Murder, She Did Read online

I pondered how to phrase the obvious answer. Amber stomped all over my feelings, but I tried to protect hers. Because I had the benefit of a stable home life and true love, I could be more considerate of her emotions. “Maybe they’re good people, like you. And they don’t want to go to bars or join Singles clubs, like you. And maybe their friends don’t know any good single women.” I thought maybe that last idea was pushing it too hard because the world was crawling with terrific women who’d been dumped, traded in, exchanged, or ignored. The thing was, they were all around my age, and therefore invisible to men blinded by the thought of a fresh out of the factory brand-new model.

  “And you know what they mean by ‘long-term relationship’?” she asked. “Overnight on the first date. It’s all a lie, a fake, a come-on. I’m too depressed to try.”

  “You’re self-defeating.”

  Amber shook her head. Her hair was the color of burnt sugar, and her skin radiated a bright heat, as if she’d spent the day in the sun, which she never did. But I could see her light dimming. Amber’s fuel was a special kind of hope, the expectation that she’d get whatever she wanted, and she was running low.

  Frankly, I was tired of Amber’s self-centered romantic woes. I had a life, too. And worries of my own. Two of the kids needed braces, my part-time job at Krafty Korner was shaky, as was the business itself. And Hal worked too hard, flying all over and exhausting himself to keep us afloat. But none of that ever came up at these dinners. All we talked about was how she hadn’t found a husband yet.

  “I simply couldn’t go through the ads,” she said, “picking and choosing like a beggar in a used clothing bin.”

  “Amber, sometimes you make me so mad, I want to shake you. If you liked being single, that’d be okay.” Unfathomable, but okay. “But you hate it. You tell me you want to meet somebody, and you say it’s impossible. I may be an innocent housewife, but I know you have to do something to flag down Prince Charming before he gallops out of sight.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Those ads…the things some of them want! The arrangements they propose! People like you—married women seeking a man for an hour a week. Or a man and a woman. Or a man and a woman and chains and sticky tape or God knows what.”

  “If you don’t want it, you don’t buy it. What’s so hard about that?”

  She stared at me, as if she couldn’t understand that basic law of shopping.

  I took a deep breath and admitted to myself that once again, if I wanted something done, like an end to Amber’s table talk, I’d best do it myself. “All right then,” I said. “I’ll do your searching. I’ll read the ads, pick out only those that meet your criteria, and toss away the rest. I am a smart shopper and you won’t do better than me. Beyond that, I have absolutely no suggestions.”

  She agreed to my clipping service. I wasn’t surprised. Amber was always happy to benefit from somebody else’s work. “Only please, please,” she said, “don’t tell a living soul what we’re doing. I’d die of shame. Honestly.”

  We made our list of particulars, what she had to have and what was optional. This shopping list was going to provide a whole lot more fun than looking for the best buy on facial quality tissue. I could feel long dormant juices activate as I thought about what was ahead. A hunt. A quest. A mission. A purpose.

  I was thrilled to become familiar with the new language. SWF and DWM and ND/NS for nondrinker or smoker, ISO for “in search of” and LTR for “long-term relationship.” I felt initiated into a secret society, and looked forward to each day’s new paper and prospects. I’d save the personals for last and carefully examine each listing.

  It was true, what Amber had said of me with such disdain. Hal, my One True Love, had been my One And Only…anything. Not that I’ve wasted time regretting that, or being curious about what else there might be. All the same, it became increasingly obvious that there was a whole lot else out there.

  I discovered that the weekly papers, the alternative presses, had even more interesting ads, and I expanded my research.

  Even Hal noticed a change in me, and he wasn’t an overly observant man, if you know what I mean. “You seem…happy,” he said one morning.

  I was shocked to hear him speak. “Not a morning person,” he had long-ago declared himself, and that had been that. He didn’t do more than grunt till midday. It used to make me sad, to tell the truth. I wasn’t asking for tap dances and songs, just a greeting aimed in my direction. And the shame of it was, during the hours that he was talkative and interesting, clients saw him at business dinners and meetings. I didn’t.

