Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  Jack considered. Would this be wise? He hadn't been with any woman since the break-up with Stephanie. And he wasn't sure Veronica was offering, anyway.

  The elevator arrived, and Veronica stepped inside enough to hold the doors open. “I guess it is kind of late,” she started to say, when Jack said “Sure,” and got in with her. They rode up the seven floors without saying anything else.

  She was right about the place being a mess. The living room floor was covered with newspapers and album covers; the blinds had fallen out of one window and lay draped across the hissing radiator. There was an empty pizza box and a can of Diet Coke, lying on its side, on the rug in front of the sofa.

  “My roommate,” Veronica said, almost as if introducing her. “I've basically ceded the entire apartment to her, with the exception of my room.”

  Veronica's room, at the end of a long, narrow hallway, was more what Jack had expected: very neat and tidy, with framed prints—Vermeer—from the Frick Museum, and a white iron day-bed, made up to serve as a sofa with plumped-up cushions in a flowery fabric, against the far wall.

  “I keep the brandy in here,” Veronica said, “or Connie would have it with her pizza.” She was taking the bottle and two glasses off a tray on the windowsill. “Oh—is brandy what you want? I forgot to ask.”

  “That's fine,” Jack said, folding his overcoat across the back of the desk chair. Veronica was fluttering around the room—depositing the bottle and glasses on the end table beside the bed; hanging her coat in the closet; flicking on the radio, tuned to WNCN, the classical music station; closing the one drawer of her dresser that was an inch ajar. She was nervous, and now that she had him up there, Jack could tell that she didn't know what to do next.

  For that matter, neither did he; he was pretty unused to this stuff. For the past three years, he'd been with Stephanie, and only Stephanie. It was odd to find himself again in a woman's bedroom, late at night, pouring out a nightcap, preparing for . . . whatever. He wasn't sure what was going to happen, and he wasn't even sure what he wanted to happen. He poured very liberal portions of the brandy.

  To Steamroller,” he said, when Veronica had finally, demurely, seated herself beside him on the bed. She was wearing the long, simple black dress that the producers liked the women in the orchestra to wear. “Long may it run.”

  They clinked glasses, and listened to the radio—a chamber orchestra, playing some eighteenth-century symphony.

  “Mozart?” Jack said.

  Veronica cocked her head to one side, listened to a few more bars. “I think it's Haydn. One of the Paris symphonies.”

  “Is it gonna wake your roommate?” he asked, even though the door was firmly closed.

  “No. Hers is the room across the hall, and I'm not even sure she's in there. Sometimes she spends the night at her boyfriend's.” “You don't sound like you like her very much.”

  “I don't, but she's the one who holds the lease on the apartment, and at least she's not around very much.” She unbuckled her shoes and let them fall to the floor. There was a hole in the toe of one stocking. “Oops,” she said, covering one foot with the other.

  “I've got a pair of socks at home just like that,” Jack said.

  “You live on Eighty-seventh Street?”

  “Between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

  She took a sip of her brandy. “By yourself?”

  “Yep. It's a studio.”

  The symphony ended, and the announcer came on. “Did you notice that clucking woodwind phrase in the first movement?” he asked his listeners. “That's what gives the symphony its name, “The Hen.’ Otherwise, it's simply Number Eighty-three, in G Minor.” There was a silence, and it appeared he would leave the air without naming the composer.

  “Who's it by?” Jack said aloud.

  “And when we come back, another of the late symphonies, also named after an animal, this one dubbed ‘The Bear.’” And then he was gone, supplanted by a commercial for the Russian Tea Room.

  “I guess we'll have to wait,” Jack said.

  “I'm not going anywhere,” Veronica replied, softly.

  Jack swirled the brandy in his glass, watching it catch and reflect the warm glow from the bedside lamp. The colors were beautiful—golden, and amber, and orange—and as he gently moved the glass, they changed, fading or darkening, or flowing together, in a soothing, almost hypnotic fashion. What was he doing here? In all those weeks of rehearsal and performance, he'd never even considered fooling around with Veronica. She was a nice girl, yes, and a damn good musician, but that's about all he'd ever thought of her. Even now, if he were to be brutally honest, he wasn't really attracted to her; there was something too pale, too unemphatic, about her. She bit her lip, she had no eyelashes to speak of, her ankles were thick . . . and she wasn't Stephanie.

