Strip

by Thomas Perry

  “Really primo sex too.”

  “Yeah.” She kissed him again. “I had a great night. It’s time for you to go home. I put my cell phone number in your wallet, and I want you to call me. Don’t send me flowers or call on the regular telephone, and don’t just show up, ever.”

  “I get it,” he said. He began dressing, then picked up the canvas bag. “Sure you don’t want more money?”

  “That’s sweet, Jeff. But I’m sure you noticed I’m a chick. I hardly ever have to pay for things except clothes and gas. I sometimes do, but I don’t have to. And this is what you do for a living. You were just nice enough to let me come along.”

  He tied his shoes and walked up the hall to the living room with Carrie following. When he reached the front door, he turned. “Good night, Carrie.”

  “Don’t forget to call me.” She smiled.

  “I won’t.” He went down the steps and along the driveway to the garage, where he had hidden the Trans Am. The door opened in front of him, and he looked back and saw her face at the window. He started the Trans Am, let it coast down the driveway, and turned it down the steep incline toward the flatland. He turned twice before he switched on his headlights, and coasted the rest of the way down the hill onto Vineland. He made it across Ventura Boulevard on a green light, then accelerated along Vineland toward Lila’s apartment.

  It took only eighteen minutes before Jeff pulled up at the apartment building and glided into the extra carport at the back. He was tempted to put the canvas bag under the seat or in the trunk of the car, but he thought better of it. He had known a pair of addicts for a while when he was just out of high school, and one night he had watched them going from car to car late at night outside some big apartment buildings. Jeff didn’t think he could sleep if he lay there thinking about some junkies opening his car for the radio and finding all that cash.

  He put his gun into the money bag, took it with him, and walked up the first-floor hall to Lila’s apartment. He found his key, unlocked the door, opened it slowly and carefully, slipped inside, and closed it again.

  He saw Eldon lift his head from the sagging couch in the living room and stare at him. Eldon seldom showed surprise. Jeff knew Eldon had heard and smelled him long before he reached the door. He suspected that Eldon’s nose had told him all the essentials of his evening too, certainly the car, the gun, the paper money, the sex—especially that—and probably the fact that Jeff had felt about ten seconds of intense fear while Carrie was blasting away and bullets were bouncing all over the place. He felt a second of relief that Eldon couldn’t talk. Eldon put his head down again.

  Jeff stepped out of his shoes, walked slowly to Lila’s bedroom door, and tested the knob. It was locked again. He moved toward the couch and saw Eldon was lying on a folded blanket and pillow from Lila’s bed. The money bag fit easily and invisibly behind the couch.

  He took off his jeans and his shirt, went to the end of the couch, and crawled in behind Eldon. Keeping Eldon on the outer side of the cushion made Jeff less likely to be the one who got pushed off. It took a moment or two for dog and man to adjust their positions to share the space. They both had their heads on the pillow together, and the blanket was draped mostly on Jeff’s body. After a few minutes in which Jeff contemplated the nature of luck, opportunity, and the variety and sheer fullness of the world, he and Eldon dozed off.

  He was awakened an astonishingly short time later when the sun, which belonged outside, fell on his upper body to light up his eyelids like lampshades and heat his face until it felt like cooked meat when he touched it. He sat up so he was out of the shaft of light. Then he seemed to recall that he had heard Eldon moving around in the kitchen, crunching food and lapping up water. He squinted and blinked, and saw Eldon waiting by the door of the apartment. Eldon gave a high-pitched whine, and Jeff swung his legs off the couch and stood.

  He put on his pants, shirt, and shoes. He took Eldon’s leash off the hook by the door, attached the end to Eldon’s collar, checked his pocket to be sure he had his key, and then let Eldon lead him out.

  They walked in the direction of the carports along the rear of the building, and Jeff made sure his car was all right while Eldon went from one clump of weeds to another, dousing each with urine, then moving on to sniff the breeze that reached him through the high chain-link fence. Jeff let Eldon lead him away from the building and around the block, then stop in the alley to defecate. Jeff had forgotten to take a plastic bag from Lila’s supply by the door, but there was a McDonald’s bag and an empty drink cup that worked well enough to clean up, and he tossed them into the first garbage can he passed.

  As he walked up the alley behind Eldon, he reviewed the night’s events. He opened his wallet and searched for a card or slip of paper with Carrie’s number on it, but didn’t find one. How could he have lost it? What if he had lost it inside the apartment?

  He stopped, opened the wallet again, and looked through the card section and the currency section. He stuck his fingertips into every compartment, searching for something small enough to have been missed, but found nothing. He put his wallet away and thought about Carrie. She was absolutely crazy, and the first few things she had told him after he met her were lies. But he thought of her last night in bed and took out his wallet again. He took out the thin sheaf of bills he had left home with last night and began to leaf through it. He saw the one right away. He had not started the night with any one-dollar bills. She must have put this one in his wallet while he was in the bathroom or something. Written on the bill was “Melisande Carr” and an 818 telephone number. “Carr, Carrie,” he whispered to himself. It wasn’t a nickname. She had still been lying to him about her name when he’d left.

