by Greg Olear
I was out all evening, putzing around in my galoshes, fighting through the relentless downpour. Aquamarine is not exactly common in jewelry stores, I found out. I think it’s because there are fewer people born in March.
I never did find the right ring. Finally giving up, I went to Kim’s Video and, to get my mind off my troubles, rented Silence of the Lambs (in which Hannibal Lecter, in his iconically creepy voice, says, “Quid pro quo, Clarice.”). Then I bought a coffee at Veselka and called it a day.
By the time I got home, my jeans were soaked through from the knee all the way down. With its shitty exposures, the apartment is poorly lit anyway, but on overcast days, it’s like Miltonic hell in there. It was dark, is what I’m saying, and I didn’t bother flipping on the light. Plus my brain was still mush—amazing the soporific effect a good lay can have on your gray matter. This explains, somewhat, how I was able to walk down the hall, through the living room, and into my bedroom, change my pants, and come back to the living room without noticing that there was someone sitting on the vinyl sofa. Someone who smelled faintly of Drakkar Noir.
“There’s nothing to read in here,” my unbidden guest announced, flipping on a table lamp. “Sassy magazine? Is this yours?”
“Taylor’s. She has a subscription.” I knew the voice, of course. Voices like that you don’t easily forget. Especially when they belong to ghosts.
I thought about beating a hasty exit through the terrace, but decided against it; if he’d wanted to kill me, he’d have done it when I first walked in.
“I heard you were dead.”
“How did Mark Twain put it? Reports of my demise have been exaggerated.” Asher closed the Sassy magazine—I couldn’t imagine any single object looking more ridiculous in his powerful, masculine hands than that glossy teenybopper rag—and dropped it on a pile of back issues stacked on the floor. “And Generation X?” he said, gesturing at the oversized blue-and-yellow paperback on the bookcase. “That must be yours. Taylor isn’t that pseudo-intellectual.”
“You’re not down with Doug Coupland?”
“The book’s a piece of shit. They don’t do anything, those people, just sit around whining. Bunch of fucking babies.”
“You want something to drink?”
“I won’t be staying long. Have a seat.” He crossed his legs and flashed a smile I can only describe as hospitable, as if this were his apartment, and I’d been the one waiting in the dark. Except that, you know, Asher Krug would never have lived in such a dive. This easy appropriation of my space should have been taken as an affront to my manhood, but under the circumstances, I meekly sat down.
“You aren’t totally off base,” Asher said. “Taylor did try to kill me, and she believes she was successful. Not that I’m in a hurry to correct her. No one comes looking for you when they think you’re dead. It’s a very pleasant arrangement.”
Humor had saved me with Taylor before, so I tried it on Asher, giving him my best S.P.E.C.T.R.E. accent: “You only live twice, Mr. Bond.”
He laughed—the only time I’d ever seen him so much as chuckle. Asher had many things going for him, but sense of humor wasn’t one of them. He was way too serious.
“Taylor is planning to kill you,” he said, which pretty much wet-blanketed my attempt at levity. “Tonight, probably. She’ll wait till you have your guard down, and then inject you with a toxic agent called Cold Ethyl. She keeps it in a dummy mascara tube. She has to kill you, company policy, because you failed to execute your pink slip.”
“I thought that was your job.”
“Not anymore.” He glanced at his Rolex. “By now, Donna Green has already joined the heavenly choir. It’s too late for you to make it right, unfortunately.”
I studied him intently, looking for a tip that might help me figure out his plan. It was no use. He was a professional killer and a spy; he could easily outwit the likes of me.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So you can save yourself. And avenge my death, as it were.”
So there it was. He wanted me to kill Taylor!
“No way,” I said. “No fucking way.”
“By tomorrow morning,” Asher said, producing a revolver from his jacket pocket, “one of you will be dead.”
Asher set the gun on the table, by the lamp.
“Election Day,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Tomorrow is Election Day.” I observed the gun gleaming under the table lamp. I had never even held a gun before, much less shot one. “What’s funny is, Taylor said that you were planning to kill me.”
