The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [85]
Even then, I detected something contrived in her opening volley, a predictable, nearly pro forma, “Norman, really, when am I going to be able to come home again?”
I sighed audibly and repeated what I had said before, how I was doing everything in my power to rectify the situation, et cetera, et cetera.
We were on the porch, the humid, cricket-loud night all around us. I had showered before dinner and put on slacks and short-sleeved shirt. She said, “Someone told me you were seen at The Edge with him.”
I didn’t answer her. “You should know, Diantha, if you were to spend ten minutes with Alphus it would change your opinion of him completely.”
She also ignored what I said. And then lobbed her little bombshell. “You should know,” she said, echoing my diction, “that I have been invited by Sixy to a concert in Foxborough next weekend.” Sixy, Sixpack Shakur, to be exact, is King of the Redneck Rappers and her former swain.
“Where exactly is Foxborough?” I asked calmly. Perhaps I would make her ex-boyfriend into an ex-person by holding my instrument of death against his shaven skull and …
“South of Boston. It’s where the Patriots play,” she said, her duh in the tone of her voice. “He’s opening for the Stones.”
The gallstones? I nearly said. “And you plan to go?”
“Merissa and I would drive down together. Bella’ll take care of Elsie. I would have invited you, but I don’t see it as your scene.”
True. What is my scene? I wondered. “You’ll be staying overnight down there?”
“I have to. The concert’s in the late afternoon. It would be stupid to drive back then.”
What rankles in a situation like this apart from the threatened breach in our marital arrangements is the reduction to smallness implicit in any spousal objection on my part. And, really, how could I object? As sophisticated, upper-middle-class Americans, we don’t start throwing dinnerware against the wall. We conceal our clenching hands and murderous thoughts and say things, as I did, like, “Do you think that is a good idea?”
To which she responded with the maddening catchall, “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, given your history with Sixy …”
“Oh, Norman, you really are being tedious.”
So that I might have wrecked the place with my bare hands. Instead, I poured more gin over ice and pretended it was a martini. “Tedious,” I repeated. “That’s a big word for you.”
“Then try ‘f*ck you’ on for size.”
“Di …”
But the floodgates of invective had been breached. Did I know what people were saying about me? Did I know I was the laughing stock of Seaboard? Did I know …
Nadirs are never trustworthy. You can and will sink lower. But in the fire and ice of our exchanges, I forbade my imagination from including Diantha in any execution scene I might conjure for her paramour. We tried to back off, but it turned into an evening of too many drinks, too many words, and very little love.
I slept by myself in a bedroom said to be haunted by a local crone who died under suspicious circumstances. I woke from a dream about Heinie the night he was murdered. We spoke to each other in flawless French about Merissa, who was hovering nearby and terrifying me even though I was watching the whole thing on a television screen with the name Anna Gramma scrolling beneath the scene. “Gnats,” I said aloud, waking to the buzz of a mosquito in my ear.
I took a sunrise walk around the mist-shrouded lake to calm myself. I heard the haunting, mocking call of a loon. I should have been reassured by the sight of an osprey gliding out of the sun to disappear into the brightening murk. I usually smile at the scolding chatter of chickadees. But nature availed me of nothing that day.
I managed, I think, to stay civil as I packed up for an early return.