Lunar Park (16 page)

I sat up. “Did . . . he have a dog?”

Kimball shifted uncomfortably and frowned, giving off the vibe that he did not think we were on the same track. But that wasn’t true. I just wanted to prolong the inevitable.

“Um, no, he did not have a dog, but there was a detail that again took me back to
American Psycho.
” Kimball pulled something from the notebook and reached forward to give it to me: a receipt from a restaurant called Ming’s, encased tightly in a plastic slip. The receipt was wrinkled and—now I swallowed—spattered lightly with brown flecks. On the other side, scrawled in ink, were the words
I’m gonna get you too . . . bitch.

Kimball paused after I handed the slip back to him.

“This particular order was being delivered to the Rubinstein family.”

Kimball waited for my reaction, which wasn’t forthcoming.

“On pages one eighty and one eighty-one a delivery boy is killed in the same manner as Mr. Wu and, as in the book, the assailant wrote the identical message that Patrick Bateman does on the back of the receipt.”

I closed my eyes and then tried to open them when I heard Kimball sighing.

“We—well, actually just me at that point—backtracked to another unsolved case involving a Victoria Bell, an elderly woman who lived on Outer Circle Drive.” Kimball paused. “She was decapitated.”

I knew the name. A bolt of clarity shot through me when I realized where Kimball was going with this.

“There is a Victoria Bell in
American Psycho
—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute—”

“—but this one was found in a motel off Route Fifty just outside Coleman about a year ago. She’d been stripped and placed in a bathtub and covered with lime.”

“Wait—she was covered with
limes
?” I exclaimed, recoiling.

“No,
lime.
It’s a dissolvent, Mr. Ellis.”

I closed my eyes again. I did not want to go back to that book. It had been about my father (his rage, his obsession with status, his loneliness), whom I had transformed into a fictional serial killer, and I was not about to put myself through that experience again—of revisiting either Robert Ellis or Patrick Bateman. I had moved past the casual carnage that was so prevalent in the books I’d conceived in my twenties, past the severed heads and the soup made of blood and the woman vaginally penetrated with her own rib. Exploring that kind of violence had been “interesting” and “exciting” and it was all “metaphorical” anyway—at least to me at that moment in my life, when I was young and pissed off and had not yet grasped my own mortality, a time when physical pain and real suffering held no meaning for me. I was “transgressive” and the book was really about “style” and there was no point now in reliving the crimes of Patrick Bateman and the horror they’d inspired. Sitting in my office in front of Kimball, I realized that at various times I had fantasized about this exact moment. This was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened to anyone as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame. Gloria Steinem had reiterated this over and over to Larry King in the winter of 1991 and that’s why the National Organization for Women had boycotted the book. (In a small world filled with black ironies, Ms. Steinem eventually married David Bale, the father of the actor who played Patrick Bateman in the movie.) I thought the idea was laughable—that there was no one as insane and vicious as this fictional character out there in the real world. Besides, Patrick Bateman was a notoriously unreliable narrator, and if you actually read the book you could come away doubting that these crimes had even occurred. There were large hints that they existed only in Bateman’s mind. The murders and torture were in fact fantasies fueled by his rage and fury about how life in America was structured and how this had—no matter the size of his wealth—trapped him. The fantasies were an escape. This was the book’s thesis. It was about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this? Yet because of the severity of the outcry over the novel the fear that maybe it wasn’t such a laughable idea was never far away; always lurking was the worry about what might happen if the book fell into the wrong hands. Who knew, then, what it could inspire? And after the killings in Toronto it was no longer lurking—it was real, it existed, and it tortured me. But that had been more than ten years ago and a decade had passed without anything remotely similar happening. The book had made me wealthy and famous but I never wanted to touch it again. Now it all came rushing back, and I found myself in Patrick Bateman’s shoes: I felt like an unreliable narrator, even though I knew I wasn’t. Yet then I thought: Well, had he?

