Past Due (24 page)

A
LURA
S
TRACZYNSKI’S ARM
clasped firmly in mine, she led me along the city streets, chatting gaily all the while. She was, I had to admit, engaging company. She pointed out passersby she found to be amusing, she window-shopped, asking my advice about that outfit, that painting, that vase, she responded to my occasional quip with a gratifying trill of soft laughter. There was an excitement about her, an electric current that seemed to transfer from her arm to mine. She exuded a sort of joy, as if this walk with me through the city streets, this day of hers, this very life was all she could ever have wanted.

“I have a secret to tell you,” she said, leaning her head close to mine as we walked.

“Go ahead.”

“I think I’m being followed.”

I jerked around to see what I could see and spied nothing.

“Don’t look, you silly. You’ll tip him off. But I’ve noticed him. A greasy little man in a hat.”

“Maybe your husband is worried about your going off to have drinks with strange men.”

“Why would he be worried about that?”

“That’s the way men are.”

“Some men, I suppose.”

We ended up at the bar of a little steak house I had never noticed before. It was one of those places that seemed to have slipped through time unscathed and walking into it was like walking into a different decade. Dark walls, leather booths, thick slabs of beef, ashtrays on every table. The man behind the bar in a red plaid vest had the open, sad face of an old-time baseball player.

“Mrs. S.,” he said in a thick nasally voice when we sat on the red-leather stools. “Terrific as always to see you.”

“Rocco, this is Victor,” she said. “Victor and I are in desperate need of a drink. I’ll have the usual. What will it be for you, Victor?”

“Do you make a sea breeze?” I said.

Rocco looked at me like I had spit on the bar.

I got the message. This was a serious place for serious drinking, a leftover from an era when the cocktail hour was a sacred thing, when a man was defined by his drink and no man wanted to be defined by something as sweet and inconsequential as a sea breeze. Kids in short pants with ball gloves sticking out of their pockets drank soda pop, men drank like men.

“What’s she having?” I said, nodding at my companion.

“A manhattan.”

“What’s that?”

“Whiskey, bitters, sweet vermouth.”

“And a cherry,” said Alura Straczynski. “Mustn’t forget the cherry.”

“No, Mrs. S.,” said Rocco. “I wouldn’t forget your cherry.”

I tried to think of a blue-blooded drinking drink that would satisfy Rocco’s demanding standards. Martini? Too unoriginal. A Brazilian sidecar? Nah. Grasshopper? Rocco would throw me out of the place.

“I’ll have an old-fashioned,” I said.

“Very good,” said Rocco, bowing slightly before sliding off to make our drinks.

“Nice choice,” she said.

“I don’t even know what’s in it.”

“Alcohol,” she said. “And some other stuff. But Rocco makes his old-fashioned the old-fashioned way with only enough water to dissolve the sugar, and one slice of orange. No cherry for you, poor dear. Cigarette?”

“Don’t smoke.”

“Of course you don’t.” She pulled a cigarette from a silver case, tapped it on the metal, lit it. The smoke came out slowly from her mouth, rising like a soft veil. Behind the screen of smoke her features softened and she seemed suddenly younger. “You want to know why I like this place? Because when I light a cigarette here I don’t get stared at like I am a leper. The only drawback is that whenever I enter I get the uncontrollable urge to buy myself a mink stole.”

“I must have passed this place a hundred times without ever going inside.”

“Exactly. I have a studio nearby, a place where I can work without interruption. A room of my own, as Virginia Woolf would have it. I’ve seen your office, you must come up and visit mine sometime.”

“Where is it?”

“Oh, a smart cracker like you will have no trouble finding it if you decide you want to visit.” She stared at me for a moment, her mouth twisting as if appraising a horse. I was almost expecting her to pinch up my lip and check my teeth. “Tell me about your life, Victor Carl. Is it perfect and exciting?”

“Hardly.”

“What is it missing?”

“Perfection and excitement. Isn’t this a little personal?”

“I hope so. We need to get to know each other.”

“Need?”

“Yes. Isn’t that what life should be, Victor? A series of desperate urgencies where everything seems to hang in the balance. Isn’t anything less just a tepid excuse for not doing enough?”

“When I have a desperate urgency, I try to find the men’s room.”

