by Ed McBain
“Then why’d you come up here?”
“Because you invited me for a drink.”
“And you believed me.”
“No, I didn’t believe you. I just wanted to see if you could really be this goddamn corny.”
“Yes, I am this goddamn corny. Take off your coat.”
“Why?”
“Are you going to sit and drink with your coat on?”
“Are you going to offer me a drink?”
“Yes.”
“Okay then.”
She takes off her coat, drapes it over the chair and then sits on it. I begin pouring from the bottle on the dresser.
“What is that?” she asks.
“Scotch.”
“I abhor scotch.”
“It’s all I have.”
“You’re not too terribly well-appointed, are you?”
“Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you sound phony as hell?”
“Sometimes I am phony as hell,” she says. “In fact, I’ve been phony as hell all night long. In fact, would you like to know something?”
“Yes, what?”
“You make me phony as hell.”
“How do I do that?”
“How old are you?”
“Forty-two.”
“Jesus!”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It’s got everything to do with everything. Are you giving me a drink, or aren’t you?”
“All I’ve got is scotch.”
“With a little water, please. I hate scotch.”
I walk to where she is sitting, and I cup her face in my hands and very gently kiss her. She responds to the kiss, and then looks up at me blankly.
“Why don’t we just quit right now, okay?” she asks.
“No,” I say, and kiss her again.
“He was a good kisser, too,” she says.
“Who?”
“My writer in Chicago.”
“But suicidal.”
“Yes. So are you.”
“A good kisser?”
“Suicidal. This is suicidal. I’m in love with someone.”
“Yes, Roger Harris.”
“Yes.”
“Of VISTA fame.”
“Yes. The honest thing to do is get the hell out of here. Right now.”
“No.” I walk into the bathroom and add water from the tap to both glasses. When I hand one to her, she looks into it for a moment, and then says, “If you’re trying to get me drunk, forget it. I never get drunk.”
“I’m not trying to get you drunk.”
She extends the glass, smiles, and says, “Here’s to our little enterprise.”
“Which one?”
“Oh, Jesus, must you always do that? It gets very tiresome, really it does.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“All the little innuendoes. Can’t you please stop it? Everything you say doesn’t have to be directed toward just one thing, you know.”
“In the beginning, it does.”
“That’s all there’s going to be, is a beginning. So cut it out.” She gestures with the glass. “Do you want to drink to our little enterprise, or don’t you?”
“To our little enterprise,” I say, and we clink glasses.
“To the bridge,” she says.
“To the bridge,” I answer, and kiss her again.
“Stop it,” she says, “I haven’t had my drink yet. Besides, this doesn’t make sense.”
“The way you kiss me makes sense.”
“I can kiss you that way all night long, and it still wouldn’t make sense.” She nods emphatically. She stares at me. She keeps staring at me. Then she rises, swallows the scotch in her glass, says, “I hate scotch,” and puts the glass on the dresser. She half sits on the dresser and crosses one booted ankle over the other. We are still staring at each other. I move to her and kiss her again.
“Why are we doing this, would you please tell me?” she asks.
“Why don’t you just shut up?” I say.
“I don’t want to shut up. Why are we doing this?”
“Because I want to make love to you.”
“Well, I don’t want to make love to you,” she says. “I’m a virgin.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, nobody’s a virgin.”
“That’s true,” she admits. “But I’m not on the pill.”
“You are on the pill.”
“I’m not. I was on the pill last summer in Arizona, but I’m not on it now.”
I unzip her dress and lower it to her waist. I unclasp her brassiere and kiss her breasts.
“So goddamn stupid,” she says, and shrugs out of the dress and the brassiere and tosses both onto the chair with her coat. She removes her headband and places it on the dresser. She is wearing only tights and boots now. Shaking her head, she moves to the chair and takes off the boots and then, without embarrassment, removes the tights. I go to the bed very quietly, and sit on its edge, and unobtrusively, so unobtrusively lest she change her mind, begin taking off my clothes. She is searching in her bag. She lifts from it a tiny white plastic container. There are four blue rhinestone chips in its lid, and a hole where a fifth one has fallen out. She takes off the lid and then carefully removes her contact lenses, first one, then the other, and puts them into the container. I have taken the bedspread off the bed, and she comes to me now and sits beside me and looks into my face again, searchingly this time. Her eyes are a paler green without the lenses. They appear slightly out of focus.
“I’m in love with someone,” she says in a whisper.
“Yes, I know.”
“I really am,” she says.
“Yes, yes.”
I ease her onto the pillow and begin kissing her. I kiss her mouth, and her closed eyes, and the tip of her nose, and her ears, and her throat, and her breasts, and the wild tangle of her crotch. I touch her everywhere. She responds to me with genuine passion, though occasionally she sighs heavily and seems about to shake her head.
