Somebody Else's Music Read online

  It wasn’t true that Michael being murdered was just a coincidence, Chris thought. It was something more like fate.

  7

  There were no bells at the ends of class periods at Columbia—Liz didn’t know why she had expected there to be. There had been none at Vassar, and none at the University of Michigan where she had done her graduate work—and for some reason this always left her feeling a little off balance, as if she had mistimed her day and everything would now be out of schedule. The truth was, her classes were timed down to the moment. She was legendary, from one end of the campus to the other, for both starting and stopping exactly on time, just as she was legendary for following the syllabus, to the letter, as if it were a television script. It was odd, the things that stayed with you and the things that did not. If you had asked her, when her first husband had died, what she expected to retain of the habits she had picked up in his last illness, that ferocious dedication to organization would not have been one of them, and yet here she was, five years later, more reliable than the atomic clock that determined Greenwich Mean Time. She looked out over the big, amphitheaterlike lecture hall as it emptied. She was always glad they had given her a room like this, in one of the old buildings. It satisfied her long-held aesthetic fantasies about what colleges ought to look like, which came down to thinking that all schools should be either Oxford or Yale. The last of the students were filing out, unaesthetically costumed in ragged jeans and T-shirts with Abercrombie & Fitch printed across the chest. Light was coming in through the great arched windows at the back, letting her know that the day had turned out to be a good one. The clouds hadn’t turned to rain. She packed her books into her black leather tote bag and thought that there was only next week, two more class meetings, before this course would be finished, and she would have to sit down and give her students grades, which she hated to do, because she always felt it was so counterproductive. The ringer on her cell phone went off, and the little caller-identification window on the side of it let her know it was her office on the line. She considered not answering it, and then decided that that was ridiculous. It wasn’t necessarily the call she had been dreading. It could be a call about her mother, or about Jimmy Card, or about a last-minute appointment that she absolutely had to make somewhere in midtown before she even thought about getting herself some lunch. She had a sudden, violent wish that she could go back five years to just after her husband’s funeral and do what she’d done then, turn off the ringers on all the phones and not care, for weeks, if anybody could reach her.

  Asinine, she thought, picking up. “I’m here,” she said.

  “It’s Debra,” Debra said. “I’m making this phone call from the guest bathroom off the conference room. I’d have made it from the sidewalk, except the way things are, I’d be afraid she’d see me. Assuming she can see anything. If you know what I mean.”

  “Crap.” It was the phone call she’d been dreading. “What happened?”

  “For one thing, she didn’t show up until nearly ten-thirty. For another, she’d already been drinking.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think she spikes that coffee she brings in a thermos every day. In fact, I’m sure of it. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Only, today, when she’d been in for about an hour, she went out again, up the street to get some tampons, she said, although why she needs tampons at her age—”

  “Some of us do.”

  “She doesn’t. Don’t you remember? It was on her health form when she first came to work for us. I remarked on it at the time. She went through menopause at forty.”

  “Yes. Okay. I remember.” Liz sighed. “Just tell me what happened. Did she go out and never come back again? It hasn’t really been that long. It’s only, what, twelve-thirty?”

  “I wish she’d gone out and never come back,” Debra said. “She came back in less than ten minutes and locked herself into the bathroom for another fifteen. When she came out she was, quite frankly, potted. And I do mean potted. There was no mistaking it.”

  “Crap, crap, crap. Then what?”

  “Then she sat down at her desk, spread the copy of the speech for the Armonk library talk all over it, started to giggle like a lunatic, and threw up. On the speech. All over the speech. And then she looked at it and started giggling again, and then she threw up again, on the carpet. The new carpet. The one you had installed two months ago after she threw up on the old one for the fifth or sixth time. There’s vomit everywhere in that office. The other girls have had to get out. They didn’t have any choice and I wouldn’t have tried to make them sit still. We’re not getting any work done. It’s going to be one o’clock before the cleaning guy gets here to mop it all up, and in the meantime we’re all milling around as if we’re at a cocktail party. And that’s just for starters.”

  “Marvelous,” Liz said. “I can’t wait to hear the rest of it.”

  Debra hesitated. “You don’t have to hear the rest of it,” she said finally. “There’s no point. I’ve got the speech on the computer and I’ve got a backup on diskette. It’s not lost. I can rescue your appointment diary from the computer, too—did I tell you she took your appointment diary when she locked herself in the bathroom?”

  “No.”

  “She did. It doesn’t matter. But this does matter, Liz, and I mean it. This is an ultimatum. Either she goes or I do. We’ve been together for what, fifteen years? I stuck with you when your finances collapsed after Jay died and you couldn’t pay me. I stuck with you when you seemed determined to go to hell in a handbasket and end up dead yourself. I think I’ve been more of a friend than a secretary most of this time and I know you’ve made it worth my while financially in the long run, but I can’t handle this. I appreciate your loyalty to your old friends, I really do. It’s a wonderful quality in somebody in your position. I love it that we kept Celia Frank on the payroll right up until the day she died from breast cancer because you didn’t think it was right to let her go and make her lose her insurance. Your generosity is something I would not like to see you lose, but, Liz, there’s a limit, and this is it. This was it, months ago, and you know it. Pension her off, if you have to. Set up some kind of trust that will keep her from ending up homeless and on the street, pay for her apartment yourself so she doesn’t spend the rent money on booze, have food shipped in from grocery stores that deliver, do whatever you have to, but get her out of here. Someday, she’s going to pull one of these stunts in front of Dan Rather or the president of AOL-Time Warner and it’s going to make a difference. And you know it.”

