by Janice Law
Kim thinks of Joey’s accident and freezes. In her mind she hears Maureen saying, “I always kept the gun locked up, always, always locked up, but Stu wanted it handy. ‘What good’s a gun you can’t get to,’ he’d say. Safety, that was his thing, but it wasn’t very safe for a little boy, was it?” Kim remembers how Maureen’s eyes went wild and dark, how she wept and said, “There were bits of bone on the wall, bits of bone.”
So Kim is reluctant to touch the gun, though Maureen went over the whole process with her, two, three times. Kim stands there, dithering, until there’s a sound— a car somewhere— and she breaks open the chamber revealing neat, shiny bullets with round brass ends. Out they come and in go the ones Maureen brought her. Close up the gun, wipe it, and put it back quick with the oily rag on top.
The carrier latch snaps loud enough to stop Kim’s heart, but there’s nothing, no reaction, no door opening, no face at the window, and all she’s got left to do is to slide the keys back into Chris’s tumbled, greasy jeans and fix herself an early breakfast.
* * * *
Two days, three days, nothing happens. Kim’s beginning to think that maybe there’s another deal, that maybe Chris has pulled a fast one, that maybe they’ll be okay after all.
Maureen wants to know if she’s sure she changed all the bullets, and when Kim says “yes,” Maureen tells her, “Wait and see.”
But Kim’s still jumpy, wired with nerves, so Maureen says, “Don’t worry; we’ve defanged them.” Maureen seems pleased about that and confident. “There’s not a damn thing they can do to us now.”
* * * *
A yellow wash from the neighbor’s security light and Chris shaking her shoulder. “Get up,” he says.
“What is it? What time is it?” Kim’s thinking fire, flood or a racoon in the trailor.
“Let’s go,” he says. “This is the day.”
She gets up and dresses, her hands shaking, though Chris has been defanged, though the gun is harmless, though no matter what Maureen does— calls the police or raises the cash— nobody gets hurt.
The kitchenette reads 5:30 A.M. “You’re way too early,” Kim says. “Stu won’t be at the store before 7:30.”
“Who said we were going to get him at the store?” Chris asks.
“You said I just needed to drop you off. You said . . .”
“Listen, I trust you,” Chris says with this awful heavy certainty. “We’re in this together.”
He puts his arm around her shoulder and they go outside. She expects him to drive, but he motions her behind the wheel and gives her the keys.
“I’ll tell you where to go,” he says. “Keep the lights off until we hit the road.”
The sky’s beginning to gray, but Kim nearly hits the boulder at the driveway end and has to put on the low beams. It’s a relief to get onto the main road and have light. Chris sits beside her, giving orders without any real direction, until they reach a country road, all winding and stone walls. After a mile or so, he has her pull in at a drive with fancy carriage lamps on either side.
“Cut the lights,” he says. Kim has to wait a few seconds until she can see to ease the truck along the circular drive to a three car garage. An attached breezeway with long windows and a glass door connects to the house. Chris pulls on a ski mask and takes the gun out of his jacket pocket. “Keep the motor running,” he says.
None of this is quite real to Kim, though she can feel her hands, which are freezing, and the clammy, coldness of the shirt against her back, and a stiffness in her feet. She’s really in need of sun and heat and someplace different, but the situation, itself, is like something on tv, like a film, a drama, a still picture in the tabloids: “Celebrity Home Invaded by Masked Intruder,” something like that.
When Kim hears the tinkle of breaking glass, she wants to push on the horn and alert the house. She also wants to put the truck in reverse and get the hell out. Instead, she hangs onto the wheel with both hands and tells herself that everything will be all right: crazy at the moment, but without permanent damage. Kim’s still telling herself this when the shots start, one, then two, three, four, close together. She piles out of the truck, stumbles across the gravel drive, and races to the house where lights are coming on, and there’s this indescribably bad, scary atmosphere.
“Chris,” she shouts and then, “Maureen! Stu!” Though that’s careless, not prudent, dangerous, as is running down the hall toward the light, toward the master bedroom, toward Maureen, who, gun in hand, is shrugging her way into a bathrobe. Maureen has a rigid, unfamiliar expression on her face, as if the darkness that used to live behind her eyes has come out into the light for good.
