“Enough. I left her and moved to New York. Of course I resigned my tenured professorship at UB. I had connections throughout the academic world, to be sure, and a decent if not glorious reputation, so I might have found something at Columbia or NYU. But the scandal I’d created made that less likely, and anyway I no longer gave a damn for teaching. I just wanted to live, and enjoy my life.

  “There was money enough to make that possible. We lived well. Too well, really. Not wisely but too well. Good restaurants every night, fine wines with dinner. Season tickets to the opera and the ballet. Summers in the Pines. Winters in Barbados or Bali. Trips to London and Paris and Rome. And the company, in town or abroad, of other rich queens.”

  “And?”

  “And it went on like that,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap, and a little smile played on his lips. “It went on, and then one day I picked up a knife and killed him. You know that part, Matthew. It’s where you came in.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t know why.”

  “No, that never came out. Or if it did I missed it.”

  He shook his head. “It never came out. I didn’t offer a defense, and I certainly didn’t provide an explanation. But can you guess?”

  “Why you killed him? I have no idea.”

  “But you must have come to know some of the reasons people have for killing other people? Why don’t you humor an old sinner and try to guess. Prove to me that my motive was not unique after all.”

  “The reasons that come to mind are the obvious ones,” I said, “and that probably rules them out. Let me see. He was leaving you. He was unfaithful to you. He had fallen in love with someone else.”

  “He would never have left,” he said. “He adored the life we led and knew he could never live half so well with someone else. He would never fall in love with anyone else anymore than he could have fallen in love with me. David was in love with himself. And of course he was unfaithful, and had been from the beginning, but I had never expected him to be otherwise.”

  “You realized you’d thrown your life away on him,” I said, “and hated him for it.”

  “I had thrown my life away, but I didn’t regret it. I’d been living a lie, and what loss to toss it aside? While jetting off to Paris for a weekend, does one long for the gentle pleasures of a classroom in Buffalo? Some may, for all I know. I never did.”

  I was ready to quit, but he insisted I come up with a few more guesses. They were all off the mark.

  He said, “Give up? All right, I’ll tell you. He changed.”

  “He changed?”

  “When I met him,” he said, “my David was the most beautiful creature I had ever set eyes on, the absolute embodiment of my lifelong ideal. He was slender but muscular, vulnerable yet strong. He was—well, go back to the San Marco piazza and look at the statue. Michelangelo got it just right. That’s what he looked like.”

  “And then what? He got older?”

  He set his jaw. “Everyone gets older,” he said, “except for the ones who die young. It’s unfair, but there’s nothing for it. David didn’t merely age. He coarsened. He thickened. He ate too much and drank too much and stayed up too late and took too many drugs. He put on weight. He got bloated. He grew jowly, and got pouchy under his eyes. His muscles wasted beneath their coating of fat and his flesh sagged.

  “It didn’t happen overnight. But that’s how I experienced it, because the process was well along before I let myself see it. Finally I couldn’t help but see it.

  “I couldn’t bear to look at him. Before I had been unable to take my eyes off him, and now I found myself averting my gaze. I felt betrayed. I fell in love with a Greek god, and watched as he turned into a Roman emperor.”

  “And you killed him for that?”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill him.”

  I looked at him.

  “Oh, I suppose I was, really. I’d been drinking, we’d both been drinking, and we’d had an argument, and I was angry. I don’t suppose I was too far gone to know that he’d be dead when I was done, and that I’d have killed him. But that wasn’t the point.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “He passed out,” he said. “He was lying there, naked, reeking of the wine seeping out of his pores, this great expanse of bloated flesh as white as marble. I suppose I hated him for having thus transformed himself, and I know I hated myself for having been an agent of his transformation. And I decided to do something about it.”

  He shook his head, and sighed deeply. “I went into the kitchen,” he said, “and I came back with a knife. And I thought of the boy I’d seen that first night in Madison, and I thought of Michelangelo. And I tried to be Michelangelo.”

  I must have looked puzzled. He said, “Don’t you remember? I took the knife and cut away the part that wasn’t David.”

  It was a few days later in Rome when I recounted all this to Elaine. We were at an outdoor café near the Spanish Steps. “All those years,” I said, “I took it for granted he was trying to destroy his lover. That’s what mutilation generally is, the expression of a desire to annihilate. But he wasn’t trying to disfigure him, he was trying to refigure him.”

  “He was just a few years ahead of his time,” she said. “Now they call it liposuction and charge the earth for it. I’ll tell you one thing. As soon as we get back I’m going straight from the airport to the gym, before all this pasta becomes a permanent part of me. I’m not taking any chances.”

  “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”

  “That’s reassuring. How awful, though. How godawful for both of them.”

  “The things people do.”

  “You said it. Well, what do you want to do? We could sit around feeling sorry for two men and the mess they made of their lives, or we could go back to the hotel and do something life-affirming. You tell me.”

  “It’s a tough one,” I said. “How soon do you need my decision?”

 

 

  Lawrence Block, The Collected Mystery Stories

 

 

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