Kansas City Noir

by Steve Paul

  “Where now?” I whispered to the sky. I took a step and turned myself in a circle, forcing a smile. “Who now?”

  There are days we must feel as far from ourselves as the ocean feels from the moon.

  Let me admit it here, I missed her when she was not around. Yes, we had parted ways, but we had never resolved anything. She said as much. Two weeks together had left us shattered against the rocks of the other. But I wanted more shattering. I wanted a year of her. I wanted a year and a day, at least.

  Let me admit this as well, Alice was never her real name.

  Boys, note this well: women make poor receptacles for your dreams.

  Girls, note this well: men make poor receptacles for your dreams.

  We are not chalices to be filled with hope.

  Yet I long for someone to prove me wrong.

  * * *

  Her father killed forty-five women in ten years across the Pacific Northwest. My father murdered fourteen women across eight years in upstate New York and into Canada. The towns had names and so did the victims, but I will leave them out in this account, because so far as I know there are no ghosts haunting those towns. So let them sleep where they may, those ghosts.

  I joined the army shortly after my father’s arrest. Part of me wanted to get away from the media. Another part simply wanted to see the world. It was only later that I recognized what I really wanted was a sense of atonement for crimes I never committed. I moved to Kansas City after spending a few years watching the dirty work of empire up close in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was in and out of a marriage almost immediately. Then I read the article in the paper about the convention and so I went, and so I met her.

  She was smart and shy, beautiful, of course. And then a week passed and everything that had felt right about our being together started to feel wrong. Once again, we were owned by our guilt for reasons we couldn’t explain.

  There was a documentary on about her father the other day. It’s always returning to us, the past.

  * * *

  I drove through the empty, snow-covered streets of downtown to the art house cinema near 20th and Grand. I’d worked at that cinema the summer I moved to the city. I think she knew this and it must have been why she invited me to go with her.

  I’d always liked working at the art house for the owner, Patrick. The theater sold PBR by the can for a dollar and Patrick didn’t mind those days we drank a few through our shifts. The theater also had a nice old wooden bar off the balcony where Patrick and I used to sip scotch with our PBR while we listened to the sound of the movie coming through the curtains. I left the job when the fall semester started at UMKC.

  She’d invited me to see Breathless. I had seen it before, but couldn’t remember it other than the gesture of his thumb rubbing his lips. I couldn’t remember whether love was celebrated or destroyed in the film. Or whether love was some vacant cause.

  Patrick smiled when he saw me. He opened a can of PBR and handed it to me. I took a sip and leaned against the counter.

  I turned when the door opened and it was Alice, her eyes bright and her smile wide for me. We hugged and held each other for a long time. Her breath felt like heaven against my neck.

  “You look great,” I said, leaning toward her.

  “You too,” she said, her eyes closed.

  I could feel a few strands of her hair stick in the stubble on my chin as I pulled away from her.

  I bought our tickets and Patrick handed her a can of beer. Her gloves were on so I took the can and opened it for her. I introduced the two of them.

  “The beer’s on the house,” Patrick said. “You’re the only two here, so drink up. We’re still waiting on the film. It’s on its way up from Wichita. They were showing it there last night, and I’m guessing the roads between here and there are slowgoing. They got a lot more snow than us.”

  I looked out the front door and saw mounds of snow rising onto the edge of the sidewalk, spilling over into the gutter. It was the typical dirty snow of any city sidewalk.

  “They called a few hours ago,” he said, “so they should be close. You can go ahead and sit down. I’ll bring you a few more beers if it looks like it’s going to be awhile.”

  We walked into the theater and sat in the middle of a row near the back. We looked at each other for a few minutes and just smiled. She touched my cheek with a gloved hand and I closed my eyes. I opened them when she took her hand away.

  “I’m moving tomorrow,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I changed my name. I’m tired of people asking me if I’m related to the Moon River Killer.”

  Her last name was distinct enough that people must have asked her all the time. Her father had been one of the most notorious serial killers in history. There were days when I had thought of changing my name, but I knew it could take me only so far away from the truth.

  She put the beer in the little cup holder and took her gloves off. She folded them and tucked them into the pocket of her coat. The skin around her thumbnail was cracked so that a little speck of bright pink flesh showed.

  “I love these old movies.” She curled a bit of hair around her finger and then chewed on it for a moment before tucking it behind her ear. “They’re always about knights in shining armor and dirty blondes.”

  I nodded quietly at the screen and tried to see my face up there, the grin of the hero on my lips.

  She started twisting another bit of hair to put behind the other ear. “I cried myself to sleep last night. I wish I could say it was the first time this year. How about you—when was the last time you cried yourself to sleep?”

  I shook my head not knowing. “Last night?” I offered. “Would that be the right answer?”

