I couldn’t look away. I said, “We met when I was nineteen. Just started my second year at Barnard. There was this party, like I said, and there he was. Somebody’s older brother. Remarkably handsome, I’ll give him that. I thought he was the best-looking fellow I’d ever seen, like he’d just stepped off a cinema screen. This lovely dark hair and this baritone voice. He was twenty-six and had a tremendous vocabulary. I was mesmerized. He fed me a few drinks, strong ones, and talked sweet to me. When I was good and drunk, he took my hand and said, Let’s get out of this dump, and I said, Sure, why not?”
“Oh, Lulu,” Thorpe said sadly.
“Well, I was just a kid. Just a dumb kid looking for something I didn’t understand. I thought I’d just found it, I guess. Thomas Randolph. Tommy, to his pals. He was staying at a cheap hotel on the West Side, because—as I discovered later—he was the black sheep of a very distinguished family, and they’d had enough of him coming into town for a bender and asking for money. Anyway, I followed him to his cheap hotel like a little virgin lamb, bathroom down the hall, and we got to kissing, and the next thing I remembered, I was waking up in his bed at nine o’clock in the morning. Long story short, they kicked me out of college for that. My father was furious. Maybe I was trying to get his attention, I don’t know. It turned out, I got his attention all right. He cut me off, and Tommy said, So let’s elope, two black sheep like us, and I thought that sounded like a really nice adventure.”
My voice started to splinter, so I rose from the crate and went to the picnic basket to find a cigarette. There followed some considerable effort to light the thing, given the trembling in my hands, but eventually I got the job done, sucked in a little blessed smoke, and turned to face Thorpe again, composure restored.
“Where was I?”
“You eloped with the bastard.”
“Yes. Indeed, we did. Ran off to Niagara, as was customary. We fucked ourselves silly for a week or so, to be perfectly frank, had a really swell time. The scenery was spectacular, no doubt about that. And then it all started to crack up. His wicked ways and all that. I mean, the old story. Black and blue in all the wrong places. Drank whatever money came our way. Not for nothing had the Randolphs washed their hands of him, I guess, and now I was stuck with him, because I was too ashamed to crawl home, too broke, and anyway he said he would kill me if I tried.”
Thorpe started to interject, but I waved him off.
“Couple of years passed. Bakersfield. By then, I’d taken to keeping a little twenty-two stashed in the bedside cabinet. Not for him, for me. I figured he was going to give me some disease, he was going to strangle me some night, and I’d decided to put a bullet in my own brain first. One night he’d gone out drinking, probably visiting the local cathouse, who knows. Commotion downstairs at three in the morning. Seemed he’d forgotten his latchkey and was breaking in through a window. Roaring about killing someone. I figured he meant me. I said to myself, Dear me, here’s an intruder, whatever shall I do. Well, I went downstairs and shot him twice in the head, that’s what I did, right in that spot behind your left ear that’s supposed to kill instantly, dropped the gun, screamed for help, and that was that. Libertas.”
I looked around for something in which to knock the ash from the cigarette. My legs shook. Thorpe started forward and crossed the room, right past me, through the swinging door and into the room I supposed to be a kitchen. He came out a few seconds later, holding a saucer, which he set down on the crate next to me.
“Thanks,” I said. “The funny thing was, nobody ever questioned my story. I mean the imaginary intruder who broke the window and shot my husband and ran off. Not the sheriff or the townspeople. Certainly not the Randolphs, goodness no. I mean, you could almost smell the relief on them. They sent somebody to bring the body home, held a decent funeral at the family plot on Long Island. Just a terrible accident, everyone said, shook their heads.