Eight Perfect Murders(20)
So when I stepped into Claire Mallory’s apartment, and when we began to kiss before we’d even gotten our jackets off, I told her, “Just so you know, I think I’m terrible at nonverbal cues. I need you to tell me everything.”
She laughed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, please,” I said, and it was all I could do to not tell her I was already in love with her.
“Okay. I’ll tell you everything.”
She started that night. In bed, with the dawn light filling her two dusty bedroom windows, she told me how her middle-school science teacher had molested her over the course of two years.
“You didn’t tell anyone?” I said.
“No,” she said. “It’s a cliché, but I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault, and I kept telling myself that he wasn’t having sex with me, at least. We’d never even kiss. In fact, he was nice to me in a way, both him and his wife. But when he got me alone, he’d always manage to somehow get behind me, pull me in for a hug, put one hand in my shirt, and the other down my jeans. I think he used to come that way. But he never took my clothes off, or his, and afterward he’d always look a little sheepish, say something like ‘That was nice,’ and then he’d change the subject.”
“Jesus,” I’d said.
“It wasn’t a huge deal,” she said. “Other shitty things have happened to me and that was just one of them. I sometimes think my mom fucked me up even more than my molester did.”
She had tattoos on the insides of her arms, and along either side of her rib cage. Just straight lines, dark and thin. I asked her about them, and she told me she loved the feeling of getting a tattoo but could never pick any image that she’d want on her body forever. So she just got lines, one at a time. I thought they were beautiful, just as I thought her body, unhealthily thin, probably, was also beautiful. I think our relationship worked so well for a time because I never judged her, never questioned what she told me. I knew she had issues, that she drank too much (although she hadn’t taken drugs in close to a year), and that she ate too little, and that, sometimes, when we had sex, I could feel her wanting me to objectify her, that it wasn’t always enough to have normal, loving sex, that she wanted more. When she was drunk, she’d turn her back to me, pull my hands around to her front, grind herself up against me, and it was impossible for me to not think of her teacher in middle school and wonder if she was thinking of him, as well.
But all this darkness, if that’s what it’s even called, was only part of what we had for the first three years we were together. Most of what we had was an incredible closeness, the happiness that comes with finding someone who seems to fit inside of you like a key in a lock. That’s the best metaphor I can come up with. I know it’s trite, but it’s also true. And it was the only time that this type of connection ever happened with me, then or since.
We got married in Las Vegas, our witness a blackjack dealer we’d met five minutes earlier. The major reason we eloped was because Claire could not deal with the prospect of her mother hijacking her own wedding. It was fine with me. My own mother had died three years prior from lung cancer. She’d never smoked a day in her life, but my father, the chain-smoker, was still alive, of course, now living in Fort Myers, Florida, and still, as far as I knew, an alcoholic and a three-packs-a-day Winston man. After Claire and I were married, we moved to Somerville together, rented the middle floor of a triple-decker near Union Square. Claire had left Redline Bookstore by this point, getting an administrative job at Somerville’s cable access station, where she had begun to make short documentary films. And a year later, after Redline shuttered its doors, I got the job at Old Devils. I was twenty-nine years old and felt as though I’d found the job that I would have for the rest of my life.
It wasn’t so easy for Claire. She hated her job at the cable station, but she didn’t have a college degree and every position she was interested in required one. She decided to go back to school part-time at Emerson College and finish an undergraduate degree; and she got work as a bartender at a divey club in Central Square. I used to visit her there, sitting long hours at the bar, suffering through overamplified punk bands, drinking Guinness, and watching my wife get ogled by hipsters in dark-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans. I developed the ability to read entire novels while ignoring the thunderous amateurs onstage. Even though I wasn’t older than the other patrons of the bar, I felt older, what with my book, and my graying hair. The other bartenders referred to me as Claire’s old man, and Claire started calling me Old Man as well. I think that, for a time, my wife loved my presence at her bar. At the end of her shift, she’d join me in having a beer, and then we’d walk back home together, arm in arm, through the dark, cluttered streets of Cambridge and Somerville. But something changed in 2007. Claire’s sister Julie was getting married, and Claire was suddenly embroiled back with her family, recruited in to serve as a buffer between her youngest sister and her mother. She lost the weight she’d gained over the last few years and added several new tattooed lines to the inside of her left thigh.
Also, she fell in love with a new bartender named Patrick Yates.
Chapter 9
After my bad dinner, I got into bed early with my Penguin edition of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept rereading the first page, my mind skipping around between thoughts of my wife and wondering who had written the comment on my blog post. I filled my lungs with the stale air of my apartment, then slowly exhaled. Why did he call himself Doctor Sheppard? Because he was the killer, right? Still, that didn’t mean I needed to try and read the book. I put it on my nightstand, where I kept a stack of poetry collections. That’s what I read at night now, before I go to sleep. Even if I’m currently into a literary biography (even though I rarely read crime, I do read biographies of crime writers), or something on European history, the last words I read before I try to fall asleep are the words of poets. All poems—all works of art, really, seem like cries of help to me, but especially poetry. When they are good, and I do believe there are very few good poems, reading them is like having a long-dead stranger whisper in your ear, trying to be heard.