Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (31 page)

The talking heads on television all loved the word “tragic.”

An abandoned baby in a dumpster was tragic. A kid caught in a crossfire between crack dealers was tragic. A rising young businesswoman falling in front of a subway train—oh yes. That was tragic, too.

Nonsense.

To be tragic you had to have
stature
. Your suffering—and you—had to be somehow bigger than life. The Electras, the Medeas, the Lears, and the Hamlets. You had to fall from great heights, endure great pain. You had to have
all the world to lose—and then you had to lose it.

Take Howard, now. Nothing tragic there.

Though on the surface there were arguments to be made.

A successful corporate lawyer. Yes.
Very
successful. A modicum of stature was implicit in any success.

Then his mother had died two months ago. Sad.

And then the inexplicable, seemingly random loss of two of his lovers.
Each of his lovers following Dora, whom he’d dumped after five long years of practically tying his damn shoelaces for him
. Pitiable.

And now a third to follow.

All this. But still—nothing tragic.

Because Howard was a worm, essentially. Small. Small enough to tell her that the sex was her fault—though
he
was the one who couldn’t get an erection—and small enough to blame her when the bank had laid her off—
along with thirty other people, thank you very much
—to say she wasn’t aggressive enough. Wasn’t sharp enough.

Small enough to try to make her feel that much
smaller
just because his ego needed boosting. And then to dump her entirely.

No. No tragic figure there.

Just a weak little man with a lot of bad luck when it came to romantic involvements.

And his luck would not improve. Not ever. Not if Dora could help it.

Not one of them would live. Not one.

Until finally, one day, sometime in the future, he saw himself for the evil jinx virus he was and stopped trying altogether.

She knew what sex meant to him. For years, until he developed his . . . problem, it meant plenty.

It would absolutely kill him.

Redemption
, she thought. It meant to recover something pawned or mortgaged. What she’d mortgaged to Howard.

To set something free.

Her sense of self. Her own
true
self.

She thought,
I need some damn redemption
.

At eight o’clock he left the building.

She was dawdling over a second cup of coffee, and she almost missed him—he walked right by her seated in the window. Dora thought he looked sort of sad somehow, thoughtful.

Perhaps upstairs things were not going all that smoothly.

It didn’t matter.

She finished the coffee slowly and paid the bill in cash.
No records
. A cabbie was picking up a fare—a dapper old man in an expensive suit, wearing a bow tie and carrying a cane—directly across the street from number thirty-nine. She thought of the Walker Evans woman in front of the market. It was still a man’s world. Even an old man’s. She waited until they pulled away and then crossed the street, walked up the stairs, opened the door, and scanned the mailboxes in the hall. Three F was B. Querida. The name surprised her. She’d been sure the woman was Irish.

She buzzed her.

“Yes?”

“Hello. Yes. It’s Janet.”

“Janet?”

“Yes. Is Howard there?”

There was a pause.

“Hold on. I’ll buzz you up.”

The buzzer sounded. She opened the door and went to the elevator and pushed 3.

There were only two apartments on the floor, which said something about their size. And the location was a block from Central Park West. B. Querida was doing rather well for herself, she thought. Probably as well as Howard.

The woman stood in the open doorway, still wearing the black silk jumpsuit—or was that
wearing it again
?—looking poised and smiling and faintly curious.

“Sorry. You just missed him,” she said.

Dora stopped just outside the doorway.

“Damn!” she said. She looked momentarily confused and flustered. “I work with him. I’ve got some papers for him to sign. Oh, God.”

“He gave you this address?”

“He said he’d be here till about eight, eight-thirty. And I just now got away. Did he say where . . . ?”

“No. Afraid he didn’t.”

“Listen. Would you mind . . . ? Do you think I could use your phone and try to call someone on this?”

“Sure. Of course. Come on in.”

The woman stood aside.

The room in front of Dora was cluttered, almost Victorian, though spotlessly clean. And not nearly as large as she would have guessed. Overstuffed chairs in front of what looked like a working fireplace. Heavy maroon curtains. Bric-a-brac and vases filled with long-stem roses.

The room was dark. Deep reds. Mahogany furniture.

Even the paintings were dark. Landscapes in storm. Undecipherable forms. One of them, she thought, might be an Albert Ryder.

It was not what she’d expected.

“The phone’s in the bedroom. This way.”

The woman was walking in front of her now, through a paneled corridor, black-and-white prints and old sepia photos on the walls, their subjects mostly a blur to her. A closed oak door lay directly ahead of them. The corridor was narrow.

Dora opened the briefcase. Her fingers found the hardwood handle.

It was awkward here, the space too tight.

Better to wait until the bedroom, she thought. Even fake the phone call if she had to.

There would be plenty of opportunity. B. Querida had turned her back on her. She wasn’t afraid. If she’d do it once, she’d do it twice.

The woman’s fingers closed over the cut crystal doorknob,
turned it, and gently pushed open the door. And now she was standing in profile, half her face visible to Dora and smiling in the dim hall light, the other half lost in the bedroom’s dark.

“I’ll get the light,” she said. She stepped inside.

Dora stepped in silently behind her, into darkness. And at once felt oddly out of place here, as though she were not in the city at all anymore but in some room in Vermont or New Hampshire, out in the country somewhere on some night when there was no moon and no stars, when the darkness seemed to swallow every shred of light. New York was never
black
. Never. It glowed.

