“What She Offered” was first published in the anthology Dangerous Women (New York: Mysterious Press, 2005).
~ * ~
S
ounds like a dangerous woman,” my friend said. He’d not been with me in the bar the night before, not seen her leave or me follow after her.
I took a sip of vodka and glanced toward the window. Outside, the afternoon light was no doubt as it had always been, but it didn’t look the same to me anymore. “I guess she was,” I told him.
“So what happened?” my friend asked.
This: I was in the bar. It was two in the morning. The people around me were like tapes from Mission Impossible, only without the mission, just that self-destruction warning. You could almost hear it playing in their heads, stark and unyielding as the Chinese proverb: If you continue down the road you’re on, you will get to where you’re headed.
Where were they headed? As I saw it, mostly toward more of the same. They would finish this drink, this night, this week… and so on. At some point, they would die like animals after a long, exhausting haul, numb with weariness as they finally slumped beneath the burden. Worse still, according to me, this bar was the world, its few dully buzzing flies no more than stand-ins for the rest of us.
I had written about “us” in novel after novel. My tone was always bleak. In my books, there were no happy endings. People were lost and helpless, even the smart ones… especially the smart ones. Everything was vain and everything was fleeting. The strongest emotions quickly waned. A few things mattered, but only because we made them matter by insisting that they should. If we needed evidence of this, we made it up. As far as I could tell, there were basically three kinds of people, the ones who deceived others, the ones who deceived themselves, and the ones who understood that the people in the first two categories were the only ones they were ever like to meet. I put myself firmly in the third category, of course, the only member of my club, the one guy who understood that to see things in full light was the greatest darkness one could know.
And so I walked the streets and haunted the bars, and was, according to me, the only man on earth who had nothing to learn.
Then suddenly, she walked through the door.
To black, she offered one concession. A string of small white pearls. Everything else, the hat, the dress, the stockings, the shoes, the little purse… everything else was black. And so, what she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman, the broad-billed hat that discreetly covers one eye, high heels tapping on rain-slicked streets, foreign currency in the small black purse. She offered the spy, the murderess, the lure of a secret past, and, of course, that little hint of erotic peril.
She knows the way men think, I said to myself as she walked to the end of the bar and took her seat. She knows the way they think… and she’s using it.
“So you thought she was what?” my friend asked.
I shrugged. “Inconsequential.”
And so I watched without interest as the melodramatic touches accumulated. She lit a cigarette and smoked it pensively, her eyes opening and closing languidly, with the sort of world-weariness one sees in the heroines of old black-and-white movies.
Yes, that’s it, I told myself. She is noir in the worst possible sense, thin as strips of film, and just as transparent at the edges. I looked at my watch. Time to go, I thought, time to go to my apartment and stretch out on the bed and wallow in my dark superiority, congratulate myself that once again I had not been fooled by the things that fool other men.
But it was only two in the morning, early for me, so I lingered in the bar, and wondered, though only vaguely, with no more than passing interest, if she had anything else to offer beyond this little show of being “dangerous.”
“Then what?” my friend asked.
Then she reached in her purse, drew out a small black pad, flipped it open, wrote something, and passed it down the bar to me.
The paper was folded, of course. I unfolded it and read what she’d written: I know what you know about life.
It was exactly the kind of nonsense I’d expected, so I briskly scrawled a reply on the back of the paper and sent it down the bar to her.
She opened it and read what I’d written: No, you don’t. And you never will. Then, without so much as looking up, she wrote a lightning-fast response and sent it hurtling back up the bar, quickly gathering her things and heading for the door as it went from hand to hand, so that she’d already left the place by the time it reached me.
I opened the note and read her reply: C+.
My anger spiked. C+? How dare she! I whirled around on the stool and rushed out of the bar, where I found her leaning casually against the little wrought-iron fence that surrounded it.
I waved the note in front of her. “What’s this supposed to mean?” I demanded.
She smiled and offered me a cigarette. “I’ve read your books. They’re really dreadful.”
I don’t smoke, but I took the cigarette anyway. “So, you’re a critic?”
She gave no notice to what I’d just said. “The writing is beautiful,” she said as she lit my cigarette with a red plastic lighter. “But the idea is really bad.”
“Which idea is that?”
