Why not try, why not try to collect what he owes me.
Of course, Dr. K——, I didn’t! Not that Sunday afternoon.
Dear Dr. K——! Are you surprised to learn that your lost love with the “spun gold” hair and the “soft-as-silk breasts” managed to recover from your cruelty, and by the age of twenty-nine had begun to do well in her career, in another part of the country?
Never would I be renowned in my field as you, Dr. K——, in yours, that goes without saying, but through diligence and industry, through self-deprivation and cunning, I made my way in a field traditionally dominated by men and achieved what might be called a minor, local “success.” That is, I have nothing to be ashamed of, and perhaps even something to be proud of, if I were capable of pride.
I won’t be more specific, Dr. K——, but I will hint: my field is akin to yours though not scholarly or “intellectual.” My salary is far less than yours, of course. I have no public identity, no reputation and no great wish for such. I’m in a field of service, I’ve long known how to serve. Where the fantasies of others, primarily men, are involved, I’ve grown quite adept at serving.
Yes, Dr. K——, it’s possible that I’ve even served you. Indirectly, I mean. For instance: I might work in, or even oversee a medical laboratory to which your physician sends blood samples, biopsy tissue samples, etcetera, and one day he sends our laboratory a specimen extracted from the body of the renowned Dr. K——. Whose life may depend upon the accuracy and good faith of our laboratory findings.
Just one example, Dr. K——, among many!
No, dear Dr. K——, this letter is no threat. How, stating my position so openly, and therefore innocently, could I be a threat ?
Are you shocked to learn that a woman can be a “professional”-can have a career that’s fairly rewarding-yet still dream of justice after twenty-three years? Are you shocked to learn that a woman might be married, or might have been married, yet remain haunted still by her cruel, deceitful first love, who ravaged not only her virginity but her faith in humankind?
You’d like to imagine your cast-off “Angel” as a lonely embittered spinster, yes? Hiding away in the dark, spinning ugly sticky webs out of her own poisonous guts, yet the truth is the reverse: just as there are “happy” spiders, observed by entomologists as exhibiting a capacity for (relative) freedom, spinning webs of some variety and originality, so too there are “happy” women who dream of justice, and will make sure that they taste its sweetness, one day. Soon.
(Dr. K——! How lucky you are, to have a little granddaughter like Lisle! So delicate, so pretty, so… angelic. I have not had a daughter, I confess. I will not have a granddaughter. If things were otherwise between us, “Jody,” we might share Lisle.)
“Jody”-what a thrill it was for me, at the age of nineteen, to call you by that name! Where others addressed you formally, as Dr. K——. That it was secret, illicit, taboo-like calling one’s own father by a lover’s name-was part of the thrill, of course.
“Jody,” I hope your first, anxious wife E---never discovered certain bits of incriminating evidence in your trouser pockets, wallet, briefcase where, daringly, I secreted them. Love notes, childlike in expression. Love love love my Jody. My BIG JODY.
You’re not BIG JODY very often now, are you, Dr. K——?
“Jody” has faded with the years, I’ve learned. With the thick wiry gypsy-black hair, those shrewd clear eyes and proud posture and the capacity of your stubby penis to rejuvenate, reinvent itself with impressive frequency. (At the start of our affair, at least.) For any nineteen-year-old girl-student to call you “Jody” now would be obscene, laughable.
Now you most love being called “Granddaddy!”-in Lisle’s voice.
Yet in my dreams sometimes I hear my own shameless whisper, Jody please don’t stop loving me, please forgive me, I want only to die, I deserve to die if you don’t love me as in the warm bath blood-tendrils seeped from my clumsily lacerated forearms; but it was Dr. K——, not “Jody,” who spoke brusquely on the phone informing me This is not the time. Good-bye.
(You must have made inquiries, Dr. K——. You must have learned that I was found there in the bloody bathwater, unconscious, nearing death, by a concerned woman friend who’d tried to call me. You must have known, but prudently kept your distance, Dr. K——! These many years.)
