“Nice girl,” he said. “A bit aggressive… what brings you home so early? I thought you were stopping by…”
“Bastard,” she said. The voice sounded hollow, and not at all pleasant. Tears began to sparkle in the corners of her eyes. “You bastard. How could you?”
She looked at him then. Yes, the spark had ignited. Her look was intended to render him gelatinous. He simply shrugged, disinclined to oblige.
“How could I what?”
“You bastard!” she shouted, and wheeled from the doorway. Her footsteps thundered fiercely down the length of the hall. Moments later, his ears were greeted with the skreee and slam of the front door, signaling her departure.
“Ah, well,” he informed the room. “The fire when it comes.”
But in truth, he felt not nearly so casual as that. A fire was already burning within, old as his years and mad as the planet he so thoroughly despised. He had no patience, no patience whatsoever, with that which failed to amuse him.
And he was not amused.
It had been better in the beginning, those three short years that seemed so much like eternity ago. She had been captured by his knowledge and his charm (not to mention his Brit accent, with the mysterious and foolproof aphrodisiac effect it had on American women); he, in turn, had been taken by her beauty, her sumptuous athletic build, her naivete, and her willingness to listen with rapt attention to any and every word he cared to say. Their coming-together had been the closest thing to a magical occurrence in all of Colin’s forty-three years. For six entire months—a personal record by which he was mightily impressed—he had scarcely entertained even the thought of another woman.
But for a man of his boundless intelligence and appetites, even six months in Paradise began to grow tiresome. For one, she started referring to them in terms that were the province of that most revolting of archaic social units: the couple. Colin found the simplistic inflexibility of the binary primate utterly revolting. In addition, he noticed that her interest in reaping the benefits of his bottomless wisdom had not only plateaued, but was actually flagging. She was beginning to call him on things, to challenge his insights, to assert her fledgling intellect in a way that he found most irritating.
And so Colin withdrew, bit by bit, from the Garden: with occasional soirees of the utmost discretion, with increasing antagonism to her increasing arrogance. Before long, he realized that it had all been an illusion; not only was the magic gone, it had never even existed.
They broke up, then, in a nasty sort of way, but a strange and powerful dynamic survived the explosion: a perverse shifting magnetism, alternately attracting and repelling, bringing them together and tearing them apart at its leisure, almost always without warning, and certainly for no reason unless it was to drive them both utterly insane in the end. She would take her leave and saunter off for a week or a month or six, trying vainly to absorb herself in the pathetic ministrations of a lesser love, an occurrence Colin inevitably regarded with a bemused contempt that was directly proportionate to the intensity of her attempted escape. The last go-around particularly so: it had dangled the promise of true love before her moist and greedy eyes, and Colin couldn’t have been more pleased. He knew it was destined to sputter and die, just as he knew she’d come limping back when all was said and done. And, lo! Miracles of miracles, it did, and so did she.
And so it was that they were together again, for bitter and for worse, in sickness and in stealth. Did he love her? No. Was she part of him? Yes. Would it ever end?
God, he could only hope…
The front door creaked back open exactly forty-two minutes later: forty-two minutes duly logged on his life’s grim grand total. He had spent them gearing up, oiling his strategy; honing the razor, in a manner of speaking.
Now she was back, amid much opening and closing of cupboards and drawers. She always stalked the kitchen when angered or upset. He had no doubt that she would hammer on the evening’s disclosure: it was, after all, the first time in their history that she’d literally caught him with his knickers down.
Well, he was ready: in casual recline across his comfy chair, fresh cigarette alight and at his lips, stereo redolent with the lilting strains of Mozart’s Ein musikalischer Spass (the aptly named “A Musical Joke”) in F major. Let her do her worst. He would nip this little beauty in the bud, tout de suite.
