by R.J. Ellory
He turned to Annie. She looked back at him with a kind of vacant, washed-out expression. ‘No more,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper. ‘I don’t think I can read any more of this right now.’
Sullivan nodded. ‘Another time,’ he replied. He took the sheaf of papers and straightened them, set them on top of the others that lay there unread.
‘One helluva story,’ he said. ‘It goes from the history of Poland and the liberation of Dachau to Goodfellas,’ to which Annie nodded and frowned, and then changed the subject entirely.
‘Stay,’ she said, ‘just for a little while. I’ll order some Chinese, have it brought up, okay?’
She didn’t wait for his response, but walked across to the phone and called the take-out.
She felt shaken, a little over-emotional. It was not the events in the story that had disturbed her, more the fact that she now believed it was the story of a real man, a real human being, and how in the first sixteen or seventeen years of his life he’d lived more of life than ten people put together. Later, folding takeout cartons and putting them in the refrigerator, she looked from the window into the darkness behind the glass, and caught her own reflection. Like a ghost, she thought. I could live my entire life here, could die one of those anonymous New York deaths where no-one knows you’re dead until the smell offends the neighbors, and no-one would be any the wiser. How many people would come to my funeral? Sullivan, David Quinn perhaps, John Damianka and his new girlfriend? And what would a priest say? She owned a bookstore. She was a nice person. She thought about taking a stray cat in one time but decided against it.
Annie shook her head. It was not a life to be proud of. It had not – if she was honest – been much of a life at all.
Sullivan stayed and talked a while – things of little importance – before wishing her goodnight, and though he proffered his customary and routine invitation to a game of cards and a drink with his friends at McKintyre’s on Schaeffer and 105th, an invitation Annie always customarily and routinely declined, this time her refusal was a conscious choice. She wanted to be alone and, in the familiar shadows and silences of her four-room apartment, she sat and listened to the wind as it carried rain west from the coast, rain that would paint the city with its own indiscriminate pattern.
She thought of Robert Forrester, of Harry Rose; she thought of David Quinn and Jack Sullivan; she thought of Elena Kruszwica and Jozef Kolzac … and they all seemed as real as one another, and all – disquietingly – a little more real than herself.
And then she thought of her father, the engineer. Frank O’Neill, a man who wrote letters that stirred emotions and made memories come alive, a man who had given her life and vanished after seven years. Why? Why so little time? And why had her mother told her so little of the man that she’d loved with such passion and who had broken her heart? These were new questions, and alongside them – as close as shadows – were new emotions: grief, loss, heartache, nostalgia, passion, promise, hope. And desire? A desire to live life? A desire to feel something … perhaps someone?
There had been times, of course there had been times, when she had gotten close. She was thirty years old, she was not altogether unschooled in the complications of men. High school there had been Tom Parselle, bookish and studious, reciting poetry to her, trying his utmost to court her, but Tom had neither the passion nor the nerve to seduce her, to sleep with her. Their relationship had lasted seventeen months, and never once had they passed first base.
Eighteen years old, her mind windswept with literature, she’d been carried away by Ben Leonhardt, altogether the antithesis of Tom. Ben had been an anachronism much the same as herself, and perhaps that sense of isolation and individuality was what drew them together. That was how she’d felt: drawn. Ben was from a wealthy socialite family, his father a financier, his mother a perpetual organizer of charity functions and theme dinners, and Ben had rejected the values and veneer of his background with vigor. Within a week of their meeting she had been seduced, slept with, swept off her feet, and yet for the two years they were together she felt there was always something missing. Her perception was confirmed when Ben took the scholarship to Harvard, plunged head-first into the deep undercurrent of expectation and majored in law. As far as she knew he was down in the financial district right now: Hugo Boss suits, Armani ties, Brooks Brothers shirts tailored to fit, handmade calfskin loafers and weekends in the Hamptons.
