She raised her head and looked at the guy. With his back to her, his spine inclined slightly, he was undressing, slipping his pants off. His legs were thin and white, but in the sunlight that came through the red cotton drapes they seemed blotchy, as if he suffered from some skin ailment.
Hurry, she thought. He turned to the bed, still bent a little at the hips in the fashion of someone undergoing an attack of shame. He was erect and his hands, dangling, masked the erection. She wanted to say, Look, I’ve seen it all before. But she said nothing, waiting for him to reach her in silence. He sat on the edge of the bed and slipped the strap of her bra from her shoulder and, moaning a little, leaned to kiss the side of her neck. A moaner, she thought. She felt his hands tug at the bra and she wondered how much of her two years she had left. Fourteen months? Thirteen?
She put her arms up around his shoulders and pulled him down.
The next bit was the trick, the whole magic show. How to distance yourself from the customer while maintaining the delicate illusion of participation. How to be yourself and not yourself, simultaneously. A juggling act. She shifted her hips underneath him, glanced at his face, saw the earnest expression locked into the features. She felt almost sorry for him for a moment, like she was a nurse with a terminal patient.
Think stocks, think shares, she told herself. Think of your bank balance and Wall Street and Max in his little office. Then you won’t have time for the creeping affliction of sympathy.
She listened to the guy grunt.
Sometimes it was hard to be the complete materialist.
4
The time, the goddamn time, how had the time slipped so quickly away? She reached for her watch and it slithered from her fingers to the floor, taking with it the wedding ring she’d removed and laid on the bedside table, so she had to go down on her hands and knees to pick them up again and the ring, that small gold hoop Mike had given her with such awful solemnity, had disappeared under the bed. She felt for it, her fingers touching a pair of rolled-up socks, a sandal, an item of discarded clothing. In the darkened room she squinted at the watch—it was five twenty. The afternoon had evaporated. And the lunch, Christ, she’d missed the lunch. Mike would be furious. An excuse, she thought. You need an excuse. I picked up this guy, Mike, I don’t even know his name, I was in the Museum and something kinda came over me and the next thing we were in a cab and we spent the afternoon in bed and I had a terrific time, Mike, the sort of time I don’t get from you . . . She couldn’t think of one. She felt only a weird panic, like a paralysis of the brain. We fucked, Mike, and it all began in the taxi, and then there was the missing glove . . . She walked up and down the bedroom, looking at the figure of the sleeping man, the dark hair spread on the rumpled white pillow, the tiny curled hairs that crisscrossed his chest and looked like small tattoos in the half-light. She wanted to wake him, say something to him, but she didn’t. All she could think of was going home, facing Mike, an excuse, an excuse. But why couldn’t she get her head to respond? She went inside the bathroom and ran cold water and splashed it across her face and she wondered: Will Mike know? Will he know just by looking at me? Is there some kind of sign? A light in the eye, something out of place?
She switched on the light. She picked up a hairbrush from the counter around the sink and ran it quickly through her hair, but it didn’t look right. I don’t have time, she thought. I don’t have time to make myself neat or meticulous. She shivered and returned to the bedroom, picking up her clothes from the floor. She dressed hurriedly, fighting with the panic, thinking: What did I do?
Why am I here? And then on some other level there was a sense of shame, not of regret, just shame, and then she couldn’t think what to say to Mike, as if the confusion and the shame were one and the same.
No underwear.
No underwear. She moved around the bed, searched the floor, wanted to turn on the lamp but didn’t because for some reason she didn’t want to wake the man. No underwear . . . And then it came to back to her. The cab.
No.
That couldn’t be. She couldn’t have left them in the cab.
She closed her eyes, tried to remember, recalling how his hand had gone under her pale gray skirt, how the skirt had been pushed up to her thighs, how torn she’d been between her own urgent excitement and the cabbie’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
The cab. She must have left them in the cab.
She twisted her hands together, feeling disgust. The cabdriver. The eyes in the mirror. He must have been watching. How could he have pretended otherwise? And the man, teasing her with his fingers, laughing sometimes as if he’d understood her hunger and how easily he could control it, satisfy it.
She moved up and down the room. She couldn’t find the underwear. She couldn’t even remember the color of the panties. She strapped the wristwatch around her wrist, then she looked back at the man—the way he turned in his sleep, as if he were about to wake and push the bedsheets aside and tell her to get back in beside him. I would do it too, she thought. I wouldn’t hesitate. No, she told herself. You can’t stay here. You have to leave. You wish you could wake him and tell him how good it was, but you don’t have time for that.
She walked out of the bedroom. She moved across the thick rug of the darkened living room. She found a lamp, turned it on, saw the light gleam in the chromium of the modernistic furniture. Something, she thought. There’s something I’ve forgotten. She couldn’t think what. That emptiness again, the mind just draining away. She gazed at the coffee table, the desk set against the wall by the door. She thought: I don’t even know his name. She went towards the desk. There were a couple of envelopes, windowed envelopes containing bills. Warren Lockman, the name read, but somehow she couldn’t associate the name with the man asleep in the bedroom. They were separate entities. Then she wished she hadn’t bothered to discover his name, she wished it had remained unknown, a wonderful secret . . .
