Straight Cut (25 page)

“From the way you sounded on the phone I didn’t expect you quite so soon,” she said.

“Things cleared up a little faster than I thought they would,” I said.

“Mysterious, aren’t we?”

“If you say so.” I reached for Lauren’s box of Marlboros, took one out and lit it. Lauren leaned forward to pick up the hair brush and went to work with it. Her hair was long and very thick. She lifted cords of it away from her head and with a distant expression on her face began to brush them slowly smooth. I watched for a minute and then, balancing my cigarette on its filter on the table, I walked around behind her chair and took the brush from her hand. The silver backing was dented and worn and I remembered that Lauren’s mother had given the brush to her when she married. Precisely, when she married me. I lifted a tress of her hair, heavy with dampness now, and began to brush it out.

“Ah,” Lauren said. “That feels so nice.”

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” It had always been something I used to do during the good times. Lauren sighed but said nothing more articulate, and I went on brushing her hair, from the roots to the ends, until it was completely soft and dry. I have no idea how long it took because I was half hypnotized. At length I set the brush down on the arm of the chair and sank my fingers into the muscles of her neck. Briefly, Lauren rested against me as I rubbed, then she leaned forward and broke my grip.

“Sit down,” she said. “I need you over there where I can see you.”

Reluctantly enough I lifted my hands from her shoulders and walked back to resume my place on the couch. My cigarette had burned itself out and I picked up the nub and dropped it in an ashtray.

“If there’s a wasp in the room you want to see it?” I said.

“That isn’t it. That isn’t it at all.”

“So how do I look?”

“Tracy. Did you get my letter?”

“I got it,” I said. “I carried it around for a while. It wasn’t till a couple of days ago that I opened it.”

“Why?”

“I was afraid to.”

It was a novelty, and not an entirely unpleasant one, to find myself telling so much of the truth like that.

“Afraid of what?”

“Of some kind of elegant brush-off.”

“Then I hope it was a nice surprise for you.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was.”

“Would it have made a difference? If you’d read the letter earlier. Would you have come straight back?”

“Lauren,” I said. “I might as well tell you, I’m fairly deep in the mascara with Kevin at this point, in case you haven’t figured that out already. I mean, it’s turned out even more unpleasant than it looked when we were in Rome. And —”

“And that was when
you
told
me
to walk away from it all.”

“Kevin was using you as a cat’s paw and you could have gotten yourself killed.”

“And you? You’re immortal nowadays?”

“So far,” I said, and gave her a weak sort of smile.

“It’s not funny,” Lauren said, looking truly unamused. “Not if things are as serious as you say. “

“It’s pretty serious. Very serious, in fact. But you don’t have to be in it at all. It’s me and Kevin, basically.”

“Oh,
basically,
” Lauren said. Her face drew in for a second in white lines around her mouth. “
Basically,
it’s just you and Kevin, like it always has been.”

“Well, it’s a nasty little piece of business after all,” I said. Now I was confused enough to start to be angry too. “I don’t quite understand why you feel such a compelling desire to get involved in it, or get me uninvolved in it, or whatever it is that you want.”

“Because I’m your wife.”

Oh, that.

“Technically speaking,” I said. “If you assume rights you assume obligations too.” We were on familiar debating ground now and that was a line that had usually shut her up in the past.

“Exactly,” Lauren said. “I’m assuming my obligation to help you get out of this bloody mess.”

Startling, that was. But the habit of being abandoned to my own devices whenever the going got tense was too old to be broken so quickly, and I was already shaking my head no.

“It’s too late. It’s too late for that now, I’m afraid.”

“You’re both of you so stubborn. Can’t you make up your minds to get along or else stay away from each other?”

“We’ve tried it, you know. Tried both of those things. And anyway, don’t you and I sort of have the same problem? And maybe you and Kevin too?”

Lauren took a cigarette from the pack on the table and held it unlit between her fingers.

“You’ve been seeing a lot of him lately, haven’t you,” I said, following my hunch.

“Well. There was Florence, first, in April.”

“Florence?”

I see the chicken!

