Hex: A Ruby Murphy Mystery
Page 28
Jane coos her approval.
I hang up.
Eventually, I go to the piano and practice scales with a vengeance. It helps.
X
A FEW HOURS later, feeling better than I have any right to, I hoist my beloved 1980 Peugeot onto my shoulder and carry it down to the street, where I hop on and veer into the light traffic of Surf Avenue.
The bright morning has turned into a blistering afternoon. Within a few minutes I’m soaked in sweat, the salt of it getting in my eyes and half blinding me. Which I don’t mind that much.
Forty-five minutes later I’ve picked Jane up outside her place and she’s riding next to me on her clanky brown bike, jabbering away about the particulars of tortoise pose as if this were just an ordinary day. I’m grateful for this.
We chain our bikes outside the yoga studio on lower Broadway and then make our way to the end of the long line of aggressive go-getters, rabid in their desire to hurry up and relax.
Jane and I unfurl our mats side by side in the huge pink and green studio. The room slowly fills with all sorts of humans, mostly females with expensive haircuts, lovely pedicures, and delicate yoga togs. Ruth, the teacher, a lanky woman who favors strange pink unitards and huge, bordering-on-garish necklaces, comes in toting a harmonium. She sets this down, gazes out at the sea of students, greets a few by name, offers Jane and me a huge grin, then sits cross-legged behind the instrument, hits a low G, and intones a long vibrating chant of Om that gets taken up by the forty some people in the room.
We launch into our first series of sun salutations, followed by a completely merciless sequence of standing poses. As I balance on my left leg, right leg extended in front of me, Ruth, who doesn’t know me well but seems to have an uncanny knack for peering into my soul, comes over and tilts her head like a curious puppy would.
“Are you okay?” she asks softly.
I shrug.
She looks worried for a moment then commands, “Leg higher,” willing my extended leg up several inches.
An hour and a half later, as the lot of us take headstands and breathe twenty-five long breaths, Ruth comes over again. I see her upside down, her long feet and legs, the crazy unitard, the amber necklace, the calm, lovely oval face. She’s peering down at me, as if contemplating some strange act of faith healing where maybe she’ll reach into my chest cavity, extract my heart, massage it a little, then return it to its nest of arteries. But all she does is move my feet slightly forward, then gently pat each foot with her fingertips.
The class ends and Jane and I go to the packed changing room. We fight for a tiny corner in which to peel off our wet clothes and towel ourselves down. It’s a veritable flesh mart in here, wall-to-wall naked women in all shapes and sizes.
We emerge from the yoga studio, get back on our bikes, and ride east to Jane’s place, where Harry has threatened to cook for us.
Though a devout carnivore, twenty years of being married to a vegetarian has made Harry fairly adept at cranking out the bland nutritious cuisine his wife craves.
“Ruby, I’m sorry,” Harry says as I come in the front door and set my backpack down. He puts one hand on my shoulder. I’m not sure how much more sympathy I can take. I ask what’s for dinner. Then feign surprise and delight at his answer: yams and tofu.
Jane has busied herself hanging wet yoga clothes in the bathroom, putting unguent on her battered feet, and generally neglecting me, which reassures me. I might lose it completely if she went against character and actually paid attention to me.
Harry is in the kitchen, poking at the yams as I settle into the fur-covered couch and light a cigarette. The cats, Blossom and Stewart, come bump their heads against my legs as I blow smoke rings and think of nothing.
We eat our yams and tofu and I watch Jane feed tiny chunks of yam to Blossom. Harry and I both invoke Jane’s wrath by lighting up after-dinner cigarettes, but by the time I stub mine out, Jane, exhibiting her incredible ability to fall asleep at the drop of a hat, has unceremoniously nodded out right there on the couch. I realize it’s time to go.
I get up and put my backpack on.
“You’re leaving?” Jane wakes up enough to notice.
“I am.”
I kiss Harry on both cheeks and thank him for the feast. Jane walks me the short distance to the door, Stewart and Blossom weaving between her legs. I head down the stairs, turning back to wave at my friend. She urges me to ride safely. She looks worried.
