by Pete Dexter
“I got another one,” Jimmy Measles says a few minutes later. “What if Michael wasn’t the only one fucking my wife?” He turns his head without moving it off the cushion and looks at Peter.
There is a blur in the corner of Peter’s vision, and then a small, weightless fist crosses the front seat of the car and hits him in the cheek. And then, a long moment later, another one. It takes Peter two punches to understand what Jimmy Measles is doing.
Peter pulls the car to the curb and stops. Jimmy Measles sits studying his right hand. The knuckle is scraped, probably from the overhead light. His chest rises and falls, fighting for breath.
The car is quiet.
“You all right now?” Peter says.
Jimmy Measles stares at his fist. Peter runs his hands over his face and stares at South Broad Street, and before long he notices the street staring back. Twelve-, thirteen-year-old kids with hard eyes; everybody’s got a comb in their hair this year.
Jimmy Measles takes another cigarette out of his pocket, lights it, and tosses the match on the floor.
“What did she tell you?” Peter says. “She said I did it, is that what she said?”
“Almost did it.”
“How do you almost do somebody?”
He realizes that is a question with too many answers. He thinks of the girls who had changed their minds at the last minute, the times he’d changed his mind about at the last minute. He thinks of the ones who drank too much and got sick, the times the telephone rang at the wrong time—he would have to be doing someone three times a day for the rest of his life to catch up with the ones he almost did.
“You start to and then you don’t,” Jimmy Measles says.
It is quiet again and the kids come by in their new sneakers and their eyeballs, and Peter sits in his seat wishing she’d told him something else. Thinking there had to be a different way to get rid of him.
He starts the car. “You all right now?” he says.
Jimmy Measles is silent and Peter pulls back onto the street. They are almost to Catherine and Ninth before he looks at Jimmy again.
“Listen,” he says, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Jimmy Measles gets out of the car as soon as it stops rolling. The blood from his knuckle blots against the upholstery behind the door handle. He walks to his front door and opens it without using a key.
The place looks as black inside as a cave, and Jimmy walks into it, slow and tired, and disappears.
A moment later the door swings shut, as if by itself.
One of the Italians is lying in the bedroom with broken legs. Not one of the old men from Constantine’s time, but a younger man, a lawyer.
He has been there almost two days.
He’d shown up at the house in the afternoon, when Michael was out, and Leonard and two of his people, who do not know one Italian from another, took turns breaking his legs in the living room.
It fed them that he was a lawyer, and not used to being frightened or hurt.
He is in the bedroom now, waiting. The air conditioner comes on, shaking the floor, and he screams.
Leonard and his people are on the couch in the living room, Peter can see them from the kitchen. They look at each other—how-were-we-supposed-to-know?—waiting for Michael to forgive them.
“I don’t believe this happened,” Michael says.
He smiles. Peter hasn’t seen him afraid in this way since they were children.
“How come they send somebody over without calling first?” he says. “Tell me that.”
“What did they want?” Peter says.
Michael looks into the living room. “Who knows?” he says. Then he stands up and walks to the refrigerator, takes out a tray of ice, empties it into the sink, and fills it with water. He leaves the ice tray on the counter and sits down again at the table.
“I can’t let the guy out of here,” he says quietly. “I got no choice about that. The way they did him, he’s crippled. Even if I pay for all the medicine and doctor bills, it still don’t change what happened. They find out about this, they’re going to think we’re out of control here.”
Peter waits while that settles.
Michael stands up again and walks a few steps toward the living room, then comes back. It is as if he wants something in there, but cannot decide to take it.
“What kind of a fucking mothball they got for a brain, they don’t know the difference between a bunch of old long-nose guys from Constantine’s time and a guy in a nice suit?” Michael says. “How do you make a mistake like that?”
The air conditioning goes off; the man in the next room moans.
“You ought to get him something for that,” Peter says. “Call a doctor to give him a shot.”
Michael is not listening. “Maybe the guy just disappears,” he says.
Peter waits. “You think they don’t know they sent him?”
“We say he never got here.”
Peter gives Michael time to think that through from the other end, how it would sound if someone told it to him.
The lawyer moans again. “At least turn the thermostat up,” Peter says, “it isn’t rattling the house every five minutes.”
“You want to take a look?” Michael says.
Peter shakes his head.
“I don’t believe this happened,” Michael says again, and it is quiet between them a long time.
“You want to know what I think,” Peter says finally, “you pick up the telephone, call them and tell them what happened. That three of your people got excited and broke the guy’s pins when he came to the door.”
He looks at Peter, blinks.
“They got stupid Italians too,” Peter says. “They’d see how it happened. And then you tell them, they want the ones that did it, here they are. Break their legs, set them on fire, anything they want.”
Michael looks into the living room again, considering it.
“You think so?” he says.
Peter shrugs. “Who knows with these guys?” he says. He pauses, looking at his cousin. “Now I got something to ask you,” he says.
“What’s that?”
“Let Jimmy Measles slide a little on this money.”