After Ben there was nobody until she was twenty-three, and then Richard Lorentzen appeared one day out of nowhere and convinced her that he was indeed the one. He was not, but it took the best part of a year for Annie to realize this simple yet irrefutable truth. Richard was intense in a tightened-up Swiss watch-spring manner. Everything possessed significance, and though at first she believed his attention to detail, the endless questions, the schedules and calendars and precise sense of organization were more to do with his own insecurity rather than anything else, she soon realized that Richard Lorentzen was fuelled by jealousy. Where had she been? Who had she been with? A girlfriend? What was her name? What did they do? She took it as long as she could, and then she told him that she really had better things to do with her life than report in every fifteen minutes. If she wanted such a life she would join the army. He was obsessive nevertheless, and for a further five months he pursued her, appeared in the street, knew her routine and followed it to the letter. She made efforts to change her routine, to leave at different times, to walk a different way. Finally she told him, on the corner of Columbus and West 99th that if he didn’t leave her alone she would speak to the police. He left her alone. He found someone else. She saw them together a month or so later, the poor girl wearing the hunted look of an abused child.
It took two years to recover her sense of participation, to let go of the idea that all men were crazy in some indefinable and yet ever-present way, and then she walked open-eyed and open-hearted into a relationship with Michael Duggan. Michael was everything good about all of them with very little of the bad. He lectured at Barnard, English Language, and thus there was something they held in common. Michael was a writer, a good one, and though he was not published then, and to date had never achieved print, she believed that one day he would make it. Their relationship lasted less than a year, and though Annie believed it had not been of her own doing, nor for her own failings, Michael had had a sufficiently restless spirit to seek the embrace of one of his students. Michael was thirty-three, the student – a brash and unnaturally self-confident nineteen-year-old called Samantha Wheland – had apparently given Michael a blow job in his office. This she surmised from the meandering explanation he had attempted when he’d ditched Annie.
The circumstances of that fiasco had stopped Annie dead in her tracks. She was twenty-seven years old, her mother had been dead seven years, her father close on twenty, and she was alone once more. She had never had sex with somebody in their place of work, never gone Greek or screwed somebody in an elevator. Blow jobs yes, even down on all fours like a Chicago hooker, but she felt such things should be reserved for those guys that meant a little more than a one-off Saturday night lay. And perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps if she’d been a little less lights-out-missionary she might have managed to hold onto any one of the men that had walked into and out of her life. But, looking back, she would ask herself if any one of them would have been enough, if any one of them had come even close to what she desired. All but Michael were far wide of the mark, and Michael had showed his true colors when Samantha Wheland showed up. And then there were kids. Kids were the thing, weren’t they? Couldn’t you tell if you really loved a man when you considered the possibility of having children with him? Sex was but a part of it and, though no small part, it was nowhere near as grand or significant as her friends in college had claimed.
She remembered nights she’d spent with some of her friends, how they’d talk of movie stars and heartthrobs – Kevin Costner and Robert Redford and Jon Bon Jovi et al. What they would do to them. Wha
t they wished they could do to them. Carrie-Ann Schaeffer had asked Annie who she liked, who she would spend a night with, and Annie – quietly, a little reserved – had said Frank Sinatra. But he’s like … like old! Carrie-Ann shrieked, and Annie had smiled and said she’d want to talk to him, just talk, nothing else. Just talk? Carrie-Annie asked, her face folding into something confused and disproportionate. Just talk, Annie had replied, nothing more nor less than that. Weird, Carrie-Ann had commented, and then told Grace Sonnenberg how Antonio Banderas could do her in the ass if that was what it took.
