What Comes Next Page 12

  “I don’t think he’s dull,” I said.

  CAROLYN: (Tongue moving between her lips, nervous sexual antenna.) He has a solemn manner, which I’m sure you’ve noticed, which passes, I imagine, for brilliance among his students. He can be very impressive, very high-serious if you don’t listen too carefully to what he’s saying. Blah blah blah blah blah.

  SEIZE BERSERK KILLER AFTER 16-HOUR SIEGE

  TWO BYSTANDERS WOUNDED

  CAROLYN: When he finished describing what I had done to mar his potentially beautiful life, his packed suitcase was at the door waiting for him. So: out. (Points blindly in direction of window, her bearings off.) So clear the hell out if you’re not happy here. I don’t want it anymore.

  CHRISTOPHER: (If they found her dead would they blame him for it? The evidence—his fingerprints too many places to be undone—would point to him, though he would be innocent. Who else would kill her?)

  “Don’t go yet,” she said.

  I sat down on a chair close to the couch, my chest heavy. Some untouched terror—a vulture’s dense need—creasing the walls with its shadow. “Would you take him back?”

  CAROLYN: (Coldly.) If you had understood what I was saying, you wouldn’t have asked that. (Nodding significantly to herself, tongue snaking out.)

  CHRISTOPHER: Do you think I don’t understand you?

  CAROLYN: (Laughs like glass breaking.) I don’t think anyone understands me. (Getting up.) You can tell my husband if you see him, though of course you won’t, that he’s made his choice and he’s going to have to take responsibility for it. Tell him that, please. (She exits to bathroom.)

  She returned with new makeup on, her hair combed, looking softer and more tired. Wearing perfume.

  “Are you still here?”

  I thought of going but there was no place, the streets dark. “Do you know where he is, your husband?”

  “Don’t you?” She winked conspiratorially. Her eyes trying to get out of her skull. Gnawed on her lip, head tilted as if listening to something she couldn’t hear. “He’s always been a self-concerned bastard.” Covering her face with her hands. “Why are we all so miserable? Why is it nothing we do gives us satisfaction?”

  Went to the bathroom, face out of focus in the mirror. Eyes like small red birds. The place had an overripe smell, a heavy mother smell. Black bra and flowered panties on the towel rack, a red towel between them. Rabbit, slightly mutilated, in the bathtub. A knuckle bleeding, skin scraped off, without any sense of how it happened. No Band-Aids in medicine cabinet. Only bottles of things. Brown-stained bottle of iodine. Couldn’t get thing out. All kinds of pills but not a fucking Band-Aid. Scrubbed at the stain, hot water scalding my hands. The stain remained, dots of red around it. Thought someone had hurt her.

  When I got back, she was all right. Knuckle still bleeding, I asked for a Band-Aid.

  “Let me see your hand.”

  “It’s nothing.” Holding it out for her to examine.

  She made a face of mock horror. “Come on in the bathroom. I’ll do it for you. Come on.”

  She stopped the bleeding, washed the cut and bandaged it. I let her do it, acted helpless. Her doing it like I was her child, my hand in her hands, made me nervous. Sniffing perfume like airplane glue.

  “You said that you thought I knew the girl Parks was with. Do you have the idea he’s with Rosemary?”

  “If that’s her name. I told you before I don’t know where he is or who he’s with. I assume he’s with this girl, whatever her name is.”

  “He’s not with Rosemary.”

  The only thing alive was her tongue. She wet her lips from crack to crack. “That’s your concern, not mine.” Stood in the middle of the room like a statue. “I’d like you to go now. I’m very tired.”

  “Can I stay on the couch? I’ll leave in the morning. I promise I’ll leave as soon as it’s light.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to go, Chris. It’s not so hard—just tell yourself to get up and before you know it you’ll be on your feet.”

  I wasn’t going. “Are you afraid of me?” I asked her.

  “Why should I be afraid of you?” Her motor quivering. “I just want you to leave.”

  “I’d like a cup of coffee first. Something. You go to bed if you’re tired. I’ll let myself out.”