I don’t ride particularly safely. I take the Brooklyn Bridge back over and tear up the incline toward the bridge’s apex, narrowly avoiding a collision with a tourist who’s straggled into the bike lane to take photos of the nighttime skyline. I fly through downtown Brooklyn and on into Prospect Heights, past the park and onto Ocean Parkway, where I ride like a maniac, reaching Surf Avenue a mere twenty-five minutes after leaving Jane’s.
I hoist the Peugeot onto my shoulder and haul it inside. Ramirez’s door is, thankfully, closed. I need silence and solitude right now.
I feed the cats, then put on my favorite Einsturzende Neubauten CD at full volume and lie on the floor for a very long time, feeling the wide wood planks of the floor vibrate and hum with the deranged beautiful music.
I go to bed around one A.M.
I sleep until noon. Feed the cats. Note that the answering machine is blinking fiercely. Decide against listening to messages. Sleep some more.
When I absolutely can’t sleep anymore, I get up and sit at the piano. In my nightgown. I play. Until night comes.
Then, when the sky turns dark blue and all the lights of Coney turn on, I go outside.
It’s a sweltering Friday night and Astroland is in full bloom. I weave between packs of people. Huge black women in tight, color-coordinated outfits balancing precariously on spike heels. Spanish girls with silky ponytails tapping rhythms down their backs. Sexy black boys with gold teeth leering into the neon night. I get ensnared in a human traffic jam and bump right into Rite of Spring Man. He stands there looking pleased, his boom box blaring out the second movement of Stravinsky’s opus.
I nod at him. He grins. “God bless you, baby,” he says.
I walk forward into the bright night that knows nothing of all the strange things that have happened to me. I start losing myself in the glowing anonymity of the place I call home.
I weave my way to the Eldorado Arcade and go to the change machine for five bucks worth of quarters. I plant myself in front of one of the Skee Ball shoots and start rolling the big wooden balls up the little metal ramp. For some reason, my body is particularly fluid and I’m consistently shooting balls into the fifty point slot, generating a long green snake of prize tickets. I start feeling pleased with myself, even letting myself pause to glance around and see if there are any kids looking on enviously. That’s when I notice Ned, standing by the horse-racing game, catty-corner to my Skee Ball shoot.
My heart falls into my shoes and my legs go soft. I clutch hard at the big wooden ball I’m holding. Ned slowly takes his left hand out of his pocket and waves. A weird, shy-seeming wave just like Oliver’s. For a minute I feel like I’m going to pass out. Ned takes one step toward me, then stops. A little girl bumps into him. I watch him mumble “Sorry” at her.
“What are you doing here, Ned, or Ed, or whoever the fuck you are?” I say.
He takes a few more steps toward me. “Sorry,” he says.
“What are you doing here?” I repeat.
“I wanted to play Skee Ball.” He puts his hands back into the pockets of his jeans. “I swear, I wasn’t trying to find you, just thought … well, I just wanted to come out here.”
One of the longest moments of my life comes, stays, and then passes. I hand Ned the wooden ball I’m holding. “Play, then,” I say.
He takes it from me. Rolls it up the little metal ramp and right into the fifty-point slot. Two green tickets shoot out of the ticket dispenser.
“Can I buy you an ice cream?” Ned asks.
His glasses hav
e fallen down to the edge of his nose.
“Sure,” I say.
Ned Ward/Edward Burke
36 / The Mercy Seat
By now I’ve come to expect everything to go wrong. It doesn’t come as a great shock when I get home and find my front door wide open and the kitten missing. When Lena the émigré failed to let herself into my place for a couple of days, I did away with the booby traps. And, apparently picking this up on her sociopathic radar, Lena has gone and done the deed. The kitten is gone. The door wide open. It’s a miracle none of the neighbors have taken the occasion to rob me of what’s in the place. All my paperwork has been gone through and the laptop is slightly askew on the desk, indicating Lena probably went through my files. The only thing missing, though, is my kitten. And I don’t like people bringing innocent creatures into their personal affairs.
