Virgil came off the stool slowly. Ryan let him take his time.
“Is there any more wine?”
“That’s it. What she’s got,” Virgil said.
“Okay, I’ll see you.” He wanted to push him, run him through the door, but he stepped away and let Virgil take his hat from the counter and put it on, holding the crown lightly with one hand and setting it on his head at the right angle with an easy motion, where it belonged, and not having to adjust it.
“That’s a good hat,” Ryan said.
Virgil gave him a mild look. His eyes moved to Denise. He said, “Take it easy, now,” and walked out.
Ryan closed the door. Denise was pouring the last of the wine into the ten-ounce glass, filling it more than half. She put the bottle on the floor next to her. Ryan waited in the silence. She wasn’t going to look his way. She was Lee again, but with short hair and clean slacks and the navy-blue sweater. Her glasses were on the drawing table. She seemed determined not to look this way. She was getting ready for him now, waiting for her cue.
Ryan walked over and sat down in the chair facing her. She was drunk but she didn’t look bad: a little glassy-eyed. Her hair was combed. She seemed at ease, looking past him in thought, calmly ignoring him. Inside she was crouched, waiting.
Ryan said, “Well, here we are. You having a nice time?”
She didn’t answer him.
“I’m gonna get the silent treatment, huh?”
“Fuck you,” Denise said.
“Fuck you, too,” Ryan said. “You dumb broad.” He waited, watching her take a drink. “Can you hardly wait’ll tomorrow, when you wake up? Be fun, uh? Listen, if you want, I’ll tell them over at the A&P you’re sick. They might want to know how long you’ll be out. What do you think, a week? A month?”
“Jesus,” Denise said, “is that how you do it? What do you call it? Twelfth Step work.”
“To tell you the truth,” Ryan said, “I’ve never done it before. You’re my first one.”
“You want to help me? Really?”
“Sure I do.”
“Go across the street and get another one of these.” She kicked at the empty bottle with her bare foot and missed and kicked at it again. “Get a couple.”
“Why don’t you go? You can walk.”
“Oh, you’d let me?” She put on a slightly prissy tone.
“If I didn’t,” Ryan said, “then you’d have all the more reason to feel sorry for yourself. You already think it’s my fault. If I don’t let you out, then you’d know for sure I’m a heartless bastard, I don’t care anything about you, I’m in this only for myself.”
“You’re a prick,” Denise said. “Like all the rest.”
“All the rest of what? Men? Jesus, you gonna give me that one? You poor little thing. Suck on your bottle.”
“Asshole.”
“What am I, parts of the anatomy? Prick, asshole. What else? How about knee? You fucking knee. Or shoulder. You rotten, miserable shoulder.”
“You’re really funny.”
“I’m literal, if that’s the word,” Ryan said. “I don’t have much imagination. I see something, I say what it is. I see you sitting there drinking wine. Maybe you think you’ve been getting a rotten deal and you want to pay me back, or you want to pay back your husband or your mother, I don’t know. I don’t know why you drink, but what I see, I see you killing yourself.”
“And you don’t want that to happen till I get the money. How much you gonna make, anyway?”
Ryan didn’t say anything.
“Then you work on me some more,” Denise said. “What do you have in mind? I mean, how do you get any of it out of me? Unless maybe we got married. Jesus, there must be an awful lot in this.”
“A hundred and fifty thousand,” Ryan said. “You were going to get half, but the way they’re thinking now, you don’t get anything.” As he said it, he felt better. But it was a little late and not doing much for Denise at all.
She was saying, “A hundred and fifty thousand dollars? Bobby owned something worth that much?”
“It’s stock,” Ryan said. “I don’t know what kind, though. His dad put it in his name when he was born and it’s been going up ever since.” He watched her thinking about it. “That’s a few bottles of wine, isn’t it?”
She looked at him. “You really AA, or is that part of your bullshit?”
