Derailed

by Siegel, James

  “He called my house, Lucinda,” I said.

  “Welcome to the fucking club,” she said.

  “What?”

  “He called mine, too,” speaking in a whisper, as if she were trying to keep someone else from hearing. Was her husband somewhere in the house?

  I’d been very much hoping that Mr. Vasquez hadn’t called my house. Or that a Mr. Vasquez had, but that it was simply someone who’d found my discarded wallet in a vestibule of the Fairfax Hotel and called as a Good Samaritan. Or for a reward. Ridiculous, maybe. But there was always hope, wasn’t there?

  Not anymore.

  “You spoke to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he want?” I asked. That, after all, was the million-dollar question here — you have to know what a man wants before you know what to do.

  “I don’t know what he wanted.”

  “Well, what did he say? Did he — ”

  “He asked me how he was.”

  “How he was? I don’t — ”

  “Did I enjoy it? He wanted to know if I enjoyed it. He wanted affirmation — isn’t that what men ask you after they . . .” But she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. I guess even false bravado has its limits.

  “I’m sorry, Lucinda.”

  Another apology. I had the feeling I could apologize to her every day for the rest of my life, then keep on apologizing to her into the afterlife, and it still wouldn’t be enough. And then I’d have all those other people to apologize to as well.

  “I think he wanted to know . . . ,” she said.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I was speaking louder than I should’ve been. Either louder or softer — because I was drawing glances from the sparsely filled train — from the woman surrounded by Bloomingdale’s shopping bags sitting across from me and the two girls with nose earrings holding hands on the other side of the aisle.

  “What did he want to know?” I asked.

  “Whether we’d done anything. Gone to the police. . . .”

  We won’t go to the police, I'd promised him. The kind of promise most victims of violent crime probably make in the heat of terror. Only in this case, a promise Vasquez could more or less believe if he chose to. This woman don’t look like you, he’d said to Lucinda. And this man — he don’t look like you.

  Vasquez might’ve jumped anybody this morning. But he’d gotten lucky. He’d found the perfect victims. Because we had to hide the fact we were victims.

  “What do we do now?” Lucinda asked me now, the same question I’d asked her back in the hotel room. Because suddenly nothing wasn’t enough. Not anymore.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Charles . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “What if he . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What if he what, Lucinda?” But I think I knew what she was going to ask me. I just didn’t wish to hear it said out loud — not now, not yet.

  “Okay, so what do we do, Charles?”

  “Maybe what we should’ve done before. Maybe we have to go to the police.”

  “I’mnot telling my husband.”

  She’d gotten real emotion back in her voice after all. A sudden and undeniable firmness that brooked no further discussion. “IfI can manage it, then you can." I was the one raped, she was saying to me. I was the one raped six times while you sat there and did nothing. If I can choose to be quiet about it, then you can. Then you have to.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. If he calls again, I’ll talk to him. I’ll find out what he wants.”

  Deanna mothered me when I got home. So did Anna — maybe she was finally happy to see someone else in need of medical attention. She brought me a warm compress to lay against my swollen nose and gently rubbed my arm as I lay half-dead on the bed.

  I was back in the bosom of my family — content, grateful, the very picture of domestic bliss.

  Except each time the telephone rang, I flinched as if punched in the stomach.

  A friend of Deanna’s. A mortgage broker’s cold call. My secretary wanting to know if I was all right.

  But there was always the next call, wasn’t there?

  And they insisted on hearing about the accident. Anna wanted to know how I could have been so spastic. Stepping out of a cab, for God’s sake. Into a hole?

  I said I didn’t want to talk about it. And I wondered if repeating the same lie was the same as telling different lies. If one was worse than the other. Neither one felt particularly good, not when my daughter was offering me a warm towel and my wife her unconditional love.

  I tried to watch some basketball in the den, to root for the struggling Knicks. But I found it hard to focus; my mind kept wandering. There was a player on the Indiana Pacers, for instance, who looked a little like . . . Black, but Hispanic. Lopez, his name was — a backup guard. Taller of course, but . . .

  “What’s the score?” Anna asked me. She’d stopped watching basketball with me at age nine, but I supposed she was trying to be kind to her bruised and battered father.

  “We’re losing.” It was a safe answer these days, even if you didn’t actually know what the score was.

  Just then it turned up in the left corner of the screen. The Knicks had rallied within four.

  “Eighty-six to eighty-two,” Anna recited.

  “A close one,” I said. “We’ve got a shot.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Daddy — did you ever play basketball?”

  “Sure.”

  “On a team? ”

  “No. Not on a team.”

  “Then how’d you play?”

  “With friends. At the park — you know.” Murray Miller, Brian Timinsky, Billy Seiden. They were my best friends growing up — but slowly, one by one, they’d faded away. Years ago, I’d seen Billy Seiden in a Pathmark supermarket, but I’d left without saying hello.

  I hugged Anna. I wanted to tell her something, about love and life and how it can be fleeting if you don’t hold on — that you have to jealously guard what’s important to you — but I couldn’t think of the right words.

