The Way of All Fish

by Martha Grimes

  “Okay,” said Candy. “But Pittsburgh, it’s a fucking obsession with you. You don’t have to go to Pittsburgh to have a séance. You could do that in midtown.”

  “Chelsea, Pier 61.” Karl snorted a laugh and chewed a small pickle. “You just want to go to Pittsburgh because you never got to before, when we went.”

  “Oh, that’s ludicrous.” Paul drank his beer.

  Candy and Karl shook their heads as if both were on the same puppeteer’s string.

  “No, it ain’t. You just want another Pittsburgh.”

  “I’m from Pittsburgh, remember?”

  “So what? I’m from Wanker, Wyoming. That don’t mean we all have to go there.”

  “I’d like to go there.” Again a voice from the outskirts. Not Molly this time but Hannah, who strode in holding a piece of paper that she dropped on Paul’s desk. It was Chapter 117 of The Hunted Gardens. She looked at Candy and Karl. “Maybe we could get an apartment in Wanker. Then we could let some poor person have this apartment. It’s rent-controlled.” She had been talking about this for months, a year, even.

  Paul said, “Listen: The school in Wanker has one room, and all the grades go there. Do you think you’d learn much that way?”

  “I already know too much. That’s what Clarence says.”

  Paul told them Clarence was the fellow at the desk downstairs. He said to Hannah, “The school doesn’t have a printer. You couldn’t publish your book.”

  Hannah thought about this. “Maybe I could send it back here. I’ll talk to my teacher.”

  Hastily, Paul said, “I’d rather you didn’t mention Wanker, honey.”

  “Why not? Is Wanker some kind of secret?”

  Another voice: “Is what a secret?” Molly.

  “Wanker,” said Hannah. “That’s where they’re from.” She pointed out Candy and Karl.

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me? Come along.” She gave all three of them deadly looks as she turned Hannah around and tried to herd her out of the room.

  Hannah protested. “But Wanker sounds like it’s interesting.” She kept on protesting as she walked away. They could hear “Wanker . . . Wanker” coming from the kitchen.

  Hannah had found a new word.

  52

  Cindy Sella was eating spaghetti with white clam sauce and reading Your Life with an Aquarium when the six—no, the seven of them trooped into the Clownfish Café that evening. Paul Giverney, the two goons, a tall thin man with light thin hair, and a gorgeous redhead. And Bobby Mackenzie, for heaven’s sake.

  And Joe Blythe.

  Her heart, or her stomach, sank. This time it was she who was sitting on the other side of Frankie’s aquarium, nearly invisible to the rest of the dining room unless someone were desperately looking for her through the watery veil of forty fish.

  Two tables were shoved together to accommodate them on the other side of the aquarium. She spotted Joe Blythe between two darting starburst discus fish.

  Joe Blythe, friend of the two goons. He couldn’t be another hit man, could he? He looked like he’d be much more at home with a football or a power drill or maybe a fast car than with a Uzi or whatever hit men were using these days. He looked like such a regular guy. An extremely cute regular guy.

  A whole school of bright blue and yellow tangs whisked by and blotted him out. The view she did get was wavy, disorienting.

  And who was that redhead sitting next to him? My God, what fiery orange-gold hair! They were very busy talking, and although she couldn’t make out complete sentences, words filtered through as if rising from the water.

  What in heaven’s name was Bobby Mackenzie doing here? Looking through the tropical backdrop of the tank, she thought the legendary scion of the publishing world was being pretty loud.

  She heard Paul’s voice but couldn’t hear what he was saying. Right next to their table sat a table full of drunks who exploded in laughter. Cindy tried to bump her chair closer to the fish tank but succeeded only in frightening off a cloud of angelfish.

  Paul laughed. “The real point of going to Pittsburgh is—”

  Cindy heard those words. She wondered what Pittsburgh was all about. She tried to peer through some starbursts heading in the same direction, but all she caught a glimpse of was that redhead leaning toward Joe Blythe. An angelfish fluttered by again, on the trail of the starbursts. Then came a deep blue discus. She was just glad her clown fish were home and out of this war zone.

