The Murderer Next Door

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The Murderer Next Door

Rafael Yglesias

for Lewis

Contents

THE MURDER

GRIEF

THE MURDERER NEXT DOOR

UNREMEMBERED SINS

REMEMBERING

A BIOGRAPHY OF RAFAEL YGLESIAS

THE MURDER

BEFORE THE MURDER I WAS GRATEFUL TO LIVE WHERE I live, to work where I work—for all the happy facts. My only fear, besides the timeless one, was that it might change. Count your blessings, I told myself, don’t be smug because everything is as it should be.

The happy facts—what were they? Nothing extraordinary. I was married, a partner in an excellent New York law firm; I had successful, interesting friends. Not taken for granted: I was proud, even vain, of my life.

Why should I have been so glad to be respectable? You know, of course. I was born poor. Born poor in the town of Sargentville, Maine, the daughter of a failed lobsterman, Sherman Gray. My mother too. And his mother, for that matter. All the way back into the gray mist of Maine history, my people have lost their boats to the banks, their traps to rivals. I’ve tried to pinpoint the first luckless Gray without success. Precision isn’t required, however. All the early settlers were descendants of criminals, exiled or escaped or indentured to America. Generations of Grays have lived as if imprisoned in Sargentville, paying penalty for unremembered sins.

Bullshit, Naomi used to answer, the Grays aren’t especially degenerate. Look at the Boston Brahmins. They’re the children of pirates. And they haven’t moved for three hundred years either.

I was paroled at age eight by Naomi Perlman. She had come to our front yard to buy crabmeat. The crabs were caught inadvertently in Father’s lobster traps, and picked clean each morning by my mother’s reddened and scratched hands. I peeked around one of several rotting cars in my father’s front yard to get an eyeful of her—a new rich summer person. Naomi saw my straight and yellow hair first, so bright that even my filthy condition—there was grime embedded in every pore—couldn’t dim it.

Whose beautiful blond hair is that? she asked. Naomi’s tone wasn’t prim and reedy, the usual Boston Brahmin voice; she squawked her question, an aggressive goose, neck extended, chin forward. She had a big animated face, a thick brow, long nose, strong jaw, knobby chin—and her hair was a wild bush, electrified by her brain, sizzling up from her scalp. My daughter, Mother answered her in a mumble, eyes cast down—the ashamed, unworthy look of the poor.

What did you say! Naomi barked at Mother.

That startled Mother into a normal volume. She’s Molly, my little girl.

Molly! Naomi walked toward me in her peasant stride, each foot going as wide as it did forward, a three-year-old’s gait.

I was drawn out to Naomi from my hiding place without being aware of it, mesmerized by her brown eyes, big and gentle, curious and willing to love.

I’m Naomi, she said, and offered her hand. Would you like to earn some extra money this summer? I need a mother’s helper. Tall for my age, she mistook me for ten or eleven. I wanted to go with her anyway, and Mother was glad to have me out of the way, especially if it meant I could earn a few dollars.

Poor Naomi, I wasn’t much help that summer. She did most of the work, not teaching me to care for her one-year-old son, Joshua, but telling me of the world, especially her startling (to me) statement that women were every bit as smart and strong as men. She handed me books to read aloud while she amused her baby boy, defining the difficult words, explaining their amazing ideas. She told me what I should love, what I should hate—and that I should always think for myself.

Her husband was Sam Perlman, an ex-movie-studio president, rich from the script he was given to produce as part of his termination package. The picture had been one of the highest grossing movies of the 1950s, and although he had no other successes, those profits were enough to live on for the rest of his life, even if he turned out to be immortal. Sam was twenty years older than Naomi: she was the adventure of his middle age, a youthful tonic, vigorous, brash, and fertile. An apparently independent wife, she gathered ideological causes for him to support, and netted lost souls, such as me, to help her redeem. I don’t mean to make fun of Naomi. Although she was loud and angry and spoiled, she had the bursting, generous heart of a puppy scrambling after you for your attention and love.