Kimball had articles printed off the Internet that he was now leafing through and wanting to share with me, as I sat disconsolately in my office, staring out the window at the lawn sloping toward the street and the detective’s car parked there. Two boys raced by, teetering on skateboards. A crow landed on the lawn and picked disinterestedly at an autumn leaf. It was followed by another larger crow. The lawn instantly reminded me of the carpet in the living room.

Kimball could tell I was trying to distract myself, that I was trying to wish it all away, and gently said, “Mr. Ellis, you do understand where I’m going—”

“Am I a suspect?” I asked suddenly.

Kimball seemed surprised. “No, you’re not.”

There was a tiny moment of relief that fled in an instant.

“How do you know I’m not?”

“The night of June first you were in a rehab clinic. And on the night Sandy Wu was murdered you were giving a lecture at the college on . . .” Kimball glanced at his notes—“on the legacy of the Brat Pack in American literature.”

I swallowed hard and collected myself again. “So this is obviously not a series of coincidences.”

“We—that is, myself and the Midland Sheriff’s Office—believe that whoever’s committing these crimes is actually following the book and replicating them.”

“Let me get this straight.” I swallowed again. “You’re telling me that Patrick Bateman is alive and well and killing people in Midland County?”

“No, someone out there is copycatting the murders from the book. And in order. It’s not random. It’s actually fairly careful and very well planned, to the point where the assailant has even gone so far as to locate people—victims—with similar names or similar, if not exact, occupations.”

I was freezing. Nausea started sliding through me.

“You have got to be kidding me. This is a joke, right?”

“It’s no longer a theory, Mr. Ellis” was all Kimball would say, as if he was warning someone.

“Do you have any leads?”

Again, Kimball sighed. “The big obstacle in terms of our investigation is that the crime scenes themselves—even with the fairly formidable amount of planning and time the killer spent at each one—are, well, they’re”—and now he shrugged—“immaculate.”

“What does that mean? What does that mean when you say ‘immaculate’?”

“Well, basically forensics is baffled.” Kimball checked his notes, though I knew he didn’t need to. “No fingerprints, no hair, no fibers, nothing.”

Like a ghost.
That was the first thing I thought.
Like a ghost.

Kimball repositioned himself on the couch, and then looking at me directly asked, “Have you received any strange mail lately? Any kind of correspondence from a fan that would lead you to suspect that maybe something isn’t quite right?”

“Wait—why? You think this person might contact me? Do you think he’s after me?” I was unable to contain my panic and immediately felt ashamed.

“No, no. Please, Mr. Ellis, calm down. That doesn’t seem to be where this person is heading,” Kimball said, failing to reassure me. “However, if you feel someone has contacted you in a way that’s inappropriate or a violation of some kind, please tell me now.”

“You’re fairly sure whoever this is is
not
heading toward me?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, I mean, then who is he heading for . . . next?”

Kimball looked at his notebook, even though again I was positive he didn’t need to. It was a calculated and empty gesture and I resented him for it.

“The next victim in the book is Paul Owen.”

“And?”

Kimball paused. “There’s a Paul Owen in Clear Lake.”

“Clear Lake is only fifteen miles from here,” I murmured.

“Mr. Owen is now under heavy surveillance and police protection. And what we’re hoping is that if anyone suspicious shows up, we’ll be able to apprehend him.” Pause. “This is also why these connections between the crimes haven’t been leaked to the press. At this point that would only compromise the investigation . . . And of course we hope you won’t say anything either.”

“Why do you think this person isn’t gonna come after me or my family?” I asked again. By now I was rocking back and forth in the swivel chair.