“You only have one,” she said with total confidence. “That everything ends badly, no matter what we do.” Her face tightened. “So, here’s the deal. When I wrote, I know what you know about life, that wasn’t exactly true. I know more.”
I took a long draw on the cigarette. “So,” I asked lightly. “Is this a date?”
She shook her head, and suddenly her eyes grew dark and somber. “No,” she said, “this is a love affair.”
I started to speak, but she lifted her hand and stopped me.
“I could do it with you, you know,” she whispered, her voice now very grave. “Because you know almost as much as I do, and I want to do it with someone who knows that much.”
From the look in her eyes I knew exactly what she wanted to “do” with me. “We’d need a gun,” I told her with a dismissing grin.
She shook her head. “I’d never use a gun. It would have to be pills.” She let her cigarette drop from her fingers. “And we’d need to be in bed together,” she added matter-of-factly. “Naked and in each other’s arms.”
“Why is that?”
Her smile was soft as light. “To show the world that you were wrong.” The smile widened, almost playfully. “That something can end well.”
“Suicide?” I asked. “You call that ending well?”
She laughed and tossed her hair slightly. “It’s the only way to end well,” she said.
And I thought, She’s nuts, but for the first time in years, I wanted to hear more.
* * * *
“A suicide pact,” my friend whispered.
“That’s what she offered, yes,” I told him. “But not right away. She said that there was something I needed to do first.”
“What?”
“Fall in love with her,” I answered quietly.
“And she knew you would?” my friend asked. “Fall in love with her, I mean?”
“Yes, she did,” I told him.
But she also knew that the usual process was fraught with trial, a road scattered with pits and snares. So she’d decided to forgo courtship, the tedious business of exchanging mounds of trivial biographical information. Physical intimacy would come first, she said. It was the gate through which we would enter each other.
“So, we should go to my place now,” she concluded, after offering her brief explanation of all this. “We need to fuck.”
“Fuck?” I laughed. “You’re not exactly the romantic type, are you?”
“You can undress me if you want to,” she said. “Or, if not, I’ll do it myself.”
“Maybe you should do it,” I said jokingly. “That way I won’t dislocate your shoulder.”
She laughed. “I get suspicious if a man does it
really well. It makes me think that he’s a bit too familiar with all those female clasps and snaps and zippers. It makes me wonder if perhaps he’s… worn it all himself.”
“Jesus,” I moaned. “You actually think about things like that?”
Her gaze and tone became deadly serious. “I can’t handle every need,” she said.
There was a question in her eyes, and I knew what the question was. She wanted to know if I had any secret cravings or odd sexual quirks, any “needs” she could not “handle.”
“I’m strictly double-vanilla,” I assured her. “No odd flavors.”
She appeared slightly relieved. “My name is Veronica,” she said.
“I was afraid you weren’t going to tell me,” I said. “That it was going to be one of those things where I never know who you are and vice versa. You know, ships that pass in the night.”
“How banal that would be,” she said.
“Yes, it would.”
“Besides,” she added. “I already knew who you were.”
“Yes, of course.”
“My apartment is just down the block,” she said, then offered to take me there.
* * * *
As it turned out, her place was a bit farther than just down the block, but it didn’t matter. It was after two in the morning and the streets were pretty much deserted. Even in New York, certain streets, especially certain Greenwich Village streets, are never all that busy, and once people have gone to and from work, they become little more than country lanes. That night the trees that lined Jane Street swayed gently in the cool autumn air, and I let myself accept what I thought she’d offered, which, for all the “dangerous” talk, would probably be no more than a brief erotic episode, maybe breakfast in the morning, a little light conversation over coffee and scones. Then she would go her way and I would go mine because one of us would want it that way and the other wouldn’t care enough to argue the point.
“The vodka’s in the freezer,” she said as she opened the door to her apartment, stepped inside and switched on the light.
I walked into the kitchen while Veronica headed down a nearby corridor. The refrigerator was at the far end of the room, its freezer door festooned with pictures of Veronica and a short, bald little man who looked to be in his late forties.
“That’s Douglas,” Veronica called from somewhere down the hall. “My husband.”
I felt a pinch of apprehension.
“He’s away,” she added.
The apprehension fled.
“I should hope so,” I said as I opened the freezer door.
