Paul shakes himself. When he speaks, I’m startled at the pitch of his voice. “Well, God damn it, Lola, what do you want? I live here. I’m doing my best and you’re knocking back everything I try. And you’re not trying at all. You’re just sitting there, it’s no good. I can’t just ignore you sitting there like a death’s head. I live here.”
I freeze. “I know this is your place, Paul. I can’t go back to mine.”
“I know.” Paul puts his head between his hands and presses. “I know that. Just—please try to be nice while you’re here, eh?”
“You sound like my mother,” I say. “While you’re under my roof, you do as you’re told.” Though it was Becca she said this to, not me. My stay under her roof was always considered more transitory.
“Lola, for God’s sake! Please don’t take things out on me.”
“Why not?” The words are out of my mouth before I know I’m going to speak. What I felt when I talked to Bride rises in me again, the passion to live, to rend whatever stands in my way. My fingers claw in my lap. I look at Paul. I want to touch him, caress, drive some passion into the air around us, but also to hurt him. I remember how his hair feels, the fine, tough strands, and my hands tug at the cloth of my jacket. I’ve seen how pleasure changes his face, traces itself around his eyes and mouth, but how would he look, how would he sound, if I hurt him?
“Because—” He’s pacing now, raising and dropping and raising his hands, caged. “Because it’s fucked up, that’s why. I’ve been nothing but nice to you, Lola. It doesn’t mean you can turn on me because you’ve had a bad day. You got a problem, deal with it. Don’t fire on the nearest safe target like a coward.”
“You think I’m a coward?” I laugh; the sound echoes, hard-edged and acrid like a dropped coin. “There speaks the respectable man. You go out one night with a trank gun and the moon up and see how liberal you feel.”
“That’s nothing to do with me!”
“No,” I say quietly. “You’re right. It isn’t. Try it sometime, and then call me a coward.”
“I can’t.” His voice is as quiet as mine, and just as harsh. “But that’s not to do with me either. Don’t try to justify attacking me by flashing the DORLA card.”
Flashing the DORLA card. He’s seen me do that, he’s seen me get past people by flashing the card. He remembers.
“Then don’t call me names,” I say.
“What has the one got to do with the other?” The phrase is scholarly, educated, and I slam my fist against a cushion. “And leave the fucking cushion alone.”
“Why, do you feel sorry for it? Go on, take the cushion’s side against me.”
He looks at me, and his face collapses in laughter. “For God’s sake. This is getting ridiculous.”
I knock away the hand he reaches out to me.
“Lola, stop it. Why are you being such a bitch?” The word is sharp-pointed and savage, but his tone is more questioning than anything else.
“I told you not to call me names.”
“Oh for God’s sake!” He flings away from me again. “Lola, I’m prepared to be nice about anything if you’ll work with me, but this is just fucking ridiculous. I’ve had enough, you can just sit there and simmer.”
Simmer. I’m a pot that will burn his hand if he touches it. “Of course. You only sympathize with those doe-eyed enough to beg for it. I forgot you were sentimental.”
“Here.” He takes a knife off the sideboard, a small one for cutting fruit, and tosses it over to me. “You want to sit there playing knife-thrower, use a proper weapon.”
“Oh, wonderful, now you’re giving me props. Get me to act out your little scenario rather than deal with me. You’re such a fucking child.”
Paul slams his hand into the wall. I flinch at the sound, shrink back into myself. Then he turns around, and I’m angry with him for making me shiver. “If you’re going to hit the wall, I think I’m entitled to hit the cushion,” I say. “And wake the neighbors up while you’re at it, I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.”
“Lola.” His voice is slow, precise, fierce. “Leaving aside the fact that it’s seven o’clock, I have to tell you that I’ve had absolutely all I’m going to take of this. I don’t want you picking fights with me, I don’t want you throwing out barbs about everything I do or say. You’re not the only one who’s had a bad day.”
“Oh, you’ve had a bad day.” My voice is hard.
