Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories

A Girl Like You

He knew they were in trouble and he couldn’t eat. He knew they were in trouble and he couldn’t sleep. He knew they were in trouble and he couldn’t concentrate.

Not on anything except his girl Nora.

His name was Peter Wyeth and he was eighteen, all ready to enter the state university this fall, and he’d met her two-and-a-half-months ago at a kegger on graduation night. He’d been pretty bombed, so bombed in fact that she’d driven him home in the new Firebird his folks had bought him for graduation.

That first night, she hadn’t seemed like so much. Or maybe it was that he’d been so bombed he didn’t realize just how much she really was. The truth was, Peter pretty much took girls for granted. He could afford to. He had the Wyeth look. There was some Dartmouth about the Wyeth boys, even though they’d lived all their lives here in small-town Iowa; and something Smith about the Wyeth girls. Between them, they broke a lot of hearts hereabouts, and if they didn’t seem to take any particular pleasure in it, still they didn’t seem to care much either.

Nora Caine was different somehow.

He’d never seen or heard of her before the night of the kegger. But he asked about her a lot the next day. Somebody said that they thought she was from one of those little towns near the point where Iowa and Wisconsin faced each other across the Mississippi. Visiting somebody here. It was all vague.

He ran into her that night at Charlie’s, which was the sports bar on the highway where you could drink if you had a fake ID. Or if you were a Wyeth. She was dancing with some guy he recognized as a university frosh football player, something Peter himself had planned to be until he’d damaged his knee in a game against Des Moines.

He didn’t like it. That was the first thing he noticed. And he realized instantly that he’d never felt this particular feeling before. Jealousy. He didn’t even know this girl and yet he was jealous that she was dancing with somebody else. What the hell was that all about? Wyeths didn’t get jealous; they didn’t need to.

He watched her for the next hour. If she was teasing him, she was doing it subtly. Except for a few glances, she didn’t seem aware of him at all. She just kept dancing with the frosh. By this time, Peter’s friends were there and they were standing all around him telling him just how beautiful Nora Caine was. As if he needed to be told. What most fascinated him about her physically was a certain... timelessness... about her. Her hair style wasn’t quite contemporary. Her clothes hinted at another era. Even her dance steps seemed a little dated. And yet she bedazzled, fascinated, imprisoned him.

Nora Caine.

She left that night with the frosh.

Peter spent a sleepless night — the first of many, as things would turn out — and knew just what he’d do at first light. He’d go looking for her. Somebody had to know who she was, where she lived, what she was doing here in town.

He met her that afternoon. She was sitting along the peaceful river, a sleek black raven sitting next to her, as if it was keeping guard. Her apartment was only a block from here. The landlady, impressed that she was talking to young Wyeth, told him everything she knew about Nora. Girl was here for a few weeks settling some kind of family matters with an attorney. The frosh football player a constant visitor. Nora listening to classical music (played low), given to long walks along the river (always alone), and painting lovely pictures of days gone by.

“You remember me?”

She looked up. “Sure.”

“Thanks for driving me home the other night. How’d you get home?”

“Walked.”

“You could’ve taken a cab and just told them to put it on my father’s account.”

“He must be an important man.”

“He is.” Then: “Mind if I sit down?”

“I sort of have a boyfriend.”

“The football player?”

“Yes.” She smiled and he was cut in half so profound was the effect of her smile on him. He wanted to cry in both joy and sorrow, joy for her smile, sorrow for her words. He felt scared, and wondered if he might be losing his mind. He’d been drinking too much beer lately, that was for sure. “The funny thing is, I don’t even like sports.”

“I’d like to go out with you sometime.”

“I guess I’m just not sure how things’re going to go with Brad. So I really can’t make any dates.”

A few weeks later — well into outrageous green suffocating summer now — Peter heard that Brad took a bad spill on his motorcycle. Real bad. He’d be in University hospital for several months.

He’d tried to distract himself with the wildest girls he could find. He had a lot of giggles and a lot of sex and a lot of brewskis and yet he was still soul-empty. He’d never felt like this. Empty this way. Empty and scared and lonely and jealous. What the hell was it about Nora anyway? Sure, she was beautiful but so were most of his girls. Sure, she was winsome and sweet but so were some of the girls he’d dated seriously. Sure, she was— And then he realized what it was. He couldn’t have her. That was what was so special about her. If she’d ever just give in to him the way the other girls did... he wouldn’t want her.

She was just playing games like all the other girls (or so he’d always imagined they were playing games anyway) and he was — for the first time — losing.