She saw another piece of paper lying alongside the envelope, half-buried, an official-looking form of some kind. She pulled it out from the pile and looked at the heading: NEW YORK CITY HEALTH DEPARTMENT. For a moment it didn’t dawn on her, the dark print blurred in front of her eyes, she wanted to crush the paper, crumple it, set it alight. WARREN LOCKMAN. I don’t know anyone by that name, she thought. I never met anybody called Warren Lockman. Just a man, an afternoon lover. INFECTIOUS VENEREAL DISEASES. No, she thought. LIST OF ALL—
The paper was bent. She couldn’t read the rest of it without unfolding the form. She didn’t want to do that. LIST OF ALL—
How could she belong to the list of somebody she’d never even met, for God’s sake? She turned the paper over. LIST OF ALL—
But the dark print was liquid again, black water, ink spilled over paper and turning into Rorschach blots in the margins. SEXUAL CONTACTS TWO WEEKS PRIOR TO INFECTION. THEY MUST BE NOTIFIED AND EXAMINED FOR GONNORHEA. She let the paper slip from her hands, watching it flutter to the floor, watching it settle on the rug as though it were a singularly ungainly butterfly. Then she couldn’t think, she couldn’t get it straight, all she understood was she had to get home, she had to confront Mike, lie to him, she had to see Peter, surround herself with that entity she called family . . . because that’s where she’d be safe.
She stepped into the corridor, pulling the door quietly shut behind her. LIST OF ALL, she thought. But she hadn’t read the rest of it, had she? No, there hadn’t been time for any of that. It was just a form, just printed matter. It had no connection with her. She pressed the button for the elevator. LIST OF ALL—LISTOFALL—then it was just meaningless nonsense. She heard the elevator rise in the shaft. It made a level humming noise. She’d get inside. She’d go home. Everything was going to be okay. The doors slid open. She entered. She pressed the button for the ground floor. She closed her eyes. If you don’t think, she told herself. If you just don’t think. She pressed her hands together.
There was no wedding ring.
Oh Christ, Mike’s ring. She
must have left it on the bedside table. After scooping it from under the bed she must have laid it on the table and then forgotten it.
How could she have done something like that?
She’d have to go back up. She’d have to press the button and make this car stop and then press another button, but she couldn’t remember the floor number now. Nine? Ten? She stared around the elevator, as if she might find some answer in the panelled wood. Nine, ten, how could she tell? If all the goddam floors looked alike, how the hell could she tell? She wanted to weep. She kept on stabbing at the buttons, but the car was still going down, down, and somehow she imagined that the further down it went the faster it moved, but that couldn’t be. Control yourself, Kate. You find the apartment. You ring the bell. You get your ring. A simple series of actions. ABC. Nothing to it.
But why wouldn’t the cab respond to her pressing the fucking buttons? Figure it out. Simple, if you wouldn’t panic, if you’d only stop to think. Somebody has pressed the call button on another floor. Right? The thing won’t respond to you until it’s answered the prior call, right?
Right, Kate. So you wait. You try to be patient. You’ll get your ring back. She shut her eyes. When she opened them she looked at the flashing numbers. The brown walls—why did she allow them to press in on her like some terrible weight? The old claustrophobia. She put a hand to her forehead. Clammy. The car stopped. She looked at the indicator and saw that she was on the fifth floor. An old woman, wrapped in an ancient fur with the head of a dead fox appended to it, stepped inside. The doors slid shut again. Kate leaned against the wall, waited, catching the sickening scent of camphor. She peered at the old woman. Then the car stopped again, this time at the lobby. Moving very slowly, sighing to herself, her dentures clicking, the old woman got out. Kate pressed the button marked ten, watched the doors close, then thought: Hurry. Please hurry. The ring. That’s all you want now. Don’t even think of anything else. Don’t think.
She stared at the numbered lights. Eight, nine, ten. Ten is right, she thought. It has to be ten. She felt the car shudder to a stop. The doors opened.
At first she couldn’t understand. She thought: This is all some terrible mistake, it doesn’t make any sense; you must have found the wrong person; my name is Kate, Kate Myers, please . . . Then she was aware of something else, the motion of metal through air, the strange whispering sound, the sight of herself reflected in the dark glasses, the way she raised her hand to fend off the piece of metal, but that must have been later because she felt a sharp pain flash through her wrist and she saw blood rising from her skin. Then the metal was being raised in the air again and the doors were closing, the car was moving, the blonde woman was striking the air and the metal was flashing in the light of the car—
It was a dream, a sick dream, something you dredged up from a deep place inside yourself, your own theater of the absurd, your own auditorium of menace.
But why was the pain so fucking real?
Why did she hear herself scream so loudly?