Just then Rocco returned with our drinks. My old-fashioned sat in front of me, squat and bright. I took a sip. Wowza. Stronger than my usual. Rocco winked at me and ambled off to the end of the bar.

“What do you want out of life, Victor?”

“Isn’t this way too personal?”

“Do you want to, instead, talk about the weather?” She roughed up her voice and gave it a cornpone accent.
“Oh, it’s a hot one today. Yes it is.”

“People talk about the weather precisely to avoid talking about their lives.”

“That’s my point. Come now, Victor. Don’t disappoint me. I could tell you were different from the first moment I spied you. What do you want out of life?”

“Nice day today, isn’t it?”

“I’ll tell if you’ll tell.”

I squinted and thought about it and grew curious myself. “Go ahead.”

“I’ve known what I wanted from the dawning of my adolescence. I was a peculiar little girl, running home after school to spend my afternoons alone in my room, dancing by myself, or reading and writing, waiting for something better, something pure to take over my life. Can you see me there, Victor, in my room, pining? And slowly that something I was waiting for came and saved me, a decision that would guide every step of my life.”

“To become a meteorologist?”

“Listen closely, Victor. This is important. I decided I would become an artist, I would become Matisse, a fantastic colorist, but with a great difference. Instead of splattering my art on a rough piece of canvas, I would live it. My life is my art, Victor. And I insist that it shimmer like a dream, that every moment be filled with glorious color. I never wanted to merely see beauty in a painting or read of it in a book, I wanted to drink it, breathe it, become it.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

“Surprisingly well. Rocco, darling, another round, please.”

I looked at my drink, still half remaining. I narrowed my eyes and took a gulp. There was something strange in what she had just told me. This wasn’t offhand, none of this was offhand, the meeting, the drinks, the questions about life.

“And this is all related to Tommy Greeley how?”

“Ah, the blunt simplicity of a simple man.”

The drinks came. I snatched down the rest of my first drink, felt my head wiggle just a bit, started on the second. It didn’t seem quite
as strong, which was the first sign that it was way too strong for me. Alura Straczynski lit herself another cigarette, inhaled.

“My husband was very agitated after your meeting,” she said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No you’re not. It is what you wanted, to upset him. And you succeeded. My husband had a very complicated relationship with Tommy. They were like estranged brothers. There was love, there were secrets, there was deep-seated rivalry. But in the end it was the drugs that separated them. My husband couldn’t abide them.”

“How about you? Could you abide them?”

“Drugs? Oh, Victor, haven’t you listened? Drugs were never a part of my life, or my husband’s after we met. That isn’t shimmering brilliance, that is stupidity. Any idiot can paint his life in Technicolor with drugs, at least for a short time. A few ounces of that, a few tabs of this. But where is the art in that?”

“So Tommy wasn’t your dealer?”

“No. Really now, Victor. How did you ever get that idea?”

“Something in the way your husband looked at you. Like he wanted to protect you from the past.”

“Ah, yes. See, I was right about you. My husband, Victor, is more than a mere spectator to my life. He is a collaborator. When we first met we were like two shy flowers, waiting for the sun to open our blooms. We found our sun in what we created together. We would spend nights writing in our journals, not saying a word and yet so totally connected. He would read what he had written and I would read what I had written and it would be the same. Not the words, Victor, but the emotion, the intensity, the yearning. We were everything, one to the other. We still are, but it is different now. We are no longer so connected. He finds his art in the law, his little theories that so excite the men in suits, and that allows me the freedom to search for my own.”

“Was Tommy part of that search?”

“Tommy Greeley was a worm. Pure and simple. Now worms have their uses, don’t they? They aerate the soil. They help us catch fish.” She thought for a moment, she bit the corner of her lip. “But still they are worms.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh, Victor. What is there to understand? I’ve heard you described as a worm too. And yet I find there’s something about you. A spark I’d like to explore.”

I tapped my stomach with the side of my fist. “Just a touch of gas.”

Her light line of laughter. “Maybe that is it.”

“So who is it that described me as a worm? Your husband?”

“That would be tattling. But you can tell me something. Who is it who is so interested in our worm Tommy Greeley?”

“Me.”

