These Violent Delights

by Micah Nemerever

  He didn’t try to stop Julian from leaving. He just watched. For a long while after the car pulled away, Paul looked blankly at the place where it had been, a patch of damp asphalt ringed by snow.

  8.

  He was letting his family believe he was sick, and it wasn’t quite a lie. He’d skipped his run, and he threw up the few bites of breakfast he’d managed before his stomach turned. It wasn’t much evidence in his favor, but it was enough to give his mother something benign to fret about. Even Audrey didn’t dare ask him what was really wrong; now and then she came close, pausing at the sunroom door and looking at him with her lips barely parted, but at the last moment she always thought better of it.

  Laurie put a cushion over his legs and curled up on the couch with him to watch game shows. The blunted weight of her head on his shin was more comforting than he expected it to be, as much an echo of his childhood as the tulip-printed cushions on his mother’s wicker chair. His mother was steaming a pot of rice in the kitchen, and he knew she would be by soon to serve it to him plain, in his old soup bowl with its motif of peaceable rabbits. The excuse bought him a day at most; eventually he would have to come up with something better.

  If he shut his eyes, Paul could imagine sliding backward, becoming the simple and incomplete creature he had been before he ever heard Julian’s name. But the illusion always fell apart and his shame and dread returned in waves, and he pressed his forearms against his churning stomach to punish himself for wanting to cry. When the phone rang, Paul knew it wasn’t him; he wasn’t confident it ever would be. He didn’t remember at first that he had other things to fear.

  His mother had been preparing a familiar tray of sick-day food. He heard her peel back the foil top of the cup of applesauce before hurrying to answer before the third ring.

  “Hello?” Then, inevitably: “Papa, what’s wrong?”

  Laurie was asleep. Paul carefully slid his legs out from under the cushion and sat upright.

  It wasn’t a long conversation. His mother’s interjections were incredulous and inscrutable. “Of course,” she said quickly, “we’ll be right there.” She hung up without saying goodbye.

  There was a thick, unbearable silence as she paused in the hall, gathering herself. Then she hurried through the kitchen to fetch him.

  “Paul,” she said, and only when she saw him in his T-shirt and green high-school tracksuit did she remember he was supposed to be sick. She winced, but hastily put on a brave face. “Honey, I’m sorry, but we need to go talk to your grandfather. It can’t wait.”

  Audrey had rushed upstairs to intercept them. She was already carrying her shoes. “Ma, what’s going on? Is everyone okay?”

  “It’s—there’s been a misunderstanding.” Paul’s mother pushed him gently but sharply toward the door. “Go upstairs and look through your father’s Rolodex, call the garage when you find numbers for his friends in the DA’s office—home, we need home and office, they might be off work for the holidays—”

  Whatever Audrey had been expecting, that wasn’t it. Paul looked down to pull on his shoes before she could meet his eyes.

  “What . . . the fuck kind of a misunderstanding?”

  Their mother didn’t even remark on her language. “It’s nothing, it’s ridiculous, we’re going to sort it out—the Rolodex, honey—”

  It was windy, dry snow catching on the gusts, but his mother forgot to tell him to put on a coat. He zipped up his sweatshirt and chased her to the car. She was floating on fear, moving as smoothly and swiftly as if she were dreaming, and he nearly slipped on the sidewalk trying to keep pace with her. She wasn’t looking at him; they had driven several blocks before he realized it was on purpose.

  “Ma?”

  Several wispy locks of hair had fallen free of their knot. Paul watched the muscles work in her face and throat—watched her swallow hard and bite the inside of her cheek. When she finally looked at him, Paul wished she wouldn’t. She’d had the same look after his father died, a hopeless and primal despair at not being able to lie to him.

  “Is it that drug thing again?” He tried to make his tone guileless and exasperated, but from the inside it sounded like a singsong imitation of a child. “I don’t understand why they . . .”