Veronica’s husband faced me again when I closed it, the ice-encrusted vodka bottle now securely in my right hand. Now I noticed that Douglas was somewhat portly, deep lines around his eyes, graying at the temples. Okay, I thought, maybe midfifties. And yet, for all that, he had a boyish face. In the pictures, Veronica towered over him, his bald head barely reaching her broad shoulders. She was in every photograph, his arm always wrapped affectionately around her waist. And in every photograph Douglas was smiling with such unencumbered joy that I knew that all his happiness came from her, from being with her, being her husband, that when he was with her he felt tall and dark and handsome, witty and smart and perhaps even a bit elegant. That was what she offered him, I supposed, the illusion that he deserved her.
“He was a bartender when I met him,” she said as she swept into the kitchen. “Now he sells software.” She lifted an impossibly long and graceful right arm to the cabinet at her side, opened its plain wooden doors and retrieved two decidedly ordinary glasses, which she placed squarely on the plain Formica counter before turning to face me. “From the beginning, I was always completely comfortable with Douglas,” she said.
She could not have said it more clearly. Douglas was the man she had chosen to marry because he possessed whatever characteristics she required to feel utterly at home when she was at home, utterly herself when she was with him. If there had been some great love in her life, she had chosen Douglas over him because with Douglas she could live without change or alteration, without applying makeup to her soul. Because of that, I suddenly found myself vaguely envious of this squat little man, of the peace he gave her, the way she could no doubt rest in the crook of his arm, breathing slowly, falling asleep.
“He seems… nice,” I said.
Veronica gave no indication that she’d heard me. “You take it straight,” she said, referring to the way I took my drink, which was clearly something she’d noticed in the bar.
I nodded.
“Me, too.”
She poured our drinks and directed me into the living room. The curtains were drawn tightly together, and looked a bit dusty. The furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than for style. There were a few potted plants, most of them brown at the edges. You could almost hear them begging for water. No dogs. No cats. No goldfish or hamsters or snakes or white mice. When Douglas was away, it appeared, Veronica lived alone.
Except for books, but they were everywhere. They filled shelf after towering shelf, or lay stacked to the point of toppling along the room’s four walls. The authors ran the gamut, from the oldest classics to the most recent best sellers. Stendahl and Dostoyevsky rested shoulder to shoulder with Anne Rice and Michael Crichton. A few of my own stark titles were lined up between Robert Stone and Patrick O’Brian. There was no history or social science in her collection, and no poetry. It was all fiction, as Veronica herself seemed to be, a character she’d made up and was determined to play to the end. What she offered, I believed at that moment, was a well-rounded performance of a New York eccentric.
She touched her glass to mine, her eyes very still. “To what we’re going to do,” she said.
“Are we still talking about committing suicide together?” I scoffed as I lowered my glass without drinking. “What is this, Veronica? Some kind of Sweet November rewrite?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“You know, that stupid movie where the dying girl takes this guy and lives with him for a month and-”
“I would never live with you,” Veronica interrupted.
“That’s not my point.”
“And I’m not dying,” Veronica added. She took a quick sip of vodka, placed her glass onto the small table beside the sofa, then rose, as if suddenly called by an invisible voice, and offered her hand to me. “Time for bed,” she said.
“Just like that?” my friend asked.
“Just like that.”
He looked at me warily. “This is a fantasy, right?” he asked. “This is something you made up.”
“What happened next no one could make up.”
“And what was that?”
She led me to the bedroom. We undressed silently. She crawled beneath the single sheet and patted the mattress. “This side is yours.”
“Until Douglas gets back,” I said as I drew in beside her.
“Douglas isn’t coming back,” she said, then leaned over and kissed me very softly.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s dead,” she answered lightly. “He’s been dead for three years.”
And thus I learned of her husband’s slow decline, the cancer that began in his intestines and migrated to his liver and pancreas. It had taken six months, and each day Veronica had attended him. She would look in on him on her way to work every morning, then return to him at night, stay at his bedside until she was sure he would not awaken, then, at last, return here, to this very bed, to sleep for an hour or two, three at the most, before beginning the routine again.
“Six months,” I said. “That’s a long time.”
“A dying person is a lot of work,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” I told her. “I was with my father while he died. I was exhausted by the time he finally went.”
The Best American Noir of the Century Page 76
