“Goodnight, Nick.” She kissed me on the back of my cheek, where the neck meets the ear. Then she turned and walked into the bedroom. I watched her walk.
That night I slept on the couch. The cat slept on my bed, with Kim Lazarus.
The next morning I used my room to change clothes while Kim showered. She had reorganized my dresser into a makeup stand. Moisturizing creams, eye shadows, and lip glosses were mixed in with barrettes and odd pieces of jewelry. A wallet-sized, aged black and white photograph of a German shepherd was wedged in the frame of the mirror that hung over my dresser.
“I guess I kind of took over,” Kim said as she walked into the bedroom wearing my bathrobe. Water dripped from her hair onto her shoulders and over the top curves of her full breasts. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “I like a woman here. The difference of it, I mean. When I was married, my wife was always putting fresh flowers and plant pieces around our place. It’s something I would never think to do myself. Now it’s one of the few things I remember about our marriage.” I pointed to the picture of the dog on the mirror. “We ms someho’s this?”
“Rio,” she said. “A shepherd I had when I was a kid.”
“How do you feel?”
“Really good,” she said. “The mornings are great. I feel so proud waking up, knowing I made it through another day without doing drugs. But the nights are really rough, Nick. I just associate the nighttime with getting fucked up.”
“You feel like going for a ride today, look at the leaves?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “I’d like that.”
We drove out 270 and turned off at the Comus exit, parking in the lot on Sugarloaf Mountain. We hiked the mile to the top.
It was Monday but crowded due to the peak foliage. We found a rock on the edge that was unoccupied, and had a seat. The air was cool and there was a strong breeze. As the clouds moved across the sun, we watched their shadows spread over the trees below.
The temperature began to drop. We didn’t speak for quite a while. Kim found my hand with hers and held it. I was thinking of Jimmy Broda and I know she felt it. But she let the afternoon drift by and didn’t say a word.
That night I fell asleep on the couch shortly after Kim had gone to bed.
She woke me sometime after midnight with a long kiss on my lips. She was wearing only a T-shirt. She was kneeling beside me, and the T-shirt crept above her pale, round ass as she leaned in.
“Aren’t you tired of this arrangement?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
She pulled down my blanket and straddled me, easing me into the folds of her dampness. I pushed her breasts together and kissed them, then her neck. Her hips moved with an even liquidity. I let her take me to it, and when I was there, it was if she were tearing a piece from me to keep in her lambent belly.
Afterwards I remained inside her. She laid her chest on mine and I listened to her breath.
We slept in my bed that night, with the cat between our feet. I woke early, showered, and dressed. I shook her awake and told her I was leaving to run some errands, then kissed her. Her eyes had closed again by the time I reached the door.
When I returned two hours later, she was gone. Her suitcase had been taken, as had all of the makeup and jewelry on the dresser. The rest of the apartment was orderly. There were no signs of struggle.
The photograph of the German shepherd still hung crookedly on the mirror, the only item Kim Lazarus had left behind, like the last discarded fragment of a childhood long since past.
TWENTY-FIVE
The weather that morning suddenly turned, to the kind of gray, windy October day that is a harbinger of winter. I put on my charcoal wool sportjacket over a blue denim shirt, filled the cat’s dish, secured the apartment, and headed downtown.
I had the desk clerk ring up Kim’s apartment from the lobby of her building. There was no answer and she had not been in to pick up her mail.
Out in the street, I turned my collar up and walked into the wind down the two blocks that ended at the river. I entered a seafood restaurant on the waterfront that was just opening for lunch, and had a seat at the empty bar.
The bartender was a thin man with a thin mustache wearing black slacks and a stained white shirt. He stopped cutting limes, idled over, and dropped a bev-nap on the bar in front of me. Then he ran a waxy fingernail along the edge of his mustache.
“What can I get you?”
“A bottle of Bud. And an Old Grand-Dad. Neat.”
He served me and returned to his cutting board. I downed the shot and lit a smoke, then drank deeply of the beer. When the bottle was empty, I ordered another and a shot to keep it company.
I watched a yacht leave the marina while I killed my second round. I settled up and walked back out, up the street and to my car. Heading northwest, I stopped at a liquor store and bought a sixpack and a pint of Old Crow.
Before my next stop I slammed two cans of beer and had a fierce pull off the bottle. I wasn’t really sure where I was going, but it didn’t much matter. I knew at that point that I was spiraling down into a black binge.
I parked in front of May’s, a glorified pizza parlor on Wisconsin between Georgetown and Tenley Circle. To the left of the dining room was a bar run by a fat Greek named Steve Maroulis. Maroulis also made book from behind the bar.
“ Ella, Niko!” he shouted when I walked in.
“Steve,” I said, and took a stool at the bar next to a red-faced geezer in an Orioles hat.
“What’ll it be?” Maroulis asked cheerfully, with a smile on his melonlike face.
“A Bud and a shot.”
“You still drinkin’ Grand-Dad?”
“Yeah.”
He put both in front of me and I drained the shot glass. I lit a smoke and put the matches on top of the pack, then slid them neatly next to my bottle of beer. All settled in.
“Sorry to hear about Big Nick,” Maroulis said.
“He had a life.”
“Tough sonofabitches, those old Greeks.”
“That they were.”
“Not like us.”
“No,” I said. “Not like us.”
I drank my beer and watched a soap opera on the bar television. A pretty-boy actor was doing his impersonation of a man, while the young actress opposite him was trying to convince the audience that she could love a guy who wore eye makeup.
I ordered another round and finished watching the show. When the next one came on, the same garbage with different theme music, I asked Maroulis to switch the channel.
“Anything,” I said. “Christ, even The Love Boat would be better than this shit. How about a movie?” I was looking at the stacks of tapes Maroulis had lined up next to the VCR.
“No movies!” the geezer next to me declared, and pounded his fist on the bar to make his point. “Haven’t seen a movie since Ben Hur. Don’t plan to either. They’re all shit.”
“All right, old-timer,” I said. “No movies.”
And, I might have added, “Welcome to the ’90s.” I thought of T. J. Lazarus, another senior who claimed he hadn’t seen a movie in years. But there had been a brand-new television and VCR in his house. Probably one of the gifts from Kim that he had mentioned. I thought of Kim’s state-of-the-art equipment in her barren apartment. But from the looks of her collection, she hadn’t purchased a record since Don Kirshner’s heyday. And I thought of Pence, with his unconnected recorder, a pathetic reminder of the gift from his missing grandson. Gifts.
The geezer next to me was still talking. I don’t know if he was talking to me. I smoked another cigarette and moved the ashes around in the ashtray with the lit end. In my other hand I held the empty shot glass and made circles with it on the bar. I finished my beer.
“Steve,” I said, calling him over. “You still got that phone in the office upstairs?”
“Yeah?”
“I need to use it.”
“Go ahead.”
He handed me an unsolicited beer as I stepped away from the bar. I put the Camels in my breast pocket and passed the kitchen, tripping once as I went up a narrow staircase. I found the small office and had a seat at a government-issue desk that faced a dirty window overlooking the alley. The phone directory was under the desk.