Eight Perfect Murders(21)

I got out of bed and went to my bookshelf to find an anthology of poems that contained one of my favorites, “Winter Nightfall” by Sir John Squire. I could probably recite it by heart, but I wanted to see the words. When I found a poem I loved, I would read it again and again. For one entire year I must have read Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” every night before I fell asleep. Lately I’d been reading Peter Porter’s “An Exequy” even though I understood less than half of it. I do not have a critical mind for poems, but I react to them.

Back in bed I read the Squire poem, then shut my eyes and let the final words gallop over me—“and the slop of my footsteps in this desolate country’s cadaverous clay”—again and again like a mantra. I thought some more of my wife, and the decisions that I made. When Patrick Yates came into her life, and I actually remember the date because it was March 31, my birthday, I knew right away that something momentous had occurred. Claire had done the afternoon shift that day at the bar, so as to get out early and take me to the East Coast Grill for my birthday dinner. “We finally hired a new bartender,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Patrick. I started training him today. He seems okay.”

The way she said his name, a combination of hesitancy and boldness, and I knew right away that he had made an impression on her. My body felt as though an almost imperceptible electric current had coursed through it.

“Does he have experience?” I asked, as I tipped an oyster back.

“He worked at a pub in Australia for a year, so that’s something. I thought of you because he has a tattoo of Edgar Allan Poe on his right shoulder.”

I was not a jealous husband, but I was also aware that Claire, unlike myself, was never going to go through life content with just me. She’d been with numerous men in college, and she’d admitted, more than once, that she’d go through periods when every time she met a man, or every time she’d pass a man on the street, she’d wonder if that man wanted her, and then she’d obsess over what these men might think about doing to her. I’d listen to these confessions and tell myself that it was better that she told me. Better than the alternative. Better than secrets.

She did have a therapist, a woman she referred to as Doctor Martha, whom she saw once every two weeks, but after her appointments she’d be in a dark mood, sometimes for days, and I wondered if it was worth it.

Part of me had always told myself that one day Claire would cheat, or maybe not cheat, but that she would fall for someone else. And I’d accepted that. And hearing about Patrick I knew that day had come. It scared me, but I had already decided what to do. Claire was my wife. She would always be my wife, and I would stand by her no matter what. It provided a sense of comfort, knowing that I was in it for the long haul, no matter what.

She did have an affair with Patrick, at least an emotional one, although I suspect it tipped over into the physical on at least a couple of occasions. I waited patiently, like the wife of a sea captain, hoping that she’d make it alive through the storm. I wonder sometimes if I should have fought more, threatened to leave, berated her when she came home two hours after the bar had closed, her clothes smelling of the American Spirits that he smoked, her breath sharp with gin. But I didn’t. That wasn’t my choice. I waited for her to come back to me, and one night, a hot summer night in August, she did. I had just arrived home from the bookstore, and she was sitting on our sofa, head bowed, tears in her eyes.

“I’ve been such an asshole,” she said.

“A little bit.”

“Will you ever forgive me?”

“I will always forgive you,” I said.

Later that night she asked me if I wanted details, and I said only if she needed to say them out loud.

“God, no,” she said. “I’m done with it.”

I found out later, but not from Claire, that Patrick Yates had disappeared after cleaning out the till on a Saturday night, and that at least three other female bartenders at the club had all been devastated by his departure.

After that incident, it got better between Claire and me, although things were worse with her. She quit the club and dropped out of Emerson College. For a while she did a few shifts at Old Devils, but then she got another job as a bartender at an upscale restaurant in the Back Bay. The money was good, but she felt frustrated with the lack of creativity in her life. “I don’t want to be a bartender for the rest of my life. I want to make films, but I need to go to school to do that.”

“You don’t have to go to school,” I said. “You could just make a film.”

And that’s what she did. There were her evening shifts at the restaurant and during the daytime she made short documentary films. One about tattoo artists, one about the polyamory community in Davis Square, even one about the Old Devils Bookstore. She posted them on YouTube, and that was where Eric Atwell found her. Atwell ran what he called “an innovation incubator” outside of Boston in a renovated farmhouse in Southwell. He offered free workspace (and occasional bedrooms) to young creatives, in return for a percentage of their final product’s profits. He contacted Claire, told her he liked her tattoo documentary, and asked if she’d film a promotional video for his incubator. Unlike with Patrick Yates, I didn’t get a bad feeling about Eric Atwell when Claire first started telling me about him. She said he was a cliché, a fifty-year-old who acted thirty, someone who clearly liked to surround himself with young people, preferably sycophants.