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In 1972, Alex Benedict is deliriously and obviously guilty. This doesn’t stop you from going to bed with him – you see in those days you were much easier, then. Unattached. Lonely. You figured picking up the dog would help with the empty house. It doesn’t. Alex Benedict is alluring – he’s a puzzle with more than a few pieces missing, and in the moment when he slyly opens the door to his guest bedroom and asks if you’d like to tour it, you know damn well what he’s after. What surprises you is how quickly you find your mouth opening to accept his tongue, the ease at which he slides in between your legs. An almost perfect fit.
Mr. Benedict, you misunderstand me, is all you can get out before he makes it back to your lips. After another minute, you’ve both dropped the formalities – what purpose is there for things like Mister or yes, sir when you’ve tasted yourself on the man’s lips? On the drive home, you take a good and long look at your reflection in the rearview mirror and tell yourself never again. It’s for your own good, really. The man is pompous, and not too bright, but when you stood in the foyer of his fancy Pasadena home and took him all in, he cowered at the bottom of his own stairs like some stranger, and in that moment all you could see was yourself.
Thirteen years after you first met, Alex is a wisp of himself, no passion and all nerves. His hair is almost all silver now, not just around his temples like they were when you first slept together. He has a pair of glasses on – readers, not prescription, you notice once you get up close – and he walks with a slight limp, hence the stick. It takes him a minute to notice you loitering outside of the building waiting for him to come out, sticking out like a sore thumb across the street. Then he shoots you that look – you remember it so well, the way his nose tips down and his eyebrows furrow. Moments later, Alex stands in front of you with an expression that you can’t quite read.
Are you real?
You could ask yourself the same thing. You already have, the night before you put him away for good. He’d come over, did the whole song and dance you performed about coming over unannounced, and against your better judgment you’d ended up tangled in bed, tracing his jawline with your fingers until Alex started to stir.
No, he’d mumbled, half-asleep. In the moonlight the hair around his temples glowed like stars. By the time you wake up, I won’t be here at all.
He was right about one thing.
There are some things you have an unwavering belief in – love, always love. The stars, and fate, too, to some extent. The line you gave your now-husband on your second date about reading palms had been your attempt to get into his pants, yes, and a very successful one at that, but you also believed in it as much as you wanted to watch that handsome man’s eyes roll all the way back into his head.
What else? The inherent capacity for good in anyone you meet – yes, even those you investigate. God? Probably. Heaven? Most likely. Ghosts? No.
People stayed dead no matter how badly you wanted the opposite to be true. If you’d had the miraculous power of bringing the dead back to life, you’d be out of a job. In that case you’d rather be unemployed – it would clear up a lot of space in your head. Some cases are easier than others. Most of them go as quickly as they come to you, a quick solve and then onto the next, the eternal revolving door of murder that never seems to stop. Others stick to your ribs. Months after you sent him up you felt Alex Benedict still crawling under your skin, the closest thing you ever had to a ghost.
And then came the day when your husband dutifully answered the phone and held it out to you with a complexion that was white as a sheet, and the police officer on call on the other end of the line told you they’d found his car by the beach with all of his papers and him nowhere to be found. They remembered how you worked his case – the box with all of his letters and your notes burning a hole in the back of your closet – and gave you a courtesy call. We thought you’d want to know, the other man said like it was nothing, and it wasn’t until the phone slipped out of your fingers like water and hit the ground with a thud and you tumbling right along with it that you even understood what was happening.
In 1974, two years after you’d sent him away, Alex Benedict had the balls to stand in the middle of the life you’d built with someone else and try to burn it down. I had you first, he’d sounded so proud and yet so desperate.
I don’t love you, you’d lied, fully aware that to say so was to do the thing you hated more than all else: cocking a loaded pistol and firing it directly into his heart.
Mere minutes later, you’d watched him exchange tense words and a cigarette with your husband on the front lawn before stalking off, and almost a month to the day later you stand watching the remnants of his car – the thing he’d been so proud of – towed away by the city. He’d started it on fire before walking into the ocean. You go home and hurl the contents of your stomach into the bathroom sink.
Funny running into you like this, you offer, an attempt at breaking the ice. Alex remains unmoved, and after a minute of icy silence you just start walking in the direction of the park. You know he’ll follow you, and he does, albeit slowly. After a while the game begins to wear off, and so you find a bench to sit on. He joins you, sitting all the way on the other side, far away enough to where you can’t touch him.
Why are you here, Alex says calmly. Not a question. An accusation. As if by habit, your head tips to one side.
