Corkscrew

by Donald E. Westlake

  'I don't think so.'

  It was as though he were having an affair, seeing another woman, and he and Susan were keeping the marriage alive by pretending it wasn't going on, Susan waiting for it to blow over and for him to return to her, he waiting…

  For what? For Bryce to call and say it was all a joke? You didn't take me seriously, did you, pal, it was just a bull session, of course that's what it was, a couple plotmeisters sitting around scheming.

  The contract was real, drawn up by a real law firm. The Domino Doublet had been sent to Bryce and had not come back. He'd returned the contract, with that little note about California. If Bryce wanted to change his mind, this was the time to do it.

  And if Wayne wanted to change his mind? But how could he? He'd given away his unpublished novel, he'd signed and returned that contract, he'd managed to meet Lucie Proctorr and now he had a dinner date with her. He was in motion, whatever this motion was, and what was the alternative? He was in the situation he was in right now because there was no alternative.

  They finished the meal in silence, and watched something or other on PBS. When they were going to bed, her body looked strange to him, foreign, not appealing. He sensed that she felt the same way about him.

  Before they turned off the lights, she said, 'Is this the end of it?'

  'Oh, no,' he said, startled she'd think it would happen that fast, that easily. 'No, this is just — This isn't the end.'

  He wanted to say to her, this is just the reconnaissance, really. I'm meeting her at her apartment, and we're going to dinner in her neighborhood, and this is to figure out what the possibilities are. I don't even know what, how I'm going to, what weapon. I think I've even been avoiding all those thoughts.

  He might have to take a train south some day soon, buy a gun. He'd never owned a gun, never shot one, but maybe.

  What else, what were the other possibilities? He'd have to think about it, see if tomorrow evening gave him any ideas. A number of his characters, in his books, had killed other of his characters, in various ways, but at this point he couldn't remember how any of them had done it, or how it had seemed easy.

  He wanted to say, no, Susan, this is just the reconnaissance, don't worry about tomorrow. But to say that would begin the conversation they'd agreed not to hold. No conversation, not till later. Some time later.

  With the lights off, he suddenly thought of the stack of resumes he'd made at the copy shop. They were still atop the filing cabinet in his office, with the partial list of college addresses that he'd stopped, incomplete, when Bryce had spoken to him. What if he were to send them out, just to see?

  Not tomorrow, that would hex everything. Thursday, after his first date (!) with Lucie Proctorr. Not even mention it to Susan, just send them out, see what the responses were. Maybe there was a wonderful job out there he didn't even know about, and some way that Susan could go on with her own career.

  I'll send them, he thought. First the reconnaissance with Lucie, then I'll send out the resumes.

  He couldn't sleep, was restless. At one time, turning from his side on to his back, his right hand brushed her left hand, and she at once closed her fingers around his. He held tight to her fingers and they lay side by side, on their backs, not talking, grasping hands.

  •

  The reservation was for eight, and they'd agreed on the phone he'd pick her up at her place at seven-thirty. 'If the weather's decent, we can walk, it's just a few blocks from you.'

  'Oh? Where are we going?'

  'Salt,' he said, naming a restaurant near her on Columbus Avenue.

  'Well, good,' she said, sounding surprised he'd chosen well. 'I haven't eaten there, I've wanted to.'

  'See you tomorrow,' he said, and at seven-thirty Wednesday evening he paid off his cab outside her building and stood a minute on the sidewalk.

  It was a cool evening, late November, but dry. Her building was a modern high-rise, taking up half a block of Broadway in the low eighties, on the west side of the street, a part of the spurt of apartment building construction in this neighborhood a dozen years ago. The façade was some kind of mottled maroon stone, highly polished, and the broad entrance was high-tech, glass doors and wall and chrome verticals, as though it were the entrance to an airport building rather than somewhere that people lived. Inside, to the right, a uniformed doorman sat at a wide high desk of the same stone, reading.

  A doorman. That wasn't a problem tonight, but what about the future? Whatever he did, however he did it, whenever he did it, it would have to be away from here. And even so, would the doorman, sometime later on, be able to identify him as someone who occasionally visited Lucie Proctorr?

