But hiding it wasn’t the point. Why had she kept it at all? Given the way she felt about her father, you’d think she wouldn’t have been able to wait to get it out of the house and into the garbage. And the garbage cans were out back, in the garage.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry,” I sighed. “Maybe I’m getting paranoid. Well, here goes …” With her help and the wall’s support, I pulled myself to my feet, wincing as I bumped my arm. “Ow! Damn.”

  She cringed right along with me. “Do you want me to get you to a hospital? Should I call a doctor?”

  “No, it was just a twinge,” I said as the wave of pain and nausea passed. “We better call the police, though.”

  “The police?” She stared at me. Here comes another story, I thought, angry at myself for thinking it. I know the look now. She’s coming up with reasons why we shouldn’t call them. “What would be the point? Those men are gone, they got what they wanted, they’re not coming back.”

  “They think there’s another copy of the film.”

  “But we don’t know anything about that. Look, what can the police do? We can’t describe them, they didn’t leave fingerprints—”

  “God damn it, Lily, I don’t believe this. When two guys break into our house like that, and push you around, and all the rest of it, I’m calling the police.” Now it was Lily I was mad at. “Besides, they’re probably the same ones that killed your father, have you thought about that?”

  Her face stiffened. “I don’t care—”

  “But I do. They’re murderers.” I pushed myself away from the wall. I was feeling steadier now. That’s what anger does for you. “I’m going to use Sal’s phone. I want you to come with me; I don’t want you here alone.”

  “Sal’s phone! But I just told him there was nothing the matter. I can’t—”

  “That’s your problem,” I said. My chest was rigid. I felt as if something in me had come unhooked. “Put on a coat, it’s cold.”

  She looked at me with narrowed eyes. I couldn’t read her expression. “You’ve changed, Pete. You’re different.”

  “I’ve changed—!”

  This was an exchange that wasn’t headed anywhere promising, so I was glad when we were interrupted by the front buzzer again, followed by hammering on the door. “Police! Open the door, please.”

  We continued to stare balefully at each other. When had we both become so volatile, so ready to be angry with one another? “Pete, please,” she said, squeezing my forearm. We went to the door together, me trying not to hobble.

  Two rumpled police officers who looked as if they were at the end of their shift stood there looking us over, ready not to believe whatever we were going to say. Behind them, down at the curb, their car was pulled up crookedly. “We have a report of a disturbance here. What exactly is the trouble?”

  Both of us were suddenly tongue-tied. “Uh—”

  “What happened to your window?”

  Lily glanced at me, pleading. Please.

  “We’ve had a break-in,” I said, looking away from her eyes. “Two men in ski masks. They were after a can of film.”

  Chapter 6

  The police didn’t leave until 1 a.m., and when they did, they took us with them, dropping us off at the Kings County emergency room, me for X-rays, and Lily along with me because neither of us wanted her to spend the night alone at home. The X-rays came up negative, but they kept me there till morning anyway, to poke and prod at their leisure. Happily, they didn’t find whatever they were looking for, and by 9 A.M. we were back at home.

  But home was hectic. We had barely showered and changed clothes when the police were back with more questions. They came back two more times in the next couple of days as well, and Kovalski got into the act too, calling us to his office once and stopping at the house a couple of times to ask questions and look dubious when we answered. He’d come to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the murder and the break-in were related: that Vercier had been battered in an effort to get out of him the whereabouts of the film, and that the effort had been successful. That, he said, must have been how the two thugs knew where to come looking. Whether or not Vercier had been killed intentionally or had just succumbed to the beating he’d taken was still up in the air. And I got the impression that Kovalski, who didn’t seem to be making much headway, thought that up in the air was where it was likely to stay.

  On the second of those visits he casually asked Lily if she’d been aware that her father had been a partner in the Galeria Metropolitana, a well-to-do Barcelona dealership in ancient jewelry and silver.

  She colored slightly. “I told you, I don’t know anything about him. I haven’t seen him since I was seven. I didn’t even know he was in Spain.”

  “A partner?” I put in, surprised.

  The reason I was surprised (aside from the fact that the last I’d heard he’d been a barber) was that he’d hardly struck me as a cosmopolitan art-world type, or a well-to-do guy either. On the other hand, a partnership in a big Barcelona gallery would explain the suite at the St. George.

  He nodded absently. “Yeah, I called Barcelona—well, I didn’t, Officer Ramirez did—and talked to the other partner, a guy named Lebrun. He filled us in. The reason I bring this up, Mrs. Simon, is that when we asked what he was doing in the States, they told me he’d come to see you; they didn’t know about what. I thought you might want to take a guess.”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  He accepted this with an unsurprised shrug, “Also, it occurred to me you might want to talk to them, find out the name of his attorney and so on, because you might have something substantial coming to you. I mean, it’s none of my business—”

  “Thank you, sergeant,” she said. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I have no interest in anything that’s ‘coming to me’ from him. I think I’ve explained why.”

  He didn’t answer, just looked at her steadily with his sad, sleepy eyes. He doesn’t believe her either, I thought.

