Past Due

by William Lashner

  Well, that made me feel a whole lot better.

  “We’re concerned about your father’s condition, Victor,” she said, her sincere face showing sincere concern, her eyes staring at the chart she held before her like a shield. “We’ve tried two different courses of antibiotics, but his infection is not reacting as we had hoped. Apparently he has a stubbornly virulent strain.”

  “It’s my father,” I said. “I could have told you that from the start.”

  “I like your father.”

  I was taken aback. “You do?”

  “He’s crusty, sure, but sort of soft inside.”

  “You’re talking about my father and not a baguette?”

  “I think he’s sort of sweet. What happened to your forehead?”

  “A golfing accident,” I said as I smoothed my hair over the cut.

  She tilted her head, examined me for a moment as if I were some obscure abstract sculpture that made not a whit of sense, and then shook her head. “If there’s no improvement in your father’s condition we’re going to try a new antibiotic, Primaxin, which has more universal coverage. The pulmonary specialist has told us this drug has gotten good results in similar cases, but we can’t be certain this will work either.”

  “Is there anything I should be doing? Anyplace I should play the squeaking wheel to make sure something gets done?”

  “We’re doing everything we can. Really. And”—she smiled—“I’ve made sure everyone knows that the patient’s son is a lawyer.”

  “Does that help?”

  “It’s like a plate of tofu.”

  “It sticks in your throat and makes you gag?”

  “No, Victor. It might not help, but it can’t hurt.”

  “I heard that line differently.”

  “I had a good time the other night.”

  “So did I,” I lied. Oh, stop it, you would too.

  “You haven’t called back.”

  “Work has gotten pretty intense.”

  “Looks like it, from the way you’re standing.”

  “I had a run in with an angry debtor.”

  “I thought the reason you didn’t call back was my cats. I got the sense maybe you weren’t a cat person.”

  “I’m not, actually.” Think, think. “It turns out I’m allergic.”

  “Really?”

  No. “Yes.”

  “That’s too bad. They’re so cute. They have pills for that, you know.”

  “Isn’t it hard to get their little mouths open?”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” She stretched the word out, widened her eyes, made me feel every inch the fool. “If it doesn’t get better soon, Victor, you should know that we’re going to have to take more drastic action.”

  “You’re talking about my father now, not the cats.”

  “Right. That’s what I wanted to tell you. He’s having a harder time breathing, his respiratory rate is above where we’d like to see it, and there is only so much oxygen we’re able to put through the nasal canula. We might have to put him on a mask and, if things get any worse, a ventilator. Try to keep him from talking too much, or getting upset, okay?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good.” She wrinkled her nose at me and then walked off. I watched her as she leaned over the nurses’ station to drop off the chart, her back arched, her left leg held straight out, the toe of her white sneaker pointed. I supposed they taught ballet out there in Ohio, taught it with much sincerity.

  My father was sleeping fitfully when I entered his room, his mouth open, his breaths short and wet, his hand looking like a dead bony carp as it lay atop his sheet with its pulse oxymeter clip in place. His oxygen level was eighty-six, his respiratory rate was twenty-three, his heart rate was still over a hundred. All bad signs. I sat next to his bed, checked my watch, decided not to awaken him. Dr. Mayonnaise had told me to keep him from talking too much or getting upset and both had been occurring with regularity during my visits as he continued to tell to me, with a peculiar urgency, the story of his long-lost love. Maybe tonight he’d sleep through the hour of my stay, give us both a rest.

  No such luck.

  He awoke slowly and then started when he saw me, as if I were some emissary from a darker world come to claim him.

  “Are you ready?” he croaked.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, shook him lightly. “Dad. Shhhh. The doctor wants you to stay quiet tonight.”

  “The red door.”

  “Please, Dad, don’t talk. Not tonight. How do you feel?”

  “Like crap.”

  “Okay. Let’s just be quiet then tonight. Just tonight.”

  He reached out and grabbed my wrist, his big hand weaker than I ever remembered it. “I have to tell you. I have to.”