  Wayne turned away, and walked slowly up the block, looking through the glass wall at the doorman, who remained deeply involved in his reading. It was a fotonovela, a kind of comic book in Spanish that used photographs of actors and actresses instead of drawings.

  Wayne walked on to the corner, then turned back, trying to decide what to do. Phone her? Suggest they meet at the restaurant? Too late for that. And what excuse would he give?

  It was also too late to leave. His only choice was to keep moving forward, adapt to circumstances.

  This time, as he reached the building entrance he turned his coat collar up and pulled his hat a little lower on his forehead; not too much, not to look like an escaped convict. Then he walked through the entrance and immediately held both cupped hands to his mouth, blowing into them. 'Getting cold out there,' he said.

  The doorman put a finger on his place in the novela, glancing at Wayne with impatience. 'Who you wanno see?'

  'Ms Proctorr.'

  The doorman kept that finger on the novela, holding it open, as he reached with his left hand for the house phone, laid it on the counter in front of himself, and punched out the number, saying, 'An you are?'

  'Tell her it's Wayland,' he said, and turned away to look out at the street, watching the traffic, giving the doorman less than a profile of his face.

  The doorman spoke into the phone, then hung it up and was already looking at his novela when he said, 'Sixteen-C. The secon' elevators, back there.'

  'Thanks.'

  Wayne walked to the elevator feeling pleased with himself. The doorman's accent would have conflated 'Wayland' and 'Wayne' for Lucie, but if he ever had to give a name to the police it would not be Wayne.

  He was alone in the elevator. When he stepped out at 16, it was into a smallish well-decorated rectangular space that was shared by four apartments. Lucie stood in the doorway to the left. 'Right on time,' she said. 'Very good.'

  'We aim to please.'

  'Come on in.'

  She stepped back, and he went through the doorway directly into a large but low-ceilinged living room. The place was furnished tastefully but anonymously by the management, like the living room of a good hotel suite. The primary colors were beige and rust, in the sofas, the end tables, the carpet that covered most of the blond wood floor, even the several paintings on the walls, which were of southern European village scenes, steep streets and old stone walls.

  'Sit for a minute,' she said, with an airily dismissive wave at the low sofas. 'I'm almost ready. Are we walking?'

  'Oh, I think so,' he said. 'It's nice out.'

  She said, 'Do you want a drink?'

  'Only if you are.'

  'One for the road. If I'm going to walk, I want wine. Red wine because it's winter. What about you?'

  'Same.' he said.

  'I'll be back.'

  She went away down an interior hall, and he looked around, deciding not to sink into one of those low sofas. Instead, he crossed the long room to the wide window and looked out over the roofs of shorter buildings to the black river and New Jersey beyond.

  Sixteen stories; quite a drop. Except the window was plate glass, and couldn't be opened. Would there be an openable window anywhere in the apartment? Maybe in the bedroom.

  Not a good idea. A screaming woman dropping through the night, Wayne w
aiting for the elevator, and the doorman in the lobby.

  She came back with red wine in a surprisingly fancy etched glass. 'Very nice,' he said, taking it.

  She said, 'Don't try to figure me out from the surroundings, I rented this place furnished, absolutely everything in here came with it.'

  'Everything?'

  'Well, almost everything,' she acknowledged, and gave him a narrow-eyed look. 'Why?'

  There was a terracotta statue of a chunky horse and his bundled-up rider, less than a foot tall, on an end table, too large for the space. Wayne had noticed it on the way in and thought it was probably a copy of one of the thousands of terracotta cavalrymen and their mounts that had been discovered buried in China a few years before. He'd read about them in the course of something he was researching. He gestured with the wineglass at the statue and said, 'That's yours, isn't it?'

  The narrow-eyed look became narrower. She turned to gaze at horse and rider as though rethinking her ownership of the piece, then nodded briskly at him and said, 'Try, Wayne, not to be too brilliant.'