“Well, the author of the book isn’t in the book,” Kimball said, offering a pointlessly reassuring smile that failed utterly. “I mean, Bret Ellis is not a character in the book, and so far the assailant is only interested in finding people with similar identities or names of fictional characters.” Pause. “You’re not a fictional character, are you, Mr. Ellis?” Kimball knew this smile hadn’t reassured me and he did not attempt it again. “Look, I can see why you’re becoming so upset, but we really feel that at this point you’re not in any danger. Still, if you’d rest easier we could offer you police protection that would be extremely unobtrusive. If you want to talk this over with Ms. Dennis—”

“No, I don’t want my wife to know about this, yet. No. I’m not discussing this with my wife. There’s no need to freak her out. Um, but I will let you know as soon as possible about your protection services and all that”—I had gotten up, and my knees were shaking—“and I really don’t feel well so . . . um, I’m sorry, I really don’t feel well.” The room was now filled with despair, torrents of it. I knew even then, half-drunk on vodka, sobering up at a rapid pace, that Kimball would not be able to rescue anyone and that more crime scenes would be darkened with blood. Fear kept bolting me upright. I suddenly realized that I was straining not to defecate. I had to grip the desk for support. Kimball stood uneasily beside me. I was of no use at that point.

A card was handed out with various phone numbers on it. I was instructed to call if anything “suspicious” or “abnormal” (those two words uttered so soothingly that they could have existed in a nursery rhyme) came up, but I couldn’t hear anything. I blindly walked Kimball out to his car while mumbling my thanks. And at that moment Jayne pulled into the driveway in the Porsche. When she saw me with Kimball she sat in the car and watched, pretending to be on her cell phone. Once Kimball drove away she bounded out of the car, smiling, and walked over to me, still beaming from the new beginnings we had promised each other that morning. She asked me who Kimball was and when I told her he was a student she believed me and took my hand and guided me back into our house. I didn’t tell Jayne the truth about Kimball because I didn’t want to scare her, and because I thought that if I did I would be asked to leave, and so I kept silent, adding something else to the list of all the things I had already hidden from her.

The rest of the evening was a daze. During dinner, while sitting at the table, the kids conceded that they’d had a good time at the mall and regaled Jayne with various scenes from the movie we saw, and then there was a long discussion about Victor (who didn’t want to sleep in the house anymore but whose panicked barking outside at night made this demand impossible to meet). The only thing that had any impact—the one thing that broke through my fog—was when Sarah brought the Terby over to me, though I don’t remember where I was at the time. Was I slouched in the armchair in front of the plasma TV? Or had it been during dinner, sitting with my family while zoning out on a plate scattered with zucchini and mushrooms, and where I was trying to smile and stay interested in the moment, concentrating on the flow of information being passed around? (I tried to appear casual by humming to myself, but this was maddening and I stopped just as casually when I saw Robby scowl.) All I know is that I was somewhere in that house when Sarah brought the horrible Terby over and asked me why its claws were encrusted with what looked like dried crimson paint and if I could help her wash off those claws in the kitchen sink. (“They’re dirty, Daddy,” Sarah explained, while I nodded dumbly. Yes, I remember that exchange. And I also remembered how bad the thing had smelled.) There was a football game on TV that I would have watched any other night but when I shut myself in the office and dialed Aimee Light’s number again, Jayne opened the door and suddenly guided me upstairs, and she was murmuring things to me as she led me back into the master bedroom and past the flickering sconces, and I could tell by her velvet smile that she was expecting something, a promise of some kind. I felt the same tug but couldn’t follow through—it was too late. I was supposed to see my reflection in her and simply couldn’t. I had taken an Ambien and finished the rest of the Ketel One and after easing myself into bed I was soon sleeping soundly, freed from having to deal with my wife’s desires, the scratching at the side of the house, the furniture that was rearranging itself downstairs and the darkening carpet it rested on, and as the four of us slept a madman I had created roamed the county while a cloud bank settled over the town and the moon somewhere above it was causing the sky to glow.
He’s back.
I had whispered those two words to myself that dark night spent shivering in the guest room, replaying what I’d seen out in the desolate field behind our house. I had involuntarily been thinking of my father and not Patrick Bateman.

