A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

The detective said that the body had been brought in without any personal identification, and none had been found in my apartment.

“What about his cell phone?” I asked. “He always had it with him.”

“We hoped you would know where it was. And his wallet.”

“Are you saying someone took them?”

“I’m saying the police didn’t find them.”

I felt that he was criticizing me for not knowing the whereabouts of Bennett’s phone and wallet, that this detective was exasperated with my inability to aid in the investigation.

I was surprised to find myself in tears. “Look, I don’t know who he was. I thought I did, but I didn’t. When you find out, please tell me, okay?”

• • •

I took the L train back to Williamsburg, to the Metropolitan pool off the Bedford stop, a 1920s public bathing house. A skylight ran the length of the pool. You could see sunlight on the tiles as you swam in the eighty-degree water. If I squinted, I could pretend I was floating in the Caribbean.

Swimming had been my routine — five days a week, summer and winter — and my passion. Actually, swimming wasn’t the correct term. I deep-water ran. I used an AquaJogger, a simple flotation device that fits around your waist so that you are suspended in the water. Some people jog, but I ran as fast as I could. The water slowed me, stilled me; the sensation was like trying to catch a train in a dream.

The locker room, with its broken fans and hair-clogged drains, smelling of ammonia and hairspray, didn’t prepare you for the beauty of the pool, a seventy-five-foot, three-lane lap pool, shimmering with light.

I used the slow lane, designated for the sidestrokers, kickboarders, and gossips who paddled and chatted. The lane was about the width of a subway car and peopled with the same assortment of strangers.

I normally entered by the ladder, but today I plunged in — I needed the silence and compression of water, the few seconds where nothing above the surface mattered. When I came up for air, I began running with an urgency that surprised me. I ran past the blind lady doing jumping jacks in the shallow end, past the old ladies who wore shower caps instead of swim caps and kept their makeup on, past the obese boy who treaded in place. If I were on dry land, I would have been running a six-minute mile.

I ran from the body of my former lover in the coroner’s office, from my own gullibility, from shame. The more I strained against the water, the better I expected to feel, but what I was up against was so large my body didn’t know if it was relaxed or just tired.

When I finally got out of the pool, I felt gravity again. Deep-water running is how astronauts learn to maneuver while weightless.

I got out of the pool just as Ladies’ Only Swim was starting, a two-hour period in which only women, mostly Hasidic, could use the pool. Curtains were drawn over the glass windows that looked out to the lobby, and the lifeguard was female. In the locker room, a dozen women of all ages were getting into their swimsuits, long dresses made out of bathing-suit material. I swam in a Speedo, yet I never felt contempt from them. In truth, they treated me as if I didn’t exist. Except for Ethel, who was as curious about me as I was about her. She said she lived a staid life with her husband’s Satmar family in Williamsburg, except during the summers, when she proudly sat in as a lifeguard at a kosher girls’ camp in the Catskills. She told me about Aqua Modesta, the original kosher swimwear dealer, an online shop that sold “modest” bathing suits. In the summer, though, she wore Aqua Modesta’s latest bathing-suit fashion: “capris.” “As long as your elbows and knees are covered,” she had explained.

I toweled off in the shower area and then walked into the crowded dressing room. For a moment, it looked as if scalps were hanging on hooks in the lockers. The ladies’ wigs!

• • •

“Did you have to look at the body?” Steven asked.

“Mercifully, no.”

“They tell you who he was?”

“No fingers, no fingerprints.”

The flippancy did not reflect my state of mind. It was more an attempt to level off a mounting hysteria.

I waited for Steven to call it a night and then signed on to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a database open to both the public and the police. Everyone in my Psychological Autopsy course had to register with NamUs. I clicked on the case number that the man at the coroner’s office had given me: ME 13-02544.

Minimum age:20

Maximum age:40

Race:white

Ethnicity:

Sex:male

Weight:148

Height:68, measured

Body parts inventory (check all that apply):

All parts recovered

Head or partial head not recovered

Torso not recovered

One or more limbs not recovered

One or both hands not recovered

Notes on body parts recovered:Canine teeth marks are visible on all limbs and partial limbs, torso, and neck.

Body condition:face avulsed.

Next I entered the Missing Persons database. Someone must have contacted the police when Bennett, or whoever he was, didn’t come home — a wife or his real mother, not Mme. Marie Vaux-Trudeau.

I went to their advanced-search page and entered Bennett’s physical description, the date last seen, the age when last seen. Three missing-persons cases in the tristate area matched his general description and the date he went missing.

I hesitated, both wanting and fearing the results. None of the photos remotely resembled Bennett.

I went to his website, the one he had showed me, for the list of indie bands he represented. Said he represented. The bands were real, but none had a manager named Bennett Vaux-Trudeau. I made a short list of other “facts” he had told me that I could easily verify. Turned out he had not attended McGill, had not won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, had not played bass with Radiohead.

Was there something Bennett had not lied to me about?

• • •

I had been staying at Steven’s for nearly a week before I asked him to come with me to get some clothes and books from my apartment. The yellow crime-scene tape had been taken down by then, but that didn’t keep a couple of my neighbors from coming out into the hallway when my key turned in the lock. Mrs. Szymanski offered condolences that seemed genuine. Grace del Forno closed her door when I looked at her.

I waited in the living room while Steven, consulting a list I had made for him, went into the bedless bedroom to find what I needed. As in a movie, I looked at a photo, taken in Maine, on the coffee table, Bennett with his arm around me, Lake Androscoggin in the background. For a moment I was confused, thinking the crime-scene cleanup service would have removed that, too. My confusion carried over to the smile on Bennett’s face. Was that a lie? I looked at him objectively. I wanted to find a coldness that would have been a clue had I noticed it sooner, but to my dismay I saw him as I always had.

Steven appeared in the doorway, holding up two pairs of jeans, a question on his face. “Both,” I said, feeling cowardly for remaining outside my own bedroom. Next, he brought out a short stack of textbooks. I asked him not to forget my laptop. I didn’t want to keep using his. I didn’t want Steven to discover what I planned to look up: Lovefraud.com, the first website Cilla had suggested. Then again, it might interest him as he had recently been blindsided by a new girlfriend.