“What’s happened?”
Maureen recognizes her then, recognizes the voice, the face. “Don’t go in there,” she says, meaning the bedroom, where Kim can now see objects, bundles like, lying on the floor. Bundles she somehow knows are Chris and Stu. Kim starts to cry.
“Don’t do that,” says Maureen, touching her shoulder like the old Maureen, the real Maureen, glimpsed for that second then disappearing. “You don’t have time. Go down the field track to the highway and hitch a ride to work.”
“I’ll be late,” wails Kim as if this is all that matters.
“Tell them Chris went out early with the truck,” says Maureen. “You don’t have to know anything else. But get out of here. You’ve got to get out of here now.”
* * * *
Kim walks out the glass doors and takes a moment to see the palms and the crowded strip of sand at the edge of the water. Outside the hotel air conditioning it’s really too warm for her nice receptionist’s blazer, but green’s her best color, and it only takes a few minutes to run to the coffee shop, crowded with delivery guys and workers and other hotel staff on breaks. Kim returns greetings, friendly waves: she’s been around long enough to know people.
Coffees, one with, one without, plus a bagel, a donut, extra sugar. Kim’s already collected her order when she checks the magazine rack and feels time stop for a moment: Princess Diana on the cover again, midnight blue silk, a jeweled necklace broad as your hand, eyes as blue as Maureen’s when she stood on the edge of the grave with all the mauve and white mums and handed over the envelop.
“You’ll need,” said Maureen. “To get started.”
Kim took it; there wasn’t anything else to do, not if she wanted to leave, to start again, to get away from scary bundles and awkward questions and Maureen’s wild eyes.
“Maybe you’ll come back,” said Maureen.
And though Kim said, “Maybe,” at the time, she knows she never can, she never will, because Maureen’s crazy; Stu Gleb was right about that. Just the same, standing in her green hotel blazer just across from the sand, Kim can’t help feeling grateful, and nostalgic, too, about the cemetery and picnics and real life.
My Demon Lover
My mother always warned me, “be careful what you wish for,” and I should have listened, because what I got from my wishes was both unexpected and alarming. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to when I was seventeen and plump. Nothing excessive, I realize now, just definitely on the high side of the size chart. Plump, with problem skin no amount of tetracycline or Cover Girl could solve, I was young, awkward, and a bit lonely. I wanted not just sex and excitement, but romance with a capital R; I was looking for the other side of my soul.
Along the way, I became addicted to the more extravagant templates of romance like Heathcliff and Romeo, men who lived and died and killed, killed, too, for love like Carmen’s Don Jose, demon lovers, every one. I had a taste for the excessive and the improbable; I wanted a spectacular love, the sort that is unreal and unlikely. I wished for it, ached for it, and, ten years down the road when I’d almost settled for what was reasonable, available, and likely, I got my wish.
I was slimmer then. Well turned out, in fact, because I was working as the evening Weather Girl at WFAX, our biggest state channel, pulling in a 20 share and double figure rati
ngs. I was expected to give the evening forecasts, exchange banter with the studio anchors, make happy talk about sunny days, and put on a serious face when meteorological disasters struck.
Not, you’ll perhaps agree, the most promising media position, but one that suited me and which I made my own. Please believe that I am something of celebrity, far better known than either of the anchors. In fact, I possess the best sort of celebrity: glamour combined with authority.
Before moi, the station entrusted its meteorological duties to a succession of good, gray trustworthy father and uncle types, who were losing their hair and clogging their arteries. That tells you right away where television’s head is, doesn’t it? The weatherman has to be trusted, even though it’s far easier to check the weather than most other things in modern life. Better, I say, to have a sleazy, unreliable type at your weather desk and save the solid citizens for important things like renovation companies and auto body shops. But there you are: “image, it’s everything.”