  Because the phone rang.

  Anna picked it up after the second ring.

  “Foryou, ” she said.

  “Who is it?”

  “Some Spanish guy,” Anna said.

  THIRTEEN

  The conversation:

  “Hello there, Charles. ”

  “Hello.” His voice seemed out of context. It belonged in a hotel room smelling of blood, not here in the safety of my own den. Unless my den wasn’t safe anymore.

  “How’s things, Charles? ”

  “What do you want?”

  “You doin’ okay, Charles?”

  “Fine. What do you want?”

  “Yousure you doin’ okay, Charles?”

  “Yes, I’m doing okay.”

  “Not getting stupid on me, Charles, right? Not running to the cops?”

  Lucinda was right; he wanted to know if we’d gone to the police. “No,” I said.

  “I know you promised and all, but I don’t know you that well, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “I haven’t gone to the police,” I said. I was speaking softly; I’d ushered Anna out of the room, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t come in again. And then there was Deanna, who just might pick up the phone and wonder who I was talking to.

  “That’s good, Charles.”

  “What do you want?” I asked him again.

  “What do I want?”

  “Look, I — ”

  “You’re not going to get stupid on me, Charles, right? You tell the cops, you got to tell the little woman, right, Charles? You got to tell her how you’re fucking Lucinda, right, Charles? Why you want to do that, huh?”

  He’d laid it out for me. The crux of the situation, just in case I’d missed it.

  “I’m not going to the police,” I repeated.

  “That’s good, Charles. Her
e’s the thing — I need a loan.”

  Okay. It was the question Lucinda had begun to ask me on the phone. What if he . . . Not exactly finishing, but if she had, she would have said: What if he asks for money?

  “I hate to ask, know what I mean?” he said. “But I’m a little short, see.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you think — ”

  “Not much, Charles. A little loan, you know. Say ten grand. . . .”

  “I don’t have ten grand.”

  “You don’t have ten grand?”

  “No.” I’d thought it was over, but it wasn’t over.

  “Shit. That’s a problem.”

  “Look, I don’t have cash just lying around like that. Everything’s — ”

  “That’s a real problem, Charles. I really need that loan, see.”

  “I just don’t have — ”

  “I think you better get it for me.” Leaving unsaid why I better get it for him.

  “Everything’s tied up. I just can’t — ”

  “You’re not listening to me, Charles. I’m talking here and you’re not listening. I need ten grand, Charles. Okay? That’s the deal. You’re a big fucking executive, Charles. Says so right on your business card. Senior”—saying it like señor—“creative director. Ex-ec-u-tive vice pres-i-dent. That’s pretty fucking impressive, Charles. And you don't got ten grand? Who the fuck you kidding?”

  No one, I thought.

  “Charles.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about your cash flow, okay? I want ten grand from you. You understand me?”

  Yes.

  “If you understand, then say you will give me ten grand.”

  Deanna was calling me from the kitchen. “Do you want some chicken soup?”

  “I’ll get it for you,” I said.

  “You’ll get what for me?”

  “I’ll get you the ten thousand.”

  “Great. Thank you. Hated to ask you and all, but you know how it is.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll call you again, okay, Charles?”

  “Can you please call at the office? Can you — ”

  “Nah. I like calling here. I’ll call you back here, okay, Charles?”

  Click.

  What if he asks us for money? Lucinda had wondered.

  Even though he’d taken our money, even though he’d said, See, I got your money, right here, he didn’t have all our money, did he?

  And as long as we weren’t going to the police, he could go ahead and ask for it.

  The Knicks lost at the buzzer.

  Deanna asked me what was wrong, and that’s what I told her — the team lost and I’d been pulling for them.

  “Poor baby,” she said.

  Which is exactly what Lucinda had said to me that day on the train. Poor baby, as she’d patted me on the arm and whispered something into my ear. Something about me being sexy.

  Which maybe I was, back before I’d turned into a clown.

  Vasquez wanted ten thousand dollars.

  I didn’t have ten thousand dollars just lying around. It wasn’t sitting under the mattress or accruing interest in a bank account, either. What I did have was approximately $150,000 worth of stock certificates sitting in a file cabinet in my office attic. Company stock, handed out to me each and every year thanks to Eliot’s beneficence.

  Deanna and I had a name for those stock certificates—a designation that left no doubt as to their purpose. Not our vacation fund, or our retirement fund, or even our rainy day fund. Anna's Fund. That’s what we called it. Anna’s Fund, there for whenever and whatever might come in the future. Call it a hedge against a coming depression.

  An operation, for instance.

  Or ten operations. Or other things I didn’t necessarily want to contemplate.

  Anna’s Fund. Every paper penny of it.

  But what else could I do but pay him?

  I lay in bed with Deanna, Deanna already starting to doze even though it couldn’t be much past nine. Those twenty-six third graders take a lot out of her—and now this, what would this take out of her? If she knew, that is—if she found it. If I broke down and told her, not breaking my promise to Lucinda, not exactly, not telling the police. Just her.

  Then I wouldn’t have to give Vasquez his money, would I? Unless . . .