  “I keep hoping she’ll decide to get her act together and change.”

  “She doesn’t want to change. Trust me. My father was an alcoholic for thirty years. Some of them want to change and they do, but none of them changes with an attitude like that.”

  “Okay,” Liz said. “Let me think.”

  “There’s nothing to think about. Fire her. Or let me fire her. Do it now. Tell Jimmy when you meet him for lunch and he’ll buy you a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Remind him to save a glass for me.”

  “Let me think,” Liz insisted. “I can’t just fire her right this second, don’t you realize that? We’re supposed to be going down to Pennsylvania in two weeks.”

  “So?”

  “So she’s expecting to come with me. It’s her hometown, too. That’s all been set up in advance. She’s probably told people she’s coming, people we’ve both known forever. We wouldn’t want to embarrass her—”

  “Like hell.”

  “Listen,” Liz insisted. “I’ve got it all worked out, all right? You won’t ever have to deal with her again, I promise. Does that work?”

  “It might.”

  “Don’t be facetious. When you get her awake again, do that however you want, tell her that she’s obviously sick and needs to go home. Insist on it. Say you’ve talked to me and I said to send her home and make her stay there for the rest of the week until she’s over whatever she’s got, stomach flu, think of somet
hing—”

  “I will not call a gin binge a stomach flu.”

  “Then don’t call it anything. Just get her home and make sure she understands that I said she was to stay there and not come into the office for at least a week. I’ll call her later this evening and talk to her—”

  “If she’s sober.”

  “If she isn’t, I’ll talk to her in the morning. Okay? She’s not a reeling drunk all the time, Debra, and you know it. I’ll talk to her. I’ll tell her I need her to go out to Hollman early and do some advance work for me, and then I’ll send her off and give her some make work to do. She’ll know it’s make work, of course, but we can’t be picky at the moment. Anyway, then, when I get down to Hollman myself, I can have a talk with her. Between now and then, I ought to be able to figure out another arrangement that will keep her out of your hair—”

  “What are you going to do to keep her out of your hair?” Debra said. “Liz, I hate to sound like a broken record, but I don’t think she even likes you, and I don’t think it’s all envy, either, although she’s got enough of that. I think she hates you.”

  “She doesn’t hate me,” Liz said automatically.

  “Right. Okay. Whatever. Look, I’ll do what I have to do, and all I want from you is the promise that I never have to put up with her in the office again. Fair enough?”

  “Yes, fair enough. I’m sorry, Debra. I know this hasn’t been easy for you.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if I thought there was any point to it. You going to go meet Jimmy for lunch?”

  “I was intending to.”

  “Good. Go. Give me a little time to get this stuff straightened out. Don’t come back until I’m likely to have got her off the premises and on her way home, at least. You don’t need this today.”

  “Right,” Liz said. “Thanks again.”

  Then she flicked the phone off—you couldn’t say “hang up,” could you, when there was nothing to hang the receiver up on—and shoved the phone back into the little leather pocket in her tote bag. Jimmy had bought her the tote bag, at some leather store on Fifth Avenue, on a kind of whim, because he said she didn’t understand how to spend money on herself. She thought for a moment of all those things in Maris’s apartment—the Steuben glass tumblers, the one-of-a-kind handmade king-sized down-filled quilts, the shoes from Brooks Brothers and Coach—but that, of course, was because Maris had never had children. She had nothing to spend her money on but herself, and besides, she was used to having that kind of thing in her life. If she were ever forced to go without it, she’d be too depressed to function.

  Liz checked, one more time, to make sure that she had everything she’d brought with her packed up and ready to go. Then she hoisted the tote bag over her shoulder and went out the door at the side of the podium, out the wide corridor with its twenty-foot-high ceiling, into the sun and light and spring of Morningside Heights. Students at Columbia liked to tell their friends back home that they were going to school “in Harlem,” but although it was technically true, it was fundamentally a lie. On an afternoon like this, Columbia could have been set in the middle of a field in Vermont or on the edge of an English village, it had so little in common with the raw violent ugliness of so much of the city around it.

