“Ahh, okay, Vinny see. You a-got it, Charlie,” and he clapped his red-and-white-striped helots into action with a Sicilian tantrum.
Now, imagine this, if you will: me at the pizzeria window looking through my reflection at Gillian, who was at the passenger’s window looking through her reflection at me. Get it? Proust would give you sixty pages about those reflections but this is Connecticut and I’ve got to move on here.
No beer in a bar, much less sex in my car, but just the two of us perched on the top step outside her one-bedroom prefab townhouse with a cheese pie so succulent it rendered us speechless for minutes at a time. She had said that, lifesaver though I was, if I attempted anything wacky or even suggestively satanic, she’d go succubus on my ass—she had studied ninjutsu and Descartes and knew how one enhances the other—“so don’t get snaky,” she said—and I warmed with admiration. Here was a gal with gumption, sangfroid, with a Virginia voice that might melt wrought iron. In the driveway slept her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the face of a whopping flower painted on the hood and testifying to goodness.
We talked and ate till midnight, the familiar chatter about childhood, siblings, and what we would buy if we won the lottery. I said, “I’d donate half the money to the children’s hospital and use the other half to build a house with no other houses in view. Privacy matters.”
She hinted that she was unmoved by my soppy wish to play Robin Hood for a hospital, and that if I was trying to win her approval with stories of sick kids, the donkey in me could forget it. She said she’d spend all the money on a curvy boat and a team of scientists and fishermen, trying to be the first-ever person to capture a giant squid, which no modern human has ever seen alive but about which tales abound. Astonishing! Gillian collected giant squid curiosa and could hold court with any ocean-loving dweeb in thick glasses.
“It lives,” she said. “I know it. Ancient seafarers have seen it and written about it. The problem is, we think it lives at such great depths it’s nearly impossible to find. Some carcasses have washed up onshore, but we need it alive. There are only a handful of scientists who have dedicated themselves to finding it. Sadly, the really big funding is scarce for the giant squid.”
“Giant squid, huh? How’d you become interested in that?”
“In childhood, Charles. Always in childhood.”
“A monster?”
“No, not a monster,” she confirmed. “A beautiful animal.”
And I thought, Yes, a beautiful animal indeed. When I drove home that night—her number already entered in my cell phone, me jittery with a teenage thrill, alive again after what seemed bubonic eons, the lunar light pulling at my water—I was certain that if I switched on the news in my living room I’d find that the cosmos had been washed of brutality and outrage. Remember the stimulating incipience of romance, the excitement of possibility, of being rescued from the abscess of lonesomeness and having someone to share your hydrogen with? Recall the glee? It meant your little life was worth something, your personality, yes, have-able. It meant sex for your now-laudable seed, and dinnertime conversation, too. Go grab your lovers, people, hold them close, feel the validation. You’re barely carbon-based without them.
So that was our beginning in the Garden of Connecticut. The bog in me had ceased its bubble.
HERE’S ANOTHER CONFESSION while I’m hard at it: I dislike cops. You give a man that kind of authority and just like that his cock swells six inches. What it does to female cops I’m not qualified to say, but it can’t be good, though each one may be maternally erotic in her own way. Marvin’s being a Virginia state trooper could have had some influence on my decision to shepherd him henceforth, seeing as how state troopers can be more crooked than the common cop. More important, he’d always be able to find us, no matter how we tried to elude him. I’ve heard those troopers have access to supercomputers that will let them locate anyone anywhere, which was how he had managed to remain in contact with Gillian even though she had fled Virginia and started over in suburban Connecticut. His being Southern had zero to do with it; as a Democrat and New Englander I harbor no prejudice and do not care for the Neil Young song that claims the Southern man is a louse. In addition, I readily admit that Robert Lee was the most honorable individual ever to mount a steed, his photographs boasting integrity incarnate. My side won the war and I had nothing at all to prove, but I won’t budge on this one point: NASCAR is not a sport.