Presently, Katie appeared in the living, stoicly featured and hooded of eye, just as he’d expected. He smiled benignly, biding his time, reading the liner notes that the Smithsonian had so graciously provided, a perfect smoke ring blossoming in the air before him, She would, of course, be waiting for him to initiate this dreary discourse. And that, of course, would be the first of her many mistakes.
The moment stretched. She stood by the door, evidently endeavoring to bore holes into him with her righteously smoldering gaze. He waited. The moment stretched. She cleared her throat. He blew another smoke ring.
Twenty-two million, nine hundred and thirty thousand, two hundred and seventy-one minutes into his life, she finally began to speak.
“Why?” she said. A compelling introduction.
“Why what?” he answered gently.
“Why do you do these things to me?”
“Ah.” He smiled. “Oh, why indeed? Don’t you think a more appropriate question might be, why do I do these things to myself?”
Katie said nothing. Words failed her; it would appear that her emotional apparatus had gone on the fritz once again. Colin, however, was no longer content with silence. It was time for the dissection to begin.
“I mean,” he continued, “how many times have we traipsed down this road together, you and I? One might think that by now you’d have figured out what to expect from me. I’m not altogether unpredictable, you know. My habits are quite nearly as tediously repetitive as anyone else’s.”
Her eyes fought the flood, brave little soldiers that they were. But alas! Her lower lip had already begun to tremble. Naturally. Jesus wept, while Pavlov yawned.
“Say, yours, for example. You know as well as I do that you’ll begin to make little weeping noises at any moment. For my part, the temptation is to ask, is it live or is it Memorex?
“In fact, perhaps we’d be well advised to videotape this entire sordid melodrama now, as it unfailingly unfolds. Then the next time we’re tempted to play it out, we can just sit back and watch it on the telly instead.”
On cue, the tears spilled forth. Any second now, the whining would commence. Colin blew a pair of concentric smoke rings, one after another, the second neatly penetrating the first.
“I just don’t understand how you can be so cold!” she blurted. “Like you don’t care about my feelings at all!”
Abruptly, Colin’s hands came together, like a thunderclap in the small apartment. It jerked her eyes up to commune with his as he launched himself from his seat.
“My God!” he cried. “It’s a revelation! The Good Lord Himself must have lighted on your head! The fact is, I don’t care about your feelings! The fact is that they bore me to tears! Would you like to know why? Righty-right! Here we go!”
He was advancing toward her now; she retained her customary runny-eyed cowering stance against the wall. She was taller than he, and quite possibly stronger; but in the battle of wits and wills, she had never stood a chance. His weariness was exceeded only by the thrillrush of poisonous anger and bile that always accompanied this stage of the game.
“It’s because they’re not even your feelings!” he roared. “They ‘re the same old crock of pious platitudes and simpering pea-brained middle-class slope-browed sentimentalisms you inherited from your mother, and she from hers, and she from hers, all the way back to the pitiful dawn of time! If you ever had an actual feeling of your own, I’d be honored to witness it, but I won’t hold my breath!”
She turned to flee the room then, but he would not allow it. The thrill of the hunt was giving way to the chill of the kill; he was on her in an instant, apprehen
ding her arm and yanking it back, eliciting a tortured yelp as he affixed her once again to the wall.
“I mean,” he breathed, melifluous now, “what are you upset about, really? He was directly in her face now; when she tried to pull away, he grabbed her by the cheeks and forced her head back round. “No, really. What is it? What has upset you so?”
She let out a dreadful high-pitched sound: a trapped-animal sound, far more expressive than words. It was rare indeed that he pushed her this far; the “relationship” could only take so much, all perverse shifting magnetism aside. But, God, it was a sound worth waiting for. One could spend their whole lives searching out something that pure.
“Come on,” he cooed. “Give us a clue. Surely it can’t be just about my little peccadillos. Surely it’s not just because I fed that trollop my prick.”
“Leave me alone!” She squirmed. He held her fast.