But I had been wrong. Because now they were both back.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2

12. the dinner party

I
woke up in the master bedroom for what seemed like the first morning in weeks, stretching pleasurably in the empty bed, refreshed by the Ambien from last night, and in the kitchen Jayne was preparing brunch, and I took a leisurely shower before getting dressed to join the family. I stared at my reflection in the mirror before heading downstairs—no bags under the eyes, my skin was clear—and realized, shockingly, that I was actually hungry and looking forward to eating something. Sunday brunch was the one meal of the week with no dietary restrictions: sesame seed bagels and cream cheese, bacon omelets and sausage, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts and French toast for Robby (who again mumbled about the scratching sounds outside his door last night) and hot chocolate and pancakes for Sarah (who seemed withdrawn and tired, probably due to the new cocktail of meds that had been prescribed last month and were now finally kicking in), but because of the reshoots Jayne had only a banana soy milk smoothie and tried to downplay her anxiety about leaving for Toronto next week. For once, I was the one member of the family doing okay on that Sunday. I was mellow and content, even after leafing through the papers, which were filled with follow-ups on the Maer Cohen disappearance, as well as lengthy recaps of the (now) thirteen boys who had vanished in the last five months. Their photos took up an entire page in the County section of the local paper, along with physical descriptions, the dates they disappeared, and the places they were last seen. (Tom Salter rowing a canoe on Morningside Lake; Cleary Miller and Josh Wolitzer outside the post office on Elroy Avenue; the last image of Edward Burgess was of him walking serenely through the Midland airport, caught on film by the security cameras.) It was a yearbook page for the missing, and I simply put the paper aside. Once Robby and Sarah went upstairs Jayne and I traded thoughts on how to get out of the Allens’ dinner that night, but it was too late. It was easier to just suffer through it than to blow them off, so I planned my day accordingly until seven o’clock, at which time we’d leave.

I spent the rest of the morning putting the furniture in the living room back in its original position but realized while doing this that I
liked
how the furniture had been rearranged—and felt a weird pang of nostalgia as I pushed the couches and tables and chairs around. And the carpet—though still discolored—was spotless: the footprints stamped in ash were no longer evident, and even though the wide expanse of beige Berber bordering on green shag was bothersome, the room was no longer open to interpretation. I then went outside to the field and checked on the blackened wet patch; to my relief, it had almost dried up, and the hole was beginning to refill itself, and as I looked out over the acres of field leading out to the dark bank of woods, taking in deep breaths of the fresh autumn air, I briefly felt that maybe Jayne was right, that this
was
a meadow and not a place where the dead reside. Next I went upstairs to look at the scratches on Robby’s door, and when I knelt down and ran my hand over the grooves I’d seen on Halloween I could detect no change. Again: relief. I felt now as if the bad news Kimball had brought yesterday was being balanced out. The afternoon was long and quiet and uneventful. I watched football games, and Aimee Light still hadn’t called me back.

At six o’clock Jayne dressed me in a pair of black Paul Smith slacks and a gray Gucci turtleneck and Prada loafers—chic yet conservative and imminently presentable. While she took the next hour to pull herself together I went downstairs to greet Wendy, the girl who was going to watch over the kids tonight since Marta had Sundays off. Wendy was a not unattractive student from the college, whose parents Jayne knew and who also came highly recommended by all the mothers in the neighborhood. Jayne had initially resisted calling Wendy since we were only going next door for a few hours and could simply bring the kids with us, but Mitchell Allen mentioned something about Ashton’s ear infection and subtly vetoed our plan. And considering what Kimball had told me yesterday, I was grateful to have someone in the house to look after the kids. While waiting for Jayne I downloaded onto the computer the pictures she’d taken on Halloween: Robby and Ashton, both sullen and sweaty, already too old for the holiday; Sarah looking like a child prostitute. An image of the cream-colored 450 SL initially caught my interest, but it no longer seemed fixed with meaning—it was simply someone’s car and nothing more. I realized this after uselessly trying to enlarge the photo and locate the license plate, but it had been washed out in the glare of the street lamps and, as with everything else that Sunday, didn’t seem to matter much. I skipped any shots that I was in, but the photos that bothered me most weren’t the ones of me looking frightened and blitzed but those of Mitchell Allen and Jayne posing in front of the Larsons’ house on Bridge Street, Mitchell’s arm wrapped protectively around Jayne’s waist, his lips raised in a mock leer. That seemed far more worrisome than the small and innocent car I’d briefly become so afraid of on Halloween night and now no longer was.

I had actually gone to Camden with Mitchell Allen but barely knew him there, even though the school was a tiny and incestuous place. What had surprised me to discover was not so much that Mitchell Allen was now living next door to Jayne, but rather that he was married and had fathered two children: Ashton, who because of their close proximity was Robby’s default best friend, and Zoe, who was a year younger than Sarah. Given what little I knew about Mitchell at Camden I had assumed he was bisexual if not, in fact, totally gay. But back then, before AIDS hit, everyone was basically screwing everybody else during that brief, sexually freewheeling historical moment. After we graduated and the eighties passed, it was not unusual for the “lesbians” I’d known during that era to have married and become parents, and the same held true for many of the Camden men whose sexual identities remained hazy and blurred during their four years in New Hampshire. It was considered cool at Camden to be bisexual—or at least to be
perceived
as bisexual—and the student body not only was inordinately tolerant of its own sweeping pansexuality but actively encouraged it. Most guys shrugged off the occasional one-night stand with another male and some even wore it as a badge; Camden girls thought it was hot, and the Camden boys considered you mysterious and dangerous, so it opened doors and increased your desirability level and made you feel, within the context of everything, that you were more of an artist, which was really what we all strove for—to let our peers know that there were no boundaries, that everything was acceptable, that transgression was legitimate. And after getting over my initial surprise (because my only memories of Mitchell were composed of rumors that he’d initiated a lengthy affair with Paul Denton, another classmate of ours) I recalled a girl named Candice whom he hooked up with during his last couple of terms, before he began graduate school at Columbia, where he met Nadine on the steps of Low Library, a replica of the ditsy, hot blonde Mitchell had dated as an undergrad. When we were first reacquainted this summer at a neighborhood barbecue in Horatio Park he pretended to mistake me for Jay McInerney, a lame joke that Mitch was so enamored of that he repeated it three more times to other couples he introduced me to, but since these weren’t readers they failed to “get it,” causing Mitchell to realize that he didn’t have an audience. Neither one of us was particularly interested in getting to know each other better or to reminisce about Camden and our respective raunchy pasts, even for the sake of our sons (the improbable best friends). For his part, Mitchell was simply too enthralled by Jayne to make any attempt at male bonding. We were older now and living in a different world, and Mitchell let Jayne’s presence reduce him to that peculiar desperation frequently seen in men who fall into close contact with a movie star. The cool, uncaring facade Mitchell played out in Camden—the exquisite vagueness, the stab at bohemia, the Christmas in Nicaragua, the Buzzcocks T-shirt, the punch he spiked with MDA, the screwing around and the moving away—all of that had been zapped out of him. This was due, of course, in part to age, but this erasure was also connected to his immersion in suburbia (plenty of men my age in Manhattan still retained some semblance of their youthful edge). The handsome and edgy sexual adventurer was replaced by a dorky guy nearing forty with a slavish devotion to my wife. Nadine noticed this too and kept a tight rein on Mitchell whenever school activities or the occasional dinner party brought the four of us together, and I didn’t really care; I had my own proclivities, and I knew that Jayne was so not interested. It was the inevitable outcome of being early-middle-aged and bored and having a beautiful wife. But when Nadine flirted shamelessly with me—that was when the tiredness and the cliché of suburbia would dampen whatever enthusiasm I had for my new life as a man trying to form himself into the responsible adult he probably would never become.