“Yes. I didn’t ... I wasn’t ... I suppose I let you think I’d come from New York when I showed up in Rome. I hadn’t. I’d been in Florence with Kevin and he went to Paris with me because I was doing a show and then I flew to Rome from there.”

“Oh, Christ. You did carry that bag across a few borders, then.”

“I didn’t know what was in it. I was telling the truth about that. And I suppose you won’t tell me, if you know now.”

“You’re right about that.”

“And I have been seeing him some, a lot really, since I came back here. Oh, I know I shouldn’t have, with whatever you’re into with him going on, I know that. But I didn’t get any answer to my letter, and I thought he might drop something about you — oh, don’t worry, I didn’t ask. And I had my own questions besides.”

“Get any answers?”

“Tracy, I do want to tell you the whole truth about this now. If there is any whole truth … I never left you for Kevin, I think you know that, but he was very sweet to me when I first got back to New York, before Italy I mean, and I don’t know, you know how nice he can be —”

“Sure I do.” I did, too.

“And I needed it, then. That was important. That was why I felt like … I owed him the favor with the bag. More than the part in the picture or anything like that. And before I came to Rome I was still very angry at you.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But after Rome I wasn’t angry anymore and when I was seeing Kevin again here, I ... I don’t agree with you about him. But in a way there’s
nothing there.
At least he doesn’t have the things I need. I think I’ve really known that for a long time now. “

Lauren struck a match to her cigarette, finally, and drew on it deeply.

“Then why do you keep going back to him?”

“Because he’s easier to be with than you are.”

“Easy,” I said carefully, “is not what it’s all about.”

“I know that,” Lauren said. “And I’m not going to see him anymore. “

I took a cigarette from the pack myself and lit it.

“You know, there’s a funny thing about Kevin,” I said. “I remember something that happened a long time ago when we were just out of school, kids practically, just beginning to learn the business. We were gofers on some cheapo flick and all of a sudden Kevin got a chance to boom.
Hands on the equipment,
man, that was a big deal to both of us then. Kevin had to hold a Sennhauser shotgun mike out at arm’s length without moving it any. And he couldn’t do it. He kept wobbling so the mike made noise, so then they gave it to me.”

“What’s funny about that?”

“Well, after about thirty seconds I thought my arm was going to fall off. And I knew my arm couldn’t hold the mike out there any longer. That’s when I learned something. It wasn’t ever my arm that was going to do it anyway. My arm didn’t even really need to exist. It was my will that was going to do everything. I don’t think Kevin ever really learned that.”

“My God, you make me so angry,” Lauren said. “I’m not a prize in a pinball arcade. I’m not going to be a conquest. I am a sovereign human being. What you and Kevin do to each other doesn’t matter to me that way.”

“Okay,” I said. “I should know that. I’m sorry.”

“I want to stop fooling around now,” Lauren said. “I want us to have a real marriage and I want it to work. “

“Oh baby,” I said, “you know I’ve always wanted that too,” and then I had crossed to her chair and was kissing her face and mouth, until her grip on my shoulders turned from an embrace to a shove.

“Not now,” she said. “I don’t want to feel. I want to think.”

I went back to the couch and sat heavily down.

“All right,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s going to be very hard for us,” Lauren said. “It’s strange, but it feels like the end.”

“Respice finem,”
I said.

“What?”

“It
is
the end. It’s the end of everything and the beginning of everything else. “

We looked at each other. I said nothing and she said nothing and we stared at each other until I began to feel quite dizzy. I shook my head to clear it, and when I looked again I saw that Lauren’s eyes were shut, and as a matter of fact she’d gone to sleep. Right then and there. It was amazing, really. Her lips were a little parted and her breathing was slow and deep. I could see her eyes moving back and forth below their closed lids, which meant, I suppose, that she was dreaming. I watched her reverently; it’s hard not to fall in love with any quiet sleeper, and I loved Lauren so much already. Then she twitched a little and woke up.

“I want to go home,” she said sleepily.

“You are home,” I said, thinking she was only drowsy.

“Not here,” she said. “Back to the farm.”

