by Saul Black
“I’ve been with Clayton for five minutes and I know she’s going to say no.”
“Would you ask her? This is going to take forever with a pencil and paper. Not to mention a brain that’s a shadow of its former luminous self.”
“I’ll take a temperature reading,” Valerie said. “I’m not promising anything, either.”
“It’s been good seeing you. But you know that. I’m sorry about the childish remarks.”
The Nick remarks. Valerie had an image of Nick jerking off. Imagining Katherine, legs spread, smiling. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if he had. Wouldn’t it? Her head had room for it. Her heart was another matter.
“It won’t happen again,” Katherine said, getting to her feet. As Warrell ushered her toward the door, she passed close to Valerie. Perhaps only a foot separated them. Valerie found herself noticing that Katherine smelled of hard soap and the prison’s nylon fatigues. When she’d arrested her, she’d smelled of complex perfume and cigarette smoke and cosmetics. Katherine stopped and turned to face her. They didn’t speak, but for a moment Valerie felt again the terrible nakedness. It was as it had always been, as if she had known Katherine in a former life. The space between them livened, as with an electrical charge.
Then Warrell said: “Let’s go, Katherine,” and in a moment the two of them were out the door.
10
Six years, Nick thought, and Katherine Glass still had the power to fuck everything up.
He was in the Le Beau Market on his way home from work, ostensibly for Arborio rice, but in fact because the place exerted a calming influence on him. He supposed he was becoming eccentric. But after ten hours of staring at a desktop screen and trawling binary for the dirty secrets of criminal strangers, the raw colors and rich smells of a great deli were sensually therapeutic. Ditto cooking. Chopping yellow peppers or grating Parmesan or pouring out a slug of olive oil gave him back some of childhood’s aesthetic innocence. Eccentric—or just middle-aged? He was only forty-one. But cops were like dogs: one of their years racked up seven on the soul. Either way, he was past caring. You were Police. You found things that helped—and did them. That was all. So among other things, he cooked. A waste, half the time, since Valerie’s hours were still the inhuman mess Homicide demanded, not to mention that she ate like a fucking sparrow, but he didn’t care. It gave him pleasure to hear her rummaging in the fridge at some random hour and discovering the wrapped leftovers of whatever he’d made. She ate, when she did eat, with the bulk of her consciousness elsewhere, on the work, but every now and then the deliciousness of something she put in her mouth brought her back to immediacy and she actually tasted it. A few months ago he’d woken at three in the morning and heard her in the kitchen. He’d lain in bed in the dark, following her via the sounds, knowing she was going to find the garlic chicken he’d made. After a moment, he heard her say to herself, softly, with delight: Fucking hell.
So let me get this straight, Eugene had said to him, between games not long ago. You do the shopping and the cooking? Yes. Eugene had shaken his head in pained disbelief. And what if you had a kid, and your woman wanted to keep running around chasing bad guys? Would you stay home and take care of it? Maybe. Seriously? Nick had shrugged. I don’t know, he’d said. We’d work something out. Dude, Eugene had said, listen to me, that’s a bad idea. Here’s what’ll happen: Initially—initially, mind you—your gal’ll be all over it. Twenty-first-century enlightened man, so comfortable with his masculinity that he doesn’t care if he’s wearing the domestic dress. She’ll talk you up to her friends. The friends will twinkle with envy. And then in about two years she’ll wonder where all the butch went and end up having an affair with an asshole like me. I’m just saying: don’t say I didn’t warn you. Get an au pair at least. Eastern European, blond. You don’t even have to fuck her. Just to keep your lady on her toes. Plus your kid can learn a foreign language.
