Travel Writing Read online

  I went back to Carolyn’s place and lay on my back on the floor with my palms to the ground. My anxiety, which seemed to bloom full after any contact with Lydia, was manifesting itself in two ways: as something akin to vertigo and as a form of agoraphobia. I was scared of my own height; I felt too tall and conspicuous, though I am not very tall. I wanted to be shorter, lower, smaller, flatter. I also wanted to be alone. In crowded places I felt panic. Grocery stores with their fluorescent lights were particularly bad. One day I left a full grocery cart in the middle of an aisle and fled. The noise in restaurants sometimes got inside my head. Twice I’d had to make lame excuses and go out to my car to lie down across the backseat for a while. Sometimes I held onto the table or chair with both hands. I was afraid that I might just slowly topple over or slide under the table. Another antidote to all this madness was movement. Like a shark, if I kept moving, I could feed and breathe and stay just ahead of my demons.

  For a couple of days after seeing Lydia, I avoided human contact, slept on the floor, and rode my bike. Gene told me to wait, so I waited. The first day was muggy and misty, and I rode slowly north along the lakeshore, picked up the North Shore bike path in Lake Forest heading west, turned north on the Des Plaines River bike path, and ended up in Libertyville at an old barroom called The Firkin that has good food and great beers on tap. I ate a salmon sandwich, drank two cold glasses of Hoegarden and read some of Eric Hanson’s Motoring with Mohammed. When I started back, the sun had burned the mist away, so I found a bright, grassy spot beside the river, intertwined my legs with my bike, and slept on my back for an hour before riding back to the city. Then I sat on the deck with Art, Cooper, and my book, and read until dark.

  The second day I rode the lakeshore south to Hyde Park. A front had passed through in the night, and the pavement and grass were wet with the showers it had brought; the air was cool and clear. I stopped often to look at the city and the lake, to watch boats coming and going, a basketball game, the dogs at the dog beach, and the black, Puerto Rican, and Vietnamese fishermen along the rocks and harbors. I spent an hour in the 57th Street Bookstore, and bought Jochen Hemmleb’s Ghosts of Everest about the search for Mallory and Irvine, bought a falafel and a big iced tea on 55th Street, and rode down to the lake to eat. That evening I took some cold beers and sat outside at Penny’s Noodles to eat Thai food and finish reading the Hanson book.

  The third day I had a phone message from my mother, who had moved to the cottage for the summer. She said that there had been a rain and the gutters had overflowed; they needed cleaning. Could I take a day or two to come up, clean them out, and spend a little time? I was happy to do so. She is a reader and napper who was unlikely to intrude on my solitude. Besides, I’d been wanting to take a ride on the Kal-Haven bike trail that runs on an old railway right of way along the Black River. I put my bike and Cooper in the back of my station wagon and Art in the front, where he leaned against the door and looked out the window like a teenager. I listened to an audiotape of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and I thought how pure an example it is of Keats’s line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Sad truth. The sad truth good men have to face about themselves. “Would I?” I wondered. “Have I? Am I even a good man?” I listened to the last paragraph again. It was training, I thought, for writing Molly Bloom’s monologue. I love the way Joyce turns words back on themselves: Snow “was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.”

  In 1900 it took a day to get to southern Michigan from Chicago by steamer. In 1924, when my grandfather first made the trip, it took eight hours by car, and then you often had to walk over the last few dunes carrying your bags so the cars could climb them without getting stuck. Today it’s two hours from the Loop by superhighway, but then, when I’m falling asleep at night on our porch, I can hear the trucks on that highway and sometimes I can see the lights of the nuclear-power plant across the dunes to the north of us and even hear the steam rising from the cooling towers. You can get there easier today, but it’s not quite as far away. Life is as full of reversals as Joyce’s syntax, I thought to myself. Once the world was wild except for pockets of civilization. Now the world is crisscrossed by highways, contrails, and microwaves, except for a few preserved pockets of wilderness like Quetico. Going there is fabricated adventure, postmodern and artificial just like the adventurers of today, rich people who climb mountains and sail balloons around the world unnecessarily. But if this old cottage in the woods was also an illusion, it was one I valued. I stood on the roof, my hands in wet work gloves, and I could see only woods and water all around and beneath me all the way to the horizon.

