“Only—everything.”
She laughed. “Well, there’s some pretty strange things about you, too.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that.”
The little bell on the door of the café jingled and I saw a woman in her mid-twenties—trim, dirty-blonde, very presentable in her rain slicker and slacks—holding the door for someone. In the moment before her companion appeared I found myself thinking—it was sheer force of habit—about how I should stand, grab the door for her, engage her in some witty, nonthreatening repartee. I could have her number in minutes, I knew—or, I corrected myself, I could have, a dozen years ago. Back then I would have had her number, her address, I would have been going out with her that evening and stripping her naked and fucking her brains out a couple of hours later.
But then the person she was with came shuffling under the step and into the room. He was a white-haired, stoop-shouldered old man in a faded trench coat. For a moment he looked confused as to where he was; she leaned close and said a few words to him. She ordered drinks for them and they took a table at the other end of the room. The woman helped him off with his coat. His vein-choked, liver-spotted hands were shaking.
“What are you thinking about?” my friend asked. “You look sad.”
“Do I? I wasn’t thinking about anything, really.”
“I guess that’s just the way you always look. When you forget that other people are looking at you.”
“That man over there reminded me of my dad,” I said softly. “He lives with my sister. He’s old, too. He’s starting to have a lot of—problems. You know, like old people do.”
“Oh. Where’s your mom?”
“She’s dead. Since I was little.”
She nodded, glancing back at the man and woman. “Do you think you’ll live to be that old?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I—kiddo, I can’t picture it. I can’t picture lasting that long. I’m too tired. I’ll never make it.”
“You can make it. If you want to.”
“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. But I don’t know.”
I watched the old man’s lips quiveringly surround the straw that was plunged into his drink. He had some trouble and a thin trickle of brown liquid traced its way down his chin. The young woman watched him. I thought again of stepping over to them for a moment, striking up a conversation with her. Suddenly I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry very much.
“It’s okay, Ben,” the girl said gently.
My voice shook. “It’s not.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Just—you wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me, Ben.”
I glanced at her. She was leaning forward, concern warm in her eyes.
“I—I don’t know,” I admitted. “Just—something about—him there, that elderly man—and Vincent—my shirt missing its damned button, and I didn’t even know it—and—” I thought of other things too, things I couldn’t tell to this innocent sixteen-year-old who looked twelve. The parade of women now long passed by who once occupied my bed: just meaningless fragments of women now, tattered scraps of breath and voice and memory. Sometimes not even that. So much grasping and clutching, so much fleeting, doomed passion, hardly any of them still whole and firm in my mind. One, the first of all, with orange hair and a luminous smile. And one, one especially, one who still lived vividly behind an invincible mental door I’d constructed and tried to keep forever locked. A dead girl. The dead girl. But then it felt oddly as if I’d killed all of them somehow, or part of each one. The phone calls that used to come afterwards. The weeping. The pleading. The knocks on the door in the middle of the night. And always, the dead girl. How I wished that she could see me now. That they all could.
“What, Ben?”
“I…” The words came chokingly. I knew I was embarrassing myself. “Sometimes it all just—just seems—seems like too much, you know?” The girl at the counter was looking over at us. I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, not quite weeping, but my eyes stinging, my throat tight, constricted. Jesus Christ. A big, fat slob of a middle-aged idiot pouring his hollow heart out onto some kid whose name he didn’t even know. It was pathetic, I recognized. But somehow I couldn’t stop.
“It’s okay to cry, Ben.” She reached out and touched my palm.
“No it isn’t.” I tried to get hold of myself, to slow my breathing. Absurdly I remembered Vincent telling me how he was in control of his breathing for the first time in his life. I needed a lesson from him, obviously. “Please, don’t tell me what’s okay or not, okay? Miss…Miss Ghost Girl.”
I felt her little hand grip mine firmly. “Ben, do I feel like a ghost to you? Do I, Ben?”
