People Like Us (24 page)

Gus made no effort to raise his voice for Anthony Feliciano to hear him, as if he were voicing to himself for the first time what he felt and what he wanted to do. “I used to think how great it would be if he was murdered in prison. Or raped, by gangs of prisoners. He was an arrogant son of a bitch, and I prayed for something like that to happen to him, but, alas, he has proved to be a model prisoner.”

“You don’t go around expressing these thoughts to people, do you, Mr. Bailey?”

“No.”

“Don’t confide that sort of thing to anyone. It can all be used against you.”

“Strangling, you know, requires a great deal of strength. It’s not every killer’s choice,” said Gus.

“What is it you have in mind, Mr. Bailey?” asked Feliciano. He wondered for a moment if Gus was mad.

“I want his hands put in a giant vise and crushed,” said Gus, calmly, without turning to face Anthony Feliciano.

Feliciano remained silent for a moment, staring at Gus. Then he chuckled. “He won’t be able to strum a guitar anymore,” he said.

“He won’t be able to strangle anyone either,” said Gus.

“
La señora
,” said Immaculata, the housekeeper, “is in the garden.”

Gus walked toward the French doors at the back of the small house. To the right was the dining room. To the left was the living room. The furniture was furniture he had once lived with, in different arrangements and different coverings. On the piano were silver-framed photographs of a family that once was and now was no longer, a family demolished by divorce and disease, estrangement and murder. Gus did not stop to look, other than to notice that Immaculata had been sparing of late with the silver polish, a housekeeping shortcoming that would go unnoticed by Peach, who had long since ceased looking at the photographs, or who looked at them without seeing them. He went out the door and across the lawn to the white stucco wall that ran from the house to the pool house. He pushed open the wrought-iron gate that led into Peach’s small garden. For a moment the wisteria bushes on each side of the gate, dripping in heavy lavender bloom, partially obscured his view of the rose bushes that were Peach’s pride and joy.

“I’m over here,” called Peach, when she heard the wrought-iron gate slam. She was sitting in her wheelchair next to a wooden bench. Gus walked toward her on a grass path between two rose beds with blossoms of every color mixed together, without thought of symmetry or balance. Symmetry was of no concern to Peach. Symmetry, when they were married, had been Gus’s concern, which Peach resisted. Without Gus, it became inconsequential. Her garden flourished with a sort of wildness and lack of design.

Gus knew, even before he reached the place where Peach was sitting, that gardening was not what was occupying her thoughts. Her clippers, her gloves, her wicker basket filled with roses lay on the wooden bench. She was wearing, as always, a caftan, to cover her useless legs, and she had sheltered her skin from the sun with a wide-brimmed straw hat. Next to her, sleeping, was one of the several black cats that were always with her. Gus had not seen her for five months. The disease
that ravaged her beauty and incapacitated her legs had taken five months’ toll.

“Oh, hi,” she said when she saw who it was. She never said more than, “Oh, hi,” to Gus when he came to visit her on his infrequent trips to Los Angeles. She did not register surprise, or delight, or displeasure.

“Hi,” Gus answered, in the same manner. He looked at her for a minute. He used to think there was a natural conclusion to love. He had, after all, been in love before Peach, and after her he had been involved several times, but it was always to Peach that his thoughts and longings returned.

“What kind of a name is Peach?” he asked her the first time they met.

“It’s what I’m called,” she answered simply.

“Gus and Peach. How do you think that sounds?” he asked her.

“It doesn’t really get me,” she replied.

“Maybe Peach and Gus sounds better,” he said.

Actually her name was Rebecca, but if there was ever anyone who was not a Rebecca type, it was she. Her father, whom she loved, called her Peach, and Peach became what she was called.

When Gus asked Peach Prindeville to marry him, he didn’t really expect her to say yes. He thought that she had seen the deficiencies in him, recognized them inwardly, the way women were supposed to. The surprise was when, after thinking about it, she said yes, she would like to marry him. She said it by letter. He was thrilled. He was also terrified. He was in awe of her. Always was. Still was. Awe, of course, was never what Peach wanted.