  'That'll be easy,' he said, trying for a friendly smile, wanting to keep it as light as possible. After all, he'd want to come back here, wouldn't he? Another time?

  'Good,' she said. Moving away once more toward the hall, she said, 'I won't be long. A man wouldn't notice this sort of thing, but this hair is not ready for public inspection. I'll just be a sec.'

  She was fifteen minutes. He spent part of that time, wineglass in hand, wandering the beige room, thinking these apartments would mostly be rented to corporate people, businessmen assigned for a few weeks or a few months to New York. Lucie Proctorr being here showed that she, too, had put her life on hold, waiting for the divorce, the same as Bryce.

  He also hefted various objects in the room, looking for something lethal. Everything seemed too lightweight. Besides, could he do that? Hit someone on the back of the head with a… with that ashtray? All that golden hair; wouldn't it cushion her?

  When at last she came out, she looked to his eyes the same as before, but she seemed satisfied with whatever changes she'd made. 'All set. Is it windy?'

  'No, not really.'

  'I'll bring a scarf,' she decided, and he thought about strangulations with a scarf. Isadora Duncan. He didn't see how that would work.

  He helped her with her coat, and they left the apartment to wait for the elevator. Trying to find conversation, he said, 'I was thinking, those furnished apartments like that, they're mostly rented to corporate types.'

  'And divorcing women who live alone,' she said, as the elevator arrived. They boarded, she pushed L, and as they descended she said, 'Women who really want to live where there's a doorman.'

  'I guess so.'

  'Believe me,' she said, 'a doorman is just as good as a husband any day. More reliable, usually.'

  'You can feel safe,' he said.

  'I always feel safe,' she said.

  When they crossed the lobby, he kept Lucie between himself and the doorman, who looked up, recognized the tenant, and said, 'You wan a taxi?'

  'No, we're hiking,' she said.

  Looking back at his novela, the doorman pushed a button that opened the glass door as they reached it. They went outside and she said, 'Which way?'

  'Over to Columbus, I guess, and up.'

  They crossed Broadway at the corner and headed down the side street. 'Oh, it's a great night,' she said. 'I can smell winter, can't you?'

  'Yes, I can.'

  'Oh, God, then Christmas,' she said, and made a disgusted sound. 'Family.'

  'You don't like your family?'

  'I like them where they are. And I like me where I am.'

  'Where are they?'

  'A place called Carmody, outside St Louis.' She sounded affectedly weary when she said, 'You fly to St Louis, and some relative has to drive and drive to pick you up and take you home, and then four days later they have to drive you all the way back, and you fly in another airplane, and you say, 'Please, God, never again,' but there's no escape.'

  'What's wrong with your family?'

  'Oh, nothing, really, nothing,' she said.

  They turned north on Columbus, the herds of headlights descending the avenue toward them, one with every cycle of green, and she said, 'If I'd stayed in Carmody, married somebody I went to high school with, they'd all be just great, and I suppose I'd be a nicer person, too. But I went away, I'm more than fifteen years away, and we don't think like each other any more. I can't stand the television they watch. Their jokes are so stale and old, and they insist on telling them. And they never understand a word I say, of course. I've been in New York all this time. I was married to the rat for seven years, and when you're married to him you go first class, my dear, you meet the elegant and the swellegant. It's not just that I'm a big girl now, I'm a big city girl now. But enough about me, tell me, what do you think of me?'

  'I think you're funny,' he said, a bit surprised to find that was true. I'm not going to like her, I hope, he thought. I don't have to make Bryce's mistake and fall in love with her, all I have to do is like her, and everything's messed up.

  'Funny,' she echoed. 'That's been my goal all these years, to have somebody too cheap to take a taxi think I'm funny.'

  Oh, good, he thought, let's have more of that, and they reached the restaurant. 'Here we are,' he said.

  •

  They sat at one of the tables in the raised section at the rear, where they could look out and down at the bar, already half full, the pretty brunette bartender in constant motion. Later on, there'd be live jazz, and the bar would fill entirely, and there'd be a second bartender.

