Thinner (2 page)

She had gone to the stove in spite of his original no
sometimes she knows me so well it gets to be depressing,
he thought. Now she glanced back. 'You
are
still thinking about it, then.'

'I'm
not,'
he said, exasperated. 'Can't a man lose three pounds in peace? You keep saying you'd like me a little . . .'

thinner

'. . . a little less beefy.' Now she had gotten him thinking about the Gypsy again.
Dammit!
The Gypsy's eaten nose and the scaly feel of that one finger sliding along his cheek in the moment before he had reacted and jerked away the way you would jerk away from a spider or from a clittering bundle of beetles fuming in a knot under a rotted log. She brought him the bacon and kissed his temple. 'I'm sorry. You go right ahead and lose some weight. But if you don't, remember what Mr Rogers says -'

‘-I like you just the way you are,' they finished in unison.

He prodded at the overturned
Journal
by the lazy Susan, but that was just too depressing. He got up, went outside, and found the New York Times in the flowerbed. The kid always threw it in the flowerbed, never had his numbers right at the end of the week, could never remember Bill's last name. Billy had wondered on more than one occasion if it was possible for a twelve-year-old kid to become a victim of Alzheimer's disease.

He took the paper back inside, opened it to the sports, and ate the bacon. He was deep in the box scores when Heidi brought him another half of English muffin, golden with melting butter.

Halleck ate it almost without being aware he was doing so.

Chapter Two

245

In the city, a damage suit that had dragged on for over three years - a suit he had expected to drag on in one shape or another for the
next
three or four years - came to an unexpected and gratifying end at midmorning, with the plaintiff agreeing during a court recess to settle for an amount that was nothing short of stupefying. Halleck lost no time getting said plaintiff, a paint manufacturer from Schenectady, and his client to sign a letter of good intent in the judge's chambers. The plaintiffs lawyer had looked on with palpable dismay and disbelief while his client, president of the Good Luck Paint Company, scratched his name on six copies of the letter and as the court clerk notarized copy after copy, his bald head gleaming mellowly. Billy sat quietly, hands folded in his lap, feeling as if he had won the New York lottery. By lunch hour it was all over but the shouting.

Billy took himself and the client to O'Lunney's, ordered Chivas in a water glass for the client and a martini for himself, and then called Heidi at home.

'Mohonk,' he said when she picked up the phone. It was a rambling upstate New York resort where they had spent their honeymoon - a gift from Heidi's parents - a long, long time ago. Both of them had fallen in love with the place, and they had spent two vacations there since.

'What?'

"Mohonk,' he repeated. 'If you don't want to go, I'll ask Jillian from the office.'

'No, you
won't!
Billy, what is this?'

'Do you want to go or not?'

'Of
Course
I do! This weekend?'

'Tomorrow, if you can get Mrs Bean to come in and check on Linda and make sure the wash gets done and that there aren't any orgies going on in front of the TV in the family room. And if -'

But Heidi's squeal temporarily drowned him out. 'Your case, Billy! The paint fumes and the nervous breakdown and the psychotic episode and -'

'Canley is going to settle. In fact, Canley
has
settled. After about fourteen years of boardroom bullshit and long legal opinions meaning exactly nothing, your husband has finally won one for the good guys. Clearly, decisively, and without a doubt. Canley's settled, and I'm on top of the world.'

'Billy! God!' She squealed again, this time so loud the phone distorted. Billy held it away from his ear, grinning. 'How much is your guy getting?'

Billy named the figure and this time he had to hold the phone away from his ear for almost five seconds.

'Will Linda mind us taking five days off, do you think?'

'When she can stay up until one watching HBO latenight and have Georgia Deever over and both of them can talk about boys while they gorge themselves on my chocolates? Are you kidding? Will it be cold up there this time of year, Billy? Do you want me to pack your green cardigan? Do you want your parka or your denim jacket? Or both? Do you -?'