  But you adjust, get over things. That’s reality. That’s marriage.

  I kept my promise to Amber. I scouted and circled and mailed off the winners and never let my family know what was going on. I honored her shopping list, too, as I roamed through “Men Seeking Women” and honed the candidates down to those seeking LTRs. Of course, they had to be STD free. I also winnowed out the ones with bad grammar, like the one who wrote, “I love intimacy, slender and aware.” No parallel construction, no shot at Amber. I also tossed the one who said, much too vaguely, “I have movie star looks.” He didn’t say which star or movie, and for all I knew, he was a double for the raptor in Jurassic Park.

  Another wanted “an unblenchable spirit.” I had no idea what it meant to blench, but thought it might involve turning pale and burping, and that didn’t sound like Amber. Nor did the slew of men touching their “child within,” which sounded unhygienic to me. Adios as well to the “spiritually evolved” fellows when I realized that both Jesus and Gandhi would have failed to meet Amber’s criteria being neither tall nor solvent. Plus, they wouldn’t have advertised themselves as spiritually evolved.

  And since Amber was an inside kind of woman who favored artificial light and climate control, out went the excessively athletic, the skydivers, marathon runners and wilderness trekkers.

  Amber wound up with one or two, but in the process, I enjoyed spending time with them all, the ones who made the cut and the ones who didn’t. I loved speculating, imagining, discarding. At first, I was embarrassed. I thought of myself as, face it, a pimp, a procurer. But then I admitted that Amber was only an excuse. This was an adventure. I was doing this for me. Suddenly, my low-key life didn’t seem at all without event and the imagination I hadn’t had, or so Hal said, was getting itself born, flexing its muscles, having an aerobic workout. Where’s the harm in that?

  I sated myself with the outdoorsy and the indoorsy, with men looking for someone wonderful. Someone a whole lot like me, if you must know.

  “…looking for female interested in nude sunbathing and hot oil massages…” Just because I hadn’t thought about that till now didn’t mean I wasn’t extremely interested.

  “…seeking adventurous lady to climb the High Sierras and scale even more heights under the stars.” I could be adventurous. It had simply never been suggested before. But precisely what heights was he talking about? What hadn’t I found out about? And was it too late to do so?

  I took a deep breath and caught myself. I was a happily married woman. I had one of the only good men in America. Ask Amber. I had to squelch these thoughts, these immoral, wrong-headed ideas. But I couldn’t. I positively buzzed with them, and felt more alive than I ever remembered.

  I decided to bring the thoughts home, where they belonged. I planned a fantasy evening with my One True Love.

  “Hey,” Hal said after I’d kissed him. He held me at arm’s length to study me, “What’s come over you?”

  “The children are asleep,” I said in a low voice, “and you’ve been gone for days. Welcome home, darling.” I was wearing a new nightgown and perfume. “I’ve warmed oil, and I’d like to massage you, and then…”

  “Jesus,” he said, pushing me even further away, “what is wrong with you? All week, I’ve dragged my ass from city to city, waiting to get home and rest, and you want fun and games? I’m not a young man anymore. Do you have to make me feel bad about it wit
h crazy demands?”

  His words hit me like a mallet. I felt crushed inside and out. But after I realized that I’d been thinking only about myself, and considered how Hal must have felt while I carried on, I tried to be more considerate. I knew how fragile a man’s ego was.

  From then on, I kept the ideas I got from my reading to myself. The personals were my hobby, I told myself. Harmless. A diversion. I would never jeopardize my life, never hurt Hal and my marriage and my family…

  But, what if there were no consequences? After I warmed up by shopping for LTRs for Amber, my eyes wandered from “Men Seeking Women” to the “Alternate Lifestyles” column. No LTRs here. No R’s, except of the most primitive kind. Instead, a meaningless—thrilling—universe of short-term encounters and experiments.

  Dangerous territory. Off limits.

  But I couldn’t stop.

