The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  When she appeared she was wearing black pants that hugged her body, and a short jacket that was cut like the one she’d worn to meet him. He said, “You look too good for me.”

  “Once I was in there for my purse, I figured what the heck.”

  They walked to a restaurant she had recommended to him when she’d shown him around the neighborhood five weeks earlier. It was called John Harmon’s Irish Bar and Grill. They went inside and he studied the place. There was a dining room that was all dark wood paneling and booths, with a fireplace. And there was a barroom that was completely filled by men and women in their twenties and early thirties, just off work.

  Caldwell took Zoe’s arm and conducted her to the dining room, where a young blond woman took them to a booth. They ordered a pair of Jameson 18 black label whiskeys and two glasses of water, and sat across from each other. As soon as the drinks arrived, Caldwell said to their waitress, “Two more please. Just the whiskey.”

  When the waiter left, Zoe said, “Why?”

  “I know we’ll want another and I won’t want to interrupt our conversation to ask for the next one. And I don’t want her to have to interrupt us.”

  She picked up her glass of whiskey. “Damned sensible.”

  “Thank you. To pretty ladies.” He took a draught of the whiskey and let it expand on his tongue to impart its warmth and flavor before he swallowed it.

  “To sensible men.” She drank.

  “So here’s what I know,” he said. “You’re a fine pianist. I’ve listened to you. And you have a daughter and a son who turned out okay. I assume you poisoned their father?”

  Her eyes widened and her shoulders came up, and she nearly spit out her drink, but managed to swallow and laugh. “You’ll never pin that one on me. He’s alive and well except for the alimony.”

  “Why are you divorced?”

  “Isn’t that a little personal?”

  “General terms,” he said. “Did he beat you up, or suddenly realize he was gay, or did you just catch him cheating?”

  “Cheating. I know it sounds mundane, but it seemed like enough of a surprise at the time. I was a pretty good wife, and I was trying to be a better wife, because it’s a little easier to do once the kids are out of the house. When we had it out, I gave him a choice, and he picked the girlfriend.” She took another sip of her whiskey.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t imagine. She’s twenty years younger than I am, and doesn’t know half as many recipes or old song lyrics as I do. All she has is a beautiful face and a great body, and she thinks he’s brilliant and sophisticated.”

  “Got it,” said Caldwell. “Sorry to pry, but I wanted to know the general outline, so I’m not an insensitive roommate. You look great, by the way. He’s going to be sorry he doesn’t have you as time goes on.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “But now I’m entitled to your story.”

  “My wife died of an undiscovered aneurism at forty-five. I walked into the kitchen and found her sitting on the kitchen floor with a pot of soup on the stove that had boiled down to nothing and scorched the pot. When I found her, she still looked beautiful, normal, as though she had just fallen asleep. But her skin was cold.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “It was about ten years ago, so the wounds aren’t fresh. I was lucky to have her as long as I did.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Anna.”

  “To Anna,” she said, and they drank.

  “I’ve noticed that you put a lot of work and time in to the piano,” he said. “Are you preparing for a concert or something?”

  “Back to me already?” she said. “I’m not really doing it for a practical reason. It was something I did before I met Darryl, and I taught while I was married. I think when the marriage ended it was the logical thing to cling to. Playing gave me something else to think about, and a way to fill the time. I could do something to improve myself—practice. Learn harder pieces that I never had time to learn before.”

  “Well, those are all good effects.”

  “So you don’t think I’m turning into a crazy old bat who sits in her apartment playing for nobody?”

  “You’ve got a long way to go before you’re an old anything. And you can go back to playing for other people. You’ve already got me. And you could get students. You’re good enough to be a concert pianist.”

  “Thank you. But nobody begins a concert career at forty-five.”

  “So you gave the career up to marry Darryl.”

  “I did win some prizes when I was young. I suppose I seem stupid to have given up my shot at success for a guy who was just going to dump me.”

  “I don’t think it’s stupid. You still love your kids.”

  “You’re just trying to make me feel better, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged. “I know some bad, sad things that are true. So do you. But I’m reminding you of some better things that are also true. And since when is it bad to try to make a friend feel better?”

  “Are we friends?”

  “We will be.”

  “Why do you think so?” she said.

  “Because we’ve decided to be.”

  After the second glass of Jameson’s, Caldwell said, “It’s time to order dinner.”

  “I didn’t ask you to take me out to dinner,” she said. “I just said we should have a drink sometime.”

  “We’ve had the drink. Now I’m hungry,” he said. “Unless you have another commitment.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then have dinner with me.”

  She looked at him, her head tilted. “You’re kind of a take-charge guy. I didn’t think you would be.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not a bully or a psycho. I am hungry, though.”

  “I’ll have dinner on one condition,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I want to sit next to you, on your side of the booth.”

