How It Happened

Churning white clouds of stone dust in the wake of his Charger, he touched her thigh, her muscles tensing as his car rumbled faster, and she reached for the handle on the door by her side as she said please to the playwright, but the man didn’t hear her. There were poles past the weeds at the roadside—speedblurred poles at the edge of a wheatfield.

She said please to the man—held the handle.

She said, Stop. Whispered, Stop. Murmured, Stop.

The Woman in the Passenger Seat

She was born in rural Pennsylvania. Her mother was an elementary school music teacher. Her father was an electrician. She attended Madison High School and graduated as her class’s salutatorian, but by the time she began her first semester at New York University, she gave only passing consideration to her academics, and she finished with Cs in most of her courses.

Her parents had not permitted her to have pets, but she’d kept a fish tank in her dormitory one semester. When she went away for a weekend for a friend’s lavish wedding, her roommate forgot to feed the hungry goldfish, and they died in the fish tank.

She had three piercings in one ear but only two piercings in the other. She could not remember why one ear had fewer piercings, but she knew that there was a reason, so she wore three earrings in one ear and only two earrings in the other although this made her feel imbalanced.

Her name was Caroline, which was what everyone called her.

No one called her Carol or Carrie.

Discovery

Forty minutes later, a washerwoman, Mabel Samuelson, saw the car in the wheatfield. She found the man inside the vehicle, the car’s seats soaked with his blood, and after returning to her station wagon, she drove to a farmhouse in the distance, and she asked to use the telephone.

The sheriff rushed to the wreck site. He found the corpse of the woman who was thrown from the Charger, and then he looked in the car—saw the playwright.

The sheriff reached for the bill of his ballcap. They weren’t friends exactly, but he’d had drinks now and then with the playwright. He’d have Janine at the station send for Stan, the county coroner. He’d call Denise—call the wife of the playwright.

He wasn’t sure what he’d say, but he’d call her.

Denise

The playwright met Denise in graduate school. It was a whirlwind courtship, but for a time, they’d been happy. Denise’s first play, A Bonfire of Innocents, premiered to moderate acclaim, and eager to equal his wife’s success, he began work on The Glazier, a play about a laborer who repairs the windows of wealthy property owners. Although the play has since been lauded as an ambitious (if not particularly groundbreaking) debut, the earliest reactions to the play were decidedly less kind, and the first production of the play was halted after seven poorly reviewed performances.

The lackluster response to The Glazier was responsible (his friends suggested) for the playwright’s earliest struggles with alcoholism.

Encouraged by his wife, however, he continued writing. When Orchestra of Theremins premiered at New York’s Canarsie Theatre only twelve days after the playwright’s thirty-second birthday, that masterwork of absurdist theater garnered the playwright immediate acclaim, and his stature eclipsed, for the first time, that of his talented wife Denise, whose award-winning play A Bullfighter Sings at Noontime was playing a small forty-seat theater in Greenwich Village while Orchestra of Theremins was drawing considerably more attention.

By this time their marital troubles had begun in earnest, and several nights a week, Denise stayed with Lillian Abernathy, a wealthy restauranteur whom she’d been introduced to years before. The distance between the couple only increased with time, and years later, when the accident occurred, Denise was living in the mountains of Colorado with her golden retriever, Lester. She hadn’t spoken with the playwright in eleven months, and when she learned of her husband’s death, she stared for a moment at the snow-covered mountains.

Stan, she asked the man on the telephone, was he alone when it happened? The sheriff didn’t answer her.

Forget about it, she said to him. She said, I don’t want to know it.

The Automobile

He’d purchased it from a collector in Evansville, Indiana after months and months of searching. There were weeks of restoration. Because he himself had little knowledge of automobile repair, he entrusted the work to a man named Larry Adriatico, whom he’d met through a friend, and this mechanic restored the Charger beautifully.

Because of the weather perhaps, he only drove the car in August. He drove it an average of fourteen miles per hour above the speed limit, but he’d been ticketed only twice.

Long before he became a playwright—when he was a short, stocky boy from rural Tuscarawas County—his best friend’s older brother drove the same model Charger.

That was why he’d wanted it.

Where They Met

Men wearing neckties made a path through the library, and one of the men, the university president, told a man who trailed the others in a worn, rumpled blazer, We circulate nearly a million books annually. Can you believe that? Almost a million books a year.

She was reading at a study carrel. She’d not attended that morning’s comparative studies class. Instead, she read about the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 and watched the man in the blazer slip away from the others. When the man sat beside her—when he stared at the stacks and at the low metal railings of the library’s many levels—Has no one jumped yet? he asked.

