Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  “This is what?”

  Jim looks at the detective. He’s a weird old bird, this one, he thinks. Mr. Gimpy.

  “This is where it started, I guess.”

  That same Sunday afternoon, Cogan, wearing a pair of Ray Bans, sitting at an umbrella-covered table, drinking a lemon-flavored Calistoga sparkling water, is watching a blonde get a tennis lesson on court five.

  “What do you think?” asks his friend, Rick Reinhart, who’s sitting to his left, across the table, facing the same direction.

  Cogan looks again. As hard as he’s studying the blonde, Reinhart is studying him. It’s a habit of Reinhart’s. He’ll tell a guy to check out a woman, then instead of looking at her himself he looks at the guy. Once Cogan asked him about it, and Reinhart, discounting it, said, “I’m just watching your reaction.” But Cogan thinks it’s weirder than that. He thinks Reinhart loves the moment so much, when he checks out an attractive woman he wishes he could see the expression on his own face.

  “She’s hot, isn’t she?” Reinhart says. But it comes out sounding more like a lament than an exuberant declaration.

  It’s true, Cogan thinks. She is hot—in a certain way. Petite and slender, she has a perfect tan, the kind you really had to work on, that plays well with the white of her tennis skirt. If she has a weakness, it’s her face. Not that she’s bad-looking. But she wears too much make-up, and it seems to affect the way she plays tennis, because she isn’t moving much for the ball. It’s as if she fears she may break into a sweat and threaten the perfect but delicate mask she’s created.

  “What do you want me to tell you?” he says. “She’s good-looking.”

  “But you wouldn’t go out with her, would you?”

  Oh, shit, Cogan thinks. Why does he set himself up like this? Why does he care?

  “What level of ‘going out’ are we talking about?”

  “Whatever the fuck I’m doing.”

  “I don’t know if I could handle that.”

  Reinhart doesn’t really react. He just nods; he appears to chalk up the response, like he’s taking a poll.

  They watch her for a moment, then Reinhart says, “She does offer to pay for some meals.” Cogan isn’t sure whether he’s talking to him or just thinking aloud. With his right hand, Reinhart nervously slicks back his dark, receding hair, then adjusts his Nike tennis shirt. He’s neither as tall nor as athletic as Cogan: Reinhart’s on the thick side, a heavy breather with big bones and a wide, handsome face. Thirty-eight and a plastic surgeon, his nickname is “The Rhino” partly because of his surname, partly because of his hard-charging style in whatever competitive activity he participates. As a kid, much to his dislike, he’d been called Rhino (“I was pretty heavy back then,” he’ll admit). He’d escaped the name when he went off to college, but then one day at the club he’d charged the net to get to a drop shot. He got to the ball but was unable to stop and ran straight through the net, snapping it from its moorings. Ever since then he’d become affectionately known as The Rhino, a name he accepted because Cogan had convinced him that, unlike Rhino, it had a singular, macho quality to it.

  “Whenever we go out, she insists on splitting the check,” he says. “And that’s refreshing. But I’ve got to be the one to organize everything. I’ve got to pick the restaurant, the movie. She never says, ‘Hey, why don’t you come over and I’ll make you dinner,’ or anything like that. It’s the little things, Teddy. She’s in the game, but she doesn’t move. She does nothing away from the ball to get open. There I am, scrambling in the backfield—”

  Reinhart stands up and does his best Joe Montana imitation, dropping back a few steps with an imaginary football in his right hand, shifting back and forth, juking imaginary defenders. “There I am scrambling, and she’s just standing there. And wham, I get creamed.” He makes believe he’s been hit by a 270-pound line-backer, rolls backward onto the grass, and lies down with his arms spread out at his sides. After feigning unconsciousness for a few seconds, he gets up and says, “Do you know what she did?”

  “No, what?”

  “She didn’t get me anything for my birthday. Not even a card.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Didn’t even offer to take me out.”