  She put a hand on my arm and said, “Yes.” She looked at me, her blue eyes wet with sorrow. “Yes,” she said, again. “Yes.”

  I liked her hand on my arm. She gently rubbed it before taking hold of my hand.

  We sat in the soft light of the theater waiting for the lights to go all the way down and for the old cartoon that signaled the start of the film was near. I wondered what it meant to move at this time of the year, to drive through the hard dark of a winter night toward a new home. I wondered what it was like to go by a new name, the old one left alone to gather dust on some shelf in the basement.

  I could have used a new name. I could have used a new city to haunt, with new troubles and new pleasures to tremble my lips. Let us all drive through the dark toward a new home, the heart of winter shaking the air around us like a bell rung deep.

  “I wish we shared better secrets,” I said.

  “Like how to measure love?” she asked.

  “Like how to measure love.”

  “Instead of by days and weeks and years,” she said, holding my hand tight.

  “Like two weeks.”

  “Like two weeks,” she said. “We did have fun though.”

  “We were okay.”

  “Don’t undo it yet,” she said. “Not while I’m still here.”

  She gently squeezed my hand and I did the same to hers. We turned our faces and stared at the different walls for a moment.

  “What’s your new name?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’ll make it easier if you don’t know.”

  I shifted in my seat and my shoes briefly stuck to the floor. I looked up at the screen. I looked at the walls. I looked at my hands. I didn’t know where to look because I knew she was watching me. I stretched my hands, open, closed.

  “Easier for me,” I said softly.

  “Both of us,” she said.

  I knew that I should have agreed, but part of me always felt that no matter how hard we were on our emotions, the pain of our loss was worth the price of our pleasure.

  “Where are you moving?” I asked. “Can you tell me that?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Easier,” I said.

  She nodded.

  She leaned toward m
e and kissed me gently on the lips.

  “You should buy me some popcorn,” she said.

  “Would you like some popcorn?” I asked.

  “It’s like you read my mind.”

  I brought the bucket of popcorn back. She’d taken her coat off and the warmth and perfumed smell of her body made my head hum. We ate the popcorn and were quiet for a few minutes.

  “I like to take the popcorn home with me,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  “I did.”

  “I never eat it all, but I always buy the biggest one. You made the right choice on that.” She tapped the side of the container.

  “I didn’t want to look cheap,” I said.

  She smiled and took another handful and ate it. “People think it’s weird when they see you leaving the theater with a bucket of popcorn. They think it’s like the furniture, something you should leave behind. My dates must think I’m crazy. I’ll take it with me when we go and I’ll leave it in their car or carry it out to drinks with us. Then at the end of the night, after we kiss, I carry it upstairs with me and leave them behind.”

  We were quiet. It was like the silence inside a bell. I touched my thumb to my lips. I touched my thumb to hers.

  “You cannot touch silence,” I said.

  She smiled and touched her thumb to my lips. We ate more popcorn.

  “It always bothered me that my father killed someone with the same name as me,” she said. She chewed softly. “I could never fuck a man who has his name.” She turned to me. “Would you ever fuck someone with your mother’s name?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “No one with that name has ever asked.”

  She liked this and laughed loudly.

  “How many times have you seen this film?” I asked.

  “Once. But you can hold my hand if you get scared.” She smiled at the screen. “Or you can just hold my hand. I don’t mind right now. I don’t know why but I feel warm for the first time in weeks.”

  I wanted to ask her what she was thinking about. I always wanted to ask her.

  “We always made the sheets sing,” she said.

  “Then why didn’t it work?”

  “Because we were hell on each other’s emotions. You know that.”

  “Yes,” I said, and I did see it. But I had always hoped that we could work past this.

  “We’re owned by guilt,” she said.

  “Are you packed?” I asked.

  “Mostly.”

  The owner came in and told us that it would be another hour. “Let me buy you a real drink,” he said.

  We walked up to the balcony and sat at a table that overlooked the lobby. She hugged the popcorn to her chest. She put the popcorn on the table and glanced around the room. She bit at her lips and rubbed my hand.

  Patrick came back with a Jameson and a Guinness for each of us. He raised the Jameson and we toasted the weather.

  “Are you originally from here?” she asked Patrick.

  “No,” he said. “St. Louis.”

  “Everyone is from somewhere else these days,” she said, staring off into the distance.

  “That is true,” Patrick agreed. He smiled at me and walked back downstairs to the lobby.

  “We own the town we come from in our heart,” she said. “But we don’t own people, we own problems.”

  Outside the snow swirled in the street. The Jameson went down easy in the fading light of the bar. I wondered what the first name she ever whispered was. I wondered what would be the last.

  * * *

  When the movie arrived we went back to the theater. We were still the only two there. The weather had kept everyone away. The lights finally fell and the projector illuminated the darkness. Dust particles sparkled in the projector’s swath of light.