Nick had brushed it off, as he did all Eugene’s routines—but it had made him wonder. Not about a house-husband being a turnoff for Valerie (in comparison to the women Eugene claimed to know, Valerie was a different species), but about the ease with which he, Nick, could imagine his life as something around Valerie. It appalled him, slightly, that he had apparently found his sufficiency in her. He was forced to concede, with gentle bemusement, that work was no longer very important to him. It had been getting less important to him ever since he’d left Homicide and retrained in Computer Forensics. This truly astonished him. Working Homicide had felt like a necessary disease. It had defined him in the way it still defined Valerie. It wasn’t just what they did; it was who they were. But he’d left it behind. It had taken so much of his life and soul that some part of him had rung an alarm bell: Get out now before there’s nothing of you left. He hadn’t thought about it that way at the time. In fact he’d gone through the motions of quitting Homicide as if he were watching himself from outside his body, as if he’d been shunted to one side of his life by a quiet demonic presence that had taken over and was making his decisions for him. It had felt inevitable, out of his hands.
And now?
He didn’t regret it. He wanted other things. The moral core of him said it was just that he’d done his share: he’d devoted enough of his life to catching murderers and putting them away. He was entitled, now, to be a little more harmlessly selfish. Walk in the mountains. Cook. Have conversations that went beyond blood-splatter patterns and ropy alibis. Have a life that didn’t, every fucking day, have death at its center. Be a father.
All of this, this strange, gradual metamorphosis, had led him to knowing that he was going to ask Valerie to marry him, and knowing further that she would marry him. If she wanted to carry on working Homicide, fine. He would be part of the life that allowed her to do that. In fact—this was the crux of it—he would be part of the life that stopped her job from driving her completely fucking insane.
Was that it? Did he love her that much?
He was forced to admit that he did. It gave him a sense of surprised peace.
Except now Katherine Glass was back in their lives.
From the moment Valerie had told him about the killer’s note Nick had known that his proposal would have to wait. Katherine stained what needed to be a blank canvas. It wasn’t that Valerie would say no. It was that when she said yes it would be through the toxic haze of Katherine. If he asked her to marry him now, she’d say yes, but she’d wish he’d waited until all this shit was behind her.
He knew all of this without any of it needing to be said. He had to wait. Perversely, not working Homicide made it worse. If he’d been on the current case he would have at least been able to comfort himself with the thought that he was doing his share in closing it, progressing the investigation to its denouement and getting it off both their desks so they had a clear field ahead of them. He and Valerie would have been in it—as six years ago—together.
But was that true? Working the original murders with Valerie back then had been claustrophobic. Katherine and the Man in the Mask had been with them from the moment they woke to the moment they fell asleep, had been the dense air they breathed. That conversation they’d had, Valerie wanting to know if he found Katherine desirable. Superficially, in spite of what Katherine had done. In reality, because of what Katherine had done. Unlike Valerie, Nick hadn’t watched all the hours of video footage. He hadn’t needed to. An hour had been enough. More than enough. The material had gone in and stayed in. One of the victims, Julia Galvez … Katherine had watched while the Man in the Mask beat her with a cane, hard enough so that every resonant whack broke the skin in a bloody stripe. Katherine had told him to stop, then stood with her back to Julia Galvez and spread her ass: Kiss my asshole and you’ll only get three more. Otherwise you get twenty. Your choice. And because Julia Glavez was long, long past anything other than the need for the pain to stop, because anything, anything to minimize her suffering, she did as Katherine said. Nick remembered Katherine’s calm, civilized voice. That’s
it … gently.… That’s right. A little tongue now.… Katherine had laughed softly when she’d done it, turned and lifted Julia Galvez’s face by the chin and looked into her wrecked eyes. Good girl. I said only three more, didn’t I? Then to the Man in the Mask: Give her twenty. Actually, no, just keep going till I come. A little harder, I think. You must admit you’ve been strangely gentle so far.…
“Need any help?”
Nick started. A young guy in a store apron was standing in front of him.
“What? Oh, no—well, actually, yeah. Arborio rice?”
“Sure, let me show you. It’s right over here.”