It is quiet again. “You seen him walking around the street,” Michael says, “that means he already got his slide. Now he’s got to come up with it.”
Peter waits.
“He’s into me sixty-five,” Michael says. “That’s one thing when he’s got a club, it’s another thing he’s a bum. It’s the same thing now as he couldn’t stay off the tables in Atlantic City, that’s how much I like him walkin’ around owing me money.”
“It isn’t his fault, what happened at the club.”
Michael shrugs, his shoulders looking as big as Leonard’s. “What’s that mean, his fault?” he says.
The air conditioning comes on again, and a long, hollow wail comes from the next room. Weaker than before.
Peter fixes on his cousin, trying to distance himself from the sound in the next room, to find a place farther away to watch the things. Far enough away so that the man in the room becomes temporary—stalled here a few moments, a passing tremor in the long settling of this house.
Far enough away so the lawyer’s sounds do not mingle with his own.
The noise suddenly stops and Michael leans across the table. He smiles, the way he always does when he’s asking for something Peter doesn’t want to give up.
“You want to look at him for me, Pally?”
Peter doesn’t move.
“Lookit,” he says. “I need another opinion here.…”
Peter looks across the table. “Give Jimmy some slack,” he says, “I’ll go in and have a look.”
Michael stares at him, beginning to get worked up. Then something changes.
“Fuck it,” he says. “Tell Jimmy to relax.”
From half a block away, Peter sees the front door is open. It is eleven o’clock in the morning, the sun is reflecting at him off flattened cans an
d pieces of glass in the street, from the windows of the stores and houses, from everywhere but Jimmy Measles’s open door.
The thought of burglars never enters his mind.
He parks the Buick on the sidewalk, a few feet from the steps, and sits behind the wheel. He can’t imagine going into the house and seeing what is there; he can’t imagine not going in. He opens the car door and steps out.
He doesn’t bother to knock. He steps into the place and hears a sound upstairs, someone running a shower. He stands still, listening to the water, making himself stay. He finds a light switch, but the electricity is off.
The place smells damp.
Beyond the light switch are the drapes. Jimmy mentioned once what his wife spent for drapes, Peter can’t remember the number. He pulls one a few inches open and holds it in place with a chair, and looks at the staircase. He knows that is the direction.
All the doors are closed upstairs, and he opens them as he moves toward the noise, lighting the hallway.
The door to the bathroom opens half an inch and stops. There is a hook-and-eye lock, he thinks perhaps it was put there to keep the dogs out. He pushes through. An easy push, the sound of the hook hitting the tile floor, the sudden coolness of the room. A half-empty bottle of Beefeaters gin is standing next to the tub, a few inches from Jimmy Measles’s hand. Beside it is a martini glass and the atomizer.
The pill bottles are in a line across the sink, all empty. The tops have been dropped on the floor. Jimmy Measles is sitting under the shower, his head resting against the back of the tub, the cold water splashing off the swell of his stomach. He is still in his underwear, a pastel shade of blue today which sticks to him like another skin.
Along the line where his weight presses into the porcelain, his blood has settled and the color is darker.
Peter turns off the faucets and sits down on the edge of the tub, Jimmy Measles’s hand almost touching him. For a moment he believes he is lying on the cold porcelain too.
He would leave the room now if there were someplace else to go.
The water drains out of the tub, out of Jimmy Measles’s shorts. Peter picks up the Beefeaters and empties it.
It’s a better gesture, finishing the bottle.
He thinks dying must have come up on Jimmy quietly or he would have done it himself.
Grace is waiting for him outside a Presbyterian church in Cherry Hill. She smiles as he walks through the heavy wooden doors, relieved.
“How you doing?” he says.
“I don’t know yet,” she says.
He understands that she cares about what has happened to Jimmy Measles—they have been calling him James Katz for the last half hour; he still can’t think of him with that name—but she keeps more of herself back than she gives away, even now, to Jimmy or anyone else.
He finds nothing in that to resent or regret because she has never pretended it was some other way.
“Are you going somewhere?” she says.
The church empties. Only eleven people have come for the service, including Grace’s sister and her son. Halfway through the service, the child began to cry, and the sister took him outside to wait in the car.
Nine mourners.
Peter is reminded of the club, Jimmy Measles and all his friends.
“I wouldn’t mind,” he says.
A familiar smell is in the air around her. It teases the edge of the things he remembers, just beyond his reach. They walk away from the church toward a Mercedes parked up the street.
He stops before they get to the car and looks at the sky—a clear, cloudless day, with the moon hanging just over the line of the church roof—and when he begins to move again he is a step behind her. He finds himself staring at the small of her back, fastened to that spot where she is in perfect balance—where all her movements come together, and cancel each other, and leave her, in that place, completely still.
They are at the car.
She opens the door, and drops her head inside. He hears her say, “You go on, I’ll catch a ride.” She closes the door and they walk to the Buick.