  “You’ll go when I tell you to go.” Like some schoolteacher punishing you. (I hadn’t done anything to her.)

  I shook my head.

  “Christopher, I want you to go.” She extended her arm, pointed to the door.

  Without reason I started to laugh.

  She slapped me in the face, my eyes burning. I got up, burning. She screamed (though I hadn’t touched her) and kicked me twice in the leg. “You bastard. You idiot bastard.” Running from me.

  I heard her barricading the door to her room.

  Two police cars drove up. I watched them park across the street, their red lights flashing. A cordon of men surrounding the building. Curtis Parks with them, pointing his finger at the window. Someone had his gun drawn. I ducked back out of sight. Under the couch, pressed flat. Pretending to be unconscious, I waited, the gun in my hand under me. When they turned me over to see my face, I would start firing. The voices came and went. They looked everywhere but didn’t find me. When they lifted the couch I wasn’t there.

  Walked around, my leg stiff where she had kicked me. Three-twenty on the kitchen clock.

  She wandered in as if she were lost. “What’s the matter?” she said, a thin bathrobe over her nightgown, her eyes barely open. “Can’t you sleep?”

  “What does Parks have against the war? Someone has to kill someone.”

  “We’re all for peace in this house, Christopher. Would you like a sleeping pill?”

  “No.”

  “I’m a light sleeper. Please try not to make so much noise.” And she went back into her room.

  A Post on the floor next to the couch. July 28. Yesterday or the day before. I’ve lost track. When did the days pass?

  HOUSEWIFE

  IS RAPED

  IN MINEOLA

  A 35-year-old housewife was raped and beaten by a masked intruder waiting in the bathroom of her Mineola, Long Island, home today.

  AUTHORITIES CONCEDE

  ACCIDENTAL BOMBING

  REGRET NECESSARY EVIL

  OF AIR WAR

  U.S. authorities announced that two U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom jets were responsible for the accidental bombing of a peaceful village in the Iron Triangle. The U.S. Command said the planes made three bombing and rocket passes, killing 83 civilians, wounding 175, and leaving 10 missing.

  My chest stretched on its bones. I went to the window to breathe. A light going on in the hallway.

  “Once I wake up during the night I can’t get back to sleep,” she whispered. “I thought I might take some pills—something—though I feel sleep-proof at this point.”

  I said I was sorry I had waked her, reading the outline of her soap-bubble breasts under her bathrobe. She, seeing me look, smiling queerly. “Are you a good pill?”

  “A bad pill.” I grabbed her, kissed her neck, pretending to be a vampire.

  “You have to learn to be gentle,” she says, holding me away. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to be with a woman?” Her breath heavy.

  I follow her, wife, into the bedroom, cold, hands sweating. Looking on as if watching myself. Parks’ student, so cold, and teacher’s wife. He following her (her fingers have his) to the big bed, the covers down. The room dark. Silhouettes of figures.

  Her tongue invades his mouth, plays like a fish between his teeth. She gives instructions.

  Lie down. Lie down next to me. Don’t be afraid.

  The room is dark. He is not her husband, though she doesn’t know who he is. He is afraid of dying.

  He bites his tongue, which is salty and raw, a slab of gristle. The blood fills his mouth. His eyes are closed. Watching the two of them in his mind, Parks and wife. Making time on a velve
t red couch while he waits outside. He tastes himself.

  “I’m waiting for you, Christopher,” she says in a murderous voice.

  The good soldier stands at attention in crisis. Does what he’s asshole told. Good early training and you never have to worry about them again.

  ENEMY ASSAULTS

  14 POSTS IN DELTA

  “Christopher, I’m waiting. What’s the matter, honey?”

  Don’t let her pull you by the bloody nose, whatever you do, Parks says.

  (I’m watching them, taking student notes in head.)

  “Christopher, sweet Christopher, little Christopher.” Mocking whisper.

  Sits up as he comes toward her. His fist against the side of her face. Testing. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Five times. Child’s play. Someone crying. “Christopher.”

  (I’ll protect you, I tell her. That’s what I’m here for. I won’t let the motherfucker hurt you anymore.)