  “Why, Dad? Why do you have to tell me?”

  “You need to know. Before I die.”

  “You’re not dying.”

  “Who are you kidding?”

  Who indeed?

  “Listen,” he said. “Shut up and listen.”

  He was shaking my wrist now, the tape holding the IV line in his vein was coming loose. I pried his fingers from my wrist, patted his gnarled, veiny hand, rested it again on his chest. For some reason he wanted me to have this story, to own it, to carry it with me, always, to be able to take it out and refer to it like a big golden watch in my vest pocket. For some reason.

  “Okay, Dad,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  He coughed, fought to regain his breath, calmed himself enough so he could speak. “The red door,” he said.

  The red door.

  It glows like a warning, across the street from where my father now stands in the shadows with his love. The sky is pitch, the moon has set, the city is quiet. They are in that soft, dead moment between night and morning when even insomniacs have drifted off to an uneasy sleep. No birds, no crickets, only the scritching claws of a city raccoon scrambling along a cement wall.

  Do you have a key? says my father.

  No.

  Then how do we get inside?

  There is an unlocked window, she says.

  “And it was,” said my father. “She knew. Unlocked.”

  Around the back, a window to a little-used mud room off the town house’s back alley. As he climbs after her through the window, my father doesn’t ask how she knows the window is unlocked, doesn’t ask how it became unlocked in the first place, doesn’t ask how the key to the locked mud room’s door became taped beneath a storage shelf holding sacks of salt, thick woolen gloves, cans of antifreeze.

  This way, she says as she quietly clicks open the lock to the mud room’s door and he follows her inside.

  They pass through a room, dark and warm, the kitchen—he can tell from the gleaming counters, the shining metal ovens. Then through another room, past a long dining table with chairs. Soft light is gathered up like a bouquet of color by a crystal chandelier, large enough for a hotel ballroom. She steps soundlessly across thick rugs and he follows, trying to step just as soundlessly but failing, banging into chairs, rubbing against a wall. They pass into a center hallway with a sconce lighted through the night. The hallway is papered with red velvet medallions, the floors are covered by a thick, deep blue rug. There is a wide stairway leading to the left and the great red door to the right.

  He pulls her close. Where are your things? he whispers.

  This way, she says.

  Not up the stairs?

  This way, she says, as she grabs his arm and tugs him forward, through the wide center hall, into a cavernous room. There is a light on in this room too, one dim lamp lit, and he can see the rich oriental rugs, the plush formal furniture, the piano gleaming, the great marble fireplace, its shiny brass andirons standing tall like sentries. Hanging from the walls are great classical paintings in thick golden frames, works like those hanging in the art museum sitting high on the hill above the bending river, each canvas huge, each painting covered with naked wo
men, reclining or frolicking or, in the largest painting of all, fighting against the brutal intentions of their armed captors.

  Where are your things? he asks again, this time more urgently.

  In here, she says softly and then leads him, strangely, toward a wall. She places a hand on the wall, a panel slides.

  “A hidden door,” said my father. “She pulled me through.”

  She pulls him through the opening and closes the door behind them. Blackness, a darkness darker than night, darker than sleep, darker than death. He can hear a deep throbbing, like the beating heart of that very house, as if it were alive, as if it sensed their presence. Doubts assail him, he shouldn’t be here, they shouldn’t be here, in this house, this hidden room, this darkness. Something here will take her away from him, he feels it, knows it. All he wants is her, forever, and this house is a threat. He wants to grab her, to pull her away from the palpable evil pressing against his flesh. The vision remains of the naked women in that one painting succumbing to the force of men in armor. He wants to grab her and pull her away but she grabs him first, in the darkness, and places her hand at the back of his neck, and pulls his head down and kisses him with a passion that stuns, that leaves his knees weak and his certainty dulled.

  Tell me you love me, she says.

  I love you, he says.

  I’ll never leave you, Jesse.

  Promise me, he says.

  I promise.

  Whatever happens.

  Whatever. I promise.