  She looked toward the road. Her fingertips just barely touched the steering wheel.

  “Someone died, honey,” she said. “They’re trying everything they can think of.”

  The litany of even if was so familiar by now that he could have laughed at his own desperation. Even if they hunt down every car it could have been, they won’t find any proof of which one it was. And even if they do—even if . . . He was running out of ways to finish the sentence. When he found his tongue, he didn’t have to fabricate the panic in his voice.

  “But that’s insane. All that happened was I signed into the storage room at school the same day someone stole something from it, I don’t understand why I—”

  “No,” said his mother with sudden vehemence, and he’d never in his life hated himself as much as he did then. “No, honey, don’t ever defend yourself to me, I know my baby wouldn’t get mixed up in something like this.”

  At the garage the police were gone, but their chaos remained. Paul lagged behind his mother and watched through the office window. His grandfather stood amid the mess with his hands on his hips, until his mother drew near and seized his arm with both hands.

  Paul’s careful ordering of the office was completely destroyed. Binders lay open in piles, their pages crushed by careless hands. His grandmother stalked restless circles around the office booth with her bony arms folded tight, tugging at her Magen David pendant. When she reached the office door, she stopped and stared inside.

  “I’m going to find out what clown of a judge they got to sign the warrant,” she said, “and I’ll canvas every goddamn door in this city to get him voted out.”

  When she caught sight of Paul, her face didn’t soften, but she set her jaw as if she were holding back furious tears. As he passed her, she reached up and combed her hand briefly through his hair; inside the office, his grandfather nodded and patted him on the shoulder. No one spoke to him; Paul couldn’t tell if they were trying to shield him or if it was an attempt to give him space.

  “It was a veteran,” his grandfather told his mother. “Some poor kid who was in Vietnam. They’re grasping, it’s all politics, the papers are getting worked up and it’s an election in November. I can’t think of anything more cynical.”

  Paul hardly heard them. It felt imperative, somehow, to put the office to rights. He smoothed a crumpled ledger page and closed the book to press it flat, but his grandmother spoke so sharply from the doorway that he jumped.

  “Leave it,” she said. “We need to take pictures.”

  Paul lowered himself silently into his desk chair. He saw suddenly that the repair manuals were all missing, and he couldn’t make sense of it until he remembered the engine of Charlie Stepanek’s car. The police might be combing through the manuals at that very moment, paging through the sections on oil pan maintenance to dust fruitlessly for Paul’s fingerprints.

  “. . . overdose,” his mother was saying in an undertone. “You’d think they’d go after the drug dealers, not . . .”

  “It wasn’t that kind of thing, Ruthie . . . No, later, I don’t want to worry him.”

  The uppermost desk drawer was just slightly open, and Paul pushed it shut before he remembered what was inside. He kept a photograph there, one he had taken on the trip home from Maryland. Julian alone, solemn and round-shouldered in the summer rain, leaning against a roadside fence with the gray-blue mirror of Chesapeake Bay behind him.

  Paul opened the drawer again, but he already knew it would be gone.

  9.

  He must have made an excuse, but he didn’t remember it and doubted the others would either. By then they’d returned to his mother’s house, and all three adults were preoccupied by the tedious business of calling on his father’s prosecuto
r friends for favors and explanations. They pretended in a clumsy, fiercely loving way that Paul himself was beside the point.

  Before he left, he slipped upstairs to comb the contents of the paint box under his bed. He would have to leave a few secrets inside, to give the police the satisfaction of discovery without finding anything they could actually use. He sat cross-legged on the floor and forced himself to choose a few memories he could live without. He couldn’t bring himself to read through the notes Julian had given him all autumn, because even from the corner of his eye they were so raw and revealing that he couldn’t understand why he’d never seen them for what they were. He crumpled them in the bottom of the box and left them there, underneath some failed sketches and a fold of glossy Baroque painting reproductions he’d torn from a library book when he was fourteen.