Now, to the business of killing a man: plenty of books and movies are filled with it, and kids today get batty with their sadistic video games, but the truth is that the standard person has never committed murder and never will, nor is he likely to know anyone who has or will. I suppose I don’t fit into the standard category because I don’t believe every human life is precious, Christian though I am. Mankind would be a prettier lot without certain sons of bitches. So I’ve always felt myself capable of killing but was grateful I never had cause, not till hobgoblin Gluck presented himself to me as a pesky root that needed plucking. The cycle of his threats and slobbering apologies gave me digestive trouble or else caused me to urp unkindly.
One Wednesday when Gillian was at work I consulted my friend and confidant Groot, an old high school chum who just happens to be a Navy SEAL and has murdered many men—in Iraq, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia—some of whom didn’t even know they were in the same room with him. He can cleave an apple with a knife from twenty feet away; I’ve seen him do it. My favorite story is how he and his unit were flown to a mosque in a city north of Baghdad. Insurgents were headquartered inside; it was after midnight in the stygian heat of July. Groot told me the Navy has secret helicopters that make no sound; they can hover six feet above your hair and you’d never know they were there. (UFO technology, he told me, from Roswell. His imagination has a child’s beauty.) So one of these choppers clipped in close over the mosque and Groot and his pals rappelled down to the rooftop, dropped themselves just below the ceiling wearing night-vision goggles. Then, with silent carbine assault rifles, they proceeded to shoot every insurgent while he slept. The whole thing sounded very Mohican to me.
Groot’s parents still live in town; several times a year he returns home to visit them and that’s when we get together to yak. After I called he came to our place, and as we perched at the kitchen table with perspiring glasses of iced tea, I told him my unkind Marvin dilemma while looking crossly at the cowboy hat I had cautioned him never to wear in daylight.
“Charlie,” he said, “you aren’t Josey Wales. Killing a man is not what it looks like on TV. At least not at first. Maybe I should just fly down there and have a talking-to with him. You know, make him see things our way.”
“Groot,” I said, “this Marvin Gluck is not the talking-to kind. Believe me. We’ve tried. I have letters and emails here that look as if they were scribbled by an eighth century psychopath with Manichean tendencies.”
“Ahh, yes, I know the kind.”
Looking through the sliding glass door into our meek backyard, I saw what work needed doing: Tom Sawyer the fence, hang a new clothesline, replace the cracked patio, all less viperous than planning homicide, which I was still uncertain whether or not I could carry out. But I had at least to seem firm, fed up and stalwart, lest Groot think me gutless and easily plodded upon, opinions I know he had held in the past when I was too yellow to defend myself: Back in high school, for instance, when a lacrosse-playing orangutan falsely accused me of attempting to look up his girlfriend’s denim skirt at a keg party, never mind that her legs were barely mammalian. He smacked the spittle from my mouth and I was too frightened to fight back. When Groot saw this across the yard from his vodka vantage point, he charged over and chopped the goon across the throat, at which point said goon gagged himself red and nearly fainted from air loss. Other lacrosse-playing thugs attempted retribution but Groot slid out a chilling combat knife from somewhere inside his jacket. And then—I couldn’t believe it—he licked the blade. Didn’t talk. Just licked the blade. Those thugs halt
ed and then dawdled away carrying their throat-crushed comrade. After that, we retreated to Vinny’s Pizzeria and Groot gave me pointers on how to disable an assailant with bare knuckles or else garden tools if they’re handy. We had been pals since kindergarten but never before had I felt that kind of love for him.
“Are you going to write about this Marvin Gluck adventure in your memoirs?” Groot asked.
“And implicate myself? Negative.”
“Charlie,” he said, “as your trusty compadre, I’ll do it for you if you can’t manage. Really. I don’t think I want you to do this. You’re not made for it, Charlie. I am.”
“That’s sweet. But I have to do this myself. Is it really that difficult?”
“Honestly, no, not at all. The human being is flawed with frailty. And the quality of mercy is so strained”—that a bit of Shakespeare I’d have to look up.
He slid out a seven-inch blade from inside his cowboy boot—by what means he had acquired his high regard for that babble clucked out by Garth Brooks, I cannot say—and handed it across the table to me. It was, by golly, the same knife that nearly filleted those lacrosse bullies fifteen years earlier. The rubber and metal of the thing felt so…balanced. And clean. It seemed a great shame to dirty it with Gluck.
“Use this,” he said.