Dr. K——, not only have you managed to erase me from your memory, but I would guess you’ve forgotten your anxious first wife E——, “Evie.” The rich man’s daughter. A woman two years older than you, lacking in self-confidence, rather plain, with no style. Loving me, you were concerned about making “Evie” suspicious, not because you cared for her but because you would have made the rich father suspicious, too. And you were very beholden to the rich father, yes? Few members of the Seminary faculty can afford to live near the Seminary. In the elegant old East End of our university town. (So you boasted in your bemused way. As if contemplating an irony of fate, not a consequence of your own maneuvering. As, smiling, you kissed my mouth, and drew a forefinger along my breasts, across my shivery belly.)
Poor “Evie”! Her hit-and-run “accidental” death, a mysterious vehicle swerving on a rain-lashed pavement, no witnesses… I would have helped you mourn, Dr. K——, and been a loving stepmother to your children, but by then you’d banished me from your life.
Or so you believed.
(For the record: I am not hinting that I had anything to do with the death of the first Mrs. K——. Don’t bother to read and reread these lines, to determine if there’s something “between” them-there isn’t.)
And then, Dr. K——, a widower with two children, you went away, to Germany. A sabbatical year that stretched into two. I was left to mourn in your place. (Not luckless “Evie,” but you.) Your wife’s death was spoken of as a “tragedy” in certain circles, but I preferred to think of it as purely an accident: a conjunction of time, place, opportunity. What is accident but a precision of timing?
Dr. K——, I would not accuse you of blatant hypocrisy (would I?), still less of deceit, but I can’t comprehend why, in such craven terror of your first wife’s family (to whom you felt so intellectually superior), you nonetheless remarried, within eighteen months, a woman much younger than you, nearly as young as I, which must have shocked and infuriated your former in-laws. Yes? (Or did you cease caring about what they thought? Had you siphoned enough money from the father-in-law, by that time?)
Your second wife, V——, would be spared an accidental death, and will survive you by many years. I have never felt any rancor for voluptuous-now rather fattish-”Viola,” who came into your life after I’d departed it. Maybe, in a way, I felt some sympathy for the young woman, guessing that, in time, you would betray her, too. (And haven’t you? Numberless times?)
I have forgotten nothing, Dr. K——. While you, to your fatal disadvantage, have forgotten almost everything.
Dr. K——,” Jody,” shall I confess: I had secrets from you even then. Even when I seemed to you transparent, translucent. Deep in the marrow of my bones, a wish to bring our illicit love to an end. An end worthy of grand opera, not mere melodrama. When you sat me on your knees naked-”nude” was your preferred term-and gobbled me up with your eyes, “Beautiful! Aren’t you a little beauty!”-even then, I exulted in my secret thoughts. You seemed at times drunken with love-lust?-for me, kissing, tonguing, nuzzling, sucking… sucking nourishment from me like a vampire. (The stress of fatherhood and maintaining a dutiful son-in-law pose as well as the “renowned theologian” were exhausting you, maddening you in your masculine vanity. Of course, in my naiveté I had no idea.) Yet laying my hand on the hot-skinned nape of your neck I “saw” a razor blade clenched in my fingers, and the first astonished spurts of your blood, with such vividness I can “see” it now. I began to faint, my eyes rolled back in my head, you caught me in your arms… and for the first time (I assume it was the first time) you perceived your spun-gold angel as something of a concern, a liab
ility, a burden not unlike the burden of a neurotic, anxiety-prone wife. Darling, what’s the matter with you? Are you playing, darling? Beautiful girl, it isn’t amusing to frighten me when I adore you so.
Gripping my chilled fingers in your hot, hard fingers and pressing my hand against your big powerfully beating heart.
Why not? why not try? try to collect?-that heart.
That’s owed me.