  And not just Harlem, Liz thought, flagging an empty cab on its way downtown. She settled herself in the back and gave the driver the address of Jimmy’s apartment. She put the tote bag on the floor at her feet and her head back on the curved top of the seat. Jimmy’s apartment was in the Dakota. His neighbors had approved mightily when they had first taken up together—they liked to think of themselves as cultivated and intellectual—but approved less so now, when her picture was on the cover of every tabloid in the supermarket. Sometimes, she wondered what it would take for her to stop feeling so guilty, because guilty was what she felt, all the time, about everything, and especially about Maris. It seemed to her that the things that had happened for her had been entirely a matter of chance and circumstance. A lot of people who were better writers than she would ever be had not been given spot after spot on CNN. A lot of people who had had more promise and more talent than she could ever have imagined in herself had ended up flat on their faces, like Maris, through no fault of their own. Of course Maris drank, Liz thought. She would drink herself, if she were Maris, if she had started out with all of Maris’s brilliance and talent and promise and watched it come to dust in her hands. Liz knew what they said about her, at home: that she had somehow caused Maris to fail; that she had no right to succeed when Maris had failed so badly; that it wasn’t fair. She knew, too, that this was the kind of thing people did as they reached middle age and found that their lives had not worked out the way they wanted them to. What she couldn’t shake was the feeling that, in her case, they were absolutely right. It wasn’t fair, and she had no right to any of it. What had happened to her was not like working hard and getting ahead, but more like winning the lottery. One day, the numbers on her particular ticket had been drawn, and forever afterward—

  What?

  The cab had pulled up to the curb in front of the Dakota, on Central Park West, not around the corner at the gate where John Lennon had died, because Liz truly hated that gate. She remembered taking a friend from out of town up there on the morning after it happened, when she was still an editorial assistant and her friend was still in graduate school. They had been lovers once, but her move to New York had been too much for whatever they’d seen in each other. He was the kind of man she’d gotten used to in college, with family money and the disdain for routine work that went with it, and by the time she had been working and on her own for a month, she was already disappointed in him. What bothered her about the Dakota now, of course, was Jimmy Card. All she needed in her life was some guy who wanted to be the second one to gun down a rock star at that damned metal gate.

  Actually, Liz thought, that wasn’t what she’d been thinking about at all. What she’d been thinking about was that high keening wail in the wind and the rain and the words that sounded like music in the claustrophobic bubble that covered her head.

  slit his throat slit his throat slit his throat

  PART ONE

  “At Seventeen”

  —JANIS IAN

  “The Boho Dance”

  —JONI MITCHELL

  “A.M. Radio”

  —EVERCLEAR

  ONE

  1

  In the beginning, the problem of the body of Anne Marie Hannaford had not been as simple as it should have been. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had seemed reluctant to give it back, as if they were afraid she had become an icon, like Jeffrey Dahmer, and that people would make a shrine out of her grave. When they finally did give it back—three days late, and not embalmed—Bennis had decided that there was nothing she could do. In spite of the Hannaford tradition of being buried in the big family plot in the cemetery behind the Episcopal Church in Ardmore, where Hannafords had gone to rest since 1762, Anne Marie would have to be cremated. Bennis tried to consult her brothers about this decision, but it was hopeless. Christopher didn’t care. Bobby had other things on his mind. Teddy didn’t want to talk to her. It felt, she sometimes told Gregor, as if they were all still children growing up in Bryn Mawr, where boys were the ones that mattered and girls were supposed to fend for themselves as much as possible, unless they were debutantes, when they deserved the kind of attention that would make it possible for them to marry well.

  After Anne Marie was cremated, her body was put into a small brass urn with handles that looked like a bowling trophy and then—because nobody could decide what was going to happen with that, either—left on the top of Bennis’s low dresser in her own bedroom in her apartment on the second floor of the brownstone house on Cavanaugh Street. It would have been a morbid thing, except that Bennis never slept in that bedroom anymore. She rarely even went to that apartment, except to work, and these days she had her work station set up in the living room on a big table pushed up against the plate-gl
ass window that looked down to the street. She said she never thought about it, but Gregor did. He thought about it all the time, and once a day, when he knew Bennis would be out at the Ararat or at Donna Moradanyan’s, he went down to look at it for himself, just to make sure it was still there. He had no idea why he thought it might be gone. She couldn’t very well bury it, or place it in a vault, without a good deal of formality. The people who ran cemeteries were sticklers for paperwork. Dead bodies could be dangerous, even if they had been burned to ashes. That was why the Commonwealth insisted that anyone who wanted to scatter ashes within its precincts get permission. Maybe, Gregor thought, he was afraid that she’d open the urn and scatter the ashes on her own, without permission. He just didn’t understand where she would scatter them. God only knew, she didn’t want them on Cavanaugh Street. She said that often enough, and vehemently, when Tibor brought up the possibility that the ashes could be placed at Holy Trinity Church. Maybe she would take them out to Ardmore herself, or take them with her to one of those “events” she was always being invited to but never agreeing to attend, like the Philadelphia Assemblies. Maybe she would eat them. The whole thing had become a matter of annoyance, because Gregor didn’t really know what he thought of it, but he couldn’t stop obsessing about it. He felt like Lida, or Hannah, whenever it looked as if someone new would be moving onto the street. They obsessed, too, and also to no good purpose. Eventually whoever it was moved in and got settled, and they knew no more about it than when they had started staying up nights to speculate to each other on the phone. Sheila Kashinian would have stayed up with them, but Howard couldn’t stand it when Sheila talked on the phone in bed.