  I love you.

  Yes, she says.

  And then she flicks on the light.

  My father gasped as he remembered, coughed, fought to find again his breath. “Treasure,” he managed to get out. “A room filled with treasure.”

  The room is small, windowless, paneled in wood, with two plush leather chairs, a golden throw folded on the arm of each. The chairs flank a narrow table with a magnifying glass and a lamp on its surface. Wooden shelves cover three of the room’s walls and every shelf is filled with treasure. Ancient books, small gold statues, gilt chests, intricately carved ivory, figurines of bright green jade. The wall without shelves has a perfectly lit single painting in a golden frame, a small highly detailed portrait of a monk in brown robes on his knees, praying with reverence in a rock-strewn landscape. My father is dazzled by the wealth in this small room, more wealth than he had ever before imagined could exist in one man’s house. Some of the intricate boxes are open. Strings of pearls, coiled each atop the other, spill out of one. Another is filled with silver broaches covered with gems. There are rows of leather albums, their bindings embossed with the names of countries. France. Germany. U.S. Pre-1840. He spins around helplessly at the sight, dazed, and then he moves his gaze from this obscenity of treasure to the girl who has brought him here, the girl in the pleated skirt, his girl, his love.

  Her chin is raised, her hands are shaking.

  Where is your stuff? he asks.

  Here, she says.

  Where? he asks.

  Look around.

  This isn’t yours.

  She turns to stare at him, her eyes fierce, rapacious, the eyes of a canine protecting a bone.

  He owes me, she says.

  She steps toward one of the walls of shelves, takes down a large wooden box, its top precisely ingrained with stones and pearls in the shape of a kneeling Atlas, hoisting on his shoulder a great globe. She places the box on the table, turns on the lamp.

  His coin collection, she says, her eyes widening with wonder.

  She lifts the top. The interior of the box is divided into a series of equally sized squares and the squares are filled with small, flat velvet sacks, each with its own drawstring. Her hands shaking, she grabs one of the velvet sacks out of the box. She struggles in her haste to loosen its drawstring and pull out a coin. Her hands fumble the sack. It falls on the table with a muffled crack. She picks it up again, succeeds in loosening the drawstring, drops the naked coin into her hand, a golden coin with Lady Liberty holding a torch carved into its surface, the coin’s bright skin glinting under the harsh light of the lamp, the hard yellow light reflecting like a knife’s edge of gold in his lover’s eyes.

  “And then the wall,” said my father, struggling now to get the words out. “A doorway of shelves. It swings. Swings open. And the old man. In the opening. The hidden doorway. The old man. Darkness behind him. Darkness streaming in behind him. And he’s smiling. The eyes of a fox. Smiling. The old bastard. At his little treasures. At the coins. At the gold. At her.”

  Back from the hospital in the few moments before I had to leave to meet Lonnie and Chelsea, I found myself standing in front of the photographs pinned to my wall. There was something about my father’s story that seemed to resonate in the mosaic of limbs and breasts, of bones and curves and flesh. For the first time I found the array of photographs frightening.

  It was the lack of a face in the photographs, the missing lens through which we view another’s humanity. Lies, despair, love, secrets, lust, all of it is found in the one part of this woman at which I couldn’t gaze. I had liked that missing ingredient before, it had allowed me to imagine, to match the perfection of the captured body with my own inventions for her eyes, her cheeks, her nose, her mouth. It had made the pictures all the more alluring, all the more seductive. But right now, I was still suffused with the memory of my father’s old lover standing in that hidden room, leaning over that open treasure box, the glint of gold in her eyes. The recesses of her soul were becoming ever darker and more mysterious to the man who had lay naked with her not a few hours before, and that was what I found frightening.