“Let me guess,” said Asher. “She said she’d do your pink slip for you on the sly, so you’d be off the hook, but I knew the truth, so I had to be removed. Something like that?”
“Something like that.”
“She told me she loved me,” he said, his voice losing all trace of its usual arrogance. “For the first time, she said those words. Then she kissed me—and shot me up with Cold Ethyl.”
I remembered that final diary entry:
Three words are all you need to make a guy putty in your hands.
Was Asher playing it straight with me?
“Fortunately, I’ve been inoculated. You haven’t.” Asher stood up, straightening his jacket. “The gun is loaded. Keep it under your pillow, is my recommendation.”
“You’re wrong, Asher,” I said, rising. “Taylor loves me. She didn’t say so, but I know she does.”
Asher shook his head grimly. “I hate to be the bad messenger,” he said, handing me a thick envelope. “These were taken a few hours ago. She’s a fucking whore, Todd.”
He gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Under the pillow.” And with that, Asher Krug took his leave.
He must have liked living under the radar, too, because I never saw the guy again.
Inside the envelope was a roll of grainy, black-and-white film, date-stamped today, showing Taylor leaving the apartment, being accosted in the stairwell by Trey Parrish, going into Trey’s apartment, taking off her clothes, and…well, you can figure out the rest. Do I really have to spell it all out? Put it this way: the pictures were so graphic, I could see that Taylor’s hamster analogy was actually generous.
My mouth went dry; my face, white (I could see it blanch in the mirror). I felt a tightness in my chest, like I was having a heart attack. I’ve never been more angry in my life—not at Taylor; at Trey. Displacement, they call it in therapy. I hurled the photographs at the sofa, which did little to appease my rage. They billowed in the air and came down gently, like hang gliders. I picked up the gun. I tucked it into my pants, the barrel between my butt cheeks (even in my mad state, I knew not to point a gun at my balls). Then I raced out the door and down the steps.
I couldn’t get to that fuckwad fast enough. My adrenal glands were working overtime. You know how these tiny women can suddenly lift up automobiles when their kids are pinned underneath the tire? I felt like I could knock that bastard’s door down with my fists. And I sure as hell tried.
“Open up! I know you’re in there, you piece of shit!”
There was a New York Mets emblem on the door, another for the Hoboken Ski Club. I pounded my fists against those stickers until they were raw.
“Open the door!”
I didn’t know what I would do when I saw him. Sock him one in the jaw, probably. Then kick him while he was down. He’d date-raped Taylor, was how I read the situation, and he had to pay. I’d bash his kidneys until they were tenderized. I’d stomp on his balls until he could never breed. I’d blow him so full of holes you could play him like an oboe. I’d…
The door opened. I reared back my fist, ready to strike…but Trey Parrish was not there. At first, in fact, I didn’t see anyone. Then I looked down, where a shrunken old Indian woman, four and a half feet tall at the most, with a wrinkled fuchsia sari and a gold bindi where her cycloptic eye would be, regarded me with suspicion. Behind her, rows and rows of U-Haul boxes. Moving boxes.
“Where’s Trey?”
She muttered something in Hindi.
“I said, where’s Trey?”
But she didn’t know. How could she know?
“Fuck!” I shouted, as she urgently slammed the door.
He must have moved out that afternoon. And in 1991, before Google and Classmates.com and all that, when someone moved, they were much harder to track down. Since Trey Parrish would probably not take my phone calls or respond to a forwarded letter—and since Trey Parrish’s real name was almost certainly not Trey Parrish—it didn’t matter if he’d relocated to the Upper East Side or Outer Mongolia—the guy was history.
Defeated, I went back to my apartment. Still a bundle of nerves, of potential energy, I paced around the living room, burned holes in the rug. I was trying to figure out my plan of attack. Or, more properly, my plan of defense.
