16
Soup
My argaret Lately, my attorney, looks like Hitchcock’s blondes if he’d allowed them to ripen into softness. A luminous woman of a certain age who oozes a sophistication that requires whole teams to manifest, Maggie, as Margaret likes to be called, is an ebullient blonde given to laughing loudly, drinking excitedly, smoking avidly, and talking chummily with just about anyone, but especially with men. She is a broad, and I liked her as my lawyer. If you’re going to get a defense attorney—and should you become a “person of interest” I suggest you do—choose one whose company you can tolerate. You spend an inordinate amount of time together.
Tedium is the crux of the judicial process. I have a limited attention span for anxiety; I grow exhausted, and then I become bored, a feeling I envision as Millennial Pink: a faintly labial shade that manages to be both irritating and unobtrusive. I waited weeks after my meeting with Detective Wasserman in Suffolk County before I was arrested; months went by before the trial; more time passed before the sentencing. All told, more than a year elapsed between the day that I killed Casimir and when I went to trial for it. Like a summer vacation, this waiting period seemed to stretch out endless and unimaginable, then it sped up, contracted, and turned small and fleeting. Looking back, I see it was relative freedom bound by inescapable confinement. I wish I’d done more with that time than spend it with Maggie, but few people would be seen with me, and even those who liked me well enough to visit me always seemed to have other plans. Being on trial is remarkably draining, unendurably lonely, and terrifically public. I can’t say I cared for it.
I learned a lot about Maggie’s sons, whom she loved, and her ex- husband, whom she did not. I learned about her appreciation for Thai food (lemongrass and coconut), and her dislike of Chinese food (too greasy). I learned that some mature women wear only tones of ecru, wheat, ivory, and alabaster because they believe these shades bathe them in “caressing light.” And I learned that upon her sixtieth birthday, Maggie had tossed out every garment, every unmentionable, every linen, and every bath towel that didn't fit into this blanched, buffed, and bleached color family. You learn a lot about people when you're trapped in a legal case with them. But spending time with a lawyer is much like spending time with a therapist, which is to say that while your conversations may run to the intimate, when your time is up you never hear from them again. I spent my months immersed in the facsimile of caring for Lately and for the simulacrum of Lately caring for me; I didn't have much else to sustain me.
The truth is I knew I was going to serve time—I held no illusions about carceral justice before my trial, and I have even fewer now.
Any fool can do the penitential math; it takes a special fool to believe she won’t be found guilty by a jury of her peers, and let’s face it: if you live in America, even in New York City, your peers are dim, myopic, vengeful, misogynistic, hungry trolls who want nothing so much as to see the bad witch burn.
Together, Maggie and I went to court; together, she and I ate lunch and often dinner; together, we appeared in the pages of the Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and even Eater, Gourmand, and Bon Appétit. When she was apart from me, Maggie was my avatar on NY1 and the local news affiliates. As we drew close to the trial, Maggie became the closest thing I had to a friend, which was understandable since the last time I'd seen a friend was Emma's ashen face, stricken in blinding lights as a phalanx of cops told me to put my hands in the air or they'd shoot.
How, you may wonder, did this happen. What, you may ask, pushes an otherwise controlled woman to a point where she feels compelled to break into her best friend’s loft at three a.m. on a Wednesday night in the middle of January, a meat cleaver in her purse, and no plan beyond the solid certainty that her friend must
die. What makes a careful and calculated, if psychopathic, woman give in to the call of hot blood spatter and raw id. To be honest— and, really, when have I been anything but—I’m not sure I know, not even now. I sit on my narrow bunk in Bedford Hills and I think on it more than I like to admit. Emma, I thought, had to die so that I could live. It became almost an algebraic formula in its clarity and self- evidence.
For Dorothy to flourish, Emma must perish: I recall this thought with the lucidity that I remember the severe clear blue sky on September 11th, with the precision that I recall the acrid, oily smell of my mother’s tomato plants, with the thoroughness that I retain the heartbeat of Gil’s sails luffing in the wind. But even as the memory of this thought—Emma must die—remains crystalline, how I got there is nebulous. It’s almost as if one moment I was driving home from the vanilla brick interrogation room at Suffolk County Police, and the next I was standing over Emma’s prostate body, cleaver in hand, wondering where best to strike. Almost—but not quite. I do remember crumbs of my thinking that brought me to doing violence against Emma’s sleeping body in the dark—slices, but not the whole loaf. Memory is a tricky mistress.
