Long Island Noir (19 page)

Mary could see it, could see where he was going.

“After it got good and dead enough,” he continued, “they would just tow it back to shore. Imagine how that made the whale feel. These people come along and just peck at you and peck at you, till you have no choice but to give up and die.”

“I see your point, Eddie.”

“Listen, Mary, Ralph was a son of a bitch for the way he laid his hands on you. Life made him pay, it always does.”

Eddie had known about Ralph’s hands-on approach to relationships from the start, but had done nothing. She exhaled. “The Long Island Expressway made him pay.”

He laughed a cold laugh. “We’re still family. But just remember, whatever this is, I’m helping you out just this time. Just this once. Come by tomorrow.”

* * *

“Hello, Professor Cipriano!”

On campus, one of Mary’s sweeter but more mediocre students recognized her walking out of the parking lot in her hat and bright black slicker. She said, “Kerri, hello.”

Traffic had crawled on the way from Riverhead. Not paying attention to her driving, Mary had taken 495 instead of 25A and had been adrift in a sea of traffic slowed down by the rain.

“I can’t believe you’re totally late for class!”

“Errands,” Mary said. “Happens to the best of us. How is your paper coming along?”

They walked together under umbrellas to the Humanities building and to Mary’s Modern American Poetry class.

The lesson was on parsing Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” and Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” but Mary could barely focus. The rain drummed hypnotically on the windows.

With ten minutes left, Mary had run out of things to say and questions to ask. She stared at her students for a hazy moment, not really seeing them at all. There was a long silence as the rain stabbed again and again at the windows.

Then the back door kicked in, and Lawrence slinked in, late as always, looking bored, looking as if nothing were amiss in his world. He took his regular seat way in the back, in the middle, so he had a direct line of sight to her.

She felt hot. She felt annoyed. She felt invigorated.

“Well,” she said, “I want to remind you about the research paper due next week. Strict MLA standards are to be followed—without fail.”

When class was over, the students scattered. But Lawrence, ever Lawrence, slinked his taut body through the sea of chairs, straight to her podium. His slicked-back, wavy hair and light brown skin were wet from the rain.

“Hi, professor,” he said. His pretty, angular mouth broke into a smile. He had huge brown doe eyes, a chin framed by beard hair slightly reminiscent, Mary thought, of his pubic hair.

“You look hot today,” he said, brushing her hand. He was touching her openly. Was there another class due in? Mary worried. Would anyone walk through the door?

“Lawrence, please. Not here.”

“I like when you say,
Please
. Can we do it tomorrow night?”

“Remember—I have to run that errand we talked about.”

“Oh yeah, cool. Do that first. I really gotta have that money.” He came even closer, if that were possible. You could barely see any Native American anymore, unless you got very close. “We don’t want anybody knowing about us, right?”

“No, no, we don’t. I—I don’t know if I’ll be able to get the money right away.”

He made a hard fist with his hand, but rubbed his knuckles gently against her cheek.
People will see!

“C’mon, Professor Mary, he’ll give it to you.”

His infantile pet name for her. It made her defenseless.

“Yes, darling, I know,” she said softly. Damn this boy.

“Will you have time to meet me afterward? In your office?” He was radiant, glittering with barely postadolescent energy.

“We’ll see.”

“I think you should.”

The words themselves were a lover’s importuning, Mary thought, but they could just as easily be heard as a threat.

“Yes, of course, I will.”

Mary had known Lawrence for years, since he was a child. But she’d thought nothing of him then, just a handsome little boy. She was not one of
those
women, she was not. After her first husband’s death, she only heard from Eddie once a year, at the holidays. She hadn’t heard from Lawrence at all until he wrote to tell her he’d gotten accepted to Stony Brook.

When he took her American Lit class his freshman year, she found it fun to tease him and be teased by him. She liked his confidence, she liked his strength. She liked the exotic look of him. Then he would linger after class, walk her to her office, to her car. One day, her car wasn’t starting. He offered her a ride. She knew by the look on his face that it would be wrong to accept.

But she did.

And so she became the stuff of tabloid headlines.

He listened to her long, boring stories, he brought her bag after bag of unhealthy snacks, and, at the same time, when they were alone, he dominated her in the most masculine way any man had ever done.

“
Victory, union, faith, identity, time / The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery
,” she said aloud to no one.

