Kechel was saying how beautiful Juliana was, how beautiful her body, her eyes, her hair—“Yes, but you know that, dear, don’t you? Of course you do.”
Was the old man besotted with her? Juliana laughed, uneasy. She must calculate her escape. She must leave soon.
But no: they were planning to shop for an engagement ring. Of course. That was why Juliana was here, in this sour-smelling bed.
Let the old man spend money on her, it was what she deserved, Juliana thought. She’d earned it. She would marry Gordon, or possibly not marry Gordon, but she would keep the engagement ring, for she’d earned it.
“You do know the effect you have upon men, Juli-an-ya, don’t you. Of course, you aren’t a child. You know.”
Almost wistfully Norman Kechel spoke. Juliana wondered if, in some wild flight of fantasy, the father of the fiancé might take the fiancé’s place: divorce the old, worn-out wife, marry the beautiful young fiancée. A preposterous turnabout, but not impossible.
It’s up to you—Juliana told herself. No one else!
The smooth apricot-colored liquor had gone to her head, very pleasurably.
Stroking her thigh, leaning down now and then to kiss it, his wet lips against Juliana’s shivery flesh, Kechel was telling Juliana about his business in Kansas City. She’d missed the part where he’d identified a product. Or possibly there was no product, just a service of some kind. He spoke of his wife’s family—“Pioneer stock.” He was immigrant stock, second generation.
In that wistful yet somehow reproachful tone Kechel spoke of his children, sons. He did not speak of Gordon by name. My sons. Good kids. But needing guidance. Juliana had resolved as an adolescent to have no children of her own. Not ever. Children are the disappointment, always falling short. Always, strings attached. No. Already too many of them inhabited the world, choking and smothering one another.
Juliana was becoming dizzy. She’d had only two, three mouthfuls of the exquisite apricot-colored liquor. Had to lie back on the bed, against the headboard, one of the pillows crooked and uncomfortable beneath her. Eyelids heavy. Had she made a mistake? Had she miscalculated Norman Kechel? Had the man drugged her? Poisoned her? Confusing Kechel with the visiting professor in film studies who’d also drugged/poisoned her.
Whiskey wasn’t her drink, whiskey was a man’s drink. Straight whiskey. Still, the taste was good. Soothing. You could not deny that.
No, no more! Thank you but no more.
Her eyelids were heavy. A hand removed the whiskey glass from her hand, gently.
Must’ve slept. Time was confused. Was she alone? Or—
Not Gordon. Vaguely she understood—Not the film professor and not Gordon.
Whoever this was beside her, a heavy, humid weight. And now he was standing above her. A kind of triumph, heaved to his feet. Vaguely she could see the face, not a familiar face. Not a kindly face. Not a fatherly face. In that heavy-jawed face, disapproval and dislike.
Wearing a white terrycloth bathrobe out of the hotel closet, the man stood above her swaying, gloating. The terrycloth white was bright and potent and hurt her eyes.
What was the man doing? Taking pictures of her with his cell phone? As she lay sprawled and helpless? Tried to shield herself with her arms. Naked arms, naked torso. Breasts, belly. Seeing the contempt in the face that should have been a kindly face, the blood-darkened rage. Quivering jowls. She was trying to hide, as a child might hide, curled up, knees to her chest. She hoped he would not strangle her in this bed and pull the cover over her. She hoped he would not leave her for dead. Drag her into the bathroom, her lifeless body hauled into the bathtub, an old, heavy porcelain bathtub of another era, as large as an Egyptian sarcophagus.
Those many years, the rumors you hear. Girls, women, raped, strangled, beaten to death, left for dead in their own vomit, excrement. The kindest of these (you might tell yourself) was the body never recovered. For then the case was still open. A possibility that the victim is still alive.
“Evidence. My naïve son needs to know the kind of slut he’s gotten involved with.”
The voice was slurred, elated. The voice went on to inform Juliana that he had a plane to catch, six p.m. that evening. He had no intention of taking “the slut” on a “shopping spree.” He was going to take a shower, Kechel said, to wash the smell of her off his skin, and when he came out of the bathroom, he wanted her gone.
