Gun Church

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “I guess that’s what alarms me,” she said. “Very scary stuff.”

  “You have no idea, Meg. No idea.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “No, and don’t ever bring it up!” I snapped.

  “No need to bite my head off.”

  “Sorry. It’s just safer if you think of it as purely fictional, Meg.”

  “Safer? Safer for whom?”

  “Just safer. Leave it alone,” I said more to myself than to her.

  “So I see the book is moving along.”

  “It’s getting there.”

  “But where is ‘there’ exactly? You were pretty vague about the ending in your plot synopsis and I’m not sure where you’re taking it.”

  “You’re worried?”

  “It’s my job to worry.”

  “Well, stop it. You’re my agent, not my editor.”

  “I’m your friend.”

  “The ending will be as good as the rest of the book,” I said.

  “I think that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “I didn’t call to talk about the book.”

  “What then?”

  “What’s Amy’s cell number?”

  The question has been raised a thousand times: Would Romeo and Juliet’s love have endured had they survived? In Kip Weiler’s uproariously profane and deliciously cruel second novel, Romeo vs. Juliet, he not only restates the question, but uses the answer to absolutely flay the American body politic. Weiler takes to task all the parties insinuating themselves in the divorce proceedings. No group or individual is immune from his scathing wit. With demonic delight, he skewers the Knights of Columbus, ACT UP, Sinatra, Streisand, Jerry Falwell, and even poor Larry King.

  — JACKSON DRUM, THE MERTON REVIEW

  Thirty-Seven

  Lot’s Wife

  She didn’t bother hiding the anger. I hadn’t expected her to and she was never very good at faking it. There was never any doubt about when Amy was pissed off. I’d given her ample opportunity to display her many and varied expressions of anger-from slow boil to rage-and by the end of our marriage, angry was her baseline state of being. But there was something else in her tone, a grudging joy at the sound of my voice that made me push her to see me again. I didn’t have to say Please more than ten or fifteen times and I didn’t try to explain why I’d left her standing in the lobby of the Algonquin.

  We met on neutral ground, a coffee bar in the West Village. Dressed in paint-speckled jeans, torn running shoes, a back-to-front black Kangol cap, and the weathered Schott motorcycle jacket I’d given to her as a birthday gift twenty years ago, Amy looked more like her old self, more like the woman I fell in love with than the woman I’d fled from eight weeks ago. Just seeing her, her eyes afire, brought it all back-how stupid we’d been for each other, how much we still were. It was as obvious on her face as it must have been on mine.

  “God,” she said, taking her green tea from the barista. “I will never understand how you do this to me. Even when I hated you, Kip Weiler, I loved you. That night after the country club, when I told you I couldn’t take it anymore, I would have stayed with you if you had persisted a little longer.”

  “I know, but you were right to push me away. I’d been scuttling my ship for a long time and you were getting pulled down in the suck. That last year together was terrible. I was empty and you didn’t even want me anymore. That’s how I knew we were over.”

  “Is that introspection I hear from the lips of the Kipster?”

  “No … I mean, yes … I mean, it’s introspection but not from the lips of the Kipster. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “Everything.”

  “You used to be succinct.”

  “Believe me, that is succinct,” I said, sipping my coffee. “Everything has changed. Let’s walk.”

  “Walk? You used to take a cab to go to the bathroom. Do you have a fever? What have you done with my ex-husband and who are you?”

  “Cut it out, Amy.”

  “Fine.”

  “I even run these days. Well, not for the last month, but I’m getting back to it this week.”

  “Not if it keeps snowing like this you’re not.”

  We’d both heard the forecast for a lot of snow, but I guess we both sensed that we needed to get this first get-together over with as soon as we could. It was easy to ignore the snow before it started falling. Now, it was fairly impossible to ignore.

  We turned south toward Tribeca, snow falling pretty heavily as we walked. There was already more snow on the sidewalk than the combined snowfall in Brixton over the last year. New York City is beautiful in the snow, but it’s a very transient beauty. Nothing stays pure very long in the city once it touches down.

