or were they trying to get him to reveal something besides his own genuine confusion?

McCallum appeared at the house while he was out on an errand?

Out getting milk .

What year had he met McCallum?

Whatever year he was hired.…

How would he characterize his personal relationship with McCallum?

Oh, as a colleague. You know: bantering. He had trouble with his wife, trouble at home .

Trouble at home.

The wife was pregnant and McCallum didn’t seem pleased by that .

How well did he know McCallum’s wife?

Oh, not at all. Not … perhaps he’d seen her across a room .

What time did he leave the house that morning?

Nine-thirty .

And he had gone out on an errand the night before to get—

To get milk. Sonja was showing some prospective clients a house; I realized we were low on milk , Marshall filled in, surprised that he felt slightly giddy, an odd mixture of pleasure at pleasing, filling in the spaces, saying something informative: the good student still. Yet he also feared that his nervousness was apparent. He felt himself shifting in the chair, shifting more than someone ordinarily would, when informing people he’d gone out for milk. Well: they didn’t need to know anything about Cheryl Lanier. He could forget Cheryl Lanier. Whom he had dropped off at that house, glowing in the darkness, after she had said that she wanted to spend the night with friends, after he had pulled her close to him in the car. I’m sorry?

The question was repeated: his wife had been home, she said, for a couple of hours with McCallum.

Yes, Sonja got stuck with consoling him for quite a while.… He saw the trap: he could not have been getting milk for two hours. Maybe it seemed to her that she talked to him for two hours; probably she didn’t talk to him for two hours .

“An hour,” the cop said, shrugging. Helping him along. But not believing him. He did not think the cop believed him any longer. He could remember the way his skin felt against the smooth skin of Cheryl Lanier’s cheek, smell Cheryl’s minty shampoo in the chicory-scented steam from the fresh cup of coffee he had just been handed. He was being asked if McCallum had ever stopped by his house before. This did not seem a good question to answer no to.

I think he meant to, but he never really …

To clarify: he left at nine-thirty a.m. and McCallum was sleeping?

Sonja said he was sleeping . This was ridiculous; why were his words suddenly being spoken skeptically? It was true: Sonja had said he was sleeping, they had both gone off, leaving him there. Of course he had been there. What did they think, that his wife had crept in and stabbed him when they were still in the house and they’d heard nothing? McCallum was sleeping in the guest bedroom, he and Sonja went off to work. This was factually true, and a quite simple matter to understand. What was he supposed to do, rouse the man and make him leave, just because they were leaving? It wasn’t as if McCallum were going to loot the house. Not as if he didn’t know the man at all.

If he had met Mrs. McCallum, it might have been at some large social gathering? Something at the college?

This was difficult to focus on, because he had already said — hadn’t he? — that he had not met her, that there was a slight possibility he had seen her across a room, but truly: he had no recollection of McCallum’s wife, though the policemen’s questioning had made him suddenly imagine her in their house, and as he saw her, she was a tall, brown-haired woman — a woman who must be carrying a knife.

Quite frankly, I have no memory of ever having been introduced. Someone may have pointed her out at a department party, or something like that .

His wife said she did not know Mrs. McCallum either. Therefore, they were only McCallum’s friends.

You know, I don’t mean to imply that my wife and I are close friends of McCallum. He must have felt close to us — or at least that we’d be sympathetic listeners. You know — to come to the house at all .

Mrs. McCallum said you all knew one another.

You believe a crazy woman who just tried to stab her husband to death?

Two different viewpoints: two people saying they didn’t know her, she maintaining that she knows them rather well.

I don’t know how I can demonstrate that I, we, don’t know her, but the fact is, if I’ve ever met the woman, which I doubt, it would have been so unremarkable that I have absolutely no memory of that .

Therefore, there would not be any possibility that either he or Sonja knew that she had murderous intentions toward her husband?

No .

Also, in the one or two hours during which he was buying milk, he did not cross paths with Mrs. McCallum or in any way contact Mrs. McCallum?

Well, I … I spoke to her on the phone .

She called?

I called .

What time was this?

Oh, nine o’clock, probably. I called from a pay phone outside a convenience store. Because he’d been upset when last I saw him. Because of troubles in his marriage, as we now know. So …

So what?

Wanted to see if he was okay. Friendly concern .

This was at what time?

Eight. Nine .

Your wife thought that you returned home about ten-thirty.

What are you suggesting?

I’m trying to get an accurate time frame on everyone’s movements the night before the attempted murder. Let me ask: You thought to call from this convenience store instead of from your house?

I wondered how he was doing .

Okay. This is at what time?

This is ridiculous. Am I under suspicion? I’ll need to call a lawyer. Are you saying I’m suspected of — what? McCallum’s wife confesses to stabbing him, and you suspect me of stabbing him, or something?

