The Crimes of Jordan Wise Read online

  Usually we went out to dinner, then a nightclub or a movie or a show of some kind. Once we drove down to Half Moon Bay; the rest of the time we stayed in the city. After each date I kissed her goodnight, a couple of times lingeringly, but that was all. She didn't invite me into her apartment. I wanted desperately to make love to her, but I was afraid to suggest it or to make any aggressive moves that might lead to rejection. Twice, in the car afterward, the memory of her body pressed close and the taste of her mouth gave me a hard-on. I'd only masturbated three times in my life before then, in my teens, but on both those nights I gave in to the frustration and the need for release as soon as I got home. My attitude and my behavior seems ridiculous now, looking back. But that was the kind of man I was then. The kind of half-man I was then.

  Things changed on the last in our string of dates. Annalise drank a fair amount of wine, and when I took her home, she returned my kiss with more passion than ever before and invited me in. We sat on the couch, began making out. Her hunger was as great as mine at first; her tongue worked into my mouth, she ran her fingers through my hair and moaned a little when I slid a fumbling hand over one breast. I was certain we would end up in her bedroom.

  But it didn't happen. Without warning she put a stop to it. Pulled away, breathing hard, and said, "No, we can't do this, it's all wrong."

  I said, "Why?" in a choked voice.

  "It just is. Wrong for me, wrong for you."

  "Annalise—"

  "No. You'd better go, Jordan. Right now."

  I went. What else could I do? I went with my heart racing and my pants bulging and my head full of confusion. Drove home, jerked off, lay in bed trying to understand. She wasn't a tease and she hadn't been faking her passion; she'd wanted me as much as I wanted her. Then why the sudden turn from hot to cold? Why was having sex wrong for us?

  I found out the following week. I called her on Tuesday, as usual, and at first she said she was busy that weekend. Then she said, "No, that's not fair to you," and said she'd see me Friday night. Not for dinner; for a drink, at Perry's on Union Street, where we'd gone a couple of times before. After work, say six o'clock. No, she didn't want me to pick her up, she'd meet me there. I tried to get her to tell me what was wrong, but all she'd say was "We'll talk about it on Friday."

  Bad week. I sensed what was coming. I tried to tell myself I was overreacting, but by the time I met her at Perry's I'd given up the pretense. She was already there, sitting in one of the booths with a glass of wine. As soon as I saw her, I knew what she was going to say—I knew it was over.

  She waited until I'd ordered a drink for myself. Then she sighed and said, "There's no point in prolonging this. You've probably already guessed anyway. Jordan, I'm sorry, but I don't think we should see each other anymore."

  "Why not?" I had myself under tight control, but the words still came out sounding weak and plaintive. "Somebody else? Bert?"

  "No. I haven't seen him in more than a month. It's not that."

  "Then why?"

  "I'm a bitch, that's why."

  "That isn't an answer."

  "All right. Can you stand brutally honest?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm fond of you, I really am. More so than any other guy I've been out with in a long time. I can talk to you, you're gentle, you don't make demands. But that's not enough for me."

  "Why isn't it enough?"

  "You want an intimate, long-term relationship. So do I. But I don't see any way we can have one together. That's why I didn't go to bed with you last week. I wanted to, I wanted to give you that much, but I couldn't go through with it and then hurt you like I'm doing right now. I'm not that much of a bitch."

  "I don't understand," I said. "Why can't we keep on seeing each other?"

  She said, "We're a bad mix, that's why. You can't give me what I need out of life. And I can't give you what you need."

  "That isn't true . . ."

  "Oh yes it is. In the long run you're looking for a wife, kids maybe, a nice little house in the suburbs. Stability, security. Respectability. None of that suits me. I grew up in a household like that and I'd go crazy, do God knows what, if I tried to live that kind of life again. Even without the Bible-thumping. No, don't say it wouldn't have to be that way with you. It would. It's already heading in that direction and that's why I have to end it now. We go out, we do the same kinds of things, all our time together is nice and orderly and predictable. Sex would spice it up for a while, but then that would become nice and orderly and predictable too. It almost always does in a long-running relationship."

  The words stung, even though she was speaking in a low, matter-of-fact voice. I could feel myself wincing under the lash of them.

  "What do you want, Annalise?"

  "I told you I was ambitious, didn't I? I want to be a fashion designer, live in New York or Paris. If I can't have that, I'll settle for enough money to live well and dress well and travel, and I don't much care what I have to do to get it."

  "You don't mean that—"

  "I do mean it. I've already done things that would shock you if I told you about them. You see? I know you, but you don't know me at all."

  "You've never let me know you, never even hinted at any of this before."

  "I should have. I came close more than once."

  "Why didn't you?"