“Because the last time I checked, love—and you may want to take note of this—my prick still belonged to me. I am still the sole proprietor of my most private parts, even to the extent that I might wish to bare them to the world!”
“Get your hands off of me, damn you!” She could barely speak the words, so boisterous were her sobs.
“But I don’t think that’s the sum en toto of what’s bothering you, my dear. I think it runs a wee bit deeper than that.” His fingers dug into her cheeks until she made that sound again. “I think the problem is that you want so desperately to change me, to get me to conform to your stupid God-fearing chickenshit morality. And the fact that I won’t do that makes you feel like a failure.
“Well, let me tell you something, sweetheart. I feel like a failure, too. Way back, when I used to love you … yes, you heard me correctly. When. I. Used. To. Love. You …”
He rapped her head smartly against the wall, in tandem with the words.
“… I thought perhaps that I could help you awaken from your stupid conditioned robotic trance. But evidently I was wrong. You don’t want to be awakened. You want to spend your life as a fucking drudge; the better to fit in, I suppose, with the rest of the fucking drudges!
“Well, to hell with you! I’m bloody well fed up! So you can pack up the lot of your pitiful possessions, and your vomitous creeching sentimentality, and you can get them the fuck right out of my li…”
It was at that precise moment that her knee met his groin.
The effect was instantaneous and incandescent, with no room for more than a microsecond of incredulous alarm. Colin felt his wind take flight, and the fireworks began: great spiraling pinwheels and blossoming blooms of crackling Technicolor pain, overwhelming his inner vision with their majesty as he sagged to his knees on the floor.
Katie pulled away from him then, and his upper torso connected with the wall. She was still sobbing violently, and she moved with a graceless shambling gait, but this was not of the tiniest concern to him at the moment. She had put every bit of her considerable strength into the act, and his testicles felt quite thoroughly pulped. He cupped them gingerly in his hands; the gesture succeeded only in unleashing another grand salvo of brilliant agony. His lungs sucked on nothingness, stoking the display. He could do nothing but wait for the anguished entertainment to abate.
Dimly, behind him, he heard the sound of her finger tracing circles on the telephone dial. A moment later, she began to speak, with a voice rather desperately struggling for control. He could make out only bits and pieces of what she said, through Mozart’s absurdly comic dissonant pomp and the air raid sirens blaring in his ears; still, snippets of phrases made their way to his attention. “Meryl, I’m sorry… Katie, the girl who… were you serious… bit of trouble… can I come?… tomorrow… thank you… look for another… promise… . thanks … how can I… thank you!” The click of the phone.
By that time, the pain had receded to the point where he could, though barely, turn in her direction. His own wheezing hacks were coming under control as well: the beginnings of normal breath. He watched her turn to stare at him; and though she was no longer crying, she did not have the eyes of a victor. There was uncertainty there, and sadness, and fear. He could see her attempting to cling to her anger; but the more she clutched at it, the more it turned into something else.
Colin understood, understood perfectly. Curiously enough, his own anger was gone. Perhaps it had gone the way of his wind, replaced by the nausea he choked on instead. He felt quite certain that it would be back.
But for now, what he felt was a twisted amusement, provided by the understanding that, in this game, there were no winners. If he had lost, then so had she. Another great triumph for the meaningless void. Another medal on the chest of Absurdity, his only true friend.
“Congratulations,” he croaked. It was the best that he could manage. “You severed the Gordian knot. Alexander would be proud.”
“I’m moving out of here tomorrow morning,” she informed him. There were no more tears, but her voice still hitched. “I’ll pack up tonight. You can sleep in your chair.”
“Whatever you say. You’ve the pants in the family.” “And I swear to God: if you touch me again, I’ll kill you.”
“Of course, of course.” He chuckled, or at least made the effort. “I think you may have succeeded in your ultimate aim. I may never be able to fuck again.”
For one split second, she almost smiled. Then her face went hard, and she turned away. Fine, Colin thought. Let her stew in her old Christian guilt.
