Manhattan Noir 2

by Lawrence Block

  “I have that cabinetmaker coming over today for an estimate,” Chrissie said. “On the wood paneling for your library.” Bob nodded, and noted that she’d said “your library,” which was appropriate because her idea of reading was “25 Treasures in Your Garbage” in Real Simple. “You want to know something? You’re the only man I know who’d want a library.” Was this a compliment? A criticism? Compliment, he decided, because her eyes had that I-love-you Hallmark greeting card haze.

  A library. Their daughter Jordana was graduating from NYU Law School, and as there was no way she’d ever live at home again, they were turning her bedroom into his own private space. Wall-to-wall bookshelves and a sound system designed to resonate off wood. “Everybody else’s husband would want a media room. Do you know what a library says? This man has class.” He nodded and swallowed quickly, so egg ooze wouldn’t coat his throat. “Bobby,” she went on, “since the cabinetmaker is coming anyway—”

  “No.”

  “Could you please just hear me out?” she squealed. Whenever her voice rose this high, stretched by tension, he wanted to cover his ears to protect himself, the way people did in news footage when bombs plunged to earth, from her screeching.

  “No, because whatever it is, we can’t do it now. You yourself said let’s go with custom shelves because in the long run it’s the same price as buying and installing, but it’s costing—”

  “It’s not! And if we give him cash, he won’t charge us tax.” She smoothed back her hair, preening, as if she’d just come up with a financial coup worthy of Jay Gould. “It’s simple economics. Tell me if I’m wrong: You know better than anyone. He’ll be here, so isn’t this the time to put a new front on the medicine cabinet, so it’ll look like an old mirror in a fabulous antique frame—not a real antique, but distressed wood—instead of just an ugly piece of crap from Tacky Bathroom Expo 1967 or something?”

  Bob realized then that his thinking of Chrissie as a genuinely decent human being had been a momentary lapse brought on by birthday sentimentality. The truth, the real truth? She does love me, as far she is able. Except she has the emotional range of a pigeon, and ultimately she’s never been able to think beyond feathering her own nest. Now, with Jordana finishing law school and James at Hampshire at $45,000 a year, happy though still unsure whether he wants to continue making clay pots (citing Picasso’s success in ceramics) or switch to Asian Studies, it’s within my power to be free. Not to have to hear that voice—“Good merrning!”—as the first human contact every single day of my life.

  “You probably think I’m terrible,” she said, “asking for something on your birthday. But number one, this is for both of us, our medicine cabinet, and number two …”

  Babble, babble. If the Apocalypse came in their lifetime, she’d jabber right through it, then look around and ask: Did something happen? Bob lowered his head and eyed the rectangular box, the steak, that sat on his plate. A small, broiled curlicue of fat hanging from the left corner. When he glanced back at her, he saw an almost-fifty-year-old woman who not only didn’t get the meaning of life, but didn’t care whether or not there was one.

  A genuinely decent person? Forget it. He was being too decent, talk about decency. Chrissie was now and always had been completely self-absorbed. And superficial? She should have her very own superlative adjective: superficialest. If she could have, she would have demoed the kids along with the kitchen and redesigned them to fit her banal vision of what was desirable. Turn Jordana into an editor at Vogue instead of an aspiring intellectual property lawyer. As Chrissie saw it, “property” was good, but “intellectual” demoted it to a topic impossible to introduce as dinner party conversation. (Jordana’s unduly hairy boyfriend Clark was a lawyer, Harvard, which made him okay in Chrissie’s view, along with the fact that the Times’s Style section had called his father the go-to radiation oncologist at Sloan-Kettering.)

  As for their son James, Chrissie would grow him five inches taller, give him some career she could drop at cocktail parties: astrophysicist, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. Actually, Bob had been taken aback when his son reached five-footeight and nothing more happened height-wise. He himself was five-eleven, but you don’t think about having your son only come up to your ear in family pictures when you marry a short woman.

