Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 23, No. 12, December 1978

Past Perfect by John Lutz

Le Clair was a perfectionist in everything...

“Let me treat you to a last round and tell you about Le Clair,” Strickland said, raising his eyebrows and waiting for an affirmative silence.

It was almost closing time, and we four regulars were the only customers in the bar. We’d been discussing the curious whims of fate at our usual corner table, watching Nevo the bartender wipe down the polished mahogany bar while the piano player softly and absently fingered the gleaming keys for his own amusement. We ordered.

When the drinks came, Strickland looked into his glass as if he’d spotted a fly, deciding where to begin. None of us really knew much about him. He’d just started coming to the inn a month ago, and he’d naturally fallen in with us. No one objected. He was a likable little fellow, fiftyish, quiet, and rumpled. The only distinctive thing about his appearance was his eyes, blue and deeply thoughtful.

It all happened over twenty-five years ago (Strickland began), shortly after I’d graduated from college. I met Le Clair at one of those pretentiously arty cocktail parties. He was a sculptor, though not a very successful one. The critics thought his work was too strict, too sterile. But I suppose that’s the only way it could have been, because Le Clair was a perfectionist.

I don’t mean he was one of those people who must have everything as near perfect as possible. That wasn’t enough. Le Clair was a perfectionist — in everything. His clothes were expensive and impeccably tailored, even on his limited budget. His moustache was trimmed so precisely it appeared painted on. He was perfect himself: small, evenly proportioned, with erect posture, a well-shaped head, and a dark, almost feminine face.

We became fairly close friends, considering. Not many people could put up with his obsession with detail; I couldn’t myself for any length of time.

Sometimes on long afternoons I’d read in his apartment while he pounded away in his adjoining studio, hammering his perfect soul onto stone. His apartment was furnished in a modem style, everything as precisely positioned as in a hospital room. In his antiseptic kitchen he did his own gourmet cooking. A meal at Le Clair’s was more delicious than a meal at the finest restaurant.

Today he’s considered a genius for that same uncompromising quality that used to attract critical scorn. And his work does contain genius, I suppose — but the kind that spirals inward and consumes its possessor.

It seemed unthinkable that a man like Le Clair could ever marry, but somehow I wasn’t surprised when he introduced Leona as his bride. She was, in appearance at least, the perfect woman. Tall and finely boned, she had the easy, graceful carriage and serene beauty of a queen. Possibly the rumor that she was descended from Rumanian royalty was true.

We had dinner together often, and Le Clair would dote on Leona and brag about her as if she were one of his own stone creations. When she left the table for some reason he’d look at me, his eyes aglow.

“See how the line of the jaw is at just the right angle to the neck,” he would say. “Exquisite! How perfect her posture is. Like a goddess!” And he would cut an exact piece from his steak.

They were happy enough for about a year, Le Clair dedicating himself to his sculpting, Leona looking beautiful for him. She was ideal for him in every way, catering to his excessive demands, encouraging him in his faultless art. It was obvious that she loved him, and increasingly obvious that she forced herself into a confining mold to please him.

Next to his work, she became the most important thing in his life. His sculpting was the foundation, Leona the centerpost of his illusion of perfection. He existed in his own world, breathed his own rarified atmosphere. It was a house of cards that seemed fated to collapse.

Yet it did not collapse.

“You’re an uncommonly lucky man, Le Clair,” I once told him.

“Yes,” he’d agreed, lighting a cigarette with his imported gold lighter that never failed, “but then I’m an uncommon man in all respects.”

Things continued to go smoothly until that summer night when Le Clair stepped through a doorway into reality.

It was midnight (Le Clair always went to bed precisely at eleven o’clock) when something made him wake. A slight noise perhaps, or the feeling that things weren’t quite right. He walked into the living room and saw a crack of light beneath the studio door. He crossed the room and threw the door open.

Leona was in the studio with another man.

They say Le Clair actually fainted from the shock. That Leona’s infidelity occurred in his studio made the wound all the more agonizing. For some time afterward Le Clair avoided everyone.

I’ll have to tell you the rest of the story as Leona told it to me from her hospital bed.

Le Clair forgave her, then hurled himself into his work as never before. The two of them lived like hermits in their apartment. They agreed never even to mention what had happened, agreed it would never happen again. Still, the memory of the incident ate away at Le Clair like drops of acid; it was the one imperfection in his life.

You have to understand, he had the unrestrained ego of the pure artist. He loved Leona as before; yet how could he love the only blemish on his otherwise spotless existence? It was a paradox that tore at his soul, and it came to dominate him. If that one element of his unshakable faith had crumbled, could not the rest? Perhaps the critics were right. What held up the remainder of his house of cards?

Le Clair’s taut mental state began to affect him physically. He seldom slept, and he became pale and thin. A love so delicately balanced as his could be tipped by the lightest touch toward hate.

One morning, while Leona was preparing breakfast, Le Clair broke. He sat at the kitchen table, his head buried in his slender arms, trembling and sobbing. Leona sat down beside him, trying to console him, trying desperately to calm him.

Suddenly, violently, he straightened and sniffed the air.

The bacon and eggs were burning!

They would be inedible!

Le Clair sprang from his chair, and his hand closed on the handle of the hot frying pan. Without hesitating he hurled the sizzling bacon grease into Leona’s face. Screaming in pain and disbelief, she tumbled backward in her chair. And Le Clair, too, screamed, a tortured cry for what could never be undone.

But it wasn’t the screams that brought the police. It was the shot that followed.

Leona wasn’t quite dead. They took her away in an ambulance.

Strickland stopped talking and looked over our shoulders. Then he smiled, a strangely luminescent smile that quickly faded.

“My wife,” he said. “I’ll have to leave.”

A woman stood just inside the door. She was tall and finely boned, with a natural beauty’s perfect proportion and graceful carriage. She wore an old-fashioned wide-brimmed hat pulled low to conceal most of her face. There was no doubt in our minds as to her identity.

I gripped Strickland’s arm as he rose to leave.

“What happened to Le Clair?” I asked.

In a softly modulated voice Strickland said, “That morning in his kitchen, he shot himself. One inch in front of the ear and at exactly the correct angle.”

Strickland and the tall woman walked out the door. They seemed perfectly happy together.

Nevo the bartender walked over with the bar towel tucked in his belt. “Mr. Strickland forgot to pay for that last round of drinks,” he said.

I found out later that Strickland’s wife was from Cleveland, possessed a homely but unscarred face and had never heard of Leona Le Clair.