  * * *

  These pressures, along with the neighbors’ restrained but obvious curiosity and the not-so-restrained curiosity of the men who came to fix the window and to install another telephone, didn’t do anything for my relations with Lily, which went from bad to worse. She started getting irritated at little things I did: Why couldn’t I close a drawer after I opened it once in a while? Why couldn’t I just once fold my napkin neatly after eating instead of crumpling it up the way I did? And was it really so very hard for me to remember which side of the hall closet was hers and which side was mine?

  None of this was new; I’d heard it all before, lots of times, but it had always been said with a sort of loving, head-shaking amusement, it being understood between us that a certain amount of professorly absent-mindedness merely added to my charms. Not any more. Now she flung them at me with tight-mouthed exasperation. And I wasn’t any bundle of good humor myself. For one thing I ached all over from the beating; for another, the constant state of tension with Lily, an unprecedented thing, was wearing me down.

  The worst thing was that after years of watching next to nothing on television she suddenly turned into an addict. As soon as the dinner dishes were done she’d flick on the set, and on it would stay, right up until she fell asleep in front of it. She’d watch Life of Riley, 77 Sunset Strip, Route 66, You Asked For It, The Real McCoys, Burke’s Law, Steve Allen—whatever happened to be on, things she’d never have thought of looking at before.

  Even I—I with my shying away from meaningful dyadic interaction—couldn’t help seeing what all this TV-watching really meant. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was desperate to avoid me. Even The Real McCoys was preferable.

  I tried my best to be understanding and give her some room, but I was really starting to worry about us. More than that, it hurt me to be excluded like that, to be kept at a distance from the only person in the world I deeply cared about, to be an outsider in my own marriage. I began to feel all the time as if I was carrying a stone in my chest. So after a few nights of it I waited for the end of a one-hour special on bird life in Antarctica and turned off the set.

  “Million Dollar Movie is coming on,” she said. “It’s a Sonja Henie. I wanted to watch it.”

  I came back and sat in the chair beside her. “Lily, this is no good. What’s happening to us? We used to talk about everything, we used to trust each other—”

  “I trust you, Pete, it’s not that. Don’t think that.”

  “Then what?”

  She hunched her shoulders. “Oh, it’s everything together, really. Kennedy, my father, that detective and his questions, questions … so many memories I thought I’d put behind me. It’s hard to put into words. I just feel as if my world’s suddenly turned kind of black. I don’t want to think about anything right now.”

  “Lily, honey—”

  She smiled a little. “It’s just temporary, darling; don’t worry, I’ll get over it. Just let me work it through on my own, all right? I’ll be my old self in a little while, you’ll see. Just give me a little time.”

  When I started to say something more she put a finger against my lips. “Pete, please don’t press me right now. That detective is bad enough. I already told you what happened with my father—what he did. Don’t make me go into the details.”

  That stone in my chest got heavier. You already told me, but I don’t believe you. “Okay,” I said with an inward sigh, “I won’t press you.”

  * * *

  After that she started going out to the movies instead of watching TV at home. I went with her the first time but it was obvious she would have been happier by herself. So after that I let her go alone. There were four movie houses within a few blocks of the house, so it wasn’t hard for her to find something nearby every night: The Birdman of Alcatraz, Hud, Lilies of the Field, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

  I felt as if I’d come unmoored. I could sense Lily slipping away from me, receding into the distance, growing ever smaller, fainter, less real. Already the calm, lovely, uncomplicated years of our marriage seemed like a dream, like a not-quite-real memory of some fresh, clear brook that had run for a wonderfully long time but had finally flowed on by, dried up, and disappeared. I began to wonder if we could ever put it together again. I was scared.

  By the fourth night of movies I was getting paranoid too. Was she really spending these evenings at the theater? Was she really alone? Was there something else going on? She was going to the Benson, she’d told me. So half-an-hour after she left, I walked there, bought a ticket, entered, and looked for her in the darkness. There she was, all right, and alone, sitting motionless in the tenth row, her usual row, with flickering gray-blue lights and shadows from the screen playing over her face. She was watching Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. From a seat at the far end of the last row, feeling like some kind of pervert, I watched her for forty solid minutes. Her face never turned even fractionally from the screen. She never once laughed, never moved. She looked like the statue-lady in my dream

  I slunk home in a wet, sticky snowfall, brimming with doubts and anxieties I couldn’t name.

  * * *

  I suppose I should have talked to Louis about it before it had gone this far. Despite the overlay of gobbledygook (mostly acquired during a year’s sabbatical at the Institute for Analytico-transformative Psychotherapy in London, before which he’d made sense a majority of the time, or pretty close), there was a perceptive and intelligent guy there, and, more important, an old friend with my interests at heart. But I wasn’t able to bring myself to go to an outsider, even Louis. About my dreams, sure—I only half-believed they meant anything anyway, and even if they did, so what? Talking to him about them was more fun than anything else, a mental diversion for us both. But about Lily and me? About the very core of my life? No, that was too personal, I just couldn’t. Whatever was going on between us, I’d been sure we could work it out and put it behind us on our own.

