Part Two: Chapter 5

V

I insert my key card and withdraw it and Amy pushes the door open when the little green light comes on. Just inside the door is a letter typed on several pages of plain paper. Amy hands it to me and I begin reading aloud:

Dear Stanley,

Or should I call you Chet?

I guess I should apologize to you for creating a little confusion in your life the past few days. But you created confusion in mine first.

I was very angry with you, but now that I have had a chance to watch them haul you away in a cruiser my anger has subsided a bit. That was sweet.

Once you wrote in your bogus little newspaper column that Mary Kate was the love of your life. You called her Kate, but how could I not know? I knew you, after all, Stanley Branford. And even more than I knew you, I knew Mary Kate.

She was the love of my life, too, Branford. You might even say I had her first. Long before she loved you. She knew, even if you didn’t.

I’m sure you never even noticed me hanging around town when you went off and started college, but Mary Kate did, and she was nice to me. Nicer than anybody else ever was, that’s for sure.

Then she came back from Quebec with you and she told me you guys got married. “Sorry, Bruce,” she said when she saw the tears on my face. Nobody else in that town ever saw me cry.

The only other mistake you ever made as far as I was concerned, Branford, was that you raised my expectations. I still have some of that black electrical tape. When I found out about you and Mary Kate I took two pieces of that black tape and a picture of you from the newspaper giving our high school graduation speech. I made a nice little “X” with the tape over your picture. Took me thirty years to follow through on it, but life is long. What goes around comes around.

You didn’t even know you double-crossed me. You never knew how nice she was to me, but that’s going to stay between Mary Kate and me. I promised her. I’m not the kind of man who has to tell the whole world about the girl I loved, every little detail. I’m not like you, Branford. Not like you or that slimeball Chet Spiro creation of yours. I would never try to make money off Mary Kate like you did. I might have forgiven you for stealing her away from me, I really might have. Then you had to go and splash her all over the newspapers just so you could get rich on her back, the poor aggrieved widower.

My ass. I could never forgive that. After that it was just a matter of time until I figured out how to make you pay. Just like I told Mary Kate, I’m a patient man. I have certainly enjoyed the past week.

The dirt hadn’t even settled on Mary Kate’s grave when you started popping that radio whore, Branford. I may not have gone to college like you, but I’m very observant. And I know what you’re doing with that little black whore who is young enough to be your daughter, too. They’re all pink inside, aren’t they, Branford?

Mary Kate and I used to play in our back yards together when we were little kids. Before either she or I had ever heard of anything called cooties. She may have been too nice for me, Branford, but I sure as hell know she was too nice for you.

Before my old man left out he would bring the two of us back into that old shed behind our trailer and give us candy. He would give us these wonderful chocolate-covered cherries and tell us what he wanted us to do. Then after we did it he would put me over his knee and whip my ass right in front of Mary Kate for doing what he had told me to do.

He was some kind of fuck-up, my old man. But then when he took off I actually started missing him. Not because I missed him, of course. But I missed those times with Mary Kate. There’s nothing in my life I wish for as much as I wish that that wasn’t true. But what am I going to do?

She made me promise I would never tell a soul about what went on in that shed. Sometimes she would say we had to forget all about it and begin our lives all over again. And sometimes it seemed like she was able to do that, although she was always extra nice to me. Extra nice, Branford. I never began my life over again, that’s for sure. I just did what I had to do from there on out.

Hell of a life I made for myself. Pills, little girls, other people’s money. I wish there was some simple way for me to cut it off, cut it out, and live my life like a normal person. But I’m way too fucked up for that. At least I know it, Branford. I’m just like Woody Allen or Michael Jackson, right? Without the money or the fame or the talent, maybe, but what the fuck, right? You know what I mean? The heart wants what it wants. I love the Woodman for saying that.

Then they opened up that “Little Girls” strip joint in Chelsea and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. No fucking lie. Tell me this, Branford, you’re the wise man, right? How do they have a place like that with hundreds of suits going in there every night, and dozens of little girls pulling their panties down and sucking on their lollipops, and then they tell me that I’m the sick fuck? I mean, I know I’m a sick fuck, you think I didn’t know that from the time I was six years old? But what about everybody else? That’s my fucking question. I mean, I’m not even arguing the point. I just kind of wish to fuck I knew.

Anyway, you’d be amazed at how easy this was, Branford. You seem like a careful man, but I’ll tell you, you could afford to be a hell of a lot more careful where your personal business was concerned. I especially like that special website you created with all your log-ins and passwords and whatnot. Spiffy. Saved me a lot of time.

