The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia. Страница 22

"I left the bedroom and quietly shut the door and went down the hall to my office," I say. "As you know, when I do autopsies, I take sections of every organ and sometimes of wounds, as well. The tissue goes to the histology lab where it's made into slides I must review. I can never keep up with micro-dictations and routinely take slide folders home, and of course the police asked me all about this. It's funny, but my normal activities seem mundane and beyond question until they are inspected by others. That's when I realize I don't live like other people."

"Why do you think the police wanted to know about slides you might have in your house?" Anna asks.

"Because they wanted to know about everything." I go back to my story about Benton, describing being in my office, bent over my microscope, lost in heavy metal-stained neurons that looked like a swarm of one-eyed purple and gold creatures with tentacles. I felt a presence behind me and turned to find Benton standing in my open doorway, his face filled with an eerie, ominous glow, like St. Elmo's fire before lightning strikes.

Can't sleep! he asked me in a mean, sarcastic tone that didn't sound like him. I pushed my chair back from my powerful Nikon microscope. If you could teach that thing to fuck, you wouldn 't need me at all, he said, and his eyes flew at me with the bright fury of the cells I was looking at. Dressed in pajama bottoms, Benton was pale in the partial light spreading out from the lamp on my desk, his chest heaving and shiny with sweat, veins roping in his arms, his silver hair plastered to his forehead. I asked him what in the world was the matter, and he ordered me back to bed, jabbing his finger at me.

At this point, Anna interrupts me. "Nothing else might have preceded this? No forewarning whatsoever?" She knew Benton, too. This wasn't Benton. This was an alien who had invaded Benton's body.

"Nothing," I answer her. "No warning." I rock slowly, nonstop. Smoldering wood pops. "The last place I wanted to be with him that moment was in bed. He may have been the FBI's star psychological profiler, but for all of his prowess at reading others, he could be as cold and uncommunicative as a stone. I had no intention of staring up at the dark all night while he lay with his back to me, mute, hardly breathing. But what he wasn't was violent or cruel. He had never talked to me in such a demeaning, abusive way. If we had nothing else, Anna, we had respect. We always treated each other with respect."

"And did he tell you what was wrong?" She presses me on this.

I smile bitterly. "When he made the crude comment about teaching my microscope to fuck, that told me." Benton and I had grown comfortable living in my house, yet he never stopped feeling like a guest. It is my house and everything about it Is me. The last year of his life, he was disillusioned with his career, and as I look back on it now, he was tired and without purpose and feared getting old. All of it eroded our intimacy. The sexual part of our relationship became an aban- doned airport that looked normal from a distance but had no one in the tower. No landings, no takeoffs, only an occasional touch-and-go because we thought we should, because of the accessibility and old habit, I guess.

"When you did have sex, who usually initiated it?" Anna asks.

"Eventually, just him. More out of desperation than desire. Maybe even frustration. Yes, frustration," I decide.

Anna watches me, her face in shadows that deepen as the fire dies. Her elbow is propped on the armrest, her chin resting on her index finger in what has become the pose I associate with our intense time together these past few nights. Her living room has become a dark confessional booth where I can be emotionally newborn and naked and feel no shame. I don't see our sessions as therapy, but rather as a priesthood of friendship that is sacred and safe. I have begun to tell another human being what it is like to be me.

"Let's go back to the night he got so angry," Anna navigates. "Can you remember when this was, exactly?"

"Just weeks before his murder." I talk calmly, mesmerized by coals that look like glowing alligator skin. "Benton knew my space needs. Even on nights when we made love, it wasn't unusual for me to wait until he fell asleep and get up with the stealth of an adulterer to slip inside my office down the hall. He was understanding about my infidelities." I feel Anna smile in the dark. "He rarely complained when he reached for me and felt an empty space on my side of the bed," I explain. "He accepted my need to be alone, or seemed to. I never knew how much my nocturnal habits hurt him until that night when he came into my office."

"Was it really your nocturnal habits?" Anna inquires. "Or your aloofness?"

"I don't think of myself as aloof."

"Do you think of yourself as someone who connects with others?"

I analyze, searching everywhere inside me for a truth I have always feared.

"Did you connect with Benton?" Anna goes on. "Let's start with him. He was your most significant relationship. Certainly, he was the longest."

"Did I connect with him?" I hold up the question like a ball I am about to serve, not sure of the angle or spin or how hard. "Yes and no. Benton was one of the finest, kindest men I've ever known. Sensitive. Deep and intelligent. I could talk to him about anything."

"But did you? I get the impression you didn't." Anna, of course, is on to me.

I sigh. "I'm not sure I've ever talked to anybody about absolutely anything."

"Perhaps Benton was safe," she suggests.

"Perhaps," I reply. "I do know there were deep places in me he never reached. I also never wanted him to, didn't want to get that intense, that close. I suppose starting out as we did may be part of the explanation. He was married. He always went home to his wife, to Connie. It went on for years. We were on opposite sides of a wall, separated, only touching when we could sneak. God, I would never do that again with anybody, I don't care who."

"Guilt?"

"Of course," I answer. "Every good Catholic feels guilt. In the beginning, I felt terribly guilty. I've never been the type to break rules. I'm not like Lucy, or should I say she's not like me. If rules are mindless and ignorant, she breaks them right and left. Hell, I don't even get speeding tickets, Anna."

It is here that she leans forward and holds up a hand. This is her signal. I have said something important. "Rules," she says. "What are rules?"

"A definition? You want a definition of rules?"

"What are rules to you? Your definition, yes."

"Right and wrong," I reply. "What is legal versus illegal. Moral versus immoral. Humane versus inhumane."

"Sleeping with a married person is immoral, wrong, inhumane?"

"If nothing else, it's stupid. But yes, it's wrong. Not a fatal error or unforgivable sin or illegal, but dishonest. Yes, definitely dishonest. A broken rule, yes."

"Then you admit you are capable of dishonesty."

"I admit I'm capable of being stupid."

"But dishonest?" She won't let me evade the question.

"Everyone is capable of anything. My affair with Benton was dishonest. I indirectly lied because I hid what I was doing. I presented a front to others, including Connie, that was false. Simply false. So am I capable of deception, of lying? Clearly I am." The confession depresses me deeply.

"What about homicide? What is the rule about homicide? Wrong? Immoral? Is it always wrong to kill? You have killed," Anna says.

"In self-defense." On this point I feel strong and certain. "Only when I had no choice because the person was going to kill me or someone else."

"Did you commit a sin? Thou shall not kill''

"Absolutely not." Now I am getting frustrated. "It's easy to make judgments about matters one looks at from the distant vantage point of morality and idealism. It's different when you're confronted by a killer who's holding a knife to another person's throat or reaching for a pistol to shoot you. The sin would be to do nothing, to allow an innocent person to die, to allow yourself to die. I feel no remorse," I tell Anna.