A knock. She had been sitting at her desk, staring out the window.

Professor Lee stood in her doorway, in his same old friendly corduroys. “Mary, how go the wars?”

“It’s a rout,” she said. “Raise the white flag.”

“You look a little peaked—really.”

Everett was a lovely man, really, Mary thought, given to toking a bit during the day, but still kind, caring.

“Not sleeping enough, I guess, Everett. Finals, you know how it is.”

He looked around, then stepped into the room, lowered his voice. “Well—well, did you hear about the chair position?”

She looked up. “No.”

“Looks like Gunderson’s a lock. Sorry, Mary. You know the department—they need to look diverse.”

She was quiet for a while. She stared at his white beard to keep focused. “Well, I don’t think if I were also black and handicapped it would’ve helped. Perhaps if I were a midget lesbian!”

They laughed at that.

“Gunderson is excellent,” she said. “I’m a lowly Whitman scholar, and she’s all post-post-postmodern. And she publishes like a machine. More power to her.”

“Sorry, Mary.”

“It’s okay, Everett, really.”

After he left, she got up and closed the door.

She drove home, to her colonial on Lilac Drive. Eric, the man Eddie called her “new husband,” would be home soon. She went out to the back, onto the patio. The rain had stopped, but it was still damned cold. She sat in her favorite Adirondack chair, the one on the left, in total darkness. The house was close enough to the shore that, when things were quiet, you could hear the song of Long Island Sound.

She lit another cigarette—damn Lawrence for getting her back into this habit. Eric didn’t like when she smoked. But he wouldn’t notice. Men stopped noticing things after the first few months of wooing.

She inhaled and imagined the lit tip was a beacon in the dark, a lighthouse for lost ships, lost sailors.

She had to admit Lawrence’s plan seemed to be working. Blackmailed by the son, she was forced to blackmail the father. A perfect circle of extortion. Of fearful symmetry. “He gets mad money from the cigarettes,” Lawrence had said. “We just got to bleed it from him.”

She went upstairs to change. She took off all her clothes and looked at her body. Not bad for mid-forties. No wattles. Both of the girls still perky. Not too much gray. A MILF, as Lawrence crudely said. How true. She’d start showing soon. That’s why things had to happen now. Poor Eric. He had always wanted children and couldn’t. And now this. This would kill him.

It would destroy what was left of her career too.

Before she became Mary Cipriano, professor of English literature, she was simply Mary Cipriano, good Catholic girl from Massapequa. She ate almost every night at the All American Hamburger, spent countless hours getting groped and groping back at Croon’s Lake, lost her virginity willingly in the Jones Beach parking lot during a Stray Cats concert. Mostly willingly. Bad boys, bad men. Men like Ralph. Men like Lawrence.

When she came downstairs, Eric was on the couch, neatly shelling and eating pistachio nuts.

“Chinese tonight?” he said, offering her a shelled nut. He made tea for her every morning. He had never been a bad boy or a bad man.

“Yes, that would be divine.”

“Movies tomorrow?”

“Yes—oh—actually, I have a reception.”

“Need a second wheel?”

“No, Eric, thanks. You’d be bored to distraction.”

In the morning, she drove to the diner again. This time Eddie was eating a cheeseburger. He brought her out to his brandnew SUV and handed her a paper bag.

Ten thousand dollars in a paper bag,
she thought.
How cinematic.

“Eddie, I can pay you back,” she said. “Not soon. But—I have a promotion coming up. I’ll be chair.”

“Sure, sure,” he said.

Her plan was moving forward, and she felt damned awful about it. On the drive to campus, her phone chimed. A text from Lawrence. She stopped.

No picture this time.

U get it
, he’d written.

Yes
, she typed back.

KEWL!!! C U 2 nite
.

She tossed the phone on the seat. As she drove, she began to cry.

That night, she drove back to the campus. She opened the trunk and tore open a box of cigarettes. She tossed a few cartons out, then unwrapped the gun. It was heavier than it looked and felt evil. She put it on top of the cartons. Then she sealed the box again.

Walking from the lot, she found she was scared. The campus, so green and alive that morning, was different at night. The many trees caught your eye during the day, but at night the institutional gray buildings ruled. The students had scurried to their dorms, the library, the student union. Very few of them hung around the Humanities building on a Friday night.

