Hot Sur (3 page)

Cleve Rose was never able to talk to his father about his suspicions about the identity of the murderer, because days later Cleve himself was killed in a motorcycle accident, far from the Catskill Mountains, near Chicago. Different circumstances, different setting. Nevertheless, Ian Rose, devastated by the loss, could not help but think that his son’s fate had been sealed beforehand, when Mr. Eagles’s unsolved murder had left a dark cloud floating over these mountains.

“Well, you can’t help but be suspicious,” Ian Rose tells me. “Such a brutal act in such a peaceful place. It was a terrifying mystery, breaking the natural rhythm of the day-to-day, and more so if they suggest that something is lying in wait. It wasn’t just us; all the neighbors had trouble. Some left for a while, others put up bars or alarms, something unheard of before. And right in the middle of that period of fear and uncertainty, Cleve just happens to die. I’m sorry; I’d rather not speak about that. I don’t feel well, it’s something too personal to talk about,” Ian Rose says, but he keeps on talking. “Look, no one is prepared for the death of a son. There’s no recovering from that and nothing to be said about it, so I won’t say anything else, what’s implied is understood.”

Sometime after Cleve’s death, a package arrived at the house in the Catskills, a package that disturbed his father from the moment he received it, partly because he didn’t recognize the name of the sender, but particularly because it wasn’t addressed to him but to his son, Cleve. And Cleve was no longer. For Ian that death was something he could not handle, a wound that did not heal. He blamed himself and was drowning in guilt because he had sensed something was wrong, that some ambush was waiting for them, and yet he had done nothing to stop the threat from closing in on Cleve.

“That same night on the day Eagles was murdered we should have left the house, at least for a while,” he acknowledges now. “I thought about it, but there were the dogs—it’s not easy to find a place to stay with three dogs. Naturally, we weren’t going to fit in Cleve’s studio in the East Village. But we should have done it. It was one of those times when you hear a voice inside you telling you to do it again and again, but you ignore it.”

In his dreams after Cleve’s death, Ian Rose confused the boy who had not grown up with him with the young man who had wanted to get closer to him but was with him for so short a time. He mixed up the younger Cleve and the older Cleve. He woke up asking himself why he had allowed his ex-wife, Cleve’s mother, to take him so far away, why he hadn’t been paying attention, how was it possible that the years had passed by so fast, why hadn’t he understood that in the blink of an eye a child grows up and is free, and if you are not vigilant he gets on a motorcycle and kills himself.

“I couldn’t take it,” he says. “My failure. And the passing months weren’t helping. Nothing shattered the silence or shortened the distance that separated me from my son. And all of a sudden he gets this package in the mail.”

A package that someone sent Cleve as if he were still alive, and as such brought him back to life for an instant, because there was a flash of confusion in his father’s head, for a moment the past was erased, and he was about to call out to his son: “There’s something for you down here, son.” But the spell broke immediately, the whole weight of Cleve’s death came down on him, and Ian Rose remained standing there for a while, not able to move, steadying himself against the blow of a sorrow that returned like a boomerang, and in the end he couldn’t think of anything else to do but go up to the attic where his son had slept. He put the package on the bed without opening it and said, “This is for you, Cleve. It’s from a woman in Staten Island.”

“Maybe there wasn’t anything important in that package,” he tells me, “almost definitely nothing important, something delayed in the mail, that’s all. But I couldn’t help but think that it was some type of sign. A message from Cleve, you know. Something that belonged to him and that rose up out of the void for me, as if he had sent it. Look, I’ve never been superstitious or religious; I don’t even believe in heaven, or ghosts, none of those things. But Cleve’s death left me grasping in the dark, looking out for signs. He also left me with a head of gray hair and nervous tics, and I think I’m even more stupid. Grief kills neurons, you know. That’s a fact; otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to live through it. Maybe the hunch about the package was superstition, if you want to call it that. But in the face of the death of a loved one there’s no other choice: either you give in to it, which is impossible, or you begin to believe things, to be guided by signs that are beyond reason. Who knows? Maybe everything was much simpler: that package could contain some information about Cleve, some detail that would help me understand. Something like finding someone else’s love letter, or reading through a stranger’s e-mail.”