  “Then come on over.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

  “I assume it’s so you can steal food off my plate.”

  She moved over to his side and sat beside him. “You know a lot about women.”

  “I guess I do,” he said. “Was that it?”

  “No. I’m just afraid that after two drinks, one of us will say something that I don’t want overheard. One of us meaning me.”

  “Well, now you can say whatever you want.” He picked up a menu and handed it to her.

  She looked at the menu while he beckoned to the waitress.

  After they had both ordered Zoe said, “I like this menu. It’s friendly food, the kind you don’t have to think about or compare to what you had in the south of France. All you have to do is eat it and go back to drinking.”

  “A wise menu,” he said. “So tell me more about you. What were your parents like?”

  “They were professors at the University of Chicago. One was a Russian physicist, and one was a Roman historian, but not the one you’d think. My mother was the physicist. She met my father in Rome and fell for him so deeply that she defected so she could have an affair with him. That’s what she told me. What about your parents?”

  For an instant he considered telling her something that would further his plan to keep her friendly, but decided the story he’d compiled from the lives of several real Peter Caldwells would do that about as well as anything improvised. “We lived in a small town along the shore of Lake Erie in upstate New York. My father worked at the steel mill—Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna—until it closed in the 1960s.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “My mother had a little store that sold housewares—sort of a hardware store for women. There were pots and pans and cooking utensils, a little cheap china, sewing stuff, knitting stuff.”

  “Did they send you to college?”

  “Yes. I graduated with a major in math and a minor in economics, two truly dull subjects. Then I joined the army. When I got out I
went to work for the government. I stayed there a couple of years and quit.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why quit?”

  “Because by then I was sure that I knew all about taking orders. I didn’t like it. As soon as I started making my own decisions the world got to be a better place for me.”

  “You made a lot of money.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because you don’t care about money. You don’t think about it, or respect it, the way people do who don’t have any.”

  “And why did you tell me you’d figured that out?”

  “Because I like you and I wanted you to know that I’ve been paying attention to you and thinking about you. And I guess I also wanted you to know I’m smart.”

  The admission that she liked him and paid attention made him anxious, but he didn’t let it show. “I knew you were smart.”

  “Oh. I guess I’m too concerned with making sure nobody misses any of my diminishing good points.”

  They ate and talked and then had desserts that neither of them would ordinarily have ordered. He had often noticed that getting people to talk about their children was an effective way of keeping them from thinking about anything else, so he asked her about her son and daughter.

  It was nearly eleven when they began their walk back to their apartment. Zoe put her arm through his and held on tightly, and he suspected she must be feeling the alcohol.

  When he unlocked the apartment door and let her in, he could see the dogs’ eyes glowing with the reflected light of the streetlamp outside. “Hi, Carol. Hi, Dave.”

  The dogs circled them in the hallway, wagging their tails and making little noises of welcome.

  Zoe patted them and said, “Wow. You guys are so great to come home to.”

  “I’d better go out with them for a minute,” Caldwell said. “They’ve been inside for a long time.” He opened the door again and said, “Come on.” The dogs muscled past him and trotted down the stairs to the front door, and he went out to watch over them, then produced a roll of small plastic bags he still had in his pocket from their walk and cleaned up their messes on the strip of lawn. They went around the building to the trash cans and he deposited the bags there, and then the three went up the back stairs.

  He and the dogs found the living room was still dark, but Zoe was standing in the middle of the floor. When he came close, she took two steps forward and hugged him.

  “Thanks, Peter,” she said. “That was the most pleasant dinner I’ve had in a long time.” She stood on tiptoes with her hands on his shoulders and kissed him. It seemed to have been intended as a quick peck, but it landed on his lips. She seemed about to pull back but then she didn’t, and instead her arms snaked upward around his neck and they kissed differently. The kiss lasted at least five seconds before they broke apart.

  This moment was extremely dangerous. If he tried to be distant, he could make her hurt and angry. He might have to move out of this ideal hiding place, and be on the highway looking for a place to stay. He might even turn her into an enemy who would complain to other people about him and try to pick apart his story. “You’re welcome,” he said, so late that they had both almost forgotten what had prompted it. He adopted a casual tone. “We’ll have to have drinks again sometime. Well—”

  She said, “I don’t think I’ve ever shown you my room. I don’t suppose you’d like to come for a visit?”

  He was silent for a moment. “I would love to, but I’d like you to think about it after daylight. If we take that step, it’s pretty hard to undo. If you decide it wasn’t such a good idea, then you won’t have anything to regret.”

  She said, “God, Peter. I’m a grown-up. Don’t you think you can assume I’ve been thinking about this all evening? The truth is that I made up my mind before that—perfectly sober, by the way. I decided to make you take me out for drinks because it was the simplest way to get us to this point, here and now.”

