“And what’s your vulnerability?” I ask.
“You can hardly expect me to reveal it to you,” she says, and appears amused. I curse my tendency to blush when embarrassed or angry.
Deborah, hands still crossed, is smiling, waiting for the next question. I get the impression that she’s playing a part; there is something about her affect that doesn’t feel quite genuine. Every once in a while around Palo Alto you see some poor rich woman who’s had too much plastic surgery and you pity her tight expressionless face. Deborah has that. I don’t mean that she’s had work done. Her face is as a fifty-four-year-old woman’s should be. She looks good for her age, but she does look her age. Still, there’s some immobility of features that suggests she is being guarded. I also feel that she’s not taking me seriously.
“But why do you want to hear all this? Surely my opinions are irrelevant.”
“Everything is relevant,” I say. I pick up my iced tea. It’s not like any tea I’ve ever had before. It’s bitter and aromatic at the same time. Although sweetly fragrant, the taste is sour and puckers my mouth. “If I understand John, and his relationships, perhaps I’ll understand his murderer.”
“That seems to be taking the long way around to your goal,” says Deborah. “As I’ve said before, a goal with an erroneous premise. No one killed John. He was in terrible shape, wouldn’t take care of himself. You know the phrase. ‘Doctor, heal thyself.’ John should have done so.”
What she says sparks a question I’d meant to ask.
“By the way, did John have life insurance?”
“Yes, of course. I insisted, from early on, John being our sole source of income.”
“How much was the policy worth?”
“Ten million dollars.”
I must have involuntarily made some sort of noise because she adds, “ I know that might sound like a lot to someone like you”—I keep my face frozen to avoid giving her a reaction—“but you have to understand John brought in quite a bit from his share of the clinic. And we’ve put away quite a bit over the years, invested it well. So actually, I’m financially secure enough without the insurance money.”
“I understand from MJ that you aren’t going to make any claims on equity in the Los Gatos house, although you’d certainly have a case.”
“Yes,” says Deborah, almost indifferently. “As I said, we invested wisely. I can spare a few hundred thousand for that poor creature.”
MJ. Poor creature. I wonder how Deborah refers to me when I’m not here.
34
Deborah
WELL, THAT YOUNG DETECTIVE IS gone. A relief. No, more than a relief. A liberation. Liberation from emotions I don’t wish to feel. She reminds me too vividly of a way of living, of a milieu I am very anxious not to be in contact with. I saw how hungrily she looked around. Although I’ll say to her credit that I don’t think she hungers for things, but rather for beauty. I don’t imagine her life has much of that in it. And when one has a taste for beauty, the lack of it is a deep hunger indeed. I doubt she fully understands this. To my mind, that must be even worse, to have such an acute ache and not enough self-knowledge to know what part of the body or mind is in distress.
I could sympathize, if I let myself. I won’t. I grew up in a world without beauty. My parents were failures. Losers, as the kids today would say. Forever changing jobs, changing houses, changing lives. Not exactly criminal, because they were never caught doing anything wrong, but my father always had schemes, always had partners with whom he was going to strike it rich. I never really understood how he earned a living, but when he talked on the phone, he spoke of “opportunities” and “prospects” and offers that “wouldn’t last.” For a while we’d have money to pay the rent, the electricity bill. Then the partners would disappear, the money would evaporate, and we’d move on. Once I came across an old passport of my father’s—but with a different name. I took it to my mother, who just shrugged and said he had his reasons to not be that person anymore. She said it as though it was of no importance.
My mother, she could find work wherever she went as a court stenographer. She was good, could type 150 words a minute without a single error. It was all about focus, she would say. And she was utterly focused on the present. Because the past was over, and the future yet to come. Why worry? she would say. Character by character, word by word, she eased through life, always disappointed but sanguine when my father’s latest scheme failed and it was time to move again.