I’m still back at the convenience store. You phone him at eight or nine p.m., speak to his wife, though you don’t really know his wife, then speak to him. Then time has to elapse before you find him in your living room, because your wife spends one or two hours talking to him, which would mean they sit down together at eight-thirty or nine-thirty, if we assume your wife is correct about your returning at ten-thirty. What I’m getting at is that McCallum isn’t Superman, this we know, so if you’re speaking to him at eight or nine, by your wife’s account, he would already be in your living room. You’ve gone out to buy … what was it?

Two-percent milk .

Much healthier to drink low-fat milk. I’m a very literal-minded kind of guy. You know how it is: you can get fixated on things when there seem to be gaps. The gap in time here disturbs me. I figure you weren’t out buying milk for approximately two hours, but hey: a person can have a private life. I notice, though, that you don’t volunteer information about what you were doing when you weren’t buying milk.

This is all just some confusion — my confusion about what time I left the house, I suppose. In fact, I was going in to school to pick up a book I’d forgotten, but the weather was bad and I turned around. I phoned McCallum. I guess I talked to him longer than I thought .

When the cop shrugged and opened the door without comment, Marshall walked to the waiting room, haunted by the cop’s sarcastic words. Bothered that McCallum’s wife would lie and say she knew him and Sonja when she didn’t, but more upset that because he was unwilling to mention anything about Cheryl Lanier, some cop who prided himself on his professional skepticism had cornered him, revealed him to be a liar, then let him go as if he were throwing back a small fish. The cop had made him feel small, and slimy. He wriggled uncomfortably on the bench, filled with shame, though he knew there was no objective reason why he should feel that way, knew that all he was guilty of was having touched his lips to Cheryl Lanier’s in a dark car, and what was that in the long run? What was that compared to people like McCallum …? But McCallum was in the hospital, in serious shape, and he didn’t want to think bad thoughts about McCallum. He wanted Sonja to emerge from the room where she was being questioned. It was ridiculous that they were keeping either of them so long, ridiculous because the police had a confession, they must have found fingerprints on the knife, he and Sonja weren’t the kind of people who should be questioned about where they were and what they were doing every second of what would have been a perfectly ordinary evening if not for their goodwill, their only involvement in the whole horrifying affair having been a willingness to extend themselves to two people who turned out to be murderers and assholes — McCallum was at least an asshole, whatever self-righteous justification he offered about the time he’d spent with Livan Baker. When Marshall exited the room where he’d been questioned another policeman walking by had told him that McCallum was in intensive care. They had operated for over three hours to repair his damaged kidney. Jesus: the woman had stabbed him in the kidney. She had been hurt herself, also — something Marshall hadn’t even thought about. McCallum had fought her off, hit her, but then he had collapsed, and if she hadn’t confessed to — could that really be what they said? a post office employee? — if she hadn’t confessed, he might have bled to death in the house. That was what Green Eyes was now saying to him; that he and Sonja could not return to the house, because it had been sealed off. The cop was asking him if it would be a problem to find somewhere else to spend the night, and he was saying — realizing as he spoke that he was telling another half-truth — that of course they could stay with a friend. They could stay at a motel, he said. That would probably make more sense, even if they did have friends, but the notion of being in some motel, shut out of their house, which was probably bloodier than he wanted to imagine, depressed him, as if he and Sonja were two stray children with nowhere to go. He tried to pull himself together, he was sinking so fast into self-pity; he began fabricating something he suddenly wanted to be the truth: him and Sonja starting over, united by their having been victims in someone else’s drama, McCallum, strangely enough, having done them a service by bringing them closer as his own marriage collapsed. This whole nightmare now seemed so protracted, so ultimately silly; if not for McCallum’s wife’s frightening insanity, it could simply serve as a lesson in not being dragged into other people’s problems. Like falling dominoes, now Cheryl Lanier had learned that lesson from getting involved with Livan Baker’s problems, and he had learned that lesson from getting involved with McCallum’s problems. Cheryl was young and inexperienced — easy to see how she was taken in — but he had helped no one, had not even been genuinely concerned, as Cheryl had been, about anyone’s well-being: in the end, McCallum had pressed himself on him; Livan Baker had interested him only to the extent that Cheryl was troubled by her behavior, and some part of him had wanted to help Cheryl. At least that had been genuine. To what end, though? To settle her problems so he could then extricate himself from the situation, or to try to help so she’d be impressed, grateful — so he might become closer to her? That was the answer, he suspected: otherwise, why was he constantly reminded of the smell of her freshly washed hair, why was he troubled — increasingly troubled — that he had left her off at a house in Dover and driven away? He had instigated something — or had he finalized something — when he drew her to him in the car. She would be horrified when he called and told her what had happened. He should be the one to break the news to her about McCallum; though she didn’t know him, he’d come to influence her life, he’d indirectly caused her worry and trouble and pain, and although what had happened to McCallum had nothing to do with what he did or did not do to Livan Baker, still Cheryl should know what had happened to this man she’d been made to think so much about. He could do it now, call her, except that he did not want to be overheard talking to her in the police station.