“I wasn’t looking for you when I went to that meeting,” Ryan said. “I needed to go. You said your name, I still wasn’t sure. You remember talking to me in the bar?”
“Virgil mentioned it. I’m not sure.” She started to rise, then sat back again and put her hands on the wooden chair arms to pull herself up. She went into the hallway and came out again, looking at the floor.
“I can’t find my goddamn shoes.”
“Where you going?”
“Out.”
“Why don’t you go to bed? I mean it.”
“You mean shit.” Denise went into the kitchen then and turned on the light. “There you are,” she said to her sandals.
Ryan went over to the door and put on the chain lock. She came out, taking her purse from the counter, and stopped, looking at the door and then at Ryan. When she moved toward the door, Ryan stepped in front of her.
“Come on, what’re you going to do, tie me up?”
“Think about tomorrow,” Ryan said.
“Think about tomorrow. It sounds like a fucking soap opera. Get out of the way.”
“If you go to bed now,” Ryan said, “not have any more, you’ll be in pretty good shape.”
Maybe. She was having trouble with her balance. Her eyes, narrowed at him, were glazed. She was past thinking or listening or reasoning. If she told him she hated him or wanted to kill him, he’d believe it.
“I’m going out,” Denise said. “You stop me and I’ll have all the more reason. You said it, I didn’t. All the more reason to feel sorry for myself. Right? You’ll be responsible for it, you sneaky son of a bitch.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Ryan said. “I don’t give a shit what you feel, you’re going to bed.”
He grabbed her, pinning her arms to her body, and dragged her, twisting against him, into the bedroom.
Denise stopped fighting. She said, “All right, leave me alone.” She stood by the double bed, weaving slightly.
“Get undressed,” Ryan said.
Denise looked at him, closing one eye. “Now we’re horny, huh? I’ve been wondering when it was coming. All the times you’ve been here, I was thinking, I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t have any balls. Is that your problem, Ryan? No balls, huh?”
He left the room as she spoke, crossed the small hallway to the bathroom, and looked in the medicine cabinet for aspirin. There was a small bottle of Excedrin. He had to go to the kitchen for a glass of water. When he came back to the bedroom, Denise had her slacks off and was pulling the navy-blue sweater over her head. Ryan looked at her compact little can in the white panties. Good thighs, slender; but very pale. She needed sunlight on her and clean air. Ryan thought of Florida again, the second time that day, this time seeing the two of them, tan, walking along a sundown empty beach.
“Fucking sweater,” Denise said, inside the navy-blue folds. It was caught on her bracelet. She pulled the sweater free, dropping it, and was looking at him again. Ryan handed her two Excedrin tablets and the glass of water. She took them without a word and handed the glass back to him, staring again with her glazed expression.
“I’m gonna stay here tonight,” Ryan said.
“Uh-huh.” She was unbuttoning her blouse now, working down from the top.
“I’ll be in the other room.”
“You’re not going to sleep with me?”
He moved to the bed and pulled the madras spread and sheet from the pillows. “No, but I’ll tuck you in,” Ryan said.
“Was that tuck you said?”
“Be nice, okay? Get in bed.”
“How nice? Hey, Ryan…”
When he looked at her she opened her blouse to show her breasts for a moment and let the blouse fall closed again. They were small breasts, but good ones.
“What do you say, Ryan, you want to fuck?”
He walked around the foot of the bed to the door.
“Hey, I thought you were gonna tuck me in.” She pulled the blouse off, hooked her thumbs in the waist of the panties, and pushed them down. When she tried to step out, she stumbled against the bed. Ryan watched her from the doorway.
Denise rolled onto the bed. She settled on her back, on top of the madras cover, her legs apart, the panties caught on one ankle. As she looked at him now, with a contrived expression, eyes half-closed, she raised up on her elbows and spread her legs a little more.
“Come on, Ryan honey. You and God Honey, you know everything, don’t you? You prick. Come on, you sneaky little prick, let’s see if you’re any good.” She moved her hips up and down, twice.