If a day went by when he did not telephone her, on some pretext, often invented, he missed her. But she rarely telephoned him, and then only for an important reason. Peach would never call Gus to say. “You won’t believe who’s getting married,” or divorced, or who’s inherited a great deal of money, or gone broke. But he would call her with that kind of news, and he
felt sure that although she often sounded indifferent, she enjoyed his calls. Since Peach, he had distanced himself from the possibility of love.

“I’m just in town for overnight,” said Gus.

“Did you tell me you were coming?” she asked. Her question acknowledged that she sometimes forgot things.

“No.”

“Is anything the matter?”

They were people who had known extreme grief and had become able, among themselves, to ask and answer questions pertaining to disaster in an impersonal way.

“I wanted to tell you that I have hired a private detective.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Lefty Flint is getting out of prison.”

“I know,” said Peach.

“You know? Detective Johnston just called me in New York last night. He wanted me to be the one to tell you.”

From a pocket in her caftan, Peach pulled out a cheap white envelope and handed it to Gus. The stamp, imperfectly cornered, said
LOVE
.

“It’s from him,” said Peach.

Gus blanched and felt the sick feeling he always felt when Lefty Flint’s presence was sensed. He moved Peach’s gardening equipment from the bench and sat down next to her. He looked at the envelope but didn’t open it.

“What’s he want?” he asked.

“He wants to come and see me.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“When he’s out, that is.”

Nearly three years earlier Gus and Peach Bailey, separated in marriage but brought together by adversity, had sat side by side in a courtroom for seven weeks, a kind-of couple again. She needed him then, as much as he needed her, and they became, in a way
neither had tried to explain to the other, closer than they had been when they were close. Less than ten feet from them sat Lefty Flint, the killer of their child, holding a Bible in his hands and with a look of piety on his face, dressed with the black-and-white simplicity of a sacristan in a seminary, although he was previously known to be a mocker of God. Peach had shuddered, seeing through it all, the sham of justice they were witnessing, knowing how it was going to end, that poor sweet Becky was going to be forgotten and Lefty Flint was only going to get his wrist slapped, in the name of love.

“Do you have any statement to make?” a television reporter had asked Gus at the conclusion of the trial.

“I sometimes wonder why the prosecution does not have the same relentless passion to convict the guilty that the defense attorneys have to free them,” Gus had answered.

“Get me a gun, will you, Gus?” said Peach, simply.

“Would you kill him if he came here?” asked Gus.

“Of course,” she answered.

“You can’t do that, Peach,” said Gus.

“You don’t think they’d send a crip like me to prison, do you?”

Gus hated it when Peach called herself a crip, but it wasn’t the moment to get into that.

“He can’t come to see you. It’s in violation of his parole if he contacts us. Detective Johnston told me that. He can’t go to visit her grave either,” said Gus. “Let me take this letter and turn it over to the police.”

“Who’s the private detective you’ve hired?”

“Let me put it this way, ‘private detective’ is kind of a classy description of him.”

“Dicey, huh?” she asked.

“Dicey, yeah,” he replied.

“Where did you hear about him?”

“Constantine de Rham.”

“Speaking of dicey,” said Peach, shaking her head dismissively at the mention of Constantine de Rham’s name. “You do know the swellest people, Gus.”

“Lefty Flint’s going to be followed. If he comes anywhere near this house, they’re going to throw him right back in the can.”

“Does Detective Johnston know you’ve hired this private detective?”

“No.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“No.”

Peach nodded. “Wheel me inside, will you, Gus. I have to get back into bed.”

Gus looked at his watch. It was time to leave for the plane to fly back to New York. Peach was lying in bed looking at a soap opera on television.

“Turn off the sound, will you?” said Gus.

