She had laughed shrilly and burst into tears. He had muttered an apology, saying it was a ‘paranoid delusion’ of his. At the last moment, boarding pass in hand, she had kissed him, clung to him, feeling she would never see him again; that she didn’t deserve to see him again. Because the answer to his question was yes, she had killed his father.
That beautiful spring day of the slapping, that mild May evening and later, during the cool black-morning hours, she had searched desperately for a way to avoid handing over her son’s inheritance. And there was no way, unless she went to the police. Even that might not do any good because Will wouldn’t let her out of his sight until after they went to the bank and she gave him the money and he took it from the cashier’s window to the loan department, so that he would have a few more months in which to lose everything.
Would she get the eleven thousand back if she went to the police after he made the loan payment?
Could she go to the police; tolerate the shame of accusing her own husband of forcing her to hand over money?
Would anyone believe her after all the years of model marriage?
She didn’t know what she was going to do until she did it. He was in the shower. She was at the sink, staring at her face with the little white scar at the left eye, at her mouth with the new caps on the front uppers. She saw the back of the counter-top heater reflected in the full wall mirror. She wondered if it could shock him into unconsciousness and so give her time to talk to the police.
She didn’t allow herself to think it could kill him.
She went to the bedroom and found the extension cord in the dresser. She returned and plugged in the heater, and now it reached the shower tub. She hoped he had the water running full blast, because then it would form two or three inches at the bottom of the tub, coming up over his ankles, the sluggish drain needing replacement, not Draino. She pulled the curtain aside at the back end, just a little, and remembered at the last moment to throw on the heater’s switch. There was a soft whirring sound as the fan started. He must have heard it over the shower’s hissing because he began to turn.
She dropped the heater, coils downward, into the few inches of water. There was a sizzling sound, a little flash, and he screamed and fell backward. He hit his head with a fleshy thump on the tub’s rim, and almost immediately began to bleed from the mouth and nose. The bathroom lights had gone out and the heater had stopped sizzling in the water, lying half under his left arm.
She wanted to run, but forced herself to disconnect the extension cord and take the heater out of the tub. She put the heater back on the counter and the extension cord back in the drawer, drying both with a towel. She went downstairs where the remains of Roger’s breakfast were on the table. She went into the little service area where the washer and dryer stood, and opened the circuit-breaker box. She found the lever Will had sticker-marked Bth. It was tripped. She reset it, and when she walked upstairs, the bathroom lights were on and the heater was working away with just a little sizzling. She waited until it stopped sizzling and turned it off.
She went downstairs and had coffee and a cold piece of toast Roger had left on his plate. She cleaned up the kitchen and swallowed two aspirins for the very nasty headache that had crept in behind her eyes. Then she returned to the bathroom and took a good look at her husband. He was a big, fleshy man and now he seemed enormous, filling the tub. He lay with one leg twisted under him, the other straight out, his eyes wide open, his lips slightly parted, looking very naked and very surprised. She couldn’t be certain, but she felt he was dead – his penis had never been that shrunken before.
She walked slowly to the bedroom and lifted the phone. By the time she reached Dr Levin, she was hysterical, begging for help. The hysteria was real, as she feared they would find signs of the electrocution – but they didn’t.
Dr Levin later explained that Will could have died of two separate causes. ‘He either had a heart attack and fell backward, striking his head and dying of a subdural haematoma caused by a depressed fracture of the skull. Or he slipped in the tub and fell, striking his head, and died of a resultant myocardial infarction – heart attack – brought on by shock. Or he died of more or less equal portions of both. If it’s any consolation, he couldn’t have had more than a few seconds of pain.’
In bed Monday night, a few hours after having spoken to David Howars, she asked herself how she could have been so wrong about Will; how she could have loved him; how she could have married him. Which, with variations, were questions she’d asked herself about several men since Will.
Time was running out. She was almost fifty. She prayed she wasn’t wrong about David Howars.
TWO: Tuesday, 11 December
Carrie smiled broadly when Mr Howars’ girlfriend, Vanessa Brooks, walked into the office.
Vanessa said, ‘Hey, howya doing?’ and complimented Carrie on her new nail polish and her bulky sweater. They talked cosmetics and clothes for a while, Vanessa rapping just like a schoolgirl with her ‘swell’ and ‘you’re putting me on!’, but Carrie knew how smooth she could talk when she wanted to, how well she did lines of all kinds in movies and TV shows.
Carrie really dug Vanessa, who was a knock-out for an older woman – over thirty – and wore the greatest clothes, like the pale brown, tweedy skirt-suit she was wearing now with pink-striped, man-style shirt and slouchy-brimmed, dark brown hat. Her shoes were always spikes (snakeskin today) and helped her look real tall, as did her long legs, though she was only five five, she’d confessed. She had reddish-brown hair, naturally curly, which Carrie admired. She had a wasp waist, which Carrie envied, and which made her breasts look even bigger than they were. She had great posture, a great walk, and Mr Howars’s black friend Teddy, bartender at Thomasine’s, said she could be elected the Girl Most Men Want To Walk Behind.
She was also a good actress with a hot career. Carrie would settle for where Vanessa was at, professionally, when she reached her thirties. And while Mr Howars was no John Travolta, Carrie might consider settling for where Vanessa was at romantically, too, because, if you could forget his age, Mr Howars wasn’t bad in the looks department. And he was loaded in the bread department. Most important of all was what he could do for an actress he dated.
He must have done plenty for Vanessa, at least before she got rolling. Now she was independent of any man’s help; she’d been in two TV shows this year that Carrie knew of. She was bound to land a continuing part, a lead part, in a new series sooner or later.
‘Where’s your Christmas tree?’ Vanessa asked, looking around the office. ‘It’s the eleventh. You should have one up and decorated by now. What will Mr Howars’s clients think?’
‘I asked him and he said he’d order one. That was a week ago. He must’ve forgotten.’
‘I’ll remind him. Tell him I’m here, will you?’
Carrie said, ‘Sure thing,’ and lifted the phone.
Vanessa always spent a few minutes with Dave’s secretary, a nice kid with ideas of getting into acting. But Carrie didn’t have a clue as to where it was at. Of course she could learn, just as Vanessa had. Learn to use the looks God had given her . . . or God and the plastic surgeon. Learn to act by going to a good school; Vanessa had suggested Estelle Harmon’s.
But first, Carrie had to learn to walk the tightrope between poverty and prostitution that most women serious about acting knew instinctively. Working as a secretary for two years here was death on an acting career. Eight hours a day, five days a week? How could she find the time necessary to hound the agents, the casting directors, the producers and directors and men who backed the films? How could she find time to go to the parties where these people gathered; to display herself and pitch and scramble and claw for whatever advantage might offer itself? How could she go on the time-consuming and nearly hopeless cattle calls where dozens of women gathered for one or two jobs; to whatever auditions the trade papers listed; to wherever the possibility of employment might