Ryan moved to the side of the bed. “Lift up your can.”
“Like this?” She arched her back, raising her pelvis toward him. “You want some of that?”
Ryan pulled the spread and sheet to the foot of the bed and brought them back, letting the covers settle over her. He went out, closing the door. In the living room, as he sat down and reached for a cigarette, he heard her call him. Hey, Ryan, repeating it several times. He heard her call him a rotten motherfucker and heard her voice, sounds, but not the words clearly. Finally there was silence.
During the night he thought about Denise and would see her body again, the way she had showed it to him, her private nakedness that he had had to imagine before. He wasn’t worried about Denise now. That was a funny thing; he had a good feeling about her. She wasn’t down in a hole, depressed; she was mad, and that was something he felt he could handle. What he thought about most of the night, when he’d wake up sitting in the canvas chair with his feet on the edge of the low table, was Mr. Perez. Mr. Perez in his hotel suite. Mr. Perez speaking in his quiet, deceptive tone. Mr. Perez, shit, standing on this thing immobile, like a dead weight, and the bayou hillbilly helping him hold it down.
How did you go about pushing Mr. Perez, or faking him out? Leave him standing there with nothing.
In the morning, he heard Denise get up and go into the bathroom. She came out and went back to the bedroom. When she appeared she was wearing a raincoat, barefoot, her hands deep in the pockets of the coat.
“It’s cold in here.” Her voice was subdued: someone who had come out of a sickroom.
Ryan looked over. “How’re you doing?”
“I can’t find the Excedrin.”
“Oh, it’s in the kitchen. I’ll get it.”
He rose, pushing out of the chair and arching the stiffness from his neck. She was already in the kitchen, standing at the sink with the water running, her back to him as he came in.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You mean, for trying to seduce me?”
“I remembered-when I woke up I remembered things I said… what I did. I’m very sorry.”
“How do you feel otherwise?”
“Otherwise, shitty. I’ll thank you for one thing,” Denise said, “not letting me have any more last night. Beyond that, I’m not sure we have anything to talk about.”
Ryan turned her around by the shoulders, seeing her eyes briefly, before she looked away.
“We have quite a bit to talk about, after you have some breakfast.”
“Just coffee.”
“All right, just coffee,” Ryan said. “I’m not going to argue with you. I’m not going to try and force you to believe or do anything I say. But I’m going to ask you to listen to me. After that, if you want us to be friends again, fine. If you don’t, okay, that’s that. But you’re not allowed to think of something else while I’m talking, or what you’d like to say, or interrupt with some smartass remark. All right?”
Denise shrugged. She didn’t seem to care.
She didn’t want Ryan to look at her. She was tired and felt sick. She stood at the counter smoking cigarettes and sipped the coffee getting cold, staring at it while he talked to her in a quiet tone. She liked the sound of his voice and at another time would want to believe him, but right now it didn’t matter. She looked awful and felt awful and didn’t want to be here.
Not today but tomorrow she could walk in her mother’s house with a happy-daughter smile and say, “Hi, Mom, I’m home.” Her mother would let Denise kiss her cheek. They would sit down in the kitchen to have a nice cup of coffee with real cream. She would think of all the things she could tell her mother to try to be close to her as a person and not simply a daughter. She could say, “Mom, I’ve been drunk for three years,” saving Bobby Lear till later, and for a moment her mother would stare at her. Then her mother would say, “How could you do that to me?” Or she might say it was impossible because no one in the family drank. Or she might pretend not to have heard. Or she would be saved and protected by an act of God: the telephone or a neighbor at the door, and her mother would come back in the kitchen with a letter from Denise’s brother, Don, who worked for National Cash Register in Dayton, and show her Polaroids of Don and Joanne and their three boys, Scott, Skip, and June Bug doing “soooo big” with his arms raised over his head.