  Unless Vasquez threatened to tell someone else. Unless he said, Fine, your wife knows — great, but Lucinda’s husband — he doesn’t. Lucinda’s husband, whom she’d sworn would never know, no matter what, never know she’d gone to a hotel room with another man to have sex and ended up having more sex than she’d bargained for.

  If I can manage it, then you can, Lucinda had said to me.

  I owed her that, didn’t I? After letting another man rape her—after sitting there and watching another man rape her? We were in this together.

  Besides, I could fantasize all I wanted about telling Deanna, but the truth was, I could no more imagine telling Deanna what I’d been up to than I could imagine telling Anna. I could rehearse the very words; I could imagine the burden being lifted. See? No burden. But it was make-believe — it wasn’t real.

  After Deanna was safely asleep, I went upstairs to the attic to rummage through our file cabinet. Under A for Anna’s Fund.

  Only to find it, I had to wade through a few other things first, the file cabinet having surrendered over the years to general disorganization and chaos. High school diplomas, college degrees, birth certificates—a record, more or less, of us. The Schines. Milestones, achievements, life-changing events. A tiny pair of footprints courtesy of Anna Elizabeth Schine. A degree from Anna’s kindergarten. And farther back — a marriage certificate. “Charles Schine and Deanna Williams.” Promising to love and honor — a promise I’d callously discarded in a downtown hotel.

  There was a surreal quality to taking my stock certificates out of the file cabinet in order to pay off a rapist. There was no manual for this sort of situation, no self-help books promising to make it all better.

  On the way out of the den, I passed Anna’s room — a sleeping Anna bathed in moonlight, or was it simply her night-light? She’d begun plugging it into the wall again soon after she’d gotten sick. Because she was suddenly scared to death to be alone in the dark. Because she worried she’d wake up hypoglycemic and wouldn’t be able to find her sugar tablets — or maybe that she wouldn’t wake up at all.

  Sleep seemed to relieve her of all her anger and sadness, I thought.

  I tiptoed in and leaned over her bed. Her breath brushed against my face like butterfly wings (remembering now how I’d once pinched a monarch’s wings between my thumb and forefinger to show it to a four-year-old Anna before carefully placing it into a cleaned-out jelly jar). I planted a kiss on one cool cheek. She stirred, groaned slightly, turned over.

  I went downstairs and slipped the stock certificates into my briefcase.

  FOURTEEN

  I met Lucinda at the fountain on 51st and Sixth.

  When I called and told her what Vasquez wanted, she’d lapsed into silence and then asked to meet me there.

  I’d been sitting there ten minutes when I saw her cross 51st Street.

  I stood up and began to raise my hand in greeting. But I stopped — she was with another man. She continued toward me, and for a moment I was caught between sitting down and standing up, between saying hi and saying nothing. I sat back down; something made me lie low.

  I stayed seated right there on the rim of the fountain as Lucinda and the man walked right by me without a glance.

  The man was dressed in a respectable blue suit and recently shined shoes. Fiftyish, hair just beginning to thin, lips pursed in thought. Lucinda looked almost normal again, I thought, which was to say gorgeous, if you didn’t look too closely. If you didn’t peer intently at the faint rings under her eyes — not like the rings under mine, which resembled football black, but undeniably there. A woman who looked as though she hadn’t slept much lately, who’s
tossed and turned despite the two Valiums and glass of wine.

  She seemed to be speaking to the man, but whatever she was saying was swallowed up by a cacophony of New York clatter — car horns, bicycle bells, piped music, bus engines. They passed within five feet of me and I couldn’t hear a word.

  I waited as they headed for a side street. I was surrounded by the usual mix of tourists with craned necks, afternoon smokers puffing away with undisguised desperation, and the odd street person mumbling to himself.

  I stared at the Christmas decorations on Radio City Music Hall across the street. “Spectacular Christmas Show,” it said, the entire marquee wreathed in holly. A sidewalk Santa was ringing a bell by the front doors and shouting, “Merry Christmas, everyone!” Here by the fountain it was cold and raw.

  I waited five, then ten minutes.

  Then I saw Lucinda coming back, hurrying around the corner and staring straight at me. So. She’d seen me after all.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. For what?”

  “For not saying hello. For not saying anything. That was my husband.”

  That was my husband. The golfer. The one who would never know.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He surprised me at the office. With flowers. He insisted on taking the cab uptown with me. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. How have you been?”

  “Just terrific. Couldn’t be better.” The tone of her voice suggested that I was kind of stupid for asking her that, like one of those TV reporters at a scene of unimaginable tragedy asking the victim’s remaining family how they’re feeling these days.

  “Has he called you again?” she asked me.

  “Not since he asked for ten thousand dollars. No.”

  “And?” she said. “Are you going to give it to him?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked down at her hands. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” And I didn't want her to mention it, either. Because every time I mentioned it, it became realer, something that was going to actually take place.

  “Look,” she said, “I have one thousand dollars here. A little account my husband doesn’t know about.” She reached into her pocketbook.