Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  Bunny took the initiative. “Kate Dawson, I would have never recognized you. Look how grown up you are!”

  Given the level of enthusiasm, Kate pretended to remember the strange woman.

  “I’m your sister’s old friend, Bunny. We went to high school together, Claire and I, and isn’t it a small world, but the one day I sneak out to the movies, who shows up in the same theater but Phil Ketchum. And now you …”

  Ducking out of the way, he eased back under his hat. “Small world. Had I known she was in there, we could have sat together and split a popcorn. It’s godawful long, Kate, and kinda violent for a kid.”

  The gang of teenagers pressed closer to the conversation, and Katie hastened to defend herself. “I’m not a kid, Phil.”

  “She’s all grown up,” Bunny said. “You’re certainly old enough to see a movie about a bridge. Why don’t you be a gentleman and treat your sister-in-law?”

  “That’s all right,” Kate said. “We can pay our own way.”

  “Tell Claire that Bunny says hello, would you? Nice bumping into you, Phil. Good to see you, Kate.” She raised her hand to hail a cab. “Happy New Year’s.”

  Everyone wished everyone the same, Phil walked off whistling “The Colonel Bogey March,” and the crisis was averted.

  The old man tugged on my sleeve and motioned for me to engage in an aside. I could not take him entirely seriously on account of that ridiculous fez. “I’m having trouble,” he said in a low voice, “knowing who to root for in this one. Bunny is Bunny, of course, but who is the male lead of the drama—the cuckold or the cad?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, sloshing my scotch, uncertain as to the significance of his question.

  “That is to say, do you remember, do we root for Phil or Jerry here? And what do you make of the gun?”

  Glistening atop the medicine cabinet, the gun seemed harmless for the moment, so I shrugged once more, indicating my general ignorance.

  “Anton Chekhov asserted that if you put a revolver on the mantel in Act One, it must be fired by Act Three. A principle of dramaturgy that seems eminently sensible.”

  The woman in the black dress stared straight at us, hearing his every word, impatient for our interruption to conclude.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the gun,” the old man said.

  In one fluid motion, Bunny lifted the hem of her skirt at her right hip and extracted, from a bespoke leather holster strapped just above her stocking, a derringer. Raising her arm in a straight line, she fired a single shot into the ceiling. The small explosion startled everyone in the room and reoriented our attention to the narrator. Bunny continued.

  The morning after she groped Phil Ketchum at the Stork Club, Bunny waited for his arrival in a state of mild agitation. Her husband had left earlier that morning bundled like an Eskimo against the January cold, even though it was just under the freezing mark. His precautions she found nearly unbearable; the coat and mittens and stocking cap and scarf were emblematic of the problems inherent in his general character. Jerry was a very sensible man. Got it from his mother, probably, who had babied him through childhood, hovering over his every cough and sniffle. The zealous hen had raised him to be afraid of life. No baseball, you could put an eye out. Wait two hours between eating and a swim, you can’t be too careful. No wonder her son was such a closet nebbish, not like Phil, who did not give a damn about anything and would do anything, try anything she asked of him.

  He banged on the door at half past nine, careless of the neighbors, and was upon her the moment she closed the door. Bunny ran into the bedroom and he chased her, tearing off his tie, kicking off his shoes, and leaping beside her on the bed. Breathless, she undid his belt and unzipped his fly, astonished that he was already erect after little more than a kiss from her. He nuzzled her neck, fondled and licked her breasts, and kissed her on the flat of her stomach. In no time, his face was between her legs, the smooth-shaved chin brushing against her thighs, his tongue flickering like a snake’s. She lost herself in such moments, abandoned her mind to the lust that radiated from his mouth and hands. He would do anything she asked, she thought, there is nothing he would not do to please me. His hands slid beneath her bottom and he pulled her whole body toward his mouth, and she grabbed his hair and held him to her, thinking how nice it felt in her hands, soft and thick and not the bald spot like Jerry’s, growing wider day by day while the rest of him seemed hairier, his skin slick and waxy. But Phil, he filled her, and she moaned and pulled him up so that his fat dingus could go in, and she loved him and wished he could be hers.