  But now it had reached the stage where I was so unable to communicate with her that I was actually sneaking around spying on her. When I wasn’t feeling resentful or put-upon I was feeling rudderless and empty. What Lily was feeling I couldn’t tell. We were in trouble and I was no longer sure we could find our way back.

  So the next day, after lunch, I asked Louis if he had a few minutes. I didn’t want to talk in his office—too close to a professional consultation—or in mine either, so we found a deserted classroom in Boylan Hall and pulled a couple of desk-armchairs around to face each other.

  “This is really hard for me, Louis.”

  He nodded, doing his best to suppress his natural, slightly maniacal look in favor of a thoughtful, judicious restraint that didn’t suit him at all. “Okay, shoot. I’m at your service.”

  I took a breath—chalk dust, steam heat, and floor polish—and laid it out for him, right from the morning Marcel Vercier had returned from the dead. It took me half-an-hour. Mostly he listened quietly, with his head down, tracing with one finger over the old names and initials that had been carved into the wood long ago and darkened over the years by layer on layer of Waterman’s blue-black ink. After I’d finished he was silent for a few seconds, then looked out through the window at the campus, where a few students trudged through the thin layer of snow on their way from one building to another.

  “I gather you’re not in need of any theoretical constructs at this point.”

  “What I’m in need of is help, Louis. Lily and I, we … well, dammit, I just don’t understand what’s going on. Two weeks ago I knew everything there was to know about her, I understood her better than I understand myself. Seriously. You know, she’d start a sentence and I could finish it. Half the time she wouldn’t even have to start it. Now, it’s as if …” I shook my head. “I don’t know what’s in her mind, she’s like a different person, a stranger. I can’t get close.”

  “No, I don’t buy that, Pete.”

  “You don’t buy what?”

  “I don’t think you knew everything there was to know about her.”

  “Well, everything important, everything that mattered.”

  “Really? Let me ask you something.” He looked hard into my face. “You’ve always thought it would be nice to have kids, right? But Lily doesn’t.”

  “So?” I said. “A lot of women don’t. What’s that go to do with anything?”

  “And what career does she choose?”

  “She’s a junior high counselor, you know that. What’s the point?”

  “The point is that this woman who’s not interested in having children picks a career of working with kids, and handicapped kids at that—kids who need a lot of attention. Does that make sense to you?”

  That stopped me for a moment. “Well, she’s interested in helping others, Louis. She always has been.”

  “Oh, please, that’s lame, and you know it. All right, how much do you know about her life before she met you?”

  “Well, when she was a little girl—”

  “No, I mean after was a little kid, her life during the war.”

  I shrugged. “She doesn’t like to talk about it, and I don’t blame her. I haven’t pressed her.”

  “You haven’t pressed her,” he repeated. “For what—twenty years, you haven’t pressed? You never asked what her life was like day-to-day? It must have been a tremendously formative time for her. Was she in the Resistance? Did she—”

  “Pete, she still was a kid, for Christ’s sake. She was twelve in 1940, when the Germans came. She was barely seventeen when it ended. She’s put it behind her, and as far as I’m—”

  “Did she go without food? Was she ever in trouble with the Nazis? Did she spend the whole time at home? What happened to her relatives? Did—”

  “She went hungry a lot, just like everyone else, but no, she was never in trouble, and, yes, she spent the whole Occupation in Veaudry with her mother, and … and …” And that was about all I knew. Aside from the never-happened execution of her father, of course, on that fateful day on the village square in Veaudry.

  I grumbled something. I was getting irritated; this wasn’t the way I’d intended the conversation to go. “Look, Louis, I know you find it hard to believe when someone prefers not to go around sharing all her innermost feelings, but …” I waved my hand to cancel out the rest of the sentence. “Oh, hell, I’m sorry. But you see, Lily—”

  “No, no, you miss my point. I’m not talking about Lily, I’m talking about you.”

  “I don’t want to talk—”

  “Tell me about your career.”

  “I don’t see what—”

  “Just answer; humor me. For Christ’s sake, you ask me to help you, and then you won’t shut up. What’s your profession? Come on.”

  “I’m a historian, okay?”

  “Exactly. Now, you don’t suppose that could be because you like things cut and dried?”

  “History isn’t cut and dried, Louis.”

  “Trust me on this, Pete. When you’ve been dead four or five hundred years, things are cut and dried. Remember that war you were getting so excited about last week, the War of the three Andrews in whatever it was, 650?

  “The War of the Three Henrys, 1585. So?”

  So this: here you are; you were alive at the time of the greatest conflict in the history of the world—you were in it, for Christ’s sake; a participant. Your wife was really in it; right in the middle of it. Am I right or am I right?”

  “Louis, I’ve really got a big problem here. I wish you’d—”

  “And after you get back from defending your country you go back to school for eight long years so you can spend the rest of your life studying stuff like, what? The famous, seminally important War of the Three Henrys.” He stuck his face out at me, the better to fix me with that goofy stare, then tapped his temple. “Could this be part of a pattern, I ask myself. Is this—I mean, just possibly—a man that works overtime to avoid problems that just might turn out, God forbid, to be relevant?”