Nick’s face felt hot and overfull by the time he left the store. He got in his car and sat for a few minutes with the AC going full blast. He wasn’t afraid. Just sad. He’d been Police long enough to know that the innocent days of either/or were long behind him, long behind everyone, if they were honest. Simplicity demanded that either you were fascinated by Katherine or you were repelled by her. He wasn’t repelled by her, beyond knowing that what she was was wrong, had taken a fundamentally wrong turn somewhere in her past, or been compelled to take it by a combination of genetics and accident. Was he fascinated? He had asked himself at the time—and he asked himself, now that she was back in the scheme of things, again.
No, he wasn’t fascinated. It was only her beauty that led your interest to what she did. If she’d been plain his interest simply wouldn’t have engaged. Beauty was an amoral beguilement. It gave weight where there was none. It made what was ordinary and one-dimensional seem mysterious and complex. Beauty made you look. That was all it was. Beauty just made you fucking look.
Six years ago, he had said to Valerie: Katherine Glass is the smartest person I’ve ever met. But for all of that it’s as if she’s missed this huge, simple thing that so many of us less smart people take for granted.
What huge simple thing? Valerie had said.
It had put him on the spot. Because the truth was he couldn’t explain it. He probably wouldn’t be able to explain it now. It turned out this simple thing Katherine had failed to see wasn’t so simple after all, or at least that it was beyond his powers of articulation. In the end, all he’d said was: It’s no good to be the way she is. It’s just no good. I don’t mean morally, none of that shit. I just mean you spend five minutes with her and you can see that everything she does, all the talk and the mischief and the razzle …
Yes…? Valerie had said.
It’s a massive distraction, he’d said. From herself. It’s like she has to talk all the time because if she didn’t she’d hear what she was in the silence. He’d groped for the analogy. She’s like a shark. Has to keep swimming, or it dies. I think she’s terrified.
Terrified or not, he thought now, she was back in their lives. And thanks to her he was going to have to wait to ask Valerie to marry him. It almost made him laugh. He had an image of himself confronting Katherine and saying, furiously: Do you realize that you’re getting in the way of a fucking marriage proposal? In the chaos of her sins, what would that sound like?
He was excited today. But it was like he wasn’t seeing me properly. I didn’t say anything, but something must have told him because then he kind of dialed himself down and said Okay, okay, we don’t need to do it all in five minutes, we can get to that later. Meanwhile come here. Something happens when he just tells me what to do, like my whole body goes deep calm and thrilled at the same time. The place he’s got in the Caribbean he’s got like servants. He showed me a picture. A skinny black boy in a bright-white jacket and past him a big glass window showing the beach, one of those where the sand looks white and the ocean that blue that says warm.
When I saw her that first time I told him I knew and he said it was the same for him. He told me the name of some philosopher guy I can’t remember now, but anyways this guy said no one ever discovers anything, they just remember it. That’s so true. That’s what it’s like with him. Both of them. Like I knew them in some past life. Like I forgot but now I remember. The feeling of homecoming, he said. God, he’s so right. Like the first time I saw her picture in the paper I knew. And in the court it was like a line of warm light between us.
Bad food today. Cheeseburger at work and a packet of Doritos at home and a butterscotch cheesecake. I was mad at myself so I threw all the crap in the cupboards away. Headache. The bullfighter said serves you right. That was another thing. First time I saw that painting I knew it was something.
11
Valerie got in around nine that evening.
“So how was it?” Nick said. He was at the stove, stirring something.
“Ambiguous,” Valerie said. “Surprise. She hasn’t changed much. What’s for dinner?”
“Risotto. In fact, come here for a second and keep stirring this. I need to pee.”
“It smells like booze.”
“Vodka.”
“In risotto?”
“It’s supposed to be white wine, but that’s for sissies.”
“If you’ve cleaned out my Smirnoff, you’re in trouble.”
“Just stir it, Skirt. All the liquid has to be absorbed.”
“You know, your masculinity took a big hit when you left Homicide.”
“Tell me that when you taste it. You know what look I get these days from women? It’s the look that says: I know you’re not appreciated. One of these days…”
While Nick was in the bathroom Valerie checked messages on her phone. One from her mother, one from her sister. It gave her not just the usual vague feeling of guilt (her family had long since gotten used to her unavailability) but something more specific, though she didn’t know what it was.