I talk to her all the while we are making love. I do not talk in bed with Abby, never, but with this girl, with this Sara, I am garrulous and lyrical. I tell her how I love to watch her move, the clean stride, the long swift look of her in boots and abbreviated skirt (I tell her that at the airport my first inclination was to run my hand up the inside of her leg to her crotch, that I had to use every effort of will to prevent myself from doing so and being arrested on the spot), the brown leather sombrero tilted wantonly over one eye, the long brown hair falling loose down her back, loose and free.
She listens while I cover her with kisses and conversation.
I tell her that I was furiously jealous last night when I called and found her line repeatedly busy, suspecting she was in deep and intimate conversation with sundry snot-nosed college boys while I longed to hear her voice. I tell her that her voice excites me, even when she is being phony and haughty and precisely articulate. I tell her that I love the theatricality of her, the way she opens a package of cigarettes, or lifts a drink, or removes her contact lenses, the very dramatic way she has of performing unimportant tasks to make them somehow personally her own (had anyone ever really torn the red cellophane strip from a package of cigarettes before Sara pulled it free like the rip cord on a parachute?). I tell her I love the trappings of her, the leather headband that makes her look like a sullen Indian princess, her grandmother’s wedding band, the fresh-water pearl from the suicidal Chicago hack, the idiotic container for her contact lenses, with its single open eye socket where one of the blue rhinestones is missing. I tell her all this while we kiss and touch together, and she listens, and occasionally sighs as though in sorrow.
When I am inside her, when she is open to me, cradling me and enfolding me, intimate now I think, possessing her now I think, I whisper into her ear gutter talk of cunts and cocks and lustful fucking, and she listens quietly, until at last we come not a heartbeat apart, and fall back against the pillows spent.
I kiss her often during the night. Her mouth is always there, receptive and responsive. She sleeps straddling my thigh, her legs scissored around me.
In the morning, when I awake, she is gone.
(Confirming my surmise that this is all a fantasy.)
Thursday, October 24
She arrives at the hotel at the stroke of noon. The university bell tower is tolling the hour when the battered red Volkswagen pulls to the curb. A Negro is at the wheel. (I am forty-two years old, and the word “black,” drummed into my head as derogatory, still comes hard to me. But I am learning all the time.) Sara introduces us. His name is Seth Wilson. He is the university’s writer-in-residence fellow. He wears his hair in an Afro cut, and he ducks his head and smiles sheepishly when he takes my hand. His grip, however, is firm and strong. I immediately distrust him because: He is a writer and Sara has already exhibited a strong proclivity toward such types; he has no reason to smile the way he does unless he is hiding something; it is stupid to have him here on the morning I am going out to reconnoiter a bridge I expect to blow up; he is black, and the thing he is hiding with his guilty smile is his desire to chop off my head with a machete.
We stand awkwardly on the sidewalk in the middle of a Western mountain town, each of us separately wondering what the other has done or is doing to Sara. Race relations are not improved an iota. Sara breaks the deadlock by waggling her fingers at him and sending him off to write the Great American Novel.
“Do you want to drive?” she asks me.
“I thought maybe you had someone else in mind,” I say.
“What?”
“I thought maybe you wanted to take a few dozen other college kids along, explain to them that this is the bridge I’m going to blow up, you know, give them the exact time and date. I thought maybe that’s what you had in mind.”
“Seth is an old friend,” she says.
“And entirely trustworthy.”
“He knows nothing about any of this.”
“Yet.”
I start the car. We drive through the main street of the town in silence. She is wearing a long coat that affords only occasional glimpses of her legs.
“Have you been to bed with him?” I ask.
“Once.” She pauses. “But we didn’t do anything.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Well, we necked.” She pauses again. “He has stars on his ceiling. Luminous little stars. I love his ceiling.” She seems to search for words, she is different today. The bored sophisticate is gone. There is only a little girl in a large black coat. “Actually, we talked mostly. He’s a very nice boy.” Her voice sounds wistful.
“Did you tell him you were in love with Roger Harris?”
“I tell everyone I’m in love with Roger Harris. Because I am.”
“Oh? Do you go to bed with everyone?”
“I’ve been to bed with only three people in my life. Roger, you, and Seth. And I didn’t do anything with Seth. Except neck a little. And talk.”
“And look at his luminous stars on the ceiling.”
“Yes, they’re lovely. I love little paper stars on the ceiling.”
This girl, this waif in the enormous black overcoat, is as phony as the one with the haughty expression. Her voice is almost a whisper, she speaks of paper stars in something like profound awe, she wears on her face a look of incandescent wonder. Her hands are folded in her lap like a third grader’s. I notice for the first time that her hair is caught in a pony tail at the back of her neck, fastened there with a wrought silver barrette (another souvenir of Arizona, no doubt). She is wearing flat black ballet slippers. She is lost in her big coat, poor girl, lost in a universe too immense for her, poor little lost darling who spends the night with a Negro looking up at his luminous stars and wondering about the mystery of it all. She is totally full of shit.
“Don’t be cross,” she says. “It’s such a beautiful day. Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
“Gorgeous.”
“Soon, they’ll all be gone. Leaf after leaf after leaf.” She turns to me suddenly, the coat opening over a quick flash of remembered knees. “Do you know what the plural of leaf is?”