I was looking for my ring, that was it. The wedding ring. And I couldn’t find it, no matter where I looked.
Blood ran in her eyes. She put a hand up to her face. The blade fell again, slashing across her fingers. She felt herself slide down against the wall, blinded, pain piercing her with the intensity of a laser. She covered her head with her hands but the pain had moved elsewhere. She crossed her legs. She was bleeding down there, bleeding from the crotch. She tried to rise. She tried to push the blade away but she couldn’t, it just kept falling and falling. She tasted her own blood. She tried to wake up, to force herself out of the nightmare—but there was no end to it. She imagined she heard the name “Elliott,” but suddenly there was a great and terrifying distance between herself and the world; it was like some harsh tide that, as it ebbed back to the horizon, carried her away to a dark place, a dark sun, a black sky. And still, fainter now, she could feel the slicing of the blade.
She had the absurd thought: I’m dying.
But that couldn’t be right.
That just couldn’t be right.
Even as the lights faded and the sound of the blade became no more than a breeze blowing in a spider’s web, she knew it couldn’t be right.
5
Liz watched the door close, saw Ted’s hand uplifted in a coy little wave, and then she was alone in the corridor, passing under the lamps to the elevator. He was okay, she thought—what you’d call a nice ineffectual guy, probably house trained and henpecked by a wife and shabbily treated by a boss. You could read the story of his life in his sex act—shyness, reluctance, a certain softness. He’d probably saved up to get laid and his wife was back in a place like Syracuse or Quincey, thinking he was on a business trip. Maybe, she thought, the thing that glues relationships together isn’t love or affection, but some emotional sleight of hand, a trickery of the heart, a collection of tiny deceits and minuscule treacheries. There was something depressing in that.
She stopped at the elevator and pressed the call button. As she waited she looked along the empty corridor at the wall lamps. Sometimes apartment buildings were spooky, like all the inhabitants had upped and left. You could imagine opening all the doors and stepping inside rooms filled with furniture covered over by dust sheets. She listened, hearing the motion of the elevator in the shaft.
She was dogged by tiredness again; she should have taken the day off—but somewhere her internal calendar was telling her about time passing, a message that became increasingly urgent. Two years: would she look back later and say they’d been worth it? The decision back then had been cold and deliberate, reached out of an understanding that the world was a hard place to be without bread and that the most saleable commodity you possessed was your own body. She yawned, leaned against the wall, heard the sound of the elevator growing louder.
The lights on the panel blinked. The elevator came. The doors slid open.
Later she would try to remember what she felt, she would try to remember what she saw, and at the core of the memory there would be confusion, panic, terror, and the strange constricted echo of her own scream.
THREE
1
Sometimes it seemed to Marino that the world was nothing but the sum of grief, that suffering was the major part of that entity called the human condition. The only answer maybe was to immunize yourself against it, the way some of the older cops had done, going the hard-bitten route, refusing to be surprised by anything, refusing to be disgusted by anything, hiding under a veneer of easy cynicism. It wasn’t his way, even if he had tried it: he couldn’t wear cynicism like it was a badge you got in return for several years of service. He had other, simpler, escapes—like having a quiet dinner with his wife in a place on Mulberry Street or taking his kids to a ball game. They were temporary releases from an aching concern; it was like Mary always said: You get too wrapped up in all that stuff, Joseph (always Joseph, never Joe). Why can’t you just see it as a job?
He wondered why he couldn’t, why the frequent brutalities the city threw up from its darkest places always affected him personally. You put on a front, sure, because you had to; but inside there was the feeling of an emotional meltdown. A corpse—maybe that of a young kid senselessly stabbed or a bum knifed for a half-pint of booze—any corpse always made him feel sick in his gut, always carved some hollow out of his heart. I’m soft is all, he sometimes thought. But the more he thought that the more he tried to hide the softness away, as if the simple human reaction to homicide were a terrible weakness. Can I help what I feel? he’d asked Mary once. She hadn’t answered the question, or if she had he couldn’t remember.
Now, sitting behind his desk, he closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids with the tips of his fingers. He sighed. There was a flash again of the dead woman in the elevator. I don’t need that, he told himself. There had been more blood than you’d expect to find in a slaughterhouse. One of the guys from the medical examiner’s office had counted eighteen different incisions made by the blade
of the open razor. Okay, he thought. On the bottom line you can’t even imagine the most vindictive kind of vengeance needing that frenzied killing. Two fingers had been mutilated from the right hand. Between the legs the blade had laid the flesh back to the pubic bone. Three times the blade had sliced the skin around the eye, cutting the eyeball open. If I were going to kill somebody, he thought, it would be one shot from a Magnum in a dark place. But that was a rational murder—here you were dealing with something else altogether. Madness. The specific frenzy of insanity. He wondered what she’d felt when the razor first came down. Surprise? Fear? Whatever, it would boil down to the bleak understanding that your clock had run out, and that you were as alone as you had ever been . . .
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