What a shock.
“You believe in love at first sight?” I asked.
She turned and looked at me directly. “What a silly question.”
“What’s your silly answer?”
She took a long time answering, of course…a long, endearing moment.
“I think I do,” she said. “Yeah.”
She blushed.
“I am so tired of being alone,” she said.
“Don’t be, then.”
“Damn you,” she said. “Damn you, damn you, Janeway. Of all the things I didn’t need in my life, the list begins and ends with you.”
“I bet you’ve been thinking about me constantly.”
“You’re a thug. My God, a policeman! Me with a cop.”
“I’m a refined, wizened dealer in rare books.”
“You wouldn’t know a rare book if it fell on your head.”
“But I learn fast. I soak up knowledge like mere mortals eat soup. I’m witty, I’m bright; I’m a bundle of goddamn laughs in case you hadn’t noticed.” I stopped, realizing suddenly, sadly, that 1 had lifted the pitch somewhere. It was almost the same half-joking plea that Miss Pride had used the night she’d come begging for a job.
Rita was looking at me intently.
“Here’s the best part,” I said. “I don’t mind taking orders from a woman.”
“How kind of you. How generous.”
“Can’t you just see it, lighting up the night sky? Janeway and McKinley. What a wow, huh?”
“Six days ago I’d never heard of you. I was five thousand miles away, lying in the sun. Now you’re not only taking me over, you’re getting top billing.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. It’s like in vaudeville: the straight man always gets top billing.”
“Shut up,” she said, coming close. She took off her coat and threw it somewhere. The air seemed electric between us: the fine hair was standing up on her arms and neck. I knew if we touched, the static would fry us both.
She threw her arms around me and kissed me hard. The world went pop.
“This is insane,” she breathed into my neck.
I kissed her too. Her hand was on my gun. I could feel her heart; I could hear it, like a distant drumbeat.
“You never cared about books,” she said. “It’s all just a ruse to get in my pants.”
“I can’t keep anything from you.”
“Well,” she said. “I guess it worked.”
46
I remembered something Ruby had said: It’s the most hypnotic business a man can do. He was talking about the book business, equating it to making love. I still had the gun in my hand: I don’t even remember now how that happened, but somehow the three of us wound up in bed together. I clutched the gun and held on for dear life. That piece of cold blue steel was my last link with sanity. I shuddered my way inside her and she jerked, pulling me all the way down. I held on to the gun and went all the way. This was so right. I closed my eyes and lost it. Oh, I lost it all. Anyone could’ve come through the front door and killed us both: I wouldn’t‘ve known, much less cared. They could’ve come through with a battering ram and six regiments of cavalry. I think maybe they did. They ripped the door out of the frame and stormed through on the way to the Little Bighorn, and the last man through picked up the door, gave it a paint job, hung it back, closed and locked it good as new. Brushed himself off, saluted, and called me sir: then left us there, before I knew they had come.
“Janeway,” she said.
“Mmmm.”
“Tell me that isn’t your gun mashed against my head.”
I took the gun in my other hand and propped myself up.
She began to laugh. “Now that’s one for the books. I’ve just been screwed by a man with a gun and it wasn’t even rape.”
“That’s what you think,” I said. “I never had a chance.”
47
It was two o’clock in the morning and we were just getting around to the steaks. “This is my day for decadence,” Rita said. “Lose my virginity. Go back on meat. I seem to be a wanton, savage creature at heart.”
“Jeez, were you a virgin too?” I said.
She tousled my hair. I liked that. It showed affection, not just lust. I opened two beers. The steaks were almost done.
We ate. The food was wonderful, the company superb. We didn’t talk at all.
It wasn’t till much later, sitting by the fire, when she started to unwind. “I called Paul right after I talked to you the other night,” she said. “The night…it happened.”
“Paul is…?”
“The guy I was gonna marry”
“I love the past tense. Go on.”
“It was three o’clock in the morning back there. I got him out of bed. Guess I could’ve waited, but somehow it seemed too important. God, it seemed earthshaking. I felt like my whole world had tilted off its axis.”
I kissed the side of her head.
“I called him to say good-bye,” she said.
Suddenly there was no more white space, no eternity between the lines. “I met him in Greenpeace a couple of years ago. That’s where I go every summer, to work in the field. I saved a whale this year, can you imagine that? Got in a wet suit, put myself between him and the killers, and harassed them till they went away. I didn’t know I’d have the courage to do it till the time came: then there was no thought of not doing it, it was what I’d come for. We lost a volunteer this year, did you know that? We had a young man killed in a protest over a nuclear test. I knew him slightly, but his death made everything very suddenly real. I knew I could die too, and I didn’t want to. I expected to be blown into nothing every minute. Have you ever seen what a modern harpoon gun can do? It’s frightening, and here you are, taunting them, daring them to shoot you with it, knowing they’d like to do just that if they could find a way to call it an accident. They had me on NBC that night. Paul got me a videotape of the broadcast and I never looked at it: it diminishes the real experience too much. It’s what Hemingway meant when he wrote about hunting and war. Everything’s ruined when you talk too much. I used to read that and think, What macho garbage, but goddammit, he’s right. They show a twenty-second clip on Tom Brokaw and what it really was was a two-hour test of wills. Hemingway was right, the old fool. You do something that people call heroic and you can’t talk about it, you can’t sit in front of a tube and gloat over a tape, all you can do is carry it in your heart. Even talking about it this much fucks it up.”
She pointed to the picture on the walclass="underline" the guy in the wet suit.
“That’s Paul. I’ll take his picture down if you want.”
“Leave it,” I said. I could afford to be generous. I knew Paul would be glad to let me be the picture on the wall and him be here on the sofa.
“He’s a good man. I don’t know why things never really… what’s the word?”
“Ignited.”
“Yeah, that’s the word. He really is a fine man. Doesn’t deserve a bitch like me. You, on the other hand…”
“I think I can handle you.”
“I’m sure you do. So handle me, Janeway: tell me what you want to know.”
“Anything you want to tell.”
“Oh, please. Don’t go soft on me now. You’ve been pushing me since the moment I first saw you. Long before that, if you count that snotty phone message.”
“Then tell me all of it.”
It took her a while to get started. We loosened up with brandy and put some logs on the fire.
“I was working in a bookstore in Dallas. We had a customer named William J. Malone. You know the name?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You would, if you’d been in the business longer. William J. Malone was a collector of books. You didn’t see his name much in AB. He was one of those guys who didn’t like limelight. A lot like me that way. Very private. No friends. Distant. I guess to people who didn’t know him, full of mystery. But all the so-called big boys of the book world knew him. He had no credit limit with anyone. A thug from your side of the tracks would say he had deep pockets. And the ruling passion of his life was books. Modern lit, that was his thing. He was the last of his line and he never married, but God— what a bookman! Malone knew everything. He had a wall of reference books but he didn’t need them. He had it all in his head. The joy of his life was to go into a bookstore and find wonderful things. He didn’t care about the money, it was all a game. He paid what they asked and never wanted a discount, didn’t matter whether he spent ten dollars or ten thousand. If he wanted something, he got it.