“Yes, you, for whatever reasons. Probably because you are paid. That is what I’ve heard about you, Victor. Money, money, money. But if that were true there would be Rockefeller on your wall and not Grant. But someone else cares too, yes?” Her eyes brightened as if she was eager to gain a salacious piece of gossip. “Who is so interested in our friend Tommy? Who?”

I took a sip of my drink.

“You refuse to tell me?” she said.

“I am nothing if not circumspect.”

“Of course you are, you’re Jewish.”

“That’s actually almost funny.”

“Tell me about the girl. Kimberly, was it?”

“That’s right. Kimberly Blue.”

“Such a pretty girl. She works for you?”

“No.”

“She sleeps with you?”

“Stop.”

“Oh, I can see the answer in your eyes. Pity for you. So, then, she works for or sleeps with the man who is interested in Tommy, yes? Victor?”

“Did your husband send you to ask me all these questions?”

“My husband doesn’t send me.”

“Too bad.”

“Don’t be clever, Victor. Clever is like a sports car with a leaking gasket. It only takes you so far and then, well. But you”—she cupped her hand and placed it on my cheek and my jaw tingled—“you could go so far, if only you wanted. I’d like you to do me a favor, Victor. Do you think you could?”

“It depends on what it is.”

“It always does. This is small. I am looking for some notebooks. Four to be exact. They have been missing for a long time and it is as if, without them, I am missing a limb. I am in the midst of a great endeavor, the endeavor of my life, really, and to complete my task I need those notebooks.”

“Why would I be in a position to find them?”

“I sense things, it is my gift, and I sense you will. In your travels. And I’d like you to return them to me. Will you? Please?”

“Sure, if I find them.”

“And only to me.”

“Ahh, you mean not leave them for you at your husband’s office.”

“Who could ever imagine you were such a quick study? Good, that is settled. Now, Victor, it is your turn.”

“My turn?”

“We had a deal. I’d tell if you tell. So tell me, Victor, what is it that you really want from life?”

I thought about it for a moment. It was a hard question, harder still when you weren’t sure why it was being asked. I drained the rest of my drink and snapped my head at the burn of it and tried to come up with an answer and failed and realized that was what I wanted after all.

“Answers,” I said after a long hesitation.

She leaned toward me. “To what questions?”

“It varies from day to day. Some days I want to know the purpose of existence. Some days I want to know why it seems everyone else is happier than am I. Some days I wonder why God doesn’t seem to go very far out of his way to help those who need it. And some days, most days, I simply want to know why my laundry place keeps using starch on my boxer shorts.

“Victor.”

“Every week I say, ‘No starch, no starch,’ and the lady, she nods yes, yes like she understands, but she doesn’t understand. Why doesn’t she understand? It’s a mystery all right.”

“So what’s today’s great philosophical question, Victor? What is the answer you are looking for today?”

“Today’s question? Today I want to know what the hell happened to Tommy Greeley and why.”

She turned her bright green eyes away from me and bowed her head. There was a puddle of condensation on the bar. She moved her finger across it, her bright red nail leaving a strange trail, up, down, swooping around like a pen on a page. Her expression took on the same serious cast it had taken when she was writing at my desk. I moved my gaze away from her face toward those strange squiggles she was leaving in the damp. I tried to follow the movements of her finger, tried to decipher the strange glyphs she was forming, as if they had great meaning, as if maybe all the answers I had said I was searching for could be found right there.

And as we both stared down at the bar the edges of our foreheads touched.

“I get the feeling, Victor,” said Alura Straczynski, her voice soft, her breath warm, “that you are going to be fatal.”

I
WAS DRUNK
and I was horny and I thought it more than passing strange, considering what a bad combination those two are, how often they pop up together. Pop up, get it? I did, and I thought it hilarious. I repeated it out loud as I staggered toward my apartment, “Pop up. Pop up,” accompanied by my demented laughter. They say your judgment is the first to go but I’d say it is your sense of humor.

I was laughing at my little pun but all the while, through my drunken fog, I was trying to figure out what I had just been through with Alura Straczynski. It appeared for some reason she wanted to learn of Eddie Dean’s identity. And it appeared she wanted to tell me, she was desperate to tell me, of her peculiar artistic goal of turning her life into a shimmering dream. And it appeared she thought I had something of hers, her notebooks. And finally it appeared, yes it did, that most of all what she wanted was to slip into my sheets.

