The Architecture of Fear (23 page)

The cab sploshed indifferently onto Tenth Avenue, heading uptown. The beer sploshed in my roiling guts, heading south. And the memories came boiling up...

We went back a little ways, LeeAnn and I. Long enough to count. Worked for the same messenger service: humping the bullshit of the business world by day, pounding at the walls of our dreams at night. She was in the office, I was on the streets. She was sharp and funny and smarter than anyone else in the whole fleabag organization; I was the only one in the entire company who would talk to her without staring incessantly at her tits. No easy task, let me tell you. But I did it, because I valued her trust almost as much as I hungered for her touch.

So there we were, sharing in the adventure of being young and piss-poor in New York, trying desperately to make it in our respective careers: clone of Kerouac meets fledgling Bourke-White. Came to spend a lot of time together: scrutinizing my first drafts and her black-and-whites over a dinner of ravioli and Riunite; wandering the streets and parks in search of inspiration and free entertainment. We grew very tight. Very close.

With one rather glaring exemption.

You see, for all that deep meaningful contact, it never quite gelled for LeeAnn and me. It was ridiculous, yes. I mean, I'd heard the most heartfelt feelings she'd ever cared to offer without blushing or batting an eye; I would have taken a bullet or thrown myself gleefully into traffic to save the tiniest hair on her head.

Sure. I could do all that. But somehow I couldn't bridge the safe, comfy distance between friend and lover. I just couldn't bring myself to tell her how I felt, to grab her and give her the kind of kiss that would make her reciprocate my passion, my love.

In retrospect, I realize that I was waiting for
her
to do it. I cringe to think of it now, but it's true. Part of my heart sincerely believed that she would wake up one day with the realization that no one would ever love her like I did. No one else could be so tender, so compassionate, so understanding. No one else would bear with her through her tragedies and madness, devote themselves so selflessly and completely to her needs.

She would wake up one day, I told myself, kicking herself for her foolishness. And she would throw herself, weeping, into my arms. And I would tell her that it was okay, it was over now. And we would be swept away into a love that not even death could destroy.

One day, I knew, she would realize just how much she was saying when she said the words
Dave, I need you.

That was the bullshit
I
believed. I preferred it to the cold hard truth.

As for LeeAnn, well...

LeeAnn preferred a different kind of guy.

A guy like Rodney, for example. I grimaced as his sneering pug loomed up like the answer in a magic eight-ball toy. Rod the bod, punk hunk
par excellence.
Took her on a three-month, nightmare tour of the Lower East Side, every nook and alley and rathole club that charged four bucks a beer. Rod, the artiste. Rod, the super-intense. He was inspiring her, giving her photography a whole new edge. Sure. Asshole inspired her, all right: eventually o.d.'ed on crack and went nuts in her apartment, damned near inspiring her to death before heading off to be shot by the police.

I upended the first can, draining the dregs, and popped the second in a ceremonial toast.
Rot in hell, Rodney.

If they'll have you...

After that it was Willis, the far side of the pendulum. I think she met him at a Soho gallery opening. Willis of the shining white mane, who was strong and stable and financially secure and about old enough to be her father. Willis wined and dined her like a princess; my god, he even proposed to her. And she actually accepted, to my unending shock and horror, though I think it was more political than emotional. He had connections. He could
help
her. That is, until she found that her Svengali absolutely forbade her to work after the wedding. Not a woman's place, you understand. LeeAnn shouldn't worry her pretty little head with thoughts of careers. LeeAnn should worry about tending to Willis's earthly needs.

Or how 'bout Roger, her latest disaster. Yeah, Roger was great. Handsome and fortyish and too hip to hurt; cut him and he'd probably bleed Ralph Lauren aftershave. Now
they
were an item, and
soooo
good for each other. He was doing a book on Central America, was going to take her along as his photographer. Maybe her big break. I remember her coming out of the office at checkout time, pulling me aside to tell me the great news...

The great news ended rather abruptly at the Midtown Women's Services clinic, at precisely the same microsecond that the urine test came back positive. That was six weeks ago, give or take a millenium.