  She was resting her chin on her hands to hide the froggy sac that was developing. Ribbit. Ribbit. Distaste barely surfaced before it turned into disgust, and an instant later a wave of hatred rose within him and pressed against the inside of his skull until he had to stifle a moan of pain. God, did he hate her! Honestly, he wasn’t at all a violent man, but he’d like to put his thumbs right under her froggy chin and press on her … What the hell do they call an Adam’s apple in a woman?

  He didn’t even try banishing these sorts of thoughts anymore, and had long stopped feeling guilty about having them. Like a sex fantasy, it gave him pleasure and it didn’t hurt anybody. “… it would give the whole room a look of … I don’t know. Solidity. Elegance.”

  “What?”

  Chrissie gave him her weary, stoic reaction. Flared nostrils, followed by a sigh blown through her nose. He hated her nostrils; they were isosceles triangles. “The mirror. Framing the medicine-cabinet mirror.”

  No, not throttle her. Truth be told, on and off over the years he played a kind of whodunit game about getting rid of her. Not seriously, because obviously that would be immoral. His ideas were more like putting poison into those giant antioxidant capsules she took every morning with a hideous glug. Oh, and the old defective electrical appliance business, tossing it into the bathtub. If he really wanted to be nasty, he’d buy a plug-in vibrator, so the cops and people from the medical examiner’s office would snicker. No, then they might think she died because he couldn’t satisfy her. Anyway, ninety-nine percent of the time, the husband was the top suspect and he was never able to think of a way he wouldn’t be.

  “Look, it’s my birthday and I don’t want to get into a whole discussion, but we did what you wanted to do. The kids’ bathrooms.” He waved his arm in a grand gesture, like a conductor introducing a hundred-piece orchestra. “The kitchen. We agreed to hold off on the master bath and do the library first. One project at a time.”

  Her nostrils flared again, but she managed a smile, and that seemed to bring back her perkiness. “You’re not enjoying your cholesterol festival?” she asked.

  “No, no, it’s fine,” he said, smiling back. “I appreciate the fuss.” He cut through the steak and wondered how he was ever going to get down enough of it—it must be close to a pound of meat—to stop her from asking a million times, Didn’t you like it? It looked good, as if she’d gone to one of the chic, boutique butchers on the Upper East Side. But it was good for a big-deal dinner, not for breakfast. She knew he could never eat this much, but she probably didn’t want the butcher thinking she could only afford four ounces of sirloin or tenderloin, whatever the hell it was. It was a little too well-done for him, but at least not her usual revolting, underdone beef-as-wounded-flesh. He’d thought about telling her he wasn’t going to eat red meat anymore, but of course that would mean he couldn’t order it in restaurants where people actually understood the meaning of medium-rare.

  “Oh, speaking of fuss, when we go out with the McDevitts and the Schottlands Saturday night for your birthday, would you mind if I asked Jordana and Clark to join us?” Bob knew exactly where this came from: the Times. They had run something about how people with younger friends live longer and they’d run shots of a couple of gatherings where kids in their twenties were mingling with what appeared to be forty- and sixty- and eighty-somethings.

  “No. It would be inappropriate. I mean, we’ve been doing birthdays with these people for years, so how, all of a sudden, can we suddenly say, ‘We want to bring our daughter along’? Anyway, they’re just dating.”

  “Living together and, in my humble opinion, very, very serious. Don’t the names
Jordana and Clark sound great together? Very modern but not too hip. I only wish he wasn’t so hairy. I hear his father is too. When he’s sitting down and I walk around in back of him, I can see the hair on his back kind of merging with the hair on his head, except it’s curlier …” Endless babble. But the steak wasn’t bad, and at least she had stopped salting it before putting it under the broiler, which would have turned it into striated muscle with rigor mortis. “…but he’s really very impressive, on the partner track at one of the top firms, and don’t forget he’s thirty, so he can hold his own in conversation. I was a little surprised, frankly, that someone like him would look at a summer associate, but she does keep herself in fabulous shape and …”

  Bob swallowed. Good, actually good. He gave her a nod. In the old days he would have said something like, Here’s looking at you, kid, except then she’d be repeating it back to him, ad nauseum, for weeks, raising a Diet Coke to him in a toast, or as a salute when he was putting on a tie in front of the mirror, or as an overworked conversational comma to punctuate her babble. Another bite. Maybe if he ate enough of the steak she’d cut him a little slack on the eggs.