She doesn’t ask where he is going, even when he enters the Garden State Parkway outside of Atlantic City and turns south. She puts her hand on his leg, as light as a glove, and leaves it there all the way south to the end of the peninsula, where New Jersey stops at the ocean.
“Cape May,” she says, looking around.
He drives to the house and takes her inside, leading her by the hand through the door. The doors and windows have been closed a month. He takes her upstairs and then to the bedroom where he sleeps. She sits down on the bed.
He lifts her skirt to her waist and peels the stockings off her legs, stopping at the bottom to take off her shoes.
He kneels on the floor, feeling her watching him. He reaches behind her and finds the small of her back, and pulls her into him, the soft cushion of hair beneath her panties pushing into his mouth and nose. He holds her there until he feels her hands on his head, touching his ears, the back of his neck, asking him for something more. He moves the panties aside, tearing them, hearing her breathing now.
His hand presses into the small of her back, and he feels it there first. Even before the shaking is in his mouth, his hand senses it coming, from the distant parts of her body, and as it narrows it surfaces.
She wraps her legs around his head and shakes—a hooked fish coming to the top, to that other place, and then she breaks the surface gasping for breath, gasping in the new light.
She is lying on her stomach, her face resting against the back of her hands. A piece of her hair falls across her eyes, and she stares at him through it. “You’re nothing like Michael, are you?”
He does not want to think about himself and Michael. He gets up to open the window. There is a breeze off the ocean and it fills the thin white curtains and pushes them into his face. The tide is coming in, and he can hear the sound of the water and the sound of the wind. He crosses behind the bed, out of her line of sight, and then covers her carefully with his own body, fitting himself against the cool rise of her bottom, and then puts himself inside her.
Her face is still resting against the back of her hands, and when he is fully in she closes her eyes. They lie still for half a minute, the only movement in the room is the rise and fall of their breathing, and then slowly he feels her tighten, squeezing him a long time, letting go, milking.
Her bottom moves, and she takes him slowly along the edge of a circle inside her, no more than an inch around, and it seems to him now that she knows what he is feeling. And that thought, more than the feeling itself, finally pulls him away from Jimmy Measles lying in a spray of cold water, and fills him with an old stillness that lifts him in the direction of the surface.
“Is this where you bring girls?” she says.
He shakes his head. “This is where I come to sleep.”
She sits up and looks around the room, the sheet falling into her lap. The sun has set and the sky outside his window is deep and black. He senses them falling—this house, the woman, himself. The stillness returns.
“Jimmy couldn’t sleep,” she says, the first mention of his name since the church. “He had doctors all over the city, none of them knew about each other. They all gave him prescriptions.”
“I saw the bottles,” he says.
It is quiet for a moment. He notices the fine hairs at the base of her back.
“He had to have the television on,” she says.
Peter stares at the wall behind her. Then at the ceiling. Everything is exactly where it was, but everything is changed. Jimmy Measles is fresh in the room.
“What did you think, when you saw him?” she says.
He shakes his head.
He feels her watching him, waiting for him. He is reminded that she asks for more than she gives.
“He was cold,” he says. “I turned off the water and sat down, and the coldness just came off him. I didn’t touch him but I felt it, and it made me cold too.”
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br /> “He looked the same?” she says.
It takes him a moment to remember. “There wasn’t a lot of light in there,” he says. “They’d cut off the electric.” He takes a deep breath, trying to get it out of his head. “I’ve seen him looking worse.”
She puts her hand on his leg again, the way she had in the car. The room seems to breathe, the curtains rise and fall.
“I’m glad it was you that found him,” she says.
She moves over him then, climbs over his chest and sits on him. She pulls his penis from beneath her and lays it on his stomach in such a way that it might belong to either of them. She traces a line up the underside with her fingernail.
She raises herself off him, and then guides his hand underneath. “Just one finger,” she says. “Close your eyes and put one finger inside.”
He does, and she squeezes it.
She rides his finger, and he is wet to the wrist.
“Pretend,” she says, and he feels the weight of his penis change on his stomach, heavier at first, and then suddenly light as it fills and lifts itself off.
And then he is inside her again, but the newness of it has washed off, and beneath it is the purpose.
He can’t bring her with him this time, and when he has gone to the surface and come back, he looks at her in the half dark of the room, and sees that she is crying.
And he knows that for a little while Jimmy Measles has his wife back.
Peter returns to the gym, the first time since he washed Leonard Crawley’s blood off the ring floor. It is Friday, five weeks to the day.
Nick is sitting in a chair by the window, still in his work clothes, his elbows resting on his knees, bending into an open newspaper as if he were sitting on a toilet. Harry is jumping rope. It is a few minutes past six o’clock; the place is always empty on Fridays in the summer.
Nick sees him as he clears the staircase, and drops the paper on the floor. “Peter,” he says, getting up, “where you been?”
Peter looks around the room, everything familiar. The ring, the pictures on the wall, the towel lying under the bench, the hand wraps hanging from the chinning bar. It feels as if he has been gone a year.