Once I cracked your account at the paper it got even easier, because I figured out how to use all the tools you newspaper guys have to get people’s information right off the internet. Party on, Bruce!

There ought to be a law against you guys having the access you have to everyone’s deepest, darkest personal secrets. I mean, even if you guys can be trusted, which doubt, there’s always the chance that some no-good ex-con like me with too much time on his hands is going to get involved. I guess that’s what happened here.

So I guess I should pass this little roll of tape back to you, Branford. Maybe you can use it to patch your life back together. And while you are tying together the loose ends, there are a couple of little details you may want to pay some attention to.

One is your teeth. What do I know about your teeth? Well, don’t worry. It’s no big problem. I’m sure your teeth are fine. Probably a lot better than mine are. But if I were a betting man I would wager that they don’t match up with the dental records the state now has on file for you, that are supposed to be from the little dental exam you had when they processed you in to MCI Concord the other day. I’ve had the opportunity to make some contacts around the D.O.C. in my day, and wherever I don’t have contacts I’ve developed other forms of access. There are hacks, and then there are hacks, you know what I’m saying? They can make for a dangerous combination, under the wrong circumstances.

The other thing may not matter that much to you. Who am I to say? But you may just want to have a look-see into some outstanding paternity issues where Mary Kate’s daughter Rachel is concerned. Probably enough said. You’ve had enough to deal with the past week, and, like I say, I promised Mary Kate.

But I’m going to try to help you out now, Branford. I promise to leave you alone after tonight. I’ve done almost everything I needed to do. I’m not proud of what I have done in my life, but that’s the way it turns out sometimes, right, Branford? Just like you said to me way back when.

And I think even you would be proud of the one last thing I have left to do, if you figure it out.

Happy trails,

Bruce

I move around the room as I am reading. I pour myself three glasses if water and gulp them down in some kind of instinctive effort to maintain physical control of myself. By the end of the letter I am sitting on the edge of the huge king-sized bed.

On the floor near the door where we entered is the small roll of black electrical tape that Amy and I overlooked when she picked up the letter.

“Who the hell is Bruce?”

“His name is Bruce Gibbs. He and I grew up together down the Cape.”

“Together?”

“Well, apparently more together than I realized.”

“Apparently,” says Amy. “Any idea where he would be right now?”

“No. Why?”

“Think, Stanley. This letter is a pretty strong piece of evidence that this guy has framed you for everything that you have been accused of.”

“I’ve got to get it to Diana.”

“Forget Diana. I’m sorry -- bad choice of words. But never mind Diana for right now. You’ve got to get it to the AG’s office. Let me give Wick a call.”

“Wick?”

“Wick. You know. The brother who works in the AG’s office.”

“The one who wants to show you his moves.”

“Yeah, that one.”

“I’m going to have to think about that.”

“What’s to think about? Do you have any idea how close you are to spending most of the rest of your life in prison?”

“There’s Mary Kate to think about. And Rachel, too.” Just saying Rachel’s name, after Bruce Gibbs has threatened to explode her ties to me as my daughter, brings me close to breaking up. Amy gazes at me and seems to pick up on how brittle and fragile I am right now.

“Okay. I’m sorry. I guess I have a bit of a one-tracked mind because your legal situation is so serious. But you’re right. This is pretty explosive stuff.”

“It’s my life.”

“So let’s talk about it.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

And with that I lie back on the huge bed, turn, and curl into a fetal ball. I am totally closed off, impenetrable. The possibilities that Bruce Gibbs has raised in his letter seem real enough to me that I am terrified of facing them, of allowing myself even to enter into a conversation where Amy or anyone else might utter the actual words that Bruce Gibbs has strongly implied.

The details themselves are terrible, of course, but the two things that I cannot cope with go far beyond mere details. My entire belief structure is now threatened, and there is nothing abstract about the threats. Two of the most important relationships in my life – with my first wife Mary Kate and with our daughter Rachel – may be based on total falsehoods.

Could my entire life with Mary Kate have been a sham? Why would she have felt compelled to keep such horrible secrets about herself from me? Was it shame? Was she trying to protect me? What hurts me as much as anything is that she may have denied me the opportunity to help her cope with the devastation that, apparently, Bruce’s father Henry Gibbs caused in her life. If the essentials of what Bruce Gibbs wrote really are true, as I suspect is the case, it actually amazes me that she apparently did such a good job of moving on.

Or did she? Bruce Gibbs obviously wants me to believe not only that there were highly sexualized early childhood interactions between them, but that something continued to go on between Mary Kate and himself through our high school years and beyond, even after we were married. How could such a thing be true? Had Bruce Gibbs been “grandfathered in” by Mary Kate because the two of them had been victims together as children of this predatory sexual monster?