How inspired I am, composing this letter, Dr. K——! I’ve been writing feverishly, scarcely pausing to draw breath. It’s as if an angel is guiding my hand. (One of those tall leathery-winged angels of wrath, with fierce medieval faces, you see in German woodcuts!) I’ve reread certain of your published works, Dr. K——, including the heavily footnoted treatise on the Dead Sea Scrolls that established your reputation as an ambitious young scholar in his early thirties. Yet it all seems so quaint and long-ago, back in the twentieth century when “God” and “Satan” were somehow more real to us, like household objects… I’ve been reading of our primitive religious origins, how “God-Satan” were once conjoined but are now, in our Christian tradition, always separated. Fatally separated. For we Christians can believe no evil of our deity, we could not love Him then.
Dr. K——, as I write this letter my malfunctioning heart with its mysterious “murmur” now speeds, now slows, now gives a lurch, in excited knowledge that you are reading these words with a mounting sense of their justice. A heavy rain has begun to fall, drumming against the roof and windows of the place in which I am living, the identical rain (is it?) that drums against the roof and windows of your house only a few (or is it many?) miles away; unless I live in a part of the country thousands of miles distant, and the rain is not identical. And yet I can come to you at any time. I am free to come, and to go; to appear, and to disappear. It may even be that I’ve contemplated the charming facade of your precious granddaughter’s Busy Bee Nursery School even as I’ve shopped for shoes in the company of V——, though the jowly-faced, heavily made-up woman with the size ten feet was oblivious of my presence, of course.
And, just last Sunday: I revisited the Museum of Natural History, knowing there was a possibility that you might return. For it had seemed to me possible that you’d recognized me on the steps, and sent a signal to me with your eyes, without Lisle noticing; you were urging me to return to meet with you, alone. The deep erotic bond between us will never be broken, you know: you entered my virginal body, you took from me my innocence, my youth, my very soul. My angel! Forgive me, return to me, I will make up to you the suffering you ve endured for my sake.
I waited, but you failed to return.
I waited, and my sense of mission did not subside but grew more certain.
I found myself the sole visitor on the gloomy fourth floor, in the Hall of Dinosaurs. My footsteps echoed faintly on the worn marble floor. A white-haired museum guard with a paunch like yours regarded me through drooping eyelids; he sat on a canvas chair, hands on his knees. Like a wax dummy. Like one of those trompe l’oeil mannequins. You know: those uncanny, lifelike figures you see in contemporary art collections, except this slouching figure wasn’t bandaged in white. Silently I passed by him as a ghost might pass. My (gloved) hand in my bag, and my fingers clutching a razor blade I’d learned by this time to wield with skill, and courage.
Stealthily I circled the Hall of Dinosaurs looking for you, but in vain; stealthily I drew up behind the dozing guard, feeling my erratic heartbeat quicken with the thrill of the hunt… but of course I let the moment pass, it was no museum guard but the renowned Dr. K——for whom the razor blade was intended. (Though I had not the slightest doubt that I could have wielded my weapon against the old man, simply out of frustration at not finding you, and out of female rage at centuries of mistreatment, exploitation; I might have slashed his carotid artery and quickly retreated without a single blood drop splashed onto my clothing; even as the old man’s life bled out onto the worn marble floor, I would have descended to the near-deserted third floor of the museum, and to the second, to mingle unnoticed with Sunday visitors crowded into a new computer graphics exhibit. So easy!) I found myself adrift amid rubbery dinosaur-replicas, some of them enormous as Tyrannosaurus Rex, some the size of oxen, and others fairly small, human-sized; I admired the flying reptiles, with their long beaks and clawed wings; in a reflecting surface over which one of these prehistoric creatures soared I admired my pale, hot-skinned face and floating ashy hair. My darling, you whispered, I will always adore you. That angelic smile!
Dr. K——, see? I’m smiling, still.
Dr. K——! Why are you standing there, so stiffly, at an upstairs window of your house? Why are you cringing, overcome by a sickening fear? Nothing will happen to you that is not just. That you do not deserve.