I glance at her face. Her green eyes are bright with discovery. I am thinking that the only time she is honest is when she is in bed, and I am also beginning to wonder about that.
“Of course I know what the plural of leaf is,” I say, and turn my eyes back to the road. We have come beyond the town now. The grade is beginning to slope gently upward as we enter the foothills.
“What is it then?”
“Leaves.”
“No. Leafs.” She nods. “One leaf, two leafs, three leafs. I love leafs, don’t you?”
“No, I love little paper stars.”
“Those, too,” she says, and hugs herself in satisfaction.
“Where’s the heater in this damn car?” I ask.
“There’s a little knob down there. Are you cold? Do you want me to turn it on?”
“Please.”
She begins twisting a knob somewhere near the floor. “This is Seth’s car,” she says. “I know you’ll be pleased to learn that.”
“Yes, I’m thrilled.”
“It’s very much like Seth, actually. Sweet, and battered, and comfortable and dependable. It’s a nice little car.”
“It’s a darling little car.”
“Would you like some music?” she asks. Without waiting for my answer, she turns on the radio. A rock-and-roll song erupts into the automobile. Sara’s slippered foot beats in time to the music. “Why are you angry?” she asks suddenly. “Didn’t you enjoy last night?”
“Yes, I did. Very much.” I cannot take my eyes from the road now because it is beginning to twist around the side of the mountain. “Didn’t you?”
“That was last night,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve forgotten it already. I’ve turned it off.” She nods in agreement with herself. “I can do that. Turn things off. Just like that.” She snaps her fingers. The sound is like a rifle shot in the small automobile.
“That’s a wonderful knack,” I say drily.
“Yes, it is,” she agrees. “Can you do it? Turn things off? Like that?” She snaps her fingers again. The coup de grâce.
“No, I can’t. Total recall, remember?”
“Right, right, total recall.” She is immediately lost in thought. She bites her lip for effect. A disc jockey is prattling about a skin cream that will remove unsightly blemishes. He finishes his spiel and unleashes another musical assault. “I can hardly remember anything at all about last night,” Sara says.
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s not. I’ve already forgotten almost all of it.”
“What do you remember?”
“Hardly anything.”
“Something though.”
“Yes, something.”
“What?”
“Your kissing me all night long. No one has ever kissed me all night long.”
“Not even Seth?”
“Oh, fuck off with Seth, will you please? He’s just a good friend.”
“And what am I?”
“You’re a forty-two-year-old married man,” she says flatly and harshly and coldly and almost viciously, “who may get killed blowing up a bridge at the end of the month.”
“Two days after Halloween, to be exact.”
“All Hallows’ Eve, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. All Hallows’ Eve. And leafs.”
“Yes, leafs,” she says angrily. “And there’s your damn bridge.”
I stop the car and pull up the emergency brake. We both get out. Sara comes around to the driver’s side. We are on a dangerous curve, and there is no time for extended conversation.
“What time will you be back?” I ask.
“Half-past four.”
“What time do you have now?”
“I don’t have a watch.”
“Everybody has a goddamn wat
ch.”
“Except me,” she says, and slams the door, and drives off.
There is a majesty to this ravine and the bridge that crosses it.
I am a city boy and do not normally react hysterically to natural displays, but this V-shaped open wedge in the earth is aflame with autumn, its steep sloping sides racing with reds and oranges and yellows, scattered with the softest browns, boldly scarred with low jagged rock outcroppings, black and gray and the purest white. The sky is tight above it, the flaming hillside burning more furiously against its cool, cloudless blue. Across the divide, the bridge hurls its girders, buries its steel deep in concrete embedded in the cliff’s steep sides.
I must destroy this bridge if we are to survive.
There is a strong wind, and my eyes are wet. It keens in the steel girders, swirls and eddies in the canyon below, sends fallen leaves into frenzied arabesques. The earth is alive. I am here to deliver death.
I start down into the ravine.
The rattle of the leaves (she has brainwashed me, the word sounds incorrect; surely it has always been “leafs”) could easily disguise the rattle of a snake. This is the West, and such things are not unheard of. My eyes scan the terrain. It is difficult enough to keep my footing; I do not need the added burden of having to watch for rattlesnakes. But I study every fallen branch before stepping over it, scrutinize each flat rock for signs of menace coiled and waiting to strike. There is no faithful retainer here to suck out the venom if I am hit. I am alone.
(“If you fail, you fail alone,” Sara has said. “No one will be there to mourn your death.”)
At the bottom of the ravine, I begin making my sketch of the bridge.
Sara picks me up at four-thirty on the dot. She is nothing if not punctual. As soon as I get behind the wheel, she says, “They want to see you.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Why?”
“They want a progress report.”
“There’s been no progress.”
“Maybe that’s why they want a report.”
It is close to five when we get back to town. The long shadows of dusk are claiming the streets. The lamppost lights suddenly go on, evoking a small sharp cry of surprise from Sara.
“I’ve never seen that before in my life!” she says.
“What?”