We sat there in the café for a long time, silently, our fingers interlocked. I wanted to say, You don’t understand, kiddo. It’s all my fault. But I didn’t. She wouldn’t have understood. No one could have.
Yet her hand in mine was like a mountain climber’s rope, one he grabs onto and holds fast the instant before he would have dropped into the abyss.
# # #
“Are you okay now?”
We were sitting on a bench outside my building. We’d said little on the walk back to my apartment, but on reaching the entrance we both moved to sit without asking the other. It was deep twilight, nearly dark.
“I’m okay. What are you, my therapist? I’m okay. I’m fine.”
“You didn’t seem fine at Dugan’s.”
I looked at her. “I just had a—a moment, okay? I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Don’t apologize. I liked it.”
“Liked it?”
She shrugged.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to be…you know…but I’m thinking about the e-mail you sent…you don’t…you know, you don’t have some sort of crush on me or something, do you?”
She rolled her eyes and giggled, not rudely, but with genuine merriment. Her shoulders shook.
“Oh my God,” she said finally, “you really are full of yourself, aren’t you? Do you think every girl you meet falls in love with you?”
“No. Actually none do.” Not anymore.
“Oh, come on.” She bumped me on the arm. “You’re okay. But I don’t have a crush on you. You’re not my type.”
“Well, to you I must seem about a million years old.”
She shook her head. “A million and one.”
I sighed, then chuckled. “It’s getting late. You’d better go home. Wherever that is.”
“You’re probably right.” She stood. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure I’m okay.”
“I can stay for a while longer if you want.”
I shook my head. “Thank you, though. You’ve been very nice. Seriously.”
She studied me for a moment, then kicked my knee playfully. “I told you,” she said as she turned away, “don’t take everything so seriously!” She skipped into the crosswalk before the building, waiting for a car to go by, then moved across the roadway. She vanished as cars passed in her wake.
I made my way up in the elevator and stepped into the apartment. The answering machine light was flashing, as usual. I ignored it. I killed an hour or two watching the news and chewing on some leftover Chinese food I found in the refrigerator. I was pleased to realize that I’d not had a craving for a cigarette in hours, but then thinking about the lack of craving created one. I stuck a piece of gum in my mouth and worked it for a couple of minutes.
I wanted to call Tracy and have her come over, but the simple fact was that I had no money. I’d always managed to keep such encounters on a cash basis—I’d never allowed myself to use credit. That way lies madness. Tracy or a cigarette—either would have helped, but the cigarette would have been a lot cheaper. I considered heading back downstairs to the Mini-Mart, but didn’t. Finally I collapsed onto the bed and shut out the light. What the hell, it was late enough. Fully dark, anyway.
But the waking dreams I had weren’t happy ones. My mind returned to the sighs and murmurs of long ago, of girls of whom I had little memory. Who had they been, that breathless parade? Young, pretty, all too ready to be used by a callous would-be poet. They floated to my consciousness—a few of them, at least. I saw a small-breasted girl standing at the foot of my bed one morning, naked and grinning, her hands running through her frizzy blonde hair as she asked me, “What’ll we do today, Ben?” and then looking down at herself and laughing, “Your come is running down my leg, lover!” What had her name been? I’d gotten rid of her less than an hour later, never saw her again. I’d known her for all of two days. There had been one girl with a big scar across her belly, not a Caesarian mark, whose sad story she’d told me tearfully one long night between bouts of fucking. Who was she? Debbie, Denise, Delores? Some “D” name. Long black hair, a crescent-moon mole on her inner thigh. Odd I should recall that. And what had the story of the scar been? Something terrible, I was sure; but I couldn’t remember a single detail. One night, after all. Must have been fifteen years ago. Yet I remembered the mole on her thigh. There was the mousy girl with greasy hair who made me an elaborate lousy dinner and an elaborate lousy breakfast and asked me eagerly how I liked them and talked about how much she wanted me to meet her parents. A black girl who assured me she never slept with white guys but then maintained a running commentary of the pros and cons of the sexual habits of black men versus white men. An older woman, maybe forty—she seemed ancient then—who insisted on giving me a bath beforehand, an actual bath, like a mother would give a toddler. I remembered being disturbed by the knowledge that she had no children.
