VI
In the morning, I begin by apprehending the absence of things on which I have come to depend emotionally: Sam’s heraldry of the morning, his running shout and grippy hug, and Diana’s daily intimation of love. I have not experienced these treasures for several days. So, I am not at home, still, and when I open my eyes for the first time is evident to me that I am not, any longer, in prison. Eliminate this, eliminate that, and sooner or later my essentially binary brain is bound to be able to locate me, I will remember or discover where I am, but it is somewhere new, somewhere I was last night, and I am still, I notice, fully clothed.
I feel warm pressure behind me, and I am filled immediately with regret as I realize that it is Amy spooning around me from behind. But we both seem to be clothed, and I have no memory of being otherwise, or of crossing any critical line. I am conscious of my own breathing and of Amy’s, and of my being in an inconvenient state of readiness. In our synchronicity we have not yet to begun to exchange twitches of the preliminaries to disentanglement, so I am fearful that any move I make may wake her. And then I have a memory: what awakened me, a sound at the door, nothing much.
Was the thump at the door an intruder’s warning? Should I feel guilt or shame that our bodies are entwined in this way? This is not a lustful entwining, I know that, although it is very comfortable, pleasurable, even intimate in exactly the same way that Amy and I have become, precisely, not lovers but intimates, intimate friends. There are various ways in which it is possible for the bodies of adults to become entwined, and I am sure that I am as ready as the next person to impute a conventional lexicon of meanings to different forms of entwining. The most heated such entanglements, face to face with rigorous grinding and the occasional thrust, usually speaks to a period of ascent in a relationship, that delicious time when love is unconsummated and thus tends to fill the lovers’ imaginations with as steady a surplus of anticipatory fuel as any kid might experience on any Christmas morning. But this spooning position in which Amy has captured me from behind – I wonder: all night long, or only for the last hour or so? – is, while much less heated, a signal usually of even greater intimacy: that of lovers who have been to the mountaintop, likely more than once or twice, and now feel the ease and comfort of an established couple with one another. A still adoring established couple, perhaps, but established nonetheless.
So I am aware that anyone observing Amy and me as we are now arranged might well arrive at a false conclusion. We seem to be lovers, and once again – these discrepancies are occurring so regularly in my life now that it is an act of will to continue believing that it is my life – appearance undercuts my self-defining protestations of innocence, my claim that I remain True Blue Stanley, true to Diana, true to my children, true to my family. True Blue Stanley, who doesn’t live there any more. Diana and Rachel, who do not love me any more. Appearances have lately been undercutting my claims of innocence in ways so total and devastating that I am becoming unable even to press my claims. Which in turn, I am sure, only aggravates the problem.
Today I will reverse this hideous process. That is why Amy and I are entwined this way. Well, that’s not exactly true, but it is true enough, in its way. It follows. Lying lengthwise side by side together on the spacious king-sized bed, we talked ourselves into exhaustion last night. We got past the possibility of a sexual adventure, more or less safely, just as we have had to do several times before. We made a plan. We conspired. I believe in the words Amy spoke to me, in her commitment to my hope to recover my life, and even in her ability to work wonders with Wick.
At some point in our deliberations I even agreed, finally, to let Amy call Wick. They arranged to meet at ten o’clock this morning downstairs at Henrietta’s Table, the restaurant off the hotel lobby. She will talk to him about Bruce Gibbs’ letter and she will let him look at a copy, provided he agrees to keep any issues related to Mary Kate and Rachel confidential. Before their breakfast meeting Amy and I will walk across the street to Kinko’s to make a copy of that letter and to allow Amy and me a fresh chance to sit down together at a computer monitor to look over the online accounts that she has been researching on my behalf.
Amy has drilled me hard on the basic elements of my self-defense and she has helped me both to understand the need for, and to frame, a two-pronged effort to deliver myself from my current wretched predicament. Amy will focus first and foremost on my legal status, beginning with her meeting with Wick, and I will concentrate my efforts on trying to win back Diana. My hope is then to enlist Diana in helping me to reach out again to Rachel. I was reluctant to embrace the idea of using Diana as a proxy in that way, because it feels like an admission of my total failure as a father to have to admit that the rug has been pulled out from under my relationship with Rachel so totally that I cannot approach her directly. All of our past paradigms for relating to one another seem woefully inadequate now.
And here I am lying on a bed in a fancy Cambridge hotel suite with my butt tucked into the very warm and inviting crotch of a beautiful woman less than half my age. Where’s Frank Grossman when the Herald really needs him? Print this picture in the paper and any chance I have of getting Diana to hear me out will, of course, be totally obliterated. I emit a small chuckle – nothing more than gallows humor – as I lay here imagining myself at the impossible task of trying to persuade Diana, under those circumstances, that “nothing happened:”
“We spent the night in a hotel room together so that Amy could help me prepare to prove my innocence to you, darling.”