  “That night at the Algonquin, when you just showed up like that, what was that about?” I asked.

  “I miss you. I’ve missed you.”

  “Ain’t memory grand, how time sands off the bitter edges? But you couldn’t miss the Kipster, not really. In the beginning of us, I acted like a sex- and drug-addicted fool because that’s who I was. At the end, I was doing it to hurt you, to make you push me away.”

  “I know.”

  “So, I don’t get it. I get why you dumped my ass. Best thing, really, but why marry Peter fucking Moreland?”

  “I married Peter for several reasons, all good ones, I thought at the time, but none of them having to do with love. He was stable. He understood my work and-”

  “-he wasn’t me.”

  “Exactly,” she confessed. “He wasn’t you. I married him to punish you.”

  “Yeah, and how did that work out?”

  “Somebody got punished.”

  “Not somebody, everybody.”

  She stopped in her tracks, playfully pulling my coat sleeve so that I’d turn to face her. “Okay, this is the last time I’m going to ask: What have you done with my ex-husband?”

  “I told you, everything’s changed. Weird thing is, most of it happened in the last few months. I got straight a long time ago, after my second trip to rehab. But I hadn’t really started exorcising the Kipster until about a year ago. I finally got sick of all my old bullshit. In Brixton, I’d had a long series of one-night stands and loveless affairs just like at all the other schools. I had this one terrible affair with a colleague named Janice Nadir. One afternoon, we were lying around in bed in one of those motel rooms with mirrors on the ceiling and I was staring up at myself. I was thinking about you, wondering what you would think of me there doing what the Kipster always did.”

  “And what did I think?”

  “You were sorely disappointed, but not surprised. I imagined you shaking your head and saying, ‘Same old Kipster.’ I got this notion in my head that I wanted to earn back your respect whether or not you ever knew about it. I didn’t think I would ever write again, but I thought I could at least start acting like a grownup. Your unknowing respect became the central theme of my boring life in Nowheresville.”

  Amy stepped close to me, slowly worked her arms around me, and rested her head on the wet, snow-covered shoulder of my jacket. She let her tea fall to the ground. I dropped my coffee too. We didn’t kiss. I didn’t take off her cap and stroke her hair. She didn’t brush her hand against my cheek. We didn’t even move much. We just stood there like that, her head on my shoulder, ten years of hurt and longing condensed into a silent, snow-covered moment on the street.

  Then a strange voice broke the trance. “You guys wanna go get a room or something?”

  The first thing I saw when I turned around was his badge. The first thing he saw was the panic in my eyes.

  “Yo, buddy, relax,” he said. “I was only busting your chops.”

  “Sorry, officer. You startled me.”

  “No problem, but I think you and your girlfriend better get going anyways unless you wanna become Mr. and Mrs. Snowman. It’s coming down pretty good. S’posed to get at least two feet.”

&n
bsp; “Thanks.”

  “And you might wanna pick up these cups. Love ain’t an excuse for littering. You know what I mean?” He winked as he walked past us. “Have a nice day.”

  We watched his dark blue figure disappear into the snow. Finally breaking our embrace, Amy scooped up the cups and threw them in the corner trash basket. I used those few seconds to get my heart out of my throat. My breathing was almost normal when Amy got back to me, but she wasn’t fooled.

  “What was that about, Kip? You nearly jumped out of your skin when you saw the cop. I could feel your heart pounding through your coat. You’re not carrying, are you?”

  Carrying? I panicked again, then realized she was talking about drugs, not guns.

  “I told you, I’ve been clean for a long time.”

  “Then what? You can’t tell me that reaction was nothing. You were scared to death.”

  See, about a month ago, I killed a man. Shot the motherfucker right through his heart in front of witnesses.

  No, somehow I didn’t think this was the appropriate time or the place for that confession, but I had to tell her something.

  “This sheriff’s deputy in Brixton used to harass the shit out of me because I slept with a woman he was hot for. It was years ago and it didn’t last, but he could never let it go. So when he found out I was moving back here, he promised to make sure the bullshit would follow me north.”