  "I don't know. It doesn't matter. The point is, now you know what a greedy bitch I am. And you might as well know what else I want that you can't give me: thrills, excitement. You may not believe this, Jordan, but a lot of the time I don't really feel alive. I feel like I'm on hold, or caged, or worst of all, as if I'm running in a wheel like a goddamn hamster. I ache to go places, do things that are exciting and dangerous—live on the edge so I can feel alive all the time. Can you understand that?"

  "Yes."

  "I mean really understand. I don't see how you can."

  "I may be dull, but I'm not insensitive."

  "No, you're not," Annalise said. "And you're not stupid or self-deluded, either. You're as aware as I am of what you are—a nice, quiet, unexciting accountant who'll never be anything else. That's your future, and I don't want any part of it. Now, is that enough for you or should I say more?"

  I hated her in that moment. The hate flared hot, a white stabbing brilliance like a matchhead struck in a dark room. It burned bright for three or four seconds, flickered, went out and crumbled away into ashes. Left me feeling numb.

  She finished her glass of wine. I heard her say, "We'd better leave now." I got up when she did and followed her outside, two paces behind like a dog at heel.

  On the cold, windy sidewalk she said, "My car's just down the block. We might as well say good-bye right here."

  I said, "Annalise, I love you."

  "Oh, God. I don't want to hear that. You're only making it more difficult."

  "I can't help how I feel. Please, won't you just—"

  "I won't because I can't. We can't. There's nothing more for us, can't you just accept that?"

  "I don't know, I can't think right now."

  "Well, you'd better accept it, because that's the way it is." She took my face between her hands and leaned up and kissed me on the mouth, a cold dry kiss that left no taste of her at all. "Good-bye, Jordan. Have a good life."

  I watched her walk away, thinking it might be the last time I would ever see her.

  The thought was unbearable.

  You hear a lot about love. All the psychological and physiological interpretations, the mystique manufactured and built up by Hollywood, fiction writers, ad agencies, greeting card companies. It's sexual attraction and raging hormones and the mating urge and the need to perpetuate the race. It's God's will. It's Cupid's arrow and hearts and flowers and Valentine's Day and sweet-sad songs and sappy movies. It's daydreams and night sweats and long-range plans and lavish weddings and paradise honeymoons. It's feeling as though you'd been hammered and walking around in a daze, or waking up some morning and grinning at yourself in the
mirror and saying out loud, "Jesus Christ, I'm in love." It's being unable to eat or sleep or work. It's thinking you'll die or go crazy if what you're feeling isn't returned by the other person. It's this and that and a hundred other things.

  And most of it is crap.

  The simple truth is, you can't define love or put labels on it. It's an individual experience. You really have no idea of what it'll be until it happens to you, and even then you might not recognize it for what it is for a long time. I didn't. Neither the word nor the concept entered my head until "Annalise, I love you" popped out of my mouth on that cold sidewalk outside Perry's. Before then, she was just a woman who'd gotten under my skin a little deeper than most, a woman I yearned to sleep with and who would eventually pass out of my life whether I got into her or not. I thought about her a lot, I liked being with her and wanted to be with her more often, but that was as far as it went. I didn't walk around in a daze. My appetite was the same, I slept my usual seven hours almost every night, I crunched numbers at my desk with the same precision as always. Love? No way. I wasn't in love with Annalise Bonner.

  Except that I was.

  And that night I said it, and that night I admitted it to myself.

  I'll tell you some of the things love was and is for me. The voice of my experience, the gospel according to Jordan Wise.

  Love is that intolerable feeling of loss.

  Love is as much suffering as it is joy.

  Love is forced self-analysis, having to peel away the outer layers of self so you can see who you really are.

  Love is dying and being reborn as something more and something less than you were before.

  My rebirth didn't come immediately. I moped around all that weekend, still numb and hurting, and when I went in to work on Monday I must have looked pretty bad because two coworkers asked whether I was ill. I hid from them and the others in the office in columns of numbers and mathematical computations. I'd always been able to do that; mathematics is an orderly world, clean and simple, one in which I functioned supremely well. My retreat, my safe haven.

  The fact that Amthor Associates' annual internal audit was scheduled for the next week made it even easier. The firm's fiscal year ran from September to September, the thirtieth of that month, and preparations for it and then the audit itself made for an extra busy time. The audit was mostly a routine procedure, conducted exclusively for tax purposes. The accounting department ran at a high level of efficiency, so there was never any problem aside from a few minor errors and discrepancies. No errors or discrepancies had ever been discovered in my records. My reputation as a skilled and completely trustworthy employee was the primary reason I had been promoted at a relatively young age to assistant chief and why I would be in line one day for the chief's position.