  He shrugged. “I’m sorry. Pretend I never said anything.”

  “I will,” she said. “Now kiss your dogs good night, and come on.”

  8

  He woke at seven, disoriented for a half second, but then he remembered. He blinked a couple of times and looked around. Her room was sunny, with thick white drapes that had not been pulled together to cover the thin white translucent curtains. He looked over at her side of the bed. It was empty, her pillow still in place with an indentation from her head, and the covers pulled back up, as though she had simply vanished.

  He sat up and swung his legs off the bed. His mind began to run through a brief inventory of images, sounds, and words. The fact that he was naked brought him directly to the last part of the evening, and prompted visceral memories. He redirected his thoughts and went over the whole evening rapidly, searching his memory for mistakes he might have made. He decided he had not revealed anything he shouldn’t have, and he had not offended her. She had given him a last kiss and drifted off to a gentle sleep with an untroubled expression.

  Still, the whole episode had brought on terrible danger. Living in the same apartment as a pleasant and pretty female acquaintance wasn’t terribly hard. Living in an apartment with a woman who was intimate with him, free to ask all the questions she wanted, and had a right to expect direct answers, was almost impossible to do safely.

  His clothes were draped neatly over the back of a chair. He put them on. He opened the bedroom door expecting to see the dogs waiting impatiently for him to reappear, but the hallway was unoccupied. He heard faint sounds from the kitchen, things rattling, and smelled coffee. He walked to the kitchen doorway.

  He saw Zoe at the dishwasher, taking out clean dishes and putting them away in cupboards. Dave and Carol were in the kitchen too, eating the last of the crunchy dry food they ate for breakfast. They both stopped and looked up at him, and then stood and trotted toward him. The sound of their metal tags made Zoe turn her head to look, and then straighten to face him. She was wearing a bathrobe that hung nearly to her insteps. It was cinched around her waist and cut in a style that made it look like a gown. “Good morning,” she said.

  Her smile reassured him—no resentment, no reserve. He said, “Good morning. You look positively regal.”

  “Now and then my noble pedigree shows. I take it you slept well.”

  “Great,” he said. “How about you?”

  She closed the dishwasher with her hip and stepped closer to him. She put her arms around his neck and gave him a small, gentle kiss, affectionate instead of erotic.

  He said, “Does that mean you slept well?”

  “It didn’t make me feel like a new woman. Refurbished, maybe, with the odometer turned back a few miles.” She hugged him and stepped back to look in his eyes. “I guess we need to talk again, don’t we?”

  “Only if you think so.” The tests he had feared were about to start. He wasn’t ready for an hour with a skilled interrogator. He had to persuade her that all his feelings were positive. That was essential. But somehow he had to slow this down.

  “Not a thirty-minute talk. Maybe five. I loved last night. I have no regrets. None. But now, as you tried to warn me last night, things are different. We jumped across that chasm, and now we’re on the other side of it, and can’t go back. We have to live—or learn to live—over here, where we’ve been naked together and everything. Your turn.”

  “We are in a different place,” he said. “At the moment I’m pretty comfortable over here. It may just be morning afterglow, but I’m glad it happened. I propose that we try very hard to keep being friends.” He smiled. “We made a really good start.”

  This time they both came together at once, and their kiss was a longer, deeper one. She said, “Friends who just know each other better, or friends with benefits?”

  “With benefits, by all means,” he said.

  “Then the ayes have it,” she said. “With benefits it is.” They kissed again.

  “Want to tak
e a shower together, or is that too much me in eight hours?”

  “Only one way to find out,” he said. “We’re kind of testing the waters.”

  “And saving the planet.”

  He pulled the belt of her bathrobe so it came loose. She didn’t close it, just leaned on him as they walked back toward her bathroom. “One thing, though,” she said. “If one of my kids comes for a visit, don’t walk in and slap me on the ass, or fiddle with my apparel like that, okay?”

  “That goes for you too,” he said.

  “I’ll try to restrain myself.”

  They spent some time in the shower, dried each other off, and then went out together to walk the dogs in the park. They stopped at a café to buy coffee and croissants, and ate them on a park bench while the dogs chased squirrels into the trees.

  As he looked out over the park, he thought about Anna. Several times they had the same conversation about dying. He had told her that she should prepare herself to outlive him by many years.

  One time Anna said, “You always assume you’ll die first. Did you get a bad fortune cookie or something?”

  “I’m five years older. I’m male. And there’s a lot of wear and tear on me. Look at an actuarial table. There are also people trying to find me and kill me, which kind of adds to the odds. Remember that I’ve gotten you several false identities, and hidden money for you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said, and invented something that she needed to be doing—dusting some books he remembered. “It makes me depressed, and we don’t know any more about the future than we did the last time.”