But before the murder can take place, the wife springs another surprise, running off with a boyfriend whose existence the man had never even suspected. At this, the man turns raging beast. He drives straight to the house of the prostitute and strangles her, then strangles her pimp, who happens to be watching television in the next room. Later he thinks that, although killing the woman had given him the big rush and release he’d been seeking, it was killing another man that made him feel proud. Later still, he reflects on his feelings about killing the woman: He’d had nothing against her. He didn’t think she deserved to die. But he didn’t feel bad for her, either. She was a whore, and whores got murdered all the time. It was one of the things whores were for.
Thus ends part one.
Patricia Highsmith once admitted that she liked criminals, finding this type of person extremely interesting and even admirable for their vitality, freedom of spirit, and refusal to bow down to anyone. But the criminals in most crime fiction are not like that. Especially the killers, most especially the serial killers, are not like that. This one has the familiar one-dimensional personality of the violent psychopath. He is brutal and sadistic, lacking in conscience and empathy. What makes him somewhat more sympathetic is that he has a yearning for self-improvement. Still in his twenties, he is gripped by the idea that he has somehow missed out on some very significant part of life, which he connects to an understanding and appreciation of the arts. When the novel opens, it’s a beautiful summer dusk, and the man has been hanging out by himself at the gleaming, brand-new complex of Lincoln Center. He sees rainbows in the jets of the plaza’s central fountain and watches enviously as people stream toward the various performances, a thing that he not only has never done but has trouble even picturing himself doing. He may be plotting a barbaric crime, but he is also fantasizing about “getting more culture.” Later, the same yearning impels him to sneak into classes at Columbia University. Getting more culture, reading big books, learning about music and art—this is how he hopes to spend more time once he’s got uxoricide out of his system. This aspect of the killer’s character did not make me like him. But it did make me feel for him. I had the sense that, as much as his sins, this virtue would have a role in bringing him down.
I was perfectly happy not to find out, though. I was happy to leave the story there, after thirty-odd pages, at the end of part one. I didn’t have much curiosity about how the murders would be solved. It never matters to me how a mystery ends. In fact, I have found that, after so many pages of so many twists and turns and other to-do, the ending is usually something of a letdown, and the bad guy being caught and ultimately brought to justice or destroyed is invariably the least exciting part of the plot.
I like the story of a nursing home resident who had one book, one whodunit, that she was able to read over and over as though it were new. By the time she finished it she would’ve forgotten everything that came before, and as she started reading again she would forget how it all turned out.
* * *
—
My host has hearing loss. She did not hear me come into the living room though I made no attempt to be quiet. It was the following morning, I was ready to leave, and I’d come to thank her and say goodbye. She did not see me because she was standing at the window, looking out. When I spoke she spun around with a gasp, hand on heart.
It happens to some women after a certain age that something babyish comes back into the face. The flesh has fattened and slackened at the same time, and you can see what the woman must have looked like as a toddler. So the woman looked to me just then: like a frightened toddler. I cannot say how much this impression was heightened by the fact that she was crying.
Of course she was all right, she said, tooting a laugh. There was nothing wrong, she said, nothing at all. I was just, well, you know. I was just thinking.
* * *
—
Imagine my surprise (he wrote) to see you in the audience last night. Have you moved? I had no idea. I suppose if you’d wanted to talk to me you’d have looked for me afterward. I suppose if you’d wanted to be seen you wouldn’t have sat way in the back. Anyway, I did want you to know that I saw you and to thank you for coming. I thought of trying to reach you after dinner, but it went on quite late. I thought maybe if you were willing to get up very early we could have breakfast at my hotel before I had to leave. Then it occurred to me that the very idea of having breakfast with me might fill you with horror. Well, too late now. I’m at the airport. Again, thanks for coming. It made a difference to me, up there, knowing that you were listening. I hope all’s well with you and that you won’t mind my sending this message. I worry that it might give you pain, and yet it seemed the right thing to do. But, needless to say, please don’t feel that you have to reply.
* * *
—
What gave me pain was seeing him so much older. Not that he’d ever been handsome, but still. The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old.
* * *
—
She was just thinking, she said.
Flaubert said, To think is to suffer.
Is this the same as Aristotle’s To perceive is to suffer?
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. Alfred Hitchcock.
Sufferin’ succotash. Sylvester the cat.
II
The cancer treatments my friend had been receiving—and which included one course that was still experimental—succeeded beyond what cautious doctors had allowed her to hope.
She was going to live.
Or rather, as she put it, she was not going to die.
Actually, what she said was I don’t have to leave the party just yet.
Now she was swinging between euphoria and depression. Euphoria for the obvious reason; depression because, well, she wasn’t exactly sure why, but she’d been warned to expect it.
It sounds absurd, she said. But after thinking all this time that this was the end, and trying to prepare myself for it, survival feels anticlimactic.
In fact, her first thought upon receiving her diagnosis had been that she wouldn’t accept any treatment at all. When she learned the survival rate for someone with her type of cancer at the stage at which hers had been found (fifty-fifty, according to her research, though her oncologist would not be pinned down), she foresaw a long period of painful and debilitating treatment during which she would be too sick to do anything that could properly be called living and that, in all likelihood, would fail to save her anyway. She had seen it happen too often, she said. So had I. So had we all. Still, we urged her not to give in, we insisted that she must do everything possible to fight the disease. Fifty-fifty: not the worst odds.
And, in the end, it had not been hard to persuade her. She didn’t want to leave the party early. And why not be a guinea pig (over her doctor’s repeated objections, she kept calling herself that).