  I like cleaning gutters because it is a dirty, easy job. The dirty part lets you feel accomplished. The easy part leaves time for the beach. I took my chair and umbrella there and read much of the afternoon. The water was cool and cleansing, and I shampooed my hair in it. Cooper lay panting in the wet sand, and Art played with a long stick, asking everyone who passed to throw it for him. My mother had made a beef stew with carrots and leeks and we ate it on the porch with French bread and red wine. I went to bed early listening to the calls of night birds.

  When I got up at dawn, my face felt grubby, and I realized that I hadn’t shaved in a while. I took a few minutes to do so, and there he was in the photograph of Lisa’s parents clipped from the paper and still taped to the mirror. He was the other man; he was the man at their table. It was the way he was rising and turning simultaneously, just as he rose and turned, stepping out of Lisa’s car that rainy, December night. It was the angle of his back, his posture, the way he held his head. It was he. “I’ll be damned,” I said out loud.

  I did not run back into the city as I was inclined to do at first. I took my bike ride, although I admit to being distracted and now remember the trail as little more than a long green tunnel. It could not be a coincidence. He must have known them. He must have known her. Perhaps he was another doctor. If so, his apparent neglect or indifference was even more troubling. But could I be sure? Was I certain or was I desperate? I stopped my bike, straddled it, dug the photo out of my pocket, and unfolded it. I was certain. On some essential, visceral level, I was absolutely certain.

  The next day was Saturday, so I packed up the dogs and my bike and headed back into the city in time to catch Tanya Kim at Outfitters. “I want to see if you know someone.” I handed her the photograph.

  “Are you kidding?” she said. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Not your parents. Him. That guy.”

  “Oh,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “I thought he might be a friend or maybe a colleague of your parents.”

  “I don’t know him,” she said.

  10

  …

  The Summer of Lisa Kim

  AS I LOOK BACK NOW, it seems to me that the summers of my boyhood often had themes, although I don’t know quite how they got them nor which one went with which year. It was all fantasy stuff, all self-invention. One summer a bunch of us spent weeks blazing trails through the Michigan woods. We trampled them, mapped them, and marked them by painting tin-can lids and nailing these to trees. Another summer a friend and I started a lawn-mowing business with an emphasis on the business part; we spent all the money we made on business cards, triplicate-receipt books, and clip-on ties. Another time a bunch of us formed a band, although no one could really play an instrument. We sat around someone’s basement wearing yellow-, pink-, and blue-tinted sunglasses, pounding, beating, strumming and wailing really bad songs. We spoke of record contracts. A couple summers we played softball every morning from ten to noon and kept meticulous personal records; in the end we had almost as many at-bats as the big leaguers we were imagining ourselves to be. When I was a little older, I saved up my money and bought a secondhand drafting table, and one summer I was an architect wearing white short-sleeved shirts and designing a to
olshed my father later built. The next summer, a friend and I wrote a daily comic strip about turtles because turtles were about all we could draw.

  That summer I lived at Carolyn O’Connor’s—the summer of Lisa Kim—I indulged myself as if I were a kid again. This time, of course, I was a detective. It wasn’t all that hard to do, either, with ten weeks free and no one there to shake her head or roll her eyes. It involved imagination, prevarication, and a lot of telephone calls. The first of these I made to the hospital where the Kims were on staff, and the second to Miriam Prescott, the woman who was the head of the hospital’s special-events committee. She invited me to meet her at her club.

  In the Fitzgerald/Hemingway debate, I side with Hemingway and then some. It seems to me that money often insulates people and makes them silly, like the Kronberg-Muellers and their circle in Mexico. I thought Miriam Prescott would be like one of them or else a long-faced patrician woman in tweed, despite the heat. Instead she had buck teeth and freckles, and I felt bad about taking advantage of her almost before I knew that I was doing it.