  After they'd ordered, Lucie turned to him and said, 'So how long have you been divorced?'

  Startled, he said, 'What?'

  'Oh, come on,' she said, 'everybody our age has been married, and you're not a faggot, and if you're taking me out you're not married any more, so you're divorced. I mean, this is not as brilliant reasoning as you and my dynasty horse.'

  'I'm not divorced,' he said. 'Like you, you aren't divorced.'

  'Oh, I get it,' she said. 'En train, the separation in place, the lawyers at the trough. You know, a friend of the rat's once said he'd never heard of a trial separation that didn't work, but I say the trial comes before the separation. So who left who? What's she like?'

  What to say? How to handle this? He had to tell some lies, but not too many. He could describe Susan as she was, but give her a bit more of that hard edge she could sometimes have, not with him, but that tough flat voice he'd heard her use on the phone a few times, talking with people about things related to her job. 'Her name is Susan,' he said. 'Susan Costello.'

  'She kept her maiden name?'

  'On the job.'

  'What job?'

  'She works for an outfit called UniCare,' he told her. 'They allocate money to charities.'

  'What does she do there?'

  'She's the assistant director.'

  'Of the whole thing?'

  'Yeah, the whole thing.'

  'It sounds like a big deal,' she said. 'Is it?'

  'Yeah, it is. She's testified before congressional committees a couple times. Mostly, though, it's just keeping everything running.'

  The waitress brought a small dish, then an amuse gueules 'compliments of the chef': avocado puree on sesame-crusted salmon with a dab of Japanese barbeque sauce. When they'd admired it and eaten it, Lucie said, 'So your Susan makes good money.'

  'Pretty good,' he agreed. 'Charity work isn't that great, but pretty good.'

  'That explains it,' she said.

  The waitress took away the small plates and brought their first courses. Lucie started to eat, and Wayne said, 'Explains what?'

  She held her fork up to say, wait, my mouth is full, then put it down to sip some wine. 'Very good wine.'

  'Thank you.'

  'And a really good restaurant. You chose well.'

  'Thank you again.'

  He waited, but she didn't say an
ything else. When she reached for her fork, he said, 'Explains what?'

  'Oh,' she said, as though it hardly mattered. 'I looked you up in Amazon.'

  'Oh, did you?' She was that interested, at least.

  'You haven't published anything for years and years.'

  'Eight years.' No point getting into the tribulations of Tim Fleet.

  'And everything's out of print,' she said. 'I clicked for used copies, and there were just a few, for not much money.'

  'I've never looked myself up in Amazon,' he said. 'I suppose I ought to.'

  'Don't,' she advised, 'you'll find it depressing. But I wondered, what were you living on? I mean, you don't have a job, you go around saying you're a writer. But now, I guess, the only question is, what will you live on after Susan divorces you? She's the one leaving, isn't she?'

  'Yes,' he said. 'But I'm not living on Susan, if that's what you mean.'

  'Oh?'

  'I've had editorial work,' he said, 'other writing work. I support myself.'

  'Well, you don't have to be defensive about it,' she said, but there was a gleam in her eye.

  •

  Between the appetizer and the main course, she said, 'Will you get alimony?'

  'What, me? From Susan? No, of course not.'

  'Men can, you know. And, God knows, she won't get any from you.'

  'You'll be getting alimony,' he said.

  'You're damn right I will,' she agreed. 'Once the lawyers get finished with their little dance, and I don't care how long it takes, the longer the better for me, I'm going to be rich, and glad of it. And don't think I haven't earned it. Seven years of his ego. And let's not even talk about sex.'

  'I didn't intend to,' he said.

  She looked at him with laughing surprise. 'Wit!' she cried. 'I had no idea you could be witty! Wit and brilliance. What a catch you'll be for some solvent girl.'

  •

  He paid cash, to avoid any record in this neighborhood. Walking homeward, Columbus Avenue traffic behind them now, giving the sidewalk ahead of them a shifting dull gray gleam, the sky above them featureless, not black but like a thick black cloth over a faint source of light, she said, 'I had fun.'