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We spent the afternoon together. As we talked, we walked up and down lower Manhattan, sticking to the big avenues. In some ways he was the most important person in the story, and I didn't understand who he was.
There were two theories about him. One was the anybody-can-snap theory that an old colleague of his, Gay Roberts, had told me in New Zealand. In his second year in Tonga, De
De
His beard was shaved neatly around his mouth and cheeks, but his shoulders in a cutoff Champion T-shirt were hairy, and he had a fu
When we hit Union Square, he pulled out a folded piece of paper and read me a proposal. He said I could convey his terms to my editors, so I will report its fuzzy outline here: De
I should have anticipated such a gambit. Emile had described to me a chilling visit to De
What I told De
It was my own form of bluff. The Gardners didn't want to talk to De
I didn't tell De
He'd maintained a poker face for three months in Tonga. He had almost killed himself with hunger strikes two or three times so as to be kept in the jail in downtown Nuku'alofa, near his friends, rather than at the isolated prison farm. And while Emile had refused to play the double-jeopardy game, other friends had helped him. He'd made a kind of confession to Barbara Williams, in order to gain admission back into the human family, but Barbara's loving expectation that he would be incarcerated in a mental hospital meant nothing to him. Another friend had given him a Bible that he had read thoroughly in jail, and he had then told Dr. Stojanovich that he was Deb's Jesus Christ and savior and she was possessed by the devil-or he had allowed Stojanovich to say as much on the stand. Then, in the States, De
Believing it pointless to cite a larger social good, I appealed to De
I was going to change that; didn't he want to help?
"Okay, if I'm as smart as you say I am, then how come it's not me with the big house by the lake in Seattle?"
"You're as smart as Bill Gates, you just care about different things," I said.
I'd pictured this encounter for years, and always with explosive scenes. He did get angry a couple of times, and I had the underlying sense that he was deeply dissociated, but all in all it was a civilized meeting. He was a free man in Soho. We were two middle-aged cerebral New Yorkers, lost in conversation, tied together by intense feelings about a beautiful loner of a woman whom he had prevented from ever growing old, and whose crystalline girlhood had trapped me, too, in seventies amber.
We went back to Dean and DeLuca. I got a bottle of juice and he got a lemonade, and we walked south. "I want to show you my pictures," I said.
We sat on a rusted iron stoop on Grand Street and I showed him one hundred or so of the images I'd collected. He flipped impassively through the pictures of Deb, broke down when he saw a picture of his old friend Paul Boucher, lost it for a few minutes, had to walk off down the street. The narcissistic monster, only thinking about his own bloody life.
Then he carefully drew something from his knapsack he'd brought along, a stiff card with a blue edge, his membership in the Royal Nuku'alofa Martini Club, a group founded by expatriates in 1975. It was an artifact from before Deborah, before his life had fallen apart.
In the months that followed our meeting, De
Philip Weiss is a NewYork author. This piece is drawn from his book, American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps. He has worked for many years as a journalist, writing a column in the New York Observer. He has been a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and Esquire. He is at work on a book about the army in Australia and New Guinea during the Second World War.