Well, he did pay for exactly half of the costs, which was awfully decent of him. But he wasn't there for her on the day it happened, with a smile or a hug or a hand to hold. I was. And he wasn't there in the guilt-wracked weeks after, or ever again.

I was.

Yeah, Roger was slime, and Roger went the way of the wind. But even he wasn't the worst. First, there was Martin.

There was
always
Martin...

The cab cut up Tenth Avenue like a shark through dark waters. Forty-second Street floated by; I blinked back fractured patterns of garish light and color that winked like beacons to hungerlust and loneliness, previews of coming attractions that would never hit town. The moron-parade marched on in my brain: an onslaught of compelling, charismatic bastards who, for all their disparate differences, had held one thing in common. Which I had not.

LeeAnn.

Lithe, lissome bane of my existence. An otherwise intelligent woman who wouldn't take two ounces of the same shit on the job that she ate buckets of in her personal life. And who, for some equally unfathomable reason, liked her men either old and sensitive or young and macho. Old, macho men were chauvinistic pig-dog bastards.

Young, sensitive men were wimps...

I winced, biting back the thoughts, denying any possible truth. The cab turned onto Forty-eighth and crossed Ninth Avenue as the last of the Foster's slid down my throat. I felt bilious, and I needed to take a leak. My mind was burnt crispy. My nerves were live wires.

But as the cab slid up to the corner, I resolved that this time,
this
time it would be different. Tonight would mark the end of her love affair with the scum of the earth. I felt a queasy determination that I underscored with a toot of cocaine courage, an alkaloid surge of ersatz bravado.
It's
my
turn, dammit!
I told myself. If it could be done, it would be done.

It wasn't until I paid the cabbie and hit the pavement that I started to get nervous.

Maybe it was the way she sat, back framed in the grimy bay window, red and green neon backwashing her features like some DC comic damsel in distress. Maybe it was the window itself, which hung dripping like a plate-glass gullet. The way it displayed her.

Like bait...

I felt it, all right. As I hunkered over and puddle-dodged toward the door, it was there: a small, wormy gut-rush, synching with the Bud and Stroh's signs that blinked wanly behind the glass, vestige of some primal warning mechanism not entirely obliterated by the drugs. Saying:
No... No... No...

It was enough to register. It was not enough to stop me. The place was a dump, all right, but I felt sure I'd seen worse. It was nestled in the middle of a block dominated by drug dealers, pimps, and pawnshops, with the occasional ratbag adult emporium tossed in for good measure. The sign above the awning read simply
BAR
, with a badly painted-over prefix that looked as though the name had changed hands so many times that they'd just given up. The grime on the big window was thick enough to carve my initials in. The street itself was mercifully void, thanks to the rain; a sole Chicano bum not too far from his teens sprawled by the doorway, oblivious to the pounding. He twitched and muttered sporadically.

I fingered the folding knife thrust deep into the right-hand pocket of my jacket, the one that I'd habitually carried since being mugged last summer. It was long and thin and very sharp; stainless-steel casing, stainless-steel blade. I had never pulled it, never even used it, and often wondered if I carried it as a kind of a talisman more than a weapon. I hoped that I wouldn't need it in either capacity tonight. The thought:
Oh shit, LeeAnn, what are you into now?
loomed forth. The only possible answer was directly ahead.

The smell of bridges burning lay behind.

***

The first thing that hit me was the stink, a palpable presence that grew exponentially as the door shut behind. The usual stale smoke/stale beer bouquet, yes. But something else, underneath: a vague, foul underpinning. Familiar. Like...

Sewage,
I realized.
Great.
My stomach rolled. I grimaced and took in the layout in an instant. The interior was long and low and dark, the furthest reaches of it enshrouded in greasy shadow some forty feet back. A pseudo-oldtime finger-sign pointed down some steps near the back, one word emblazoned in large gold script:

GENTLEMEN.

The source, no doubt. This must be my night.
My bladder begged to differ. It wouldn't be long before I had to hit the hopper. It was no longer an idea I relished.