Again her mind was filled with images of David Quinn, the words he’d released into the hollowness of that moment … a man who believed her beautiful. A man who – perhaps, just perhaps – would be the kind of man to think of as her children’s father …
She undressed sometime before midnight, and lying naked in her bed she imagined someone beside her – a nameless, faceless being; imagined someone holding her, touching her, kissing her perhaps. She closed her eyes and thought of Tom Parselle, of Ben Leonhardt, of Richard Lorentzen and Michael Duggan, and for the first time in her life she believed that perhaps half of the difficulty had lain with her. They had reached out, but had she reached back with equal desire, the same passion? Had Richard Lorentzen’s demands been fuelled by jealousy as she’d so thoroughly convinced herself, or had those demands been nothing more than his need to get something in return? He had given everything, and she had managed to keep it all at arm’s length.
Annie O’Neill opened her eyes. She would not sleep, she knew that, and leaving the warmth of her bed she went barefoot to the kitchen and stood in the shadowed silence for a moment. She opened the refrigerator door and, glancing to her left, caught the reflection of her naked form in a mirror hanging on the wall beside the bedroom door. She turned and faced herself, her body cast in a half-light; overcoming an initial sense of self-consciousness, she reached up and pulled her hair back behind her head. She looked at her face, her breasts, the angle of her ribs as they sloped down towards her stomach, and beneath her stomach the dark triangle of pubic hair. With her right hand she touched her breasts, each in turn, and then with her outstretched fingers she traced circles across the tops of her thighs. She shuddered, closed her eyes, and for a moment listened to nothing but the sound of her own breathing.
Annie opened her eyes, looked at her reflection for a second more, and then closed the refrigerator door. The kitchen was swallowed into darkness. Annie lowered herself into that darkness willingly, silently, and was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness that obliterated all else. And of all people, she wanted to speak to David Quinn the most. Couldn’t have even if she’d had the nerve, had no way to reach him, no way to find him, and that, perhaps, was the loneliest thing of all.
She sighed, a deep and enervating sigh, and returned to her bed, lay there for some time while the rain ghosted through the city and dampened each sound, each color, each image. There were people out there – hundreds, thousands, millions of them – and she believed that fundamentally they were all chasing the same thing. To have someone listen, to have someone understand, to have someone appreciate who they really were. For they were all someone, deep down they were, and it was just that no-one seemed to notice these days.
She closed her eyes, she slept, she did not dream.
Too empty to dream perhaps.
TEN
The store opened late Tuesday morning, closed early too. Wednesday it rained more heavily, and out along the horizon a storm threatened New York with angry thunderheads and darkness. Annie stayed home, dressed in sweat pants and loose-fitting tee-shirt and listened to Sinatra and Barry White. She ate left-over Chinese food from Monday night, cold noodles and gelatinous lemon-honey chicken. She read too, bits and pieces of a dozen or more books: by Steinbeck and Hemingway, Francine Prose and Adriana Trigiani. She read poems by Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, wandered back and forth between the kitchen and her bedroom. Then she searched out Breathing Space by Nathaniel Levitt. She traced her fingers across the legend on the inside flyleaf – Printed in 1836 by Hollister & Sons, Jersey City. Bound by Hoopers, Camden. And beneath that – in the same unmistakable hand that had written the letters brought by Forrester: Annie, for when the time comes. Dad. 2 June 1979. She read the book through again, and though she had read it a dozen times before there was something about the pace and rhythm of the prose, the simplicity of the story, that touched her in a way that it had not done before. Love lost, and found once more. Like Sullivan said, better to love and lose than never to have loved at all. She held the book close to her face, could smell the age in the pages, feel the texture of the leather cover against her skin, and for a moment she wanted to cry. For when the time comes … What had he meant? What time? When would it come?
Once or twice Sullivan looked in on her, read the simple desire to be alone in her expression, and with nothing more than a smile, a nod of his head, made it clear that he was there if she needed him. She did not. She wanted no-one for a while. She wanted to be herself, to find something inside that would explain why these past thirty years now seemed so hollow and meaningless.