Why don’t I just shoot myself now and make it easier on all concerned? I probably couldn’t even say it without stuttering. Too much of my training as a newspaperman, like Diana’s training as a television and radio journalist, is predicated on the simple notion that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc., etc. This principle never seemed like oversimplification to me before, but then it was just my job. Now it’s my life.
It is something of a reach to think that Frank Grossman would let himself into the room and just start snapping pictures, but then I remember how it is that I happen to be in this particular hotel suite in the first place. Bruce Gibbs knows I am here. He could easily flash some bogus identification and get himself an extra room key. He probably already has one. He probably knows that Amy is here with me, too. I practically jump out of bed, causing Amy to stir briefly, and I walk over to the wet bar where there is a coffee maker read to brew a pot of Starbucks coffee at the push of a button. I push, then walk over to stand in the huge floor-to-ceiling window looking down on the Charles River. Last night’s fog is gone and the early sun casts a golden shimmer over the water as the morning’s first scullers slice through the water.
A pleasant coffee aroma begins to take over the room, and Amy stirs again.
“There’s a very sweet fantasy of mine that you could fulfill if you were feeling up to it,” she purrs.
I am unable to keep the exasperation out of my tone as I respond: “I thought we went over that last night.”
“Coffee. Jesus, Romeo, I’m just talking a simple cup of coffee here. It’s just a mostly innocent little fantasy of waking up to find you serving me a cup of freshly brewed coffee.”
I pour a mug and bring it to her black.
“Thank you,” she says. “You didn’t have to be such a grump about it.”
“I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to be a grump.”
“Okay. I know. We’re both a bit tender this morning, aren’t we?”
I top off my own mug with cream and draw a couple of good pulls from it. I experience coffee’s reward of an improved sense of mental acuity so quickly these days that I sometimes wonder if the reward is not primarily, for me, a placebo effect.
“You’re up early, Branford. We were talking until after two, I think.”
That was less than four hours ago. Searching for an explanation other than that I was caught up in a bit of paranoia about yet another compromising newspaper photograph, I remember and recover the thumping sound that I suspect first awakened me. Just a little thump outside the door. Newspapers being delivered? When I checked in last night and the desk clerk asked me which complimentary newspaper I wished to have left outside my door in the morning, I gave the answer I always give, as a newspaperman and a newspaper junkie: “All of them.”
So that was probably it. I pour us each a second cup and walk over to open the door to retrieve a stack of the morning papers: the Times, the Globe, the Transcript, the Post, and the Herald. The Herald, unapologetically on top, greets me with a stunning front-page headline:
TRANSCRIPT’S BRANFORD:
DISGRACED AND DEAD AT 53
This time the front-page picture shows me in handcuffs and leg irons being perp-walked out of the courtroom by a couple of court officers last Friday.
Whenever I have looked at such photographs in the past I have focused on the eyes of all the participants, the keepers and the newly arrested or sentenced alike, looking for some sign of relationship, of dignity, or concern or any other attitude of engagement toward one’s fellow humanity on the part of any of the players. I have noticed that the eyes of the newly sentenced tend often to focus inward on some unseeable point that is possibly somehow the geographical center of their efforts to keep themselves together, body and soul, after what I have presumed were, whether surprising or not, serious setbacks in their lives. In my own eyes, here, I see fear, disbelief, and a not very confident defiance.
Do I see these things only because I know, already, that they are there? For the most part I have made my life a life of opportunity and comfort, and it has been extremely rare for me to find myself in a pinch, in a tight situation, without the personal or material resources to solve it. There is this situation, of course, but before it I can remember only a few adolescent scrapes where I screwed up in some way and had to face the music. But I realize, looking at this picture, something essential about myself that I do not like. The fact is that when I am faced with a sense of doom for any reason I begin to shut down: I tend to become affectless, monotonal, resigned to whatever might turn out to be my fate. I seem constitutionally unable to make any presentation in my own defense, as if to do so would be beneath my dignity. Having been granted for so long a platform to tell multitudes of New Englanders what they should be thinking, without ever having to get my hands dirty, I am now unable to lift a finger to represent myself. I watch the actions and attitudes of others so that I can assess their loyalty to me. How eager are they to judge me? How understanding are they of possible human frailty? How near or how remote is the possibility, to them, that they might ever find themselves in my shoes?