And the others, scores of others, ones without notable eccentricities or physical oddities, gone from my memory now, hauled to the curb and forgotten. And how many of those girls remembered me? I hoped none, but I suspected otherwise. Many probably recalled the young good-looking so-called writer with the gracefully flowing locks who had seemed so sweet and poetic and sad—until he changed the next morning, or the morning after that, once he decided he’d used them as much as he cared to.
Ah, God. So much misery, so much abandonment, so much pain.
My mind drifted into sleep for a while.
Sometime in the middle of the night I woke, or thought that I did. I wasn’t sure. There was a character in my mind. A story, something I’d not conjured up in a long time. It shone clearly before me, suddenly and inexplicably. Two people. A room. An atmosphere of sadness, defeat.
Maybe tomorrow, I thought. Maybe I’ll think about it tomorrow. I turned over in the bed, drifted toward sleep again.
And then later, possibly much later, I felt the presence of someone with me. I could hear breathing. Soft. Slow.
I felt a pencil being slipped between my fingers. Then a pad of paper was placed into my hand.
“Write it,” she said quietly. “Write what you couldn’t say to me.”
I didn’t need to open my eyes. I knew whose voice it was.
6
“The Girl That Nobody Liked”
by Benjamin Fall
“I think I died,” she said.
He opened his eyes blearily. Gray sleet speckled the windows.
“What?”
“Last night.”
He closed his eyes again and rubbed them, sighing. His head throbbed.
“You think you what?”
“Died.” Her voice was small, distant.
“Hey…” He was about to say her name, then realized he couldn’t remember it. He turned over in the bed to face her. She was sitting up. He placed his arm across her pelvis, pushed his face against her skin. “Lie down,” he said softly. “Relax.” It did not concern him too much that he couldn’t recall her name. Just another girl. They rarely left much impression, coming and going as easily as dreams. Where had he met this one? Her smell was drab, vaguely unpleasant, and didn’t seem familiar. Her shape was all right, if a trifle thin. Her skin was pale. But he could see no more of her from where he lay and wasn’t all that inclined to try.
“I’m serious, Mitchell. I think I’m dead.”
Her voice was whispery, high-pitched and a little annoying, with a slight whine in its tone.
“Shh.”
Eyes closed, face burrowed against her, he felt her take his hand and place his fingers around her wrist.
“Feel,” she said.
“C’mon…”
“Feel.”
Still without looking, he pressed his fingers gently into the softness of her wrist. After a moment he moved his fingers slightly, pressed more firmly. He scowled then, raised his head.
She said, “I don’t have a pulse.”
He remembered her face now. White, anemic, with big dark hollows around her eyes. Nondescript black hair, disarranged from sleep. Thin colorless lips. She wasn’t bad-looking; she wasn’t good-looking. She was the kind of person that, if he hadn’t been half-drunk and horny last night, he would have passed by without even noticing.
“What are you talking about? Everybody has a pulse.”
She held out the other arm to him. “Try this one.”
He sat up in bed, curled his fingers around her other wrist.
“This is crazy,” he said. “We’re not doing it right.”
He felt again. He could see the blue veins at the end of her wrist, pushed his fingers around them, pressed. Finally he chuckled.
“Yep, I guess you’re dead, all right.” He smiled at her. “How do you do it? I mean, do you have, like, an abnormally weak heartbeat or something?”
She only looked at him. Finally she held her fingers to her neck, near her jaw.
“Try this,” she said, taking his hand and placing it just where her own had been.
Nothing.
He shook his head, puzzled but not terribly interested. He needed to bring this to a close quickly, gently encourage her to go.