  “Secure male seeks underloved lady for thrilling daytime rendezvous. I’m safe and full of energy.”

  Tears pricked my eyelids, surprising me, because what did I have to cry about? Underloved? A man was devoting his life’s strength to me and our kids!

  Full of energy. Well, in that department, Hal wasn’t a contender, but it wasn’t his fault. We weren’t getting any younger. So it was shabby of me, unworthy, to moon over ads advocating boundless energy in meaningless relationships.

  “Seeking discreet lady for daytime rendezvous.”

  These ideas! These were lazy, delicious cover-up words, verbal slipcovers for bad things: adultery, illicit business, the making of videos, the shameless baring of everything with a stranger. These ads violated everything I stood for, everything upon which I’d based my life. And I could not stop reading them. They were my reason for waking up each morning.

  “I have a great sense of humor, am financially secure and I know how to treat a lady.”

  I realized I was weeping. I did that a lot, lately.

  And I was speculating. I did that even more.

  “…fun. Are you as sensual and uninhibited as I am?”

  “How would I know?” I asked the question out loud, heard it bounce off my countertops, the coffee maker and the hood of the range, echo back over all the years of my marriage. “How would I know?”

  “Great listener,” another one said, and my vision blurred. It wasn’t that Hal meant to ignore me. It was life. Time. You couldn’t expect nonstop romance. But all the same, “…I would love to hear your private thoughts and fantasies, or you mine. And then…”

  And I lusted for an orgy of words touching more than touch could, of exploring the innards of each other’s selves. Something I’d never known.

  Then Hal came home, exhausted, the lines on his face deeper than ever, and I was consumed with shame for my terrible thoughts, the infidelities of my mind.

  I vowed to stop, but I was too far gone.

  “…zest for life a must!”

  More tears. I had a routine. I had a life. But zest? The only thing close to it was this, the daily readings, and they alone got my blood going enough to survive. Was that anything like zest? Was that anything like a life?

  And then Amber called one morning. “You were right,” she said. “Let me be the first to admit it and to thank you.”

  It seemed I’d “introduced” her to a “perfect” man, a widower with grown children, affluent, unencumbered, tall and handsome. He was funny, she said, needing to tell me everything. They’d been dating for a week, every night, and he was fascinating, been everywhere, knew everything. Loved to travel and wanted her along. She knew it was going to last. “And in bed…” Thankfully, she left the rest of that sentence to my imagination. My fevered, overheated, hyperactive newly discovered imagination. “Consider yourself retired,” she said. “With honors.”

  The newspaper was in front of me, the section with the ads put aside, like dessert, for last. Except, my job was done.

  My hands trembled. No reason now to open the paper? To read the ads? To live them?

  Then the real meaning of Amber’s call became obvious. The ads had worked their magic for her and now, now it was my turn.

  So with a sigh of pleasure, I skipped the LTRs from then on. Instead, I sank into the featherbed dreaminess of alternative lifestyles. And then I opted for complete honesty. I stopped pretending that I was satisfied skimming the surface of my ads, imagining the men and pleasures. I wanted to—no, I was going to—experience them. I grew amazingly calm, an exciting, anticipatory sort of calm, as if I’d been waiting for this admission all along.

  I went shopping. For myself.

  “…what you want…”

  “…what pleases you…”

  I rented a P.O. Box in a different zip code so that neither Hal nor the children could find out. And I carefully chose an ad. He was discreet, knew what women liked, had boundless energy, a pied-à-terre and a few free hours in the late afternoon.

  I told myself that nobody would ever know. That I’d be a better wife for getting this out of my system. A less restless wife. That I’d stop making excessive demands, humiliating Hal, damaging his masculine confidence.

  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed a way to help my marriage, because with my new knowledge, with my brand new sense of self, of entitlement, of my hitherto unsuspected passionate capacities, I knew that what Hal and I had wasn’t much more than two kids, a long history, and habits. So, really, where’s the harm in that?

