The Suspect (16 page)

It was a relief not to be able to see Carlyle's house. It had looked so vacant, even though it was still full of Carlyle's possessions. He remembered that they were his possessions, now, and this came again as a terrible shock. He tried to imagine himself sitting on the white piano stool, his hands poised above the ivory keys of the white piano; it had candleholders, he suddenly remembered, sticking out from the front of it .... He recalled one night when Carlyle had put candles in them and turned out all the lights and sat down and played. George couldn't remember whether this had happened in Sechelt, before Myra died, when they sometimes went to see Carlyle, or in Vancouver, a long time ago. Carlyle's hair had been pale in the candlelight, he remembered; but before it was white or gray it had been blond, so that didn't help. He couldn't remember Carlyle's hands on the keyboard—his fingers had moved too quickly. But he remembered the music: Chopin, it was. And when he finished, Carlyle had quick put his hands in his lap and spun around on the stool, a big smile on his face. The candles made funny shadows. Carlyle had looked like he had no eyes.

George checked the shore far away on his left and tried to row harder. Clouds had begun to gather in the west.

It must have been in Vancouver, he thought, because Audrey was there. When Carlyle spun around, smiling, she went up to him and put her hand on his shoulder, tentatively; Carlyle had lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, and patted it, and then looked at George and winked.

What the hell did that mean? thought George furiously, rowing. What the hell was the meaning of that wink? He tried to sort this particular memory from the others that were crowding into his head, clamoring to be heard and seen, but it faded on that wink ....

Next he remembered Carlyle sitting on a bar stool. George was sitting next to him. Carlyle was holding a glass of beer in both hands. He was slumped over. George was filled with distaste and alarm; he was afraid Carlyle was going to burst into tears and wondered if they'd below, racking sobs or silent, just salt water pouring noiselessly down his face into his drink. It'll ruin that beer, George remembered thinking. He had put his hand in his pocket, ready to haul out his handkerchief. But Carlyle hadn't cried after all. He shook his head and gave a kind of a laugh and then he looked up sideways at George.

"You don't know what the shit I'm talking about, do you, fella, do you, George, old sock, old buddy, old pal. " George couldn't remember what the hell either of them had been talking about. Again he glanced to his left. He seemed to be making progress. He was sure the end of the spit wasn't as far behind him as it had been the last time he looked ....

One morning in autumn, during a spare period, he had left the staff room to go to the office. He'd walked down the middle of the wide hallway lined with lockers. Drones and murmurings issued from the classrooms as he passed them. The floor gleamed in the light from the big glass front doors at the end of the hall, and George had a secret inside him; he'd applied again to teach in Germany. (He was almost unbearably excited at the possibility of living in another country. He couldn't talk about it much to Myra, couldn't hope out loud that this time they'd get to go, because it meant too much to him. For Christmas she gave him a set of luggage. He was furious with her at first, because he thought she had tempted the gods. But she told him he didn't have enough faith, and in January his application was accepted. He had felt a new and different kind of respect for Myra, from then on.) He was walking along the shiny waxed floors holding onto his secret and looking down the long hall at the sunshine coming through the glass at the end of it when a door burst open ten or fifteen feet in front of him and a student hurtled out, stumbled, and grabbed at the opposite wall. Before George could get himself together to go to the boy's aid Carlyle strode out, banging the door behind him. He yanked the boy around; Carlyle was a tall man, and the boy only came up to his chin. "You little punk,” said Carlyle, in a raspy whisper that echoed down the hall. He seized the boy by the shoulders and banged his head against the wall. "You son-of-a-bitching little punk," he said.

And then, gripping the student's shirtfront with one hand, with the other Carlyle. took the boy's left wrist and twisted his arm back into an awkward, unnatural position. He kept pressing and pressing, his eyes on the boy's face. George watched, stupefied, for several seconds before he managed to uproot himself and walk quickly toward them.

"What's the trouble?" he called out in what he hoped was an authoritative tone.