“Yes, I’ve had a bad day.” He flexes his fingers, looks at the door. “Whatever you say about your job, I’m sure it’s true, but, but no one likes dealing with social workers either, and I’m trying to do my best, too. You’re not the only one outnumbered, you’re not the only one fighting uphill. I do a hard job, Lola. And I haven’t laid it on you. I know you’re going through something really bad. But I’m—for God’s sake, I’m taking a risk even having you here.” The blood stops in my veins at the words. “And you’re not the only one who’s, who’s got a life to deal with.”
He’s put our lives in separate categories. “You can’t blame me for not reading your mind.”
“I don’t want you reading my mind. All I’m asking is that you think about the possibility that you might not be the only person who can get upset.”
“You didn’t have to risk yourself,” I say. I’m beyond emotion; I feel what he’s said as a physical pain in my chest. “I told you when I asked you, you didn’t have to take me in.”
“I wanted to, God damn it. Christ, Lola, you think I don’t know what it’s like for you, you spend all your life thinking ‘no one understands me,’ and it’s just not true. I know what you’re up against. I wanted you to stop fighting the world for a bit. I thought if you stayed here you’d know not everything was against you. But if you’re going to carry the fight in here, then—then you’re still staying here,” he starts to look confused, frustrated with his words, “but you’re not going to fight with me. It’s just—it’s just damn well ungrateful, that’s all.”
I sit. I stare. Everything he’s said has been in the past tense. “If you invited me here to prove a point,” I say, my voice unsteady, “you might have tried telling me. If you wanted to turn me into an object lesson, you should have let me know. You think I should be grateful? If you can dare stand there and tell me that you wanted me so you could prove something, if you wanted a woman you could fix, then I’m sorry I trusted you.”
“Jesus,” Paul says. He’s gazing at me as if I was a news bulletin of an atrocity, a self-inflicted wound. “You really don’t like men very much, do you?”
“I don’t have a problem with men,” I say. “I have a problem with lycos.”
We look at each other. What we’ve said hangs tattered on the walls around us, closing us in, it’s everywhere we look.
Paul speaks quietly. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
I swallow, say nothing.
“You actually think it’s all right to say things like that.”
I can’t speak. My teeth ache and I have to press them together to keep the pain out.
“Lola, if I said something like that to you, you’d kill me.”
Could he say that to me? All I can see is that he knows he might. If Paul calls me a bareback, I’ll die. I make myself meet his eyes. “People say—something like that—to me all the time. It won’t kill you to hear it the other way around.”
He opens his mouth as if to shout, then shuts it fast. In the second that takes, I’ve heard so many answers—that I’ve no right to pass on abuse, that he’s never done anything to deserve it, that insults are my lot in life and no fault of his. Instead, he gestures as if pushing aside a heavy branch, and speaks in a tense, quiet voice. “If you feel that way, Lola, then why are you seeing me?”
I can’t tell him I love him.
“Come on, Lola, you always have an answer for everything. If you feel so badly about lycos, then why are you sleeping with one? Why not stick to people like yourself?”
Pe
ople like me.
If he thinks this is self-hatred, that I wouldn’t want someone like myself, he’s wrong. I know he’s wrong. I wouldn’t want someone like myself, but that’s not because I’m a bareback, it’s because I’m me. But why would he say that, if he doesn’t believe, deep down, that I should know myself for a freak?
“I just met you, that’s all,” I say. “You were interested. Bareback girls are sluts, didn’t you know?”
He covers his forehead. “You’re not a stupid woman, Lola. Why do you come out with such stupid things?”
I open my mouth to say, Well, I guess I didn’t have the advantages of a lyco education, but I stop. Paul has always somehow made me ashamed of cheap remarks, and even now, sitting shaking on his sofa, his warm untidy sitting room as empty and cold around me as an Arctic wasteland, I can’t say it.
“See,” he says, soft as snow, “when you say those things, you really are the way people see you.”
“Who sees me?” My throat is closing up, a wire inside pulling tighter and tighter.