  The idea came to me while I was preparing for the audit.

  Every day in the office, I was responsible for the disbursement of thousands of dollars to subcontractors and suppliers, yet I'd never thought of stealing any of it. Never thought seriously, I should say. Once in a while a vagrant thought had crossed my mind. You know the kind I mean. Everyone has them, even people born without a dark side. Momentary impulses, little imps of the perverse that appear and disappear so quickly you hardly realize they're there. All that money going out and I'm the one controlling it. Good thing I'm an honest man, because it would be easy enough to turn dishonest. That sort of thing.

  This time it wasn't just a stray thought. The idea came suddenly and clearly, not as idle speculation but like a revelation.

  I could take some of the firm's money . . . a lot of the firm's money. A staggering amount, in fact, if it were done slowly and with great care. And it wouldn't be all that difficult to accomplish, given my position.

  Enough money to do all the things I'd yearned to do.

  Enough money to give Annalise everything she wanted.

  I could still have Annalise.

  It was a mad notion—I told myself that a dozen times. Siphon off thousands of dollars, embezzle it, steal it? I'd never stolen anything in my life. I was honest, I was loyal, I was too damn timid, I'd never be able to go through with it.

  You're a nice, quiet, unexciting accountant who'll never be anything else.

  Annalise had been right. No matter how much I rebelled against it, that was who I was and that was my future. I didn't blame her for pointing it out, or resent her for cutting me out of her life. How could I? If our positions had been reversed, I would probably have done the same thing.

  But I couldn't get rid of the idea; it had already put down roots. The enormity of it and its potential consequences terrified me, yet at the same time it was fascinating, energizing. It gave me something to focus on, a way to lift myself out of the mire of depression and self-pity. All right, I thought, so I wasn't capable of actually doing it. I could still treat it as if I were. Determine whether or not it could be done. An intellectual exercise, like solving sophisticated puzzles and cryptograms.

  For the next two weeks I worked on the problem every weeknight and all day Saturday and Sunday. I approached it mathematically, as a complex algebraic equation. Only in this case it was a problem I had to design myself, in its entirety, in order to arrive at a viable solution. I broke it down into two main linked equations: how to appropriate the money, and how to disappear with it without getting cought. The first was the easier to construct, with fewer corollary difficulties; the second was the harder, with more corollaries. I worked on the equations one at a time, shaping and building each with care and noting the corollaries on separate sheets of paper. Once I had the basics in place, I addressed the secondary problems individually, working on each in turn until I had its solution and then plugging it into the main equation.

  By the end of the first week, it was no longer an intellectual exercise but a solid possibility. By the end of the second week, it had become a probability.

  I knew something else by then, too: it not only could be done, I was capable of doing it.

  Annalise hadn't been right, after all. I was not just an accountant who would always be an accountant; I was not a nice, unexciting guy who was too timid to take risks. Not any more. The enormity of the plan and its potential consequences no longer frightened me. If by some chance I was cought and sent to prison, life behind bars couldn't be much worse than the restrictive life I'd been leading behind invisible bars of my own construction.

  I saw myself as I really was. And discovered my dark side.

  I went over the equations half a dozen times, factor by factor, backchecking, refining. There was room for further refinement, but in the main they were flawless except for two factors. One was a y factor: the unforeseen mishap, like a submerged rock in shoal water, that could rip the bottom out of any plan—bad luck, coincidence, miscalculation. The other was a missing x factor.

  There was nothing to be done in advance to forestall a y factor. The x factor was essential; it had to be added to the equations to make them complete and functional. The x factor was Annalise.

  I could do it for her, but I couldn't do it without her.

  I called her the Wednesday after the company audit was completed. She wasn't happy to hear from me, that was plain enough from her voice, but neither did she sound angry or hostile. A little exasperated was all.

  "Why are you calling?" she said. "I meant what I said at Perry's."

  "I need to see you," I said.

  "No, Jordan. It wouldn't do either of us any good."

  "As soon as possible. It's important. Very important."

  "There's nothing you can say to make me change my mind."

  "One hour of your time, that's all I'm asking."

  "So you can plead and beg? I couldn't stand it."

  "I'm all through with that kind of thing," I said. "What I have to say I think you're going to want to hear."

  "And that is?"

  "When I see you."

  She sighed. "Oh, all right. Tomorrow night at Perry's, after work."

 
"No," I said. "It has to be your apartment or mine."

  "Why? Why are you being so mysterious?"

  "I'm not. This talk has to be in person and in private. You'll understand why when you hear it."

  "I don't know . . ."

  "One hour. You can stop me any time, and I'll leave you alone and never bother you again."

  "You mean that?"

  "I swear it."