Diablerie (15 page)

"I thought you said he was working?" I said, squeezing her arm tighter.

"He was supposed to be but he came back. It was raining that day . . . I don't know."

"What happened then?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"You guys went outside. I was afraid to go. I knew how mad Sean could get. You guys went out there and then, maybe five minutes later, you came back and told me that you took care of him."

"I told you that I killed him?"

"You said that you took care of him," she said with real fear in her voice. "I didn't know what to do. You told me that we had to get out of there, but I was afraid to be with you. You told me that you didn't care about me anyway. You put on your clothes, took the money, and left.

"After you drove off, I went to see if I could help, help Sean. But he was dead. The side of his forehead was crushed. So I took his car and drove it to Berkeley, where my sister lived. I told her what had happened and we had the car junked.

"You're hurting me, Ben."

I was gripping her upper arm as hard as I could. I released my hold, thinking of what she had said. I didn't remember any of it—not the woman, not the pilot, not the murder, not anything.

Barbara had fallen into the chair, holding her hurt biceps with her good hand.

"I don't know you," I said.

"How could you forget?" she asked. "You killed him."

"You don't know that," I said, floundering. "You didn't see me do it."

"What else could it have been?"

The tone of her question made me look closer at this woman, my nemesis. Her defiance made her brave—not in a heroic way, but the kind of bravery that criminals have. Here I was standing before her, a greater force, and she was threatening my borders. She was afraid of me, but at the same time she wasn't backing down.

I considered killing her; I really did. I tried to imagine my hands around her throat. I thought of her on the floor beneath me, my knees snapping her ribs as I strangled her. The desire was there but it was weak, unable to bring the strength of murder to my fingers. I stood there staring at her. She rose up and went around me. I think she could see the murder in my eyes.

She went to the door, opened it, and said, "You should go."

Three very dark, French-speaking African men came into the elevator on the second floor. They were wearing business suits and having a serious conversation. I accompanied them out of the hotel and departed their company when they asked the doorman to hail them a taxi.

On the street I wondered about Barbara Knowland's story. Why would she lie about something like that? It made sense, if events occurred the way she related them, that she'd be petrified to see me at her reading. The police had already put her on the hot seat for murder; all I had to do was blame the killing on her. Maybe she thought that I'd come to blackmail her.

"Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" a woman shouted from one of the apartments in my daughter's new building.

I remember thinking that she'd have to hear her neighbors rutting all the time now that she was living in a building like this. It was the same way when I was a kid in Colorado. But back then I was the one doing the rutting; either that or I was passed out from liquor.

I knocked on her door and the screaming stopped. Even then I only marveled at the thinness of the walls: The lovers could hear me knocking right through my daughter's walls.

"Who is it?" Seela called.

"Me."

The silence that followed was profound. Sixty seconds passed before the door came open. My ugly-duckling daughter was standing there in a ratty blue housecoat next to a chubby white boy who was wrapped in a bright orange robe that was made for a woman. I could see the outline of his waning erection through the thin, tightly held cloth.

"Hi, Daddy," Seela said. "This is Martin. My, um, fiend."

"What happened to Jamal?"

"Nothing."

"Oh," I said. "I see. Martin?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Put on some clothes and give me a few minutes with my daughter. You could go down to the coffee place at the corner. She'll be with you in a few minutes."

They had been going at it on a thin mattress in the middle of the living room floor. Martin bent down to pick up his clothes and rushed into the bathroom. I walked over to the mattress and nudged it with my toe.

Seela busied herself at the sink, turning on the water and rinsing something. There wasn't much furniture in the apartment. Seela had brought in a small red table and two blue chairs that she'd bought some years ago on a family vacation to New Hampshire.

I sat in one of the blue chairs and Martin came blundering out of the bathroom. The buttons on his shirt weren't lined up straight.

"I'm going to go back to the theater, Seel," he said. "Call me later."

