Look At Me_ A Novel Part 25

She'd been on her way toward me; now she stopped. "You took it from my bag?"

"In a sense."

"What do you mean, in a-? You either-"

"Yes."

"Charlotte, why?"

"I wanted to read it."

"What kind of f.u.c.ked-up thing was that to do?" she said, in the first volley of profanity I'd ever heard from Irene. It jarred me. "All you had to do was ask. I would have shown it to you gladly. Why sneak around like that?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know why a person sneaks around, but I'm looking forward to finding out." And then I told her: The phone number. Halliday. Jackpot Jackpot.

She looked away, exhaled and sat down heavily on the piece of furniture I had determined not to mention in her presence.

"He said you would explain," I said.

Irene didn't answer. For a long while she seemed to be thinking. "Okay," she finally said. "I'm going to start with the worst part, right up front. I'll just say it, okay?" Still, she hesitated. Since entering my apartment, she had actually gone pale. "I'm not a reporter."

She blurted this out, then seemed to wait for what devastation might follow.

"Huh," I said, careful not to react. But I was shocked. More than shocked, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't imagine her as anything else.

"I'm an academic," she went on, "a professor of comparative literature. An adjunct," she added quickly, as if saying the first without the second amounted to further duplicity. "My area is cultural studies. Specifically, the way literary and cinematic genres affect certain kinds of experience." I sensed her straining to put this in language I would understand. "For example, the Mafia. How do cultural notions of the so-called wiseguy affect the way people like John Gotti dress and move and speak? How does that extra layer of self-consciousness impact experience? The same for cops; they watch cop shows, too. And how does their experience of those shows affect their experience as cops?"

"Detectives," I said, addressing the cigarette in my hand.

"Exactly. Detective stories. The genre is almost as old as the profession, the two have been intertwined practically from the beginning."

"Detectives write books," I said ruefully.

"That's right," she said. "A surprising number try to write detective novels, as if writing books were a corollary of the experience of being a detective. So ... well, you know where this is going."

She had interviewed Halliday for a paper she was writing on detectives, then asked if she could spend a couple of weeks observing his work. He'd called her a few days later, spur-of-the-moment, and offered her an opportunity to experience his work from the inside: to interview a reluctant witness in a missing-persons case. So she'd invented the phony story about being a reporter who was looking for a model with a brand-new face. She'd phoned around until she found my agency and pitched the story to Oscar, who, desperate on my behalf, had lunged unthinkingly into the trap. Then she'd fabricated a business card on one of those selfservice machines and shown up on my doorstep.

"At that point you weren't real to me, Charlotte," she said. "It was all just a goofy experiment, a slice-of-life kind of thing."

During our "interview," she'd felt cushioned at first by the several layers of disingenuousness that separated us, but with time those had seemed to burn away, leaving her exposed and at my mercy. And then a queasy sense of impropriety had made itself known within her. "I don't know if you remember this," she said, "but you said something like, Can you look me in the eye and swear on your husband's life that everything you're saying is absolutely true? I was like, Oh my G.o.d, get me out of here."

Afterwards, she'd felt crummy about the whole thing-so crummy that although she did write the paper on detectives, she'd found a different one to observe rather than work with Halliday. "He was very sweet about it," she said. "He felt badly that I felt bad."

"So there was no article?" I asked, still not fully able to grasp it.

"Well, there was an article. But not about models. And not for the Post Post, that's for sure. I don't even read it!"

"And the business card wasn't real?"

"It was all fake, Charlotte. That's what I'm telling you."

"But how did you think up those questions?"

Irene looked at me with concern. "I just made them up. I was trying to get you to talk about Z. I mean, granted, I wasn't very good at it-I had no idea what I was doing."

"I see," I said. But I didn't. Irene Maitlock the reporter I trusted implicitly; this new woman I was having trouble believing.

And then, she said, I had called her out of nowhere, wanting to meet again. She'd tried to wriggle out of it, but when I announced that I was on my way to her "office" armed with her phony business card (a card she was fairly certain she had made illegally, with her real phone number on it), she'd dashed to my apartment to stave me off. And once she was here, practically the first words out of my mouth were about the very person Halliday had been looking for.