“Nobody,” he says. “But if you want people to treat you like a person, if you hate it so much when people point and call you names, why the hell do you play the bareback card so often?”
Bareback. The word, in his voice, cuts a red, wet piece out of my heart.
I curl up, wrap myself around a cushion, turn my head away from him and burrow into the sofa. My voice is barely audible. “You said you didn’t use that word.”
“Why not? You say it yourself.”
“It’s different.”
“Of course, everything’s different for you. Lola, you really need to get over yourself.”
He says it, the adolescent phrase, the simple, snap-out-of-it solution. Get over myself. Not the world, not life, not silver bullets in the back of men’s heads. Myself, as if I was a wall I could scale, as if I was a grief to recover from.
I lay my cheek on the cushion, turn away from him. “Leave me alone.”
“I’m not the one who started this, Lola.”
“Leave me alone.”
“What, have you had enough fighting? Guess you wouldn’t be so tired of it if you’d been doing all the shouting. It’s hard to take, isn’t it?”
“Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone!” Something black and scalding floods me, and I turn and hurl the cushion at him. It flings itself out of my hand, spins in the air. He catches it, stands with it in his grip, and this maddens me. I throw another, then another, pull and wrench at the sofa, dislodging all its comforts, laying waste.
He stands, the cushion in his hands, looking at me. He doesn’t say a word. I curl up, press my face into the last cushion left, cover my head with my arms, wrapping up as small as I can go.
Finally I hear a sound. He tosses the cushion down, picks up his keys and heads for the door. “I’m going out,” he says.
There’s nothing I can say.
I hear the door open, and then he speaks. “I’ve got my cell with me, call me if anything happens.” He sounds no less angry than before. “And don’t forget to lock up after I’m gone.”
Then the door slams, and he’s gone. It’s a long time before I can move.
He’s gone for an hour. In this time, I raise my head and look around me. There are cushions all over the room. I want to lie down, but I can’t; my tiny island that I’ve left on the sofa is too small, it confines me. It’s long, weary work to stand up, fetch the cushions one by one, replace them one by one.
The sofa is reassembled, but it doesn’t look right. Something about the angle of the cushions is wrong, it’s become different, as if a new piece of furniture had replaced the old when I wasn’t looking. But since there’s no one here to see, I can get back on it. It’ll do to lie down on.
The feeling of shame is like a bridle, it checks me every time I turn my head. Too much of what he’s said is just. Still I think Becca has betrayed me, still I think Paul shouted at me, but they both of them said things that I can’t shake off. My sister and Paul tangle in my head, I fight both of them at once, hear again what they said to me. What I want to say to them now is that I know I’m not a good woman. I never was. Most of the time, I’m not even a pleasant woman. But if they’d had my life, if they’d had everything that happened to me happen to them, would they have been any better than I am?
The trouble is, I don’t think Paul would consider that an excuse.
I lie very still. It’s too empty in here. I wish I hadn’t quarreled with Paul. He’s gone, and I may have driven him away for good. That thought is worse than anything, it cuts so deep that I don’t even have the strength to watch the door, search the corner for assassins. All I can do is hold a cushion, pull it to me as hard as I can.
He said he’d keep his cell phone with him, he said to lock the door. Those were things about my safety. The more I think about what he said, the more the bridle tugs. Because the overwhelming thing is that he fights fair. He didn’t say I was a bitch, he said I was being a bitch. He didn’t say I was a coward, that I was stupid. He said that was how I was acting. It’s such a big difference. He didn’t call me a bareback. He said it was a word I used. I called him a lyco, I said I didn’t like lycos, but he never called me a bareback.
I hold tight to the cushion, because this is no good. I really am in love. The thought is not a happy one; it brings no warm flushes or songs about Paris in the springtime. There aren’t many roses in my view. It’s a cold, tight absence in my chest, flowing cool through my veins, making me need him, need to get close enough for him to warm me up. The timing is bad, the prognosis worse, but for all my doubts and fears and grudges against the world, I can’t stop shaking and holding the cushion and wishing for him to come home.