He told her to use her judgment and went back to his client. The client was already halfway through his huge glass of Chivas and wanted to tell Polish jokes. The client looked as if he had been hit with a hammer. Halleck drank his martini and listened to standard witticisms about Polish carpenters and Polish restaurants with half an ear, his mind clicking cheerily away on other matters. The case could have far-reaching implications; it was too soon to say it was going to change the course of his career, but it might. It very well might. Not bad for the sort of case big firms take on as charity work. It could mean that –

-the first thud jolts Heidi forward and for a moment she squeezes him; he is faintly aware of pain in his groin. The jolt is
hard enough to make her seat belt lock. Blood flies up - three dime size drops - and splatters on the windshield like red rain.
She hasn't even had time to begin to scream; she will scream later. He hasn't had time to even begin to realize. The
beginning of realization comes with the second thud. And he

-swallowed the rest of his martini in a gulp. Tears came to his eyes.

'You okay?' the client, David Duganfield by name, asked.

'I'm so okay you wouldn't believe it,' Billy said, and reached across the table to his client. 'Congratulations, David.' He would not think about the accident, he would not think about the Gypsy with the rotting nose. He was one of the good guys; that fact was apparent in Duganfield's strong grip and his tired, slightly sappy smile.

'Thank you, man,' Duganfield said. 'Thank you so much.' He suddenly leaned over the table and clumsily embraced Billy Halleck. Billy hugged him back. But as David Duganfield's arms went around his neck, one palm slipped up the angle of his cheek and he thought again of the old Gypsy man's weird caress.

He touched me,
Halleck thought, and even as he hugged his client, he shivered. He tried to think about David Duganfield on the way home - Duganfield was a good thing to think about - but instead of Duganfield he found himself thinking about Ginelli by the time he was on the Triborough Bridge. He and Duganfield had spent most of the afternoon in O'Lunney's, but Billy's first impulse had been to take his client to Three Brothers, the restaurant in which Richard Ginelli held an informal silent partnership. It had been years now since he had actually been in the Brothers with Ginelli's reputation it would not have been wise - but it was the Brothers he always thought of first, still. Billy had had some good meals and good times there, although Heidi had never cared much for the place or for Ginelli. Ginelli frightened her, Billy thought.

He was passing the Gun Hill Road exit on the New York Thruway when his thoughts led back to the old Gypsy of that was Heidi's doing - she had developed into a world-class nag when it came to Ginelli - but part of it had also been Ginelli's.

'You better stop coming around for a while,' he had told Billy.

'What? Why?' Billy had asked innocently, just as if he and Heidi had not argued over this very thing the night before.

'Because as far as the world is concerned, I am a gangster,' Ginelli had replied. 'Young lawyers who associate with gangsters do not get ahead, William, and that's what it's really all about - keeping your nose clean and getting ahead.'

'That's what it's all about, huh?'

Ginelli had smiled strangely. 'Well . other things.'

'Such as?'

'William, I hope you never have to find out. And come around for
espresso
once in a while. We'll have some talk and some laughs. Keep in touch, is what I'm saying.'

And so he had kept in touch, and had dropped in from time to time (although, he admitted to himself as he swung up the Fairview exit ramp, the intervals had grown longer and longer), and when he had found himself faced with what might be a charge of negligent vehicular manslaughter, it had been Ginelli he thought of first.
But good old tit-grabbing Cary Rossington took care of that,
his mind whispered. So
why are you thinking about Ginelli
now? Mohonk - that's what you ought to be thinking
of.
And David Duganfield, who proves that nice guys don't always
finish last. And taking
off
a few more pounds.

But as he turned into the driveway, what he found himself thinking about was something Ginelli had said:
William, I
hope you never have to find out.

Find out what? Billy
wondered, and then Heidi was flying out the front door to kiss him, and Billy forgot everything for a while.

. there
are
a few

Chapter Three

Mohonk

It was their third night at Mohonk and they had just finished making love. it was the sixth time in three days, a giddy change from their usual sedate twice-a-week pace. Billy lay beside her, liking the feel of her heat, liking the smell of her perfume - Anais Anais - mixed with her clean sweat and the smell of their sex. For a moment the thought made a hideous cross-connection and he was seeing the Gypsy woman in the moment before the Olds struck her. For a moment he heard a bottle of Perrier shattering. Then the vision was gone.