It could have been that Asher was playing me—appealing to my emotions to trick me into killing Taylor. That’s what I wanted to believe. Problem was, the evidence—the Trey Parrish photos, the absence of my name from her recent diary—suggested otherwise. With no better recourse, I decided that when Taylor came home, I would just pretend that everything was normal and play it by ear.
But I hid the gun underneath my pillow, as Asher had suggested, just in case.
There are many ways enlightened human beings can harness raging emotions: yoga, meditation, prayer, Nintendo. For us unenlightened types, serenity comes in a bottle. A longneck bottle.
There was a six-pack of Rolling Rock in the fridge. I drank three of them in about five minutes. Usually that would get me tipsy, but all it did that night was take the edge off. I could have done surgery, my hands were so steady. Or won a round of Operation, the Wacky Doctors’ Game.
No sooner did I pop open the fourth bottle then Taylor came home, wearing a slinky black and white polka-dot dress. She kissed me on the lips, with just a taste of tongue, and goosed my ass.
“Wow, you look great,” I said.
“Thanks. Hey, give me one of those, would ya?”
I dug out a beer, twisted off the cap, and handed it over. By the time I’d turned around, Taylor had doffed the dress, and oh my. She looked so good I forgot my anxiety. Black silk panties, teddy, fishnet stockings, stiletto-heeled shoes, a garter belt. A fucking garter belt. I’d only seen garter belts in T&A mags. She looked like someone you’d meet in Gene Simmons’s hotel room at three in the morning. She looked like…well, she looked like a prostitute, to be honest. This raised a red flag in my beleaguered brain—as well as something more tangible in my boxers.
“Let’s drink these on the terrace,” she suggested.
Taylor pivoted on one of those shiny heels and vamped her way into my bedroom, shaking her derrière all the while. Her stockings had lines on them that ran from her heel up the center of each leg—wow! When she crossed the threshold, she glanced over her shoulder, shot me a come-hither look, and coquettishly closed the door.
You might think I’d have been apprehensive, making my way to the room. No, sir. Al Toon couldn’t have high-tailed it to the bedroom faster than I did (or David Meggett, if you prefer ’91’s Super Bowl champion Giants to ’91’s 8–8 Jets). The only thing that held me up was the folded-up sheet of paper I spotted on the floor by the sofa. I recognized it at once—her list! It must have fallen out of her bag. In one smooth motion I picked it up and slipped it in my pocket, for further study (it is the only piece of her writing still in my possession). Then I went into the bedroom, closing the door to keep the cat out. I was in no mood to share.
Taylor lay on the futon, on her side, chin propped up by her right hand. Her left was between her legs, holding in place a familiar whirring device.
The presence of my plastic rival only heightened my desire.
“This beats the terrace,” she said.
“You said it.”
I stripped down to my boxers (in ’91, men’s underpants were either boxers or briefs, hence the query put to Governor Bill Clinton on MTV the following year; the boxer short had not yet been supplanted by the dialectical boxer brief).
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“Please do.”
“It’s done.”
“What’s done?”
“Your pink slip. Signed, sealed, delivered.”
Outside, tires were screeching, horns blowing, drunks screaming. As usual.
“You killed Donna?”
“No,” she said, working the vibrator; this conversation was obviously exciting her. “You did.”
“But…”
“No buts, Todd. She was dead before we even got involved. All I did was protect you, and your family, and your references. No one needs to know that you wussed out.”
So many conflicting emotions coursed their chemical way through my body that I didn’t know what to feel, let alone what to say. I took a sip of beer and choked on it.
“It was beautiful,” she said. “I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, but then fatso’s dress ripped, so I was able to inject her without her even noticing.”
Cold Ethyl.
“Ethyl dim-ethyl-phos-pho-rami-do-cy-an-i-date,” Taylor said, singsong, like a child remembering her ABC’s. “It’s a lethal nerve agent they’re using in the Gulf. Cold Ethyl, we call it. Three or four minutes after the injection—five or six, if you’re a whale like Donna—you drop dead. Coroner’s report will say heart attack. Like Walter Bledsoe’s. Cool, huh?”