  “… right before she began dating him,” Chrissie was saying, “I started noticing packages from Sephora.com. I mean, it never ceases to amaze me that there’s a generation that buys makeup online, but there you go.”

  He swallowed again. A little too big of a bite, not quite enough chewing. The steak was right there, at the top of his throat, but it wasn’t going down. He tried to cough it up quietly, but that didn’t work, so he coughed harder. Except then he realized he couldn’t cough. She was looking at him quizzically: head cocked to the side so that half her chin lifted up from her hands. Maybe she had a puzzled look in her eyes, but, as her brow had been Botoxed out of commission, he couldn’t be sure.

  The steak is caught in my throat, he started to say, but then realized he couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. My airway is blocked! he thought, amazed because he always thought of that happening in restaurants, seeing all those Heimlich maneuver notices on his way to the men’s room. No, one good, really hard cough. Bob brought his fist up to his mouth and almost stabbed himself with his fork, so he let it fall from his hand to clank on the plate. The hardest cough he could manage, but the cough wouldn’t come. Look! Don’t you see I’m trying to cough up that fucking glob of steak, you stupid bitch?

  Chrissie’s hands clutched the edge of the table and she said something brilliant like, “Huh?” Didn’t understand what was happening, because all she did was sit there, her jaw dropping as though she couldn’t believe her eyes. No, more like she was waiting for some terrible, shocking thing to happen as she watched the horror movie.

  Bob banged his fist on the table, knocking over his juice glass. She started to look around for a napkin, so he banged it twice more to get her attention, then pointed to his throat. Yes, yes, that’s right, I’m choking, you idiot, and I can’t breathe and obviously I can’t talk.

  “Is something wrong?” she squeaked.

  Oh my God, this is a goddamn nightmare. No air, no air could get through. He’d always been one of those if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed-try-try-again types, but nothing he could do—

  His chest felt like it was about to expand, but then it wouldn’t. Trying harder didn’t work. Be calm. Don’t panic. Maybe try to inhale through my nose. No. Nothing happened.

  He could die. He could. He could actually die. He could choke to death and that moron was just sitting on her tub of a butt asking if something was wrong.

  The Heimlich maneuver. He put his hands mid-torso and pushed to demonstrate. No reaction. Okay, maybe her jaw dropped a little more so she looked like the idiot she was. Desperately, he made a grand arc with his finger to tell her, Come around here. Get off your ass and … Pushing against the table, he managed to stand, although he was bent over, as if taking a bow. Then he mimed the Heimlich business again. What do you need, you stupid twit? Written directions? Voice-over narration? How stupid are you that you can’t see that this is an emergency? He’d show her. He swept his forearm across the table, knocking off plates and silverware, coffee cups and the steak and eggs. The stupid piece of parsley she put on practically everything that came to the table seemed to be in a universe with different gravity. It floated …

  I’ll do it myself! Stay calm. He’d read about it. If you’re alone and you find yourself choking, you do the Heimlich on yourself. But he couldn’t remember illustrations. The same: probably the same way. He pressed his hands against his diaphragm and pushed and pushed. Powerful arms, the guy in the gym told him once, seeming not to hold it against him that even after the free demonstration lesson Bob had decided against one-on-one training.

  No. It wouldn’t come out. Nothing he could do … He was starting to feel … lack of oxygen. Woozy. Not faint, he wasn’t going to faint. And it was like getting punched over and over again, fear! fear! fear! as if his panic was a sadist attacking him.

  Finally, she was getting up out of her chair, but like a movie in slo-mo. Maybe time was stretching, the way people say it does during a car accident. So Chrissie was finally getting it, and was actually moving, but it was like she was just a fucking fat turtle on two legs.