This conversation may have ended.
But the magnetism remains…
.......................................
.........SEPTEMBER
5
SLAVE OF NEW YORK
It was late Saturday morning by the time she got her stuff down to the street, apprehended and bribed the requisite cabbie, loaded up, and headed off toward her new abode. No simple task, in any respect. But it had to be done.
And it certainly wasn’t the first time.
The hardest part wasn’t the leaving itself. As always, once she’d made up her mind, the process took over completely. In the resulting flurry of motion, there was no time for doubt or regret. At least not yet. That was the good news.
And Colin, to his credit, was astoundingly thoughtful this time around. He took off, and didn’t come back. It spared them both the need to replay any more ugly tapes from the past. No attempts to charm or browbeat her into submission; no killing silence; no tense charades; no emotional reneging; no sarcasm; no sulking; no insults; no nothing.
It was far and away the wisest choice. She had to give him that.
So, no, leaving was easy. It barely even agonized her. The hard part was in recognizing how very little it actually changed. Tama Janowitz was right, dammit.
Katie was still a slave of New York.
For in a city that offered unlimited employment but could not happily house its millions, finding a roof over your head to call your own was the single stickiest survival chore on the roster: harder than mugging-and/or-rape avoidance, harder even than catching a cab in the rain or finding a cop when you really really needed one. To be a slave of New York was to live in the shadow of someone else’s name on the lease, never knowing when the caprices of Fate or your property master would dash you out from under that roof and onto the cold cold streets.
Katie had been in New York for a little over three years. She’d spent a good bit of that time bolting from one asylum to another. It was a pattern she’d already established back home in Selma, but Manhattan had upped the voltage substantially.
The worst thing about moving was that it flashed you back, and back was not a place you necessarily wanted to go. Bad enough that you’d already been there. Sitting in the back of the cab, those few possessions she refused to part with piled up all around her, Katie felt like an urban boat-person on some kind of bizarre emotional exodus.
The cab hit a pothole and sent the blunt, battered edge of her cheval up to rap her on the chin. She bit her tongue and cursed unde
r her breath. Not even God knew why Katie hung onto it. Certainly not for its beauty: it was an ancient, scarred oval frame of oak ringing a mirror that only a forgiving disposition could consider as being rustic. The silver had cracked and blistered and flaked away in innumerable places around its periphery, leaving a pitted varicose latticework that curled around the reflective surface of the heavy glass. Only the center was clear, and staring into it was a vaguely disconcerting effect, like seeing the fabric of reality itself unraveling all around you.
Once upon a time that had been appealingly romantic, way back when they’d first found it, abandoned in the weekly flea market that was trash night in the Village. Once upon a time it had been worth lugging the twelve blocks home, simply because it was funky and free and she and her lover had found it together as they strolled down Ann Street, and that had consecrated it, made it unique among the cast-off furnishings of the world and thus a thing to be kept, and cherished.
That was a long time ago.
Why she still held onto it, she wasn’t sure. She’d shown up on Colin’s doorstep with it six months ago, lumped in with her clothes and bags and boxes like a big wooden albatross, a clunky memento of the last good thing in her life before it had gone sour. Why she’d dragged it with her into this very compromised position, however, was clear enough: she didn’t want the sole remaining symbol of what they’d had to fall into Colin’s cynical clutches…
The cab hit another bump, and Katie’s thoughts jarred back into the real world, the world of forced marches and slavery.
The world of Colin.
He was notable for several reasons. Topping the list was the fact that he was a repeat customer: Katie had shared space with Colin on three, count ‘em, three separate and distinct occasions. She couldn’t fathom it to save her life. The first time started good, got bad, and ended worse. The second skipped the first stage, and the last went more or less directly to hell from the git-go. Each time she swore she’d never see him again; each time, it hurt a little more. This time being the worst of all.
Dead Lines Page 4