  TWELVE

  The Mysterious Disappearance of Curtis Parks

  HIS FIRST STOP was at a residence hotel on Twenty-third Street, where he spent two sleepless, exhilarated nights, charting the course of his new life, hallucinating the best and worst of its possibilities. Then, a piece of luck, he was given the key to a place off Perry Street, an apartment of a friend of a friend, an actor who was on the road with a show and would be gone, if the trip was successful, for at least six months. He whistled to himself as he watched the scraggly beginnings of a beard in the full-length bedroom mirror, the reflection of a new man.

  The war, going on without him, uninfluenced by his move. He divorced himself from it, no longer responsible.

  Lonely living alone, his third day in the world, Curt phoned Rosemary. Since her midnight call, the night she was attacked in the park, he had been obsessed with winning her back—his sense of loss, the extent of it, the barometer of his affection. His sense of himself in the balance.

  In his vision of the future, he saw Rosemary running toward him as in the fade-out of a movie, unable to contain her joy, as it had been in the early days with them. He phoned in exhilaration, his voice flying to her. He had separated from Carolyn, he announced, and wanted to see her. In a faint voice she said she didn’t think it was a good idea.

  He pleaded. She said no, no, absolutely no, she couldn’t.

  “The hell with you,” he said, and hung up, then called back and apologized, but it made no difference.

  He suspected that she had given him up for the one who just recently had been a guest in his house, the student he had done so much for and gotten so little from in return. He didn’t want to think about it. Christopher was a thing of the past.

  It was painful to take, though he took it well, better than he had planned. Necessity was justice, he told himself. He had earned her loss, needed it to go on. Their relationship had come of a bad time, had been determined by terms no longer in effect. The old no longer mattered—the past dead. Beyond what had already been, she had nothing to offer him, a strange sad girl with greater capacity for pain than for pleasure. If dead to the fact of her, the idea persisted. The Lady Rosemary of his loins. He missed what he didn’t have, a man surrounded by death.

  He was a phoenix emerging from his own ashes. The new improved Curtis Parks. Trying to recall what he had wanted to do and not done—the possibilities of himself he had given up, given away—during the dead years of his marriage. Unable to remember.

  After talking to Rosemary, he went to a movie on Forty-second Street—Some Came Running, with Frank Sinatra—and fell asleep, sitting down, somewhere in the middle. He woke during the coming attractions of a spy film (a body falling from a closet with a knife in its back), in love with everyone—moved by the pleasures of his dream. Wanted to embrace the sleeping hag next to him, but embarrassed to, went home to his new home to sleep.

  His loneliness gnawing at him, he made a date with an Oriental-looking Jewess of about thirty, top-heavy, a high-school French teacher he had met in the peace movement, recently divorced. Their first night together, with a minimum of preliminaries, he took her to bed in her own apartment, which was just what he needed. It was the best sex he had had in a long time and, grateful, Curt stayed on, long after the time he arranged with himself beforehand to go. After a while—Curt was dozing off—Carol rolled on top of him and they made love again, his pleasure in the act even greater than it had been the first time. No doubt, he told himself, struggling to get a little sleep, he had struck gold here. What a marvelous girl this was—loving, skillful, taking her pleasure without the fraud of empty endearments. A little later they made love again. Carol slept pressed against him, her mouth at the hollow of his ear, her breath … Curt, exhausted, unable to sleep.

  In the cold light of early morning, out of the shadows of a dream, he awoke, Carol blowing in his ear (Not again, he thought, feigning sleep). The fever of need reached him even in exhaustion. And so, dreaming of sleep, he occupied her again, assaulted the cave of her treasure, a celebrant of life, dying slowly to the music of her motion. She sang his name to him—Curtis, Curtis, Curtis, Curtis, Curt—a concert of recognition. So that’s who he was.

  Before leaving, he asked her if she liked movies. Not knowing what was expected of her, she said yes, she liked some movies, good ones, foreign films. They made a date to go that night and he went home to sleep.