  Later in the rumpled soiled sheets, they rested in a languid stupor. She loved him more, if possible, afterward and took possession of his skin, his arms, the power in his hands. For his part, Phil waited to begin again, gauging the energy necessary to stir himself to arousal. She knew he was allowing her to work him up.

  Bunny spoke across the pillow. “Don’t you ever wish we could be together always?”

  He breathed deeply and longed to rise from the bed and float away, right through the ceiling into 7B and on until he bashed through the roof and escaped gravity altogether. “I do,” he told her.

  “We can’t go on like this.” She slowly raked her fingernails against the ladder of his ribs. When she hit the right spot, he flinched and rolled away, and then sat up on the edge of the bed. Bunny leaned her head against the arch of his back. In the half-light of the shuttered room, he stumbled and found his Lucky Strikes and lighter. They shared a smoke.

  “We’ve been over this a hundred times, Bun.”

  The first time was just a drunken whim, a chance meeting at the Carnegie Deli, a momentary opportunity when he saw her home and found her husband out on travel. But Jerry would sooner kill her than divorce her. He had beaten her years earlier, when he suspected that she was carrying on with an actor named O’Leary, and he swore he would never let her go. As for Phil, all of his finances were tied up with Claire’s inheritance, everything in her name. He would be destitute without her money. They had been over and over the options for the past four months.

  With a sigh, she slipped out of bed and extinguished the cigarette in an ashtray on her bureau. From his spot on the mattress, he watched her nude form glide through the room, and she could see the lust stitched in his gaze. She moved deliberately through the light seeping between the slats of the blinds, allowing him to watch her, drinking in his pleasure at her nonchalant sensuality. Bunny knew that Claire would never dare parade in the buff in front of Phil. To make the moment linger, she grabbed a brush from the dresser and watched him watch her in the mirror as she fixed her hair. A small laugh jumped from her throat.

  “What’s so funny?” He was lying down on his side to get a better look.

  “Just a thought.” She dared not face him. “What if they both were out of the picture?”

  “Sure, that would solve everything.” His voice oozed sarcasm.

  In three quick steps, she was back in bed with him. “You have to take care of Jerry, bump him off. It’s the only way out. He’d never give me a divorce. Once I get ahold of his dough, you take care of Claire, and we live like royals.”

  “Wait just a minute, Bun.… You’re asking me to kill my wife?”

  “No, silly.” She rolled over and lay on top of him. “You kill Jerry, and then we get rid of Claire. You could divorce her if you had Jerry’s money to look forward to.” She sat up suddenly and wondered if he would actually leave his wife for her. She broke into a toothy grin and straddled him. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Staring up at her, luxuriating in the touch of her fingers, Phil could not help himself. His body betrayed his true feelings.

  Down in the backyard, a tomcat yowled, and I could tell by the length and timbre of the call that Harpo had returned and was announcing his presence. Had I left the cat flap unlatched?

  Alice went to the window and peered into the abyss. “What on earth made that hellish cry?”

  “Yo
u, my dear witch, of all people, should know,” the old man said. “It is a cat.”

  The mention of a cat in such proximity caused quite a stir in the room. In the small space, they kept bumping into one another in a kind of flustered, mild panic. Adele could not stop shaking her head in disbelief, and Marie was ready to tear out her hair. Flo and Jane huddled near the door, debating escape. Alice approached the old man and grabbed him by the lapels of his robe. “Nobody said nothing about any cat.”

  The old man stood and addressed the crowd. “I have spoken to your man here about the filthy beast, and he has assured me that said cat will stay in the bottom of the house while we occupy the top. There’s no need in getting yourselves in an uproar, ladies.” His speech mollified them to the point where everyone returned to their places. From the corner of his mouth, he muttered to me, “Allergies.” With a nod of his fez, he indicated to Bunny that she might resume, and so she did.