Peering into my own eyes now on the front page of the Herald, I have no difficulty distilling these questions from behind my mask of affectless neutrality. I am a student of human hypocrisy and imperfection, a humble man who believes that, my specific present-case innocence notwithstanding, I am capable and we are all capable of flawed, even deeply flawed behavior. And I would never want to protest my innocence so shrilly as to seem as if I believe myself incapable of guilt.
Several seconds of silence have passed, and Amy has quietly taken a position behind me, her hands resting on my shoulders.
“Branford,” she gasps. “You’re dead?”
We read the story silently together.
CHELSEA—Disgraced Boston Morning Transcript newspaperman Stanley T. Branford, 53, was found dead last night after his automobile apparently exploded and burned in a Chelsea parking lot just hours after he was released on bail from the state prison in Concord.
Branford’s charred remains were burned beyond recognition but were found in a late-model Volvo automobile registered in his name. Massachusetts state police were able to confirm Branford’s identity based on a match of his dental records with records recently added to the state’s identification database of convicted felons and state prison inmates.
“It’s a lucky thing for all of us that Mr. Branford spent several days in the state prison system this past week,” said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Diane Werby. “The result in this case is that we gathered Mr. Branford’s dental records as a routine part of the intake process, logged them online, and they were almost instantaneously available to use when we needed to be able to match them with Mr. Branford’s remains.”
Ironically, Branford’s death occurred in the same Chelsea parking lot where he was arrested last Thursday night prior to being arraigned on 112 counts of grand larceny for stealing the identities and the life savings of hundreds of victims. The parking lot is adjacent to the infamous “Little Girls” adult entertainment complex, where Branford squandered thousands of dollars of stolen funds, and where he spent the final hours before his arrest hanging out, chatting with some of the young nude dancers who work there, and buying them lollipops in exchange for unspecified favors.
The Massachusetts chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) joined Chelsea neighborhood and parents’ groups last year in charging that the “Little Girls” nightclub is an affront to women and a danger to children because it encourages active and potential pedophiles to see children as appropriate objects of sexual interest and activity.
Branford was released yesterday on $100,000 cash bail from the MCI Concord state prison facility where he had been held awaiting trial since his arraignment in Suffolk Superior Court last Thursday. State officials were mum when asked who had posted Branford’s bail.
“It was the Court’s decision to allow bail for Mr. Branford, against the Commonwealth’s recommendation that he be held without bail as a potential danger to himself and others,” said assistant attorney general Daisy Hamill when reached at her home early this morning. “But we would not criticize the Court in this case for its effort to find the right balance between the claims of the Commonwealth and the rights of this defendant. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.”
State police investigators on the scene of last night’s deadly automobile explosion and fire refused comment on its cause, and would not rule out either suicide or homicide.
“Obviously there was gasoline involved in the ultimate explosion, which may be all that accounts for the strong smell of gasoline at the scene,” said state police captain Edward Downs. “We have thus far been unable to identify any evidence of an incendiary device or any other signs of foul play or, for that matter, of suicide. But it would not be too much of a stretch to speculate that Mr. Branford may have been despondent recently, even after being bailed out of Concord.”
Ms. Paula Levitt, a neighbor in the Belmont neighborhood where Branford lived until recently with his wife and children, told the Herald last night that it did not appear to her that Branford had returned to his home yesterday after being released on bail.
“That’s actually a relief, I’m sorry to say,” said Ms. Levitt. “This is a family neighborhood and the safety of our children is our paramount concern here.”
Although the only charges filed against Branford at his arraignment last week involved the larceny of millions of dollars through internet identity theft, state investigators told the Herald yesterday morning that they have been preparing additional charges involving the possession and likely distribution of child pornography. Reporters at the Herald and other newspapers throughout the country have received email messages purporting to be from Branford recently directing them to a series of pornographic images with file names such as “stanleybabies1.gif,” “stanleybabies69.gif,” and so forth. These photographs include hard-core child pornography as well as pictures clearly depicting a wide variety of other sexual activities including some involving women and farm or domestic animals.
Before recent events exposed his apparent double life, Branford had long been considered one of New England’s most respected newspaperman. As one anonymous wag said after his arrest last week, “It appears that the conscience of the Boston Morning Transcript has become the con man of the Boston Morning Transcript.”
“For as long as many of us can remember Stanley Branford was entrusted by the Talbot family with the job of telling Massachusetts liberals what to think about the issues of the day and who to vote for on Election Day,” observed former Republican Governor A. Paul Cellucci, now the U.S. ambassador to Canada. “I was never one of the people who garnered votes as a result of Mr. Branford’s deliberations, but until these recent events I always thought he was an honorable man. It saddens me to learn otherwise.”
The article drones on with an unenthusiastic recitation of some of the more positive milestones of my career in journalism.
“I’m dead,” I say, without affect.
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