“What for?” I said. “I never thought you liked it much. Why there?”

Lauren smiled and closed her eyes again, settling deeper into the chair.

“Because I’m pregnant.”

After I had put her to bed, carefully, as if I were wrapping a Ming vase for storage, I left to take the train back uptown. I suppose it was a Freudian slip that made me overshoot the Sheridan Square stop and ride on to 14th Street, where Grogan’s just happened to be. Trade in the bar was slow. There were two or three people on the stools besides me and a couple more asleep in the booths in the back. Terry nodded to me crabbily as he poured me my first drink. A beer and a shot and a beer and a shot. On the third round, the one he poured me free, I started crying. It wasn’t that I was unhappy exactly, only that I’d had more than I could really absorb. I dropped my face into my folded arms to hide it.

A voice, not wholly familiar, spoke briefly in my head:
I’m bleeding to death and I don’t even know it.

Terry was shaking me by the shoulders. “No sleeping at the bar,” he said.

I raised my head, obediently.

“What’s the matter with you, then?” Terry said with some surprise.

What could I really tell him? My dog died?

“My wife left me,” I said, knowing he’d prefer it kept simple.

“Ah, don’t worry,” Terry snarled, releasing my upper arms. “She’ll come on back.”

Y
OU MAY WELL ASK
at this point, or soon, why, in view of Lauren’s change of heart and my happy prospects of the restoration of my love and the renewal of my marriage and even the foundation of my family, why then didn’t I just lay off the other project altogether. And the answer will be, I’m afraid, that I don’t know. Of course there are the obvious reasons, prominent among them the point that there were a lot of other hungry people involved and there probably would have been precious little peace and contentment down on the farm if I didn’t do something to satisfy them or otherwise calm them down. Then there was the simple momentum of the whole thing, which was already sweeping us all along with it, me very much included. But more even than that; I had a quite conscious sense that I would have to deliberately put an end to everything before everything else could properly begin.

Respice finem,
indeed. Or you might just say that I didn’t want to leave any unfinished business behind me. I myself will say nothing, because any sort of apology I could make would be too little and too late at this point.

But what it all immediately meant was that I had to pull myself together and get out of Grogan’s reasonably early and reasonably sober. I walked the long diagonal of Greenwich Avenue down to Sixth, where I could cross over to the Earle. In my room, I shook out the sheets and remade the bed, turned out the light and lay down. I needed to be as fresh as I could possibly manage the next day, so although at first I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t reach for the bottle or switch on the TV. I kept myself lying still in the dark, eyes closed, breathing deeply, listening to the tick-tock of my blood and feeling the alcohol roll out of my system like a tide.

Then it was four, four the next afternoon, and I had slept enough to get rested. I got up, washed and dressed, then went to the window and peered out. Yonko was on duty today.

Hell. I knew they’d be more careful now. The back door trick would never work on them twice in a row. I thought and I thought and then I had an idea. An absolutely simple idea. I checked the street again, picked up my shoulder bag, which was empty now, and went down to the desk. At my request the clerk called me a cab. When it arrived, I got in and rode away, leaving Yonko gaping on the sidewalk. It’s only in the movies that there’s always a second cab standing by, waiting to engage in hot pursuit at any moment.

I had the driver drop me at a midtown address where I could get an Aqualung. You can always get anything somewhere in New York, even if there’s no obvious local use for whatever it is. I bought the gear outright and paid in cash. No cards, no names, no references. The tank was small and didn’t take up much room in my bag, though it did add a lot of weight. I left the store and walked to where I could catch the F train downtown. At Delancey Street I changed for the J for Williamsburg.

It was rush hour now, and standing room only on the J train. I was packed into a mass of Puerto Ricans and Orthodox Jews for the most part, though there were enough other WASP invaders so that I didn’t attract any special attention. I fought my way to a pocket against the connecting door of my car and when the train came clear of the tunnel and began to climb the bridge I stepped through it. The train turned and I swayed, unbalanced by the extra weight in my bag. The door slammed shut behind me and I caught the handles and braced myself back against it.