“You could not be more incorrect,” Jerome said, with startling gravity after so much hilarity. “You underestimate her. Keeping her back at the station when she should be out on the street. She can think rings around Miller.”
“That’s damning with faint praise,” Raymer said. “Anyway, my point is she thinks I’m a fool.”
“You are a fool,” Jerome said, again surprising him. “So am I. So’s just about everybody we know, dude. I mean, look around. Who’s not a damn fool most of the time?”
“Yeah,” Raymer said, “but there’s a difference between being a fool and looking like one.” From inside the men’s room came more strangled laughter. “Look, I know you’re a fool, Jerome. You don’t have to convince me of that. You’re in love with a fucking car.”
At this Jerome’s eyes narrowed, as if Raymer had crossed a very serious line.
“But still, people don’t laugh at you.”
“That’s because I refuse to tolerate disrespectful behavior. I dress well. I speak well. I have excellent posture. I’ve got a great apartment. I drive the ’Stang. People take one look at me and decide to fuck with somebody else. And of course I’m armed. People do respect that, especially in a Negro male.”
“Yeah, but this is exactly what I’m talking about,” Raymer insisted. The second beer was kicking in, and he felt a terrible drunken urgency to make Jerome understand. “I’m armed, too. Maybe I don’t take my gun out and wave it around like some people, but it’s right here on my hip where everybody can see it. In all the years I’ve been a cop, I’ve unholstered my weapon only once, and the man I pointed it at coldcocked me. I might as well have been holding a Q-tip. Don’t tell me shit like that happens to a man whose true destiny is police work.”
“Doug,” Jerome said, “people voted for you. Okay, maybe they’ve had some fun at your expense, but they voted for you, man.”
“They were probably thinking of all the crimes they could commit,” he said miserably. “Things I’d never get to the bottom of. If I found any evidence against them, I’d lose it.”
“Only in your imagination — which I have to say is deeply weird — was that garage-door remote evidence of anything.”
Raymer took a deep breath, the way you do before saying or doing something you know better than to say or do. “Tell me something. Why do you think she married me in the first place?”
“Beats me,” Jerome said, as if he’d already given the matter a lot of thought and felt no need to hesitate at all.
“Thanks.”
“Dude. You’re seeking a rational explanation for an irrational behavior. Why do people fall in love? Nobody knows. They just do.”
Raymer had heard this opinion voiced more than once, but was it true? He knew exactly why he’d fallen in love. Becka was beautiful and sexy and clearly out of his league. He supposed, in hindsight, that last attribute should have been a red flag. It might’ve been a good idea to ask what she saw in him that other women had been so completely blind to. But who, confronted with such good fortune, asks sensible questions? If a girl like Becka wanted you, you’d be an idiot not to want her back, wouldn’t you?
“But…you were surprised, right?” Raymer said, recalling Jerome’s reaction when he first introduced him to Becka. “Admit it. You thought, Wow! This woman’s going to marry Raymer?”
Jerome shrugged. “Sure. That’s correct.”
“Thanks again.” Dejected, he rose and went back around the bar. “Gert,” he called. “I’m drawing myself another beer.”
This produced a muffled grunt of acknowledgment, so he laid another two bucks on the bar.
“Okay, I was surprised,” said Jerome when he returned, “but you’re imagining things. I didn’t think she was too good for you…not exactly.”
“No, not exactly.”
“It was more like…”
Raymer waited for him to split the hair he was squinting at in his mind’s eye.
“It’s more like you two weren’t interested in the same things. I mean, Becka liked to work out and listen to jazz and read and travel and drink good wine and dance and—”
“Stop.”
“What?”
“You’re just rephrasing my original question in a way that makes me feel even worse.”
“But she married you. She must’ve seen something she liked. Same with your job. People voted for you. They saw something, too.”
“You said the two weren’t related.”
Jerome sighed. “I was wrong about that. They’re related, okay? Satisfied now?”
From behind the racing form, Gert grumbled, “I voted for you.”
Gert voted? “Seriously?” Raymer said. “Why?”
“I don’t recall,” he said. “But I did.”
Now Raymer sighed again, unsure how to feel. He scrolled back through the conversation, troubled by something Jerome had said. “Becka liked to dance?”
Jerome made a face. If he knew this, Raymer should’ve known, too, was the point intended. Toward the end Becka’s primary grievance was his inattention, his knack for missing things that were “right in front of his face,” like that extra “not,” things he’d see plainly if he just opened his eyes. Including, apparently, her unhappiness. So yes, his failures as a husband did dovetail neatly with his failings as a policeman. Of course they were related.
“I should’ve danced with her,” he said, the very idea sending a new wave of despair coursing through him. Because she really was a good dancer, sensual and provocative in the movement of her hips, always just a little slower than the music seemed to call for. He could practically see it now, like a video playing in front of him.
“Do you even know how to dance?” Jerome wondered.
“I could’ve learned.”
Jerome looked doubtful. “Stop punishing yourself. Bottom line? You weren’t rich, so it must’ve been love. It just didn’t last.”
“Yeah, but why not? It’s not like I changed. I didn’t trick her. Right to the end, I was the same guy she married.”
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe she wanted you to change. Grow. Try new things. Expand your horizons.”
“She was my horizon. I was supposed to be her horizon.”
“That’s asking a lot.”
“No, she found a new horizon instead, and now I’ll never find out who he was.” Three beers. Every time. Just like clockwork. Drunk, maudlin, pathetic. “If I knew who this horizon was, maybe I’d know what was wrong with me, horizon-wise. Suppose I meet somebody new? How do I keep from doing the same thing and losing her, too.”
“Maybe it was something you didn’t do.”
“Like what?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask.”
“The right one’s dead.”
“Ask Charice, then.”
“How would she know?”
Jerome shrugged. “She’s a woman?”
“Chief?” said Charice at that very instant, her voice startlingly near on the radio. For a moment it felt to Raymer as if she’d been privy to their entire conversation and had finally decided to add her two cents’ worth. “Are you at the Arms? Because you need to get out of there.”
“I’m across the street.”
A moment of confused silence, and then: “The only thing across the street from the Morrison Arms is Gert’s.”
“That’s where we are.”
“We?”
“Jerome and me.”
“My brother is at Gert’s Tavern? With the lowlifes and scumbags and derelicts? That Gert’s?”