"I listened," she said, "I was curious, obviously, I remembered that this was the guy who'd disappeared. But afterwards, when I got home, the whole thing seemed too neat. And I wondered if Anthony was somehow behind it-if the two of you were in cahoots, trying to mess with my head."

I knew the feeling. Because now, at last, I saw it all, like the final, critical moves in a game of solitaire. Halliday wanted information on Z. He'd sent Irene to get it. And, in the course of two short months, I'd told her everything.

"So you called him," I said pleasantly.

"I did."

"You told him what I'd said."

"About the wire. Yes."

"And?"

"And I could tell by his reaction that he hadn't set it up."

"He was excited. He finally had some information."

"He was ... interested. But I told him he was on his own from there on in. That was the last time we spoke."

"And there's a bridge in Brooklyn you'd like to sell me, if I'd be interested."

Irene sighed. "It's the truth," she said. "You can believe it or not believe it."

"You little b.i.t.c.h!" I cried, jumping to my feet.

She looked frightened, just as the other Irene-the reporter-would have looked. But I wasn't fooled anymore.

"Charlotte, I wanted to tell you," she said. "I felt s.h.i.tty about having lied. But the longer I waited, the harder it seemed, the weirder it got, and finally I thought, Look, what does it even matter? This thing we're doing is about you-what does it matter exactly what I do for a living?"

"Oh, it matters," I said. Already she seemed different to me; bolder, less restrained. I wondered if what I'd mistaken for reticence, reserve-for honesty honesty-had merely been the fact that she'd been hiding something.

"I would even tell myself sometimes that you, of all people, would understand," she said. "If you knew."

"I do understand," I said. "I understand that you're exactly like everybody else. You lie, you say whatever you need to say, you're one more calculating b.i.t.c.h in a world that's full of them."

"Like you?"

"Yeah, like me. The difference is, I don't pretend to be anything else."

"Neither do I!"

"You did! You do! Look at you, with your odd hair and your ripped hem and your genius husband who obviously can't earn a dime. You come off like someone who could never tell a lie; the last Honest John left on earth."

"You invented that person," she said angrily. "That was never me."

"I liked her better."

"Then find someone else to play her," she said, standing up. "I'm done."

"Go," I shouted. "Take the apartment. Take the couch. Is there one f.u.c.king thing I have left? Take that, too." I knew I wasn't making sense. I felt on the verge of pa.s.sing out.

I stormed into my bedroom and flung myself on the bed, facedown. The room was dark. I heard buzzing in my head. There were certain fights I'd enjoyed in the course of my life, riotous collisions and clamorous dissolutions, but this one felt sickening. A loss I couldn't afford. After a few minutes, Irene came in. "I'm sorry I hurt you," she said in a tight voice, from somewhere to my right.

"Hurt me," I snorted.

"Well, disillusioned you."

"This happened long ago."

"I'm sorry I'm not the person you thought," she said sadly. "I have a feeling I used to be."

"I'm sorry I believed you," I muttered.

There was a long silence, so long that I wondered if Irene was still in the room, or had left. I wasn't going to look.

"Anyway, there are a million reasons not to do this thing," she finally said. "Now it's a million and one."

I opened my eyes just as her silhouette vacated the doorway. I heard her gathering up her belongings as if she were doing it inside my skull-jacket, bag, notebook-footsteps whispering on the carpet toward the door, whose many locks she unfastened effortlessly now. She checked it after it closed, making sure the lock had engaged.

I lay there a long time, such a long time that when I finally sat up, I felt the imprint of the bedspread on my cheek. Irene was right, whoever she was-we were more alike than I could have believed. She had done exactly what I would have done in her place, and I was stunned by what a bitter, almost intolerable disappointment this was. I didn't want Irene to be like me. I wanted her to have the qualities I no longer had-perhaps had never had-so that in her company, I would have them, too.

I called her. In fact, I called her even before the lumbering crosstown bus she took to the West Side, where she lived, had delivered her home. Her husband answered the phone. We had never spoken.

"Charlotte?" he said in an anxious, threadbare voice when I asked for Irene. "Isn't she with you?"

In the midst of explaining myself, my other line beeped. It was Halliday. "Charlotte-" he began.

