I could hear the wind blowing through the park. It was supposed to rain. I’d ordered Chinese takeout and there was good stuff on TV.
But Maureen sounded so desperate. And I enjoyed going out drinking with an attractive woman other than Louise.
And something could happen. “Okay. See you there about 8:00.”
“I went down on the son of a bitch!” she yelled before I could hang up. “And he walks out on me like that. What a jerk I am.”
My mind buzzed with words like dignity and self-esteem and self-respect, but I didn’t say any of them. I listened to more ranting until we finally said goodbye. I was sure she’d been going to bed sucking on a bottle every night.
The calendar said September. The wind told me December. No rain yet, but the night wasn’t over.
So there we were. She was hoping for déjà vu to happen in the Bucking Bull-that some guy or the same guy would show up. It was a fair bet that she’d buried the degradation down deep.
The Bucking Bull is a steak house with a small bar. The decor is a cliché of snorting bulls and brave toreros in tight yellow outfits and funny black hats, at the ready with red capes in one hand and raised swords poised to strike in the other.
This night the bar was almost as cold as outdoors. I ordered black coffee and a double Courvoisier. On the music machine Wynton Marsalis was blowing the blues.
I had successfully quit smoking the year before. But since Maureen met Vitorio I’d started again. I lit up, chased my booze with coffee, and puffed my cigarette, trying to form smoke rings while Clive made faces at me. It was illegal to smoke in the bar. That was the routine while I waited. Smoking and drinking and breaking Clive’s chops.
Finally, Maureen raced in. She was wearing a shiny low-cut dress. Blue. It looked good with her pale skin and red hair. “Hey, pal,” she said, pressing her cheek against mine, dropping a blue sequined purse on the bar, and draping a small blue cape on the stool next to me. The cold didn’t seem to bother her.
That’s when I noticed her split lip. The kind you get when someone smacks you. Hard.
I thought about asking what had happened but didn’t. In spite of her battle scars she was still gorgeous, acting as if the world was her oyster. She pushed a bunch of quarters into the machine and danced over to me before the Latin music even began.
“Working?”
She nodded. Her right hand mimed holding a tray. Like many Broadway gypsies, she kept body and soul together waiting tables. She showed Clive an index finger.
“One Chivas Regal,” Clive said, pouring and delivering a double along with a bowl full of cashews.
Maureen tossed her drink down and rapped the bar with the heavy empty glass. Clive obliged with another double.
She had a long svelte body, and though she’d gotten too skinny for my taste, she was still a looker. She was also very screwed up.
One of my oddest memories is of waking up with most of those twenty or so Barbies in bed with us, and Ken, the master and daddy, clasped to Maureen’s chest.
Now I was the pal she told her sad stories to.
With a ballet dancer’s grace Maureen leaned forward, and without touching the glass, delicately sipped a taste of her drink. Smiling, she undulated-that’s the only word that fits-to the music, doing that hands-down-her-breasts move and continuing clear to her thighs.
The door to the Bucking Bull opened, bringing in the dark, cold night air, and the real bucking bull Maureen had been dreaming of. Vitorio.
I had a cigarette in my mouth, but I didn’t light it.
Maureen stopped dancing. Her body tense, she stared at Vitorio. It wasn’t all lust. There was dread there, too. Maybe that added to the sexuality. What did I know?
Vitorio glided over to Maureen, pulled her to him, kissed her, then flung her, Apache-style, across the room. Very Rudolph Valentino. Corny but it worked. They danced, looking great together.
After a big finish they settled in at the bar. Vitorio chugged Maureen’s drink and ordered another round. What the hell. She would pay for them. Maureen talked to me a couple of times to support the fiction that she and I were there together.
Pretty soon I was the invisible man. That was fine for me.
But I worried about Maureen. With each new round Vitorio got meaner and louder. He started manhandling her, grabbing her bare arms and leaving welts.
“Take it easy, friend.”
“Fuck you where you breathe. You aren’t my friend and I’ll take it any way I want to.”
I stood. Not to fight, to get out of there. To give me time to think, I grabbed a handful of cashews and popped them in my mouth. “Maureen…” I chewed and swallowed. “I’m working the new Redford film tomorrow. Have to get up early. You want a ride home?”
This was a sham. I lived on Central Park West and Maureen was across town near Second Avenue.
“No, I’ll be fine.” She leaned close and whispered in my ear, “He’s okay. He’s just hot for my body.”
Yeah, I thought.
It must have been 3 in the morning when the phone rang. “Hello?”
I could hear her sobbing. “I’m downstairs. Outside the park. I need you.”
“Maureen! What’s wrong?”
“Come and get me. Please, Eddie.”
I threw my clothes on and hurried out through the side door on 83rd Street.
The night was misty, colder than September had any right to be. Foggy, too. Murky clouds raced overhead, alternately hiding and revealing the moon.
Across the street the large, imposing black boulders in Central Park, looking like monster sentinels, cast great shadows on the street.
The wind wailed across the park, shaking the trees. Me, too. I wanted to rush back to the sanctuary of my apartment.
For a strange instant all was blackness and silence. Next I spotted a glint, then a shadow lurking just beyond the glow of the streetlamp. I ran across to the park side. Maureen stepped out of the shadows, her face highlighted by a macabre halo of lamp light.
Her blue dress, sans cape, was torn and bloody. Clutched against her chest, her sequined purse, a cell phone, and an elegant Barbie doll in a sparkling white wedding gown also specked with blood.
A yellow cab pulled up. “Taxi, folks?”
Maureen was in such a rush to get the door open she dropped her cell.
“Wait a minute,” I said, peering at the shadowy ground.
“Forget about it!” Maureen shrieked. “Hurry.”
The driver headed downtown to come around.
“No!” Maureen cried. “East. We’ve got to go across the park.”
I patted her hand. “He knows.”
She pulled her hand away. “Nobody knows.”
After a few turns we entered the park at 86th and traveled the empty road east, past angry stone walls, moonlit hundred-year-old shuddering trees, and through their ground-bound silhouettes.
Above, clouds were scudding across angry sky while Maureen mumbled variations of, “Look for him by moonlight, watch for him by moonlight, he’ll come for you by moonlight, fear for him by moonlight, fear him by moonlight…”
As we stopped on Second Avenue, thunder crashed.
Then came the deluge.
Maureen paid no attention to the rain pelting down. She jumped out at Second Avenue and ran to 81st Street. Her building was on the left, perhaps a hundred feet away, next door to a book shop.
I shoved some bills at the driver and chased after her. By the time I reached her building I was drenched. Maureen was nowhere in sight but I could hear her running up the stairs reciting her crazed mantra. “Seek the man by moonlight, snatch the man by moonlight, catch the man by moonlight, he’ll come for you by moonlight, beware of him by moonlight, despair for him by moonlight. Despair for me by moonlight.”
I raced up to the fourth landing two steps at a time and found Maureen in her apartment, soaked from the rain, sitting on the floor like a child. Her collection of Barbie dolls was piled in her lap and scattered around her. Within reach was a large, heavy frying pan and Ken in a dinner jacket, his head snapped off. Surrealistically, a bit of blood spotted his headless neck.