night, Sweet Princess, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
On-and offline, I couldn’t find much of substance. She’d been born Vanessa Compton in Rockville Centre, a town near the south shore of Long Island. She’d gone to Hofstra, also on the Island. After a brief stint (though I never heard of a stint that wasn’t brief) working at a gigantic employment agency in the city, she’d founded Panache while still in her twenties.
Her clients ranged from the corporate, like Kluckers and a computer software giant, to individuals, like socialites and professional athletes. By the time she was in her early thirties, she had not only married Stan, but had also gotten him to build her a fifteen-room mansion on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound, a place with such a surfeit of Doric columns it was clear that too many girlhood viewings of Gone with the Wind had caused a slight impairment to the region of the brain that governed her architecture aesthetic.
One of the online pieces had an old Panache publicity picture of Vanessa; she was wearing a coatdress and perched on the edge of her Louis the Something-th desk. She was flanked on the left by a woman in a maid’s uniform and a man in a hardhat holding a clipboard; a man in a three-piece banker’s suit stood on the right and, beside him, another in a one-piece mechanic’s coverall. All four workers looked competent and content, yet Vanessa outshone them. Whether it was some inner glow or simply good lighting I couldn’t tell.
In a long article in the Shorehaven Sentinel, I read: “Her former husband, Stanley Giddings, could not be reached for comment, although a Giddings family spokesman released a statement that said Mr. Giddings was ‘shocked and saddened to learn of Vanessa’s suicide.’ ” The shocked and saddened Stan, the paper noted, had married an artist, who went by the name of Ryn, three months earlier. They’d moved out of Shorehaven many months before the nuptials and were living in dandied-up waterfront warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The place had just been photographed for Architectural Digest.
The next time I glanced up, it was long past eleven o’clock. Shit. Hurriedly, I made a pile of clippings and printouts about Vanessa’s death, arranged in chronological order. Why had I spent the night doing this when facing eighteen first drafts of term papers on New Deal agencies?
Well, Vanessa had called me her friend. On the slim chance she hadn’t been full of it, that she was truly so friendless that she considered a near stranger a friend, maybe I owed her something. Or it could have been my gut reaction: her committing suicide was ninety-nine percent unlikely. Over the years, I’ve learned my gut is right more often than not. Who knows? It simply could have been that after dinner with Nancy, on yet one more bleak night alone, a mystery was just what I needed to put some life in my life.
My husband was gone. True, Bob and I hadn’t had a fairy-tale marriage. Still, even when all that’s left is polite conversation and lackluster marital sex, you have to remember (I’d told myself all those years we were together) that once upon a time it had to have been a love story. I always half-expected the plot would get moving again. Some incident would touch off a great conflict and, lo and behold, not only would the air clear, but there’d be romance in it! Bob and Judith: we’d walk hand in hand into a sunset, happily ever after—or until one of us went gently into the night in our eighth or ninth decade.
Imagine my surprise when he died before my eyes in the emergency room of North Shore Hospital. One minute, he squeezed my hand—a reassuring gesture—but I could see the fear in his eyes. As I squeezed back, he slipped away. Just like that. Gone, before I could say, “Don’t worry, Bob. The nurse told me Dr. Feinblatt—the cardiologist—was one of New York magazine’s Top Doctors.” Or just “I love you, Bob.”
Not only
Ann Voss Peterson, J.A. Konrath