I hung up without saying h.e.l.lo.

Chapter Fourteen.

"Up there?" Charlotte asked, squinting through her rain-spattered gla.s.ses north along the river and teasing into focus, among the vectors of railroad bridges, a sheet of falling water. The dam. It looked like the skin of a bubble. "That's it, right?" asked, squinting through her rain-spattered gla.s.ses north along the river and teasing into focus, among the vectors of railroad bridges, a sheet of falling water. The dam. It looked like the skin of a bubble. "That's it, right?"

Moose nodded, standing close to her in his orange plastic rain poncho. "Built when?"

"Eighteen fifty-three."

"By ... ?"

"The Water Power Company."

"One of the first companies to use it?"

"Clark and Utter."

"Their most famous product?"

"The Manny reaper."

Satisfied, Moose lunged into a brawl of wind that rousted his poncho halfway over his head, bounding north along the slippery riverbank with an urgency Charlotte noticed more and more often in him as the weeks pa.s.sed. It was April, late afternoon. She fought to keep up with him.

Near the Morgan Street bridge, a factory building was still in use, two workmen in blue jumpsuits avoiding the rain in a doorway. The men flicked their eyes from Moose to Charlotte in a way that pleased her. She was flattered when people mistook them for a couple; it helped to redeem the fact that she could never be seen with Michael West. Two weeks ago, she had gone to Baxter pretending to look for her friends, but really to see him-see what would happen when they met in daylight, in that familiar place. She'd walked the halls until she glimpsed him in a cla.s.sroom, talking with two younger boys at his desk. She stood in the doorway and waited for them to finish. If he smiles, then he. If he smiles, then he. Michael had looked past the boys, turning on Charlotte a cool, stranger's face. "Can I help you with something?" he asked, his voice so persuasively that of a teacher she had never seen before that Charlotte froze, disoriented, wondering if she knew him after all. "No," she said, and left the school shaken, without even finding her friends, whom she hadn't seen in many weeks. Michael had looked past the boys, turning on Charlotte a cool, stranger's face. "Can I help you with something?" he asked, his voice so persuasively that of a teacher she had never seen before that Charlotte froze, disoriented, wondering if she knew him after all. "No," she said, and left the school shaken, without even finding her friends, whom she hadn't seen in many weeks.

He never mentioned the incident, nor did she.

Her uncle stamped onto a soggy spit of pebbles and mud thrust out among the brothy waves of the Rock River. He pointed left at Kent Creek, a snaking, muscular arm that parted the land, then angled out of sight. "You know what that is ..."

"Of course I know," Charlotte said, but withheld the information, teasing.

Moose grinned at her. Rain dripped from his longish hair into his wet brown eyes and back out again, coursing like tears through the stubble of his beard. "Oh, yes?"

"Yes!"

"Would you care to, as they say, back that up?"

"Midway," she said. That was the name Germanicus Kent had chosen for his settlement in 1834, because it was midway between Chicago and Galena.

"Keep it coming," Moose said.

"Lewis." That was Kent's slave, a man who had followed him north and earned his freedom after four and a half years.

"You're getting there."

"Eighteen thirty-eight." The year Kent built his sawmill-Rockford's first industry-in the woods along the creek, just yards from where they were standing.

"Bingo," Moose said.

Of course, what surrounded them now were not woods or sawmill but abandoned factory buildings and empty lots, weeds erupting from fissured pavement, idle smokestacks, piles of old garbage and rotting tires and occasional desultory human workers in tall black boots. The old Water Power District, on the west side of the river just south of downtown, where Clark and Utter had made a foundry, where John Manny built his reapers, where threshing machines and wood lathes and drill presses and gas stoves and socks and paper and paint and pianos had all been manufactured at one time or another. Last spring, Charlotte had sat on this same section of riverbank, drinking Old Styles with Roselyn and some guys from school. Then it had seemed a blank, empty place: no place. This was hard to remember, now, so dense were her surroundings with clues and artifacts, winking from every direction like ore in a mine. There was a kind of thrill in just standing in a place she had seen so many times on her uncle's maps.

"So over there is where the millrace was." She pointed north across the creek to an area that was now mostly parking lot.

"Exactly," Moose said.