The week after my trek to the wilds of Long Island was a haze of alcohol and chicken broth, haunted by the pervasive sense that Emma was telling the police everything. The more I thought on it, the more I grew certain that I’d made Emma a drunken confession that night we shared too much Super Tuscan and steak. The more I thought on it, the more certain I was that Emma had felt compelled to do the right thing. The more I thought on it, the more I was convinced that Emma was in cahoots with Wasserman. Emma had betrayed me, I realized. I felt this icy awareness twist steely in my gut.
Emma and Wasserman had so much in common, I thought. Their untrustworthy disavowal of carbohydrates. Their short stature. Their united need to see me in prison. I felt sure that they were conspiring against me. Emma knew me almost as well as I knew myself. Only Emma had known me for decades, had sat privy to infinite secrets, had heard me ring ragged on the men who entered stage left, exited stage right, and were never seen again. Only Emma was as smart,
as clever, as perceptive as I, and thus Emma must be the sole reason why Detective Wasserman suspected me.
For more than a week after my visit to the Suffolk County Police Department, I laid up in my apartment, methodically drinking my way through my stash of bourbon and my cellar of wines, compulsively and systematically ordering all of the matzo ball soup that Seamless could deliver to my Upper West Side apartment. My kitchen was awash in remnants of my compulsive soup delivery: little white paper cups, tiny balls of foil, vacant saltine wrappers, and empty wine bottles. The phone rang. I picked it up without looking at the caller.
“Dolls.” It was Emma. “What the hell.”
“Emma. How are you.”
“I’ve been calling and texting you for the last ten days. What am I supposed to think when you don’t answer your phone?”
“Have you. I hadn’t noticed.”
“Jesus fuck, Dolls,” Emma said and then whispered something to someone. I couldn’t catch it. I saw her sidling up to Wasserman, their heads together, black and blacker. Emma and Wasserman were twinned together, giggling about me. “Sorry about that,” she said.
“I’m trying to get the Whorestep Chronicles ready for the gallery.”
Sure she was.
“Emma, it’s nothing. I’m not feeling well. That flu. You know.”
“Really?”
I didn’t answer.
“What’s going on with that thing?”
“What thing, Emma. You have to be more specific.”
“That thing with the detectives.”
Was that a click I heard on the phone line? I felt certain I heard a click.
“Oh, that. It’s…it’s, you know, it’s nothing.”
“Really?” There it was, that click.
“Yes, really. A mistake. It’s all cleared up. It was nothing.”
“So. You didn’t have to talk to herr-em?” Had Emma elided “her” and “them,” had she corrected herself mid-word? Had she made a tactical stumble, given a sign of her collusion?
“Talk to whom, Emma?” Did she say her or him? Did she say them? Maybe both.
“The detectives.”
“No. I mean, yes. I did. I went to Suffolk County a few days ago.”
Why was she asking me questions to which she knew the answers.
How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a faithless friend. She may smile and smile and be a villain. Lie thou there. My right hand twitched. That it should come to this.
“And?” I had to hand it to her. Emma’s voice was tense, constricted, as if with actual emotion. I’d no idea she had this level of duplicity in her. (Here in prison, I look back at this moment and wonder whether Emma, too, is a psychopath, whether she, too, inhabits the emotional winter that is an utter lack of conscience— could it be this that brought us together.) “And what, Emma. It was nothing. A case of mistaken identity. I’m
nothing—it’s nothing. It’s done.”
“You sound really strange, Dolls.”
“I’m tired. The flu. That’s going around.” I told her I was going to rest. I told her not to worry about me. And I hung up, certain that my phone was tapped.
My friend’s treachery whirred; a hamster wheel that squeaked in the night, it turned obsessively. Emma knows all, I thought. Emma has told all, I thought. The police know everything, I thought. She has betrayed me, I thought. I tried to square everything I knew about Emma—her anarchist roots, her anti-establishment beliefs, her bohemian sensibilities—with the knowledge that she had turned her narrow back on all of it and ratted on me. It felt clear as consommé: I’d horrified Emma with my unremembered confession, and she felt compelled to rat me out. Lying on her bed, I had shown myself to be the naked monster I was, and Emma gave me up, I felt sure of it.
She was hardly the first.
Then, creaky and petulant with inertia, the wheels would reverse, and my logic would turn withershins. I’d known Emma for decades.
In that time, she’d never been anything but my faithful friend; our bonds were thicker than time, faster than men, more solid than family, and truer than brown bread. Emma was the one person I loved, a thought that felt like a douche of cold water. She was, then, the sole person who could hurt me, and hurt me she did.