I spent my days and most evenings at her house that summer. From the beginning I was made equal: freer, more respected, more loved than I was at home. I sat pretty, not serving, at her elegant dinners. After a month, Naomi became obsessed with the notion that I should go to a better school than the local one. By Labor Day Sam offered to send me to a boarding school.

Naomi and I went together to discuss the idea with my parents. Sam had objected: You don’t know how they’ll react. You’d better—

Shut up, Sam. Naomi put the flat of her hand on his bald spot whenever dismissing him good-naturedly. We don’t need Big Daddy.

I thought we did. I was scared. My stomach gurgled in the passenger seat of Naomi’s Volvo while we drove to my parents’ trailer. The afternoon sun—we timed ourselves to arrive after their dinner at four—flashed across Naomi’s deeply tanned, thick legs. In an effort not to intimidate my parents, she was dressed casually in shorts and a T-shirt. I guess she hadn’t waxed recently because I remember her legs were hairy; usually black, the hairs were tinted red and brown by the sun, flashing as the light penetrated roadside maples, pines, and birches. We passed one yellow-leafed birch, an early victim to fall, standing alone among still-green brothers.

Look at that! I pointed to the birch. She’s turned.

Beautiful, Naomi said dully. She never noticed scenery, she seemed only to see people.

Why do you think one of them turns before all the others? Is it sick? What makes it different? I asked.

That’s clever. She smiled as if I’d made a joke, glancing away from the road to look at me. Her smile faded at my puzzled expression. She returned to her driving and frowned, worried.

What’s wrong? I asked, knowing I had missed a chance to be clever.

Do you really want me to ask your parents to let us send you to school?

I told you so already!

It might hurt their feelings.

They won’t like it, I agreed, and my stomach hurt, twisting.

She stopped the car. Should I turn back?

I remember staring at the black dashboard. The ashtray was pulled out in the middle, filled with butts, its metal smudged gray. My eyes trailed to her toasted legs, flesh squashed out on the seat, red and brown hairs curled on top. Naomi did something shocking to the locals: she sunbathed topless on her beach, unconcerned if someone happened by. She had big breasts, much larger than my mother’s, and I thought about them then, sitting in the car, although of course they were covered. I wondered how big mine would be. I worried they wouldn’t be nice. Let’s go back, I said, giving up.

We returned in silent defeat. Again, Sam offered to go with us. For an answer, I burst into tears, upset by the confusion in my heart, a strong desire to be free of my dreary poverty, and the equally strong fear of a world I didn’t know. Naomi hugged me. I cried into her T-shirt, and then sneezed from her perfume. When I had calmed down, they wrapped me in a blanket and I sat on the floor in front of their huge stone fireplace, big enough for me stand in if I crouched a bit, watching a birch log burn. I thought back to the yellow-leafed tree that had somehow puzzled my will. Naomi brought me a cup of hot chocolate and stared through the fire, unresponsive to the noisy crackling bark, pensive as she knitted one thick eyebrow with her fingers. I thought the oddness of her features was beautiful: long nose, black eyebrows, protruding forehead, argumentative chin—an angry storm of flesh—while her gentle brown eyes were calm and loving at the center. She seemed nervous, twisting her eyebrow hairs, her right foot jiggling.

I’ve let her down, I thought, and felt cold in the warmth of the blanket, shivering from the hot fire. I want to go. I’m sorry. I changed again.

Naomi’s foot calmed, she raised her head from the fire and stared at me, the brown eyes quizzical. But she didn’t speak. The birch in the fireplace began to whistle. Father used to say wood made that noise when it was about to be split open by the heat.

Sam answered. He was behind me on the couch. Take your time. I can call your folks, tell them you’re sleeping here—

I want to ask them. I’m not scared anymore. Sure enough, the log cracked and flames appeared from its middle.

I scared you the last time, Naomi whispered.

As soon as she said that, I knew she was right. She had weakened my resolve. Somehow, my inspiration had also been my nemesis. Yes, I answered. I want to go to that school. Let’s go ask them.

You’re the bravest girl in the world, Naomi said.

We got back into the Volvo. This time I covered my eyes when we passed the prematurely yellow birch.