Throwing her clothes at her. The face bloated with gloating, fury.
Juliana pulled a sheet over her stricken body. It was what you did—cover a body. Her reactions were slow, as if underwater. She’d been thinking at first that Kechel was joking, for his manner was often jocular, not serious; yet he did not seem to be joking now.
“Get dressed. Get out of here. Get out of my son’s life. If you try to see him again, I will show him this evidence, what you are …”
He was laughing at her without mirth. He was triumphant, gloating. She was stunned, she’d so miscalculated. The shame of it …
He left her, she could hear the shower in the bathroom. Still, Juliana wasn’t certain what had happened. Was Norman Kechel joking? He’d seemed so smitten with her.
Stricken with pain. Shame. She was whispering to herself—It will be all right. It will be all right. He didn’t hurt you, you are alive.
Her fingers fumbled to dress herself. The clean, chic, attractive clothes on the sullied, smelly body.
No one to observe how she managed to button her jacket, pushing pearl buttons through tight, embroidered buttonholes.
The room swirled about her. She struggled to remain on her feet. He must have put something in her drink—a sleeping pill, possibly. How naïve she was to have accepted that drink from him—how vain she’d been to think that her will was stronger than the man’s.
Recalling now, though with difficulty, how he’d hurt her, making love to her. The excuse of—“making love.” His roughness, clumsiness. He’d even closed his hands around her throat, in play. Teasing. But serious. Oh certainly—he’d have enjoyed strangling her. All that talk of beautiful, gorgeous—just means that they resent you, would love to strangle you.
And as Kechel strangled her, he’d have rammed the hard, fat slug-thing against her faster and faster until it burst.
She loathed him. She would have to kill him. That way Gordon would never know. The shame of this, this humiliation, would be erased.
But killing the man, the physical bulk of the man, the weight, the will of the man—how could Juliana do this? She wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t strong enough. Even with a knife, a weapon—not strong enough.
On a bureau lay the man’s wallet, in plain sight. This was too obvious. It’s a stupid test. He knows I won’t dare take his money.
She took his money. Just larger bills, fifty-dollar bills, twenty-dollar bills. The smaller bills she left in the wallet, out of contempt. The several credit cards she rearranged in the wallet so that Kechel would assume they were missing. The large-denomination bills she folded into small, tight wads and placed in the pockets of his trousers, which were neatly draped across the back of a Queen Anne chair.
These wadded-up bills the man would discover in his pockets, though not immediately.
By then Juliana would be gone from the Commodore Hotel. Never again would she see Norman Kechel. Never would she see Gordon Kechel. Never again would she return to the red-neon Mon ey Bar, with its crude racist caricatures that she’d mistaken, in her ignorance, for innocent cartoons.
6.
Wild Goose Tavern. Where in the front window neon cascaded in emulation of a waterfall, bright blue, cloudy blue, dark blue advertising a Canadian beer.
Where, six years later, Juliana met Ned Spires.
Or, Ned Spires met Juliana.
Working as a paralegal, part-time. Telling herself it was good work, necessary work. As many hours of her (daytime) life devoted to the cause of social justice as she could manage.
Twenty-six years old. Life just beginning!
/> Twenty-six years old. Christ, how long has her life been …
Drinking vodka now. Savoring the many facets of vodka. Invisible, no-taste, low-calorie.
Juliana had gone through a (perverse) phrase of whiskey—apricot-colored, smooth-burning, potent. In the wake of the fiancé’s father, a trance of self-loathing.
Following that, a phase of rum and Diet Coke.
But best of all, vodka, seltzer, and lemon. Dreamy waterfall neon captured the taste, the tone. Like something glimpsed through swirling, frothy water.
On the grandiloquent old jukebox with flashing colors, Johnny Cash. Sexy-deep baritone voice of the dead.
At the Wild Goose Tavern those many nights they’d talked earnestly of life, death, poetry, music. The films of Jim Jarmusch, which Ned Spires too admired: not surprisingly, his favorite was Paterson. (Though his favorite filmmaker was Andrei Tarkovsky.) Is there God, is there an afterlife, is there meaning in life. What do we owe one another, how do our lives intersect? Can we love, deeply, more than once? Must we love, deeply, more than once?