He did a very irrational thing one rainy night. He parked in the alley behind her apartment house and watched as she left the house. He climbed the fire escape along the back and broke into her room and there he saw her paintings. They were everywhere, leaning against the walls, set in chairs, standing on one of the three easels. As silver rain eeled down the windows, he stood in the lightning-flashes of the night and escaped into the various worlds she had painted. They looked like magazine cover illustrations from every decade in this century — the doughboys of World War I, the hollow-eyed farmers of the Depression, the dogfaces of World War II, a young girl with a 1950s hula hoop, an anti-Vietnam hippie protester, a stockbroker on the floor, Times Square the first night of the new century. There was a reality to the illustrations that gave him a dizzy feeling, as if they were drawing him into the world they represented. He’d have to give up smoking so much pot, too. It obviously wasn’t doing him any good.

Then she came home, carrying a small damp sack of groceries, her red hair bejeweled with raindrops. The funny thing was she didn’t even ask him why he was here. She just set down the groceries and came to him.

Not long after that, a local newspaper editor, Paul Sheridan, came up on the street to him and said, “I see you know Nora Caine. She’s going to teach you a lot.” As always, the white-haired, ruddy-cheeked Sheridan smelled of liquor. He was in his sixties. As a young man, he’d written a novel that had sold very well. But that was the end of his literary career. He could never seem to find a suitable subject for a second novel. His wife and daughter had died in a fire some time ago. He had inherited the newspaper from his father and ran it until his drinking caused him to bring in his cousin, who ran the paper and did a better job than Paul ever had. Now Paul wrote some editorials, some reviews of books nobody in a town like this would ever read, and did pieces on town history, at which he excelled. There was always talk that somebody should collect these pieces that stretched back now some twenty-five years but as yet nobody had. Sheridan said: “If you’re strong, Peter, you’ll be the better man for it.”

What the hell was Sheridan muttering about? How did he even know that Peter knew Nora? And how the hell did anybody Sheridan’s age know Nora?

It was two weeks before she’d let Peter sleep with her. He was crazy by then. He was so caught up in her, he found himself thinking unimaginable things: he wouldn’t go to college, he’d get a job so they could get married. And they’d have a kid. He didn’t want to lose her and he lived in constant terror that he would. But if they had a kid... When he was away from her, he was miserable. His parents took to giving him long confused looks. He no longer returned the calls of his buddies — they seemed childish to him now. Nora was the one lone true reality. He would not wash his hands sometimes for long periods; he wanted to retain their intimacy. He learned things about women — about fears and appetites and nuances. And he learned about heartbreak. The times they’d argue, he was devastated when he realized that someday she might well leave him.

And so it went all summer.

He took her home. His parents did not care for her. “Sort of... aloof” his mother said. “What’s wrong with Tom Bolan’s daughter? She’s a lot better looking than this Nora and she’s certainly got a nicer pair of melons” his father said. To which his mother predictably replied, “Oh, Lloyd, you and your melons. Good Lord.”

They avoided the old places he used to go. He didn’t want to share her.

There was no intimacy they did not know, sexual, mental, spiritual. She even got him to go to some lectures at the University on Buddhism and he found himself not enraptured (as she seemed to be) but at least genuinely interested in the topic and the discussion that followed.

He would lay his hand on her stomach and dream of the kid they’d have. He’d see toddlers on the street and try to imagine what it’d be like to have one of his own. And you know what, he thought it would be kinda cool, actually. It really would be.

And then, this one morning, she was gone.

Her landlady told him that a cab had shown up right at nine o’clock this morning and taken her and her two bags (they later found that she’d shipped all her canvases and art supplies separately) and that she was gone. She said to tell Peter goodbye for her.

He’d known they were in some sort of trouble these past couple of weeks — something she wouldn’t discuss — but now it had all come crashing down.

A cab had picked her up. Swept her away. Points unknown.

Tell Peter goodbye for me.

He had enemies. The whole Wyeth family did. Whenever anything bad happened to one of the Wyeths the collective town put on a forlorn face of course (hypocrisy not being limited to Madison Avenue cocktail parties) and then proceeded to chuckle when the camera was off them.

A fine handsome boy, they said, too bad.

He wasn’t a fine boy, though, and everybody knew it. He had treated some people terribly. Girls especially. Get them all worked up and tell them lots of lies and then sleep with them till a kind of predatory spell came over him and he was stalking new blood once again. There had been two abortions; a girl who’d sunk into so low a depression that she had to stay in a hospital for a time; and innumerable standard-issue broken hearts. He was no kinder to males. Boys who amused him got to warm themselves in the great presence of a Wyeth; but when they amused him no longer — or held strong opinions with which he disagreed or hinted that maybe his family wasn’t all that it claimed to be — they were banished forever from the golden kingdom.

