“You got your answer.” When Peter took a step to the side Harry moved with him — Peter’s reflection — blocking the way to the door. “What are you — some kind of nut?” Peter fairly shouted. “Get out of my goddamn way.”
“Come on,” Harry taunted him. “Come on, you big bastard. I’m waiting for you.”
Four inches or so taller than the man facing him, Peter guessed that he outweighed Harry by, maybe, fifteen-twenty pounds; still, he was tired, his right hand out of commission, and Harry (the bastard) was raging for a fight. “Why should I fight you?” Peter said, stalling, looking for an honorable way out.
“Because you’re a big witless bastard, that’s why,” Harry said, feinting his head. “Come on. Yahhhhr!” He lowered his head as though he were about to rush him. Peter backed up as far as he could go, his back literally to the sink,
“I’m not going to fight you,” Peter said, the declaration coming out curiously like a threat. “I have no reason to fight you.”
It was over in a moment. Harry, an old schoolyard fighter, charged head-down. Peter, surprised into reflex, caught him in the side of the head with a roundhouse left that spun Harry half-around. Then, as if recollecting the impact of the punch, Harry went wistfully down. Peter waited for retribution.
Once down, however, Harry made no effort to get up — or else remained down merely to recoup his strength, crouched on the bathroom tile (as though planning to get up eventually at some symbolic count of nine), his eyes averted, a bit shamefaced at his failure. Peter hovered, ashamed at the pleasure of the punch, nursing two sore hands. “Are you all right?” he kept asking, but Harry, giving him back his own, refused to answer.
“Can I help you up?”
The contempt of silence.
“Hey, let me help you up.” Peter extended his hand cautiously.
“Go away.”
“You’re all right, though?”
Harry growled something and Peter withdrew his hand in a hurry, as if afraid the man on the floor was going to take a bite of it.
Having no reason to stay, Peter started to leave, but when he noticed that Harry was not getting up, that he had covered his face with his hands, he came back, hovered over this stranger he had knocked down with a sense of pressing, if undefined obligation. “I live in this building,” he said, “What were you going to ask me?”
Harry looked up, his mouth opened and closed without sound, its movement like the rip of a seam. His fingers touched gingerly the side of his head where Peter’s punch had landed, and smiling savagely at some private irony, muttered something either to Peter or to himself.
“What was that?”
“Fuck you,” Harry said, no longer smiling.
Peter returned the compliment. At which Harry, unaccountably, burst out laughing. And laughed. And laughed. Tears coming to his eyes. (And maybe it wasn’t even Harry.)
“Where have you been all this time?” Helena said when Peter returned. She was lying in state on his bed, her shoes off, as though she was planning to stay for a while.
“This may be hard for you to believe,” Peter said, “but the truth is I had a fight with a man in the bathroom.”
“You what?” Helena was torn with laughter; then, afraid of being overheard, she covered her mouth. “Was it Harry?” she wanted to know, unable to stop giggling.
He had no way of knowing for sure, unable offhand to distinguish Harry from any other stranger looking for a fight in his bathroom. Helena described Harry for him. Peter described his man. There was a resemblance.
“He’s much shorter than I am?” Peter asked.
“Not much. A little.”
“This man was about five inches shorter.”
“Maybe.”
“Does he have thick curly hair?”
“Sort of. He has hair sort of like yours.”
They decided finally that it must have been Harry (who else would behave so irrationally?), and then sat guiltily on the bed together, their fingers laced, the joke of Harry’s performance a pact between them.
Peter took out a fifth of Macy’s Blended Whiskey which he had stored away in the bottom of his desk for the emergency of a friend dropping over. He ripped the seal and removed the cork with his teeth, offering the bottle first to Helena, who refused it with a witch’s smile. Peter took the first drink, the rawness of the stuff tearing his throat, and handed the bottle to the small dark-haired girl on the bed next to him. Helena took a drink, then held the bottle to Peter’s lips while he drank. It was hard work, the stuff burned its way down. Each held the bottle for the other while he drank — a matter of rite. They exchanged glances, an indecent, almost obscene pleasure in Helena’s face, as if in the intimacy of sharing the whiskey they were sharing Harry’s blood. The more they drank, the less it seemed to matter.
Without a word, the silence a part of their pact, they drained the bottle between them, killed it, buried it under the bed. Helena smiled and smiled. Peter preserved his grief with a mourner’s gravity. It was a tacit joke between them.
It was getting dark, but neither seemed to notice. Truck lights illuminated the room for a passing moment, crosses of light melting across the walls. He closed his eyes.
“Who’s going to sleep on the floor?” Helena said, her voice thick, dreamy.
“Harry,” he said.
She squeezed his arm, her breath too near — minutes, seconds away. There. She giggled.
“Shh.”
“Shh,” she parodied him, still giggling, caught in its terror. “There’s room for Harry under the bed. Hello, Harry,” she said giddily to the shadows. “How’s the weather down there?”
Peter laughed, the sound breaking from him, full of grief, night cries, loss, almost a wail for the souls — the ungrieved souls — of the lost.
The sight of Harry sprawled helplessly on the bathroom floor seemed, the more he dwelt on it, a miraculous joke. “He insisted on fighting,” he said, in pain from laughing, “and then he didn’t even land a punch.” He kept laughing, hating himself. “What happened to the bloody bottle?”
Helena bowed her head solemnly, mourned for its loss. A laugh, a giggle of laughter, escaped.
“You want a drink?” she said.
“Where …?”
“Come here, I’ll show you.” A laugh from somewhere in the room, from one of them.
He leaned toward her, a man without expectation — the room dark, her face flattened by a veil of shadows. “There’s nothing to drink,” he insisted, amused that she thought there was.
“Yes.” She gave him her mouth, her tongue, sour with blended whiskey and other bad memories. “Good?”
He wasn’t sure. “The truth is — ” he started to say.
Interrupting him, she flashed her pickled tongue into his mouth, taking it back before he had made its acquaintance. “More?” She licked his closed mouth, but when he tried to kiss her she pulled her head back, laughing at him. Did he need it? He found a breast in the dark, a lamb’s-wool sweater separating the nipple from the love of his fingers.
She removed his hand. “Be good, sweetie.” Kissing him.
“You’re a witch,” he said, half in anger.
She giggled, a witch’s laugh, pleased. “How did you know?”
He laughed villainously, put his hand inside her sweater.
“You have more hands than an octopus,” she said sullenly. “Did I tell you I’m really afraid of men?” A witch’s laugh — a child-witch’s laugh. “I like you, Peter.”
He took another drink from her store, squeezed her breast.
“It’s tender,” she said, a whining song. “Don’t …”
He accepted it as his luck, removed his hand. “Ahhh!” he complained.
“Let’s just sleep for a while,” she said.