“A knife, eh? Not a gun? Or, uhh, poison, maybe?”
“No, a gun’s too messy, too many potential problems. The noise, ballistics, powder residue, and all that. Poison is hard to get, besides too traceable.”
“This is all new to me, Groot. You kill with a knife, and I kill with my words. Ahem.”
“That blade is serrated on one side, a razor on the other. When you exit the body you pull up on the serrated side. You know the vital areas?”
Of course I did: I myself was mostly vital areas.
“The Southern man,” he said, refilling his iced tea at the table, “is one sick dude. Some of the sickest dudes I’ve ever met in the military are Southern. Hostility left over from the Civil War. They’re good soldiers, so use caution.”
“I shall,” I said, and held up the knife to the sunlight jabbing in through open blinds.
And then we didn’t speak for a stretch; we just stared at the sun reflecting off the blade, Groot no doubt convinced I had snapped my cap, I wondering about the repulsive mess the knife would make when it found Marvin Gluck’s jugular.
“Frankly, Charlie, I’m worried about you. You’ve always been the artsy kind, peace-loving and all that. I never understood it myself, but I esteemed the idiot in you. Now I feel as if you might be crossing a line into a whole new mode of existence.”
“Groot,” I said, “understand: this must be done. He’ll stalk and kill her one day, I can feel it. Or firebomb our wedding. He already said he would. We told the cops; they don’t give a damn. Bastards protect their own. So what kind of man would I be to do nothing, to let my lady live in fear?”
“Syrupy Miss Gillian really has a vise grip on the heart of my pal Charles. It makes me proud to see you all grown up,” and he winked at me. “When we were in college I was worried that you might become a loner and misanthrope, a stranger to the flesh of others.”
“Likewise, loyal Groot. You make me proud, too.”
“Just call me if you have a problem, Charlie. And whatever you do, don’t turn yourself in if you get to feeling guilty.”
This was an allusion to the robbery we’d pulled off our senior year of high school: Each Christmastime, a local sporting goods store rented a warehouse in an industrial park to sell all overstock items at discounted prices. Groot recruited me for “the job,” as he kept calling it: at eleven one night—the start of “the witching hour,” he found it necessary to inform me—he scaled the wall with a grappling hook and rope, unscrewed the skylight directly above the warehouse, dropped the rope, and zipped down inside. He then unlocked the door to let me in—no alarm and no security guard, which he knew because he had “cased the joint.” We loaded six gigantic outdoor garbage bags with so many coats, watches, sneakers, and boots that they almost didn’t fit in the backseat and trunk of my car. We had purchased the bags at Food World before we went; they were called Steel Bags, and Groot thought it a comedy beyond Mel Brooks that we were using them to steal.
Two days later, a front-page article in our local paper proclaimed the theft, and right there next to the piece blared a color photo of a crying woman: the owner. She and her husband were the kind of distraught that occurs in the Congo. I felt so wretched about what we had done that I brought back all the loot—still in my car because Groot’s mother had a habit of turning over his room in search of armaments—directly to the owners themselves. Mine were the apologies of a reformed swindler—I believe I uttered the word exculpation and made a reference to Hammurabi—and they were so grateful for the missing merchandise that they let me drive away without calling for handcuffs.
Why had I committed the crime in the first place if I knew I wasn’t of the crime-committing mold? Boys, let me share a bit of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way: males want mostly the esteem of other males, even when in earshot of the pom-pom swish and rah-rah chants belted out by a bevy of disrobed cheerleaders. If you ask me, this male want is absolute Neolithic, which just goes to show how far we’ve come.
But I was not yet a grown man in love when we pulled off “the sporting goods massacre,” as we—he—titled that legendary thrill.
No, a grown man in love is a different critter altogether.