The day the package arrived had begun like any other, and Ian Rose had already gone through his daily dawn routine, standing by the window of his bedroom and taking in the whole of the landscape, except for a corner in which a stretch of road appeared; ever since Cleve’s death the sight of the highway upset him, disrupting his fantasy that he lived in a place where no one could enter and no one could leave. He had begun his day dressing without bathing and putting on his Taylor & Son boots that he had worn for years. He was fond of those boots; the leather had become almost like a second skin with wear. Later, he’d taken the dogs out for a walk in the woods. He liked that. In fact, it’s what he liked best, what still gave meaning to his days. Strolling through the woods with Otto, Dix, and Skunko allowed him to forget everything for a few hours, and he let go, becoming like a dog among his dogs for a couple of hours and sometimes longer, actually each time longer; lately, he worked less each day and the walks became longer. Nothing serious, he was retired anyway, living off a pension, and if he clung to work, it was because he liked it more than anything. He no longer took on large projects, satisfied with craft work and helping out a neighbor if the septic tank got clogged, the dishwasher was leaking, or the irrigation system in the garden needed fixing.

Because it was cold, when he got back home Rose split a big pile of wood, took a hot shower, and put on what he always wore: a pair of baggy pants, a white T-shirt with an unbuttoned lumberjack shirt over it. Then he had breakfast, tea with toast and some fruit. That first tea of the day was always Earl Grey with a cloud—what his English mother called a drop of milk poured into the middle of the golden liquid.

After that he fed the dogs their Eukanuba—Eagles’s widow delivered it these days, with treats and a Scheiner’s sausage for each of them—and had gone to the front room to start a fire. It never ceased to amaze him, seeing that fire domesticated in a corner of the house, peaceful and purring like a good cat, when it could rear up if it wanted, madly turning everything into a useless pile of charred bones and ash. Sometimes Ian Rose thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing, to be turned into nothing. But the dogs would have no one, so he persisted with the tasks of the day.

Every once in a while, he’d reminisce about Edith, his ex-wife, Cleve’s mother. As a bachelor, Ian Rose had been no playboy, not good with the ladies at all, so he felt lucky when Edith had been willing to go out with him. From his perspective, she was a marvelous and inaccessible creature who played the cello in a university group called the Emmanuel String Quartet, while he saw himself as a handyman, some novice technician who helped with the Friday concerts in the school auditorium and sat in the audience to listen to her. And to look at her, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was a true sight, that woman with a strong large body, with that curtain of dark hair that fell theatrically over the fairness of the face as her knees pressed the sides of the cello. It was big, that cello, no junior model, but the official full-size, on which the incomparable Edith produced a mewling that was almost human and that set him on edge, and not metaphorically. Edith could give him erections with her cello. But he didn’t dare approach her. He found the very thought of going to her dressing room with a bouquet of roses or some such other ridiculous gesture absurd.

Once, during one of those concerts, in the darkness of the audience, Ian kept his hands busy playing with the silver lining of a pack of cigarettes as he concentrated on the music, or more specifically on Edith. His hands moved on their own, folding the paper until they had created a tiny star. And as it happened, after the performance, Ian went into a bar near the auditorium and almost fell over backward when he saw the magnificent Edith come in. She was alone, her beautiful mane of hair in a ponytail. She had removed her makeup, making her fairness look even more spectral, and had exchanged her evening dress for a pair of jeans and a leather vest. Edith sat on a stool at the bar and ordered a dry martini. Ian, who still had the silver star in his pocket, chugged down a whiskey to work up the nerve, walked up, and handed it to her.

“Who are you?” she asked. And in a burst of showboating that she’d still chided him for years later, he responded: “I’m the star giver.” He blushed immediately afterward, hating himself for speaking like such a fool, and to make matters worse, Edith, from her superior position seated on the tall bar stool, regarded the insignificant object in her hands and said, her head tilting to one side, “Come on, now you’ve put me in a spot; now I don’t know where to toss this thing you’ve given me.”