I am not one who thinks that deep down everyone wants to screw my ears off. You know the type who do, those square-jawed boys who see in every glance, every smile, every nonhostile gesture an invitation. I am not that guy, I’m neither handsome enough nor smooth enough to be that guy, and my chest isn’t hairy enough to be a proper setting for the obligatory gold medallion. Yet, even as she told me of those marvelous early moments with her husband, I had
the strange sense that Alura Straczynski was angling to create her own marvelous moments with me. It was in the way she held her head, the way she smiled at me, the way she put her hand on my cheek. And once, when she was whispering in my ear, some funny secret about a man at the other end of the bar, something seemed to catch on my lobe. Was it her teeth? Wowza. Mrs. Justice Jackson Straczynski. When I realized what was going on I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Two, three more drinks, tops, just to be polite, and then I was out of there, yes I was. Out of there.

So I was on my way home, drunk, because Rocco knew how to mix a drink, and horny, because, no matter how much I didn’t didn’t didn’t want to sleep with Alura Straczynski, there still is some strange connection between the ear and the prick so that when the first is turtle-snapped the second stands at attention. I wondered just then if it worked the other way around.
Did a bee sting your ear, or are you just glad to see me?
I was in a primed state of mind, yes I was, and the images that were floating in my mind just then had nothing to do with Alura Straczynski and everything to do with the photographs pinned to my wall, the legs, arms, breasts, thighs, the lithe lines of desire. Whose desire? Tommy Greeley’s desire? My desire? Was there a difference right then worth noting? Oh yes, I was in quite a riled state, when I turned onto my street and approached my building and saw her on the front stoop, sitting there, waiting, for me.

She didn’t rise when she saw me, she stayed there sitting on the steps as I approached, but she smiled, yes she did, and it whooshed through me and set me to tingling like a blast of radiation pure.

“You look like a mess,” said Chelsea when I sat beside her.

“I’ve been working.”

“At what?”

“Good question. Can I ask you something?”

“I suppose,” she said, warily.

“Does my ear look swollen?”

She leaned close and examined first one ear and then the other. It was as if I could feel her gaze on my skin, warm, probing.

“Not really. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“I wanted to apologize for storming out like I did the other night.”

“I wanted to apologize too.”

“No, it was me. You were right. Even after all these years, I’m only starting to understand what exactly we were doing.”

“And what was that?”

“Screwing up.”

She was still leaning close and I leaned closer and then I kissed her softly on her lips. It was something I had wanted to do from the first time I saw her, and was angling to do during our date at the Continental, and now, filled with the false courage of half a dozen old-fashioneds, and spurred by the desire somehow coaxed out of me by Alura Straczynski but not aimed at Alura Straczynski, a more generalized desire that latched onto anything nearby—small dogs shuddered citywide—I up and did it. I leaned close and gently swept away the long black hair that fell in front of her cheek and I kissed her. I kissed her. And…And…And nothing. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t respond either, she just let me, just let me kiss her. And when I stopped for a moment and pulled back to gauge the effect of my lips on her, she looked at me with a strangely blank expression and continued speaking as if nothing, absolutely nothing, had occurred.

“Sometimes I try to assign blame for what happened to us, to me,” she said. “I blame the strange little agent from the FBI who started knocking it down, the people working with us who made the mistakes that got us noticed in the first place, the creepy money guy who testified against us. I want to blame everyone and everything when what I should be blaming is myself, for getting involved with it all in the first place.”

I leaned in and kissed her again and it was exactly the same, like she was letting me, sure, but what she was really doing was waiting until I stopped so she could go on talking. And even so, I must say, she was delicious. There was something fruity and clean on her lips. I licked them softly, just rubbed the tip of my tongue over the tender ridges. Yes. Fruity, like she had just eaten a bowl of ripe cherries. I pulled back again and tilted my head at her.

“So what I wanted to say was that I am sorry about the way I acted. I’m sorry I left you in a huff like that.”

“What is a huff, do you know?” I said.

“No.”

“Is it a type of cat?”

“Maybe,” she said, with a quick laugh.

“I just kissed you.”

“I know. But I was apologizing and I wanted you to know that I am trying to be sorry for what I did.”

“For storming out of the bar.”