It was as though they hadn't heard him. They were looking directly into each other's eyes. The boy's face was creased with pain and fear and was very white; his freckles stood out like blood blisters. Carlyle's stare was intent and curious as he pressed the arm back, and back—

"Hey!” said George loudly. He put a firm hand on Carlyle's shoulder. He saw Carlyle's pressure on the boy's wrist relax, allowing the arm to fall forward. Still Carlyle held his wrist, and the front of his shirt. The boy's eyes rolled toward the ceiling. His lips were quivering.

"What's going on?” said George.

Tears appeared at the corners of the boy's eyes. Carlyle let go of his wrist. He did up a button on the boy's white shirt, which had come undone during the one-sided fracas. He tugged indifferently at the shirt, smoothing it. Then he reached out and with no expression at all patted the boy's cheek, his hand lingering there, smudging the tears.

He turned to George, his eyes bright. "No trouble, " he said. He pulled down his shirt cuffs and adjusted his tie. "A small difference of opinion. That's all." He turned and went back into the classroom without giving the boy another glance. George turned to the student, who began shoving his shirt back inside the waistband of his cords. "Are you sure you're all right?"

The boy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"What the hell happened?" said George.

But the student refused to answer. After a moment he went quietly back inside the classroom ....

George stopped rowing. He hung onto the oars and rested his face on the backs of his hands. The muscles in his shoulders were fluttering. He checked his coordinates: the end of the spit of land was almost directly opposite him, on his left. He hoisted the burlap bag up onto the edge of the boat and pushed it over. It made hardly any noise as it hit the water. He leaned over and watched the ripples from its passage into darkness disappear. He waited, watched, but it didn't return to the surface.

Wearily, he turned the boat around. The moon was to his left, now, halfway between the horizon and the top of the sky, and sometimes it disappeared briefly behind a veil of cloud stretching across the sky from the west. Ahead of him lay the ocean, a black carpet to nowhere; he could see it rippling. He thought about turning around again and continuing to row out to sea, watching the shore as it retreated farther and farther and then disappeared. He would row on and on through the soft warm night until his arms collapsed and the weight of them pulled him into the bottom of the boat, where he would sleep until awakened by the day. Then he would sit up and look around and find himself approaching a small uninhabited island. He would let himself drift onto its beach and he would climb out and lie down on the sand, and on the softness of the sand with the sea kissing the soles of his feet he would sleep while the hot sun soothed him and he'd never wake up, just sleep there forever on the soft sand, in the hotness of the sunshine.

Except that there wouldn't be any sunshine tomorrow. The clouds were coming.

The muscles in his shoulders bumed. He glanced behind him, to see how far he had to go, and kept on rowing .... She ran up to him, her arms filled with lilac. He remembered hinking that she ought to be queen of that festival they had somewhere down in Washington, a lilac festival, the color of the flowers suited her so well. She thrust them into his hands and threw her arms around him. The lilacs were smothered against his chest. He felt her cheek against his, and smelled the lilacs, and ever since that day Audrey never came into his mind without bringing with her the softness of her cheek and the scent of lilac.

"Please be happy for me, George, like Myra is,” she said.

"We're going to be married, Carlyle and I."

It he'd had that kind of shock now, at age eighty, he would have died of it.

"You can't do this,” he had said, incredulous and appalled, clutching the lilacs. But she laughed, and put an arm around his waist, and led him into the kitchen where Myra waited, smiling, ready to open a bottle of wine in celebration. If only he could have found, somewhere, the right thing to say!

He knew he wouldn't convince Myra. Whatever he said to Myra sounded weak and desperate because she couldn't know what lay behind his fear, he had never told her; she could not possibly have understood the bleakness, the sickness that struck at his soul, when Audrey said it: "We're going to be married, Carlyle and I." The more he railed against it, the more impatient and exasperated Myra became. "What have you got against him, for God's sake? Isn't she entitled to a life of her own? Are you going to keep her chained to you—to us—forever?"

But Audrey understood. She knew exactly what he feared, and why. But she refused to discuss it. So he had said, "He's  too old for you!" and God knew that was true enough, there were twenty years between them. And he had said, "I don't like him!" and that ought to have been enough; oh, Christ, if only that had been enough .... She would have been sixty-four, now, he thought: a woman in her prime.