  “I thought she was out of town for your birthday.”

  “She was. But she could have set something up for when she got back.”

  “Sit down, will ya? You’re making me nervous.”

  Reinhart sits down. But he can’t stay down. As soon as he hits the chair, he bounces back up, as if the chair is electrified. He says, “Do you think she appreciates that I set this lesson up for her? I had to call her to remind her about it. She would have blown it off if I hadn’t said anything.”

  “She’s playing you, man. She likes you.”

  “She’s got one wheel on the off-ramp.”

  Just as he makes the proclamation, the woman—Lisa is her name—comes to the fence and calls out to him. She motions for him to come over. Without so much as a glance at Cogan, Reinhart walks down to the tennis court and speaks to her. Then he heads back up toward the table.

  “I’m going to get a drink,” he says. “You want anything?”

  “A drink drink?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re playing, man.”

  “Just a Bloody Mary. We’ve got time.”

  Cogan looks at his watch. It’s just after two. “We’re playing in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll be OK.”

  “What’re you getting for her?”

  Reinhart murmurs something.

  “What?”

  “A bottle of Evian,” he says louder. Then he points a warning finger at Cogan and says, “Not a word, Teddy. I don’t want to hear it.” He turns and walks away toward the pool and clubhouse.

  “Are those whip marks on your back, Doctor?” Cogan calls after him. “It’s amazing what kind of force the human vagina can generate. It’s got tremendous torque. Very impressive, isn’t it, Dr. Reinhart?”

  “Shut up,” says Reinhart.

  Carrie and Kristen came around 4:30, just as the North Carolina-Clemson game was about to tip off. Jim remembers the time because he was crashed out on the couch in the parlor room, watching the game with five or six guys, when the girls walked in.

  He and two other freshmen had spent the last hour lugging cases of Coors and Keystone Light up from the basement and dividing the cans into tubs. Afterward, they placed the tubs and some back-up cases behind three fixed bars on the first floor and two they’d set up in the backyard, where the pre-party was about to begin.

  If they were having a smaller party, they’d go with kegs, but the frat president, Mark Weiss, preferred cans for big parties because it meant people could drink faster—you didn’t get these long lines at the kegs. Cans were efficient. They also made it easier to measure how much people drank. And that was important for controlling a party, as well as for future planning.

  These are the things that most outsiders don’t understand, Jim tells the detective. A frat house isn’t just a group of guys who get together to get shitfaced. It’s a business—there are budgets to meet, funds to raise, and plenty of administration. And if you aren’t careful—if you aren’t efficient—the enterprise will fail.

  Admittedly, his sister, Carrie, didn’t quite see it that way. She looked at the house as a “PG-rated Chippendales, her own guy-land in the middle of Blahsville,” and she had been ready to soak it all up the moment she walked in.

  She didn’t even wait to be introduced. She just walked into the TV room all jovial and asked in her loud voice, “Hey, who’s playing?” as if she knew everybody. She’d met a couple of the guys before; that was true.

  “But, man,” Jim says, “I just wish she could be a bit more reserved and not try to dominate a room every time she walks in.”

  The other guys didn’t seem to mind, though. They got right into it with her, jabbering away about which teams were going to make the Final Four in this year’s
tourney. As was her way, Carrie took the opposing view every chance she could, even though Jim doubted she had any idea what she was talking about. She kept mixing up players and teams. But the more mistakes she made, the more the guys seemed to take to her.

  “Truth is,” he says, “I barely noticed Kristen at first. Maybe it’s because my sister’s more outgoing. Also, she has pretty big tits, and she was wearing a tight T-shirt. I saw some of the guys checking her out.”

  “And you were more concerned with that?”

  “Yeah, I should’ve expected it, but I was kinda pissed she wore that shirt. Hey, can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot,” the detective says.

  “Did Kristen leave a note or anything?”

  “I can’t really speak to that right now.”