“Not just that. I want you to know that I am also trying to be sorry for what I was doing back then, for the drugs and the money and the stupidity and the belief that we were blessed when we were really only criminals. For the whole time I was involved with Tommy Greeley.”

“You paid your price.”

“But not in the heart. You see, not that. Not yet. But I’m working on it. Cooper’s been helping me.”

“Cooper Prod?”

“Yes. But it’s not easy. Like he always says, the more we learn about the past, the less we will ever understand.”

“He seems pretty evolved for a jailbird, Cooper does.”

“He is. And he’s very interested in you. He wants you to know that, and that he will help however he can.”

“Is that why you came over, to deliver his message?”

“One reason, yes.”

“How sweet.”

“I could have called.”

“Okay.”

“There’s something else I wanted to tell you. Something I thought I ought to make clear. I might have given you the wrong impression about something.”

I kissed her again. This time I kissed a little harder and this time I could feel something give in her, and her head leaned back and her mouth parted slightly and her hand lifted gently to rest on my throat. And then with that hand she pushed me away.

“I need to tell you this.”

“All right,” I said, not really listening, just wanting to kiss her again.

“It’s about Tommy and me and Lonnie.”

“All right,” I said, but even as I said it the fruity taste of her lips worked upon my mind like a drug and I tried again to kiss her. But this time, with that hand curled at my throat, she kept me away.

“No,” she said. “Listen. I told you the thing with Lonnie and me—”

“The marriage you mean.”

“Yes, the marriage. My marriage.” She took her hand from my throat, rubbed her two hands together, as if cleansing them under a spigot. “I told you it was after my relationship with Tommy. But it wasn’t, not really. Cooper said I should tell you everything and so I need to tell you this. Tommy and I were together sometimes even after I was married to Lonnie. It was just something we did, but we did it.”

“I knew that.”

“How?”

“I just did.”

“But—”

I put my finger on her lips to quiet her and then I thought of something. I thought of something and I took my finger away and I kissed her, kissed her quick and rubbed my tongue again gently on her lips and then I pulled back and gazed into her sweet brown eyes.

“Did Lonnie know?”

“About Tommy and me?”

“Yes,” I said. “About it continuing after you married him.”

She turned away from me. “He found out.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t trying hard to hide it. I think he suspected something and then followed me.”

“How did Lonnie take it?”

“How do you think he took it?”

“Not well. That’s how I would take it if my wife betrayed me with my boss. Not well at all.”

“Maybe I should go.”

“No, don’t. Please.”

“This whole thing, just talking about it has got me…”

“It’s okay, Chelsea. It’s over. All of it. Everything that happened was a long time ago. It’s over.”

She turned to me, her eyes glistening. “But it’s not, is it?”

She wanted some assurance, but all the assurances I had were false. She was right. It wasn’t over. Not all of it, not any of it. I had nothing I could say to her so instead I leaned forward and gently kissed a tear welling in one of her eyes and then kissed her cheek and her jaw and then again her sweet lips. And this time she kissed me back, as if she was suddenly relieved of a burdensome secret and was able, now, to respond, finally, to my touch. She placed her hand gently on the back of my neck and pulled me closer and kissed me. And it was lovely and soft and somehow as sad as her eyes and as we kissed I felt the alcohol in my blood start to boil.

And then I saw something approach us from the left, just the shape of something, of a man, of a man in black leather. I guiltily jerked my head away from her, certain I had been caught. Caught? Caught at what? Adultery? No. Who was married? Caught by whom? By whom else? By Lonnie Chambers. And for some reason it scared the hell out of me.

But it wasn’t Lonnie, it was some guy with glasses, his black leather jacket butter soft and draped loosely over his narrow shoulders, leading a little white dog on a leash. The spurt of anxiety disappeared. The man smiled at us wanly, the white dog came close, sniffed my legs, my crotch, gave me a worried glance, and then hurried away.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said, and we did, and what followed was the usual thing, you know how it goes, tender kisses, soft caresses, frantic unbuttoning, unbelting, long, languorous licks of the neck, the collarbone, the soft mounds rising above the black frill of lingerie, the reaching hand, the fumbled clasp, the bra falling away leaving breasts like the motherland itself, glorious and free—all followed by the inevitable howling bout of outright humiliation.