  “Séance—”

  Paul again.

  Cindy shut her eyes. Séance?

  Given his imagination, Paul must be the plotter of some scheme whose purpose she could not discern. She looked past the ghost clown fish she had given Frankie to see the redhead saying something in Joe Blythe’s ear. Cindy picked up her wine and finished off half a glass in two gulps.

  Damn! She should go home and do some work. Try to get Lulu out of the car. My God! Here was Paul Giverney getting up a plot involving Pittsburgh and a séance, and here she was without the imagination to get her character out of a car.

  Cindy threw down her napkin as if it were a glove and she was demanding a duel.

  Lulu could not get out of the car because she had no life. That was why she could not pry her fingers from the steering wheel.

  Okay, okay, just sit there, Lulu! Cindy could not expect herself to sit with her and suffer whatever wordless trauma Lulu was going through.

  Cindy was going to get a life right now, tonight. No more staring with Lulu through the windshield of a car hour after hour, day after day.

  She got out her wallet and slapped more than enough money on the table to cover her meal. Then she got up. She intended to walk bravely down the two broad steps to the rest of the dining room and march by their table, perhaps giving them a fluttery wave of her fingers, but not stopping even for a minute to chat.

  She was walking so fast she was nearly running to the side door, the door through which L. Bass Hess had made his hurried exit on the night of the Clownfish Café shoot-up.

  53

  The club was called Grunge, and she’d passed it several times on her way to see her friend Rosa Parchment and her cat. Any time after nightfall—and she imagined it fell early in Grunge—passersby could hear the noise, the dead beat of disco music.

  All manner of people went down the steps, mostly girls in skirts that would never cover their ass if they bent over, and guys in leather and bracelets of tattoos.

  She walked down the stone steps to the vaultlike door of the entrance, where a thuggish bouncer with empty eyes and a black T-shirt that said Ratboy folded his arms against the likes of her.

  She had no idea what the Grunge protocol was, so she tried out a lopsided smile and a wink. Then she realized she had put on dark glasses, so the wink hadn’t registered. He didn’t stand in the way of her yanking open the door except to bark, “Twenty.”

  Twenty? “Actually, I’m over thirty, though I don’t—”

  “Twenty bucks, Christ sake.” He still wasn’t looking at her.

  She pulled out her wallet and tried to see the bills in the jittery light filtering out every time the door opened. He waved her in.

  Whatever was playing was loud and vicious, but everyone seemed to go with loud and vicious and stoned. She had seen enough TV and film to make it look as if she knew how to dance like this: a lot of hip movement, a lot of arm waving. She needed to build up the nerve to get out there and pretend she was one of them. A drink or two would probably help. On the right side, a bar ran the width of the room, and all of the bartenders, male and female and advertising a lot of hair product, looked like they were in the process of making a Wes Craven film.

  She shoved through the crowd at the bar, took a stool that a slick-looking guy was sliding off of, and ordered a bourbon and water. Without acknowledging the order, the bartender expertly unwedged a glass from a rack above the assortment of bottles behind him, dug it into some ice, pulled a bottle from among what looked like a thousand, poured, slapped dow
n a coaster and then the glass, and did it all in six seconds. He was so fast, his hands blurred. When she asked how much, he raised both hands and flicked all ten fingers.

  Cindy pulled a twenty out of her wallet and put it down. Apparently, all communication at the bar was semaphoric. She turned on the stool and watched the strobelike colored lights washing in arcs across the ceiling and down the dancers; it made her think of the Clownfish Café, as if this were a huge replica of the brightly colored fish swimming in wineglasses. The dance floor, surprisingly large for the basement club, was so crowded that she didn’t see how she could move her hips and fling her arms properly without hitting someone in the face or bum.

  After a second drink, she went for it: She threw her arms up, then down, shoved hair off the nape of her neck. Eyes closed, she could visualize all of it perfectly; it was like watching one of her characters dance. If they ever danced. She only wished she were wearing funkier clothes than the white T-shirt and jeans. Sway hips, grind a little, hips, hips, arms up—

  “Whatcha on, babe? I’d like a taste of it.”

