Tape Forty-One

"What a person cuts from the record is the only part of it that was ever really theirs."

Four months earlier

She did not go to the police.

She would be asked about it later, by a great many people, in a great many tones of voice, and she would learn to say, with a small lifting of the hands, I was in shock, and to let them nod. It was a perfectly good answer. It was even partly true. But on the morning of the fifteenth of June, in the gray hour before the garbage trucks, when she sat on the edge of the bathtub in the apartment in Brooklyn with the door locked and the fan running and a small black machine in her lap, the real reason was sitting a foot from her face, and it was not shock. It was four seconds long.

Nathan was asleep. She could hear him through the wall, a deep slow rhythm, with a catch at the end of every breath. She had come in at one in the morning and told him that the dinner had run late, that Desmond had made a scene about the second printing, that she had a migraine. He had held her face in his big hands and looked at her for a long time, and said, You're shaking, Soph, and she had said It's the wine, and he had gone to make her tea. He had put honey in it. She had drunk every drop, with her teeth clenched, and she had thought: If I tell him, he will go to Westport with a hammer, and they will bury him.

It was true. It was also not the reason.

She put the earphones in, and pressed the button, and rewound the tape to the place where the counter read 0211.

…

It was extraordinary to hear it.

The machine had picked up everything. The soft ticking of the candle flame, and the creak of leather, and Satie in the paneling, very faint, like a music box in the next house. Desmond's voice, warm and close and astonishingly intimate: There. You're with me. Her own voice, thick and slow: What... did you...

She sat on the cold lip of the tub and listened to herself being afraid, and a curious thing happened. She felt nothing. The fear had gone out of the sound the way heat goes out of an iron, leaving the outline. It was a good recording. It was clear, and unhurried, and complete. She thought, with the strange professional coolness that had carried her through two divorces of friends and a mother's funeral: I could transcribe this in an afternoon.

She listened to him read the chapter. She listened to his voice break on page one hundred and eighty-four. She listened to herself lie, with a skill that sounded, on the tape, almost frightening: I will not be the last page. She heard how well it was done. She heard where the pauses fell.

And then she came to 0289.

Take someone else.

She had imagined that it would sound like a scream. It did not. It sounded like a child at a school door, speaking quickly, politely, in a voice with all the manners taken out. Please. Not me. I have a husband. I have a house. She listened with her eyes closed to the sound of her own tongue running ahead of her mind, offering up, one after another, with a dreadful practical helpfulness, the names of the things that she owned. Girls at the press. Interns. There's a girl who comes in on Tuesdays.

She stopped it. She sat quite still.

There is a kind of hearing that is a kind of looking in a mirror, and she had spent her life in the habit of listening to voices for what they gave away. She knew what this one gave away. It was not cowardice. She would have forgiven cowardice, in any other woman, in a heartbeat. It was fluency. There had been no stammer in it. There had been, under the animal panic, a perfectly functioning editor, going down the list of her own acquaintance and pricing them.

Four seconds, she thought. That's all it took. That's the whole length of me.

…

She played it eleven times.

On the twelfth she took a pencil and a legal pad and began to transcribe, as she had transcribed forty other tapes, in the neat slanted hand that her mother had taught her. DH: There. You're with me. SL: What... did you... She wrote it all down, line by line, the candle and the knives and the book. And when she came to 0289, her pencil stopped above the page, and hovered, and did not come down.

She looked at the empty line for a long time.

If I write it, it will exist.

It was a childish thought. She knew that. The tape existed already, in her hand, in her bag, in the world. But there is a difference between a thing that is recorded and a thing that has been set down, and she had been a writer long enough to know it in her blood. A recorded thing could be lost, or erased, or never played. A transcript was a document. It could be subpoenaed, circulated, quoted, photographed on a courtroom wall. And in the long, gray, ticking hour on the edge of the tub she saw, as clearly as if it had been read out to her, the paragraph that a lawyer would underline in yellow: At no point did the witness express concern for the intended victim. When threatened, she offered a third party.

She skipped the four seconds. She wrote, in the neat slanted hand, [inaudible, 0:04]. And she went on, and the transcript was finished at ten past six, and it read like the record of a very tense and very civilized conversation in which a frightened woman had kept her head.

It was the first cut. It was only four seconds, and she would make a great many more.