She could give up and let herself melt into her mother’s life and wear a dress on Sunday and sit with her mother’s friends in the maple living room and compare Edison bills and watch TV, the new Oral Roberts who no longer healed people, and, in the evenings, watch Name That Tune and Let’s Make a Deal. She would run into boys on the street she had known in high school. Her mother would say all the nice boys were married and had good positions with State Farm and John Deere and the bank or mixing prescriptions. Two of them would be on the County Board of Commissioners. Her mother would find one, though, who had not married. Harold something, a long German name that was on the Edison Company centennial farm plaque hanging in the new annex of the courthouse.
She could live with her mother and listen to her complaints and make molded salads and never have to think again.
“Are you all right?” Ryan said.
“Fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You listening or trying to hide?”
She stood with her head down, staring at the counter. “I think I’ll go back to bed,” Denise said.
“I’ll tell you something. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Ryan said. “I’m telling you everything, but I could be losing something I want very much.” He waited.
She was aware of the silence and felt him watching her.
“What? The money?”
“Shit. You’re not listening.” Ryan waited again. “Well, it’s up to you. Either you’re not listening or you don’t believe me.”
She did believe him, because she wanted to believe him, but she needed assurance and protection and time; so she said, “Why should I?”
“You know why?” Ryan said. “Because I’m all you’ve got. You want the money, then you’ve got to trust somebody.”
She looked up at him now. “I haven’t said I want it.”
As she started to look away Ryan reached across the counter and raised her face with his hand and held it a moment.
“And you haven’t said you don’t want it. Goddamn it, wake up and listen to me!”
He saw her eyes come alive. When he took his hand away she continued to stare at him. Good. He held her gaze and told her quietly she had three ways to go. She could trust Mr. Perez. She could believe him and sign his papers and end up with nothing. And if she gave him any trouble, it was very likely he would have her killed. Mr. Perez wanted it all. Or she could trust Virgil Royal and ask him to help her, believing Virgil only wanted what was owed him. But if she got past Mr. Perez, Virgil would kill her for the whole prize. Either way, Mr. Perez or Virgil. They killed people or had them killed and didn’t think much of it.
“Or you can trust me,” Ryan said. “
I want to help you get it, the whole hundred and fifty thousand if that’s possible, because I owe you something. Look at it another way, I think I owe them something, too.”
“And what would I owe you?” Denise said. Staring at him was not hard now. She was getting back her confidence.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Why not?”
He was uncomfortable again and it made him mad.
“I’m not looking for anything,” Ryan said, “or trying to make a deal with you. I’ve been playing enough games, I want to get this thing done and feel good about it, about myself. You understand? You’ve been to enough meetings, you ought to know what I’m talking about.”
Her eyes were watery, red-looking. He knew she was aware of herself, and the way she kept staring at him, not letting go, surprised him.
She said, “How would we do it?”
“I call Perez, tell him you’re in the bag,” Ryan said. “If he comes over with the papers, I can probably get them signed.”
“Yeah, then what?”
“You can’t even hold on to the pen. I tell him, leave the papers, I’ll get you to sign when you start to come out of it.”
Denise waited.
“If he’s made out the power of attorney paper, that he sends to the company, then we’ll know the name of the stock.”
“He doesn’t seem dumb,” Denise said, “somebody that’d make a mistake.”
Ryan shook his head. “No, he isn’t dumb, but maybe he’s overanxious.”
Mr. Perez sounded calm on the phone, though, the son of a bitch. Polite and in control. He said he and Raymond would be right out.
Raymond was there with him in the hotel suite. Mr. Perez hung up the phone. He said, “You heard the saying, Don’t ever shit a shitter?”
Raymond nodded. “I know it well.”
“I don’t believe our friend does,” Mr. Perez said.
Ryan came back from the A&P with two half gallons and a fifth of Gallo Rhine. He put the fifth on the counter, opened the two half gallons and poured them into the sink.
“Don’t look,” Ryan said.
Denise didn’t say anything. She turned to the paint table, picked up the full ashtray, and reached down for the empty wine jug on the floor.
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