A MAN CHERISHES his lady and he owes nobody an explanation, but in my case I have a whole catalogue of reasons why Gillian is worth protecting, some of which I’ll share. First, she’s the only woman I’ve ever met who hasn’t asked me to adjust my persona, enlarge my heart, tweak my ideas, or alter my language, and this from a lady with Opinions. Second, she cradles me at night and hymns Nina Simone softly in my ear—that in itself is worth the price of murder. Only the thane of a prosperous land receives that kind of cuddling. Third, her lovemaking is as close as I’ll ever get to being a spaceman, and every man wants to strut on the moon. (In the past—I’m ashamed to admit—before I had met Gillian, tenderness, compassion, and concern had always strangled my otherwise meaty libido. I had to dislike the gal in order to climax. Shrews, bozos, those with shrunken cerebellum—they were the only ones I found alluring. Sex with a generous and beautiful woman felt a little like pissing on a flower.) Fourth, she has no annoying emotional complications, wasn’t neglected or abused by Big Daddy when she was six years old, pigtails bouncing as she hopped. Fifth, she cares for my ailing father when she can, visits him every week, brings him presents, and giggles at his not-funny jokes. If you knew my father you’d be mightily impressed by this: a killjoy with half a dozen heart-related maladies, he’s no prince to be around. And lastly, Gillian and I have never had a single argument (although, yes, there was that one time we agreed to disagree about having children: she said two sounded nice and I said they sounded like smallpox). You might call this unnatural, unhealthy, or untrue, but I call it a nice fit.
And I remembered what my layabout life was like before her, nothing even vaguely kinetic in my breast and limbs, me a somber piece of animal in gym shorts and a sweatshirt far from the gym and not sweating. See me chopsticking dinner alone at the House of Wong on a Friday night; or scrolling up and down an Internet dating site on a Saturday afternoon, and then in bed by nine with an unannotated copy of Psychopathia Sexualis; or visiting my blasé parents on a Sunday because I had no one else to call on, my college pals dispersed across two continents and my only boyhood friend constantly in goggles and a wetsuit in some other hemisphere.
How many times did I travel around New England and beyond to conduct research for an essay and wish I had had a devoted lover to share the scenery with, someone who admired what I wrote and liked me a lot to boot? For instance, several months before I met Gillian I drove to the woods of Maine, to my maternal grandmother’s cottage on a lake, the locale of my childhood
summers, a place planted at my hub, in order to ignite my memory and write an essay about those bucolic days and what they meant to the Wordsworth I am. I brought along a woman I had gone to high school with, someone I had remet at the pharmacy in town after twenty-odd years: divorced, two kids, the face of a cover girl on a cloud but the mind of an amoeba, couldn’t tell the difference between hearsay and heresy. I kept saying, “Look there, that’s where I swam! And over there, that’s where I caught a five-pound bass! And there, I chased a moose through the brush! And see, that window in the cottage there, that was my room!” But it didn’t matter because she didn’t care; we weren’t invested in one another; she and her indifference wrecked the weekend for me, and I never wrote the piece about my youthful summers in the pine scent of Maine.
Gillian entered my world with all the force of a javelin hurled by Schwarzenegger in his prime—Pumping Iron, say—and nothing I saw was ever the same after that first night with her at the bazaar. You can read in various greeting cards courtesy of those saccharine quasi-scribes at Hallmark, or hear in the melodic yeah-yeah-yeah on an early Beatles record, about how love heightens, enhances, makes a home for misfits like you and me, but I never believed the baloney until I hit thirty-one head-on and discovered myself solitary. My being alone seemed a great crime, a slur against my humble good looks and the fame I had—minuscule, sure, but verifiable. One month I went on twelve dinner dates, nearly every one a tour de force of discomfort. Two or three were very effective exercises in pessimism and soul rape. Only after too many encounters with the fraudulent can one recognize the authentic. Gillian the javelin, my dream.
That lopsided bastard Marvin knew what he’d had, all right, but it’s not my fault he couldn’t accept defeat and welcome himself to the cruel world—women will leave you, cold and hard and all of a sudden; brothers and parents will die, some horribly. Gillian left him because he got too pushy; she had difficulty breathing within sight of his face. He wanted her sex three times a day, said he couldn’t function without it, said it was like meth for a junkie. He needed to stuff his face between her thighs and keep it there for half an hour or more, inhaling deeply the soggy scent of her. Sometimes he insisted on watching her pee, his face above her lap. Other times, à la Napoleon and his queen, he demanded she not shower for days at a time so he could—yes, you’re hearing me right—lick her clean. There are certain words a man cannot use with a woman, demand and insist being just two. If you are a male imbecile, jot that down.
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