Unexpected, absurd—Juliana was entranced by Ned Spires. His skin was pocked with ancient acne scars, his eyes were often haggard. Merriment lay over his face like a cobweb, there were deep frown and smile lines beside his eyes. Ned too was a drinker.
In the Wild Goose Tavern, which was near a large urban university, Ned Spires reigned over the bar, in his hoarse-mellifluous voice reciting poems by W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, John Berryman. Surprising how many drinkers at the Wild Goose listened to poetry, enthralled by Ned Spires’s voice.
He’d been born in County Galway and was brought by his very young parents to the United States, to Boston, as a child of three. After four decades in the States, his accent was still Irish-inflected. His preferred drink was Irish whiskey straight, but for most occasions Guinness Extra Stout from the tap.
Juliana was acquiring a taste for the dark, bitter ale. You had to swallow hard once, twice, to get a mouthful down. That taste at the back of the tongue like a dark spreading stain.
So much in life is negotiable, Juliana came to see. What she’d disliked and disdained she might learn to like very much. Under the proper tutelage.
Her first glimpse of Ned Spires, he’d been unprepossessing. Subsequently she’d come to see that if you looked closely and if you listened to Ned, he was really a beautiful man.
She’d come to love the very sound of the name: Ned Spires. Confused with the waterfall neon in the Wild Goose, glimmering lights reflected against the man’s face and her face and in the mirror behind the bar behind shelves of bottles.
And in the front seat of his car the first night they were alone together. Drawing her fingertips over the warm, blotched skin of the man’s face as a blind woman might draw marveling fingertips over Braille.
Ned Spires’s poetry was the poetry of celebration but also, being Irish, the poetry of privation. Deprivation. Bitter loss, stoic resignation. He hadn’t ever believed he deserved to be happy, Ned told her.
Ravished by her. He said. His eyes on her, worshipful. But she was too young, or was he too old? (Only forty-three. Not old. Except for his thinning coppery hair and bruised eyes, he’d have looked years younger.)
By this time Juliana had begun taking night school courses at a branch of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. By day she worked as a paralegal. She was often on the phone, she was often sifting through records. She was a researcher, she accumulated data. She’d acquired computer skills beyond those of her (male) superiors, whom she had to instruct even as they disdained such skills. She understood that until she had a law degree and passed the state bar exam, she would not be taken seriously by any of these individuals; she would not be eligible for any job she might believe worthwhile.
In telling Ned Spires a selective account of her day-life, she felt a small thrill of pride. That life, a life she wore casually, as one might slip on a stylish jacket, was in fact a life of work, effort. Trying to reverse unjust convictions. Investigating corrupt police officers, perjured testimonies. What was required was the most stubborn idealism. You had to be made of something like the roughest rubber. Yet the life seemed often, to Juliana, to belong to another person.
Oh, why did she torment herself—thinking. In a man’s arms not needing to think. That is the point of in a man’s arms.
That is the point of the Wild Goose. Voluptuous night, neon.
A fact: after drinking, lovemaking is possible. Your brain is not loose-rushing like a runaway cog. Your brain is numbed, unresisting. Your brain is childlike. How simple and without complication is your life at such times.
Ned was kind to her. Vowed he would not lie.
Saying—Well, look: she was young.
“And I am worn.”
Ned Spires was a man set apart. Even before Juliana learned that he was a poet, an acclaimed poet, with several books published by a distinguished publisher. Professor of Romance languages at the Jesuit university.
Eagerly Juliana read the poetry of Ned Spires. Seeking some tracery of herself in the man’s life. Some prophecy.
Not her so much as a premonition of her. The poet’s yearning for the not-yet-known, the poet’s guilt over betrayal.
Of course, Ned Spires was married. Twice married. Almost twenty years married, in all. Near-grown children from the first marriage, young children from the second. Are your children the light of your life?—Juliana had not meant to sound mocking, jealous.
If she loved a man too much, toads leapt from her mouth. Vodka released them.