  I wondered again who she was, this woman, whose objective beauty was pinned to my wall. And now I found myself wondering what were the desires, the demons, what were the secrets she kept from the lover who was standing behind the camera, capturing his obsession with obsessive care. It wasn’t just my father’s past that was coming alive for me these difficult days, it was Tommy Greeley’s past too. And if there was an entwining of the two, it was happening here, only here, in the murky confines of my own rattled consciousness. Could one story, as it was being revealed to me by my dying father, incident by startling incident, help me fathom the other? I didn’t know, but I did know that my own obsession with the photographs seemed to grow as my father’s story deepened and darkened, my obsession with the dark limbs, the smooth skin, the missing lens.

  I took a step back from the photographs so that the whole array became visible at once. The legs, the torso, the sweet thin arms, the neck. The beauty mark on the edge of the areola of the right breast.

  And as I stared at the whole of it, once again the photographs all came together for me, once again all the varied parts of that miraculous body melded into one another and became as one, a vision standing out from the wall, separate now from the individual photographs that inspired it.

  Except, this time, there was a difference.

  This time I began to see a face, the mysterious missing face. The features weren’t yet clear, the contours of her jaw, the shape of her eyes, it all wasn’t yet clear, but it was slowly crystallizing for me. And damn if she wasn’t starting to look like Chelsea.

  Chapter

  31

  “BACK IN THE day, Dude,” said Lonnie Chambers, his eyes wide with excitement, “when the business was really churning, we had us some parties. Girls, booze, spreads to make a sheik sweat. Shrimp, you never saw so much shrimp. Piles. Mountains. Dude. And that was just the shrimp. You should have been there.”

  “Were you there?” I asked Chelsea.

  Chelsea smiled, gave an expression of fake shock. “No girls allowed, at least no girlfriends allowed.” She sipped her blue martini. “A regular boys’ club.”

  We were at the bar of the Continental, a smoky, swanky restaurant carved out of an old chrome diner. I knew the old place, I had eaten there, and generally to see a diner tarted up as some swank joint for a swank crowd made me angry and sad, but this diner
had actually been foul, nowhere near as swell as the diner that still parked across the street. And so, as much as it pains me to say it, the Continental, with its power crowd and neon lights, with its padded walls and skewered olive light fixtures and frou-frou food was, actually, an improvement.

  “The parties,” said Lonnie, jabbing at me with his lit cigarette, his rough voice rising above the hum of the crowd, “they always started with the cars. Long black limos the twins, that ran the thing, they rented to pick us all up. Each one stocked with alcohol, some powder, and a girl. A sort of stewardess who would plump your pillow, get you comfy, pour your drink, unzip your fly.”

  “Lonnie.”

  “Victor here asked what it was like back in the day, so I’m just telling him. Drinks, drugs, a long-legged girl with a mouth like a washing machine. And that was just the car. We had it going, Dude. And the chicks at home, they never knew a thing about it.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Lonnie,” Chelsea said, standing from her stool at the bar. “We knew everything.”

  “No way. No frigging way.” He tilted his head. “How?”

  She picked up her glass by the stem, stretched her lovely neck, drained the last of her martini, placed the glass back on the bar. “We paid one of the regular whores to tell us.” She glanced at her watch. “I have to make a call.”

  Lonnie’s forehead creased in puzzlement as she walked away from the bar, past the tables, toward the restrooms. She was tall and her back was straight when she walked, but, in the way she gripped her elbows as she moved, there was a sense of her holding herself together, and in her lovely eyes there had been the lovely sadness I had noted before. We both watched her go and then Lonnie shrugged, took a last drag of his cigarette, squashed it among the accordioned remnants of his priors.

  “Could be. There wasn’t much they wouldn’t do for money.” A hearty laugh. “Wasn’t much at all. Dude, you really should have been there.”

  “Lonnie, what would I have been?” I said. “Ten maybe?”

  “Hell, it’s not like you needed a driver’s license. What with the limos driving us down the Black Horse Pike. Others would fly in from all over the country, from Boston, from Miami, from Phoenix. All coming to the same place to celebrate. There’d be a reason, usually a bachelor party, but I’ll tell you this, it was, all of it, just an excuse. Hell, a lot of these guys just got married so we could have the party. Wild times, man, wild. You want a bone?”