I don't know how long I was out, but it must have been some time. It was that fathoms-deep, bottom-of-the-ocean sleep where you don't even remember closing your eyes, much less any dreams. On waking, you feel as if gravity has increased tenfold. You can barely raise a hand.
I think what woke me was the flickering, but that may only be my selective memory. Something flickering back and forth across my closed eyelids. I'm not sure, because it might have been her voice. A soft, urgent susurration inches from my ear. Lots of S's. Did they start the unconscious alarm going inside my sleeping skull?
Impossible to say and ridiculous to try. This is what happened: I awoke to her voice whispering very nearby. The room was pitch-black except for the flickering somewhere. And noises. There were more noises, voices, other voices besides hers. But hers was so close. I could almost feel the hair inside my ear moving from the force of her breath.
Veronica was saying, "Stealing. It was always stealing. Something of yours. Sex, sacred things. It was so close, Sam. Sometimes it was so close it was inside me –"
I had been so deeply asleep that despite the distinct flickering in front of my open eyes, it didn't register above her voice. I blinked a few times but didn't move, like an animal caught in the headlights of its doom. She kept talking. Low, sexy, as intimate as a lover's fingers stroking your back.
My eyes finally focused on what they were seeing across the room. Her television was on, playing a video of us in her bed, making love. I had never known she filmed us doing it, never seen a camera in her bedroom. Nevertheless there we were, rolling and tumbling, making the secret noises you think about afterward and love to remember. All of it on tape, Veronica's secret home movie.
How long had she been talking to me? How long had she been sitting on the floor next to the couch, a foot away, talking and watching this film while I slept? What kind of person would do this?
She said something I didn't understand and laughed. A lewd, joyous laugh that might have come in the middle of terrific sex. An electric zap of fear shot through my body. This was madness, velvety-soft but complete.
For however long, although it could not have been more than a few seconds, I lay there thinking as fast as I could about what to do. But there was no good answer because demons lived here, serpents and ogres, creatures from deep inside this woman's disturbed consciousness that lived in their own world and had no space or time for anything else.
Because I could think of nothing to say, I uneasily watched the television. The picture cuts from her bedroom to a busy New York street. I come walking along and enter Hans Lachner's bookstore, the place where Veronica and I first met. This part of her film meant nothing to me until I saw the suit I was wearing. Then I shuddered. It was a blue and white seersucker I had bought a long time ago at Brooks Brothers. Two years before, Cassandra had accidentally knocked a bottle of permanent black ink across both the jacket and pants. The dry cleaner said it would be impossible to save the suit, so I gave it to the Salvation Army. Two years before. Veronica was filming me then? How long had she been following me? How long had she been circling my life before we ever met?
I moved to get up, but she put a hand on my thigh and gently held me there.
"A few seconds more, please! I was going to give this tape to you for Christmas. You have to see this next part before you go. I want to watch it together. It's a big surprise." Her beautiful face was turned to the television and she was smiling. A child's smile, full of excitement and expectation. Slowly I eased back onto the couch. There was enough adrenaline in my body to bring three bodies back to life.
The film abruptly cuts to some kind of formal dance. The women are all wearing long white dresses, the men tuxedos. Hairdos announce the time period. Almost all of the younger men have too-long hair, mustaches or beards, whether it looks good on them or not. The young women wear their hair very long and ironed straight, as if they're all trying to look like soulful folk singers, Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell. It's the sixties.
Pauline Ostrova and Edward Durant Jr. dance up to the camera and stop. I put a hand over my mouth. Grainy and awkward as the film is, I remember her face. That wide mouth, the small eyes. I remember her. Thirty years have passed. I am a man well into middle age, pushing a heavy wheelbarrow full of life and experiences in front of me. Yet on seeing Pauline, I do exactly the same thing I did whenever I saw her, any time, any place: I gulp. Guuulp. Seeing Pauline Ostrova always made me gulp. In excitement, raw fear, adoration. Just like a fool, like any boy chocked full of hormones and jumbled love, his heart fireworking over the most interesting girl he had ever seen.
It was the first time I had seen Durant Jr. outside of the photographs his father had shown me. It added a dimension to the son I had never sensed. For he was a big man although he moved with great lightness and grace. To look at him, I would have guessed he was either an athlete or a dancer in Broadway musicals. The handsome one in the second row of the chorus of Oklahoma!, wearing blue overalls and a smile that makes you think he's having a hell of a time up there onstage.
The couple mugs for the camera. Edward dips his head in front of Pauline's. She pulls his ear to get him out of the way. Both of their faces are so animated! They go on like that, young and attractive, hamming it up and having such a good time together.
Seeing them on that summer night years ago made me long to freeze the film. Keep that frame of them smiling forever, holding each other. I was barely able to ask, "Where did you get it?"
"There are other clips of her on the tape. I went around Crane's View asking people who knew her if they had home movies from that time. All of the ones I found are here. You'll see.
"This came from Edward Durant. When I told him what I wanted to do, he handed it right over. It was a summer dance at their country club." She stood up and turned the television off. Ejecting the tape from the video machine, she slid it out and brought it to me. "I want you to go now. Merry Christmas, Sam."
Her mood changed so quickly that I wasn't sure how to react. Then I remembered that a few minutes ago she was watching a secret fuck film and whispering weird things in my ear. That was enough to get me going again. I stood up.
"Will you be all right?"
"Do you care, Sam? Really, what do you care about me?"
Leaving her building, I walked out into a snowstorm. Luckily I'd taken the train into the city. After dinner with Cass, I planned on spending the night at a hotel.
Standing at the curb looking for a taxi, I thought I heard something over the street noise from way above, someone calling me. Looking up through the swirling snow, I saw a head sticking out a window halfway up the side of her building. It was hard to tell, but I thought it was Veronica. Wasn't that a patch of white on the face? Her bandage? She was shouting down at the street. I couldn't make out what she was saying. Then she started waving an arm as if she needed even more emphasis. What could it be? What more could she want after all that had already happened that afternoon? A few moments went by. I thought about turning around and going back to see but right then a taxi hissed up in front of me. I opened the door and looked up at her, or whoever it was, shouting down through the snow. What she said before was right: What did I care about her now? After the friendship and intimacy, the travel and talk, the wonderful hours in her arms. After her tricks and deceptions, lies and flat-out frightening acts. What did I care? Not enough to stop me from getting into that bright yellow New York taxicab and riding off into the snowy night.