“Val, honey, it’s just Mom calling.…” (Her mother was always “just Mom” or “only Mom,” as if her existence was, by definition, insufficient; it drove Valerie and her sister nuts.) “I’m reminding you because you asked me to about Cassie’s birthday. I’ve got something for her from you, a little bracelet from that store in Fremont you know she loves.…”
Guilt and more guilt. Guilt because she’d forgotten it was her sister’s birthday—her fortieth, moreover—tomorrow, and they were having a barbecue party at her place in Union City. Guilt because she’d felt immediately annoyed at her mother for reminding her, despite having asked her to do just that. Guilt at having not picked up this message sooner (it was two days old), and guilt at having no fucking clue what store in Fremont it was that Cassie allegedly loved. Terrible daughter, terrible sister. Yeah, her father had said to her when he was still alive, but a terrific cop.…
“In any case, I’ve got the gift receipt, so if she doesn’t like it she can exchange it.…” Pause. Her mother trying and failing to disguise how much she wanted Valerie to make it to the party. “All right, that’s all for now. Give me a call back to let me know you’re okay. And don’t feel bad if you can’t make it. We just want you to do whatever you need to do, and we know … you know. The job. Love you, hon. Bye.”
Redundantly, Valerie consulted her phone calendar. Of course the reminder had popped up, as it was technologically compelled to do, a week ago: Event: Cassie’s 40th. Time: 8:00 P.M. Notes: Mom get present.
“Hey, Val, it’s Cassie,” the next message began. “Listen, you’re probably going to get a call from Mom saying no sweat about Monday, but being Mom she’ll make it sound like you really should come. So here’s the thing: you absolutely do not have to come. This is me, speaking the truth, to you.”
There was a short silence. The phrase—This is me, speaking the truth, to you—was one the sisters had begun using when they were young, for the delivery of sensitive or painful things without malice.
“Anyway, that’s all. Regardless of this dumbass party, I’d love to see you, just the two of us, anytime you’re free. Call me when you can. Love you. Bye.”
Nick emerged from the bathroom.
“I forgot Cassie’s birthday party,” Valerie said.
“She won’t care.”
“Her f
ortieth birthday party. It’s tomorrow.”
“So let’s go.”
“Yeah, I guess I’ll try. My mom got her a gift from me.”
“You’re Police. You’re absolved.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah, but I’m Police, so you’re not absolved from appreciating my risotto. Jesus, get out of the way. It’s ready. You nearly ruined it.”
They ate dinner at the breakfast bar, with Louis Armstrong on in the background. Valerie could sense Nick not asking any more about Katherine. She could sense him stopping himself.
Do you think Nick fantasized about me, Valerie?
It wouldn’t be the end of the world if he had.
“I gave her the stuff he sent,” Valerie said. “She wants in.”
“For what? Revenge?”
“She implied as much, but I think it’s just that she’s bored out of her skull.”
Was she still supernaturally beautiful?
Stop it. He didn’t ask that. Ask him if he fantasized about her. No. Don’t.
“She recognized the paintings?” Nick said.
“Yeah. The paintings, the poem, the whole shebang. Says the Bureau’s going to be wasting its time.”
“Well, if he’s got half her brains, they might be.”
A pause. Nick was live to her, too. Could feel her not saying what she wanted to say.
“It still bothers you, doesn’t it?” he said.
“What does?”
“That she’s the way she is. The things she did.”
“It’ll bother me for the rest of my days. Doesn’t it bother you?”
Nick didn’t answer right away. Not because he was thinking about the question, but because he was thinking about what was underneath it.
“Seriously?” he said. “Of course it bothers me. But it bothers me like malaria bothers me. Or earthquakes. People like Katherine are a fact of the world. We know this. We know this.”
Yes, we do know this, Valerie thought. We can’t unknow the things we know.