“I haven’t seen her,” Della said.
“This morning, you mean?”
“I haven’t seen her in a couple of days.” Della thought of her last sight of Sara. She’d looked the way women did whose husbands slapped them around, but Della couldn’t imagine Tony doing that and so had supposed it was something else that was eating Sara. Maybe the fact that she’d never had any kids. Women without kids looked that way sometimes, Della knew, all hollowed out.
“Tony give me a key to the house,” the man told her. “But, you know, I didn’t want to… barge in, maybe scare somebody, you know?” He drew the keys from the pocket of a blue parka and offered them to her. “So, maybe you could take a look inside. Make sure there ain’t nothing wrong.”
She didn’t know how to refuse, so she took the keys and walked with the man back across the street, unlocked Sara’s front door, and walked into the house.
“Sara?” she called. “Sara, you here?”
She turned and noticed that the man remained outside, and suddenly he seemed astonishingly shy to her, and good, the sort of man who turned away from the embarrassment of others. “I don’t think she’s home,” she told him.
The man stepped to the door but did not come in. “Would you mind looking upstairs? She could be up there. Sleeping or… something.”
She felt at ease with him now. There were certain men who made women feel that way, that they lived only to protect you, that it was their mission. Mike made her feel that way. “Okay,” she said.
She made her way up the stairs. “Sara?” she called again. “Sara?”
At the top of the stairs she could see into the master bedroom. Tony’s clothes lay on the floor beside the bed, and the bed itself was unmade.
“She’s not here,” she told the man when she came back out of the house. “I looked all over.”
He seemed saddened by this news but not surprised. “Okay, thanks,” he said.
They walked back to the man’s car. She stood beside it as he got in. She felt no fear of him now, no dread. It surprised her that she wanted to know more about him, maybe ask him how despite being so big and looking so scary, he had achieved this grace.
STARK
She was experienced, as he expected, and preferred to be on top. She kept her blouse on but unbuttoned the sleeves and rolled them up to the elbow. Her breathing came in quick, rhythmic spurts, and on the downstroke, little pleasurable bursts of vulgarity broke from her. “Oh, shit,” she groaned, then took a deep breath. “Oh, fuck,” she gasped. She reared back, swept her hair from her eyes, and switched to a grinding motion. “Oh, Christ.” Her movements grew more rapid. “I’m going to get it,” she said with a quick laugh. “I’m going to get it, baby.”
Then she did, and after that rolled off him and lay on her back and gazed at the ceiling.
“Do you know what they call it in the South?” she asked. “When you get it, I mean. A nut. They call it getting your nut.” She shifted onto her side, rested her head in her hand, and stared at him. “Did it bother you… about keeping my blouse on?”
“No.”
“I’ve had some… problems, so…”
He touched her lips with his finger. “It didn’t bother me.”
She brushed back a strand of his silver hair. “You’re probably married. With a couple of kids.”
He neither confirmed nor denied this.
She remained silent for a time, then said, “I took the room just for the day. I do that once a month or so. To stay alive.”
She was trying to explain something he’d heard before, that life was inadequate, a quick fuck at the Plaza just another survival tool. And why not? Nothing lasted. Nothing held. Life was just a long improvisation. You feinted left or right, and by that means dodged the blow.
“So, what do you think… Frank,” she said. “Maybe we could save the country again sometime.”
He shook his head.
She looked at him piercingly, and he saw a wound open up inside her. “Just not interested, is that it?” she asked.
Inevitably, the time had come to lie to her. “I’m leaving town.”
Inevitably, she did not believe it. “Whatever you say, mystery man.” She shrugged indifferently, but there was a bitter glint in her eye. “Too bad.” She pulled herself from the bed and began to dress. He took the cue and did the same.
A few minutes later they strolled out of the Plaza and made their way toward Fifth Avenue. The circular fountain sprayed its fine mist. Chauffeurs were gathered in small knots, smoking.
“Pretty,” she said. There was a mist in her eyes. “So pretty.”
They walked along the avenue. The silence between them lengthened and grew heavier with each step.
At last she stopped and faced him. “May I ask you something? Do you do this… a lot?”
The time had come to cut the cord, and he knew that any effort to do it slowly would only make things worse. “Every chance I get,” he said.
“Does it matter… who?”
“No.”
“How very… romantic.” Her tone suddenly grew brittle. “I should have guessed as much. All you mystery men are shits.”
He gave no response but only stepped over to the curb and hailed a cab while she watched him, fuming now, from a few feet away.
When the cab pulled over he got in. “Four forty-five West Nineteenth,” he said.
She bolted forward and rapped at the window, her eyes flaring vehemently. “Fuck you, mystery man.”
The cab pulled away and he fixed his gaze on the rearview mirror, where he could see the driver’s eyes peering at him. They were dark and sunken and they reminded him of Marisol. Her voice returned to him in a ghostly whisper, Sabes que me matara. You know he’s going to kill me.
He closed his eyes and let the black curtain fall. When he opened them again, the cab was turning onto Nineteenth Street, and it had begun to rain.
ABE
The old awning resisted him like a creature with a will of its own.
“Come on now,” he blurted out impatiently.
Abe gave the crank a furious jerk, and the awning creaked out a little, covering just enough of the sidewalk to allow pedestrians to take cover beneath it but not enough for the side flap to display the full name of the bar. Rain-soaked strangers would think they were scurrying into a tavern called “McPhe,” not one named for its first owner, Casey McPherson.
“Lucille’s not coming in tonight,” Abe said when Jorge arrived a few minutes later.
“In one of her moods,” Jake added.
Jorge shrugged. “Yah, okay, thas goo.” He hurried into the back.
“Thas goo,” Jake repeated with a laugh. “You could tell him you’d just eaten your own fingers and he’d say ‘Yah, okay, thas goo’.”
Jake was nearly seventy, with sloping shoulders and a shrunken face. He seemed to slither more than walk. Behind his thin lips, it was easy to imagine a forked tongue. “As for Lucille, she should see a doctor. They got pills for it now. I seen them advertised on TV. You pop a pill and it’s blue skies all the way.”
Abe had advised Lucille to take medication, but it had done no good. Lucille called her dark mood The Weight, and he knew how it worked in her, falling before midnight and growing heavier every minute so that she felt that she was being slowly squeezed to death, each second dropping upon her like a stone. By dawn she’d have lost all desire to open her eyes. And why not? All she’d see was a cramped, dingy room, chairs littered with old newspapers, piles of square white boxes from Tan’s Golden Dragon. Abe wondered how long it had been since she’d ordered anything but moo goo gai pan. That should have told her that it was getting worse, he thought, that The Weight would continue to fall upon her until it crushed everything-touch, taste, smell-left her with no sensation whatever except the impossible heaviness of the surrounding air.
And yet, for all that, she’d been a first-class singer when he’d met her years before. Like the best bar singers, she’d always known what the customers expected of her, how they wanted to have their spirits lifted. She’d been able to do that because she’d understood that in every man there was a knight, and in every woman a lady of the lake. The knights were fallen and the women were faded, but their vision of themselves lived on. If you kept that vision in mind, you could make each customer feel special. For years Lucille had accomplished that extraordinary feat, but at some point The Weight had crushed it, and she’d stopped singing except by rote, just mouthing the lyrics to no one in particular. He’d briefly thought of letting her go but lacked the heart to do it, and so simply had done nothing but helplessly watch The Weight grow heavier each year.