Unknown - The Genius

The week of Thanksgiving we began meeting at night at the storage warehouse. Samantha would take the train in after work, and we’d select a

box at random, have Isaac lug it to the viewing room, and spend three or four hours flipping pages in search of bloodstains. The task went faster this time around than it had before, as I was looking now with a single criterion, rather than to evaluate the work. Nevertheless, I still had trouble focusing for more than thirty or forty minutes at a stretch. My headaches, though diminishing, still made squinting painful. At those moments, I would surreptitiously watch Samantha as she worked; her delicate fingers hovering over the surface of the page, her lips extruded in that beautiful pout, concentration coming off her in waves.

“I can’t tell whether he was sick or a genius,” she said.

“They’re not mutually exclusive.” I told her about the phone calls I’d received after Marilyn began spreading rumors.

“That doesn’t surprise me at all, actually,” she said. “It’s like those women who write love letters to serial killers.” She set aside the drawing she’d been looking at. “Would it bother you if he was guilty?”

“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it.” I gave her my mini-lecture on artists misbehaving, concluding, “Caravaggio killed a man.”

“In bed,” she said and laughed.

Eight weeks might not sound like very long, but when you’re spending much of that talking to or sitting alone with the same person—we essentially learned to forget about Isaac—often engaged in an extraordinarily monotonous activity, your sense of time begins to distort, much as I imagine it does in prison. No matter how hard we tried to stay on point, we couldn’t talk only about the case. I can’t tell you exactly when the thaw began to accelerate. But it did, and we dared to make jokes; we chatted about nonsense and about important things, or things I’d forgotten were important.

“Jesus,” she said when I told her I’d been expelled from Harvard. “I’d never guess.”

“Why.”

“Cause you look so …”

“Boring.”

“I was going to say normal,” she said, “but that’ll work.”

“It’s a facade.”

“Evidently. I had a rebellious phase, too, you know.”

“Did you, now.”

“Oh yes. I was into grunge. I wore flannel and played the guitar.”

I laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” she said gravely. “I wrote my own material.”

“What was the name of your band?”

“Oh, no. I was strictly a solo artist.”

“I didn’t know one could play grunge on one’s own.”

“I wouldn’t describe my own personal music as grunge. I would say that I was more inspired by the grunge lifestyle. Everything I sang sounded like the Indigo Girls. One time this friend of mine—” She started giggling. “This is actually really sad.”

“I can tell.”

“It is, but I”—giggling—”I’m sorry. Ahem. This friend of mine junior year had to have an abortion—”

“Oh, that’s hilarious.”

“Stop. It was sad, it was really sad. That’s not what’s funny. What’s funny is that I wrote a song about it, and it was called—” She broke up completely. “I can’t.”

“Too late,” I said.

“No. Sorry. I can’t.”

” ‘The Procedure’?”

“Worse.”

” ‘The Decision’?”

“I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that there was a lyric comparing a woman’s body to a field of flowers.”

“I think that’s very poetic.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Although,” I said, “Dalf said that the first man to compare the cheeks of a woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it may well have been an idiot.”

“In bed.” “In bed. Well,” I said, “I think your parents got off easy.”

“By the time I was old enough to rebel they were too busy imploding to notice. It really pissed me off.”

“Did you write a song about it?”

“About their divorce? No. I wanted to write a poem, though.”

” ‘The Separation’?”

“I’d call it ‘A Pair of Assholes.’ “

I smiled.

“I took photographs, too,” she said. “God, what happened to me. I used to be so creative.”

“It’s never too late.”

She got very quiet.

“What,” I said.

“What you said. Ian used to tell me that.”

I said nothing.

“When I complained about my job he would tell me that.” She paused. “It’s not like that’s a very unusual thing to say, but I remember him saying it a lot. Maybe because I complained about my job a lot.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I can think about him now without getting hysterical. That’s a positive step.”

I nodded.

“I think about him now and it’s warm, rather than hot. You know? Like he was a really good friend. He was. You don’t want to hear about this.”

“I do if you want to talk about it.”

She smiled, shook her head. “We have work to do… .”

“What was he like?”

She hesitated, then said, “He and my dad were good friends. I think my dad took it harder than I did. I sort of expected that something would happen to him eventually. That’s the nature of the job. I didn’t expect that, though. Who expects that?”

I said nothing.

“Anyway, that’s that,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Now I’m on the rebound.” She grinned at me. “You were just a temporary stop on my road to recovery.

“Whatever I can do to help.”

She smiled, started turning pages again. I watched her for a little while. Eventually she saw me staring and looked up. “What.”

“I don’t know why you’re unhappy with your job,” I said. “To me it’s way more interesting than what I do.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“It is.”

“If you say so.”

“What would you do, if not this.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had a good answer to that part of the question. I wanted to do this and now I’m here. I had an idea that this was going to distinguish me from my dad. His father was a cop. My uncle is a cop. My mother’s father was in the Secret Service. Naturally, I didn’t want to become a cop, so I thought, oh, yeah, well, but a DA—now that’s different.” She laughed. “That was my final attempt at rebellion. I’ve accepted my fate.”

I said, “I think I felt the same way about my father.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I mean it,” I said. “Growing up I saw him as basically soulless and profit-driven—which he is. Unfortunately I chose the one line of work possibly more soulless and more profit-driven.”

“If you really feel that way, then why don’t you get out?”

“Lately I’ve been wondering. I don’t know what else I would do.”

“You could become a prosecutor.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a little old to start over.”

“I thought it was never too late.”

“For me it is,” I said.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked. “Why do you resent him so much?”

“My father.”

She nodded.

I shrugged. “I can’t give you one single reason.”

“Then give me a few.”

I thought. “After my mother died, I felt like a pet that belonged to her, and that he got stuck with. He barely spoke to me, and when he did it was to give me an order or to tell me I was doing something wrong. She was the only wife that he didn’t divorce, and whether or not they would have lasted—I have my doubts—when she got sick, they were still getting along. That’s why he’s hasn’t gotten married since: he idealizes her. I feel bad for him. I do. But I’m not going on Oprah or anything to make up with him.”