When he does return, the sound shakes me, as the door comes open with a sudden bang. Paul enters the room with a startled look on his face as if he was expecting more resistance.
“Didn’t you double-lock the door?” he says. There’s a slight awkwardness to his voice, a little resignation, a little frustration. “Come on, Lola, you know you have to be careful.”
“I’m sorry.” I sit up on the sofa, balanced back on my heels. I can’t look at him. My eyes are closed, keeping down tears. I sit still as a sacrifice and let him see me.
He sighs. “You know you should be more careful.” I take the reprimand. He isn’t free of the argument yet, not completely, but this reproach is better than some things. It’s not an attack.
“I’m sorry.”
I hear the sound of his keys being set down on the table. “Listen, I got a paper,” he says. It’s an attempt at peace. “Do you want to read it?”
He’s been out, he’s been somewhere where he needed a newspaper to read because I drove him out of his own home. I sit vertical on the sofa, ready to topple. “I’m sorry,” I say, because what other words are there?
The sound of something soft being laid down as he puts his paper on the table, and then he’s around by the sofa, his hand rests on my head. The gesture is like a teacher patting a boy he’s fond of, and I lift my hands, both of them, to catch hold of him, keep this concession pressing down on me. “I’m sorry.”
He sighs again. “It’s okay,” he says. “I know you’re under a lot, I shouldn’t have yelled. Just—try to be a little nice, okay?”
“Okay.” My voice is quiet. He’s earned the last word.
His fingers wriggle a little under my clasp, tapping on my scalp. “I don’t know what to say now,” he says. There’s an echo of rueful humor in his words that I lean my tired soul against.
“That’s okay,” I say. “Just—we needn’t say anything.”
He takes his hand off my head, leaving me with a bereft moment before he comes and sits down beside me. I lie down, let my upright spine give up its guarded equilibrium and slump with my head in his lap. He pats it. His touch is light, almost absent, although I know he’s paying attention. It isn’t passion, it isn’t ease. I don’t even know if it’s forgiveness. But
I lie in his lap, let him pet me as if I were a child. Not his child, there isn’t that much intensity in his hands on my hair. It doesn’t matter. I’ll take whatever’s going. Anything that will let me lie down. I’ve been balanced too long.
TWENTY-TWO
Centuries ago, before we discovered antiallergens, there was only one way to treat a silver wound: whisky and a saw and make your peace with God before I begin, my boy. As long as the silver stays in the wound, the allergy keeps going: white cells rush in and attack the inflamed flesh, the body fights itself. Tissue dies and dies, and you have to cut it away before the necrosis spreads. It used to be a punishment for prisoners of war, to cut open their flesh and stitch a silver ball inside, then wait for moonrise. The guards would lock themselves away in their compound, or chain themselves up if they were on the move, and lock up prisoners together. Sometimes they’d take bets on what would be left in the morning. That got condemned as an atrocity by the middle of the twentieth century, but by then some research-minded army doctors had learned something useful from experimenting with the survivors. There are several good serums now. Inject some and the necrosis can be stopped, as long as you’ve removed the source.
Seligmann’s friend, the man I shot, will have had to rely on traditional methods. There have been no hospital reports of a man with silver necrosis in the arm: he didn’t go in for treatment. But pliers or scalpel or woodwork saw, they must have got the bullet out, because no bodies have been found with a rotted-off arm, no severed limbs found floating in the river.
I shot him near the joint. Not easy to fix. He’d need someone who could steal hospital equipment. An orderly, a nurse, a doctor, even a janitor from the city hospital, St. Veronica’s. That’s the place to look.
A little hacking gets me in, and it’s there I find something unusual. There’s no record of instruments going missing, but used scalpels and forceps get incinerated when they’re discarded; someone would only need to grab a used sharps bag. Missing drugs, though, are another matter. The stores are watched, and thanks to this we’ve struck gold. The day after that night, the Day One that found Seligmann in our custody and this friend of his hobbled and suffering the torments of silver because of what I did to him, a little jar of pharmaceuticals went missing.
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