The Confession by Domenic Stansberry Page A

child, and at the center of them all was a photo of her father taken some thirty years before. He stood in his polo shirt and his pleated khakis at some community event, a lean man who had the admiration of all concerned. Fair-minded and generous. Charming. With a debonair smile. The kind of guy who did everything well. Made all kinds of money. Played golf like a son-of-a-bitch. Killed a million Japs in the war.
    Elizabeth came up the hallway now, her tea cup in one hand, a book in the other, and I knew her routine: how she would spend the evening in the bedroom, sitting and reading, propped up on her pillows—but before that there would be the sauna, out on the deck, and she would let the day soak out of her, her headed tilted back, eyes half-closed, not seeing the prison across the way or Mt. Tamalpais either, shadowing the water.
    “You find what you came for?”
    “Just looking at the pictures.”
    “Oh.”
    “Your father, he was a good looking man.”
    “People admired him. Yes.”
    “You can see his personality, here in the picture. You can really see the life in him.”
    My motivation was pretty transparent, I’m sure, but
    Elizabeth seemed not to care. She was blind when it came to her father.
    “He was a good man,” she said. Tears welled in her eyes all of a sudden, and she choked up as she spoke. I knew the things that touched her, I admit, and took some pleasure in her reaction. I was manipulating her, maybe, but it is the land of thing people do, sometimes, when they seek to get close to another. I’m not sure it is such a bad thing. “Did you find everything?” she asked. Though she was still angry with me, her voice was subdued and in her accent I could hear that small town where she was born. I could hear the railroad going by, and her Negro nanny, and her father, and the birds flocking to the pecan groves outside town, untended now, abandoned to the crows. I imagined for a moment the great swamp she’d walked in as a young girl, its fetid smell, the endless mud, and her laughter as the swamp stuck to her legs, sucking her deeper.
    “I miss you,” I said.
    She raised her head, becoming larger for a moment, womanly and full. I saw her haughtiness through her tears, and in that haughtiness a pleasure that made me think things were not quite over between us. “If we let this separation go on,” I said, “it might become permanent. You know how that kind of thing can happen. So I’m thinking, maybe we should get together and talk this out. Away from the house, on neutral ground.”
    I could not express it, but I knew what her father meant to her. Here in this living world—here in Marin, with the sky so blue, the clouds so white, the air so sweet—people like she and I, we consumed one another. We were hungry, the world was chocolate, it was candy. Her father existed outside time, a generous man who scattered his riches everywhere. Or so she believed. I had never had a father like that. I stepped toward Elizabeth now, wanting to possess her. To possess him, too, I suppose. She edged away. The Wilder party seemed infinitely far off, unimportant. I wanted her now.
    “Why?” she blurted. The tears were back. They rolled vigorously down one side of her face, and her cheek twitched like that of a stroke victim. “The other women. Why?”
    “My work . . .”
    She laughed then, bitter.
    “The stress . . .”
    She laughed again. “Everyone has work,” she said. “Everyone has stress.”
    “I know,” I lowered my voice. “Come on. Let’s be friends.” I listened to myself, to the sweet murmur in my throat. She’d found it sweet once, anyway, and seductive, unable to resist the duality in my voice, the irony beneath the sweetness, the sense there was something on the horizon yet to come. “How about tomorrow, we go some place quiet. We talk. Maybe we go down to Tomales, look at some property . . .
    She stiffened now.
    “I have other plans.”
    “Elizabeth . . .”
    “No.”
    Her tone