I look around, half expecting a ransom note, but I don’t see one. I go back out down the hall and pound on Lena’s door, but, of course, no response. I feel myself growing light-headed and have to lean against the wall for a minute and close my eyes. I’m standing like this, against the wall, eyes closed, panting slightly, when I hear something. I open my eyes and see Mrs. Small doddering toward me with her walker.
“Neddie,” she squeaks, “everything okay?”
“Fine, Mrs. Small, thank you. I was just feeling light-headed.”
“At your age? You should be out running marathons, Neddie.” She wags a crooked old finger at me.
“You’re right, Mrs. Small. I guess I’m not as strong as you.” I smile down at her.
“Damn straight, Neddie,” she says, and proving her mettle, quickens her pace as she shuffles down the hall to the elevator.
I return to my apartment and sit on the couch for a minute to breathe and get my head together. It’s been the worst week of my life. What with meeting a girl I like but suspecting her of nefarious activities, having her run out on me within mere moments of physical intimacy, then thinking I was going to have to arrest the girl—who now can’t stand the sight of me, and who can really blame her? Not to mention that my role in the Ariel DiCello investigation is over and I’ll probably have to go on to some less than exciting assignment, and to be honest, I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t just hang up my bureau badge and work with horses.
And now, to add insult to injury, a Russian psycho has kidnapped my kitten.
This is what sends me over the edge.
I get my tools and walk down the hall and let myself into Lena’s place.
In keeping with the disturbed slutty theme of her psyche, her apartment is bordello-like. Red satin sheets for curtains and two cheap chairs covered in fake leopard fur. It’s so predictable I want to laugh, but I don’t have much laughing inside me just now. There’s no sign of the kitten or where Lena may have gone. I begin to panic, wondering if Lena’s done something truly terrible to my kitten. Visions of bunny boiling à la Fatal Attraction float through my mind.
It’s more than I can take. I return to my apartment for more tools and then go back again into Lena’s, where, in spite of it being extremely illegal, I install a few strategically located bugging devices.
I spend the next twenty-four hours at home in the apartment, fielding calls from the bureau and waiting for activity inside Lena’s place. Sadly, there isn’t any. When it becomes clear that I’m going off the deep end, I pull myself together as best I can and take a long succession of subways to Coney Island.
When I arrive there at the tip of Brooklyn, I dial Ruby’s number. Her answering machine picks up. I do not leave a message.
I go over to the beautiful old Cyclone rollercoaster and stare at it for a while. I don’t think my body is up for the kind of beating a ride on it would give me, so I content myself with looking at the thing, listening to the chorus of screams rising up above each dip in the contraption’s tracks. All around me, people seem purposeful and happy. I drift over toward one of the horse-racing games that involves rolling little plastic balls up a wooden surface and into various holes, this action sending a corresponding automated horse forward in its course along a platform ahead. I stare at this for a long while, reliving actual horse races in my mind’s eye.
The game operator is a youngish guy who barks into a microphone, entreating the players to hold onto his balls until the bell rings. I watch the guy, imagining that anytime Ruby walks by, he probably entreats her to hold onto his balls. With this unpleasant thought clouding me, I walk on toward the Eldorado Arcade, where there are dozens of Skee Ball chutes. It’s there that, at last, my luck seems to turn a little. I spot Ruby, resolutely playing Skee Ball.
She’s intently focused on her game, feet planted hip distance apart, arm curled as she stares ahead, taking aim, then rolling the ball up and right into a fifty-point slot.
I look around to see if anyone else is watching her, but apparently not. I linger as she plays several games, obsessively pumping quarters into the thing. As I stand there, pondering what to do or say, Ruby suddenly stretches and looks around. She does an almost comical double take at the sight of me. I feel my heart skid to a halt. I offer a tentative smile. She’s asking what I’m doing here. She clearly thinks I’m stalking her. I can’t blame her.
I speak to her softly. Trying not to look like a buffoon as I gaze at her and feel warm things.