  I was surprised to be led to a café table on a terrace beside the tennis courts. “I took the liberty,” she said as we shook hands.

  A waitress was already delivering fancy tuna-salad sandwiches with elegant little homemade potato chips, cornichons, big stuffed green olives, and glasses of iced tea.

  “A working lunch,” she said, pleased with herself. “I can always justify it when the cause is good.”

  “Well,” I said, “this is . . . thank you.”

  She waved me off. “Just like Henry to make all that fuss and be so cross and then send someone right over. Anyway, where shall we begin?” On the phone I’d told her that I work for the Tribune, and I do sort of and sometimes, but she must have thought I was on assignment. I decided to play along.

  “Well, let’s begin with your dinner dance,” I said.

  “Of course, it’s just one of our three big annual fundraisers.” She told me about the other two in considerable detail, and then about the dinner dance itself, the silent auction, the raffles, how the theme is chosen, the committee, how much money was raised for the hospital. I took notes and was happy that I’d thought to bring a notebook and pen.

  “Well,” I said finally, “you’ve given me a lot to work with.”

  “I hope so. You can never get too much publicity. Any idea when your article might run?”

  “I’m sorry. I just write them. The editors fit them in. Since this is about your whole program, not just the one event, I suppose they might even hold it until . . . what’s coming up? Your fall outing?”

  “That might be nice. That wouldn’t be bad at all,” she said.

  “May I ask you a question?” I unfolded the photograph of Lisa Kim’s parents taken at the last dinner dance which I’d torn from the newspaper, and smoothed it out in front of her. “I picked this out of the files, and I just wondered . . .”

  “Oh, that’s Dr. Kim and Dr. Kim, our Korean couple. We’re so pleased with them. He’s a radiologist and she’s a pediatrician. Very, very competent.”

  “And this gentleman?” I asked. “He looks so familiar to me.”

  “Let’s see. Oh, that’s Dr. Decarre. Albert Decarre.”

  “And is he a radiologist or . . . ?”

  “No, no. He’s a psychiatrist,” she said.

  That morning I sat on Carolyn’s deck a long time looking at his phone number in the phone book. Up until now, everything could be rewound and erased. After this I wasn’t quite so sure. I took the dogs down to the dog beach at Belmont Harbor and threw sticks for them; I went through the dialogue—especially my half—in my mind. I went home and wrote it down. In the afternoon I bought a prepaid cell phone with cash; I filled out the forms using a fictitious name and address. I bought some Diet Dr Pepper and put three cans on ice. Just before I called, I opened one.

  “Dr. Decarre?” I asked.

  “Speaking.”

  “My name is David Lester. I’m a freelance writer and I’m working on an article for the Chicago Tribune about the death of the actress Lisa Kim. Our article is going to state that an eyewitness saw you with Ms. Kim a few minutes before the accident occurred. Do you have any reaction to that claim?”

  “What? No. No, no.”

  “We are also going to print that you had a personal relationship with Ms. Kim. Can you confirm or deny this?”

  “Lisa Kim was a family friend. I’ve been friends of her parents for many years. I’d known Lisa since she was a child. That’s all.”

  “Paul? What is it, dear?” a voice asked in the background. “Nothing. Just the hospital.” I jerked my head up. He had just lied. Why had he just lied?

  “We’re ready to serve,” the voice said.

  “I’ll be right there,” Decarre said.

  “Dr. Decarre, how long was Lisa Kim a patient of yours?” I asked.

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that anyone is or was a patient of mine. It is a violation of the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Confidentiality Code to do so.”

  “Would you like at this time to make any statement, clarify or add information to the article?” I asked. “We would be happy to represent your point of view.”

  There was a long pause. “No.”

  “Thank you for your time,” I said and hung up. The son of a bitch had lied, and he hadn’t denied that Lisa had been his patient. And if he was a longtime family friend, why didn’t Tanya Kim recognize him in the photograph? That didn’t make sense.