  That was the real clincher, and he knew it. It wasn't so much that he wanted Stephanie back—things had been bad long before Kurt had come along to make them worse—but Stephanie was the body he knew, the body that his own had become accustomed to, attuned to. He'd forgotten about all this uncertainty, this preliminary stuff, and he wasn't yet sure that he wanted to remember.

  The commercials ended, and the announcer returned. “We've heard ‘The Hen'; now it's the turn of ‘The Bear,’ so called because if you listen carefully to the melody in the finale, you'll be hearing the sort of tune performing bears were once made to dance to. The English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, in Symphony Number Eighty-two in C Major—”

  “By?” Jack asked.

  “—by the ‘Father of the Symphony,’ our special guest tonight, Franz Joseph Haydn.”

  Veronica clapped her hands together, in victory, as the strings and woodwinds, in the opening fanfare, charged up the C Major triad.

  “But is it one of the Paris symphonies?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said, nodding her head, sure of herself now. “I studied a lot of late eighteenth-century orchestral works at Juilliard, and this is one of the mature symphonies Haydn composed in Paris. He purposely opened it with a bang because the French really liked it that way.”

  “I'm impressed,” Jack said, genuinely so. He leaned forward to adjust the pillow behind his back, before realizing Veronica was leaning against it, too. He gave it a tug, and she was pulled suddenly against him. Her drink spilled across his lap.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said.

  “No, no, that's okay. But I've got brandy all over your pants, maybe I should get a wet cloth—”

  “Forget it, they're blue jeans, it doesn't matter.”

  “You sure? I could easily get a cloth—”

  Their faces were just a few inches apart, her hand still resting on his thigh; he took her chin—smaller than Stephanie's, more fragile feeling—and held it as he kissed her. Her lips were dry, and a little ragged. He wet his own lips with his tongue, then kissed her again. Her hand stirred, tightening on his thigh. He groped for the bedside table, to put his brandy glass down, and heard something fall over. When he looked, he saw that he'd toppled a small silver picture frame. Veronica leaned back against the cushions, catching her breath.

  “Your family?” Jack said, turning the frame right side up and self-consciously studying the photo it held. Did he want to go through with this thing with Veronica? He angled the picture toward the bed.

  “Yes,” Veronica replied, softly. “That's my parents, and my two older sisters.”

  They looked very stolid and blond, smiling at the camera in what appeared to be a suburban backyard. Her father, a big beefy man with a high forehead, was wearing a barbecue apron.

  “What's your dad do?”

  “He worked for an insurance company. He died last year, of liver cancer.”

  Jack stroked the back of her hand.

  “My sisters both work at the same company now.”

  He let his fingers trail up her arm, and watched them as if they weren't his own. His body was proceeding on automatic pilot, while his mind remained at
some remove.

  “Where do they live?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

  “Outside Boston.” Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back. Jack leaned over her, and kissed her throat. There was a slightly alkaline taste to her skin. He felt like an interested observer, and nothing more.

  When he unfastened the hook at the back of her dress, and slipped the dress off her shoulders, she shivered. “Are you cold?”

  “A little,” she said. “Maybe we should get under the covers.”

  Jack took another large swallow of the brandy, hoping it would help him to get in the mood, and slipped under the comforter with her. Gradually, their clothes came off, and were shed on the floor beside the bed. Before discarding his pants, Jack took out of his wallet the condom he'd been carrying since . . . since whenever he'd stopped making love to Stephanie. Now that was a depressing thought. When he tore a strip off the wrapper to take it out, Veronica became very still.

  “Do you not want to?” Jack asked, gently.

  Veronica paused, her head turned to one side, toward the framed photo on the bedside table. “Yes . . . no, I want to.” She faced him again. “I want to.”