She asked, From where?

From the rails.

They wouldn’t jump.

No?

They’d die.

They might want to.

She closed her bookmarked her page with a finger.

They’ll be back, said the playwright.

Who?

The men that I’m with.

But you’re away from them now.

I escaped them. I’m their guest.

Oh.

A playwright.

Oh.

I’ll hide. Should I hide? I don’t know where.

Where?

To hide till the lecture. Will you hide with me?

Where? Till the lecture.

Identification

Neither of the victims was carrying identification. Though the sheriff recognized the playwright immediately, he had a difficult time identifying the woman who’d been thrown from the playwright’s vehicle, whose only distinguishing characteristic was a large dappled birthmark on her thighs and her pelvis. As decorously as possible, the sheriff contacted those present at the gathering the two had attended before the accident, and while many of the guests recalled meeting the woman, no one could remember the woman’s name.

There’ve been so many, said Sharon Anderson. We can’t be expected to remember all of them.

The mayor’s fiancée, who was only twenty-five herself, thought that the woman’s name was Mary something.

Art Museums

Before the separation, Denise, an admirer of the fine arts, would sometimes take her husband to the city’s famous art museums. He’d follow her through the museum galleries, but he would pause for several minutes before a large abstract expressionist painting—the painting a tangle of runny paint drippings: swirled streaks of blue and green and white and yellow.

Are you coming? Denise would ask him, but the playwright wouldn’t answer her.

Then she’d notice the tears on her husband’s cheeks, and he would rush from the gallery weeping.

This happened on more than one occasion.

Reports of His Demise

Early articles about the car crash and the playwright’s death described in detail what was known about the incident—information about the event he’d attended, the car he’d been driving, and the cause of the playwright’s death (blunt force trauma, the coroner determined: the playwright’s death was instantaneous). With thorough, breathless effusion, those articles praised the career of the playwright whose honest and deeply felt dramatic works embody both the tragedy and the absurdity of contemporary existence, and whose powerful plays, which have been translated and performed in dozens of countries around the world, will ensure that the name of the playwright—and that his remarkable work—will be remembered long after his untimely death.

And so on.

Some of the articles mentioned that there was a passenger in the vehicle at the time of the accident, but only a few of the newspapers provided the woman’s name.

Factual Matters

She did not attend performances of any of the playwright’s plays. Though Caroline had read some plays in high school—only Shakespeare and maybe Sophocles—she thought that plays among all forms of literature were particularly silly. How could she care about a theater production when wars were being fought overseas, when protestors were marching in the streets of major cities, when women of all ages were being threatened time and again by the draconian restrictions of a patriarchal government?

She read of these topics in the newspapers the playwright subscribed to—newspapers he seldom bothered reading.

Sometimes he attempted the crossword puzzles, but he only now and then completed them.

Funeral

Of course, there were the usual problems with photographers trying to force their way into the funeral service, and some used telephoto lenses to try to photograph the famous guests, among them three Nobel Prize-winning authors and a half dozen well-known stage and screen actors who at one time or another had recited the playwright’s lines. By and large, however, the press was respectful of the funeral’s guests including Denise, the grieving widow, who sobbed throughout the service. She was consoled during the funeral by her three sisters and by her close friend Lillian Abernathy, but she was ignored, for the most part, by the majority of the service’s attendees, who were perhaps uncertain what to say to her about the man whose infidelities had been exposed by his passing.

The sitting president, a great admirer of the playwright, was unable to attend the funeral, but his condolences were delivered in person by a senator, three representatives, and for some reason, the secretary of the interior.

Life as a Bachelor

In the months that followed the separation, the work he completed grew increasingly abysmal. His plots were contrived and heavy-handed. His dialogue was tin-eared. In letters to his playwright friends, he speculated that perhaps Denise had played a bigger part in his success than he’d given her credit for—that her encouragement and support were, in the playwright’s words, the armor that protected him when he rode into battle. Without her, wrote the playwright, I am stripped and defenseless.

Only one play from this era was ever performed for an audience—an ill-conceived historical romance about time-traveling lovers who meet during the Greco-Turkish War. The play debuted to tepid reviews, and concerned that he’d lost his gift, he told his friends that perhaps he’d pursue a career in a different form of writing. Perhaps he’d become a poet or a journalist.