My daughter waved at him, not saying a word.

"What are you doing?" she said in a very loud voice the moment Martin closed the door behind him.

"Came to see my girl," I said with my patented fake smile.

"And why mention Jamal?"

"He's your boyfriend, isn't he?"

"So?"

"So what if Jamal came up here to see you and he hears Martin there fuckin' you so hard that you sound like you're in your own private church?"

Seela had never heard her daddy say anything even remotely like that. Her mouth opened but the words would not come. I believe that she would have cried if she wasn't too much in shock to remember how.

"Baby," I said.

"No. No, no, no, no, no,'' she said. "Don't you say anything else to me."

I told my daughter that I had heard her fucking and coming through the door. I could have told her that I paid the rent on that door. I could have said that what she did was putting her business all down the hall. But none of that would have been right. I didn't have to pay her rent. She didn't have to respect me, or herself for that matter. I was wrong, but I hadn't meant to hurt her.

While I had these thoughts, Seela began to cry. She was trembling from her diaphragm. Her hands gripped the blue cloth of her housecoat. She wanted to say something but there was nothing to say. My walking into her apartment and not averting my eyes or my words had stripped her bare. This was, I thought, a t d y traumatic experience.

"Why, Daddy?" she said at last.

"Sit, baby."

She sat across from me on the other crayon-blue chair. I smiled at her and reached out to touch her wrist.

She shifted her body away from me.

"Honey," I said. "I don't care about what you were doing here . . ."

"Martin's Millie's boyfriend," my daughter said. "She's at the theater working on stage design and he dropped by to pick up some of her plans. He's the one that told Millie that she should share the apartment with me."

"That's okay, baby."

"It's not okay. I betrayed my boyfriend and my roommate."

She was miserable at her perfidy. I could see that she felt I was some kind of divine justice come to damn her.

"It's not so bad," I said.

"How can you say that?"

"You're just a kid," I said. "I mean, I did worse than this almost every day when I was back in Colorado."

"All you did was get drunk a lot," Seela said. "Mommy told me that you drank until you had an accident and then you stopped."

I was little more than a ghost in my daughter's life, an apparition. We'd never talked about anything but money if she needed it, and math, her worst subject in school, when the homework was due.

"I used to have a friend back in those days named TJ," I said, remembering him as I spoke. "He had this beautiful Danish girlfriend named Chara.

"TJ and me used to drink pretty hard. Some nights he was so drunk I had to carry him into his house and put him in the bed for Chara. One time she was so mad that she seduced me and we did it right there in the same bed where he was sleeping."

Seela was looking at me now, into my eyes. With just those few words I could tell that I was no longer the milquetoast daddy that Mona had invented for her.

"You did it while he was right there?" she asked.

"Snoring like a bull walrus."

I smiled.

She snickered.

I laughed.

Seela actually guffawed, showing all her teeth.

"What happened after that?" Seela asked once she'd gotten control of herself.

"I went out drinkin' with TJ every night for two or three weeks."

"No."

"Oh yeah. And I'd pay for all his drinks. Every night Chara would be waiting at the door in her nightie. I'd ask her to go in the other room but she wanted to do it right up next to her boyfriend—either in the same bed, on the floor, or in his favorite stuffed chair." "Did he ever catch you?"

"One night we were goin' at it in his chair when all of a sudden we heard him say, 'Chara.' He was sitting up in the bed. She said, 'Go back to sleep, baby, me and Ben are just talking.' He slumped back down and we went at it . . . like dogs."

I hadn't thought about TJ and Chara since I left Colorado. Remembering them brought Mona and Harvard Yard to mind. I was no better than them. As a matter of fact, I was worse.

"Daddy?" Seela was saying.

"What?"

"I asked you if you ever felt guilty."

"Not then. Not consciously. The night after that I stopped going out drinkin' with TJ. I took a construction job outside Boulder and never saw either of them again."

"Do you feel bad now?"

