"No, what does it mean?"
"It means who wouldn't let me touch her after the rape?"
"Oh, is that what it gets down to?"
"I guess it gets down to I'm not the one who raped you, Eileen. I didn't rape you, and I didn't come at you with a knife, either, and if you've got me mixed up in your head with either of those two . . . cocksuckers, okay? . . . then there's nothing I can do to help you."
"Who asked for your help?"
"I thought I was here to ..."
"Nobody asked for your help."
"She said maybe I could ..."
"Nobody needs your goddamn help."
"Well, okay, I guess I misunderstood."
"And let's get one thing straight, okay?" Eileen said. "I didn't ask to be a victim."
"Neither did I," he said.
She looked at him.
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"The only difference is I haven't made a career of it," he said. "I'm sorry," Karin said, "our time is up."
The house Tommy was now living in was not quite a mile from the church Carella used to attend when they moved up here to Riverhead. Our Lady of Sorrows, it was called. He'd stopped going to mass when he was fifteen, sixteen, he could hardly remember now, because of something stupid one of the priests had said to him, but that hadn't kept him from attending the Friday night dances in the church basement. Thinking back on it now, it seemed to him that most of his early sex life was defined by those dances in the church basement. Had God known what was happening on that dance floor? All that steamy adolescent activity, had God known what was going on? If so, why hadn't He sent down a lightning bolt or something?
And if God Himself wasn't noticing, if He was busy someplace else, visiting plagues or something, then couldn't the priest see all that feverishly covert grinding, all that surreptitious clutching of buttock and breast, all that secret dry-humping there in the semi-dark? Standing there beaming at his flock while they slow-danced their way to virtual orgasm, didn't the priest at least suspect that no one was silently saying five Hail Marys? Father Giacomello, his name was. The younger priest. Always smiling. The older one was the one who'd scolded Carella for coming to confession at the busiest time of the year.
Not a mile from where he stood tonight, watching the garage from the shadow of the trees across the street, waiting for Tommy to come out, if he was coming out. Angela had told Carella that her husband had a bimbo. Well, okay, if there was a bimbo, this was as good a time as any to be seeing her. He'd been kicked out of the nest, this was as good a time as any to seek comfort and solace, //there was a bimbo.
He waited in the dark.
Playing cop with his own brother-in-law.
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He shook his head.
There were roses in bloom, he could smell the roses on the still night air. They used to walk home from those Friday night dances, roses blooming in the soft summer night, he and his sister when she got old enough, walking home together, talking about things, talking about everything. At the time, he was closer to her than to any other human being on earth, he guessed, but he hated it nonetheless when she came to the dances because he felt she was intruding on his sexual freedom. How could a person dry-hump Margie Gannon when a person's own sister was dancing with some guy not four feet away? And, also, how could you keep an eye on your sister to make sure some sex fiend wasn't dry-humping her while you were busy trying to dry-hump Margie Gannon? It got complicated sometimes. Adolescence was complicated.
He remembered talking things over with his father.
So many things.
He remembered telling his father one time - the two of them alone in the shop late at night, the aroma of good things baking in the oven, breads and cakes and pastries and muffins and rolls, he would never forget those smells as long as he lived - he remembered telling him that the longest walk he ever had to make in his life was across a dance floor to ask some girl to dance, any girl, a pretty one, an ugly one, just taking that walk across the floor to where she was sitting, that was the longest walk in the world.
"It's like torture," he said. "I feel like I'm walking a mile across the desert, you know?"
"I know."
"Over hot sand, you know?"
"Yes, of course."
"To where she's sitting, Pop. And I hold out my hand, and I say Would you like to dance, or How about the next dance, or whatever, standing there, everybody watching me, everybody knowing that in the next ten seconds she's gonna say Get lost, jerk . . ."
"No, no," his father said.
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"Sometimes, Pop, yeah, I mean it. Well, not those exact words, but you know they'll say like I'm sorry or I'm tired just now or I already promised this one, whatever, but all it means is Get lost, jerk. And then, Pop, you have to walk back to where you came from, only now everybody knows she turned you down ..."
"Terrible," his father said, shaking his head.
"... and the walk back is even longer than the walk when you were coming over, the desert is now a hundred miles long, and the sun is scorching hot, and you're gonna drop dead before you reach the shade, and everybody's laughing at you . . ."
"Terrible, terrible," his father said, and began laughing to himself.
"Don't they knowT' Carella said. "Pop, don't they realize?"
"They don't know," his father said, shaking his head. "But they're so beautiful, even the ugly ones."
There was activity across the street. The door to the room over the garage opening, a rectangle of light spilling onto the platform just outside the door. Tommy. Reaching inside to snap off the interior lights. Only the spot over the steps shining now. He locked the door and then came down the steps. He was wearing jeans and a striped polo shirt. Head bent, watching the steps as he came down. Carella ducked deeper into the shadows.
Was there a bimbo?
He gave him a decent lead, and then fell in behind him. Not too close to be spotted, not too distant to lose him. Tailing my own brother-in-law, he thought, and shook his head again.
He'd once talked with his father about faithfulness. Or rather listened to his father talking about it, listened carefully to every word because by then Carella was old enough to realize that his father had come through many of these same things himself and was able to discourse on them without sounding like the wise old man of the world. Without sounding like - a father. Sounding like just another man you happened
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to like a lot. A friend. Possibly the best friend Carella had or ever would have.
This was just before he married Teddy. A week before the wedding. He and his father were in the bakery shop - all of their important conversations seemed to take place near the ovens, the aroma of baking bread wafting on the air - and Carella was experiencing what he guessed could be denned as prenuptial jitters, wondering out loud whether or not he was about to enter a contract that might be, well, too limiting. Too restrictive, you know what I mean, Pop?
He guessed he felt the way he had when Angela started coming to those Friday night dances with him, that his turf was being invaded, his space threatened. He'd never told his father that he used to dry-hump Margie Gannon on the dance floor, or that his sister's presence had cramped his style somewhat. Neither had he ever mentioned that he'd later moved onward and upward to the blissful actuality of truly humping Margie in the backseat of the family Dodge, but he suspected his father knew all this, understood that his only son had been leading a fairly active sex life with a wide variety of women before he'd met Teddy Franklin, the woman he was now about to marry, the woman to whom he was about to commit the rest of his life.
He was troubled, and his father realized it.
He'd never signed any kind of contract in his entire life, not for a car, not for an apartment, not for anything, and here he was about to sign a contract that would be binding forever. He'd never sworn to anything in public except to uphold the laws of the city, state, and country when he took his oath as a policeman, but now he was about to swear before his relatives and friends and her relatives and friends that he would love her and keep her and all that jazz so long as they both should live. It was scary. In fact, it was terrifying.