“Yeah?”
“It’s been years since you called me that.” It had been her pet name for him back when they were first married and she still went for his head fakes pretty much every time. Back when he could still laugh her into the sack. Back when she used to love him. Before he gave her so many reasons not to.
“Yeah, well…”
“Here’s a crazy idea,” he said.
“If it’s yours, it’s bound to be.”
“We should go out sometime, you and I.”
“That’s well beyond crazy.”
“Sylvia wouldn’t like it?” Sylvia Plath was his nickname for her poet girlfriend. Not entirely apropos, of course, since Plath was a suicide, not a lesbian, at least so far as Carl knew. But he didn’t have a large store of information about women poets, and Plath had to work better than Emily Dickinson, who wasn’t a lesbian, either, so far as he knew.
“We split up, actually.”
“No shit? How come?”
“Same reason you and I did.”
“She cheated?”
“Yup.”
“She’s an idiot,” he told her, only a little surprised to discover he meant it.
“Just her? Not you?”
“No, me too.”
“You really need fifty thousand?”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, he was ashamed. “Nah,” he said. “Really, I’m good. I was just calling to see how you’re doing.”
“Oh.”
“Which is? I mean, after Sylvia?”
“You mean, am I ready to come running back to you?”
Which was, he realized, kind of what he meant. Or even exactly. “Would that be so terrible?”
“Yeah, it really would.”
“I guess,” he admitted. “So, who’s next?”
“Maybe nobody.”
“But if. Like, would it be a man or a woman?”
“Yup. One or the other.”
On TV, one of the charismatic villains, dressed incongruously in a Stetson, is strolling past the crowded booths of the Paris stamp bazaar, himself clueless. All of a sudden he stops. There’s a quick series of shots, all close-ups of stamps, accompanied by pulsing music. Then tight on the actor as he spins toward the camera. Eureka! Cary Grant’s observing all this from afar, still in the dark. Dumb fuck, Carl thought. Dumb, stupid fuck. Too dumb to live, really, though Carl knew he would. He doesn’t deserve Audrey. Or any woman, really. Well past his prime, he’s making do on charm borrowed from his own youthful self. Maybe even he knows this, and maybe that’s why he didn’t take her back at the hotel when he had the chance.
“So what happens next?” Toby wanted to know, confusing him. Was she watching the movie, too?
“After what?”
“After you lose the company.”
So, yeah, of course she was onto him. Didn’t take that head fake. “Maybe I won’t.”
“For the sake of argument, let’s assume you do.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m curious to see if you can.”
What would he do after he lost Tip Top Construction, the company his father built and loved? The company he himself always loathed but had never managed to divest himself of.
Now Cary’s standing right where the guy in the Stetson was a moment earlier, and damned if he isn’t visited by the same blinding revelation! He, too, spins toward the camera, his face aglow with understanding.
“What do you think I should do?” Carl asked.
“What you’ve always wanted to,” Toby told him.
“What’s that?”
“Poor Carlos,” she said, as if to a child, and then she was gone, the line dead.
So much for that idea. No, the truth was simple and clear. He was all kinds of broke.
There were footsteps in the gravel below, so Carl went over to the window expecting to see Sully limping up the driveway. If so, did he have any choice but to ask? How would he broach the subject? What we were talking about this morning, your offer? Of a loan? Well, actually, here’s the thing…
Except it wasn’t Sully. The man’s back was to him, so it took him a moment to recognize the balding blond head below as Raymer’s. Taking something from his trouser pocket, he pointed it at the garage door. The remote they’d been looking for out at Hilldale? How the hell had he found that? When the door didn’t budge, he took several steps closer and tried again. Carl thought about calling down and telling him that the door wouldn’t open with that or any other device for the simple reason that no automatic opener had ever been installed. Instead, fascinated, he stood at the window and watched as Raymer discovered this for himself, pulling the door up by its handle, peering inside, running his hand along the frame where the metal tracking would’ve been had there been any and then, dejected, closing the door again. Sighing visibly, he put the remote between his teeth and, staring off into space, dug vigorously at his swollen, bloody right palm with the fingernails of his left hand, which, for some reason Carl couldn’t begin to comprehend, seemed to give him some kind of relief. Though perhaps not, because when he took the device from between his teeth, he threw back his head and howled like an animal caught in a trap. Then with all his might he hurled the remote toward the street.
If this was an invasion of the man’s emotional privacy, Carl couldn’t help himself. When Raymer moved back down the driveway like a zombie, he hastened to the other end of the apartment so he could watch him from the windows fronting the street. There he saw Raymer get into the police SUV parked at the curb, and when the engine roared to life Carl expected him to pull away, but instead he got out again, crossed the street, retrieved the remote from Mrs. St. Peter’s lawn and slipped it back into his trouser pocket.
When Raymer finally left, Carl continued to peer down into the street. He was pretty sure he understood what he’d just witnessed. Raymer had suspected Sully’s son of being his wife’s lover, and now he realized he was wrong. Carl, knowing who the guilty party was, could’ve put an end to the poor guy’s suffering, but it was none of his business, was it? Still, it made him wonder if somebody of his own acquaintance was observing his every mistake while remaining unseen and unwilling to help. Wouldn’t it be a kick in the nuts if that was how things worked? If we each knew things that other people needed desperately to know, yet were forever clueless about how to help ourselves?
Back in the living room, Audrey, trying to escape Walter Matthau, has run into a theater and managed to get herself trapped onstage in the prompter’s box. Somehow Cary Grant, dumbfuck right to the end, has entered the building through a different door and is down below the stage, looking up at all the trapdoors. As Matthau, revolver in hand, crosses the stage, telling Audrey he knows right where she is, that the jig is up and that she might as well come on out, Cary tracks his footsteps by sound alone. Along the wall is a bank of levers used to spring those various doors open. But which one to pull?
This time, too, Toby answered on the first ring. “I figured out what I want,” he told her.
“What’s that, Carlos?”
“To be more like my father,” he said. The old man had been married to his mother all those years until she died and never remarried, and never, to Carl’s knowledge, even looked at another woman. He expected Toby to laugh, but instead she said, “Your wish is granted.”
Matthau, always the squirrelliest of men, is standing directly in front of the prompter’s box. All you can see of Audrey is her big, terrified eyes, maybe the most beautiful eyes Carl had ever seen. He was glad she isn’t destined to die, that Cary’s down below and, though truly a dumbfuck, he will somehow guess which lever he needs to pull. Though Carl knew all this, the suspense was still unbearable.
He glanced down at his boxers and was shocked to see they were tented.