Without replying, Peach felt around on her large bed between slumbering cats, mail, magazines, books, packages of cigarettes, and an assortment of Cricket lighters until she found the remote control for the television. Three times a day Immaculata came in to straighten out the jumble that the bed became. Peach adjusted the remote control but continued to stare at the set after the sound stopped.

“Time to go,” he said.

“You just arrived.”

“I’m going to Paris the day after tomorrow.”

“What’s in Paris?”

“I’m interviewing someone for my gigolo story.”

“Is Paris safe? There’re a lot of bombings in Paris these days.”

“Just my luck to get killed on my way to interview the new ladyfriend of a bisexual gigolo who married an old lady millionairess and inherited all her money.”

“Where do you dig up these awful people you always write about?” asked Peach.

“The gigolo told me he never met the person yet he couldn’t get it up for, if the price was right.”

“Those people might fascinate you, Gus, but they don’t fascinate me,” said Peach.

“Don’t knock it, Peach,” said Gus evenly. “It keeps my mind occupied. It keeps me from going nuts. It keeps me from dwelling on things I can’t do anything about.”

“I know, Gus. I’m not criticizing you. I might even envy you, now that I come to think of it.”

“I have to go.”

Peach continued to stare at the television set. People were yelling at each other, but the sound was still off. In bed, she was barricaded from him. What had once been a coffee table, now piled high with the accoutrements of an invalid’s life, ran the length of her bed. Her wheelchair blocked the opening between the end of the table and her bed. Gus moved her wheelchair aside and bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

“I’m sorry I made you unhappy, Peach,” he said.

Peach knew what he meant without his having to spell it out for her. She knew he was talking about back then, when they were married, not now.

“I’m not much for looking back, Gus,” she said, staring at the set.

“I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”

“Okay. You told me.”

“Aren’t you ever going to let up on me?”

“Oh, Gussie, come on. That was a long time ago.”

He took hold of her foot and squeezed it. “So long, Peach,” he said.

She understood there was affection in the gesture. “Good-bye, Gus,” she answered.

Every time Gus drove out Wilshire Boulevard past the cemetery where Becky was buried, he beeped twice on his car horn in greeting to her, wherever she was.

19

“That’s where the butler found poor Constantine,” said Yvonne Lupescu, pointing to the dark spot on the Portuguese carpet.

In the week following Constantine de Rham’s suicide attempt, Yvonne Lupescu knew happiness. “Yvonne,” the tabloid papers called her, simply Yvonne, with no last name, signifying her newfound prominence as the “companion,” which the papers always used with quotation marks, to the mysterious Constantine de Rham, who had, apparently, shot himself after he thought the Baroness Lupescu was going to leave him.

“No, no, I would never leave my darling Constantine,” Yvonne was quoted as saying to Mavis Jones, the Broadway columnist, to whom she gave an exclusive interview, sitting in the very room where Constantine de Rham had been found bleeding. “It was all a terrible misunderstanding. We love each other.”

“
WE LOVE EACH OTHER
,”
SAYS YVONNE
, ran the headline in Mavis Jones’s column.

“Where are you from, Baroness?” asked Mavis, trying to place Yvonne’s accent.

“Paris,” replied Yvonne.

For six days Yvonne gave daily bulletins from the hospital steps on Constantine’s condition, dressed always in new suits that might have been from Chanel, but weren’t, but she kept her pithy quotes for Mavis Jones, who was, after all, syndicated in sixty newspapers throughout the country. “He squeezed my hand,” she said. Or, “Today he begged me not to leave him.”

Yvonne wanted her prominence to last forever, but, alas, Faye Converse, the film star, was robbed of
all her jewels by a masked gunman in the elevator of the Rhinelander Hotel, and Yvonne could only get Mavis’s assistant, Claire, on the telephone, as Mavis was having an exclusive interview with Faye Converse. The story was moved to the back pages and then disappeared entirely, and Yvonne complained bitterly to Yang, the butler, that the city had no heart.