Taylor worked the pocket rocket in and out as she spoke, muffling and unmuffling its whir. “Someday maybe you’ll do one. Just to do it. It’s such a fucking rush, my God.”
Despite the fact that Asher was probably right, despite the fact that I was probably in grave danger, despite the fact that I felt horrible about Donna Green buying the farm, despite the fact that a homicidal lunatic was masturbating on my futon, I was, of course, hard as a rock. Because said homicidal lunatic was Taylor Schmidt, and I wanted nothing more than to supplant that stupid little vibrator.
Taylor spread her legs wide. Her pubic hair was waxed and trimmed, just a narrow racing stripe of hair down the center, an arrow telling me where to land. I’d never seen that look before—she was ahead of her time, that girl—but boy did I like it.
“You gonna stand there all night, Todd, or are you gonna fuck me?”
Talk about a rhetorical question! But I did stand there, because despite my blinding lust, there was one thing that bothered me, one thought I couldn’t get out of my head.
“Why did you fuck Trey Parrish this morning?”
Taylor’s face turned bright red, like a fire engine in a children’s book. She closed her legs, sat bolt upright, and threw the pocket rocket across the room. “Who told you that?”
Should I tell her Asher had come to see me? No, not yet. Keep that ace up my sleeve. I spun a lie of my own. “The horse’s mouth.”
“That asshole.” She closed her legs. “Yeah, I slept with him. I felt like I owed him.”
“Owed him? For what?”
“Trey Parrish hooked me up with Quid Pro Quo.”
“I know,” I told her.
For a fleeting moment panic flashed across her eyes—it was like she had broken character—but she quickly regained her composure. “I suppose,” Taylor said, in an affected tone of voice, like she were reading off a cue card, “that he told you that, too?”
The weird tone of her voice threw me, until I realized that I was the one who had fucked up. I wasn’t supposed to know about Trey Parrish’s complicity with Quid Pro Quo. The only reason I was hip to this detail was because I’d read it in her diary. Fortunately, she’d given me an out.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice, too, sounded affected, fake. I hoped she didn’t pick up on it. “The dude’s got a big mouth.”
This seemed to satisfy her. She got out of bed, walked over, took me in her arms. My worn-out boxers were all that separated her crotch from mine, which served to highlight what she told me: “I shouldn’t have d
one it, but I had to. It didn’t mean anything, Todd. I didn’t care about Trey. I don’t care about Trey. All I care about is you. All I want is you.”
The long, lingering kiss that followed—my erection had slithered out the slit in my boxers and was rubbing against her warm skin—sent shockwaves rippling through my body that probably registered at the earthquake center at Columbia.
“Do you forgive me?” she asked, as she pulled down my boxers.
Unable to speak, I nodded.
“Why don’t you lie down and I’ll give you a massage.”
I was unable to resist her suggestion. I was totally under her spell, like Robert Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate. I was going to pass the time by playing a little solitaire—even if it killed me.
“I bought some great massage oil at Pink Pussycat. Hot Hester, it’s called. It’s got a big scarlet ‘A’ on the bottle.”
I fell facedown onto the futon. Just like that, the four beers went to my head, and the room began not to spin, but to rock back and forth, like the futon had been launched out to sea. I closed my eyes, fighting off the dizziness, and prepared for the thrill of her massage-oil-lubricated touch.
Taylor ran a single teasing finger down the length of my spine. “Let me get the oil,” she whispered.
I heard her rummaging through her handbag, but I was too preoccupied by humping the futon mattress to pay attention. Suddenly, I remembered Asher’s warning. If Cold Ethyl was really contained in a mascara tube…maybe she was preparing it right now!
My heart began to pound like Tommy Lee’s “Shout at the Devil” snare. I reached under the pillow for the gun. The handle was slippery in my sweaty palm. I opened my eyes. I took a deep breath and waited.
Waited for what? For a sign.
And I knew exactly what the sign would be.