My mother and father were unsettled by Naomi’s appearance. They both came out of the house to meet us in the yard, and they didn’t ask her in, as if there were something horrible inside she couldn’t be allowed to see. Mother nervously pushed down on the legs of her jeans while Naomi talked, the way a girl might if her skirt was too short. Father held the brochure about the school in his hand without opening it, without grasping it in his fingers, without a glance at its contents. To me it described a paradise.

You’ll pay? were the first words my father said.

Of course, Naomi said. We’ll pay for the extras too, clothes, books.

They’ll take her? my mother asked.

I’m sure they will, Naomi said. She was scared of them, or their reaction: I could tell from her formal tone. Her lack of nerve surprised me again.

Do her good, my mother mumbled to Father, glancing shyly, fearfully, at him.

I felt no worry now. I was happy. The decision had been made and I knew that it was right. Father wouldn’t have to worry about paying for me, Mother would have less work, and I could be part of the other world, where it didn’t freeze for seven months, where you could become anything you wanted.

Molly, my father said, moving to stand in front of me, the brochure pointed at my chin. Don’t you mind being so far from home? We can’t come get you if you’re homesick, you know. Can’t afford to, anyways—

If she needs to come back, that’ll be—

I have to hear you say it, Molly. What should have been my father’s soft fair skin had been enameled by the ocean’s shadeless sun, browned and hardened, a dark setting for his blue, blue eyes. They shined bold and clear, looking at me without love or pity or worry or anger. Merely curiosity.

I don’t mind, I said, and then my stomach fell, knowing I had made a mistake. I hadn’t understood his question until after I answered: he’d meant, didn’t I mind not being his daughter anymore?

He hit me. Naomi told the story to anyone who expressed the slightest doubt that she had done the right thing. On many a summer evening I lay awake upstairs, furious because I overheard Naomi whisper it to an amazed houseguest.

Every thought in my head exploded from the blow. He used his fat callused hand, the same hand that held the brochure, stuck to his open palm. Its slick paper slid across my jaw. My plummeting face hit first. I stayed down, tasting the smelly ground between my teeth, mashing my mouth in even farther to eat the soil as it mixed with the blood on my lips, wanting to burrow into the shitty earth. Mother, of course, said nothing. Naomi screeched at Father. He ignored her. Instead, he stared down at me with blue, blue eyes, glowing in their sockets.

Take her, he said, watching me writhe. But she don’t come with a money-back guarantee. He silenced Naomi with a turn of his head. She changes her mind, you’re stuck with the bitch.

I NEVER CHANGED MY MIND. I VISITED MY PARENTS ON holidays and, of course, saw them summers. Mother wanted me to spend more time, or so she said. I’ll be blunt: once you live without the smell of fish, the headache of black flies, the beery thick-mouthed jokes of drag-racing heroes, you’re happy to face a panhandler, a cockroach, and hear a construction worker’s smooching call. Without a defense against the outdoors, the country is filthy: a seasonal parade of mushy snow, chunks of mud, pillars of sand, smears of grass, whittles of bark, windowsill graves of dead bugs, and the agonized noise of trapped living insects. Then there’s the live-in relationship with weather: cold knifing at the border of every window, sneaking up your legs from a floorboard, blasting your back at every exit and entry; or the ripe smell of chest-heavy humidity, the bone-aching damp of mist and fog. When you’re poor, the first thing you notice about a wealthy home, whether it’s an apartment on Fifth Avenue or a weekend house in Vermont, is the tight vacuum seal against Nature, the absolute control of environment. I never really looked back to that trailer or my sad parents. I’m not proud of my flight, I don’t say that my father’s slap gave me a right to leave. I had to take my chance at freedom: the pursuit of happiness is ruthless.

I’m concerned that you not think Naomi was capricious or thoughtless or inconstant. She tried hard to repair the damage done to my family’s feelings. She nagged me to write them, spend my holidays there (at least for a few years), invited them to dinner (Father said no), and squashed the terrible snobbishness I exhibited as a teenager.

