“I’m tired of crawling,” I said, “Let’s screw.”
“You must learn to wait, baby,” she said, fondling me, my hard on so big it had become painful to crawl.
“I made you out of my head, and I want to make love now,” I said. “Here and now.”
“OK,” she said. “Though, sweetie, it will be better if we wait. I know how these things are. There’s hardly any room in here for anything.”
I couldn’t wait. I held her down and plunged, bleeding, into her dark cut, occupied her, an escaped soldier, desperate to the final extent. She sang in my ear: of what it is to dance on the head of a pin.
I went off without feeling it, a short wistful spasm, more smoke than flame, the dust of regret on my tongue.
And then I was too tired to move.
“Come on,” she said. “My lover, my love, I want you again.”
“I’m tired,” I said. “I want to rest for a while.”
“Don’t you love me?” she asked. “Tell me you love me.”
“I love you,” I said, unwilling to argue with an imaginary woman in the black of night (in an escape tunnel miles away from light and freedom). “I need to sleep for a few hours to regain my strength.”
“Sleep, my love,” she said. “Forget everything that worries you. Put your head on my breasts and sleep.”
So I did.
I had the idea someone was following me. After six blocks, ducking in and out of places, he was gone. Later, there were two others, incompetents, easy to get rid of.
QUEENS WOMAN KILLED IN BATHTUB — headline in the early News. No mention of the Cripple Killer. (Forgotten already?) On page three: MARRIAGE CRUMBLING, KILLS WIFE, MOTHER-IN-LAW, BYSTANDER.
A woman stabbed to death in Central Park in broad daylight. The assailant, according to observers, was dark, foreign-looking, and had long hair.
I have to stay out of the park.
Called home. When he answered I said, disguising my voice, that it was my painful duty to inform him that his son was missing in action.
“Don’t think I don’t know who it is,” he said.
It was after nine, turning dark, when I arrived at Parks’ place. The pacifist in the middle of a fight with his wife. They turned off when I came in, pretending it was all right, the smell of their heat in the air.
I come in peace, Parks.
FIVE
After Christmas Rosemary Byrd
Gave Curtis Parks No Peace
AFTER CHRISTMAS Rosemary Byrd gave him no peace. For weeks, for his sins, she haunted his office. For his virtue. It was his explanation of what had happened, his way of seeing it. He did what any love-starved American man would have done in his place. To deceive his wife was hard on his sense of himself, though necessary.
For the first months of it, his affair with Rosemary made him happier with himself than a man of thirty-two, without accomplishments or expectation of some, had a right to be. Even Carolyn seemed to like him better, though perhaps it was that he was home less. And Steiner, still following him from time to time, he suspected, had returned to the once-a-week meetings in his office, his student again. When there was more ease between them, more trust, he would let him know that he knew he was following him, that it had to stop. Meanwhile, it was enough that they talked together, that he was influencing the most talented student of his short career, making a mark on his life. The confrontation would have to wait. In pursuit of too much at once, he might lose all. He kept his life in fragile balance.
In March, with less pain than he anticipated, Curt wrote the first chapter of his book. Wrote it off as if it had been in him all the time. About the time of its completion, the late-night anonymous phone calls began again.
The calls had no discernible pattern. They came and went. Sometimes there was breathing on the other end — harsh breathing — and he had the illusion, listening like an eavesdropper, that he knew who it was. Sometimes whoever was there hung up immediately. His wife suggested that maybe silent calls, like silent music, were a new fashion, but he saw that despite her joke they were making her tense. And her tension, her barely controlled hysteria, made him tense. Without saying so, she blamed him for them.
When he mentioned the calls to Rosemary, not accusing her but implying that she might know something about them, she cried. He stroked her hair, said it didn’t matter. She said she had thought several times of calling — had talked to his wife in her imagination — but hadn’t. After they made love, a matter of life and death, she confessed that once, a long time ago, before they were close, she had out of desperation called. He didn’t know what to believe — if once, conceivably it was twice or ten times. How many anonymous callers did he have? He pleaded with her, no matter what, not to do it again. Her dark eyes turned darker. She accused him with a bitterness he hadn’t noticed before of not believing her, of lack of trust. He admitted it, disliking himself for not trusting.
“First you told me you never called, Rosemary, then you said that you had once. If I trusted you the first time, I would have been deceived.”
“Is that so bad?” She covered her body with a bathrobe. “Do you never deceive me?”
“Do you trust me absolutely?”
“Absolutely,” she said, mocking him.
They made up before separating, but the fight — their first as lovers — lingered in aftertaste. Curt called to apologize, to tell her, anguished at something lost, that he trusted, wanted to. In repayment, she told him of another call, a more recent one. One that had caused him no trouble, she said, since the line had been busy. He groaned, said not to do it again. She said, her voice small, that she would try not to, though could make no promise.
He received two silent calls the next week. When he mentioned them in passing, Rosemary swore they weren’t her, asked him, rejecting his touch, to leave. Though he apologized, she was adamant. She couldn’t love a man, she said, who didn’t trust her. When he left she ran after him and they made up, holding each other, on the steps of the subway. “I don’t lie to you,” she said. “I know,” he said. “I know,” believing himself. Looking up, he thought he saw him in the distance, hovering above the landscape, his wild hair among the branches of the trees like an apparition.
In a dream Curt called his student on the phone to confront him. He answered silently. “Have you been calling me?” he asked the silence. There was no answer. “If you don’t stop, I give you my word, I have no choice but to fail you. You leave me no choice.” There was crying on the other end, sobs. “It’s doing neither of us any good,” he said, touched by his pain. “It has to stop.” There was a moan, a strangling sound, then the connection was dead. Curt woke with a revelation: the boy wanted to talk to him, needed to (the reason for silent calls), but each time he tried, couldn’t. He remembered himself at twenty — more like seventeen or eighteen — calling a girl for a date and then losing his nerve in the middle of dialing. A few times, hanging up when the girl answered, unable to remember what it was he had planned to say, afraid of seeming a fool, of being what he seemed. Though twenty years old, Christopher was in his dealings with people very much a child — forward in some ways, backward in others. For example, Curt could not recall having seen him alone with a girl, though a handsome kid, attractive (he imagined) to women. Sometimes he had noticed him, looking superior, standing at the edge of a group. Always at the edge, looking on. His idea of his student’s life, a lonely child himself, pained him.