My own image is definitely upscale. Nothing I’m going to tell you makes sense unless you have that clearly and firmly in mind. When I decided on TV, on media as a career, I studied what worked and isolated a certain gloss, a certain presence, a certain style. Although my competitors were attractive, more attractive, really, with their impeccably styled hair, perfect teeth and pretty clothes, they were all white bread, interchangeable, forgettable. I aimed for impact and a more substantial image. The Joan Collins of Dynasty was my pattern: big shoulders, big hair, big eyes, a certain sexual authority.
Weather “Girl” didn’t really suit what I had in mind, but, thanks to managerial timidity, I had to proceed gradually: think Vanna White morphing into Margaret Thatcher. I slowly added bigger shoulder pads, smiled less, pronounced more. I didn’t just read the weather, I predicted it, no “ifs,” “ands” or “buts.”
My anchors would get nervous.
“So Nadine”— I don’t think I’ve mentioned that along the way I changed from “Nancy” to “Nadine”— “what about my golf game? Any chance of sun this weekend?”
You know the right answer as well as I did: (Giggle) “Well, Arnie, there’s some hope, but pack your umbrella.” I dispensed with such wishy-washy pap: “Leave your clubs in the bag, Arnie,” I told him. “It’s going to pour.”
And it did, because, you see, I really know weather. I really do. I have a talent for it. Sure, anyone can learn to read the satellite pictures, interpret the charts, track storms. And if you can’t, there are plenty of people with pocket protectors and cathode pallor who’ll tell you all about them. I do my homework, of course, but I have something else, a real feel for a falling barometer, a nose for a storm. On tough calls, I’m right maybe eight out of ten. Good enough so that the superintendents call when school looks dicey and WFAX supports me even when I disagree with the big national services.
You’ll understand my position now: I’m a recognizable demi-celebrity and a bona fide authority. No simpering and studio banter for me. I’m there to give the weather forecast: to tell you how things are going to be, to predict a future which I already know.
I’ll admit this minor stardom grew my ego. It certainly spawned some backbiting and rug-pulling media gossip. But with ratings like mine, I could smile at criticism and take up personal appearances, charity work, community service. Even politics didn’t seem too farfetched. I was contented, well paid, good looking. I’d almost forgotten that I’d ever wished for anything else.
Then, nearly two years ago, I attended the local Opera Guild’s fall fund raiser— have I told you about my appearance for the Opera in Die Fledermaus? I was one of the New Year’s Eve revelers and, in the jail scene, when the inmates sent out to learn the forecast, I came on and brought down the house. I wore a wonderful period costume, deep purple with a black coq feather trim that made me think the eighteen-nineties would have been my ideal era: a little more rump, a little more bust, a little more tummy, a lot more drapery. Some of us have good frames for drapery, for bustles and flounces. When I put that dress on, I felt I could rule the world, I really did.
Anyway, the Opera fund raiser pulled in all the climbers and strivers: nouveau culture hawks, dutiful old Yankees, Italian-American construction moneybags, plus a smattering of politicians, gregarious and avaricious, eager to show the flag and to prospect for a little wealth of their own. I was being gracious on demand, joking about my “operatic career,” and swapping hurricane stories with Dave Griffith, a lecherous downstate exec possessed of deep pockets and gubernatorial ambitions, when a slim, dark man with a bulging forehead and untidy black hair squeezed around the drinks table and laid his hand on my friend’s arm.
“Dave,” he said, “Hugh Spencer.”
“Hugh! How could I forget! Great to see you. Hugh’s a genius,” my friend Dave said.
Hugh did not dispute this, although he did not strike me as promising. He wore an exceptionally ugly and ill fitting gray suit, an almost threadbare white shirt, and a narrow green tie. He had a lean, pale face and dark, curiously opaque eyes, as if the windows of this particular soul were shuttered tight. Otherwise, his only remarkable feature was an exceptionally wide, white forehead that was over scaled for his thin mouth and narrow jaw. He looked like Edgar Allan Poe on Valium.
“Absolutely a genius: he does video games— and business presentations to die for!” Dave exclaimed and started growling like a sports car revving up. Oblivious to the reactions from other guests, Hugh added a few high-pitched squeals. Drinks sloshing, arms waving, they began a little symphony of sound effects before collapsing in merriment.