I noted that the rest of the decor was strictly Early K mart: imitation-walnut paneling and formica as far as the eye could see. The bar itself was unique, hugging the wall to a point halfway down the far side. It was a large and graceless structure replete with tarnished brass hand and foot rails, and somehow managed to be constructed entirely of oak without being the tiniest bit attractive. Twin ceiling-mounted Zenith nineteen-inch TVs blasted cablevision mercilessly on either end.

The Hooter Girl adorned the center.

She looked like one of those paintings of the hydrocephalic sad-eyed children, pumped full of silicon and estrogen. The kind of black velvet sofa-sized monstrosities you see cranked out by the yard and offered up on abandoned gas-station aprons across America, right next to Elvis and Jesus and the moose on the mountain. Big moon eyes and tits like basketballs. Pure class. The neon color scheme had faded over the passage of smoke-filled time, leaving her once-electric tan lines merely jaundiced.

It might have been funny, under other circumstances. At the moment it was making me ill. That and every other sordid detail from the fly-specked ceiling tiles to the screaming vids to the sodden regulars that lined the bar like crows on a barnyard fence. What the hell was I
doing
here, in this hole, at this hour?

The answer crossed the lateral distance of the room and wrapped herself around me before I could mutter a word. We stood there for what seemed a very long time. I probably would have remained in that position forever, but for the eyes that had followed her course to me. They were hungry, angry, gimlet eyes.

The hunger was for her.

The anger was all mine.

"Would you please tell me what the fuck is going on here?" I said under my breath. It came out a little more hysterical than I'd wished.
Good start, chump,
I thought.
Don't whine.

"Thanks for coming," she whispered into my armpit. I waited for more. It did not seem to be forthcoming, but she added a squeeze for emphasis. The warm flesh of her back shuddered beneath my touch, but for all the wrong reasons.

"Hey, are you okay?" I asked, not entirely certain that I wanted to hear the answer.

She nodded and snuffled just the tiniest bit, but she didn't let go. It worried me. Very gently, I pried her arms from around my waist and started to say, "C'mon, Lee, what's going on h—"

I never finished. LeeAnn looked up.

She had a black eye. Slit-swollen. Nasty. A tiny crescent-shaped cut had congealed just under her left eyebrow. She smiled gamely, chagrined. Her right eye crinkled with little smile-lines; the left remained fixed and droopy, like a bad impression of the Amazing Melting Woman.

I don't know why I was so surprised. Maybe I wasn't. I'd seen it before. But I couldn't bear to see it again: not now, not ever. My gaze flitted spastically to my shoes, the tubes, the goons at the bar. Anywhere but her face. Her face was dangerous. Her face made
me
dangerous. I stared in red-eyed rage as twin Rambos dispensed endless all-beef lessons in how real men take care of business.

But the goons at the bar weren't watching that. They were watching us. They were watching me.

They were smiling.

It was too much. There was nowhere to turn with my anger but back to the source. The words that came were clipped and vicious, in a voice I barely recognized as my own. I didn't like it. I couldn't help it.

"Who. Did. It."

LeeAnn shook her head. "Beer first," she said. It was not a suggestion. "And we'd better sit down." Then she pulled away, turned, and strode over to her place at the window end of the bar, next to the very payphone she'd probably used to call me, and gathered up her things. She gestured to the bartender, a withered old troll in a baggy white shirt who looked as if he'd spent all his younger days on some Lower West Side dock, trundling the very same kegs he now presided over. He grunted imperceptibly, ash falling from the Lucky pinched in one corner of his lips, and began refilling her emptied pitcher with deft, wordless efficiency. She was back in control that fast. However tenuous, she was in charge. Of herself. Of me.

I stood in stunned silence, the rage draining impotently out, as LeeAnn returned. She squeezed my arm lightly, imploringly, and then walked back toward the shadowed and empty booths. I was supposed to pay; it was understood. I watched her graceful trailing trek across the room. I watched her hips. I watched her ass.

I wasn't the only one watching.

Two of the clientele, a pair of drunken dimwits interchangeable as Heckel and Jeckel, leered at her in brief, neck-craning abandon. The third, a hairball with thick gold chains and too many teeth, managed a sidelong snickering appraisal before resuming his ogling of the washed-out and weary-looking blonde to his left.