  But the journal was too dangerous to leave behind, even though he hadn’t written about the plan. And there were letters and photographs too precious to allow the police to take, things he would be desperate to find again if he ever had the chance.

  He gumbanded them inside a shopping bag and took them outside. The street was quiet, every car empty and long familiar, but he still paced the sidewalk and looked through every windshield, making sure he was alone. He still wasn’t certain no one would see him, but he was anxious about running out of time and had to decide not to care. He hid the bundle under the Koenigs’ front steps, in the gap behind a warped board that had pulled away from the bottom stair.

  He barely remembered how he reached Julian’s apartment. Afterward he had a faint impression of the sky clearing, sunlight diffusing white through the bus’s dirty windows—and that there had been a car, an ugly blue Ford, that he’d thought was following him until it creaked into a side street and vanished. He remembered waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, calmly imagining buying a book of matches and setting himself on fire. But every other detail slipped away.

  Paul’s key still worked, which surprised him, but the chain lock trapped him in the hallway. It was nearly a minute before Julian came to the door. Paul could only see a slice of him—dressed haphazardly, pigeon-toed in his thick winter socks. When he saw Paul, he didn’t conceal his dread. But he wasn’t surprised. Somehow that was worse.

  “Please let me in. It’s an emergency.”

  The door shut in his face, and there was a long pause before Julian freed it from the lock. Paul waited for the door to open, but it didn’t. When he let himself in, Julian was waiting in the kitchen. He didn’t look at Paul; the only indication that Julian had registered his presence was the second glass he took from the dish drainer.

  Julian filled each glass with a splash of bourbon from the freezer. His hands were moving strangely, as if they wanted to shake but couldn’t remember how.

  Paul couldn’t wait any longer to be invited to speak. The words tumbled out in a rush, before he could arrange his thoughts and remind his mouth not to stammer.

  “They searched the repair garage—they must’ve guessed what we did with the cars. They got a warrant, which means the alibi didn’t work, which means there’s something you didn’t tell me, maybe you lied when you said you kept to the script, you always say you never lie to me but I can’t believe it for a second—”

  “I’ve always told you the truth.” Julian handed Paul one of the glasses and contemplated his own before swallowing the bourbon like medicine. “Every word I’ve ever said to you was true, not that you’ve ever believed that, either.”

  Exasperation plumed through him like radiation. “That isn’t the same thing as never lying. You lie to me all the time, you keep things from me so you can control what I know and get me to act the way you want. Hiding the truth is still lying, and you’d know that if it weren’t so fucking convenient not to.”

  Julian filled his glass again; he didn’t bother to pretend it was anything but an excuse to avoid Paul’s eyes.

  “Are we not allowed to have secrets?” he asked evenly. “How did your father die, Paul, as long as we’re telling the whole truth?”

  “Oh, he killed himself,” said Paul with furious false cheer. “You know damn well, but thanks for making me tell you. Do you want to know what caliber of bullet he used? Should I tell you what a .38 does to the back of your head?”

  He didn’t give Julian a chance to answer; he didn’t want an apology he couldn’t accept.

  “Your turn. Tell me what went wrong. Tell me how bad this is.”

  Julian leaned back, one hand braced on the counter and the other holding the glass at his side. It was a deliberately open stance, incongruously at ease.

  “I did keep to the script,” he said. His tone was meticulously careless. “As much as I could, anyway. I’ve been doing this all my life, you know, talking strangers into liking me. Under ideal circumstances, it would have worked.”

  Paul felt sick enough already without the drink. He set it aside untouched. “Why weren’t they ideal circumstances?”

  Julian looked away, toward the window. He finished off his drink. “The problem,” he said, “was that I couldn’t stop thinking about the dog.”

  “What dog,” Paul started to say, but by the time he finished speaking, he knew.

  He’d never paid it much attention, but Julian had. He remembered Julian sitting in Stepanek’s kitchen and pulling treats from his coat pocket, while the little brown terrier stood on its hind legs and grinned at him.