He rolled toward his wife and hugged her tight.

She hugged him back one-armed and slipped her free hand up his thigh. 'You know,' she said, 'if I come my brains out one more time, I'm not going to have any brains left.'

'It's a myth,' Billy said, grinning.

'That you can come your brains out?'

'Nah. That's the truth. The myth is that you
lose
those brain cells forever. The ones you come out always grow back.'

'Yeah, you
say, you say.'

She snuggled more comfortably against him. Her hand wandered up from his thigh, touched his penis lightly and lovingly, toyed with the thatch of his pubic hair (last year he'd been sadly astounded to see the first threads of gray down there in what his father had called Adam's thicket), and then slid up the foothill of his lower belly. She sat up suddenly on her elbows, startling him a little. He hadn't been asleep, but he had been drifting toward it.

'You really
have
lost weight!'

'Huh!'

'Billy Halleck, you're
skinnier!'

He slapped his belly, which he sometimes called the House That Budweiser Built, and laughed. 'Not much. I still look like the world's only seven-months-pregnant man.'

'You're still big, but not as big as you were. I
know. I
can tell. When did you weigh yourself last?'

He cast his mind back. It had been the morning Canley had settled. He had been down to 246. 'I told you I'd lost three pounds, remember?'

'Well, you weigh yourself again first thing in the morning,' she said:

'No scales in the bathroom,' Halleck said comfortably.

'You're kidding.'

'Nope. Mohonk's a
civilized
place.'

'We'll find one.'

He was beginning to drift again. 'If you want, sure.'

'I want.'

She had been a good wife, he thought. At odd times over the last five years, since the steady weight gain had really started to show, he had announced diets and/or physical-fitness programs. The diets had been marked by a lot of cheating. A hot dog or two in the early afternoon to supplement the yogurt lunch, or maybe a hastily gobbled hamburger or two on a Saturday afternoon, while Heidi was out at an auction or a yard sale. Once or twice he had even stooped to the hideous hot sandwiches available at the little convenience store a mile down the road - the meat in these sandwiches usually looked like toasted skin grafts once the microwave had had its way with them, and yet he could never remember throwing away a portion uneaten. He liked his beer, all right, that was a given, but even more than that, he liked to eat. Dover sole in one of New York's finer restaurants was great, but if he was sitting up and watching the Mets on TV, a bag of Doritos with some clam dip on the side would do.

The physical-fitness programs would last maybe a week, and then his work schedule would interfere, or he would simply lose interest. In the basement a set of weights sat brooding in a corner, gathering cobwebs and rust. They seemed to reproach him every time he went down. He tried not to look at them.

So he would suck in his gut even more than usual and announce boldly to Heidi that he had lost twelve pounds and was down to 236. And she would nod and tell him that she was very glad, of
course
she could see the difference, and all the time she would know, because she saw the empty Doritos bag (or bags) in the trash. And since Connecticut had adopted a returnable bottle-and-can law, the empties in the pantry had become a source of guilt almost as; great as the unused weights. She saw him when he was sleeping; even worse, she saw him when he was peeing. You couldn't suck in your gut when you were taking a piss. He had tried and it just wasn't possible. She knew he had lost three pounds, four at most. You could fool your wife about another woman - at least for a while - but not about your weight. A woman who bore that weight from time to time in the night knew what you weighed. But she smiled and said Of
course you look better, dear.
Part of it was maybe not so admirable it kept him quiet about her cigarettes - but he was not fooled into believing that was all of it, or even most of it. It was a way of letting him keep his self-respect.

'Billy?'

'What?' Jerked back from sleep a second time, he glanced over at her, a little amused, a little irritated.

'Do you feel quite well?'

'I feel fine. What's this "do-you-feel-quite-well" stuff?'

'Well
...
sometimes
...
they say an unplanned weight loss can be a sign of something.'