by Ed Gorman
Kathleen Logan showed up at twenty minutes to midnight. She wore a white sheath that emphasised both her height and the perfect curves of her body. She threw back her long mane of ash-blonde hair as she stood on the edge of the dance floor looking as if she were trying to figure out whom to attack. When she saw Brolan, she smirked. He was dancing with a plump but very nice secretary named Joyce Conover. Kathleen's smirk said she was amused by his choice of dance partners.
Abruptly the music became rock again. Catcalls went up, but a few of the more energetic couples pleaded for just one or two fast songs. One of the couples fancied itself quite the dance duo. They loved to show off. They jumped out on to the floor, holding hands, and proceeded to do some serious showing off. The other couples were good enough sports to stand around and clap for them. It was sort of like a dance number from a 1956 Bill Haley rock'n'roll movie.
Brolan was back at the bar with Foster when Kathleen came over. It was late, and he was getting drunk, and he didn't want Kathleen to be as beautiful as she was. God, she was beautiful.
He'd always sensed that she'd destroy him in some profound and irreparable way.
She first addressed Foster. "You look nice in a dinner jacket." What should have been a compliment sounded more perfunctory than sincere. Foster was something of a chauvinist. He didn't unduly care for aggressive or successful women. But because of modern business mores he had no choice but to accept them. Kathleen had long sensed "Foster's displeasure," as she called it whenever Brolan and she were alone. Foster and Kathleen were famous for not getting along.
Foster flushed slightly, even drunk as he was, obviously sensing Kathleen's ironic tone. Ordinarily Foster would be out on the dance floor with his wife, but she was home with the flu. She'd already called three times to tell him how much she missed being at the party.
"Thank you, Kathleen. You know how much respect I have for your sincerity," Foster said. He grinned at Brolan.
But Brolan was watching Kathleen and thinking back on their affair. He should have known better than to try an office romance. They'd hired her after a look at her unimpressive resume-two junior account executive jobs in minor Chicago agencies-and one hour in her thrall. She surprised both of them by being (a) intelligent, (b) organized, and (c) inventive where working with clients was concerned. Her first job was keeping happy, strictly in the business sense, of course, a man who manufactured watering systems for livestock confinement (this was the Midwest, after all). In six months she showed the man how to develop his product to work for other species, forge a new distribution deal, and triple his business. Subsequently he tripled his billings with the agency. She asked, and reasonably enough, for a promotion to full account executive. Brolan-Foster gladly gave it to her, along with her own office and a parking space with her name on it in the ramp adjacent to their building. It was around this time that Brolan first slept with her. From that point on he had feared her as he had never feared any other woman. He couldn't even tell you why exactly. Not exactly.
"I'm sorry I'm late," Kathleen said, her blue eyes smiling. But
of course she wasn't sorry, Brolan thought. She was always late, and she never offered any explanations. He assumed there was another man somewhere. Brolan was getting less and less good at handling the whole thing.
The music slow once more, she stretched out her hands and moved toward the bar. "Would you like to dance?"
Foster nodded to Brolan and walked away.
Instinctively, and hating himself for it, Brolan started to push away from the bar and into Kathleen's arms.
On the floor they held each other at a respectable distance, not wanting gossip to start. Even in the shadows her blue eyes were starting in their clarity and inscrutable beauty. All you could ever know for sure about Kathleen was that something was going on with her, something you would never find out about. It wasn't only lust he felt for her; there was real esteem and respect, too. She'd come from a difficult childhood, one of both poverty and violence, and had through sheer willpower bettered her lot in the world. On those long snowy weekends when their affair had first started, he'd gotten to know a very different Kathleen-a sweet, gentle, wry spirit with whom he felt real kinship. He couldn't recall ever being happier, feeling more loved or needed or protected. How pure his love for her felt. And then it changed. She began showing up late for dates; taking mysterious weekend trips; answering her phone secretively in the other room. He wanted her to be the Kathleen she'd once been, back there at the tender outset. But he sensed that those had been the golden days, and that only darkness lay ahead.
