Unreliable

by Lee Irby

  Do you see the obvious parallels? Although my clothes are reasonably fashionable, I too need to be rescued. At first I thought that Leigh Rose might have been my Elmira, but now that I’m getting to know Paula better, I’m beginning to see things in a different light. We’re really hitting it off. Not to say that we’re a perfect match. She is loud and at times abrasive, and physically my superior, as evidenced by her hobby of marathon running. “I only run from the cops,” I crack, and to her credit she laughs at my lack of rigorous exercise.

  “Then how do you stay in shape?”

  “I like to take long hikes when I can. We have some pretty cool trails around Ithaca, to waterfalls and such, and I guess if you brood enough, you can cover ten miles in an afternoon.” I fail to mention that Lola also enjoyed these excursions and sometimes came with me, but I don’t need to divulge all my secrets over a glass of wine. We’re sitting in Siam, a newish Asian place off Lombardy and the only thing open in our general vicinity.

  “I’d like to climb Everest one day,” she muses, not really vociferously enough to indicate a true passion. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll quit my job and move to Nepal.”

  “I dream of leaving the country all the time.” Yes, and going to countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the U.S. I hear Russia is nice in the winter.

  “Where would you go?”

  I pretend to mull over her question, stumped for an answer, because I honestly don’t spend time envisioning myself in far-off lands. Airplanes terrify me. Driving long distances is even worse. If I could walk to Russia, cross the Bering Strait on snowshoe…“I spent some time in the Czech Republic on a Fulbright.”

  “Would you go back?”

  “No, I’ve been ordered by the U.S. consulate never to go back. Plus, I struck out with every woman in Prague.”

  “I find it hard to believe you have trouble meeting women. You’re very charming and debonair.”

  “It’s an act. I’m actually quite creepy.”

  She giggles with her brown eyes shining at me, strong chin jutting out, veins in her neck bulging—why do I find athletic women so intimidating? There’s nothing soft about her, which is a very sexist way to esteem women, but I do prefer my lovers to have a certain vulnerability. Not only can Paula scale Mt. Everest, she can probably rip it from the earth and throw it across the Great Wall of China. She needs a man as dedicated to physical fitness as she is. My passions, alas, tend toward the unspeakable.

  “Give me an example,” she challenges me in a mirthful tone. “I’m a lawyer, and I like corroborating evidence. Tell me one way you’re creepy.”

  “Just one?”

  “How many are there?”

  “Let me ask you this. Are you more interested in felonies or misdemeanors?”

  “What?” She sounds alarmed now, and her smile vanishes.

  “I’m kidding! I’m not a creep. Ask any of the students I’m sleeping with.”

  She bursts into a hearty guffaw, but inside I’m getting tense and nervous and I can’t relax…okay, I’m no psycho killer, though Lola’s unknown whereabouts are making me quite uncomfortable. Here I am, enjoying myself, having fun with a mature woman who has no children and no husband, dead or alive, while somewhere in the city of Richmond Lola is meeting up with a complete stranger because she thinks I want her to. Afraid of losing me, she’s upping the ante, and it seems like I should do something, anything, to figure out how to defuse the situation. Yet I do nothing but sip mediocre wine.

  “Back in law school, I slept with one of my professors, but it was only because I had to get an A in Contracts and the rumor was if you slept with him, you got the A. I got the A. My guy friends were so pissed! I laughed in their faces. Sucks when we turn the tables, doesn’t it? Some of my more feminist friends were appalled, but again, I didn’t care what anybody thought. Now, would I want my daughter doing that? No way. That professor today couldn’t get away with that.”

  “He couldn’t?”

  “He could? I thought there were policies in place to prevent it.”

  “Those policies only make things worse. The temptations are even greater now, which means the atmosphere is turbocharged, sexually.”

  “Interesting. So it still happens?”

  “Maybe not as blatantly, but there are illicit affairs on every college campus in this country.”

  Her face is flushed, turning a roseate shade. My stomach really can’t handle this topic. Because what I want to do, more than anything, is confide in someone. It’s hard being this alone in the world, lugging around the onerous weight Lola has dropped on my narrow shoulders. My legs are starting to wobble, but I don’t know if I can trust Paula…or anyone.

  “But you’ve never done it?” she asks clinically, as if checking off a list of symptoms.

  “Once.” I can’t believe the sound of my own voice, disembodied and hovering above me.

  “Oh, really? Not that I’m surprised. I’m sure all kinds of girls have a crush on you.”

  “It was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life and I deeply regret it.”

  She doesn’t know what to make of my unprovoked admission and studies me with abashed curiosity, obviously needing more of the story but too polite to ask for additional details. She offers condolences instead, heartfelt and genuine. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It just ended and I’m still a little freaked out by it. I’m sorry to be telling you this—you probably think I’m some heinous sexual predator, but it really wasn’t like that. She initiated it and I wasn’t strong enough to resist.”