In fact yes. “Light of the life”—the child bearing life into the next generation. In their eyes, the original light, which some of us have lost.
With a strange fatality the poet spoke. A luminosity in his blemished face. Juliana had to look away.
Well! She’d been rebuked. No one had spoken to her in quite this way, a knife to the heart.
She despaired, she would not see this man again. He was so very superior to her, secure in his love for his children, basking in his poetry. Beyond his own poetry was the world of poetry itself—he’d memorized countless poems, the most beautiful and profound lines of others were always at his fingertips.
His favorite line was from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop (of whom Juliana had heard but had never read): “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
How true, Juliana thought. The art of losing, she’d mastered at a young age.
Why vodka was so soothing now. Originally a way of numbing hurt, now a pleasure in itself, like a sparkling waterfall.
By day, work: her hands began to ache, sharp, shooting pains in both hands, typing for so many hours on the computer keyboard. Her forehead crimped like paper crushed in the hand. At last released at six thirty p.m.
Running through rain to the Wild Goose Tavern, where he might be waiting for her, a drink on the bar before him.
Or in one of the favored booths, waiting for Juliana. Already a vodka for her, or a tall glass of pale ale.
If Ned wasn’t there, it might mean that Ned wasn’t coming that evening. No excuse, no reason. He wished not to be expected.
Juliana knew. Juliana understood. Indeed, Juliana felt the same way herself. I hate it, where I am expected.
Yet if Ned wasn’t at the Wild Goose, possibly Juliana would walk a few blocks or take a taxi to the Shamrock Inn, where she was also known, welcomed. These were neighborhood bars near the university, like home to her. The bartenders knew her and liked her. Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
And beautiful to Juliana, mysterious—the waterfall sign in the front window as she approached the Wild Goose. Or the flashing gold sign in the window of the Shamrock Inn. Red neon, blue neon—the several dreamy blues of neon.
Night, neon. Neither possible without the other.
The Black Rooster: farther away, on the state highway. She’d have to take a taxi.
Red scripted neon, advertising a German beer. Faint with relief, t
he simplest happiness, at last seating herself at a bar, this bar, elbows on the bar, rain glistening on her face and in her hair, seeing herself in the eyes of others as in the mirror behind the bar, attractive young woman, still a young woman, first name only—Juliana.
But few patrons knew Juliana at the Black Rooster. Bartenders recognized her, but were not especially friendly. Ned Spires wasn’t likely to come here, the Black Rooster wasn’t one of his places.
In a way, Juliana was relieved that Ned Spires wouldn’t come to the Black Rooster. Relieved that no one knew her here. Except she’d been hearing tales of an unidentified man in that area, reported at the Black Rooster and at other taverns, stalking women, lone women, women with long hair, like Juliana. And all of them young, with girls’ faces.
Not so comfortable a place, a different vibe here. No Johnny Cash—no old-fashioned jukebox. TV could be tuned to sports or to Fox News. Raucous, rowdy. Clientele younger guys, truckers. And a bare plank floor, blank ceiling that failed to soften and blur voices.
Red neon in the window at the Black Rooster. The small trip of the heart that is hope.
If, when she wished to be unfaithful to Ned Spires. Unfaithful to Wild Goose. Drinking at the Black Rooster for the night.
Stricken with guilt over his young children, Ned Spires stayed away from the Wild Goose for five, six days. Juliana had nearly given up hope, but then he’d unexpectedly returned. A drinker will always return, you have only to wait. And that night in Juliana’s studio apartment, in Juliana’s thrift-shop brass bed that winced beneath their weight. Juliana’s hair spilling around the man’s face, onto his shoulders. Lifting herself above him, he’d gripped her hips. Big-knuckled hands, surprisingly strong.
Could he lift his youngest child in one hand?—Juliana marveled.
Once, her father had lifted her in one hand. She could swear. She could recall. Lifted toward the ceiling, like an offering to the gods.
Above Ned Spires, lowering herself onto him, gently. Their lovemaking was tender, even contemplative. Juliana did not want to think that their lovemaking was like poetry, a rueful past tense.
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