So who could argue that the bereaved, angry, sullen, despondent, boy who had been dumped by a passing-through girl... who could argue that he didn’t deserve it?

His mother suggested a vacation. She had family in New Hampshire.

His father suggested Uncle Don in Wyoming. He broke broncos; maybe he could break Peter who was embarrassing to be around these days. By God, and over a girl too.

He stayed in town. He drank and he slept off the drink and then he drank some more. He was arrested twice for speeding, fortunately when he was sober. And — back with his friends again — he was also fined for various kinds of childish mischief, not least of which was spray painting the F word on a police car.

Autumn came; early autumn, dusky ducks dark against the cold mauve melancholy prairie sky, his friends all gone off to college, and Peter more alone than he’d ever been.

His father said he needed to get a job if he wasn’t going to the university.

His mother said maybe he needed to see a psychologist.

He was forced, for friendship, to hang out with boys he’d always avoided before. Not from the right social class. Not bright or hip or aware. Factory kids or mall kids, the former sooty when they left the mill at three every afternoon; the latter dressed in the cheap suits they wore to sell appliances or tires or cheap suits. And yet, after an initial period of feeling superior, he found that these kids weren’t really much different from his other friends. All the same fears and hopes. And he found himself actually liking most of them. Understanding them in a way he would have thought impossible.

There was just one thing they couldn’t do: they couldn’t save him from his grief. They couldn’t save him and booze couldn’t save him and pot couldn’t save him and speed couldn’t save him and driving fast couldn’t save him and fucking his brains out and sobbing couldn’t save him and puking couldn’t save him and masturbating couldn’t save him and hitting people couldn’t save him and praying couldn’t save him. Not even sleep could save him, for always in sleep came Nora. Nora Nora Nora. Nothing could save him.

And then the night — his folks at the country club — he couldn’t handle it any more. Any of it. He lay on his bed with his grandfather’s straight razor and cut his wrists. He was all drunked up and crying and scared shitless but somehow he found the nerve to do it. Just at the last minute, blood starting to cover his hands now, he rolled over on the bed to call 911 but then he dropped the receiver. Too weak. And then he went to sleep...

He woke up near dawn in a very white room. Streaks of dawn in the window. The hospital just coming awake. Rattle of breakfast carts; squeak of nurses’ shoes. And his folks peering down at him and smiling and a young woman doctor saying, “You’re going to be fine, Peter. Just fine.”

His mother wept and his father kept whispering, “You’ll have to forgive your mother. She used to cry when you two would watch Lassie together,” which actually struck Peter as funny.

“I’ll never get over her,” he said.

“You’ll be back to breaking hearts in no time,” his father said.

“She wasn’t our kind anyway,” his mother said. “I don’t mean to be unkind, honey, but that’s the truth.”

“I still wish you’d give old Tom’s daughter a go,” his father said.

“Yeah, I know,” Peter said. “Melons.” He grinned. He was glad he wasn’t dead. He felt young and old; totally sane and totally crazy; horny and absolutely monastic; drunk and sober.

He went home the next day. And stayed home. It was pretty embarrassing to go out. People looking at you. Whispering.

He watched Nick at Night a lot. Took him back to the days when he was six and seven. You have it knocked when you’re six and seven and you don’t even realize it. Being six and seven — no responsibilities, no hassles, no doom — is better than having a few billion in the bank. He stayed sober; he slept a lot; every once in awhile the sorrow would just overwhelm him and he’d see her right in front of him in some fantastical way, and hear her and feel her and smell her and taste her and he would be so balled-up in pain that not only would he want to be six or seven, he wanted to go all the way back to the womb.

March got all confused and came on like May. My God you just didn’t know what to do with yourself on days like this. Disney had a hand in creating a day like this; he had to.

He started driving to town and parking and walking around. He always went mid-afternoon when everybody was still in school. He never would’ve thought he’d be so happy to see his old town again. He took particular notice of the trolly tracks and the hitching posts and the green Model-T you could see all dusty in Old Man Baumhofer’s garage. He sat in the library and actually read some books, something he’d never wanted to do in his whole life.

But mostly he walked around. And thought thoughts he’d never thought before either. He’d see a squirrel and he’d wonder if there was some way to communicate with the little guy that human beings — in their presumptuousness and arrogance — just hadn’t figured out yet. He saw flowers and stopped and really studied them and lovingly touched them and sniffed them. He saw infants in strollers being pushed by pretty young moms with that twenty-year-old just-bloomed beauty that flees so sadly and quickly; and saw the war memorials of three different conflicts and was proud to see how many times the name Wyeth was listed. He looked — for the first time in his life he really looked at things. And he loved what he saw; just loved it.