  “You didn’t.” All the air had left his lungs. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

  Julian gave an odd, clipped laugh.

  “Well, he wasn’t supposed to pop up again so quickly, was he?” His smile was agonizing. “It was supposed to be weeks. Maybe the neighbors would hear her barking, but we know all about good Samaritans, don’t we? She might have starved to death before anyone came. But of course when I went to check on her on Friday, well . . .”

  Paul’s body forgot how to support his weight. He sank slowly into one of the dining chairs.

  “I’m not an idiot, mind you,” Julian was saying. “I saw the cop cars parked halfway around the block, and I kept walking. Didn’t even flinch. But they did see me, and one of them was one of them—the white one, the one who looks kind of like Serpico. I have no goddamn idea how he remembered me, much less recognized me, but when they came by to ask about your alibi, he clocked me right away and wanted to know why someone who lives in Hazelwood would be out for a walk in Polish Hill. I thought I covered for myself all right by pretending I’d been up there trying to buy grass, but . . .”

  “You can’t. You can’t have been that stupid, it’s just a dog, it’s just a fucking dog—”

  “She couldn’t help who her owner was. She didn’t deserve to be collateral damage. I couldn’t stomach it, not on top of everything else.” Julian spoke as dispassionately as if they were just analyzing a chess game—the defensive panic underneath was almost imperceptible. “You didn’t even notice the problem, and I knew you wouldn’t care if you did.”

  “So you just—unilaterally, without even thinking it through for five seconds, because of course you’re so goddamn brilliant you don’t have to think—”

  Julian laughed again, just shy of hysterical. “Sure,” he said. “It can’t be that I just took a calculated risk.”

  Paul’s stammer had grown so thick that he could barely push the words through his tongue. “You know what I think really happened, Julian? I think you want us to get caught.” It sounded truer the longer he spoke. “You always need people to know how clever you are,” he said in a rush. “I’ve seen you, the way you’d always show off in class, all your games and your party tricks—you live for attention. You couldn’t stand to just get away with it, you needed someone to know you were clever enough to pull it off—”

  “I knew you’d find a way to spin this into me victimizing you,” said Julian coldly, “but you’re really outdoing yourself.”

  “Tell me it isn’t true. Look me in the eye and fucking tell me.”
>
  The remaining pieces of Julian’s calm looked like they would hold fast to the bitter end.

  “No, Pablo. Because I don’t have anything to prove,” Julian said. “That’s you. It always has been. Après toi.”

  It was excruciating how Julian poisoned his contempt with affection. The way Julian pronounced his nickname felt like a sharp kiss before pushing him away.

  “Don’t.” Paul grasped desperately for anger. “Please don’t, it’s your problem we need to solve, don’t try to make this about me—”

  There was a snap of movement in Julian’s body, a crash of shattering glass, but through the dizzying churn of his vision Paul couldn’t quite put them in order. He had recoiled, somehow—hands up to shield his head, the panic of a baseball hurtling toward him high and inside (what a funny thing to remember now). Then Julian was speaking, as if he could barely breathe around the words.

  “It’s always been about you,” he said. “It’s always been about you. Your revenge, your Nuremberg gallows by proxy, your grand philosophical point we were supposed to make so you could keep yourself from feeling the real reason. It was your fucking delusion that if you just made yourself strong and cold and heartless and everything you aren’t—if you could just make yourself ‘better,’ if you could destroy every part of you that’s worth loving, then you wouldn’t ever have to be afraid again. That was what you needed me to do, and I would have done anything, god help me, I would have done anything for you. I thought you’d finally trust me if you knew I’d kill for you, and it still isn’t enough, I don’t know why I thought it ever could be enough, nothing ever will be. And I’m never going to get it out of my head, I can’t, I can’t forget the sounds he made and how you just—like it was nothing—”