But his implication about Rachel’s paternity is the most devastating amongst all of the assaults on my psyche included in his letter.

I bolt from the bed and hurry into the bathroom, my body heaving with involuntary spasms. I churn up the camarones from a couple of hours earlier. When I come back out Amy is waiting for me with a bottle of ginger ale from the suite’s miniature refrigerator, and a towel.

“Stanley,” she whispers. “Sit down.”

I follow her instructions.

“I know you are reeling. I know it had to hurt you very deeply to read that letter, but there are three things I need to say to you. I hope that I can say them well enough, and I am begging you to try to listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“First, your relationship with Rachel is what it is, and nothing that this psycho can come in out of left field and say now should be able to change that relationship, change the essence of it. It is father and daughter. For fifteen years you have been everything to each other, including father and daughter, and that is a hell of a lot more important than whose DNA she has. Think about it, Branford: if this creep could be Rachel Branford’s biological father, then DNA means nothing! And if Mary Kate knew or suspected that Bruce was Rachel’s father, then take a look at what she did: she obviously made a very important decision fifteen or sixteen years ago to save Rachel’s life by choosing you to be her father. Whatever happened to Mary Kate in that shed, and whatever the scars were that she may have still been enduring from those experiences, she chose you to help give Rachel a chance to break that cycle so that it would not be reposted in another generation. It is a sacred trust, and you have done an absolutely wonderful job with it. You have to cherish that, Branford.

“Second, I know you must be wondering who the hell Mary Kate really was if some of the things you believed about her were not really true. But I think you have to be open to looking at it in a different way. Grant the possibility that everything Mary Kate presented to you was true, or is true, even if she did invent some of it. She didn’t only have to save Rachel’s life. She had to save her own life, and that must have required a super-human effort. Not only did she have to choose you to help her succeed at that effort, but in a very real way she had to choose herself, even to re-invent herself, if she was going to have a chance at a life worth living.

“You have to admit: if everything you wrote about her and everything you have told me about her is true, her self-invention created a pretty wonderful person.”

“Yeah,” I sigh. “The most wonderful person I’ve ever met. But now it all seems like a huge lie—she told it, and I wanted desperately to believe it. If she was wonderful, how could she betray me with Bruce Gibbs?”

“Betray you? I don’t mean this harshly, but I don’t think it is about you, Stanley. I really don’t. If anything she probably felt like she was betraying herself. Only a few of us have the luxury of truly being just one simple person. The reason she had to re-invent the Mary Kate who shared her life with you is that this Gibbs guy and his father raped her and stole her childhood and created a scarred and haunted girl who she must have been desperate to get away from. You were her salvation. The fact that that other Mary Kate erupted sometimes and made claims upon her and haunted her and even brought her, body and soul, into whatever sporadic relationship she may have had with Bruce Gibbs did not make your Mary Kate any less real. Don’t turn your back on her now and try to make her pay for a compulsion that she probably felt at times was totally out of her control. Remember the Mary Kate who was in your life and thank your lucky stars for her. Thank God for your sake and for Rachel’s sake that she had the courage to re-invent yourself.”

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Well, what never ceases to amaze me is this ability that you have to tune into something older than any of us, something we are never taught, something that even goes against what we are taught, but has more truth. And you just a baby.”

“Enough with the mumbo jumbo, white boy.”

“Okay. You said there was a third thing.”

“Well, it may not be as pretty a sentiment as the other two. This one is just the truth of who I am. I just need for you to know, Branford, that I am here for you. I still have a big stupid crush on you, and I may never get a chance at you all alone in a hotel room again, so….”

Amy does not finish her sentence. It’s she who crumples into tears now. I could have skated right past a simple invitation, but my sense that she is vulnerable combines with everything else that is extreme and needy in my own situation right now and pulls harder at me than I have ever felt this pull before.

I take her in my arms to console and comfort and thank her, to stay connected with her, and she is all hungry animal in my arms, her lips hot and breathy and desperate against my neck and her breasts burning through our clothes against my chest, and she certainly ignites my own neediness, but.

But.

There is not a straight line between my resolve and its execution, but eventually, even with throbbing, champing, willful evidence that my body is resolved to go further, I stand up, still holding her hands in mine.

“I don’t think it would help me.”

“No. I know. I know it wouldn’t help you.”

“It would probably help me hold the pain at bay. And it would give me a wonderful spike of good feeling.”

“But it would just be a temporary fix, for both of us.”

“And it wouldn’t help me do the right thing as far as Rachel and Diana and Sam are concerned. It might even make it seem for a while like it was okay not to do the right thing.”