"Foster's sure in a good mood," she said sarcastically.
"He thinks you hate him."
She laughed. "He's right. I do."
They danced a while longer. He was surprised that he felt even worse with her than he'd felt without her. He was afraid he was going to go through it all again-how afraid he was, how lonely he was-reduce himself to an undignified whiner and complainer. In a way he preferred his old reputation with women-volatile and decisive, willing to leave when things went badly.
At this moment he was the sort of man he despised, the self-absorbed romantic. Spare me, O Lord.
"Would you like to come over tonight?" she said.
"I'd better not."
"Really? Why not?"
He tried a smile. "I want to spare us both the soap opera."
She smiled back. "Gee, Brolan, do you get into soap operas? I'd hardly noticed."
"Right."
"Maybe things'll work out for us," she said.
"And if they don't-"
She shrugged her lovely shoulders. "If they don't, we can always be good friends."
"Ah, friendship," he said.
"It's better than being enemies."
"Not always," he said. "Sometimes it hurts more to be a friend than an enemy."
"You take it all too seriously."
"Yeah, I guess I do, don't I?"
"You're being sarcastic, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"I think we learn from each relationship. Each one makes us better."
"You and Oprah."
"You're getting serious again."
"Heaven forbid."
So, they danced. They didn't talk. There was nothing to say. Brolan looked around. People were starting to pick up all the dinner jackets and cummerbunds and high heels they'd tossed so carelessly into the shadows. Lights were coming on. Nothing was more depressing than bars at closing time. You got a hard, clean look at the ravages of liquor and age and loneliness. He knew he would look like shit, an ageing man trying to stay young. But she would look beautiful. She always did. Even at dawn, in need of a toothbrush and a hairbrush and a shower, she somehow managed still to look beautiful.
"Could I ask you a question?" he said.
"The other-man question?"
His cheeks grew hot. He felt like a fumbling teenager. "Yeah, the other-man question."
"I've tried to be polite."
"In other words, none of my business."
"In other words, none of your fucking business." And with that she jerked herself from his arms and walked quickly across the dance floor and into the shadows.
But before he could go after her, Foster was there and slapping him on the back. All the house lights were up. You could see the cracks and the water stains in the decor. You could see the age and the alcohol on faces. Everybody looked blown out now and long past the joy of winning the account. There was even a certain sadness, and Brolan felt it especially.
"You're driving, my friend."
"What?" Brolan said, forcing himself to look away from Kathleen, who was turning toward the front of the place, hurrying.
Foster dangled the keys to his Jag in front of Brolan's face. "Walk a line, my friend."
"Oh, shit."
"C'mon. This is serious business."
They went through this every time they drank. Who should be driving. Brolan tended to hold his liquor a little better, so usually
he drove. He walked a straight line across the dance floor. He had no problem. Earlier he had felt he was getting drunk. By this time he felt sober in an empty, almost cold way.
He took the keys from Foster, and they started to the door.
The back pats and cheers were considerably slower and more reserved now. "You guys did a great job," somebody from the art department said to Brolan and Foster. Foster drunkenly issued his standard public relations line. "We couldn't have done it without everybody in the agency pitching in."
But Brolan was having a hard time talking at all. He felt he wanted to cry or smash something, or both.
2
BACK IN THE FIFTIES trips to downtown Minneapolis always meant a movie at the RKO Orpheum on Hennepin or the Radio City Theatre on South Ninth. Afterward you hung around the Rexall Jacobsen Drug Company trying to catch the attention of pretty Swedish girls who couldn't have cared less about your stupid grinning and flirting, and then checked out the latest copies of Mad and Amazing Stories (with those neat Valigurksy covers) or-if you were feeling especially brave-a magazine with pretty girls in it. In those days the tallest downtown building was the Foshay Tower, and the biggest events those involving Senator Hubert Humphrey and his rallies for such causes as old-age benefits and civil rights. Of course in those days the remnants of Minnesota's old Communist party still existed, though its members tended to be hard-headed Norwegians instead of soft-bellied Russians.