  He kissed her again, passionately this time, trying to will himself into the act, trying to feel himself entirely there; Veronica's body beneath him was warm and soft and smooth. He let his own body rub against her, up and down, until he felt himself grow sufficiently excited.

  But even then, as he moved inside her, his mind was only partially engaged; one minute he was seeing Veronica's pale, lashless eyes, staring up at him with pleasure and yearning, and the next he was back on Orson Sprague's examination table, drifting back down into that afternoon's interrupted reverie. . ..

  Veronica could sense it, too, his intermittent ardor. At times she was able to lock eyes with him, and feel a strong connection, their bodies moving in rhythm; but at others he seemed to have traveled a million miles away, leaving only some shell of himself to embrace her in the creaking iron day-bed. She held him tighter, her hands spread across his back, hoping to retrieve him to the here-and-now. His body was heavy, and hard, on top of her. But she liked it, every second of it, even having the breath crushed out of her. She'd wanted Jack since the first day of orchestra rehearsal; she could hardly believe that she had him now.

  Which made her want all of him, all of him there, there with her now. She looked deeply into his eyes, the deepest green she'd ever seen, and whispered his name. He was looking right down at her, his arms planted beside her shoulders, but what he was seeing she could only guess. There was something unfathomable, and almost hypnotic, about his absent gaze, something that made it impossible to reclaim him, and almost as hard to look away. The skin on his back, exposed to the air, was cool, and she drew the comforter up toward his shoulder blades.

  “Jack . . . “ and as if he'd been asked some mundane favor, he bent his head, and pressed his open mouth to hers. His eyes remained open, and so did hers; she felt herself pinned, like a butterfly to a mat, and slowly transfixed by his open, blank stare. She thought, for whatever reason, of that photo of her family . . . and of her father, flipping hamburgers on the backyard barbecue. She felt as though she was falling asleep, with her eyes wide open, and with Jack still embedded in her; she felt everything around her growing whiter, and warmer, except for Jack, whose skin, even under the cover, was getting colder all the time. She could hardly bear to have his chest touch hers.

  Her father had never been a demonstrative man, but his affection had never been in doubt. In her mind's eye, she could see him now, driving the family station wagon, raking the leaves, mowing the lawn. She felt so weary, her legs were like lead . . . she wished that Jack would simply get it over with, and come.

  But how strange it was to see her father like this, so clearly, and under such bizarre circumstances. She hadn't had such sharp images of him since the funeral, and even then it had been hard to shake the way he looked at the very end— shrunken, emaciated, his cheeks hollowed out and gray. Seeing him now, hale and hearty, made her want to cry and hug him against her.

  Jack felt like a block of chilled marble.

  It almost seemed that her father could see her too. He swam, a kaleidoscope of images, into her vision, gradually taking on more and more definition. He seemed, without exactly moving, to be closing the distance between them. Was she the one moving? She could make out now the entire top half of his body; he was wearing a plaid flannel shirt she'd once given him for Christmas, and his arms were outstretched toward her. He had his wristwatch on, with the face turned in, the way he'd always worn it; as a little girl, she'd liked to play with him by turning it around the other way. She reached for it now, happy, wanting to play that childhood game again. But as she did, his hands went back in protest, the fingers outspread. She looked at his face, and saw that he was furious, and horrified at something. At her? What had she done? He was shouting something, and pushing her away. And his face, as he did so, seemed to dissolve, the flesh melting away from the skull, the lips narrowing, the cheeks drawing in. He looked, all of a sudden, as he had when he died—or worse yet, as he'd looked after he'd died. He drew his head back— the hair was almost entirely gone, and the tendons in his neck stood out like cables—and let out a scream that Veronica could suddenly hear, as clearly as the Haydn symphony on the radio, hear piercing her very marrow, hear echoing in her head and around the walls of her little bedroom.