I wince at the memory of me at fifteen, dressed in preppie clothes, the caw of my Maine accent yawned into a lockjawed drawl, parading about Naomi’s glassed-in dining room among her startled guests. I had had a glass of wine with dinner—and another secretly in the kitchen—before Naomi stopped me from pouring more at the table. Over dessert, a middle-aged woman began an anecdote about driving on an inland road, passing shacks and trailers, yards full of wrecked cars, describing the routine sloppiness of the poor with a kind of thrilled horror, a pleased superiority disguised as compassion. Those poor people, she concluded.

Why do they sit in their cars? her husband said. Have you noticed? They sit—

There’s nothing to do. Naomi talked over him. She didn’t return my look, so I knew she thought the conversation was hurting my feelings and that confirmed my belief I had something to be ashamed of. The government has completely failed to—

It’s like their porch. The husband ignored Naomi. His wife caught my eye. She smiled at me and nudged him. But he didn’t take the hint to be quiet. They have the highest retardation rate in the country, did you know that?

That’s on the islands! Naomi waved her ornate antique silver serving fork at him. You don’t know what you’re talking about! During the winters, those islands used to be cut off and there was a lot of inbreeding—

They’re boneless! he went on, and most of the company laughed. Have you seen them in the malls? Boneless people, waddling through the aisles. Now they were all laughing, except for Naomi. What did he mean? I wondered, feeling the heat of shame gather about my face.

That’s disgusting! Naomi shouted, and flicked the fork in his direction, spotting him with a fleck of blueberry pie juice. You’re being incredibly insensitive! It makes me sick. Who the fuck do you think you are? What do your people on the Lower East Side look like?

While Naomi ranted at him, the man finally looked at me, and obviously remembered who I was. I couldn’t meet his eyes. Boneless People, I repeated in my head, the words worrying me. They made me feel I came from creatures—science-fiction aliens—and that I would never be normal. I Am a Teenage Boneless Person.

You would know, he said to me, a bold look in his eye. He must have decided that if he pretended to be unashamed, we would all assume he meant no insult. Why do they sit in their cars in their driveways?

Don’t be a schmuck, Sam said, wearily.

They drink, I said. I had a part to play, I realized with relief. I could be the Boneless Person Expert. They can roll up the windows, smash a couple of mosquitoes, and know that no more will get in. They can neck. It’s like an extra room.

I see. He nodded. Everyone seemed to relax. I looked at Naomi for applause. She smiled gently.

Anyone want more pie? she asked.

They’re trash, I added, greedy for their attention and approval. Can’t read. Don’t know any better. Drunks. Trash. I nodded sagely. They act pretty retarded, so maybe they are—

I don’t remember how Naomi began, I don’t really remember her whole speech. She shamed me, said I knew better than anyone that Maine’s poor were victims, suffering from lack of opportunity. While she talked I sensed that every eye was on me, every mouth shut to restrain either amusement or pity. The lecture was painful. I had no real family, only Naomi. She meant to teach me the same compassion she had felt for me, but when she said, You were one of them, you know how hard their life is, I heard only her separation from me, that I was different from her, from her smart guests, from the world I now inhabited. I gripped my chair on the sides, pressed my fingertips against the wood, wishing to shut my eyes and disappear, yet also not wanting to show any of them that I was bothered. I didn’t feel angry, or sorry for myself. I felt unworthy.

Molly’s not one of them, the troublemaker said. I guess he meant to be charming. She’s got plenty of bones! She’s got great bones. The table laughed with pleasure and relief.

I tried to, but a sob came out, and I swallowed it quickly before they heard. I’d better clear, I said, and stood, grabbing two pie plates before rushing out to the kitchen. It’s over, I thought with relief, glad to have a chore to distract me.

Naomi appeared with more plates. She leaned against the sink, studying me. Did you understand what I was saying?

I nodded, prayed she would stop.

"Don’t become one of those people who despises what they are and where they came from. You have nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it should make you even prouder. And—this is important—it should make you want to help others. Because you know, you of all people know that if given the chance, any of those kids could lead better lives. Understand?"