  He wondered why a woman would be so completely open—bringing him into her house, having sex with him in every position he could think of for hours without showing a second’s shyness or hesitation, let him see her shoot people in a robbery—and then be reluctant to let him know something as public as her name. And what kind of name was Melisande? She was one strange girl. He felt a little afraid of her, but he overwhelmed the feeling by flooding his brain with some recent views of her body stored in his short-term memory. Within a few seconds, he had forgotten his vulnerability and her nerve-racking unpredictability. There was only the attraction.

  Jeff needed to forget about her entirely for the moment. She wasn’t expecting to hear from him for many hours. It was barely dawn. He followed Eldon on his rounds of his neighborhood. He tied Eldon’s leash to a table leg outside the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf to buy two big cups of coffee. He was grateful to them for not making customers say “Tall” for small and “Grande” for medium. For years it had amazed him that nobody else seemed to see what fascist crap that was.

  He put the cups in the little molded paper tray, went out to get Eldon, and followed him back to the apartment. At the apartment door, he set the tray on the floor, unlocked the door, and bent to scoop it inside, propping the door open for Eldon with his foot.

  As he raised his head, he caught sight of Lila’s bedroom door. It was open now and she was standing beside her bed, pulling the covers up. He looked and straightened, and his eyes focused on her. She was wearing the lingerie he had laid out on the bed before he left last night—the black thigh-high stockings, the bra, and nothing in between. She seemed to sense only now that he was back, and looking at her. She looked straight into Jeff’s eyes.

  In that instant the cold, half-lidded eyes conveyed everything—that she had come home from work at closing time, seen his little display of her underclothes made into an effigy and the money he was leaving her for their expenses. She had put on the outfit, thinking it was his cute way of seducing her. And then she had waited for him to arrive. She had probably explained his absence by thinking that he was out adding a surprise, that he would return shortly with champagne, flowers, things that were romantic because they were completely inappropriate for 2:00 A.M. Maybe because he had shown her he had some money she ha
d thought of jewelry too—not a ring, which would be too premature to be anything but embarrassing, because she’d have to turn it down and then sleep with him anyway. But he could have been saving something nice, a pendant or bracelet to show that he had some kind of hope for a long-term relationship and the intention to let her know.

  She stood still for another couple of seconds to permit him to see clearly that she had done her part, had put the wisps of nylon and silk on and waited for him in the bedroom. She had fallen asleep wearing them. Then she turned, walked into the bathroom, closed the door firmly, and clicked the lock.

  He was sweating as he stepped to the door. “Good morning, baby,” he called through the door. “Eldon and I brought you some coffee.” He barely breathed. The toilet flushed. The shower handle squeaked and the water hissed. He turned away and walked back into the living room. This was bad. He had just arranged the clothes into an effigy of her for fun, without imagining that she would think it was a message, a request.

  He had caught only a brief look at her standing still by the bed, but in her eyes were blame, rage, hurt, humiliation. He could actually feel them with her. He was horrified in another way by the blurred connection between playful intention and disastrous consequence.

  He tried some different ways to explain. He could say, “I wasn’t demanding anything of you. I wasn’t thinking that way.” No, that wasn’t good. He could show her the money in the canvas bag and say, “I was out of money, so I had to drive to my bank to withdraw some cash. You have to do that in person. It’s my bank in … where? Arizona? Five hours each way, driving through the night, over the speed limit each way. When I got here you had fallen asleep.” He pushed the couch out a bit and snatched up the canvas bag.

  The weight of it made him remember the gun was still inside. He took out the weapon and put it into the pocket of his suitcase in the closet, set the bag of money on the couch, and zipped it closed, then began to practice his story silently in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door.

  He had trouble with his lines, because her afterimage was still floating in his vision. She was tall and long-legged, but her thighs and hips were slightly large for her body, so he’d always thought of them as imperfections. But just now she had been as appealing as anyone he had ever seen. He had the sense of an opportunity forever lost.

  Lila came out of the bathroom wearing a big towel around her and another on her head. He studied her for any hint of eroticism, some slight, subtle, and maybe tentative signal. He took a step toward her and she recoiled, her eyes fixed on his arms and hands, not his face. He stepped back and she went to the closet for jeans and a top, to her dresser for everything else, and back to the bathroom and locked the door.

  In a very short time, she came out dressed, with her long blond hair hanging in wet corkscrew curls. She said, “Are you waiting to say something to me?”

  “I’m sorry I got home so late. I was—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you were doing.”

  “But it does matter.”

  “Not to me.” She brushed past him and sat down at the kitchen table, her forearms folded and resting on the Formica surface. He lifted one of the cups of coffee out of the tray and set it in front of her, but it was invisible to her.

  He sat across from her, lifted the other cup of coffee, and set her an example by sipping it. “It’s still warm.”

  “It’s time to talk.”

  “You’re right. I was thinking this morning when I took Eldon out for his walk that we have to talk.”

  “You don’t. I do.”

  He sat up straight in his chair, his shoulders held in a stiff cringe, nearly high enough to touch his ears.