  “I’ll call 911,” she said, as if she were saying something routine, like, I’ll call my mother. Now she was strolling—fucking ambling, goddamn it, as if browsing a sale at Bloomingdale’s—to the phone. What was she thinking? Didn’t she get that this was the biggest emergency ever? What did she want him to do, die?

  Die? No. She loved him, which showed how dumb she was, because he’d fallen out of love … What did she have to gain by his death? Nothing. Freedom. What would she do with freedom? Who the hell would want her? No, ridiculous. But she was taking her time. He couldn’t see her face because the phone was on her stupid little bill-paying desk that she called command central, as if she were a person who could command anything.

  Bob shook the table to get her attention but it barely moved. Not much sound. Swept everything off except her water bottle and the salt and pepper. Getting worse than woozy now. Hurry, bitch. She had nothing to gain by—

  Aunt Beryl’s money. The last statement, bottom line. Three mil something. Can’t remember. He managed to grab the salt and pepper shakers, bang them together, and they made a dull, ceramic clonk. Clonk, clonk, clonk. Chrissie stank in a crisis, froze, but she did love him. Some things you just know.

  She turned toward him with the last clonk. “You should see yourself,” she said. “Your face is a weird dark color.” She squinted. “Your lips are actually turning blue.”

  What? What is this, some kind of deranged power play in which she shows she has the power of life and death? And then she’ll come running over and squeeze and then when I cough it out she’ll say something like, This is to show you what it feels like when someone acts like they don’t give a shit about you. Doesn’t she get it? I am dying. Dying.

  “Don’t worry,” Chrissie said, “I’m going to call 911 … the second you stop breathing.” She ran her hands over the lapels of her bathrobe as if they were the collar of a sable coat. “If this surprises you, it shouldn’t. Do you know you treat me like I’m nothing? How long I’ve hated you?” She asked it so casually, like, Do you know how long it’s been since you got the car washed? “Your contempt, your absolute contempt for me.” Strange, her voice wasn’t a screech, but lower, much lower than he’d ever heard it. “When we go out with Times people, you’re embarrassed by me.”

  Then she gave him the finger. Standing there, three feet from the phone, sticking it up high.

  “Did you think you were dealing with such an idiot that I didn’t see it? Or someone without feelings? I can’t tell you how many nights I prayed you’d get run over by the 34th Street bus.” He tried coughing again, but he couldn’t. “This is a gift from God, you bastard. Your birthday, my gift. Half the time you say something and I’m thinking, Drop dead, you cheap fuck.” She smiled, her face luminous.
“And now you are!”

  Last ounce of life. Bob lurched toward his wife knowing she was probably thinking, He’s walking like Frankenstein, but he was dizzy and his legs … his pants had turned to lead and every step … Lift the leg up, put it down, now the other leg.

  “I tried so hard! And the harder I tried, doing new sex things, reading every single boring section of the Times and trying to make meaningful conversation, the more disgust I saw in you. But you never had the balls to leave me, did you? You know why, Mr. Hyena Breath? Because you knew nobody else would have you.”

  He wasn’t going to make it over to her. So dizzy, and falling …

  Bob fell over one of her Shaker chairs that she said went absolutely perfect with the Tuscan farmhouse look. The chair crashed to the travertine floor and he collapsed on top of it. A microsecond before his forehead banged onto the cold tile, his stomach and chest hit the back post. The force of his almost-dead weight against the wood was so violent that even as two ribs cracked, his torso was rammed in such a way that all the air in him was pushed up and out, along with Chrissie’s overdone steak.

  She must have thought he was dead, or so close to it, because she turned her back to him and went to the phone. She was pressing the 9 and didn’t see Bob Geissendorfer take three breaths and put his hand over the big new lump on his forehead. Only when he began to rise, lifting himself off the floor with surprising ease, and emitted only a soft “ug” of effort—not a word precisely, but also not a sound made by a dead body—did Chrissie turn.