Naomi couldn’t have guessed what that meant to a nervous fifteen-year-old, a lonely girl who worried she didn’t belong at the school she attended, or with the adults who cared for her. It meant to me that I wasn’t special to Naomi—one in million she had chosen out of love and admiration—but merely a social experiment, a laboratory mouse. I lied, said I understood. She hugged me, said, I love you, and went back to her guests.

Why didn’t I ask her? Why didn’t I say, am I no different from the others? Could you have gone into the next driveway and found another Molly Gray just as good? Because I thought she would routinely reassure me, that she was too kindhearted to tell the truth except by accident.

I was uneasy in the kitchen. Their voices intruded and I worried there would be more lectures, more hammering on my heart. The house was stuffy with their talk, smart talk that I had flattered myself before dinner I was equal to, and I now hated, thinking it was what disconnected me from Naomi, what had made me feel so miserable and alone.

I stepped outside into the cool air. Naomi and Sam owned a long stretch of private beach on the bay, dark and still that night. Above, there was a bright cloudless sky, exploded with stars, not vast, but crowded with life, a Manhattan skyline of the cosmos, far away, yet beckoning, knowable.

Walking down to the shore, I fought my feelings, tried to swallow their bulk. I told myself—and this was the only time I considered going back—that I should return home. I could drive there myself in a Volvo not too different from the one that had taken me away.

Go now and in a few years you’ll forget all the nice things, I told myself. Be strong—go now or you’ll always feel this sad and unsure. I thought of all my so-called friends at school and admitted that though they were polite, they were not comfortable with me. Somewhat precociously, I knew that soon I would be too old, too different, too spoiled to go back. If I returned right away, the beautiful things, the marvelous ideas, the grand ambitions might become nothing more than a fantasy, something to hug at night while I slept next to my drunk and snoring husband, also dreaming of some other life.

Giving up the struggle to pull even with all the bright rich kids, dropping my oars to drift with the current in an aimless boat appealed to me. I wanted to be defeated, to lose, to be free of freedom. I’m weak, I decided, surprised, because I thought that’s why I had been chosen, for my strength.

You made a mistake, I said out loud to Naomi, staring back at the glassed-in porch where she and her guests lingered over coffee, free now to openly scare themselves with stories of the weird Boneless People. I’m not strong enough, I bawled, overflowing with self-pity.

The bay can amplify a voice and carry it for miles: mine seemed to echo among the pines. Ashamed that I might have been heard, I covered my mouth and panted through my fingers.

Shut your trap, you stupid girl, I said to myself, imitating how my father scolded when he came home tired. I’m sick of your bawling. My Maine accent had returned; I had flattered myself it was gone. Don’t you put your ugly red face in my food. Shut up! I snapped my head back as if I’d just been slapped. Now go to your room and shut your ugly mouth!

You’ve gone mad, I thought. I spooked myself. Scared, I ran to the freezing water, knelt on the rocks, ignoring the sharp biting circles of the barnacles, and put my hot face in the bay, hoping its ice cold would shock me out of lunacy.

When I returned to the house, after all the guests were gone, to face Naomi’s nosy, worried, even guilty questions, I had wrought a change. I was no longer a soft and willing clay for her gentle, and sometimes cruel hands. I had been fired, too hard for any more shaping.

SINCE I AM TELLING THE STORY OF THE PEOPLE I’VE LOST or fought hard to keep, then our next stop is New York. I am a brand-new associate in the law firm where I eventually made partner. After two years in the city—as was the case in boarding school, college, and graduate school—I had few friends, although I had many acquaintances, dated a lot, and went to my favorite kind of social gathering, namely large, loud, anonymous parties. I had no close friend, no best friend, until I met Wendy Sonnenfeld.

