Eight Perfect Murders(19)
That was her real name, as well. Claire Mallory, who grew up in a wealthy town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, one of three sisters. Her parents were not particularly good people, but they weren’t bad enough to really figure into this story. They were well-off, and shallow; her mother, in particular, was obsessed with all three of her daughters’ attractiveness and weight, and because she obsessed about it, that meant their father—devoid of any independent thoughts, himself—agreed with her. They sent their children to summer camps in Maine and to fancy private schools, and Claire, who was the oldest, chose to go to Boston University, because she wanted to be in a city, and both New York City and Hartford felt too close to where she’d grown up
At BU she majored in film and television, wanting to be a documentary filmmaker. Her first year was okay, but in her second year, prompted by a boyfriend majoring in theater arts, she got heavily into drugs, particularly cocaine. As her habit grew, she began to have panic attacks, and that caused her to drink excessively. She stopped going to classes, was put on academic probation, briefly rebounded, then failed out her junior year. Her parents tried hard to get her to come home, but she stayed in Boston, instead, renting an apartment in Allston and getting a job at the Redline Bookstore, where I’d just been promoted to manager.
It was love at first sight, really. At least for me. When she came in to interview it was clear that she was nervous, her hands trembling slightly, and she kept yawning, which seemed weird, but I was able to recognize it as a sign of extreme anxiety. She sat on a swivel chair in Mort’s office, her hands resting on her thighs. She wore a corduroy skirt and dark leggings, plus a turtleneck. She was thin, noticeably so, and with a long neck. Her head seemed too big for her body, her face almost perfectly round. She had dark brown eyes, a thin nose, and lips that looked puffy and bitten. Her hair was very dark, cut in what I thought of as a bob. It looked like a dated style to me, something an intrepid amateur detective might wear in a 1930s film. She was so pretty that a dull throb had taken up residence in my solar plexus.
I asked her about work experience. She had very little, but during the past few summers she’d worked at a Waldenbooks at her local mall down in Connecticut.
“Who are your favorite writers?” I’d asked, and she’d looked surprised at the question.
“Janet Frame,” she said. “Virginia Woolf. Jeanette Winterson.” She thought for a while. “I read poetry, as well. Adrienne Rich. Robert Lowell. Anne Sexton.”
“Sylvia Plath?” I’d asked, and inwardly cringed. It sounded stupid, mentioning the most famous confessional female poet, as though I were somehow reminding her of the name.
“Sure,” she said, then asked me who my favorite writers were.
I told her. We kept talking this way, about writers, for the next hour, and I realized I’d only asked her one question about the actual job.
“What hours will you be available?” I said.
“Oh.” She touched her cheek when she thought. I noticed it right away, not aware in that moment of how many times I’d see her make that gesture, and how eventually I would see it not just as something endearing and individual, but as something worrying. “I don’t know why I’m thinking about it,” she said, laughing. “Any hours.”
It was six weeks before I got up the nerve to actually ask her out.
Even then, I’d framed it as a work outing. Ruth Rendell was doing an event at the Boston Public Library and I asked Claire if she wanted to join me. She’d said yes, then added, “I haven’t read her books, but if you like them, I should,” a sentence that I analyzed in the following days the way a graduate student might pick apart a Shakespeare sonnet. “Maybe we can get a drink afterward?” I said, and my own voice in my head sounded relatively calm.
“Sure,” she said.
It was a November night, dark by the time we were diagonally crossing Copley Square to get to the library, and the park was littered with brittle leaves. We sat toward the back of the small auditorium. Ruth Rendell was interviewed by a local radio personality, who was far too interested in himself. Still, it was an interesting conversation, and afterward, Claire and I walked to the Pour House for a drink, sitting in a corner booth until closing time. We talked about books, of course, and the other employees at the bookstore. Nothing personal. But when we were standing in front of her apartment building in Allston at two in the morning, the wind causing us both to shiver, she said, before we’d even kissed, “I’m a bad idea.”
“What do you mean?” I laughed.
“I mean, whatever ideas you’re having about me are bad ones. I’ve got issues.”
“I don’t care,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, and I followed her inside.
I’d had two girlfriends in college, one of whom was a German exchange student studying for a year in Amherst, and the other a freshman when I was a senior, a girl from Houlton, Maine, who joined the literary magazine that I was then editing. I’d had roughly the same feelings toward both of them. What drew me to them was the fact that they were drawn to me. Both were nervous talkers, and since I tended on the quiet side, it had worked out. When Petra returned to Germany, I told her that I’d be visiting her as soon as possible. Her response, that she never expected our relationship to last beyond her time in America, was both confusing and somehow an enormous relief. I had been under the impression that she was in love with me. Two years later, when I’d graduated, I’d told Ruth Porter, my freshman girlfriend, that now that I was moving to Boston, and she was staying in Amherst, we should end the relationship. I’d expected a happy indifference on her part, but she looked as though I’d shot her in the stomach. Through a series of wrenching conversations, I did finally manage to break up with her, realizing that I’d also broken her heart. I decided then that I was not good at reading women, or maybe just people in general.