And yet, I could think of no other way that Wasserman et al had latched their collective claws into my hide. Only Emma’s disclosure of my drunken confession could have kept the rodential Wasserman and her frowzy henchman, Lou, hot on my tail—if, in fact, I had confessed on that night to Emma, and increasingly, I was sure that I had.
Drunk, angry, and aimless, I ponged around my apartment looking for a target. All the furniture seemed to have grown. The sofa loomed belligerent; the bed menaced from the middle of the room.
The television glowered black and blank; lamps bowed their heads in judgment; pillows mocked me. I set the nearly empty bottle of Knob Creek down on the counter, and I brewed the company-sized pot of espresso. I sharpened a cleaver. I retrieved my lock picks from the ski boots where I kept them.
Even as I packed my knife and my lock picks in my satchel, I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what I was going to do to Emma.
Aphasic with worry, I couldn’t form a sentence, much less a scheme.
I wanted to frighten her, maybe cut her hair and slash her paintings, make her tell me what I’d told her and what she’d told the cops. I wanted to hear it from her pretty, roseate mouth. I wanted Emma to tell me that she’d betrayed me, and when I had heard her say it, when she told me everything I needed to hear, I wanted to slit her thin white throat. The crimson jeweling would look lovely on Emma’s flesh. Aesthetics are important.
I wore a black wig, a slouchy knit hat of indeterminate gender, and a black puffer jacket over jeans. Not recognizing me, the doorman didn’t say good night. The winter night was glittery and bright, the streetlamps’ lights pointed as shards of glass.
Surveillance lurked everywhere in the shiny city, from taxi cameras to traffic videos, from tapes in subway stations to the invisible blips off cell towers. Everywhere you went, someone was watching—the only way to fly beneath the radar was to be dead. I crossed the thirty blocks between my apartment and Emma’s, first walking, then in a taxi, and finally riding on a bike stolen from a delivery boy.
The streets were almost empty, oddly silent but for the wind and the sibilant sound of wheels. Light bounced off cold surfaces, pinged off iridescent glass, glowed ghost-like on reflective paint, and
stopped dead on matte tarmac. It felt like Manhattan herself, that fine gossamer slut clad in jeweled chokers and black velvet, was pushing me forward, her hand firm on the small of my back. I was waltzing with an invisible partner, nodding in time and smiling. Now that I’d made a decision, everything felt clear as vodka.
I got to Emma’s apartment building. An old warehouse, it had a side door that dumped into a very narrow, mostly enclosed alley. I knew that Emma’s front door had a jeweler’s lock, requiring one of those rolling ball-and-socket types of key. I couldn’t pick that lock, but I had a suspicion that the management hadn’t gone to the same trouble with the side door, an entryway that the porter used for hauling out trash. I was right; it was a standard Medeco lock. Even better, I didn’t see any cameras in the alley. I picked the lock within a couple of minutes, and the door swung open as if it wanted to swallow me whole. I’d have picked it faster if I hadn’t spent the last ten days drunk.
Creak-creak-creak went the elevator. The door shuddered open.
The door shuddered closed. Creak-creak-creak went the elevator.
The door shuddered open. Behind me, the door shuddered closed. I got on my knees and inserted one of my lock picks, feeling around for the tumbler. At no point did it cross my mind to simply knock on the door. At no point did I think I could stop what I was doing and talk to Emma, ask her simply and directly if she had betrayed me. At no point did I stop and wonder at my madness, or kennel the crawling horror-sloth whose incessant growling had edged me into action. I did not think. I only felt, and then the lock whispered its sacred “click.”
American girls grow up knowing the intrinsic importance of having female friends; our girlfriends are our bosom buddies, a term that links the girlishly erotic with the emotionally intimate. There is no Emma Woodhouse without Harriet Smith; there is no Beatrice without Hero; there is no Anne Shirley without Diana Barry. Sex and the City, The Group, Gossip Girl, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Thelma & Louise—American popular culture is positively lousy with BFFs (not even death can separate that final pair). Men may come
and men may go, but in American culture, at least, a girl’s bosom buddy will always be another woman.
In America, our girlfriends teach us what love, trust, and desire are; they hold our hands as we navigate the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of culture. With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else—family, lovers, husbands, or children—we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because—and this is the meat of the matter— it’s hard work to be a woman. It’s a full-time job. Our female friends, the close ones, are the mini-breaks we take from the totalitarian work it requires to keep up the performance of being female.