  It’s not easy for a man with a puritan conscience to stay in bed during the day without some pang of anxiety. In his fitful wakings, an FM radio playing softly in the next room, the very qualities that had pleased Curt most about Carol began to trouble him. If she had gone to bed with him so easily, on the thinnest acquaintanceship, clearly—how inexorable logic can be—she did the same with other men. It made him jealous just to conceive of it. How vulnerable she was to the betrayals of the flesh. He went into the living room and turned up the radio, took a brief shower to cool off, and went back to bed. What was she doing at the moment? he wondered, and had to stop himself from calling to find out. Did she know who he was, what kind of man he was going to be?

  Then he got to wondering what his wife was doing in his absence. He hadn’t known or cared to know during the years he had lived with her. (And she had tried endlessly to make him jealous, flirting with friends of his in his presence.) Suddenly he found himself obsessed with the idea of calling her. He looked at his six days of beard in the mirror, embarrassed at the poverty of its growth, tempted in his despair to shave it off and start again. He was overcome with a sense of hopelessness. Who was it, the vaguely familiar face in the mirror staring blankly back at him, mouth agape, insinuating knowledge of his situation? They sized each other up, madman and reflection, not enough growth between them to make one decent beard.

  With nothing else to do, he phoned his wife. He called her out of the best of intentions (what other intentions could he have?), to give her his phone number in case, in an emergency, she wanted to get in touch with him.

  He had only to hear Carolyn’s voice again to remember how intensely he hated her.

  “Where are you?” she insisted on knowing, with the possessiveness of a woman who divided the world into the things that belong to her and the things that don’t.

  He made up an address and gave it to her.

  “I hope you’re enjoying your freedom,” she said, “because when my lawyer gets through with you, you’re not going to have enough money left to breathe the air without it pinching”

  “How’s the baby?” he asked.

  “Fatherless,” she said quickly. “Is there something else you’d like to know? You don’t care how we are, so why do you ask?”

  He couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Your student Christopher called, said he wanted to talk to you about something private. Whatever that means. I told him I had no idea where to reach you. I asked him to dinner…. Well,” she said, impatient with his silence, “do you have a reason for calling, or did you call just to torment me?”

  “You? I called to torment
myself,” he said, tormented by the fact that he had married her, that he had lived with her for almost nine years, and that in some perverse (and desperate) way he missed her.

  “I’d like to see the baby sometime,” he said, suddenly aware of what it meant to him to be a father, how important it was. His daughter, a toddler now, would someday be a woman. He missed her already, felt her loss, knew what it was to lose. “Is it all right if I come over Sunday afternoon?”

  Carolyn Parks took a deep breath, withheld the first cutting remark that came to mind, a martyr to his cruelty. “You’ll hear from my lawyer,” she said with transcendent dignity, and, waiting just long enough for him to phrase a reply in his mind—her timing enviably delicate in moments of crisis—hung up.

  “Is that the worst threat you can make?” he said to a dead phone. “I’ll see my daughter whenever the hell I like. You narrow-spirited, ball-cutting bitch.” He had a drink of his host’s Scotch, took another shower (beginning to sweat again as soon as he got out), and went back to bed. Regret weighed on his chest. His beard itched. He lay stiffly in a pool of sweat, trying, with his eyes shut, to see some future for himself, some way out of the traps life had laid for him. If he hadn’t been married, or if he hadn’t been married to a woman like Carolyn, would things have been different? Thinking about it, terrified by the notion that his failures may have been his own doing, that he may have chosen Carolyn out of a need to fail, he fell asleep.

  He was on a bus going west, a child he had never seen before—immaculate in a brown Eton suit—sitting at attention in the seat beside him. It was raining outside. Heavy winds buffeting the bus. The child’s silent presence disconcerted him. Who was taking care of the boy, where was his mother? A child that age, he assumed, would not be taking a trip like this by himself. When the bus lurched—a heavy gust almost lifting it off the road—the boy grabbed Curt’s hand, hung onto it.

  “Who are you traveling with?” Curt asked him, anxious about the child, looking around the bus to see if there was someone he belonged to.