  Things went on as they had been going with Phil and Bunny, as though the subplot had not been introduced to the everyday drama of sneaking around to be with each other. She did not mention murder at their next tryst, but thought instead to treat him to his favorite sexual favor. “I want more than this,” she said to him as he left the apartment. Over the next few weeks, she repeated the performance, always with the same bittersweet good-bye at the door. Only gradually did she let him know how disappointed she was in his lack of will, canceling dates at the last minute or leaving earlier than planned or not being so compliant. But her strategies failed to work, for he took her actions as a sign of diminishing interest on her part, and she found the plot drifting away. It took an accident, an unexpected bit of bad luck, to lead him to change his mind.

  Going to the icebox for some ice for Jerry’s nightly Cuba libre, she pulled too hard on the handle of the stuck door, which then flew open and smacked her squarely in the face, blackening her eye and splitting her lower lip. The poor dumb thing took care of her as best he could, a steak for the contusion and a cold compress for her mouth, and she almost felt a twinge of affection for the mug, but Jerry fell asleep on the sofa watching Playhouse 90, so she stole away to the telephone. “He suspects something, Phil. He hit me again.” On the other end of the line, he groaned. She managed to cry a little bit, too, and have him promise to come over on Friday morning.

  The tenderness of his touch surprised her, as he ran his fingertips over the yellow and plum circle around her eye. Phil kissed her gently and withdrew when she winced and held her hand to the sore spot. Instead of taking her to bed, he made a pot of coffee, cracked a soft-boiled egg on toast cut into bite-sized pieces. Like a pair of newlyweds, they sat across the breakfast table and stared at each other. Bunny told her story of how Jerry had accused her of stepping out with Woody Pfahl, a fella who lived down in 2A, and when she asserted her innocence, her husband had struck her twice with the back of his hand. “He knocked me to the floor with the second one,” she said. “And called me a slut and a whore and said that he’d kill me if he ever so much as caught me talking to him.”

  “Who is this Woody Pfahl?”

  “Just some kid. A folksinger or a beatnik or something. You know the type.” She hid her face behind her hands. “You must think I’m hideous.”

  He grabbed her by the wrists and wrestled her hands away from her face. “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll kill the bastard. We’ll make it look like an accident or someone else did it. Maybe that Woody Pfahl.”

  Her lip began to bleed again when she cracked a smile. “You will?”

  “I could strangle him right now.”

  “And then we can take care of Claire, and be together.”

  Tamping a cigarette on the edge of the laminated tabletop, he seemed to be considering the proposition beat by beat. “Right. Jerry first, and then we just have to wait till it all blows over.”

  “A little while, and then you leave her.”

  There was a pause, a beat too long. “Sure,” he said.

  Crimes of passion are best done in haste, while the heat of the moment bubbles in the blood. Too much planning for the perfect crime often leads to overanalysis and weakens the nerve necessary to make the kill. Instead, they dithered. For months, they went over possible scenarios of how Phil might stage an accident. A push from the subway platform into an oncoming train was dismissed over potential witnesses. In April, they thought of poison and nooses, razors and piano wire, a fall from a tall building, a safe falling on him from a tall building. By May, they were discussing the merits and drawbacks of arson, leaving the gas oven on all night, an electric hair curler dropped into the bathtub, and an overdose of sleeping pills. They debated smothering and strangling, knives and ice picks. On Memorial Day, they nearly agreed upon a blow to the head with a blunt object. Whenever she brought up the subject of divorce, he changed the subject back to murder. As the weather improved and all through springtime, all they talked about was murder, murder, murder.

  A rumba came over the radio, and the girls twirled their highballs, twisted their hips, and tapped their toes. The baby shook his rattle like a maraca.

  It took another accident, another random bit of cosmic mashup, to move from the discussion stage to the execution of the plan. Quite simply, Phil met Woody Pfahl. Standing outside of Bunny’s apartment building one morning, wondering whether to take the train uptown or hail a cab or just walk the dozen or so blocks to his office. He’d lit another cigarette and was trying to clear Bunny from his mind, having just left her bed after a particularly athletic romp. Funny how the talk of homicide really revved her motor. Up the block comes this kid, no more than twenty he’d guess, dark shades, wispy beginnings of a goatee, sucking on a Pall Mall like it was an all-day lollipop. The kid seemed lost in thought because he crashed right into Phil despite the lack of foot traffic at that hour.