That happened in SoHo, in a dark loft, blaring with music and quaking with dancers. Our dates knew each other and introduced us. Later we went out to breakfast at an all-night diner on Canal Street. Over pancakes, Wendy told me she had gone to Hunter Elementary, a school for bright children. It ruined me, she said. She claimed she suffered from a self-imposed pressure; that unless she was busy with an extraordinary endeavor, she felt she was squandering her time. That was her story. She presented it, a calling card, to the people we knew in those days, a gang of writers, actors, and painters every generation seems to see when they’re young and then lose touch with by middle age. Maybe the gang are all Peter Pans and can be known only by the young. Wendy had reason to expect a lot of herself. She was talented. She played the flute so well I was amazed she hadn’t pursued music professionally. On her walls she had preserved two paintings from that phase of her artistic wanderings, each stunning and quite different. Often people mistook them for the work of an established artist. There were several etchings, a sculpture, a notebook of poems, and soon, a restless dissatisfied trail, the tracks of a search party. It’s not that she didn’t have an identity—she had no conviction her talent was worth the effort.

I’m not a genius, she’d say.

So what?

I’m not even that good.

So what? I was pushing Zen those days. Process, not results.

I don’t have a vision.

So…? I wavered. Even I thought a vision might be essential.

Artists have vision, Wendy assured me.

I got wise to her eventually. She secretly thought she was an ordinary person, a quiet stream accidentally diverted into this babbling brook of so-called artists. Ashamed to be a regular person, she was creative out of obligation.

In time, I told her my story. Not the dinner table version, but the details of Maine’s cold grubby poverty, my unhappy parents, and the sediment of gritty humiliation that must be swallowed at the bottom of even the clearest broth of charity. I took the risk she would think I was ungrateful to Naomi.

She didn’t. She understood. From then on she was my best friend because I knew I could be myself with her. But I didn’t think the reverse was true, no matter how frank she was with me, because it seemed that everyone was her closest friend. Wendy was totally open in those days, expressing her feelings with reckless ease—a bird singing in the public park, unconcerned by who might overhear, laugh, or be moved. In fact, she did have an unusually appealing voice, warm and melodic and inviting. She worked the phones at the real-estate office of a friend when she needed extra cash, and men often asked her out without having seen her, excited and in love, just with her conversation. You see why I liked her so, she was everything I’m not: emotional, friendly, trusting, charming, comfortable with humanity.

I don’t know why she liked me. I really don’t. I do know when I realized my primacy among her one million friends. She appeared at my door one Saturday morning, holding up a bag of take-out coffee and artery-stopping jelly doughnuts. Are you alone? she asked.

I don’t wake up quickly, but I forced myself to fight against grumpiness. Yeah, sure, come in. I can make you good coffee.

I don’t want good coffee. I’ve made a life choice, and I can only drink Greek-coffee-shop coffee on momentous occasions. She glanced at my bed—I lived in a studio apartment and the dining table was within view—and said, Looks too messy to have been just one person sleeping.

I kicked him out in the middle of the night.

She laughed. Did you really?

He was moving around too much.

Wonder Woman, she commented, a nickname she used for me. I had objected the first time, protesting that it was derisive. No, she had answered, I mean it admiringly. But from then on she called me Wonder Woman only when we were alone, presumably so that I couldn’t claim strangers might misinterpret. Wendy took out a doughnut, a snowball of sugar, and bit down hard, with exaggerated appetite. There was a puff of white smoke, a confectionary explosion, flakes falling on her jeans. A dot stuck, clownish, on the tip of her nose; jelly oozed at the corners of her mouth. Hmmm, she hummed, orgasmically.

The thought of that much sugar turned my stomach. I winced and looked away.

I’m gibbon ub bart, she mumbled.

What!

Wendy opened one of the coffees, raised it greedily to her mouth, the steam arching in ahead of the liquid. I’ve given up art! she said after a swallow. Fuck it, she said. Fuck creativity. It’s time to do something useful, something that works. So you’ll be my only friend from now on. She opened the other coffee and brought it to me. I’m going to become a teacher.

A teacher?

‘Those who can, do,’ she said. I’m gonna teach retarded children.

Yeech, I said, not about the coffee, although the taste reminded me of burned wood.

She stared at me for a moment, surprised. Aren’t you impressed with my compassion, my self-sacrifice, my worthiness?

No, I said. What a depressing job.

From the way she beamed at me you would have thought I had been supportive.