Not now. Her eyes could make out nothing of the woman inside. She could only hear her cross the room with the practiced ease of someone long blind in a wholly familiar darkness.

And stop. And wait.

And she almost turned away then because there was something wrong with that, somehow it wasn’t right, there was a trick here somewhere, and she didn’t much care to know where or how but this blackness was
all wrong
and something was telling her to get the hell out of there when she heard a
click
and suddenly the dark exploded, flooded her with light.

So that
she
was the blind one for the moment, unaware of the woman moving back across the room until she was already leaning toward her through the beam like some sudden evil angel bathed in light, aware only of heat and scalding brightness until the woman grabbed her arm and her briefcase and shoved her forward into the room, tore the briefcase from her hands and sent her sprawling across the floor.

The door slammed shut.

Dora thought of her father.

The door slammed shut behind him. The lock turned. Whiskey on his clothes and on his breath as he leaned over
.

Whose little girl are you?

The woman walked directly toward her out of the klieg light trained on the door.

“Some of my clients want to feel like movie stars,” she said. “Or maybe political prisoners.” She laughed. “Sometimes a little of both.”

The room was strung with track lighting. Out of the beam of the klieg, Dora could see normally. She sat up and looked around, and the woman saw her looking.

She extracted the knife from the briefcase.

As though she knew it was there all along
.

“I lied about the bedroom,” she said. “That’s over on the other side of the apartment. And nobody goes there but me. Sorry.”

Dora looked up and felt the hysterical urge to laugh and then the urge to run.

The room was long and narrow, and except for a wooden chair and small oak linen cabinet, empty of conventional furniture. There were no windows. She could see where there had been one, the sill and frame were there but the window itself had been bricked over and painted black. The rest of the room was like the padded cell of an asylum—except that the padding, too, was black. Thick steel rods webbed the ceiling. Chains, harnesses, and manacles dangled from them irregularly, some connected by ropes to pulleys on the wall. There was a wall of instruments made of steel and wood—instruments to clamp and probe, to cut and to pierce and tear.

Another wall displaying masks, belts, whips, some of them tipped with metal balls.

In the center of the room stood two huge eight foot black beams intersecting to form the letter X.

The wall in front of it was a mirror.

She saw what looked like an outdoor grille made of old rusted iron.

A wooden barrel lying on its side, studded with nails.

She saw a scarred butcher-block table arrayed with weights and clamps and knives.

To this the woman added Dora’s carving knife, setting it down gently, almost lovingly.

“He comes here, you know? He feels guilty.”

“Guilty?”

“Of course he does. Look at what he did to you.”

“Me? How do you know . . . ?”

“Oh, I know you all right. I knew you right away. See, Howard always pays cash. You’d think a guy like him, with the kind of job he’s got, you’d think he’d go with a credit card just to get the float. Not Howard. Always cash. Did you know he still carries a picture of you in his wallet?”

“I . . . he does?”

“I told you. He feels guilty. I bet you didn’t think he had it in him, did you?”

The woman was serious.
Her picture was in his wallet
. Amazing.

“Of course it’s not just you. There’s the broker and the secretary. He feels guilty about them, too. Though I never could figure out why. Hell, I think he even feels guilty about his
mother
dying. Howard’s got a lot of guilt. A lot to answer for. At least
he
thinks so.” She laughed again. “Don’t look so shocked. In this business you hear a lot of stories. People confess. I make them confess.”

She stepped closer.

“Stand up, Dora.”

She did as she was told.

“Take off your jacket. Let me look at you.”

She hesitated.

“I’m a whole lot stronger than you. Without your little toy there. You know that, don’t you?”

Dora looked up into her wide green eyes and nodded. She slipped the jacket off her shoulders. And suddenly felt naked there.

The woman reached out and lightly touched her hair. Her touch was electric.

“So what about you?” she said. “What have
you
got to answer for?”

You’ve got to get out of here
, she thought.
Now
.

The woman turned away, walked to the klieg light and switched it off.

“Let’s see if I’ve got this correct,” she said. “Once you had him, you didn’t want to fuck him anymore, am I right?” She shrugged. “It happens. For some people, the capture’s everything. Once you’ve proven you can
do
it, once he’s yours, it’s not so much, is it? Kind of turns to ashes. Especially if you don’t really like yourself much. And you don’t, do you?”

Dora felt her eyes on her again, probing.

“Of course it took
him
awhile to catch on to that—to catch
up
with you, to become the incredible shrinking dick you really preferred him to be in the first place. And then once he did, he sort of retaliated, he started to belittle you, tried to make you feel like somebody small and stupid and powerless. Which part of you
really thinks you are
. He knew exactly which buttons to push, didn’t he.”

She walked to the table and picked up Dora’s knife again, fingering the edge she’d honed this morning.

“I do, too,” she said.

And Dora believed her.

“Did it occur to you that he was only whittling you down to size in a way? So he could finally leave you, get free of you without feeling like something was wrong with
him
, prove to himself that it was really you all along? And it
was
you, wasn’t it. Part of you really
is
small. You didn’t want to fuck him. You’d already got what you wanted. Simple as that.

The woman walked back to where Dora stood in front of the huge black X and pointed the knife at her, at the top button of her blouse. Dora stood frozen. The woman turned her wrist and the button was gone.