Brolan recalled all this as they made their way down Seventh Street to the parking garage. Foster was drunker than he'd thought, stumbling and weaving along, twice bumping into Brolan. In the graffiti-covered elevator taking them to the tenth story of the parking garage, Foster even cupped his mouth as if he were going to vomit.
"We did it, pally," Foster said when he said anything at all. "We did it. We picked up goddamn Down Home."
"Not we, my friend. You. I'm just along for the ride."
"You're the best copywriter round."
Brolan grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. Foster had always been a brother to him, maybe to substitute for the brother he really had. Steve was a physician in Chicago, not only successful but a mass-going Catholic with a Betty Crocker wife and three Leave It to Beaver kids. The time Brolan's eighteen-year-old son, Rick, had been arrested for public intoxication at a Vikings game, Steve had called under the guise of commiserating. But actually Steve had wanted to remind his older brother what a mess he'd made of his personal life and say it was no wonder his eldest was carrying on in the same tradition.
In what he later had to admit was guilt, Brolan had exploded, telling his preening, perfect brother exactly what he thought of him and his Barbie doll family. Then he'd smashed the receiver down so hard, it pulled the wall phone from its moorings.
But with Foster it was different. Foster thought Brolan was crazy, too, but unlike Steve, he had a real affection for Brolan, even for Brolan's excesses. In fact, at a business retreat once, Foster had admitted that he sort of lived vicariously through Brolan. At least sometimes. All those babes.
So, it was easy for Brolan to like Foster. To feel protective of him, grateful for everything. To be always thanking him for the way he held the agency together and made sure they always made payroll (when you had thirty-nine employees, payroll was your cross and payday your Good Friday) and for the fact that each year they showed a better and better profit.
He was thinking all these fond things of his good pal Foster when the shorter man said, "Oh, shit," turned to the corner of the elevator, and let go with a stream of yellowish chunky barf.
"You okay?" brother Brolan said, trying to avoid exactly looking at the mess.
Foster nodded yes and gave him the thumbs-up sign and then started barfing again.
Brolan would sure hate to be the next guy who got on the elevator.
The parking garage smelled of the day's fading heat and car oil. Only a few vehicles sat in the shadows on the slanting floor. The cars, even Brolan's new 300-E Mercedes, looked like tired beasts dozing. The garage's low ceiling always made Brolan nervous. He suffered from mild claustrophobia. He could imagine the roofs caving in and his being buried alive, suffering for hours, gasping and crying out for each breath, pinned in the darkness and dust waiting for death itself.
They went past Foster's copper-coloured Jag. Foster didn't even look at it. Between his excess weight and the slanting floor, he was out of breath. "Son of a bitch," he said. "This is like mountain climbing." Then he added, "I'm so goddamned fat."
Brolan said what he always said, what Foster wanted him always to say. "You're not fat. You just need to lose a few pounds."
It was sort of like telling Brolan that his hair was really brown beneath all that white stuff.
"Sure, pally, sure," Foster said.
As they reached the car, Brolan thought he heard the exit door nearest them squawk shut. For a long, irrational moment there in the deep shadows of the garage, the smell of exhaust harsh in his nostrils, he had the sense that somebody had been watching him as he'd made his way with Foster up the ramp.
Then he thought he heard distant footsteps running down the concrete stairs behind the metal exit door.
But who would have been watching him, and why? He realised suddenly how isolated they were up here; how deep the shadows were; how far away the city seemed, even though they were in its belly.
He might have mentioned all this to Foster but what was the use of talking to somebody as drunk as Foster was?
He walked over to the Mercedes, the passenger side. First get Foster all squared away, all buckled up, then take care of himself.
"Can't find the old hole?" Foster laughed. "That's what I said to Suzie Simmons once. I can't find the hole, Suzie."
Brolan waggled the key in Foster's face to show that everything was all right.
Foster started to make another joke.
"Shut up," Brolan said quietly. "Please."
"What's wrong?"