On Thursday she returned to the store, early if anything, arriving a little after eight-thirty, and when she’d made coffee, removed her coat and returned to the counter, she stood there among her books, her thousands of worn-out books, and wondered if there really would be anything other than this. She felt disoriented, like a child losing sight of its parents in a crowd, and when David Quinn appeared in the doorway, his familiar silhouette pausing in the light that came through from the street, she believed she’d never been more pleased to see someone in all her life.
She stepped out from behind the counter. ‘David!’
He smiled, walked forward. ‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘Sure I am … why d’you ask?’
‘I came yesterday, the place was closed up … I thought you might be sick.’
‘I took a day off,’ she said. ‘First time in years.’
‘But you’re okay?’ he asked again.
‘I am –’ she started, and then without the thought forming in her mind, almost as if her lips were taking involuntary control of her words, she added, ‘and better now you’re here.’
He was dressed the same; the same as last time, and the time before that. There was a comfortable familiarity in the way he looked, his expression as he came towards her, and when he leaned against the counter and smiled she wanted to reach out and touch him, as if to verify his presence, to ensure he was real.
‘Take another day,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s go buy stuff, go waste some money. I’ve been wearing the same clothes since the end of last week, and the truth is I haven’t even bothered to unpack most of my stuff.’
‘So let’s go unpack it,’ she said. ‘I can help you get settled.’
‘In my apartment?’ he asked, a little surprised.
‘No, in the 7–11 David … where the hell d’you think I mean?’
‘You want to come and help me unpack my stuff?’
She nodded. ‘I want to help … I want to do something other than sit in here all day waiting for someone to come buy a book.’
David was nodding slowly, his thoughts running faster than he could catch them, and then he looked up, looked directly at Annie, and said: ‘Okay, let’s go do that … why the hell not?’
She turned the sign, locked up, and from the corner of West 107th they took a cab to the other end of Morningside Park. He led the way, down the street and in through the elevated entrance of a tall sandstone building. Up two flights, down the hall, turning right at the end and reaching a single doorway at the end of the corridor.
‘Home,’ he said, and produced keys. He unlocked the door, stepped inside and waited for her to follow.
Annie went in slowly – wide-eyed she suspected – and though there was anticipation and excitement contained in the moment, there was also her in-built caution, that walking-on-eggshells sens
ation that invaded the edges of her consciousness. What was she doing here? She barely knew this man. Nice guy or serial killer? Charming or deadly? She took another step forward and watched as the door seemed to close behind her in slow-motion. The latch hit the striker plate; it snapped home suddenly, and inside she jumped. What in God’s name was she doing?
‘Take your coat off,’ he said. ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’
She stood in a vast and apparently empty room. A single chair was positioned beside the ceiling-high windows that ran from one end of the floor to the other. This would have been heaven for a painter, the light flooding in through the glass and bathing the entire space with an ambient yellow glow. To the right against the far wall were stacked a half-dozen cardboard boxes, ahead of them a long rolled-up rug, beside it a wooden chest and a small suitcase with the travel tags still attached to the handle.
The room smelled a little musty, unlived-in, and crossing towards the window she stopped by the chair and looked down. The books he’d bought from the store were still in the same polythene bag she’d given him, and leaning down to take a closer look she noticed the till receipt was still inside. He had brought them back, set them down, and more than likely they had remained in exactly the same place.
‘Not that much of a reader.’
She turned suddenly, a little startled by the sound of David’s voice. Again a quiet sense of anxiety invaded her.
‘I want to read, I plan to read, but somehow I don’t get it together.’ He was walking towards her holding two cups, and when he reached her he set them down on the floor and held out his hand.
‘Your coat?’ he said.
She nodded, smiled a little awkwardly, and took it off. She handed it to him, and crossing the room he set it on top of the boxes behind the rug. He picked up a folding chair from beside the boxes, crossed back towards her and set it down.
‘Sit,’ he said, and she did, and for a moment felt a degree of tension inside her that was new. All of this was new. She was here with a man, a man she barely knew, and there was something so close about him that it unnerved her.