The commercial failure of The Echo Clouds of Chania put a strain on the playwright’s finances. Because he’d grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle that he very badly wanted to maintain, it was necessary for him to continue earning an income.

His agent suggested university lectures.

Funeral, Again

There were thirty-seven guests at her funeral. Most of them were family members. Four were friends from high school, and two were university friends who’d flown to town for the service.

Because the damage to her body had been considerable—because the abrasions on her body had left her almost unrecognizable—it was a closed-casket funeral.

While He Was Sleeping

She would go from his bed, from his bedroom. She’d take cups from the end tables—cups that reeked of gin—and rinse the cups at the sink in the kitchen. She’d fry eggs on the stove were she hungry.

She often went by herself to his study. When she looked through the albums that he kept on his shelves and saw him smiling in the photographs with friends, with Denise, she’d sometimes sit by the windows while the night crickets sang and think of plays that he’d written—all those groundbreaking plays that won awards placed on bookshelves in the room where she sat—and think of all that he’d done: all she hadn’t.

Sitting by the window with the photo album, she sometimes wondered whether a man who created lies for a living was a man one ought to live with.

Posthumous

Days before the accident, he’d completed the first draft of his final play, which he had not assigned a title. Its protagonist, a man with a severe peanut allergy, becomes the mayor of a sundown town in eastern Indiana, and when he attempts to amend the town charter to ensure that citizens of all races are welcome, the villagers assail the man with peanuts. He dies of course, but his death results in a blight on the community’s peanut crop. To atone for the mayor’s murder and to ensure a more robust harvest in the upcoming season, the townspeople sacrifice an array of farm animals to the god of the peanuts, but in the play’s final scene, a villager confesses that he burned the body of the mayor on the same altar on which the animals were slaughtered. Certain that this mistake has angered their wrathful peanut god, the villagers leave the community altogether, and they spend the rest of their lives as itinerant almond pickers.

Despite its nuanced criticism of worker exploitation, organized religion, and the American political system, it was not the playwright’s finest work, and contemporary scholarship regards the play unfavorably. But it was well-received when it debuted some thirteen months after the death of the playwright, and it was tremendously successful during the subsequent award season.

There was another play on his writing desk at the time of the playwright’s death. Its protagonist, Carrie, is from rural Pennsylvania. At the play’s beginning, she is an old woman in a nursing home and is far removed from her days of youth and beauty. Though she fumbles at times through the fog of senescence, she remembers her experiences as a younger woman and recalls in sometimes explicit detail the famous men she’s had affairs with.

Drafts of the playwright’s work are preserved in the rare books and manuscripts library at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, but this uncompleted manuscript cannot be found among them. It was discarded by Denise only a few short weeks after the death of the playwright.

To those who asked about the manuscript, she explained that it was lewd and unperformable and so different from the rest of the playwright’s material that she was not even certain he’d written it.

Why He Moved Away From the City

Weeks after his separation, he went to dinner with a stunning twenty-six-year-old he’d met on the subway. New to his separation, which he and Denise had agreed to keep private, he failed to realize that dinners at exclusive midtown restaurants afford one very little privacy. Photographers saw him entering and exiting the restaurant, and the following morning, they witnessed the woman leaving his apartment.

When she learned about the scandal, Denise telephoned her husband. You said we could see other people, he told her. Sobbing on the other end of the telephone, It isn’t that, Denise told him. It’s that you’ve embarrassed me in front of everyone.

Caroline was not the only woman he’d been with since he moved from the city. Of course, there were others. Far from the city’s cameras, however, most of his dalliances took place in secret, and he spared Denise a measure of embarrassment because those who knew about the playwright’s many liaisons numbered in the dozens, not the thousands.

Dinner With Friends

At dinner with friends at the Cabriolet restaurant, Caroline’s mother said she wished her daughter had never met the famous playwright. She’d have done so much, the mother told them. A woman like Caroline—she could’ve been a senator. She could have been a stockbroker or a college professor. She could have married Douglas Granderson if she wanted to. She could have been a mother.

Doris Whitley, who was childless, said, Maybe she could have done those things, but it’s better that she met him.

Better how? asked Mavis Wainwright.

Doris, who had always been a contrarian (she and her husband were members of the John Birch Society), said, If it wasn’t for the playwright, no one would know about Caroline. She’d be no more famous than you or I am.

The women paused from their plates, from their dinners. The grieving mother, whose black clothes had faded from months of wear and frequent laundering, took a sip from her wineglass.

I can’t speak to your priorities, she told Mrs. Whitley, but I can assure you that my Caroline—my beautiful and talented daughter Caroline—would rather be alive than be notorious.