  “Hey man,” the kid said, “why don’t you watch where you’re going?”

  Phil brushed the ash from his sportscoat. “You were barreling down the sidewalk like a bull. I was just standing here minding my own business.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, man. I didn’t realize it was you.”

  With one hand on the beatnik’s chest, he stopped the boy. “What do you mean by that? Do we know each other?”

  “Look, man, I don’t want no trouble. You’re just the cat comes sniffing round here every once in a while.”

  Phil grabbed the kid by his lapel. “What do you mean by that crack, punk?”

  “The situation is getting much too grave. Can we cool it, pops? I’m just trying to get back to my pad, catch a few zees. I’ve been out all night on Bleecker Street.”

  “You live in this building?” He suddenly realized the kid’s identity. “You called Woody?”

  “I don’t want no trouble.”

  Phil laughed and let go of the boy’s jacket. “Sure, Woody, go on home.” All the way uptown he could not keep from chuckling to himself. The kid could barely sprout a whisker, let alone satisfy Bunny. That’s who Jerry thinks is fooling around with his wife? She wouldn’t give a kid like that a second look. Bunny was right: Jerry was some kind of psycho nut job, and she deserved better. In Chelsea, he stopped in a shop where he had been told someone might sell him a gun.

  • • •

  Downstairs the cat clunked the empty saucer across the kitchen tiles, but I dared not move a muscle to see what he wanted. As a matter of fact, I could barely move at all, given the crowd in the tiny bathroom. Who designed such small claustrophobic spaces? Or were people smaller, more compact in their needs and movements at the time this house was built? A good old house, in many ways, but at other times, the shortcomings obverted its charms. I should expand the room or add another powder room downstairs, perhaps off the kitchen. How did the previous owners deal with such inadequacies? Bachelard, I believe, had an interesting passage on the ghosts of former inhabitants of old homes, but I cannot look it up because someone has taken my Poetics. Perhaps the cat is to blame. I could hear him creeping about.r />
  On the hot June morning that Phil brought over the gun—a Smith & Wesson revolver, a “.38 Special”—Bunny showered him with kisses and in the bedroom let him do that thing he had always wanted to do to her. Drenched in sweat afterward, they positioned themselves in front of an oscillating fan and let the intermittent breeze dry their skin and cool down their overheated bodies. The gun sat on the end table like a menacing wood and nickel hawk. Bunny rolled over onto her stomach to let the air ride over her legs and back. She could better see his face in profile, the beak of his nose and the pointy cleft chin. His lashes grew longer than hers and curled naturally. “I called her yesterday,” she said. “Claire.”

  He turned partially toward Bunny but found her face too close to focus upon. “Why would you go and do a thing like that?” She had anticipated some anger, but his voice was tired and calm.

  “To invite her to lunch, silly. We haven’t seen each other since the wedding, your wedding, and I mentioned that Jerry had bumped into you last fall and thought we should all get back in touch.”

  Raising himself halfway, he rested on his elbows and considered her backside. “I thought we were going to wait—”

  “I’m tired of waiting, Phil. There’s no reason they both can’t die one on top of the other. In fact, the more coincidental, the less likely the police will suspect they had anything to do with each other. I’m meeting Claire day after tomorrow at Moran’s, and I read about this drug in an Agatha Christie novel. Imitates food poisoning, but you end up dead. Everyone will think it’s bad clams.”

  “Jeez, Bun, that’s not part of the plan.”

  A fit of giggles passed back and forth between the two, leaving them breathless. Bunny slid from the sheets and hobbled to the end table for a cigarette, and as she exhaled the first puff of smoke, she heard the front door swing open and Jerry’s ring of keys jingling like sleigh bells.

  They glanced into each other’s panicked eyes. “Shit,” she said, and he rolled off the mattress, desperate for his pants.