  She was screaming herself now, thrashing her head on the pillow; Jack was grunting, coming inside her. He was colder than anything she'd ever felt in her life. She couldn't stop screaming, nor did she want to; it was the only way to drown out the sound of her father. She put her hands to Jack's icy chest and heaved him off of her, then threw the quilt away from her legs; on all fours, she scrambled naked across the floor. She fumbled with the doorknob, and lurched into the hall. Connie, her roommate, was standing there in her purple down coat.

  “What the—?”

  Veronica bolted past her, panting with terror, and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

  “What the hell is going on?” Connie planted herself in the open doorway to Veronica's room, and watched as Jack groggily drew the quilt around his loins.

  “What the hell did you do to her? And who are you anyway?”

  Chapter Nine

  ONE OF THE nice things about the newspaper business— one of the few nice things, as far as Arlette could tell—was that nobody kept track of your hours. You could pretty much pop in and out of the newsroom anytime you wanted, and no one asked any questions; it was assumed you were tracking down a story, or following up a lead. Arlette wasn't actually a reporter yet—she'd been on staff for less than a year—but the way she looked at it, how was she ever going to get to be a reporter if she stayed roped to her desk all day doing everybody else's drudge work?

  At twelve o'clock sharp, when Murray Spiegel, her boss, left for his usual three-hour lunch, Arlette counted off four minutes on the clock—enough time for Murray to get out of the building—then stuck her note pad in her purse and headed for the elevators. Even though it was freezing outside, a cab, in midtown traffic, would make too much of a dent in her weekly budget, so she scurried to the Lexington Avenue IRT. At Seventy-seventh Street, she got off and walked the three blocks to the Carlyle Hotel.

  Before knocking on the door of suite 912, she pulled her jacket straight, and taking the Dentyne from her mouth, dropped it in the standing ashtray in the hall. A woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Zakin answered the door, then ushered her into a spacious bedroom in back.

  “Adolph,” she said to the frail old man propped up in the bed, “this is Arlette Stein, the reporter from the Post who called earlier. Are you still feeling up to talking with her?”

  Arlette could tell that if he wasn't, Mrs. Zakin would have her out of there in two seconds flat.

  Fortunately, he nodded twice, and gestured toward the brocade chair that was drawn up beside the bed. Mrs. Zakin plumped his
pillows, and drew the lapels of his smoking jacket closed over his chest, while Arlette sat down. “I'm going to make some phone calls, Adolph; if you get tired, or need anything, ring.” Arlette saw a silver dinner bell on the night table. She figured she had until that bell rang to get the story, if there was one here.

  “I appreciate your seeing me,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

  He looked at her with watery eyes; his white hair was brushed neatly against the sides of his head. “I feel like I got hit by a car. And had a heart attack. And died.”

  Arlette's hand was shaking—beginner's nerves—but she hurriedly jotted down what he'd said in the shorthand she'd learned at Katharine Gibbs.

  “Is that what you think happened?”

  Zakin looked away, at a heavy oil painting—flowers in a vase—on the opposite wall. Arlette wondered if she should make a note of it. To set the scene?

  “That's what I've been asking myself, ever since that night. I keep thinking, it couldn't have happened; I couldn't have died. If I had, I wouldn't be here now, talking to you. I must be imagining things.” He paused. “But that's why I told my wife I would talk to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, turning toward her again, “it did happen. I died, and that Logan person—my wife has met him— came after me and brought me back. My wife says he denies it.” He shrugged. “That's his business. I know what I know.” ,

  Arlette was scribbling down every word. “Could I ask you to be more specific? I mean, what exactly happened after you were hit by the car outside the theater?”

  Zakin looked off into space as he recounted what he could remember. He told her about the sensation of leaving his body, and the sadness he felt: then the strange sense of freedom, and flight. He described the white-hot passage he seemed to be traveling through, and the blinding light he could neither look into nor look away from. How he seemed somehow to have shed all weight and gravity, to have become pure—pure essence—somehow. How he might almost have begun to welcome the sensation, when a tall figure in a long coat was ‘ suddenly beside him, covering his eyes, incorporating him again. Arlette struggled to keep up with every word.