DISAPPOINTED, she dropped into a chair in Guy’s room and lit a cigarette. She felt suddenly weary. She stretched herself, knitting her brows. She was stunned. Her illusions were shattered. What was she going to do?
In Guy’s room, under the influence of her own disappointment, she felt herself moving away from herself and her assumptions about her life into another Ariane, not well-defined, an image no more tangible than a peculiar local density in a fog. As she studied this possible Ariane, began to clarify her, she began to look like the sex interest in a dark and frightening movie, one of those that began in familiar domestic circumstances and slid, one small wrong step at a time, into a nightmare. She was seated at a dressing table, her dressing table, in a sleek apartment, or in the best suite in an expensive hotel, at some point late in the film. She was wearing her white silk gown—well, nylon—and she looked, she had to admit, gorgeous. She stretched. She admired herself in the mirror. She opened a drawer in the dressing table. There was a large, heavy gun in there. This didn’t surprise her. She heard a sound behind her, the doorknob turning. She took the gun from the drawer, turned calmly, brushed the hair from her eyes, and as the door began to open, fired. And fired again. Again. Again.
That wouldn’t do.
She began to feel an irrational compassion for Guy. She had no illusions about being able to turn him into anything worth keeping, but she felt that the poor cluck needed her help. She began to think that she might at least be able to save him from himself. She wondered how close he was to being discovered. Maybe it would be a good idea to go through the room thoroughly and see if she could find everything he had stolen, so that she would know just how exposed he was, figure out where his weakest flank was, and try to cover him there. She began going over the room methodically, but she didn’t get very far before she was too thoroughly disgusted to continue. She found a pearl bracelet, and she recognized it at once. It was the bracelet that the entire resort staff had spent an hour combing the beach for. The woman in a couple celebrating their anniversary at the resort had been frantic over the loss of it. They were the cutest couple, gray-haired, grandparents, but more like newlyweds. One evening, they had danced on the terrace, alone, in the moonlight, to remembered music that only they could hear, and Ariane and Renée and a couple of others had watched in a silence that persisted after the dance was done and the couple had walked off into the darkness. The bracelet had been her husband’s anniversary gift. She’d looked everywhere for it, without success, and decided that she must have lost it on the beach. Everyone looked for it. Even Guy had looked for it. He must have spent nearly an hour himself. Ariane had an unforgettable mental picture of the woman sitting on the sand, sifting it through her fingers long after everyone else had given up the hunt, when even she had to know that it was hopeless. Looking at it now, she wondered what it might possibly be worth. Could it be worth the effort he had put into stealing it, hiding it, and then concealing his guilt?
She wondered whether he might be psychologically unbalanced, a pathological liar, a compulsive thief. It didn’t seem likely. He seemed too composed otherwise. It didn’t make sense that someone who seemed competent and clever would have such an enormous fissure in his personality, even though she was staring right at the evidence.
She thought of sending the bracelet to its owner. Mr. Murray had her address. When the woman checked out of Sunrise Cove she had insisted that he keep her address on file, and for anyone who would listen she had sketched the hopeful circumstances that she imagined: a later guest, entirely ignorant of her loss, idly raking the sand with her fingers and coming up with the bracelet, as if she’d won it with one of those claw-grabber machines at a fair or amusement park; this woman, and she was sure it would be a woman, would at first be delighted, but when she put the bracelet on she would realize at once that someone like her had lost it, feel an upwelling of compassion, and turn it in at the office. Ariane thought of doing that. She could tell that story and give the woman a story to tell. (“And it happened just the way I thought it would!”) But then she realized that it would be best to do absolutely nothing to shake the structure. She had no idea what lies Guy might have told, what little deceptions and clumsy cover-ups he had in place, but judging from his small ambitions and inept concealment, she understood that it must be a pretty shaky construction. She already knew that it takes skill to build a deception with many parts. Guy might have stolen a bracelet and covered his tracks fairly easily, but when he went on and stole a few dollars from the next guest, and then a few dollars more out of the cash register, and so on, he had to be eternally vigilant and more than ordinarily clever to cover himself. Guy, she could see, was not the type. He didn’t have the sense or the talent for sustained deception. If Ariane did anything to shake the structure, the whole thing would surely come crashing down.
[to be continued]
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🎧 695: Disappointed, she . . .”