And none of this friendship had I known until, inch by creeping, prickly inch, I’d let Emma into my life, or she let me into hers, whichever came first. My girlfriends in high school—the giggling passels of scented fluffs and pastel ruffs with whom I ate junk food and learned how to gloss my lips—were merely people I hated slightly less than everyone else. They were necessary distractions.
They were camouflage. Emma was my first—my only—true friend.
Anything that was good about me, anything, that is, that wasn’t my work, lived in my relationship with Emma. She was the black star to my black hole. She was the reflection I saw in the mirror, for true monsters can’t see themselves. Without Emma, I was an empty surface. Brittle and magnetic and lovely, but fragile and horrible, too.
The door swung open. Emma’s loft was dark. Pieces of furniture sat in indistinct black clumps. Paintings hung like hovering dark holes. It didn’t matter. I knew my way around. I removed my shoes, slipped the cleaver out of my satchel, dropped my jacket to the floor, and tiptoed across the loft into Emma’s bedroom. Surrounded by pillows, her back to the door, she slept cat-curled in the center of her big white bed, her eiderdown pulled up and around her body so high that only a semicircle of black hair showed against the sheets. A
photograph of Emma amid that luxuriousness would go instantly viral; such was her fame.
She was alone. Good. I hadn’t even considered that she might have a lover. I didn’t relish collateral damage.
“Emma,” I said. “Don’t move.” I saw a twitch in the sheets. “I want to know what you told Wasserman. Just tell me what you told her.”
She was silent. Frozen. Still as custard. Quiet as ice. I couldn’t hear her breathe. Good. She should be scared.
“You called her, didn’t you. After the night we got drunk. You called her and you told that detective what I’d said. Everything about Fire Island, the dinner, the ice pick. The house fire.”
Silence.
“Emma, you little twisted bitch. Don’t play games.” I stepped forward, pulled the covers down, and swung the cleaver in an arc aimed at her neck.
“I’m not,” Emma said, as she flipped on the lights. I saw now the bed, empty but for a mass of pillows in the rough shape of a body, one pillow’s pallid guts spilling across a black velvet coverlet wadded where Emma’s head should’ve been. My cleaver quivered in its center.
It was a horrid tableau, and I was horrified. Emma was alive and well, but I was cooked.
A man’s voice rang, succinct and rapid-fire with authority. “Hands in the air or we’ll shoot!” I heard him as through the rush of waves. I raised my hands high. His voice told me to get down on my knees and to touch the back of my head. Rough hands pushed my face into the soft mattress. I felt one wrist and then the other circled by strong hands and clipped tight into cold cuffs. Hands on my elbows helped lift me to a standing position and spun me around 180 degrees.
I turned to see about five NYPD officers; the one next to me made six. In my ear, this officer recited my Miranda rights. I had the right to remain silent. Anything I said or did could be used against me in a court of law. I had the right to an attorney. I had the right to be firmly guided by my elbow. I had the right to be led through the bedroom door and across my former best friend’s studio, now with all the lights blazing. I had the right to walk past Emma, sleep-rumpled
in her orchid silk pajamas. I had the right to see her crying. I had the right to wonder what the fuck I’d done to myself.
I turned to the left; I turned to the right; I looked straight ahead.
My fingers got inky. I learned how to share a single roll of toilet paper with twenty other women and how to urinate in front of guards, skills that would later come in handy. Even with the bulldog diligence of Maggie Lately, I spent sixty hours in central booking after processing. Time enough to etch the foul stench of decomposing skin, stagnating urine, desiccating feces, and human boredom into my hippocampus. It was also enough time to see the same meal—a lukewarm carton of milk paired with a sandwich of spongy white bread slapped around faintly gray slices of bologna and spread with off-brand mayonnaise—circulate three times.
After Maggie finagled my release, I took a shower as long as the Cenozoic Era. I ate a proper meal at Il Mulino (delicate lobster salad kissed with garlic and lemon; improbably perfect beefsteak tomatoes, coated in eloquent bacon vinaigrette; an immodest, perfectly cooked T-bone steak; and a side of fluffy, pleasantly gelatinous spinach creamed with mascarpone; I ate it all with a lovely bottle of Le Macchiole Scrio, the bad boy of Bolgheri Super Tuscans). And I went home to sleep the heavy, velvet sleep of the guilty and caught. The next day, I presented myself at the Suffolk County Police Station to answer the warrant for my arrest. From one jail cell into another. This one with fewer women and a slightly diminished fecal scent.
Not for nothing, we got soup with our sandwiches in Suffolk County.