These pages in your shaking hand, you’d like to tear into shreds-but don’t dare. Your heart pounds, in terror of being snatched from your chest! Desperately you’re contemplating-but will decide against-showing my letter to police. (Ashamed of what the letter reveals of the renowned Dr. K——!) You are contemplating-but will decide against-showing my letter to your wife, for you’ve had exhausting sessions of soul-baring, confession, exoneration with her, numerous times; you’ve seen the disgust in her eyes. No more! And you haven’t the stomach to contemplate yourself in the mirror, for you’ve had more than enough of your own face, those stricken guilty eyes. While I, the venomous diamond-head, contentedly spin my gossamer web amid the rafters of your basement, or in the niche between your desk and the wall, or in the airless cave beneath your marital bed, or, most delicious prospect!-inside the very mattress of the child’s bed in which, when she visits her grandparents in the house on Richmond Street, beautiful little Lisle sleeps.
Invisible by day as by night, spinning my web, out of my guts, tireless and faithful-”happy.”
Dangerous Women - Penzler, Otto Ed v1.rtf
KARMA
WALTER MOSLEY
L
eonid McGill sat at his desk, on the sixty-seventh floor of the Empire State Building, filing his nails and gazing at New Jersey. It was three-fifteen. Leonid had promised himself that he’d exercise that afternoon but now that the time had come he felt lethargic.
It was that pastrami sandwich, he thought. Tomorrow I’ll have something light like fish and then I can go to Gordo’s and work out.
Gordo’s was a third-floor boxer’s gym on Thirty-first Street. When Leonid was thirty years younger, and sixty pounds lighter, he went to Gordo’s every day. For a while Gordo Packer wanted the private detective to go pro.
“You’ll make more money in the ring than you ever will panty sniffin’,” the seemingly ageless trainer said. McGill liked the idea but he also loved Lucky Strikes and beer.
“I can’t bring myself to run unless I’m being chased,” he’d tell Gordo. “And whenever somebody hurts me I wanna do him some serious harm. You know if a guy knocked me out in the ring I’d probably lay for him with a tire iron out back’a Madison Square when the night was through.”
The years went by and Leonid kept working out on the heavy bag two or three times a week. But a boxing career was out of the question. Gordo lost interest in Leonid as a prospect but they remained friends.
“How’d a Negro ever get a name like Leonid McGill?” Gordo once asked the P.I.
“Daddy was a communist and Great-Great-Granddaddy was a slave master from Scotland,” Leo answered easily. “You know the black man’s family tree is mostly root. Whatever you see aboveground is only a hint at the real story.”
Leo got up from his chair and made a stab at touching his toes. His fingers made it to about midshins but his stomach blocked any further progress.
“Shit,” the P.I. said. Then he returned to his chair and went back to filing his nails.
He did that until the broad-faced clock on the wall said 4:07. Then the buzzer sounded. One long, loud blare. Leonid cursed the fact that he hadn’t hooked up the view-cam to see who it was at the door. With a r
ing like that it could have been anyone. He owed over forty-six hundred dollars to the Wyant brothers. The nut was due and Leonid had yet to collect on his windfall. The Wyants wouldn’t pay any attention to his cash flow problems.
It might have been a prospective client at the door. A real client. Someone with an employee stealing from him. Or maybe a daughter being influenced by a bad crowd. Then again it could be one of thirty or forty angry husbands wanting revenge for being found out at their extramarital pastimes. And then there was Joe Haller-the poor schnook. But Leonid had never even met Joe Haller. There was no way that that loser could have found his door.
The buzzer sounded again.
Leonid got up from his chair and walked into the long hall that led to his reception room. Then he came to the front door.
The buzzer blared a third time.
“Who is it?” McGill shouted in a southern accent that he used sometimes.
“Mr. McGill?” a woman said.
“He’s not here.”
“Oh. Do you expect him back today?”
“No,” Leonid said. “No. He’s away on a case. Down in Florida. If you tell me what it is you want I’ll leave him a note.”
“Can I come in?” She sounded young and innocent but Leonid wasn’t about to be fooled.
“I’m just the building janitor, honey,” he said. “I’m not allowed to let anybody in any office in this here building. But I’ll write down your name and number and leave it on his desk if you want.”
Dangerous Women Page 6