And one day when he was walking down by the deserted mill near the newspaper office, he saw Paul Sheridan just leaving and he went up to him and he said, “Awhile back you told me Nora was going to teach me things. And that if I was strong I’d be a better man for it.”

For the first time, he looked past the drunken red face and the jowls and the white hair and saw Sheridan as he must have been at Peter’s age. Handsome and tall, probably a little theatrical (he still was now), and possessed of a real warmth. Sheridan smiled: “I knew you’d look me up, kiddo. C’mon in the office. I want to show you something.”

Except for a couple of pressmen in the back, the office was empty. Several computer stations stood silent, like eyes guarding against intruders.

Sheridan went over to his desk and pulled out a photo album. He carried it over to a nearby table and set it down. “You want coffee?”

“That sounds good.”

“I’ll get us some. You look through the album.”

He looked through the album. Boy, did he. And wondered who the jokester was who’d gone to all this trouble.

Here were photographs — some recent, some tinted in turn-of-the-last-century-fashion — of Nora Caine in dozens of different poses, moods, outfits — and times. Her face never changed, though. She was Nora in the 1890s and she was Nora today. There could be no mistaking that.

Goosebumps; disbelief.

“Recognize her?” Sheridan said when he sat down. He pushed a cup of coffee Peter’s way.

“Somebody sure went to a lot of trouble to fake all these photographs.”

Sheridan smiled at him. “Now you know better than that. You’re just afraid to admit it.”

“Sure, they’re real.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not. Not if you’re an angel or a ghost or whatever the hell she is.” He sipped some coffee. “She broke my heart back when I was your age. So bad I ended up in a mental hospital having electroshock treatments. No fun, let me tell you. Took me a long time to figure out what she did for me.”

“You mean, did to you?”

“No; that’s the point. You have to see her being with you for a positive thing rather than a negative one. I was a spoiled rich kid just like you. A real heartbreaker. Didn’t know shit from shinola and didn’t care to. All I wanted to do was have fun. And then she came along and crushed me — and turned me into a genuine human being. I hated her for at least ten years. Tried to find her. Hired private detectives. Everything. I wrote my novel about her. Only novel I had in me as things turned out. But I never would’ve read a book; or felt any compassion for poor people; or cared about spiritual things. I was an arrogant jerk and it took somebody like her to change me. It had to be painful or it wouldn’t have worked. I was bitter and angry for a long time like I said but then eventually I saw what she’d done for me. And I thanked her for it. And loved her all the more. But in a different way now.”

“You don’t really believe she’s some kind of ghost or something do you?”

“The photos are real, Peter. Took me thirty years to collect them. I went all over the Midwest collecting them. I’d show a photo to somebody in some little town and then they’d remember her or remember somebody who’d known her. And it was always the same story. Some arrogant young prick — rich or poor, black or white didn’t matter — and he’d have his fling with her. And then she’d move on. And he’d be crushed. But he’d never be his arrogant old self again. Some of them couldn’t handle it and they’d kill themselves. Some of them would just be bitter and drink themselves to death. But the strong ones — us, Peter, you and me — we learned the lessons she wanted us to. Just think of all the things we know now we didn’t know before she met us.”

The phone rang. He got up to get it. Peter noticed that he staggered a little.

He was on the phone for ten minutes. No big deal. Just a conversation with somebody about a sewer project. You didn’t usually get big deals on some town newspapers like this one.

Peter just looked at the pictures. His entire being yearned for a simple touch of her. In her flapper outfit. Or her WW II Rosie-The-Riveter get-up. Or her hippie attire. Nora Nora Nora.

Sheridan came back from the phone. “I didn’t expect you to believe me, Peter. I didn’t believe it for a long time. Now I do.” He looked at him for a time. “And someday you will, too. And you’ll be grateful that she was in your life for that time.” He grinned and you could see the boy in him suddenly. “She had some ass, didn’t she?”

Peter laughed. “She sure did.”

“I got to head over to the library, kiddo.”

Sheridan said goodbye to the pressmen and then they headed out the door. The day was still almost oppressively beautiful.

“This is the world she wanted me to see, Peter. And I never would’ve appreciated it if I hadn’t loved her.”

They crossed the little bridge heading to the merchant blocks. Sheridan started to turn right toward the library.

“The next woman you love, you’ll know how to love. How to be tender with her. How to give yourself to her. I can’t say that my life has been a great success, Peter. It hasn’t been. But I loved my wife and daughter more than I ever could’ve if I hadn’t met Nora. Maybe that’s the most important thing she ever taught us, Peter.” And with that, Sheridan waved goodbye.

Six years later his wife Faith gave birth to a girl. Peter asked if they might name her Nora. And Faith, understanding, smiled yes.