But how could Brolan explain it? This sense of dread, of something wildly wrong in an otherwise familiar universe, some terrible sense that matters had gotten horribly out of hand?
"C'mon," he said, very sober now. "C'mon and get in the car."
A few minutes later they were wheeling out of the garage. On the steering wheel, Brolan's hands were trembling.
3
GREG WAGNER WOKE UP TO David Letterman's smirking at him. Actually Letterman was smirking at a young actress who'd just told him of her mystical experiences, but the camera had pushed in tight on the gap-toothed TV host, and so he gave the appearance of smirking directly at Greg. Of course by now, age thirty-two, Greg was used to people smirking at him. He was four feet nine, and spent a lot of time in his electric wheelchair. He'd been born with spina bifida. While the hump on his back had been diminished by surgery, he was still unable to feel anything in the lower part of his body. He could not always control his bowel or bladder functions. This made winning the hearts of beautiful women more than a little difficult
He had fallen asleep in front of the TV. His first thought on waking was: She's dead.
He wasn't sure why he thought this, but he knew that it was more than a simple pessimistic thought. He knew-was somehow absolutely certain-that God, or something, had granted him the power to know her fate.
And he knew-despite the past twenty-four hours of hoping against hope-that she was dead.
Emma.
Dead.
He moved away from the TV set into the kitchen. The duplex had been built specially for him. He could wheel or walk anywhere inside it handily, quickly.
In the soft blue kitchen-"It's such a peaceful colour," the matronly decorator had clucked-he took a can of Diet Coke from the refrigerator and drank half of it down in three quick gulps. God, was he thirsty.
Taking more of the Coke, he looked around the kitchen. Actually he agreed with the gushy woman who'd decorated both sides of the duplex. This soft blue was a peaceful colour. The custom-built oak cabinets
and antique drop leaf table, two ladder-back chairs, and Oriental rug also contributed to the sense of harmony and civility. Like the living room, with its beamed ceilings, deep leather furniture and built-in bookcases, the kitchen was a place where he could shut himself away. Inside this duplex he was the master. It was the world that was odd, not he.
Knowing he shouldn't-he hadn't been doing his exercises a lot lately-he went over to the refrigerator again. This time he got out a slice of balogna, folded it in half, and started munching on it. The fat content was probably something like 99.9%. Wonderful.
He went back to the living room, surprised that he'd been hungry in the first place. Because he knew she was dead. Knew it
A reddish glow from the fireplace flickered across the painting of Linda Darnell that hung to the right of the fireplace itself. Darnell was a beautiful actress from the forties, his favourite era. He collected fanatically all sorts of movie memorabilia, from pin-back movie star buttons with the likenesses of Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford on them (both from the early 1930s and worth a great deal of money) to original lobby cards that depicted such stars as Hedy Lamarr, Abbott and Costello, and Carmen Miranda. This was another means of escape, and how he loved it, entombing himself within the confines of the Technicolor fantasies of the forties-Ty Power as Zorro, Clark Gable as Rhett, and Alexis Smith as anybody. He thought Alexis Smith was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. He played Stallion Road, her 1947 picture with Ronald Reagan, at least once a week on the VCR.
Only when he thought of his one and only trip to Las Vegas a few years before did he become depressed when confronted with all his movie memorabilia. In Vegas he'd met many of the people he'd corresponded with over the years, and while on paper they'd sounded like nice, normal people, they'd turned out to be sad oddballs. Just as desperate for love and acceptance as he was. He should have felt right at home-they seemed to be far more accepting of him with his curved back and wheelchair than he was of them-but he'd left after the first day, flown back home, and sat in his living room and cried. For the first time, he despised all his silly movie things-the Bette Davis doll, the Ruby Keeler ice cream cup lid, the painted plaster of Paris Rudolph Valentino-Vilma Banky Son of the Sheik bed lamp and incense burner-the pathetic little icons that gave him his pathetic little pleasures. Later, on that first night back from Vegas, he'd taken the black hard-wood walking cane he'd someday hoped to use (before the doctor said that particular operation would not be successful) and smashed half of what he'd owned.