He hadn't given up. Not until the last minute. On the day of her wedding, in desperation he told her about the episode in the school hallway. He told her other things, he gave her other examples of Carlyle's meanness, his cruelty. He rattled them off with an urgency that caused his face to flush and his heart to beat fast: Carlyle's snide remarks about his colleagues; his contempt for his students; his hatred of women, hidden behind a facade of gallantry; his loathing for animals; his appalling rages—George held his sister by her shoulders on the day she was to be married and forced her to listen to him, and when she averted her head, refusing to hear, he shook her violently and flung her aside and saw in that gesture all the things he feared for her.

From the chair into which she had fallen, Audrey said nothing.

"Do you want this?" George shouted, almost weeping. "Don't you see what you're doing?"

"What I see is that you can't forget things that should be forgotten," said Audrey. "But I can, and I will. You've made sacrifices for me, I know that. You made them for her, too, I remember that. You couldn't help how it ended. You've got to stop torturing yourself." She got up to embrace him, but he wouldn't let her. "You're a good man, George,” said Audrey, who was crying, now. "I know you mean well. But you've got to stop this. I'm going to marry him. You're wrong about him, I know it."

He hadn't been able to find the right words. He had failed her, and for that he never forgave her, and in the end it had idlied her.

He looked behind him. The shore was still a long way off. He saw the moon strike from between two clouds and lay a cool white path across the water, pointing obliquely at the land.

He didn't remember the wedding. He had no recollection of it at all, although he knew he'd been there. He'd given his sister away.

George hurt all over, now. The oars weighed a hundred pounds each, and the ocean had transformed itself into molasses, or tar. He had to stop after every two or three strokes, breathing heavily, to flex his shoulder muscles and let his head drop while he tried to relax and strengthen himself.

He knew his failure had killed her. He was certain of it. And all three of them were therefore culpable: Audrey, Carlyle, and George himself.

He had put his own guilt in abeyance in California, working furiously all day and gardening himself into exhaustion in the evenings. Back in Vancouver he thought he had come to terms with it, even put it finally to rest, by growing and nurturing with increasing skill the living things that Audrey had loved. Years later they had moved here, he and Myra. "It's the twilight of our years, my love," she had said, smiling, teasing him. They bought the little house by the sea and he started his small garden and they went to Vancouver to see Carol every month or so and everything was hunky-dory.

And then Carlyle had popped out of those goddamn laurel bushes and George's guilt made a swift return, supplanting almost everything in his life, creating dreadful, terrible flashes of things in his head.

But he got it under control.

Until Myra died. He felt so vulnerable, then. He thought about moving to Vancouver, living with Carol, who was all alone now, too—but his garden, his garden—and then last Tuesday...only six days ago, he thought: less than a week ago ....

He stopped rowing, lowered his head, and rubbed at his eyes.

. . . he sees him shout at her, roar at her, his eyes bright and his face shiny with sweat. She stands before him full of sweet reason, and it means sweet bugger-all. His hand snaps back and he hits her in the face; George sees her mouth bleed. . .

But is it Carlyle? Is it Audrey?

He jerked up his head and started rowing again, hard, pain grabbing at his shoulders.

. . .he hits the floor, her limbs flying like those of a doll . . . he crouches; his fist buries itself fast and hard in her stomach. . .

But
whose
limbs?
Whose
fist?

He shook his head violently; he would not do this must not do this will not think of this. . .

George was weeping now, hot tears gushing as he rowed.

There was nothing to look at in front of him but blackness, and to his right, the soft slow-moving land, lightless, edged by a ribbon of silver sand. He rested again on his oars and  knew he was too tired to take the boat back where he'd gotten it. He changed course, heading straight for his own beach. Could he have been wrong about Carlyle? Had the past laid such a black shadow upon him that he couldn't see to make rational judgments? Had he struck Carlyle because of the past, only the past, a time of which Carlyle was innocent, of which he should have remained ignorant? Had he killed him only because he was afraid to hear things he knew were true, and thought he had learned to live with?