  “I wouldn’t beat myself up over it. Chalk it up to the frailty of human nature. We’ve all done stupid things. It’s not like you killed her, for crying out loud.”

  Something in me gets dislodged, and a boulder comes tumbling out of my mouth. “She’s here.”

  “Where?” Paula begins looking around the small interior of the restaurant. There are maybe ten other patrons, none of whom seem to be likely candidates for a college-aged femme fatale.

  “No, she’s here in Richmond.”

  “She lives here?”

  “No. She drove down from Ithaca because she was so upset when I ended things.”

  Paula laughs empathetically. “Listen, the only reason I’m not sleeping with hot young guys is because I can’t. They no longer give me the time of day.” She pretends to wipe tears from her eyes. “How did we get on this subject? I think I could use another glass of wine.”

  She looks around for our waiter, a portly gent who spoke broken English and wore an apron that looked to have the innards of a slaughtered animal smeared all over it.

  Can I get away with dating Paula, who’ll become my step-aunt tomorrow? I do need a good lawyer, and she’s very easy to talk to. Not sure how she’ll take my perpetual flaccidity, but true love can conquer all. Not that I can love anyone. Isn’t that Dostoyevsky’s famous definition of hell? The inability to love? If so, I’ve reached the penthouse suite—er, basement grotto.

  Paula spies the waiter, who seemed to be hiding behind a soda cooler, and waves him over. Then my phone rings. I assume that Lola is calling to tell me that she’s rendezvoused with her online lover, and I’m actually considering not speaking with her. She can’t spoil everything in my life. Let me have one last night out with a classy woman. Is that too much to ask? With a stern look on my face, I check the caller ID, only to be completely blindsided by who it is.

  Leigh Rose Wardell.

  “I have to take this,” I tell Paula, pushing back from the table. I’m shaking from a sudden onset of nerves, and my trembling index finger has trouble pushing the red Answer icon to engage. “Hey,” I say sweetly once I get outside into the hot night air. Dreams never die, as long as you never let go of them.

  “I told you to stay out of this.”

  A man’s voice, gruff and angry. My head snaps back as though I’d been jabbed on the chin with a savage punch. “Who is this?”

  “You don’t know
what’s going down and now you’ve really screwed up.”

  It sounds like John Graziano’s voice, but why would he use Leigh Rose’s phone to call me? I look up and down Lombardy mistakenly thinking that I’m being watched. But I see only the usual human flotsam milling around. More to the point, why in the world am I being hauled back into this drama at all? Graziano already told me to stay away and I haven’t done anything in the interim to meddle. It might behoove me to point out this fact. “Graz, hold on. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Dude, you’re messing with the wrong people for the wrong reasons. I don’t know if I can fix this.”

  “Fix what? I haven’t done anything! Where’s Leigh Rose? She’ll tell you.”

  “Very funny, Eddie. You always had a great sense of humor.”

  “I’m not kidding!”

  “Eddie, I like you. I got no heat with you. Think of this as a courtesy call. You need to be very careful. If you’re telling the truth, then she’s lying, and I already told you that she’s crazy and you can’t trust her. She just might get you killed.”

  “What did she say? I haven’t talked to her since the hotel and so I really don’t know what to tell you. What’s going on? Be straight with me, Graz. I deserve that much.”

  But he doesn’t answer. The call goes dead and I’m left with a phone in my hand and a hole in my heart with the diameter of a bottle of scotch. My own safety matters little; if Jeb Wardell wants to take me out, he’s welcome to try and I might just help him finish the job. But Leigh Rose is in danger. They have taken her phone, but since they called me, they must not know where she is. She’s made a run for it, apparently. But why would she even need to go to such an extreme and abscond without her phone? Unless she’s already dead and they’re setting me up to take the fall…echoes of Poe again, who imagined his loved ones were dead, in his tattered clothes and poor health…

  Shaken, I try to gird myself before going back inside. My head is pounding riotously, however, and so I pace back and forth on the sidewalk until a modicum of composure settles in. But that’s proving to be difficult with the welter of emotions bursting inside. Did Leigh Rose claim her undying love for me—and did that get her killed? Or has she bolted out of her gilded cage in order to seek me out, which without a phone will prove to be a daunting task? Should I go look for her? I wouldn’t even know where to start.

  Paula must think I’m insane. I have to go back before she calls 911, but I’m not much in the way of company at the moment. Who would be, after getting threatened for no reason? They think they can push me around. Graz called to intimidate me, but guess what? They’re reading me all wrong. They think I care! Ha! They assume that I have the same aspirations as a normal person, when in fact my entire moral axis has rotated dramatically in the past twenty-four hours. I press the Redial button on my phone, not even sure what I’m going to say, standing beneath a streetlight with a hand jauntily placed on a hip, jaw set in stone…but no one answers. Leigh Rose’s voice mail kicks on but I don’t leave a message.