Cemetary Gates

The grave of the playwright is located in section D14 of the Seaview Cemetery and Memorial Park. His headstone is inscribed with the famous monologue of Clancy the Abbot, a minor character in his play The Dance of the Waistcoated Insomniacs. On one side of the speech is the full name of the playwright who penned that immortal monologue, and on the other is the name of Denise, the playwright’s wife and companion, who was buried beside her husband when she died three decades later.

His grave is easily the most popular site in the cemetery. Pilgrims travel across the country to leave him pennies, playbills, and bottles of Tanqueray, his spirit of choice. On any given day, visitors to the gravesite will find wilted flowers and handwritten letters alongside rain-ruined copies of the plays that made him famous.

The cemetery’s caretakers take the Tanqueray.

Insecurities

Her birthmark was brown and big and splotchy. It looked as though she’d spilled coffee across her lap, and though her mother assured her that many children had similar blemishes, she’d avoided swimming pools since girlhood because even the most conservative bathing suits revealed her skin’s discoloration, and she was teased at times in locker rooms.

Later, when she began to date, she concealed the birthmark as best she could from her boyfriends. Because the birthmark crossed her thighs at a particularly delicate area, her earliest intimate encounters took place in the darkness or with her body beneath the bedsheets, and though the men who’d seen her body had never commented about the birthmark, each time she took a new lover, she worried about the way he’d respond when he saw it.

The playwright’s hair was slowly graying.

Gathering

It was early in the evening. Guests a room away from him were playing charades near the fireplace, but the playwright kept apart from them. He sat with his admirers in the home’s tiny study—a room with murder mysteries and romance novels on the small, narrow bookshelves. He’d finished six or seven Tanquerays, and it was necessary for him to sit. He slurred his speech intermittently, but he masked it so effectively that the others hadn’t noticed.

Caroline wasn’t with him yet. She’d had a tedious conversation with the mayor’s fiancée, who knew a great deal about the department stores in nearby cities and the latest trends in fashion magazines. It took her several minutes to extract herself from that conversation, and she secluded herself in the restroom for nearly thirty minutes afterward until the adamant knocking of another houseguest convinced her that it was probably time to leave.

She felt alone among the party guests. She was the youngest person present and had little in common with the rest of the men and women, so she searched for the playwright in the rooms of the house and came at last to the study with the shelves’ vapid books and with the thin-padded couches where he spoke to the houseguests. The playwright rose from a couch when he saw her, and he reeled when he stood and set his drink on the desk.

I’ve had enough, said the man. We can go now.

She said, Yes. Yes, it’s time. We should go.

Why the Woman Loved Him

Margaret, who’d been her roommate for three semesters, said, He’s rich, isn’t he? And Janet, who’d dated four of their professors, said, He’s not that old. He’s handsome.

A woman she’d never met before—a woman Caroline encountered at a gathering of the playwright’s neighbors—told her, It must be terribly exciting for a woman of your age: to be involved with a man who’s brilliant.

She couldn’t tell these women—how on earth could she tell these women?—that it was none of these things that made her stay with the playwright. It was shoes he’d never learned to tie and shirts he never ironed. It was the faucet he left running one morning and the lather on his skin after shaving.

She loved his flaws.

He was flawed.

He was human.

Exeunt

The playwright swayed when he walked from the study. No longer able to conceal his inebriation, he staggered in the direction of the house’s entrance, and Caroline followed him at a distance.

There were other guests who were leaving the party early. They met them by the doorway, and the playwright, who’d taken his keys from his pockets, said goodbye to these acquaintances and to the host who’d invited him, a sculptor who worked exclusively with aluminum cans. The sculptor too had noticed the playwright’s intoxication, and concerned about his guest’s well-being, he asked, You’re not planning to drive tonight, are you?

The playwright hesitated for a moment. Caroline stood beside him then. She’d drunk a half glass of wine and also a flute of sparkling water. The playwright studied her for signs of sobriety, and noticing the steadiness of her bearing and the clearness of Caroline’s eyes, Of course not, he told the sculptor. He told him, She’s driving.

The sculptor stepped aside for him. The playwright walked from the party with his keys in his pocket, and as they came to the Charger that he’d parked in the street, she watched him balance himself on the car hood.

Do you want me to drive us home? she asked the playwright.

No, he said to Caroline.

He spun the keys on his finger.

We’ll be fine, said the man. I can manage.

Are you sure?

We’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.