It’s such a nice day out, you remark instead, clearly stalling. You don’t want to answer him yet, and so you don’t. Instead you talk about anything else: the weather, the flight from Los Angeles, all the traffic. Work. It’s so easy to slip back into this character – the one who rambles on about everything and nothing – and you know Alex hates it almost as much as he hated it back then. His eyes roll all the way back into his head, but he doesn’t get up to leave. Instead he simply fishes a cigarette out of his pocket and gestures to you for a light.
I came to see you, you allow after Alex takes a couple of long drags. You thought I was gonna let you have the last word?
In 1975, Alex Benedict is in a crumpled heap at your feet in the middle of the desert and moaning like a coyote that’s gnawed its own leg off. What you thought had been a routine middle of the night assignment had put you face to face with the man you mourned – he’d been sitting at the piano playing around like nothing had happened at all, like you didn’t still wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about him all waterlogged and puffy, a corpse that never came up for air. A simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’d rounded him up anyway, started driving him back to Los Angeles for questioning before he opened the door to the Peugeot and simply let himself fall out into the dirt. By the time you put the car in park and run over to him he’s wheezing with laughter.
Jenny, he moans in a voice so low that you pretend you can’t hear it. You haul him onto his feet and put him back into the car while he just continues to laugh. Just let me die here, he finally says when you make it to the driver’s seat. I’ll do it for real this time.
No matter how much you want to put him out of his misery, you just hold him as tight as you can, holding on to him through his thrashing until finally he just clings back to you. In all your years of living you’ve never heard sobbing like that. Even now you don’t prefer to revisit it. When Alex calmed down enough to be moved, you helped him back into the car, buckling his seatbelt as if he were a newborn. Then you drive in silence for what feels like a long time, the two of you staring forward to the long road stretching ahead.
Can I have a cigarette?
By this point you’re acutely aware of the fact that Alex is staring a hole right through you. Without meeting his gaze, you give the glove compartment of your car a tap. There’s a package in there – your husband’s emergency stash. From the way he exhales, you know Alex connects those dots, and then before you can do anything else the sensation of his hands rifling through your pocket causes you to break the spell. Alex still remembers where you keep your lighter.
I’m sorry, you offer. It’s all you can do, and it’s not nearly good enough.
Don’t be, Alex says before lighting up your husband’s cigarette and taking one long drag, as if puffing on it long enough would somehow erase his ownership of it, of you. It’s what makes you human, Lieutenant.
Ten years after that awful night, you let Alex Benedict get up and do an attempt at a grandiose goodbye and walk exactly fifteen steps away before catching up to him. It’s all so familiar, the way you loop your arm through his and match his slowing pace. Then he tells you everything, fills in a decade of blanks: how he’d fully intended to walk into the ocean and die there, and how he’d chickened out as soon as his lungs started filling with water. How he’d thought of you, then, and what you might possibly say when you found out. The coincidence of him being in that roadside shack in the first place – you’d been correct in your observation: the wrong place at the wrong time, resting after doing some odd job for under-the-table cash.
Mostly he talks about music, of all the gigs he’s played over the years, pinch-hitting for bands of all kinds in cities you can only dream of visiting. When you get back to the tiny apartment Alex has been subletting – a third-floor walkup that he can barely handle, but he rejects every attempt at help – you see pictures of it all. Looks like a nice life, you want to remark, but hold your tongue.
Alex doesn’t offer you any coffee or to take your coat. Instead he sits on the edge of his bed and follows you around the room with that hard stare. You already know what he’s asking, and you’re still not ready to answer it, but after a round of twenty questions with only one word answers, you call uncle.
So you don’t remember calling me?
I don’t remember a lot of things I do or say these days, Alex shrugs. It’s not even a line - you give his body language a close read and he means every word. Five days ago it had been just another lazy Sunday afternoon, a rare day of quiet, and you’d spent the majority of it dozing in your husband’s arms on the couch. He was reading aloud – not to you so much as just speaking prose into the air to be absorbed by anyone passing through – with one of his records spinning. It was a good day – until your phone rang, the personal number you both use for family and close friends. Without thinking, he’d picked it up, and then you woke up to the sensation of stillness. Your husband had sat up, gripping the phone. Listening intensely. Finally, he spoke:
No, Alex, it’s me.
Then he’d handed you the phone, his eyes wide with alarm.
Frank, why don’t you come over here and sit down, Alex’s voice punctures through the memory. It’s not as if he has any other chairs except for the piano bench, though the thin layer of dust gathering on it tells you no one’s used it for much of anything in a while.
Off of your silence, he digs in harder. If you came all this way to be with me, you should come over here and be with me.
I didn’t come here to be with you. You sound defensive and you know it, hate the way the corner of Alex’s mouth turns up when you speak just a little too quickly.
Okay. If you came here to say goodbye, then come and kiss me goodbye.
I should hate to think that I’d never see you again. That’s what he’d said to you, that day on the phone, his voice hoarse and strange, sounding so unlike him, and yet you’d never have mistaken it for anyone else.