  Jim is silent a moment. Then he asks, “But she definitely killed herself?”

  “An investigation is ongoing,” the detective says. “At this point, her death hasn’t been ruled a suicide or a homicide.”

  “My sister says that doctor’s involved. That Kristen slept with him that night. Is that true?”

  “I can’t discuss that,” he says.

  “What can you discuss?”

  “Not much. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep asking the questions and you keep answering them.”

  Cogan chuckles to himself as he watches Reinhart head past the lap pool toward the clubhouse. He can never understand how a person can be so together in his professional life and so messed up in his personal life. Not that he considers himself so together in either department. But the difference between how Reinhart runs his practice and how he manages his relationships with women is striking. As a doctor, he’s logical, to the point, and sensitive with his patients. For a half an hour, he can sit down with a woman who’s going to have an operation and calmly assuage her fears. Cogan has seen it. But in his social affairs he’s almost the opposite: strangely irrational and combative.

  They’d met a few years ago at the club, not long after Cogan’s divorce had become final, and quickly became friends. Its official title is the Alpine Hills Tennis and Swim Club. But everybody who belongs simply calls it “the club.” Set among oak trees and landscaped gardens, it’s in Portola Valley on Alpine Road, one of the routes to the beach. The road, a favorite among bicyclists, winds up into the mountains, turns into Pescadero Road, and twenty-five miles later ends at Route 1 near Pescadero Beach on the Pacific Ocean. Most people see it for what it is: an incredibly scenic drive. But it always reminds Cogan of something else: who it brings to his hospital.

  Alpine Road and some of the other favorite bike and motorcycle routes over the mountains are equidistant from Parkview and the university’s ER, so Parkview gets half of the accident victims, and sometimes more, depending on how busy the university is. Whenever he drives to the beach Cogan can’t help but think of them. Well, not “them” actually. The victims, the ones who boxed, left less of an impression—took less out of him—than the ones he had to talk to afterward: the mothers and fathers, the sons and daughters, the husbands and wives, the boyfriends and girlfriends.

  But the club is his refuge from all that. There are more exclusive clubs in the area—real country clubs with golf courses—but Alpine Hills, which costs $15,000 to join, is popular among the established younger set, particularly those who have families. This is, as Cogan likes to tell Reinhart, “Yummy Mummy Central”—the parade ground of young, attractive mothers whose blissful confidence in themselves and the secure position they’ve attained only made them seem more attractive.

  “Hey, buddy, what’s up?”

  Klein had arrived.

  “You just get here?” Cogan asks.

  “Yeah, but I’ve been up since eight,” he says, putting his racket on the table. “Trish has this thing about going to Café Barrone and reading the paper.”

  “I thought that was Saturdays.”

  “Now it’s Sundays, too. She’s got these friends she meets. You know, she’ll say, ‘Kate and her husband are going this morning. They asked us if we’d join them.’ The next day it’s someone else.”

  Cogan sees Trish standing over by the children’s pool. She’s putting floaters around her three-year-old son’s arms. Cogan waves at her, but she doesn’t wave back. She turns away, and he knows then that the report has come in from her friend, Deborah, whom he’d taken out for the second time on Thursday, and that it’s bad.

  “I wish they didn’t get up so damn early, though,” Klein goes on. “They’re so fucking gung ho. Like going to a café was an expedition or something.”

  “Get with the program, buddy. You can’t pursue leisure in a half-ass way around here.”

  “Tell me about it.” Klein thinks about sitting, then decides against it, and begins stretching instead. As he goes into his routine, Cogan looks back up at the pool.

  “How mad is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Your wife.”

  Klein doesn’t say anything at first. He just shrugs.

  “Come on,” Cogan says. “I’m a big boy. I can take it.”

  “Well, what do expect? You traumatized her friend.”

  “I did her a favor.”

  “Some favor.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Look, as far as I’m concerned, it’s none of our business. I told Trish that. It’s the risk you take when you try to set someone up. That’s all I have to say. I don’t want to get involved. I’m here to play tennis.”

