Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

A Burning Issue by Susan Dunlap

I am not thorough.

I don’t explore every minute detail, every aspect and angle of a subject. Only fanatics do that. But there is a basic amount of preparation required of any adult who seeks to live in relative comfort without being pummeled by recurrent blows of humiliation. And that preparation is what I fail to do.

It is not that I am unaware of this fault. Au contraire. Rarely does a day pass without its being thrust to my attention. There are the small annoyances: grocery lists I tell myself I needn’t write down; recipes I skim only to discover, as my guest sits angrily getting looped in the living room, that the last words are “Bake in 350° oven for ninety minutes.”

There was the time when, as a surprise for Andrew, I painted the house. Anyone, I told myself, can paint a house. I did, after all, have two weeks, and it’s not a mansion. This time I did not neglect the instructions on the paint can. I read them. What I did not do was consider if any preparation was necessary.

“Everybody knows you need to scrape off the old paint first,” Andrew told me later. Everybody? I had the second coat halfway on before I realized the house looked like a mint-green moonscape. But all was not lost. The day I finished, it poured. As Andrew observed, “You don’t use water-based paint outside.”

I could go on — but you get the picture. I’ve often puzzled as to what causes this failing of mine. Is it laziness? Not entirely. A short attention span? Perhaps. “You don’t prepare thoroughly,” Andrew has told me again and again. “Why can’t you force yourself?”

I don’t know. I start to read directions, plodding through word by word, letting each phrase sink into my mind, like a galaxy being swallowed by a black hole. But after two or three paragraphs I’m mouthing hollow words and thinking of Nepal, or field goals, or whatever. And I’m assuring myself that I already know enough so that this brief review will stimulate my memory and bring all the details within easy calling range.

In fairness to Andrew, he has accepted my failing. And well he should, since my decision to marry him was one of its more devastating examples.

I met him while planning a series of man-in-the-street interviews in Duluth. Easy, I thought. People love to hold forth on their opinions. (Not standing on a Duluth street corner in February, they don’t.) Among the shivering, pasty males of Minnesota’s northernmost major city, Andrew Greer beamed like a beacon of health. Lightly tanned, lightly muscled, with bright blue eyes that promised unending depths, he could discuss the Packers and Virginia Woolf; he could find a Japanese restaurant open at midnight; he could maneuver his Porsche through the toboggan run of Duluth streets at sixty miles an hour and then talk his way out of the ticket he deserved. And, most important, my failing, which had enraged so many others, amused him.

And so six weeks later (what could I possibly discover in a year that I hadn’t found out already?) I married him.

We spent a year in Duluth, bought a Belgian sheepdog to lie around the hearth and protect us. (“Belgian sheepdogs are always on the move,” I read later as Smokey relentlessly paced the apartment.) I left the interviewing job and had a brief stint as an administrative assistant, and an even briefer one as a new-accounts person in a now defunct bank. In January Andrew came home aglow. He was being transferred to Atlanta.

I packed our furniture (which is now somewhere near Seattle, I imagine — there was some paragraph about labeling in the moving contract) and we headed south.

It was in Atlanta that I painted the house. And it was in Atlanta that I discovered what I had overlooked in Andrew. For all his interest in literature and sports and his acumen in business, he had one passion that I had ignored. The evidence had always been there; I should have seen it. Another person would have.

Above all else, Andrew loved sunbathing. Not going to the lake, not swimming, not water skiing — sunbathing. He loved the activity (or lack of it) of sitting in the sun with an aluminum reflector beneath his chin.

Each day he rushed home at lunchtime for half an hour’s exposure. He oiled his body with his own specifically created castor oil blend, moved the reflector into place, and settled back — as Smokey paced from the living room to Andrew and back again.

The weekends were worse — he had all day. He lay there, not reading, not listening to music, begrudging conversation, as if moving his mouth to talk would blotch his tan.

I thought it would pass. I thought he would reach a desirable shade of brown and stop. I thought the threat of skin cancer would deter him. (Castor oil blocks the ultraviolet rays, he told me.) I coaxed, I nagged, I watched as the body that had once been the toast — no pun intended — of Duluth was repeatedly coated with castor oil and cooked till it resembled a rare steak left on the counter overnight. On the infrequent occasions he left the house before dark, people stared. But Andrew was oblivious.

Vainly, I tempted him with Braves tickets, symphony seats, the complete works of Virginia Woolf.

In March the days were lengthening. Andrew’s firm moved him “out of the public eye.” I suggested a psychiatrist, but the few Andrew called saw patients only during the daytime.

By April his firm encouraged him to work at home. Delighted, he bent over his desk from sunset till midnight and stumbled exhausted into bed. By nine each morning he was in the sun. The only time he spoke to me was when it rained.

In desperation, I invited a psychiatrist to dinner for an informal go at Andrew. (That was the two-hour-late meal, and he was the looped guest I mentioned earlier.)

Finally I suggested divorce. But when I went to file, my lawyer insisted I read the Georgia statutes, this time carefully. It is not a community property state — far from it. And as Andrew pointed out, I was unlikely to be able to support myself.

So the only way left was to kill him. After all, it would matter little to him. If he’d led a good enough life he would pass on to a place closer to the sun. If not, he could hold his reflector near the fire.

For once I researched painstakingly, browsing through the poisonous-substance books in the public library, checking and rechecking. I found that phenol and its derivatives cause sweating, thirst, cyanosis (a blue coloring of the skin that would hardly be visible on Andrew’s well tanned hide), rapid breathing, coma, and death. A fatal dose was two grams. Mixed thickly with Andrew’s castor oil blend, I could use five times that and be assured he would rub it over his body in hourly ministrations before the symptoms were serious enough to interfere with his regimen. If he got his usual nine A.M. start Saturday morning, he would be red over brown over blue — and very dead by sundown.

I hesitated. I’m really not a killer at heart. I hated to think of him in pain. But given his habit, Andrew was slowly killing himself now.

I poured the phenol into Andrew’s castor oil blend, patted Smokey as he paced by, tossed the used phenol container into the trunk of the car, and went off for a long drive.

I don’t know where I went. (I thought I knew where I was going — I thought I wouldn’t need a map.) Doubtless I was still in the city limits as Andrew applied the first lethal coating and lifted his reflector into place.

It was warm for April; ninety degrees by noon. I rolled down the window and kept driving. If I’d thought to check, I wouldn’t have run out of gas. If I’d thought to bring my AAA card, I wouldn’t have had to hitch a ride to the nearest hamlet.

The sun was low on the horizon but it was still well over a hundred degrees when I pulled up in front of the house. Andrew’s contorted body would be sprawled beside his deck chair. I hoped Smokey hadn’t made too much fuss. Cautiously I opened the door. Warily I walked through the living room.

I heard a sound in the study and moved toward it.

Andrew sat at his desk.

He looked awful, but no more so than usual.

I ran back to the car and grabbed the phenol container out of the trunk. It was too hot to hold. I dropped it, picked up an oily rag, and tried again.

Slowly I read the instructions and the warning: “If applied to skin can cause sweating, thirst, cyanosis, rapid breathing, coma, and death.” I read on. “Treatment: Remove by washing skin with water. To dissolve phenol, or retard absorption, mix with castor oil.”

I slumped against the car. The sun beat down. Why wasn’t I more thorough?

Glaring at the phenol container, I read the last line on the label: “Caution: Phenol is explosive when exposed to heat or oxidizing agents.”

I dropped the oily rag. But of course it was too late.