The next thing you know, you’re stumbling backwards until you hit the piano bench after all, your head in your hands. Don’t say that to me.
You press your forehead into your palm, running your fingers up into your hair, the way you do when you need a moment to think. More accurately, to press the reset button and do this whole thing over. Why are you here? Because I wanted to see you again. Because in the year after Alex went away, you’d dreamed about him more often than not. Because you tossed all of his letters unopened in the box collecting dust in the back of your closet. Because by the time you’d chased after your dog in the park and almost fell straight into the lap of the most beautiful man eating his lunch on one of the benches, you were – to speak frankly – a fucking mess. You were walking around with an open wound, Alex Benedict-sized, and no matter what you did to try and cauterize it, it continued to ooze and scab over. A month into your relationship with the man you married, he looked you right in the eyes and saw right through you: whoever he was, he said one night as the two of you lay side by side in bed, you must have loved him a lot.
Because you missed him. Even after all this time, you missed him, and by the time you gather your thoughts and open your mouth, he’s taken the seat next to you at the piano and begun testing to see if it’s in tune. Don’t, you want to say, putting a hand over his. You’ve seen his hands and know the real reason he hasn’t played the piano in over a year, but Alex just moves away from your touch and begins playing.
It’s slow at first, thoughtful, a beautiful warm up, and he gives his knuckles a quick stretch every now and then. Then it becomes second-hand nature to him, just like riding a bike. He picks up the pace a little, building up the melody even more. At home your husband is the musical expert, talking for hours about the history and significance of every piece, and for a minute you close your eyes and try to see it the way that he would, taking in every single note. No. This piece is for you, played just for you, and so you decide to just sit in it instead. With your eyes still closed, you move a hand so that it rests on Alex’s shoulder, moving along with his body, picking up the pace even more. Finally at the climax of the piece, his entire body seems to shake along with the piano, the keys skipping over as he plays them.
For a minute they almost sound like waves, and you’re standing there with him on the beach as he walks away into the waves lapping up against the shore. Come back, you want to say, but he never does. When the music comes to a sudden stop, you almost gasp. Alex looks at you with an expression you know all too well: he’s pleased with himself.
That’s what it felt like, he explains, and before he can say another word you lean in and press your mouth against his.
The morning after you’d slept together for the last time, mere days before his arrest, you’d woken up to an empty house and no trace of Alex Benedict… until twenty minutes later when you were making the coffee and heard a soft rap at your door. He’d hovered there in the doorway for a moment before making an excuse. I think I left my sunglasses here last night. You’d pulled them out of his breast pocket and handed them over with a smirk. I have neighbors, you know, you’d said as if that meant anything to a man so shameless. Suppose I’ll be seeing you later, Alex remarked before pulling you in for a kiss so hungry that you’d felt it on your lips for days after.
The last time you saw him, Alex sat quietly in the passenger seat of your car, on the comedown and still a bit fidgety. Against your better judgment you’d pulled over once you got back to Los Angeles and paused to let him get out, preparing yourself to watch him disappear all over again. A flash of something crosses his face – relief – and then he unbuckles his seatbelt to cross over to your side of the car and kiss you. It’s a desperate kiss, and the more you attempt to pull away the more he holds you there in the moment. When he finally lets go, both his hands linger on your cheeks. I just didn’t want your last memory of me to be a bad one .
This time, Alex pulls away after a moment, regarding you. That pleased expression is gone, replaced with a lock of surprise, but not shock. If anything, he seems annoyed that you beat him to it first. Then his fingers hit the keys and play a tune that’s been haunting you for almost twenty years.
Fucking Chopsticks. You could almost laugh. Alex is grinning now, complete with the knowledge that he’s pulled the rug right out from under you.
That’s what that felt like.
You play beautifully, you throw right back at him, pressing your shoulder right against his just as he begins to stiffen in recognition. Then you hear that coyote laughter, all nervy and under his breath.
You know, Alex finally says, I used to think about what I would say to you once I finally got you here. Now I have you and I’m out of things to say.
Alex, I– You begin before he starts playing once more, cutting you off.
Your flight is tomorrow? Off of your nod, he gives the keys one last tap before turning back to you. Lot of time to kill.
I’m sure we can fill the time, you say, turning around so that you face the keys too. I heard the famous musician Alex Benedict was giving a concerto tonight.
Yes, some farewell engagement. Going out with a bang, so to speak.
A shame, you say softly. I loved him a great deal.
Well I hear he takes requests, Alex replies with a little sniff, not meeting your eyes, and before long you call out the name of an oldie for him to play and he does so, very dutifully, the two of you slipping back into character, the maestro and the lieutenant in the front row. For a moment you could almost live there.