  I take a deep breath and exhale through my nose, mimicking an exercise Bev taught me from her days as a yoga instructor. She didn’t like it when I took her class, though, because I wasn’t flexible enough to keep up. I never understood why she married me. Even on our wedding night I was confused. I always knew she’d snap me in half, that I was too brittle for her. Ithaca was crawling with pseudo-intellectuals who could maintain a downward dog pose for more than six seconds, and one day Bev would replace me with a more limber model. The thing is, I don’t even know if Igor can touch his toes.

  One last cleansing breath…Bev would be so proud. And appalled. But not surprised. I can already hear her at the press conference: I could have predicted this years ago.

  “Sorry that took so long,” I tell Paula once I’m back inside the restaurant. The festive mood has been spoiled, and I can tell she’s both worried and annoyed. She had to have seen me prowling around like a caged lion. There’s really no plausible explanation for that, other than the truth. Oh, what a concept! I can just be honest with everyone.

  “I hope it wasn’t bad news,” she offers coolly.

  “Actually, no. Just more of the same. The last few days have been…” I laugh like an asthmatic lunatic, devoid of mirth, just a bitter caterwaul from someone befuddled by events.

  “Was it the student?”

  At first I’m not sure to whom she’s referring, and my mouth gapes in temporary confusion. She’s talking about Lola, duh. Lola who listened to me, who hated tedium as I did, who didn’t care about my erection—we fell in love without ever making it, at least in the normative sense. To think I was going to ignore her if she’d called! Why won’t she call now? Because she’s risking life and limb for me, the stupid kid. I’m seized, absolutely gripped, by an overwhelming desire to hold her. I really can’t explain these jarring vicissitudes that overtake me, these mad alterations of my feelings for her. Why didn’t we just get married? We actually discussed it back in May, during Finals Week. Lola was studying for an interesting class on the history of the family as a social construct. We were in my apartment on North Plain Street, and I’d just volunteered to go get a burrito because she was famished. I noticed her face was buried in a book called The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz, and Lola quickly explained the central argument, that at no time in American history was there ever such a thing as a “normal” family with mom, dad, and the kiddies. “Kind of like us,” she tossed out with a sly grin.

  “We’re a family?”

  “Why not? We could be.”

  I have to admit that the entire concept enchanted me, at least during the walk to the Mexican place, where I envisioned the bliss of spending the rest of my days with Lola and her harem of oversized peckers. This same notion also sickened me, but not quite as much as it allured me—close to equilibrium, though not enough to repel me. And so over bean burritos and bottles of Sol we talked matrimony. She was eager to show the world her undying love for me, which I begged her not to do—so instead she just let Dahlia in on our little secret, thereby razing our private Idaho.

  “No,” I tell Paula, suspended somewhere between a dream state and a brutal realization. “I won’t be hearing from her again.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I just know her. No, that call was another disaster. Normally so very little happens to me, that this parade of misfortune is most unusual.”

  “If you need to go…”

  “I need something. A new job. A new car. A clean conscience.”

  “Let me pay for the wine. My treat.” She reaches for her purse, and I stare glumly at her hands, her fingers long and slender, skin leathery and tough from her constant exertions. My hands? Soft as throw pillows.

  “We haven’t even gossiped about the wedding,” I protest listlessly.

  “Oh, that. I like your mother. She’s a sweet lady.”

  “But?”

  “But nothing. My brother is old enough to make his own choices and like I said, I don’t judge people.”

  “You agree that the arrangement is a bit odd.”

  “Oh, for sure. But all married couples are odd in my opinion.” A hearty laugh, a credit card produced, and an evening draws to a whimpering close because that’s how the world will end, not with a bang, but with a…except that we both hear a bang. A very loud noise that sounds like an explosion.

  “What was that?” she asks me, voice tremulous as she rises up from her seat.

  “That sounded like a bomb going off.” I jump to my feet. The other customers stand up, too, and we all gravitate to the street. The local residents join us, streaming out onto Monument Avenue, and en masse we head toward the Robert E. Lee statue a block away because that was the direction of the loud noise. The first sirens wail in the distance, horns blare, and the air reeks of smoke, though I see no fire. We hurry our pace, and the gathering crowd grows in silent increments. Soon we are at Allen.

  “Oh my God,” Pa
ula cries. She points a trembling finger. My eyes trail over to the statue. The marble plinth remains, but the bronze figures that had once stood on it are now missing. No, not missing: just toppled over, mangled on the turf below in a smoldering heap.

  “They blew it up,” Paula sniffles. “I can’t believe that just happened.”

  She struggles to fight back tears, wiping at her eyes that continue to stare in disbelief at the empty space still lit up by the spotlights below. But now they seem more like searchlights combing the night sky for another bomb to drop. I put an arm around her shoulders and she leans her head against my chest, and we cling to each other as more sirens scream in the distance.

  18