…

She did not sleep that day. At nine, Nathan came in with a mug of coffee and a worried face and said she should call the doctor, and she told him it was a migraine and kissed his cheek. At noon she took the tape out of the machine and looked at it for some time. It was an ordinary cassette, a little thing the size of a matchbook, with a white paper label. The others were in a shoebox on the closet shelf, forty of them in a row, numbered in her own hand. Number forty had been the last interview, in May, in the glass house, about his mother.

She took a black marker and wrote on the label.

41.

She wrote nothing else. No date. No name. She put it in a clean envelope, and sealed it, and wrote nothing on the envelope, and then, after some thought, she put the envelope in a Ziploc bag and put the bag into the toe of a winter boot at the back of the closet, behind the shoebox, behind her mother's old fur hat. It was the sort of place a woman hides a diamond. It was also, she thought with a small bitter smile, the sort of place a character hides a letter in a book that nobody believes.

No one will look, she told herself. No one at all.

She came out of the closet and stood at the window. Below her in the yard a neighbor's child was riding a tricycle round and round a puddle. It was a bright warm day. The maples were in full leaf. She could hear a radio somewhere, and the far, slow roll of the Manhattan Bridge.

The telephone rang.

She looked at it. It was a white plastic telephone on the kitchen wall, one that Nathan refused to give up, and the number on the little screen was a Connecticut exchange.

She let it ring eleven times. On the twelfth she picked it up.

"Sophia."

"Desmond."

"I was afraid you wouldn't answer." The voice was soft and low and very faintly amused. It was the voice of a man ringing a friend after a party to say that he'd had a lovely time. "Are you well? Have you slept?"

"I've had a migraine."

"I'm sorry. It was my fault. I think I must have given you too much." A pause. "I wanted to say how much I valued the evening. I wanted to say that you were wonderful. I had never seen anything so..." He seemed to search for the word. "So composed."

She held the receiver away from her mouth and breathed once, slowly, through her nose. Then she brought it back.

"Thank you."

"I'm going to send a car on Tuesday. We should talk about the second volume." His voice warmed. "I've had some ideas. I thought the next book might be about the aftermath. About what it is to live when you have done what I have done, and nobody will ever know the half of it. You would be the only one who could tell it. Don't you think?"

She stared at the white wall over the stove, at a small crack running down from the ceiling, thin as a hair.

"I think," said Sophia, "that I need to see my husband."

"Of course." He laughed gently. "He's a good man, your Nathan. Give him my regards."

The line went dead. She replaced the receiver. And she stood there in the sun-washed kitchen with her palm flat against the wall, and felt, rising up out of the floor, up her legs, into her chest, into her throat, a slow tide of something that she did not recognize for what it was until it had reached her eyes.

It was not terror. She had had enough of terror to last her. It was a plain, bright, ferocious hatred, and under it, like a thread of silver, a thought so clear and cold that it seemed to have been spoken aloud:

You want to be remembered.

I will remember you.

…

She went down to the study that night.

It was the small back room where Nathan kept his drawings, a long drafting table, a lamp on a swing arm, a sofa with a quilt that her mother had made. She sat at the table with the legal pad before her. She uncapped her pen. She had not written in a week, and for the first time in a month she felt that she could.

She wrote a title at the top of the page. She crossed it out. She wrote another. At last she wrote nothing, but only a line beneath, at the left margin, in small clear letters, as she had once written the first line of her first book in a rented room in Evanston when she was twenty-six and afraid of everything.

He was a small man, and he knew it.

She looked at it for a long time. It was a good sentence. It had a hook in it. It was true in a way that nothing she had written about him in five months had been true, and it was cruel, and it was clean, and it would sell.

That's the book, she thought. That's the second volume. Not what he did. What he is.

And she thought, with the same sick, shining clarity, of the tape in the boot, and of what it could be made to do. She thought: He will never see it coming. He thinks I am his reader. He has no idea I am the one who holds the pen.

Nathan came to the door at eleven and stood in it, a big shape in a gray T-shirt, rubbing his eyes.

"Soph. Come to bed."

"In a minute."

"You haven't eaten."

"I'm not hungry."

"Please." He crossed the room and laid a hand on the top of her head, and she felt the weight and warmth of it all the way down her spine. "Whatever it is. Whatever he did. I'm here."

She leaned her cheek against his wrist for a moment. She closed her eyes.

She thought: Take someone else.

"I know," said Sophia. "I know you are."

And she turned back to the page, and began to write, with the machine on the corner of the table and its small red light, steady and patient and unblinking, catching every word.