  My phone rang, and it was Lydia. Charlie Duke had called her out of the blue. “He’s in Kansas seeing his family. He wants to visit us.”

  “What? Didn’t you tell him?”

  “Of course I told him. I said, ‘Charlie, you need to know that Pete and I aren’t living together right now.’” I don’t think either of us had really said it before. I wondered if it had been hard, and if she had rehearsed saying the words, as I probably would have.

  “Do you know what he said?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “He said, ‘Oh you poor kids. That seals it. I’ll be right there.’” I laughed. I heard her laugh.

  “So when’s he coming?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? Oh Jesus, Lydia, I’m not sure I can do this.”

  “Well, he’s coming. I’ll handle this if you can’t.” Lydia’s answers sometimes reminded me of wines. They had tiny hints of martyrdom with the suggestion of moral superiority and guilt infliction.

  I went to see Rosalie Belcher Svigos again on my way to pick Charlie up at the bus station. First I called her cell phone, gambling that she wouldn’t pick up, and she didn’t. I left a cryptic little message. Would be in the hospital at 10:00 tomorrow morning. Know the name of the guy in Lisa’s car. Rosalie called me three times and I didn’t pick up. The third time she left a message to meet her at a certain nurses’ station on the eleventh floor. Good. I wanted to see her face when I said his name.

  I was on time and so was she. “Who is he?” she said immediately.

  “Albert Decarre. I think he was Lisa’s psychiatrist and her lover.”

  “Fuck!” she said. “Son of a bitch. I was afraid something like this was going on.” She took me into a family-counseling room and sat down hard in a chair. She wanted to know my evidence, and I laid it out for her. I told her about the photograph and phone call. I told her about his lie and his non-denial. I did not tell her about the hypnosis. She shook her head. “What makes you think they were lovers?” she asked.

  “Lisa wrote—but for some reason didn’t send—a letter addressed to P, ‘P’ period.” I took the letter from my hip pocket and gave it to her. She slowly and carefully read it twice.

  “Wow,” she said. “How’d you get this.”

  “Maud gave it to me thinking I was P. I gave it to an old boyfriend of Lisa’s named Peter Carey, thinking he was P; he said it wasn’t for him. Then who was it meant for? When I wa
s talking to Decarre on the phone, his wife came in and called him ‘Paul’; he goes by ‘Paul.’ Maybe it’s far-fetched, but I started playing around with it, and it’s not too hard to get from ‘Paul Decarre’ to ‘P. Decarre’ to ‘de Carre’ if you frenchify it to ‘Peter Carey’?”

  “Not so far-fetched,” said Rosalie. Apparently Lisa gave everyone she knew a nickname or called them by their initials. Rosalie said I would have been “P” or “Mr. P” or “PF Flyer” or “Old Shoe” or who knows. She also said that she had always felt something wasn’t right about Lisa’s death, had always known it, but couldn’t find even a shred of evidence, so when I called, she’d agreed to see me out of desperation; I was the first person to share her suspicion. It was the timing of the whole thing that bothered her. Lisa had called her a few weeks earlier to say that she was very, very in love, but she wouldn’t say with whom. Both those things were unlike her; she usually let other people fall in love with her, and she always told Rosalie everything. And there was the movie she’d been cast in. She was very excited about it. She was working hard on the role and making plans to go to New York. She was running every day and taking megavitamin shots. She’d never felt happier or better. It was, said Rosalie, an anti-coincidence, and she didn’t believe in coincidences of any kind. Then there was the whole heroin thing. “It just didn’t fit,” Rosalie said. “It wasn’t Lisa. It wasn’t right. Let’s look this guy up.” She went out into the hall and came back pulling a computer on a cart. I looked over her shoulder. He’d gone to a good med school, been in a top-notch residency program. His clinical interests were depression, drug abuse, eating disorders, marital problems, phobias, sexual dysfunctions, sex therapy.