I looked at the daughter I didn't know and who didn't know me. I opened my mouth but there was nothing to say. The silence that passed between us carried more information than nineteen years of the father-daughter relationship.

"Why'd you come over, Daddy?"

I could have told her that my life was Med with unanswerable questions like that one, that the fabricated structure that kept me going for two decades had fallen apart and now I was floating around like a baby black widow spider wafting on the breeze. I had no reason to be in that apartment, confessing to a youthful betrayal. I was looking for an anchor, and like a fool, I had snagged on to my little girl.

I should have walked out of there but instead I told Seela about the dinner Mona and I went to, about Star and Harvard Rollins and the man named Meeks. I skipped the part about spying on her mother having sex with Rollins, but I told her that I was sure they were having an affair.

"And when you saw Mommy, she turned away to this detective guy?" Seela asked. Martin and Jamal and Millie were the furthest things from her mind.

"Like I said, she's been having an affair with him," I said. "Don't get me wrong, honey. I've had an affair too.''

"With who?"

"That doesn't matter right now. You don't know her."

"And did you kill somebody, Daddy?" my plain-faced daughter asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I certainly don't remember killing anyone. I never entertained the idea until this Barbara Knowland came on the scene."

"Maybe she's lying," Seela suggested.

"Why would she make up some elaborate lie like that?"

"Maybe she killed him. Maybe you did go up there with her and drink until you passed out. Then, then maybe this guy came back and she hit him from behind a door with a crowbar, and when you woke up, you left and never even saw him. And now that she sees you sitting in the audience, she's worried that you figured it out and that you'll send her to jail."

Seela transformed in front of me at that moment. For years she had just been there: infant, toddler, child, adolescent. Whatever she was, it was as far away from me as a distant moon in orbit around a dead planet. I had only cared about her as a responsibility, not as a person, and she'd never said one thing that touched me.

But now that was all washed away. Seela had shown me how I might be fooled. Barbara Knowland walked up to me wanting to know why I was there. When I didn't recognize her, she thought that it was an act; she believed that I was going to turn her in for the crime she'd committed decades ago. Maybe I'd heard about her publishing deal and meant to blackmail her.

Of course she would have been the one to kill this Sean Messier, not me. She had the relationship with him. She was pregnant by him. I was no more than a rolling drunk who came to a stop in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I reached out to take my daughter's hands in mine.

"Seela," I said. "You are my savior."

"Daddy, are you all right?"

Someone knocked on the door. The sudden sound made us both gasp and flinch as if we were caught in a moment of criminal intimacy.

Seela stood up and went to the door. She opened it.

"Hi, honey," she said to Jamal.

He was like many of Seela's boyfriends: tall, very dark, and quietly handsome. She liked men and boys in that cast but always felt, her mother had told me, that she was never good enough to keep them.

I stood up and put out my hand to him. We'd met a few times when I brought clothes or books or, more likely, a check to the dorm for Seela.

"Mr. Dibbuk," he said. "How are you, sir?"

"Lucky to have a daughter as wonderful as this child here."

"Yeah, she's great."

I gazed into his dark eyes, wondering if his words were echoed in his heart. Very little I had ever said had meaning in my soul. My true feelings were trussed up in a thousand lies I used to get by. Hence, I never believed anything that anyone told me. This thought came to me like a revelation. I hardly ever believed anything but I did believe Star. I did not question her. Maybe that was because her accusations resonated with the man I buried deep inside me.

"Are you ready?" Jamal was asking Seela.

"For what?"

"To go to Millie's play," he said.

"Oh," Seela uttered. I could see Millie and Martin and her betrayal rising up into her face.

"Go on, baby," I said then. "Get dressed. I'm gonna be okay now that we talked and you are too. We both know what's important."

"Really, Daddy?"

"I'm going home to talk to your mother now."

I don't know what she thought I was saying but the words seemed to give my daughter some relief. She put her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek.