My Sister, My Love (49 page)

And A. J. Grubbe had counter-sued! As A. J. Grubbe had filed a flotilla of lawsuits demanding financial restitution from publications, journalists, and private individuals who had “defamed” his name.

Elyot in no way resembled the fiery, flamboyant A. J. Grubbe whom Skyler had but glimpsed at a distance, at a cocktail gathering at the Rampikes’; poor Elyot resembled his unhappy-heiress mother Imogene who’d been one of those soft-boneless-mollusc females who quiver with emotion no one wants to share; an eagerly smiling wife/mother who senses that she will be mangled by life no matter how kindly—generous—“maternal”
and “loving” and “good”—she is; for she is a wealthy heiress, and has attracted, fatally, the wrong kind of husband.

“And you have the most adorable little angel-sister, Skyler! How lucky your mother is.”

One drizzly playdate afternoon at the Grubbe mansion on the Great Road there came Mrs. Grubbe stumbling downstairs in what appeared to be a Japanese kimono, that disguised her soft fatty folds, and in an exclamatory voice Mrs. Grubbe interrupted the boys’ chess game, seizing Skyler’s small-boy-face in pudgy-clammy fingers as an eagle seizes small-mammal prey in its talons; Mrs. Grubbe exhaled Chardonnay-sweet breath in Skyler’s face, exclaiming over Skyler’s sister, and marveling at Skyler’s mother’s luck. Afterward, with some embarrassment, Elyot had said: “Please excuse my mother. She has been diagnosed as ‘tri-polar’—and she is medicated—but sometimes the medication fails, and she becomes excitable. I think that what Mother meant just now was that, if she were to lose me, she would have no child; whereas your mother, if she lost you, would still have your sister; and so your mother is ‘lucky,’ as Mother is not. But I doubt that Mother is capable of fully articulating such a thought, even to herself.”

(Yes! Elyot Grubbe spoke in such grammatical little-pedant sentences even as a child.)

At Basking Ridge, the boys renewed their somewhat theoretical friendship. Each was grateful for the other’s company, though not excessively. Rarely did they see each other outside of mealtimes in clamorous Clapp Dining Hall where they sat at an unoccupied end of a table of losers/exiles, eating their meals mostly in silence. Elyot’s usual mealtime practice was to eat slowly and distractedly while listening to music on his Walkman, and frowning over pages of elaborate musical notations; when Skyler first joined him, Elyot was making his way through the sacred music of Josquin des Prez; he then moved on to Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, performed by Yo-Yo Ma: “The most exquisite of composers, conjoined with the most exquisite of cellists.” Skyler remembered that Elyot had been taking cello lessons in Fair Hills, but when Skyler asked him about music lessons, Elyot stiffened: “No longer. No.” Skyler could see that Elyot didn’t wish to elaborate,
yet Skyler couldn’t resist asking why he’d stopped taking lessons, and Elyot said, sadly: “Mother believed that I was something of a cello prodigy. I was not. But I had ‘promise.’ And so music became too important to me. Especially after—you know. I practiced, and practiced, and practiced and yet—I was not perfect. When I played for my teacher invariably I struck a wrong note. Sometimes I would make it to the very end of a lesson—and then my bow would slip, and I would make a mistake, and have to start over. And the same thing would happen again, and if my teacher didn’t allow me to start over again immediately, I would become ‘agitated.’ We tried to defuse the situation by having me make a mistake—deliberately!—at the outset, and get it over with, but—” As Elyot spoke in his matter-of-fact glum voice, smile-twitches playing at the corners of his mouth, Skyler listened in sympathetic silence thinking
Worse than me! Poor bastard.

Where Elyot immersed himself in exquisite music, Skyler immersed himself in Boring Things. No surprise—were you surprised?—that freaky “Sylvester Rampole” became an A student at Basking Ridge, for his courses provided a corncoopia of Boring Things for him to memorize, that he might, with clockwork precision, like few others at the school, regurgitate out on exams and quizzes. For example, Skyler excelled in his American History class by memorizing lengthy columns of dates: wars—battles—peace treaties; explorers—conquerors—territories; states, when admitted to the Union; dates of elections—inaugurations—deaths of Great Men; Whigs—Federalists—Democrats—Republicans—Free Soil Republicans—Abolitionists—Copperheads—“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”; “Teapot Dome”—“We Stand at Armageddon”—“The Stolen Election” (1876).
*
Yet more comforting was the mind-numbing Periodic Table, for Skyler’s chemistry class; lists of vocabulary words and verb declensions, for Skyler’s French class; lengthy passages put to memory from Macbeth and Julius Caesar, to
confound Mr. Dunwoody who sprang frequent “pop quizzes” on his students, to keep them in a perpetual state of edginess, and who could not be dissuaded from believing that somehow, “Sylvester Rampole” had to be cheating.

Once Skyler met Heidi Harkness, and fell in love with her, his zeal for Boring Things quickly ebbed.

“Elyot? I’d like you to meet…”

Now there was a trio of exiles at the remote table beneath the high mullioned window. Skyler thought We are all we need.

But relations between Heidi and Elyot seemed always under negotiation, unsettled as a wind-sock. At first, when Heidi joined Skyler at mealtimes (which was unpredictably, for Heidi “hated food, on principle”), Elyot was unsmiling, and stiffly responsive; clearly he was dazzled by her, by the mere fact of her; what a shock, that Elyot’s oldest/closest friend, whom surely Elyot had assumed was as unattractive to girls, and as unattracted by girls, as he was! On her side Heidi was wary of Elyot Grubbe whom Skyler had described as his oldest/closest friend from Fair Hills who’d had “something terrible” happen to him—in fact, to his mother—that wasn’t to be talked-of, ever; and was “some kind of weird genius.” Badly Skyler wanted his two friends to like each other, for he could not bear to shun Elyot, now that he had Heidi; and, given Heidi’s moodiness, and unpredictable behavior (of which Skyler was only just beginning to learn), he was fearful of slighting Heidi…“Elyot likes you,” Skyler told Heidi, who bit at her thumbnail until it bled, “—he’s just shy, and isn’t used to girls.”

“I feel that he’s judging me. He is this ‘Eye That Sees’—judging me.”

Skyler was startled by his girlfriend’s words that had the air of being improvised, flung out on the careless shovel of her emotions. “‘Eye That Sees’—what do you mean?”

“Well, two eyes. The way he looks at me.”

“But why did you say—‘Eye That Sees.’ Where did that come from?”

“I—I don’t know, Skyler. Things just come to me.”

“Yes, but from where? ‘Things come to me’—from where?”

“Skyler, I don’t know! You’re hurting me.”

Heidi pulled away. Without knowing what he’d been doing
Skyler had gripped her thin wrist tight, might’ve been turning—twisting?—it. But not on purpose.

SEARCHING
SKYLER RAMPIKE
IN CYBERCESSPOOLSPACE. HAD SHE?

SHAME!

For there was Skyler in grungy black T-shirt, khakis, rotted Nikes and grimy baseball cap in the guise of a local high-school kid hanging about the 7-Eleven on the outskirts of the Historic Village of Basking Ridge. Sucking at a Coke, innocently eyeing the display rack of tabloid papers as he knew he should not, must not, like swallowing an unidentified pill, could be the worst mistake of your life, do not do it. Yet Skyler thumbed through pulp-paper Star Watch, Star Weekly, US Spy, where in October 2003 more than six years after his sister’s death it wasn’t unreasonable for him to assume—or was it?—that he would not come upon a photograph of Bliss Rampike another time, that heartrending little girl-skater captured in a graceful glide on the ice, glamorously made-up little fairy child, a glittery tiara in her curly blond hair Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess 1996 would not leap out at him another time, nor would he be surprised another time by a photograph of his ghastly smiling parents emerging from Trinity Episcopal Church flanked by their staunch Christian supporters Reverend Higley and Mrs. Higley, identified in red banner headlines
BETSEY
&
BIX RAMPIKE: MURDEROUS MUMMY
&
DADDY OR BEREAVED PARENTS?
—surely would not come upon, another time, the ghastly smiling likeness of his own child-self,
SKYLER RAMPIKE: THE SECRET HE HAS NEVER REVEALED
—nor those coyly juxtaposed photos of
GUNTHER RUSCHA, CONFESSED PEDOPHILE-MURDERER
and
SKYLER RAMPIKE: RUSCHA’S FIRST SEX VICTIM?
With a part of his mind monitoring the Indian clerk at the checkout counter at the front of the store even as he pages through sleazy US Spy trying to hold his breath against the sewage-stink of Tabloid Hell wafting to his nostrils, sickening sense of loss, sorrow, defeat, vanity of all human desire, utter helplessness of the kind the minimal consciousness
of the ever-flapping wind-sock must feel, or the careworn Möbius strip turning, turning endlessly with the spinning earth around its sun in a remote galaxy near to collapsing upon itself to the point of a pin, fumbling to turn a page in US Spy to discover what he has been seeking:
HARKNESS.
Not
RAMPIKE
but
HARKNESS.
With vast relief thinking Poor Heidi! But not me for here is a six-page spread of mostly photographs, red banner headline
SEXY EX-YANKEE LEANDER
&
SUPERMODEL STEFFIE: EXPECTING?
Skyler studies the photos of good-looking Leander Harkness, on the pitcher’s mound rearing back to pitch, World Series 1988; in another, Harkness has a shaved head, murk-colored eyes, sneering mouth; in another photo, in his Yankee uniform, he’s leaning over to spit; there are photos of Harkness and his attractive blond wife Alina, and of Harkness’s little daughter Heidi; Harkness, Alina, and Heidi at their town house on East 86th Street, New York City; another of Harkness and daughter Heidi at the waterfront house in Oyster Bay; how tender this Big Daddy is holding Heidi’s little hand; how trusting the little girl gazing up at Big Daddy with an adoring smile; Skyler is struck by his girl’s little-girl self, so very different from her angular, taut, wistful self; at sixteen, Heidi more resembles her murdered mother than she resembles the little girl in these photographs. And, on another page, an unflattering photo of Alina Harkness seemingly unaware of a paparazzo hovering near as, vexed-looking, decidedly dowdy, Alina emerges awkwardly from a car revealing a length of chunky leg:
ALINA HARKNESS,
35
.
Cruelly close by is
SUPERMODEL STEFFIE,
23: gorgeous, pouty Steffie with astonishing breasts, narrow waist and hips, near-naked and preening for the camera in a black silk “slip dress” for Armani. Steffie has satiny straight blond hair, bosomy lips and coy-candid eyes, a younger, slimmer, more beautiful sister of the slain Mrs. Harkness.

The feature ends with a heartbreaking photo of the poodles Yin and Yang peering up at the camera in expressions of doggy bewilderment above the caption Master, no!

Skyler has to laugh. As in the movements of a compass needle, that indicate, to the alert mind, the presence of a mysterious if invisible and inscrutable Authority beyond the world of mere appearance, so too one can discern, beyond the
sludge and sewage of Tabloid Hell, the presence of an invisible, inscrutable, and malevolent Editor.

Skyler learns in
US Spy
that Leander Harkness, even while playing major league baseball for the Yankees, had been arrested several times by police in New York City, Oyster Bay, and St. Bart’s; at the time of his wife’s death there was a restraining order against him issued by a Nassau County judge, forbidding him to come within one hundred feet of both his wife and daughter, or to harass them in any way; Harkness had been tried on first-degree murder charges not once but twice in Nassau County: the first trial in late 2002 had ended in a hung jury, the second in spring 2003 had ended in an acquittal. No other suspects in the murders had ever been investigated and it seemed to be generally believed that, despite the jurors’ decisions, Leander Harkness, acting alone, was the individual who had stabbed his wife to death (fourteen wounds to torso, throat, face) in the Harknesses’ five-million-dollar home on the north shore of Long Island; Harkness had also stabbed to death his wife’s alleged lover (eleven wounds, chest, belly, groin); and, in a macho spillage of rage, of the kind frequently exhibited during Harkness’s high-profile baseball career, he stabbed to death the adorable poodles Yin (curly white fur) and Yang (curly black fur). During the murders, which took place in a ground-floor glass-enclosed room overlooking Long Island Sound, the Harknesses’ fifteen-year-old daughter Heidi was upstairs in her room and would claim to have “slept through” the entire episode, though the murders had occurred at approximately 8
P.M.
of a July night, scarcely dusk. Heidi Harkness would claim that she had not seen or heard her father in the house, or anywhere in the vicinity of the house; nor had she seen him drive away in what Oyster Bay neighbors described as Harkness’s “distinctive” bronze Rolls-Royce coupe. At neither of her father’s trials had Heidi Harkness testified, for “reasons of health.” For fifteen weeks, Heidi had been an inpatient at the Verhangen Treatment Center in Bleek Springs, New York.

Shakily Skyler replaces US Spy on the display rack. Blindly Skyler staggers from the store.

Thinking
Poor Heidi! But not Skyler, this time.

III.

“LOVE YOU.”

“Love you.”

As in twin mirrors reflecting each other to infinity.

HE WOULD BE PROTECTIVE OF HEIDI HARKNESS, SKYLER VOWED. WHAT
he’d discovered in US Spy, Skyler would never reveal to Heidi. Not in their most intimate moments would Skyler suggest
You saw your father that night didn’t you you can tell me Heidi I will never tell a living soul
for it was Skyler’s responsibility, if he loved Heidi Harkness, to shield her from hurt. He was strong enough, he believed. This time.