  Who was this idiot? She didn’t open her eyes. Fling hair, head back. “I’m on my own self, so leave.” Hands slipping down sides, hair tossing.

  “Oooo, well, can your own self spare a little self?”

  The guy was so close, she was breathing his air. She opened her eyes, took a look at him. He seemed to be of mixed ethnicity. He could have been Latino, Mexican, Native American. Which showed how much she knew. He wasn’t bad-looking, just hard to define, part of the scene. He had a day’s growth of beard, the stubble beloved by the homeless and the fashion world.

  “What’s your name, babe?”

  “Babe.” Cindy waved her arms above her head as the lights roiled around their faces. After all the wine she’d drunk at dinner, the double bourbon wasn’t sitting well.

  “Babe?” He heh-hehed. “Come on.”

  She turned her back to him. He put his hands on her hips. She knocked them off. For about ten minutes, his trial-and-error moves went boringly on. Finally, she stopped with the twisting and shaking, said, “I need some air,” pushed through the crowd, got mashed and her feet stomped on, but made it to and through the door below the steps.

  What an experience! Ratboy was gone, probably to snort some coke. She stood flat against the brick wall, shut her eyes, and took some deep breaths, not many, because here was somebody leaning in to her.

  “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”

  “What’s it look like?” His stubbled face came close to hers. He smelled of sweat and, oddly, tangerines.

  Where was the bouncer? Where was Ratboy? She tried moving her head but couldn’t get away from his toothy mouth. He was kissing her as if he meant to take it right through the brick. Her eyes squeezed shut, she heard some kind of scuffle, sounds of feet shifting, and when she opened her eyes, he wasn’t there. Thinking he must have fainted or had a heart attack from the effort he’d been making to nail her to the wall, she looked around: the stone walk to her right, Ratboy’s chair to her left, up, down. There was no one there. Her dancing partner had disappeared.

  She walked slowly back to the heavy door. A couple came drunkenly out, groping each other. Through the door, she saw the rave was still raving.

  She hurried up the steps, miraculously flagged down the sixth cab that went by, climbed in, fell back against the seat, and almost said “Grub Street” before she remembered that was a fiction, and told him “Grove Street. West Village.”

  Mickey and his little dog opened the door of the cab for her as if it were a limousine. Mickey bowed and touched his hat.

  Here was the dancing master! Cindy lay her hand over her heart, so glad was she that she was home and that nothing had changed.

  “Evening, miss. You all right?”

  “Fine, Mickey, fine. I’ve been out dancing.”

  Mickey raised his eyes either to heaven or the high-rise across the street as he clasped his hands beneath his chin. “Oh, I envy you, indeed I do. Do you know the last time I ever danced was in Prague in the assembly rooms.”

  “That’s been years, Mickey. Do you think you could give me a few lessons? We could go up on the roof sometime.”

  “Ah. What school of dance were you demonstrating tonight?”

  Cindy thought. “It’s this sort of free movement where you’re not really dancing with someone.”

  Mickey gave a dismissive wave of his arm. “Those clubs, you mean. That’s not dancing, miss. No, the dance requires discipline.”

  Discipline? He should have been in her head; she’d been dictating the terms of her every movement: hips arms head. If that guy hadn’t ruined the evening, she would have ventured to call it a great success.

  She bent down to scratch the tiny dog behind the ears. “Good night, Mickey. It’s been a tiring evening.”

  “One of those clubs, I can believe it.” He held the door wide and touched his cap again as she passed through.

  Cindy felt immensely sad for Mickey, brought from dancing master in Czechoslovakia to doorman in Chelsea.

  Her clown fish were lounging on their plastic leaves. Gus was lounging on the bench, waiting for them to make their move.

  Cindy undressed and tossed on the old chenille bathrobe and washed her face. Then she padded barefoot to the kitchen and almost got to the Mr. Coffee machine when her door knocker lifted and fell twice. She thought for one awful moment that it must be the guy from Grunge, that he had reappeared and followed her, maybe in his car, maybe in another cab.