  “Same old Kip. At least you’re consistent.”

  That cut me, deep. I don’t know what I expected her to say. I told her a lie I knew she would believe and she did, without question. I realized then it was going to take more than her missing me or one embrace to make her see the Kipster was really dead. She did, however, seem to read the hurt in my eyes. I think she apologized. Her mouth was moving and she hung her head slightly, but I was too distracted to hear her. My focus had already shifted elsewhere.

  Just like that night at the Algonquin, I heard a noise I thought I recognized. Jim’s truck. I was sure I heard Jim’s truck. I’d been in that old pickup nearly every day for four months and knew its idiosyncrasies like I knew my own. Its exhaust system had come loose. Jim had jerry-rigged a clamp by twisting together a few wire hangers, looping the hangers around the pipe leading to the muffler, and then hooking the makeshift clamp over the rear axle. When the truck accelerated quickly, the pipe kind of rattled and scraped against the hangers. I snapped my head around, but the snow was now coming down in blinding, wind-whipped sheets. I caught a glimpse of a taillight disappearing around a corner, the snow turning its glow from red to pink.

  Was it Jim’s taillight? Of course not. Just like with the Mabry kid’s death, it was the Kipster’s narcissism rearing its ugly head once more for old times’ sake. Amy and I were right by the Holland Tunnel and even in a snowstorm, thousands of cars poured out of its exits, spilling onto the cobblestoned Tribeca streets. I was already off balance from being with Amy, from holding her again, and I was still reeling from the scare I got from the cop. I didn’t know that I would ever be able to see a cop again without going into full fight or flight, or thinking of Stan Petrovic’s body moldering in a grave somewhere in the backwoods of Brixton.

  “Kip, are you all right?” Amy asked, pulling me along.

  “I should have worn a hat.”

  “Come on, my studio’s only three blocks away.”

  But even as we walked towards Amy’s warm, dry studio and all the possibilities it had to offer, I could not help but play Lot’s wife and look behind me.

  Thirty-Eight

  Molecular

  I hadn’t turned to salt, but in some sense I was still looking behind me.

  It was three in the morning and I’d yet to shake the afternoon’s chill. It was a chill not from the cold or the wet of the snow. That chill was gone fifteen minutes after we got to Amy’s studio. No, the chill I carried with me was in my marrow, a feeling that the specter of Stan Petrovic would not be so easily buried as his body. If the day had taught me anything it was to not trust what you think you know. It went beyond imagining the scrape and rattle of Jim’s pickup. It extended all the way from Brixton into Amy’s bed.

  When we first met, Amy was just beginning to taste the fruits of success. And that early success was more about critical kudos and good press than paychecks. In those days, she was sharing cramped studio space with a bunch of other painters in the basement of an old factory building. The light sucked and she didn’t really care for some of the people with whom she shared the space. Worse, she despised their work. I bought her the loft studio as an engagement present. It was a stretch then, before I got my big contract, but I was in love. It might have been the first and last selfless thing I’d ever done. Until I met Amy, the concept of love-inspired art of any kind made me gag. Once we were together, I understood it was possible to love someone so much that promises of the moon and the stars weren’t just a load of crap. But I never was a guy to hang the moon or promise the stars; and in Amy’s universe, a spacious loft with natural light was more valuable than all the lofty promises and metaphysical conceits of a thousand ardent poets. Did that love stop me from fucking around? Not for very long, no. To be human was to be a contradiction, and in that way I was more human than most.

  Of course, as I sank further and further into living out the myth of the Kipster, the loft became less Amy’s workplace than retreat. Finally, it was where Amy moved when she left me. I think maybe that accounted for some of the discomfort I felt here. Coming here had started well enough. First off, it was dry, warm, and-even ten years removed-familiar. We talked a lot, mostly about how her marriage to Moreland had fallen apart.