“Brilliant,” said our gubernatorial hopeful. “Hugh’s presentation really changed our old gray image.”
“Varoom, varoom,” said Hugh. “That was a Lambroghini, you know.”
“Really!”
“Vintage. There’s nothing like the sound. The sound carries the image there, just picks it up and takes it to another plane.”
Hugh’s face grew animated as he described his work. His black marble eyes glowed, giving his white face the lean and hungry look of a Cassius dreaming of knives and power or the mad intensity of a drugged up poet burning with verse. But even as he talked to my friend, the politician, I could feel Hugh’s focus shifting my way like an overdue weather system.
“This is Nadine Johanson,” Dave said. “WFAX weather desk. The gal who called that killer snow storm last December.”
“I know, I know,” said Hugh, as he shook my hand. “You’re the reason I turned up today.”
Dave laughed. “I didn’t know you were such an incorrigible ladies man, Hugh.”
A film of sweat streaked across Hugh’s brow.
This was not what I’d anticipated. It’s true that I’ve never desired the ordinary, but I’d expected my long desired, completely imaginary prince to be handsome, suave— presentable, at least.
“Ms. Johanson is perfect for my new heroine,” Hugh said. “She’s perfect for the Dark Queen.”
“Queen,” I liked; I was not so sure about his “new heroine.” If you’d asked me at that precise moment, I’d have said I preferred an inconclusive flirtation with Dave Griffith to electronic immortality with Hugh Spencer.
“Another game!” exclaimed Dave. “Listen, not before we get our stockholders’ presentation finished! I tell you, Nadine, this guy can just blow a meeting away!”
“I’ve been working on the new game a while now,” Hugh said. His eyes turned opaque again, like limousine glass.
“You’ve heard of his last one?” Dave asked me. “Stone Tower? This guy could have retired on Stone Tower.”
“My nephews love Stone Tower,” I said.
Mega sales for sure! I couldn’t help regarding Hugh differently, but that dreadful suit suggested he’d done something stupid about the copyright. You can’t trust geniuses for business, can you? I’d retained that much from English Lit.
“My second effort,” Hugh said. “Nice things in it, but this new one is somethin
g special.” He turned to me, his open face as innocent as a schoolboy’s. “You were my inspiration.”
Dave laughed. Dave, I should tell you, is basically a good old boy type jerk. Because of that, he’s going to go a fair way in politics, but not as far as he’d like. I can predict that with confidence.
“Really,” said Hugh. “Your show was a revelation. The clothes, the hair, the tone!”
I was up there with the Lambroghini. Varoom, varoom!
“I saw you as the Dark Queen right away, and once I had her, everything else followed.”
“I’m flattered,” I said.
“You perhaps would like to see it, the game, I mean, The Dark Queen.” He spoke shyly, but even then I could feel that he’d be persistent. There was something different about him. He was a nerd with attitude, a geek of genius. I wondered what else might be hidden behind those shuttered eyes.
“Well, some time,” I said, looking at my watch, the busy person’s hint. A minute more and I would have been out of there. Gone. Captured by Naomi Silverstein, the Opera Guild Chair, or Muriel Nucci, the chorus director, who’d told me I have a nice alto and wanted me to help with a benefit. I was surrounded by the movers and shakers of community culture, courted by politicians, recognized by all, safe, in a word, from the subtle temptations of the imagination.
“No time like the present,” exclaimed Dave, who is singularly lacking in perception. “Listen, my kid, Patsy— you met Patsy at the shareholders meeting,” he prompted Hugh. I didn’t need any reminder. The last time Dave brought the little brat with him to the station, she’d pawed through all my makeup. “If Patsy ever found out Dad passed on a chance to see one of your games pre-publication, I’d never be forgiven.” He brayed with laughter, clapped Hugh on the back, and draped one of his long arms over my shoulder.
Hugh smiled politely, his secret, closed eyes sliding back toward my face.
“Come on,” Dave said. “This’ll be fun. You only like opera when you’re on stage. Lead on, Hugh.”