  She leaned toward me and we kissed. We took the kiss far before we parted.

  “You can be my knight in shining armor,” she said.

  “You can be my dirty blonde,” I said.

  She smiled and parted my lips with another kiss.

  “When was your last good kiss?” she asked.

  I watched her eyes move gently back and forth between my eyes. I didn’t want to answer.

  “We shouldn’t have met when I was so lonely,” she said.

  “You’re not lonely anymore?” I asked.

  “No, I’ve gone further than loneliness allows.”

  I studied her face against the light of the film. She ate a little more popcorn. She turned and stared at me. We kissed again. Her lips were salty with the taste of popcorn, her breath warm from the Jameson.

  “We should watch some of the movie,” she said.

  I agreed.

  I watched the film and thought about how none of the fairy tales I knew had prepared me for my life. I thought about all those myths we’d studied in school, how none of them had held together in the end, and how they were as fragile as the truth.

  * * *

  We left our cars at the theater and walked through the snow toward The Cashew. But when we got there she said there was another bar, a kind of speakeasy, around the corner that she’d heard about. She kept insisting it was one more turn away. We rounded several corners and never found it. We hailed the one taxi we saw and took it back to her apartment.

  She lived across the waterway from the Plaza and her apartment building was at the top of a hill. The streets in her neighborhood hadn’t been plowed yet, and the taxi couldn’t make it up the hill, so he had to drop us at the corner.

  I held her arm in mine as we walked and caught her more than once when she slipped.

  “I miss you when you’re not around,” she said.

  I pressed her against a building and kissed her.

  Shoveled snow narrowed the path on the sidewalk near her building so that I had to walk behind her. She had her head down and her hands in her coat pockets. Her skirt showed just below the bottom of her coat. I watched her back and then her legs, the dark tights, the black boots wet with snow. Patches of light from the streetlamps marked the way.

  A light snow started falling. She looked up. “What a sad snow.”

  * * *

  We fucked until neither of us could anymore. We rolled apart and stared at different walls. Piles of clothes rose out of boxes on her bedroom floor. She headed to the kitchen for water.

  I went to the bathroom and took a piss at a lean because of my erection. I put toothpaste on my finger and ran it over my teeth. I took a long drink of water from the tap.

  The windowpanes in her bathroom wore wreaths of frost. A small clear spot in the middle of each window let the night outside look in. The radiator clicked.

  I stood in her bedroom door. She was on her stomach facing me with her eyes closed. She kissed my arm when I wrapped it around her. I kissed each shoulder blade once, then all the way down her back. I wanted to hear her smile.

  “I thought about leaving while you were in the bathroom,” she said, laughing.

  “I wouldn’t have taken much,” I said, resting on my back.

  She propped herself up on an elbow next to me and ran her thumb over my lips. She tapped her thumb against my lips and went, “Hmmm.” We smiled together.

  I studied the shape of her face, the blue eyes, the soft hue of her skin, and the dirty blond hair. She looked like a daydream. She blushed and turned her face into the pillow.

  “You still can’t go,” she said, her face buried in the pillow. “Even if you look at me like that.”

  She turned and smiled, then pulled herself into my arms. I could smell our sex on her skin. I sucked a kiss against her neck.

  “Why do we always have to destroy each other?” she asked.

  I turned my head away and looked toward the glow of a streetlamp in her window. I turned back to her and she covered my eyes with her hand. She kissed me on the lips. She left her hand there.

  “What is this for?” I asked about her hand now covering my eyes.

  “I think emotions are made with the eyes,�
� she said.

  I found her face with my hand and gently put my palm over her eyes. I parted her fingers and opened my eyes to peek. She did the same.

  “We should have at least been lovers all these years,” I said.

  She looked at my face. Her eyes moved back and forth, searching from eye to eye. “We were a wreck together.”

  “I always liked you,” I said.

  “You liked the idea of me. You liked that there was someone just as fucked-up as you.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “Don’t be angry.” She covered my eyes with her hand again and kissed me. She sighed against my lips.

  “What if it was love?” I asked.

  “You’re not in love with me,” she said. “You’re just in love with the idea of me.”

  I rolled away from her but she climbed on top of me. She kissed me and her hair made a tent around our faces.

  “Tell me something nice that I told you,” she said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “When we first met?”

  “Do you remember what you said to me after we made love in your car that first time?” I asked.

  She smiled. “What?”

  “You said, I have butterflies for you.”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said, laying her face against my chest so that I couldn’t see her.

  “Don’t take it back.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “You know it’s true.” She moaned sweetly in my ear. “It’s still true. Tell me something else.”

  “When we got back here later that night, you asked me to fuck you from behind.”

  She laughed loudly. “I do like that.”

  I tried not to remember the other things. I put a hand over my eyes.