After we said goodbye to the kids (Robby was flopped in front of the giant plasma screen watching
1941
and barely acknowledged us, while Sarah sat with Wendy on the other side of the room, going over the CliffsNotes for
Lord of the Flies
) Jayne and I stepped out onto Elsinore Lane and on the brief walk to the Allens’ she patiently reminded me who everyone was and what they did since I always seemed to forget, which in this circle was considered bad form. Mitchell was, of all things, a member of the investment banking community, while Mark Huntington was a golf course developer and Adam Gardner was yet another semimobster whose supposed career in waste management was clouded with fuzz—just a group of regular dads, living in the soft dreamlight of wealth we had all created, joined by our generically beautiful wives in trying to secure our perfect children’s ascension in the world. A slight wind caused leaves to scratch along the pavement as Jayne and I walked from our house to the Allens’. Jayne held my hand and leaned into me. I moved away slightly so she couldn’t feel the bulge of the cell phone in my pocket.

Mitchell opened the door and hugged Jayne tightly before remembering to shake the hand I was holding out in midair. We were the last couple to arrive, and Mitchell ushered us in quickly since Zoe and Ashton were about to perform the yoga poses they had learned the previous week for the adults. In the living room we nodded at Adam and Mimi Gardner and at Mark and Sheila Huntington, all of us standing in that vast space while Zoe pretended to be a tree for something like five minutes and her brother demonstrated his impressive breathing exercises in a downward dog stretch. (Ashton looked as if he’d been crying—his eyes red, his face flushed and swollen—and he obediently went through his routine as if forced, though at the time I blamed his apparent misery on the ear infection.) They both did the “sideways plank” and then they curled up into a “rock pose.” This was all capped off by Zoe and Ashton’s balancing beanbag pillows on their heads until the adults applauded. “How cute,” I murmured to a delighted Nadine Allen, who I hadn’t realized was standing beside me and whose hand was resting on my lower back. She smiled generously at me (a Klonopin rictus) and then reached out for Ashton, who abruptly turned away and stalked out of the room. Nadine’s face flickered with worry—but only for a second—and then became the smiling mask of a hostess again. It was a significant moment. I was already stricken and exhausted.

The Allens’ house was an almost exact replica of our place—palatial and minimalist and immaculate. There was even the same chandelier in the high-ceilinged foyer and the same curving staircase connecting the two floors, and Mitchell started taking drink orders once the kids had gone to their rooms and Jayne glanced at me when I asked for a vodka on the rocks and I returned the glance jokingly when she demurred and decided on a glass of white wine I knew she really didn’t want, and we settled into cocktail chatter with a Burt Bacharach CD playing in the background—a knowing, kitschy touch presented with an ironic formality, operating not only as a dig at our parents’ tastes, a way of commenting on how bourgeois and middlebrow they were, but also as something comforting; it was supposed to take us back to the safety of our childhoods, and I suppose that for some it worked like a balm, as did a menu that updated the meals our mothers had served: chicken Kiev (but with a Jamaican touch—I could not imagine what that would taste like) and au gratin potatoes (but made with manchego cheese) and that seventies stalwart sangria, which like so many artifacts from that era had made a comeback.

When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them—the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms—and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples gave off and that permeated the air—the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere—despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this. I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, that doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there. And I assumed—since I was the most recent addition to this group and had not yet let myself be fully initiated into its rituals and habits—that I was the loner, the outsider, the one whose solitude seemed endless. My wonderment at how I had arrived in this world still hadn’t deserted me. Everything was formal and constricted. The polite conversation that carried over from cocktails into dinner was so stifling that it carried a certain ruthlessness, so I honed in on the women, carefully weighing Mimi versus Sheila versus Nadine, all of whom I found attractive (though Jayne outshone them all). Mitchell was leaning into my wife and Nadine kept pouring me sangria that I was positive had no alcohol in it, and everywhere I glimpsed the withholding of a once casual promiscuity and it made me feel old. I briefly imagined all of us involved in an orgy (not a disagreeable fantasy considering how well put together the women were) until I heard that Mimi Gardner owned a Pomeranian named Basket.