  “Who said anything about getting involved? Just give me a report.”

  “Nope. It’s none of my business.”

  Cogan smiles. As much as he wants to, he knows it will do him no good to press Klein, who’s already trying to change the subject by asking where the other guys are.

  “Reinhart went to get a drink,” he says perfunctorily. “He’ll be back. Dr. Kim’s going to be a few minutes late. I talked to him this morning.”

  While Klein stretches Cogan wonders how much time he and Trish have spent talking about Cogan’s behavior the past couple of days. Poor Klein, he thinks. He’d probably taken Cogan’s side at first—or at least insisted that it was none of her business. But then she’d forced him to see it her way. Traumatized. That was pure Trish. And Klein knew it. He knew he’d been bullied, and worse yet, he knew there was nothing he could do about it. Cogan could hear the frustration in his voice.

  But the thing about Klein is that he’s a compartmentalist. It’s how he copes. He puts different parts of his life in different compartments and doesn’t let them mix. When he’d said, “I’m here to play tennis,” Cogan knew he’d gone into tennis mode, and he wasn’t going to let anything distract him from that. It was his time to be away from his wife, to shoot the shit with the boys, play hard, and sweat. Anything else—his wife’s complaints about Cogan, for instance—were temporarily off limits, filed and locked away in their separate drawer.

  As he considers all this, Cogan’s eyes stray to court five. The woman and the club pro are collecting balls, loading up the pro’s basket for another go-round. Coming out of a bend, Klein notices what—or rather, who—Cogan is observing. “Wow,” he says. “Serious tuna alert.” He takes a few steps forward, trying to get a better look. “Who is she?”

  “Reinhart’s gal.”

  “Really? The one he wouldn’t go public with because he was afraid he’d jinx the close?”

  “All he does is complain about her. I think he likes her.”

  “How old do you think she is?”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell anymore,” Klein says. “I mean, if that woman told me she was twenty-two, it wouldn’t surprise me. And if she told me she was thirty, that wouldn’t either. It’s disturbing, don’t you think? I’m starting to lump people by decade. My father used to do that.”

  “How old do you want her to be?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you could have her, how old would you want her to be? What’d be your
optimum age?”

  “If I answer correctly, do I get her?”

  “You’ll have to take that up with The Rhino. I’m not in a bequeathing position.”

  Klein smiles. He likes hypothetical questions; the more absurd the question, the more he likes it. “I’ve always been partial to twenty-one,” he says. “Senior year in college, I had a good year. Come to think of it, that may have been the last time I dated a girl who was twenty-one.”

  He’d met Trish when he was twenty-two, he says, though they hadn’t officially started dating until she was twenty-four.

  “I bet she’s about that, twenty-four, twenty-five,” Cogan guesses, nodding in the direction of the court. “What’s she do?”

  “Sells gym memberships at 24-Hour Fitness.”

  “I don’t know if I could do that.”

  “Sell memberships?”

  “No, bring a young girl to the club, like Reinhart.”

  “She’s not that young. All that sun, she’s looking a little weathered, in fact.”

  “I don’t know,” Klein says. “I’d be embarrassed.”

  “That’s the beauty of The Rhino. He’s cultivated an image that allows him to do that. People expect nothing less. In fact, I think they’d be disappointed if he showed up with a garden-variety highly educated professional woman. He’d lose his charm.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What image are you cultivating?” he asks, a touch of antagonism in his voice.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, there’s something to be said for going younger while you can—while you’ve still got your looks and people over at the next table aren’t yet asking, dad or sugardaddy? We both know youth takes on a dimension all its own the older you get.”

  “I’m with you on that, bro,” Klein says.

  “I would say, however, that the last year or so I’ve felt myself slipping into an image, and I haven’t fought it. So I suppose that’s a form of cultivation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The accidental womanizer.”