Lawrence liked being
intimate
in her office. She didn’t know why. Maybe it was a rebellion against authority. Maybe it was because he knew it made her nervous. Hell, maybe it was the Georgia O’Keefe print. He liked to look at that.

She sat down and waited, facing the door.

She realized she was tired of being so lost, tired of feeling so dominated, so defenseless.

She was a professor, a woman of culture and literature. She would give the young stud his money, and he’d be gone, she knew. He liked the sex, sure, but he wanted the money more. To spend it on drugs or alcohol, or the other women he no doubt slept with; and on hair products—no doubt about that at all. Money his father was tired of giving him, money she could no longer give him, money she had gone and extorted for him.

She didn’t want to think about why she got the gun.

The door flew open. It was a girl. Mary recognized her from around campus. Some scrawny black-haired thing. Stupid upturned nose.

“Hi, I’m a friend of Lawrence. He said you had something to give him and I’m supposed to pick it up.”

“Where is Lawrence?”

“He said just to give me the money. That he would talk to you later.”

Mary felt her blood rise. She touched the edge of the box opening.

“I will give you nothing, young lady. Where is Lawrence? Is he in the hall? Is he outside?”

“Just give me the money and I’ll go, okay?”

There was a sharp, rhythmic jingling sound. The girl immediately reached into her pocket and took out her phone. “What?” she said. “I’m right here. She won’t give it to me. What do I do?”

“Is that Lawrence? Let me speak to him—”

“She is totally crazy, Lawrence.”

Then there was a knock. Right behind the girl was Eddie, Lawrence’s father.

He said, “You think I’m going to fork over ten grand like nothing, without knowing what’s going on? You think I’m stupid or something?”

“Not at all.”

“So this little girl is blackmailing you?”

“Oh my god!” the girl said, clicking off her phone. “I am so out of here.”

“Wait a second,” Eddie said, pulling the girl by the arm. “Where is Larry?” He took out his gun. “I’m not screwing around, little girl. I’m serious.”

He knows, Mary thought, he knows.

He turned to her and said, “Wasn’t hard to figure out. The menthols. The fact that Larry suddenly stopped bugging me for money. The look on your face when I said his name. Don’t ever play poker, Mary.”

The girl kicked and screamed, and then suddenly Lawrence appeared. Breathing heavy, lips parted. He yelled at his father, the father yelled back. The girl ran. The men struggled for the gun.

Mary reached into the box, touched the weapon she had brought. A small revolver. Her hands were shaking.

Lawrence was hitting his father again and again in the face. Eddie was bloody, going limp. Now Lawrence had the Glock. She pointed. Eddie yelled, “Mary, don’t!”

The son getting the advantage over the father. A shot. Eddie flew backward. Then Lawrence turned to face her, his gun pointed her way.
Phallic symbol,
she couldn’t help thinking. More shots. Almost simultaneous. She did not remember pulling the trigger. But she must have.

She saw Lawrence’s pretty face disappear. Maybe that was what she had planned all along. She couldn’t say …
The bestlaid schemes of mice and women …

Then she looked down to see a bullet hole bursting from the box on her desk, cellophane and tobacco spilling out. She looked down and saw where the bullet had gotten her.
Cosmic irony?

* * *

The drive home was quick, it wasn’t very far after all. She actually thanked God for no late-night traffic on 25A.

She parked at an angle in the driveway, almost hitting Eric’s sedan. She stumbled out of the car, the blood flowing slowly out of her belly. It was all over the car. Eric would kill her for that; he liked things clean. She did not stop in the living room. She did not stop in the dining room.

“Mary, are you okay? Where are you going, Mary?”

She did not stop until she went through the kitchen and out the back door and to the patio. She sat in her Adirondack chair, the one on the left.

Eddie wanted to talk Shinnecock. She knew Shinnecock. She knew they have a horrible penchant for dying at sea. In 1873, a freighter called the
Circassian
foundered off the coast, not far from the reservation. The crew was rescued. Then Shinnecock men, known for their skills at seafaring, whaling, were hired to salvage the cargo. Bricks, lime, nonsense. While they were on board, another storm hit. The Shinnecock were ordered to stay, perhaps at gunpoint. None survived. All for nonsense.