  “With you, Kip, there was always lust to fall back on. With Peter … ” The shrug of her shoulders as her voice faded was quite eloquent. “We started drifting apart after only a couple of months and we’ve been living fairly separate lives for a long time now. I guess we should have gotten divorced years ago, but neither one of us has felt the urge or had the energy to pursue one.” Again, she didn’t say the words, but the forward lean of her body and the smile in her eyes spoke for her. Until now, they said.

  We discussed her work and she showed me her latest paintings. Her recent work had taken a turn away from twentieth-century abstraction toward a kind of hyper-realism, which, as Amy explained, was simply another form of abstraction. Looking at those paintings, I think, was when the real discomfort began to set in. She had done a series of in situ portraits of us as a couple at different stages of our marriage. She had based the paintings on photographs taken of us by her friends at various parties. Some of the paintings were of posed group shots. Some were candid shots.

  In the paintings from early in our marriage, Amy and I were painted in full color, so vivid they almost hurt my eyes. Our features, as were everyone else’s, were so subversively subtle and cruelly perfect that to stare at them too long was to look into the invisible light of an eclipse. In these first portraits, only Amy and I were done in color. Everyone else was done in shades of black, white, and gray. But as the series advanced with our years of marriage, the pattern gradually reversed until only Amy and I were black, white, and gray. In the last in the series, I was nothing more than an outline. To look at them was far more painful than my broken ribs or concussion.

  “I can’t bring myself to show these yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “The series is incomplete,” she said, as if that explained it all. Maybe it did.

  It was after Amy showed them to me that I realized she wasn’t all forgiveness and light, that memory hadn’t sanded off all the sharp and bitter edges of our time together. I had done a lot of damage to her. There was a warehouse of residual anger in Amy that couldn’t be wished away into the cornfield. I guess I always understood that much even when I was tilting at the windmills of regaining her respect. What I wondered was, did she understand it?

  That question or its answer didn’t stop either one of us from fucking our brains out. We both knew where we wer
e headed the second we walked back into her studio. That my subway line back to Brooklyn wasn’t operating because of the snowstorm made it that much easier for us to pretend our first hungry kiss wasn’t inevitable. Both of us orgasmed almost immediately. That was easy. Lust and hunger always are; although, the remainder of the night did not pass blissfully. I know it’s crazy for someone who once fucked everything that wasn’t nailed down to say, but I’d always believed Amy and I, together or apart, were mated for life. It was molecular. From the moment I tasted her again, I felt I was home. Yet, when I moved inside her the second time, I felt a wall between us, not a welcome mat. Even as we came again, Amy seemed as far away from me as she’d been when I was in Brixton, maybe farther. And as the night wore on, with each new clench the distance grew.

  That’s why I was standing here in the middle of the night, looking out at the still-falling snow through the arched windows of the loft, the streetlights turning the flakes an eerie pale red. With the subways shut down, street traffic at a standstill, and only the occasional distant rumble of a snow plow, it was as near to silent as Manhattan ever gets. My head was a jumble of love and regret. Remembering how far away Amy felt from me even when I was deep inside her made me think about what I had sacrificed in Renee. Though I knew I would never feel that sense of being mated to her, Renee had opened herself up to me. In bed, neither one of us carried old baggage along nor put up walls. I hadn’t inflicted enough hurt on her to build barriers between us. She couldn’t get enough of me and I couldn’t get enough of her. I thought that if I had only managed the same amount of monogamy for Amy in the beginning as I had for Renee, there wouldn’t be a series of sad portraits in the room keeping me company.

  Then I heard something from down in the street and looked to my right. There, coming right up West Broadway, were a man and woman cross-country skiing. You had to love New York. I followed their progress as they glided past the loft building. But as they passed and I turned my head left to follow their progress uptown, I caught sight of a lone, dark figure across the street, half in shadow and partially blocked by the corner building. I cupped my hands around my eyes and pressed them to the glass for a better look. The ambient light, the windblown snow, and the tricks the shaking streetlights played with the shadows made it difficult to focus. By the time my eyes finally locked on to the figure across the street, it was turning away and I caught only a fleeting glimpse of a partial profile and a tuft of blond hair. My heart stopped for a beat. Renee.