Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb Page B

nasty little violent streak, at odds with his ironical detached-kid persona. At the core of him was an explosive kernel of rage. I was profoundly passive by nature, but when hit I became crazy, and he knew it. We flew at each other, and tumbled together to the ground, punching and grunting. We would end up breaking one of his mother’s delft serving dishes and Rob, as a result, would receive a grounding that would last the entire weekend. Yet twenty-five years later, sitting in the carrel with the yearbook open, what I recalled most vividly of that end-of-summer afternoon was theslight, welcome shock of the palm of his hand against my skin.
    It was now dusk. Janitors were crisscrossing the floors behind their mops, drawing a cage of shining lines on the dark linoleum. The building would be closing in a half hour. Ignoring the deepening evening, I remained sitting still while continuing the meditation on Rob, and on the strange, preordained difference between his sprawling confidence and my own cautious self-containment, and on his temper. Did I have a temper? I suppose everybody did, for that matter. But mine wasn’t like Rob’s, no. It wasn’t like the thing that happened to him when he lost control and seemed to whiteout in a blaze of human fury. It wasn’t like waterspouts, ball lightning, and those other weather phenomena that come from absolutely nowhere, roar into the middle of an apparently sunny day, strike with violent force, and shatter the unsuspecting world around them into little bits.
    Shutting the yearbook and getting up to go, I remembered the place where that violent streak eventually took him. It began, during the last days of his life in Chinatown, when, somehow, incredibly, he contrived to get a gun. No one to this day knows how. A dark and oily little piece of menace, it was called a Rolf .38. The gun was in his pocket as he left his miserable rented room for the very last time on the morning of June twenty-third and took the subway uptown. Kate was still asleep when he let himself into their apartment with his old key. It was just then seven A.M . Newspapers reported that it was eighty-nine degrees at that hour of the day. The air-conditioning was running, and so Kate hadn’t heard the key turning in thefront-door lock. But she heard the bedroom door itself open, because, according to reports, the hinges squeaked loudly. Forensic detectives would later deduce that by the time her eyes focused, he was already standing in front of her.

Chapter 9
    R OB WALKED TOWARD HER FROM THE BEDROOM door, before stopping at the foot of the bed. That much we can surmise. Seeing him appear before her first thing in the morning, Kate doubtless greeted him calmly and began to chat. The habit of calmness was deeply ingrained in her, but she also would have quickly realized the situation was dangerous, and that in such circumstances it was important to keep talking, to keep time expanding, to maintain the fiction that everything was tranquil, and that the sight of your ex-lover entering your apartment at dawn due to a key you’d never bothered to get back from him and standing before you now unshaven, stinking, and with a suspicious pistol-shaped bulge in his pocket, was just another casual event in your day.
    We know that three months had gone by since he’d moved out of their apartment, shouting that she’d betrayed him for “Mammon.” In that period, she’d seen him onlyonce, for a drink at a bar. It was an evening that had ended badly, according to eyewitnesses, with Rob “raising his voice and pointing his finger a lot.” She’d subsequently received three e-mails from him. These were later read out loud at the trial. The first, in its entirety, ran, “Cruelty is not a religion, even when practiced diligently and with faith.” The second contained simply the word “darling” in the subject box and as message bore a repeating cascade of x ’s and o ’s. The third, sent not long before Rob’s morning