  “This relationship has gone on a few weeks now.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “When you say ‘relationship’ like that it sounds like you’re thinking about breaking up with me.”

  Her head tilted a little and she looked at his face for a second, then away. “When we were in high school, we didn’t even date. When you turned up again after all this time, I was interested—flattered, curious maybe. And maybe since high school, I’d seen such a pack of assholes that you seemed better than you used to, like something I’d overlooked at the time. But since you’ve been in the apartment, you’ve ended up on the couch more times than in the bed.”

  “I didn’t want to.”

  “We just don’t actually like each other enough for this.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “We like each other a lot. We’re still just getting used to each other, learning to communicate.”

  “I’m not going to let you tell me what my feelings are.”

  “This is about last night, isn’t it? I had been feeling bad because you had been paying for everything all the time—rent, food, and so on.”

  “Thanks for leaving me the money. We can call it even.”

  He continued. “So I went to the bank to get some.”

  “I said thanks.”

  “Not that money. I needed to get more.”

  “At two A.M.?”

  “Of course not. I left right after you went to work, and I expected to be back before you got off work.”

  “Jesus, Jeff. You expect me to buy that. What bank is open that late?”

  “Bank of America. In Las Vegas. The banks are open later there, because they don’t want to keep anybody from doing anything on impulse. I needed the money because I wanted to do something for you. I’d been traveling around a lot, and so that account was the only one I had left open.”

  “If you say so. What held you up?”

  “Traffic. You wouldn’t believe it, but there was this accident right as I was coming out of the low desert up into the high desert on Route 15. You should have seen it. A big rig jackknifed across the road and ruptured its tank, so the actual road was on fire. It was around a bend, so all these cars didn’t see it at first, and there were five or six cars banged up, most of them before the fire started. I was stuck with everybody else just sitting still for hours. I sat there thinking about you, and feeling sorry that I hadn’t brought my phone with me.” He smiled with a vulnerability he had never shown her before. “I kept picturing you. You know, in those—”

  “I’ll bet,” she interrupted. “I found your phone a few minutes after I got home. I called you and your duffel bag rang. Are you sure you didn’t leave it here so I wouldn’t ask you questions?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “You have any proof you were in Las Vegas?”

  “I … Oh, I know.” He got up, went to the closet, and pulled out the canvas bag. He held it in front of his chest and pointed at the words printed on it. “Bank. Of. America.” He tipped it a bit so she could see a bit of the green currency.

  “Great. I’m so glad you’re not destitute. This makes me feel so much better.”

  Jeff smiled uncomfortably. He wasn’t quite sure that he had succeeded in meeting all of her objections, and he was wondering whether making up with Lila was what he really wanted most, and why he was trying so hard. But then he remembered the sight of her when he had walked in this morning. “Feel better?”

  “I do. I’d like you to get your stuff together and leave.”

  “Can I just say something?” He went on before she could answer. “I can see that my getting in that traffic jam in the desert last night was the most important moment of my life. All the time while I was sitting in my car, with the night lit up by those big gasoline flames, all dark orange with a blue ghost flickering around the edges, I was feeling desperate about getting home here to you. I was picturing you wearing what you actually were, with that beautiful, smooth white skin and golden hair and the face of an angel. And I realized right at that moment that I was seeing what I wanted most in the world. It was like that guy in the Bible, riding his donkey and he gets like a stroke, knocked right off his donkey onto the road. He gets up, and he’s a new guy.”

  “Saul. When he
gets up he changes his name to Paul.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I am. Didn’t you go to Sunday School?”

  “But that was just what happened to me. I got forced to sit still in the desert for a while and think about who I’d been and who I wanted to be. I realized that I may never be rich or famous or even an okay guy. But I would be happy forever if I only had you. After I sized up the situation, I had to turn off the radio to save the battery. I just stared into those flames and I saw you. It felt like a vision. I could see you in exactly the same clothes you had put on, waiting for me.”

  “That’s not exactly magic. You laid them out for me.”

  “I got so concerned about you and what you must be feeling.”

  “What was I feeling?”

  “At first I pictured you all ready and fresh and pretty, waiting for me, in a mood for romance.” He saw her eyes and kept talking rapidly. “And then, I thought that you would know it wasn’t like me to be thoughtless and leave you waiting, so you would get worried. I pictured you looking scared and sad, maybe calling the police and the hospitals. I actually got out of my car and walked up the line of cars that were blocked, asking people if I could use their phones. But it was dark and I was just this darker shadow coming out of the night. I might be a psycho or something. They all rolled up their windows. Some wouldn’t even look at me. Finally one of the highway patrol cops that were keeping people away from the fire ran up and yelled at me to get back in my car.”

  “After they cleared the road, why didn’t you stop at a pay phone and call?”

  “When we finally moved, everybody needed gas, so they lined up at all the exits I passed for the next hour. I figured I’d be better off if I kept going until I found one that wasn’t packed. Now that everybody’s got a cell phone, there are hardly any pay phones, and I might have to wait forever. I knew you were probably feeling even worse by then, and a call from me telling you I was stuck in the desert wouldn’t help. I had to talk to you in person.”