So for Ian Rose it was a miracle that in the middle of that fiasco with the paper star, when he had wanted the earth to open up and swallow him, Edith had asked him to have a drink with her. And not only that, but she had agreed to go out with him the following week; and not just that she had gone out with him, but in less than a month, she had fallen in love with him. So when they married and swore eternal fidelity to each other, Rose was a hundred percent sure of what he was doing and committed to keeping his vows. During the honeymoon, he performed admirably from a sexual perspective, even Edith was well aware of this, and from then on he devoted himself, body and soul, to the role of a married man. He kept his commitment and passion the entire length of the nineteen years of his marriage. Every morning, his eyes still closed, he stretched out his arms to touch Edith’s body, happy to confirm that she was still there by his side. Because Rose was the kind of man who was born to be married, and married specifically to this wife and none other. Although Edith had long before stopped playing the cello, Rose felt that he was first Edith’s husband, and second everything else: Cleve’s father, hydraulic engineer, employee of the British company that had transferred him with his family to Colombia, where he got paid double the salary for working in a location classified as extremely dangerous. Not once during his worst sleepless nights, nor on occasions when they had to be apart because of travel, nor during their domestic squabbles, did it ever cross Rose’s mind that Edith could conceive of their relationship any differently than he did. For Rose it was evident that if he was before anything Edith’s husband, Edith was before anything his wife. That is why he failed to make any sense at all of that night in Bogotá when he came home from work. She had stayed in bed all day suffering from one of those colds she got so often in that cold rainy city, ten thousand feet up in the Andes Mountains.

“Did you get the cough syrup and Vicks VapoRub?” she asked him, but he had to admit he’d forgotten.

Around midnight, he was awakened by a noise. There was Edith, with her red sweater over her pajamas, coughing into tissues and admonishing him in a nasal voice that he wasn’t anything but a star giver—that was all he had ever been for her, a sad little star giver who had brought her to live in this horrendous place where she’d not remain one day longer. If he wanted to stay that was up to him; if he cared more about the company than his family, then so be it, but neither she nor the boy would stay one more day in this catastrophic place in which any day tragedy could befall them.

“You’re delirious from the fever. Calm down, Edith; get back in bed. You have a fever, and you can’t leave me just because I forgot the Vicks VapoRub.”

Rose had insisted, and even had looked for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy in the phone book and ordered cough syrup and cold tablets to be delivered. But she did not stop packing until she had filled four suitcases and two carry-ons.

The next day, he found himself taking her and the boy, who would have been ten then, to the airport. They said good-bye in front of the Avianca jet for what Ian Rose thought would be a few months while he finished out his contract commitment with the company before returning to Chicago to join them. But it turned out to be forever, because shortly after their parting, Edith had begun seeing an anthropologist named Ned and had gone with him and the boy to live in Sri Lanka.

“Sri Lanka, if you can believe it,” Rose tells me. “She left me because she felt unsafe in Colombia, and she moved to Sri Lanka
 . . .
”

His initial reaction had been one of surprise and disbelief. To a large extent that had not changed. During those same years Edith and Cleve had lived with Ned in Sri Lanka while Rose moved into the house in the Catskills with the three dogs; during the summers Edith and Ned had brought him the boy and they too had spent their summer vacations at his house, with Rose’s approval. They’d all lived together amicably, Rose suppressing his jealousy or any sign that he wasn’t having a good time. As a token of gratitude for his hospitality, Edith and Ned had sent him a magnifying glass with an ebony handle from Sri Lanka, which he put atop his desk, where it remained as a testament that his marriage had in fact ended and there was no going back.

Rose had always believed that he’d be married to Edith until the day of his death, or her death. And yet, something happened at some point, he wasn’t exactly sure when, and things turned out differently. Rose had been thinking about Edith that morning when the package arrived in the mail, and he left it unopened in the attic.