  The man responded by return mail, on thick, impressive stationery. Told me the address, set a date and time which were perfect, because Hal would be out of town, in Kansas. Pied-à-terre said he’d have chilled wine, hot oils and infinite patience and energy waiting. Those were his precise words. I know, because I repeated them to myself like a mantra through the next three days. And each time, I liked how they sounded.

  I decided to dress the part, too. Go all the way with my fantasy. For the first day of my secret life, I bought a great black sweep of a hat that I wore tilted at an angle, like the heroine of a thirties movie. I looked smashing. I felt better than I ever had.

  His apartment was in the city, in an expensive residential neighborhood, an area of weathered brick, climbing ivy, mullioned windows and great discretion. All the setting lacked was background music.

  I carried a bottle of chilled champagne, to show that this was my idea, too; that I, too, had style.

  Then suddenly, I was nervous. I rode the elevator, heart beating so furiously I nearly turned back. But of course, I couldn’t. I’d come too far for that.

  By the time he answered the bell, my throat and mouth were so dry, I was unable to speak.

  “Ah,” he said with audible pleasure. “You’re here.”

  I kept my head down, the hat my last screen and defense as he closed the door behind me. The enormity of what I was about to do, of what I was risking, had suddenly hit me.

  “Come in, please,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable. I can see you’re nervous, but please, don’t be.”

  His words were soothing, his voice comforting, sensual and soft.

  And utterly, horrifyingly, familiar.

  My head jerked up, my face no longer hidden by the discreet broad brim of my hat, and I looked directly into the face of my husband. “Hal?”

  I screamed.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he shouted back.

  “This place—this is your place—you put ads in—you—”

  “What kind of woman are you? I thought I knew—I trusted—” He went on the attack, as if I alone stood in a moral pit. That was his style, as familiar as his voice. I was always in the wrong.

  Then I couldn’t hear his words, only a roaring in my ears. This was my husband, my lodestone, he who I was afraid to burden with myself, my too-eager demands, who was too tired, who barely heard me but placed ads as a great listener with great energy, who complained about every penny I spent but maintained an apartment for his daytime dalliances. Who was supposedly in Kansas at this very minute!

 
With each thought and pulse, my arm lifted, gained leverage and position until it swung back, then forward, into Hal’s temple, with all the weight of a very good bottle of champagne.

  He didn’t make a sound. Just dropped. Bump, like that, a look of amazement on his face as he hit the carpeting. It was lush, expensive carpeting, so he barely made a sound.

  And then he made no sound at all.

  Dead.

  I controlled the reflex urge to scream.

  Dead.

  I bent over him, but could feel no breath. I touched his neck for a pulse, then realized I still had my kid gloves on. I took my compact out of my pocketbook and held the mirror in front of his mouth. No fog. No breath. Nothing.

  So I left, taking my champagne with me. I left the door open, so somebody’d find him.

  Late the next day, as I sat in my living room still wearing my Krafty Korner apron after a hard day’s work, the police arrived. It had taken them a while to track down who Henry Plantagenet, the name on the apartment lease, really was. Prince Hal.

  The police were apologetic and embarrassed. “A lot of crazies wandering around the city,” they said. “Your husband just probably took some foolish chances and…we’re real sorry for you.”

  “I thought he was in Kansas,” I said. They were very sympathetic.

  As soon as I’d seen the reality of who was behind the ad, it was over with the personals. I was sad to give them up, but the good news was the discovery of my talent. Hal had been wrong about a lot of things, but the one that turned out to be most important was his low opinion of my imagination. I now knew that I not only had one, but one that worked a whole lot better than reality did.

  Think about it. I’d been married to a figment of my imagination, a totally imaginary husband, for nineteen years. I’d spun a story about happiness with a somebody named Hal, and created my own reality. A virtual marriage, I guess you could say. And I’d been great at it.

  That’s when I started writing fiction. So it’s fair to say that in stopping Hal’s career, I kicked mine into gear.

  I had and have no guilt. Why should I? I killed a man who wasn’t there, a man who was a good listener with boundless energy and splendid technique, a man who knew what women wanted and respected it.