“Look,” he said, “I work at Sears, all right? I don’t really know anything about pulses—”
“I do. I have Red Cross training. When I was in high school I worked as a lifeguard.”
“Well, I didn’t. You want some coffee? Then maybe you…”
“Put your head here.”
He glanced at her. Her hand was over her heart, like a little girl taking the Pledge of Allegiance. Her breasts were small too, like a young girl’s.
“Oh, c’mon.”
“Really. Put your head here.”
“Now, look…”
“Please?”
Sighing again, giving her a look that he hoped clearly conveyed his irritation, he leaned over and pressed his ear against her chest.
Nothing.
“Well?” she said, as he pulled his head back.
“Well, what? I don’t know. Do you feel all right?”
“Mitchell, I don’t have a pulse. My heart’s not beating.”
“Of course your heart’s beating. You wouldn’t be sitting there talking to me if it wasn’t. Do you feel all right or not?”
She scowled, chewing her lower lip. “I’m not sure. I feel okay, I guess. A little…weird, somehow. Something happened last night. I got up to pee and…something happened. It felt like my insides were coming loose. But just for a minute. Then it passed. I came back to bed. I even slept for a while. When I woke again I felt…just…weird.”
“Well, there you go. You’re probably sick or something.”
“That wouldn’t make my heart stop.”
“It hasn’t stopped,” he insisted. “That’s crazy. But maybe it’s weak or something. Maybe that’s why we can’t find the pulse. You should probably see a doctor,” he said with concern in his voice, though he felt no real concern at all.
“Probably,” she said thoughtfully, not looking at him.
“I have to be at work at eleven,” he said, glancing at the clock. He had plenty of time—the store was a five-minute walk from the apartment—but he really wanted to be rid of this girl, whatever her name was. “Time fo
r some coffee, if you want it. Maybe we could make a couple of eggs before you go.”
She glanced quickly at him, smiled weakly. “Okay.”
He tried to mask his disappointment. He should have figured that she wouldn’t recognize a meaningless courtesy offer when she heard one. Well, he would have made coffee for himself anyway, and it wouldn’t kill him to fry her an egg. It was a strange thing. Who knows, she really might be sick.
Nude, he stood and made his way to the kitchen. He liked the feeling of walking naked in front of a girl the next morning. He would usually hold off putting on clothes as long as he could. He worked out at the Gold’s Gym off Wisconsin Avenue three times a week and was proud of his body, with good reason—lots of thirty-year-old guys had begun to let themselves go, but not Mitchell Noone. And he’d found that putting on clothing tended to end the event between himself and the girl, where if he stayed nude sometimes a quick morning romp might still occur. Not that he was sure that he would want to, with this girl. But if she were willing to have a final fast fuck, he’d be willing to let her stay long enough to do it. Let her earn her eggs and coffee.
When he had the percolator going he moved back to the bedroom again. “Hey,” he started to ask, “how did you want your eggs—?”
She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, arms around herself, shivering. In a moment he realized she was crying too, quietly, thin trickles of tears running down her cheek.
Aw shit, he thought.
“Coffee will be ready in a few,” he said, trying to sound casual, hoping she would take the hint and stop. “Listen, how did you want your eggs? I can scramble ’em, fry ’em…I guess that’s about it. I suppose I could hard-boil ’em if you want.”
She looked at him, her eyes red and ringed with tears.
“I’m scared, Mitchell.”
He shook his head, tried to smile. “I told you not to worry about it. You’ve probably got some virus or something. Just see a doctor, that’s all. You seem to be fine except for that.”
“Except for my not having a pulse.”
“Yeah, that.” He shrugged. “C’mon, you’ll feel better after some breakfast.” He sat down next to her, placed his arm around her. Her body seemed to melt into his, her head falling against his shoulder. “Don’t cry...honey.”
Lullaby for the Rain Girl Page 8