  She opened a utensil drawer and ran her hand over the big spoons, can openers, looking for a sharp knife, knew none were there, but hell, a knife was a knife. How had he gotten past Mickey? Mickey could be careless, but still.

  She went to the door and tried looking through the cracked peephole, which told her nothing. With the chain on, she opened up.

  “Cindy.” Joe Blythe was standing there.

  She dropped the knife on her toe, and as if her fish had been giving her lessons, her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. No words were at hand.

  He was leaning casually against the doorjamb. “What were you doing?”

  “Huh?” Her father had loved the word “discombobulated.” Right now she knew what it felt like.

  “What were you doing at that sorry club?” He was chewing gum, making tiny movements with his jaw in the way few people did, as if indifferent to it.

  Cindy blinked. Here she was in her tatty blue robe, face washed to a shine. “What? I mean— How do you know?”

  “I followed you from the Clownfish.”

  Her mouth went back to the fish movement; she felt as if she were underwater. Having come up little by little through the water, she broke its surface and realized she could be seriously indignant: “Followed me? You followed me?” She wanted to say, The nerve!

  “You should stay away from places like that. That guy was trouble.”

  Her hands on her hips, she was so busy striking a pose that she overlooked the obvious. A smart retort came to her: “And trouble is your business? Raymond Chandler.” The obvious being that someone had dragged the guy away from where he had her pinned to the wall. Her eyes widened. “You . . . you pulled him off me? That was you? I didn’t even see you!”

  “You had your eyes closed.”

  She pulled the belt of her robe tighter. “But it happened so fast! You were so fast.”

  “It’s a skill.”

  “When I was dancing, when we were— What were you doing all that time?”

  “Having a drink at the bar, watching the people on the dance floor. You call it dancing.”

  As if he disapproved. Her eyes narrowed. “You were watching me?”

  “Sure. You were really into it. It’s clear you love to dance.” He bit his lip, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

  She drew closer to the doorjamb, ran her arm up the side, leaned against it, said, “Could I have one of those?”

  He sh
ook out another cigarette. “Sorry, I didn’t think you smoked.”

  “Why? You barely know me.”

  “True.” He put her cigarette, together with his, between his lips and lit them with an old Zippo.

  “Now, Voyager,” she said. Everyone who ever saw it had been enthralled by Paul Henreid. Men were lighting up two cigarettes at a time for years, she guessed.

  He smiled and handed her a cigarette. “That was so long ago, I didn’t think you’d’ve seen it and I could take credit for the double-cigarette light-up.”

  She smiled, too, then coughed when she inhaled, then cleared her throat. “I guess there are some moves one can make that are unforgettable. Does that make them immortal?”

  He seemed to be considering this. “Wouldn’t that mean a lot of us wouldn’t stand a chance of being immortal? Immortality wouldn’t be there for the common man. You’d have to leave something behind: a movie, a poem, a painting, a handicap, a strike.”

  “A strike?”

  “I was thinking of Ted Williams.”

  Cindy was beginning not to know where she was at all when the door to the exit opened and Edward stepped out. Seeing her in her doorway, he did a double take. “Edward!” she shouted as if the three of them had met in Grand Central.

  “Evening,” said Edward. Looking at his watch, he said, “Or morning.”

  “This is Joe Blythe. Edward Bishop.” She passed the two names between them, adding, “Edward’s a poet.” She was always pleased to be able to announce that, forgetting that Edward wasn’t pleased. “Poet,” he once said, was a word that seemed to make everybody anxious, hard to live up to.

  It didn’t seem to bother Joe Blythe a bit. “I can’t imagine anything more difficult.”

  That irritated her. What about her own writing? Could he imagine it was easy getting Lulu out of the car? She took another drag on the cigarette and said, “Writing fiction isn’t a picnic.” A picnic. What a cliché.

  “I imagine not. It’s just that poetry is much denser. Every word takes on more meaning.”