She lets me play, handing me a ball. A moment later I ask if I can buy her an ice cream, and after a few seconds’ hesitation, she agrees.
We walk in silence to Denny’s Soft Serve on Surf Avenue. Ruby deliberates a long while over the flavors, then settles on pistachio. I try not to be lewd as I watch her lick the stuff, her tongue a violent pink against the green of the ice cream.
“Aren’t you getting one?” she asks me in a friendly tone.
“Nah, don’t have the stomach for it right now.”
Ruby shrugs. We walk slowly down the avenue.
I want to tell Ruby about the kitten but it’s too complicated. Instead, I pick the innocuous subject of Xtra Heat, the great racing mare that everyone—and women in particular—loves. Her owners bought her for five thousand dollars. A plain bay filly barely bigger than a pony. Nonspectacular breeding and really not that much to recommend her. Until they raced her. She proceeded to win race after race. They put her in bigger and bigger stakes races. Against champion fillies. Against world-class colts that were practically twice her size. And she won. Running mostly on heart. At last count, she had earned over two million dollars.
By the end of the Xtra Heat conversation, Ruby is finally animated. She insists that we ride the Cyclone. What can I do? I agree.
After our third ride on the damn thing, I realize I’m going to rethink my previously negative stance on chiropractors. I tell Ruby this. She actually laughs, showing me her pretty, even teeth.
I walk Ruby to her door. I don’t try to kiss or touch her or ask anything of her. Thankfully, she offers.
I go upstairs with her. Her neighbor—a Spanish guy who’s got his front door open—is sitting at his kitchen table, shameless in his boxers and a stained white undershirt. The guy gives me the onceover, asks Ruby if everything is all right. She tells him that everything is fine. The two exchange a few more words and then Ruby and I go into her apartment.
She’s cleaned up since my escapade of searching through her stuff, and I so strongly wish I hadn’t had to do it, hadn’t seen the private things of a woman I really like. Not that I found some vast reserve of sex toys or incriminating photos, but I saw her little home without her in it. I violated a woman I like.
I sit on the couch as Ruby goes into the kitchen to do something with her cats. Eventually, she finishes up with the animals and comes to stand a few inches in front of me. It almost looks like she’s going to hit me. I wouldn’t mind. Not that I’m some S&M guy, just that it might break the ice. She doesn’t hit me, though. Instead, she laces her hands around my neck and pulls my face to hers. She kisses me violently. Biting my lips. Drawing blood.
She strips down to her white T-shirt and red panties. She puts her hand down the front of her panties. I feel certain I am going to die of lust.
“Come here, please,” I say, reaching for her. She shakes her head no and stands there, touching herself, staring at me in a distinctly unfriendly fashion.
I am naked, with a raging hard-on, at her mercy.
When she finally peels off her panties and climbs on top of me, it’s the biggest relief I’ve ever experienced in my life.
I struggle to hold back but I can’t. Like a pimply boy, I come in two seconds flat.
She laughs. I go down on her, but this makes her restless, she pushes me off. “Just wait a few minutes, then you can fuck me again,” she says in a weird, harsh voice.
I shrug.
We lie side by side, still.
And then I tell her about the damn kitten.
She frowns as I tell the story. “Did you fuck her?” she asks unceremoniously.
“Nope.”
“Then what the hell?”
“Exactly. The woman is nuts. And I want my fucking cat back.”
“Well,” Ruby says, mercifully taking my cock into her hand, “I don’t know how I can help with that.”
She puts her mouth on me.
I wake up in the middle of the night and, after staring around, remember I’m at Ruby’s. Only she’s not in the bed.
I get up, put my boxers on, and walk into the living room.
Ruby is sitting in front of her piano, apparently just staring at it.
I go up to her and ask if everything’s okay.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I can’t trust you, Ned/Ed.”
This is a valid point.
“You can just call me Ned,” I say.
She blinks.
I offer to leave. She says no, I can stay until morning.
She’s not communicative when we wake up, and not wanting to push my luck, I kiss her on each cheek and leave without having coffee. She looks so sad as she sees me to the door.