“All right, Marianne.” He took my hands in his warm ones. “If we see something that takes in oats at one end and gives out horseshit at the other, and you say it’s a Buick, well, I say it’s a Buick, too.”
I resisted the impulse to pour the jug of wine in his lap. “You have such a poetic way of putting things. But don’t condescend to me.”
“You were condescending to me.”
“I’m sorry if you think so. But I think you’re confused.”
“Now you’re getting warm.” He released me and finished his glass, and sat back with a thoughtful look. He was composing. “I am confused, but not about that. Anyone who sees clearly sees chaos everywhere. Art is a way of temporarily setting order to confusion. Temporary and incomplete; that’s why we never run out of new art. Anyone who comes to the tools of art without that sense of confusion is an invader.”
“That’s not really fair.”
“Nothing against dabblers,” he said quickly. “Cheaper than psychotherapy. But supposedly serious artists who think they know, know, what a human being is and where he stands in relation to the universe, they’re nothing but hacks. Propagandists for false values.”
I filled his glass to shut him up. “Even if that’s true, it doesn’t apply to your drawings. It would apply if you were writing jingles for commercials or something. But you’ve said yourself that you don’t take the drawing seriously. You’re a dabbler yourself.”
“There you have it. I do them to relax and don’t care to keep them afterward. It pleases me to give them to friends; it amuses me to give them to strangers in exchange for an occasional dinner or a few days’ rent. This gallery deal amounts to doing it for a living.”
“Well? It would be an easy living.”
“All right. You enjoy screwing, and you’re good at it. Why don’t you get a low-cut dress and join those slits at the bar? One night a week, and you’d go back to New New York with twice what you brought here.”
I gripped the edge of the table and took a deep breath.
“But you only give it to friends,” he said softly. “And your friends do appreciate it.”
Before I could decide whether to wound him—he was no better at analogy than at sex—I heard someone tapping on the window next to us and looked up. It was Hawkings; I waved him in.
“Be on your best behavior, now,” I said. “This is that FBI agent I told you about.”
“Jesus! Does this place have a back door?”
“Don’t be silly,” I whispered.
“Nothing silly about healthy paranoia. Don’t you think there’s some small chance we’re being watched?”
“They don’t have an army. But even if we are, there’s nothing suspicious about Jeff passing by on his way to class—”
“But then there is something suspicious about our being here.”
“So speak clearly. We don’t have anything to hide.”
He rubbed his throat. “So why do I feel this noose, tightening around my neck?”
“Anxiety reaction. Shut up.” Hawkings had stopped at the bar before coming over, and was bringing a liter of wine. For all his cool detachment, he was always polite and considerate. That was welcome now.
I dragged a chair over for him and made introductions.
“I’ve never met a poet before,” Hawkings said. “What have you published?”
That was the right question. Usually people asked, “Have you published anything?”—to which Benny would reply, “No, I just call myself a poet.”
Benny told him the names of his books. “Haven’t written much lately. It comes and goes.”
He nodded. “I have to admit I don’t envy you. It must be a very uncertain way to live.”
“More certain than yours, I think. At least in the sense that no poet ever was killed in the line of duty.”
Hawkings smiled. “I could take issue with that. It seems to me that the death rate for poets from suicide is rather high.”
“Touché.” Well, at least they had found something in common. Morbidity.
“I don’t actually encounter very much violence. It’s mostly footwork and paperwork. There are scuffles and threats, often enough, but it’s not serious. In four years, I’ve only been fired at once.”
“Safer than the subway,” I said.
“You shot back?” Benny said. Hawkings nodded. “Did you kill him?” He nodded again. “I don’t know if I could live with that.”
“Well, you’re not trained to.” Jeff’s voice was quiet and dry, classroom style. “It was almost purely reflex. It wasn’t even an FBI matter, technically.”
His brow furrowed as he poured himself half a glass of wine. “I was snooping around a warehouse, after hours, but with a warrant. Some burglar had picked the same night.
“The place was brightly lit. I walked around the corner of a stack of crates and this man was standing there, about three meters away, with a pistol pointed directly at me. If he’d taken a moment to aim, he would have killed me. Instead, he started blasting away in my general direction. He got off four or five shots, two of which struck me, before I could draw and fire.”
“And you did take time to aim?” Benny said.
“Not at three meters, not with a laser.”
“Were you hurt badly?” I asked. He’d never mentioned this to me.
“Technically. Chest and abdomen. But I stayed conscious long enough to call for a floater. My heart stopped twice on the way to the hospital, but once I was there I was out of danger. You know how good they are at that sort of thing.”
“I do indeed.” I tried to match his dispassionate tone.
“But that’s when I decided to go back to school and get out of field work. Just another fourteen months.”
“I don’t suppose they were quite as, ah, efficient in trying to save the burglar’s life,” Benny said.
“No, they just left him for the meat, for the morgue floater. That’s not as callous as it sounds. Science can do wonders, but they haven’t yet figured out how to unscramble an egg.”
I shuddered. “Can’t—”
“It doesn’t bother you?” Benny said.
“Should it?” He sipped his wine carefully, looking at Benny over the rim of the glass. When Benny didn’t say anything, he added: “I know he didn’t grow up wanting to be a burglar; I know he didn’t spend years in school studying how to shoot FBI agents. I know that it was a complex of social pressures, perhaps social injustice, and plain bad luck, that led him to that warehouse.
“And it was plain dumb bad luck that he saw me first. If I’d seen him, I would have taken a picture, then let him finish his work and leave; I was after bigger game. Still, when he pulled that trigger he committed suicide. If there’s a moral dimension to his death, it starts and ends there.”
“I take it you’re saying you don’t think there was a moral dimension,” Benny said.
“Not insofar as it concerned him and me. I am what I am and he was what he was; if we replayed that scene a thousand times, it could only have one of two outcomes. Depending on whether he could kill me before I could clear my weapon.” He looked at me. “There was no moral decision on my part. Both of his effective shots had hit me before I pulled the trigger. I would like to meet the person saintly enough not to kill under those conditions.”
Benny poured himself another glass of wine. He was speeding up, which sometimes meant he was going to get funny.
“I follow your logic, but I don’t think I would see it that way. Haven’t you ever wondered about his family, for instance?”
“What about my family? My stepmother had a nervous breakdown. One of my line sisters said she’d never speak to me again if I didn’t quit the Bureau. She hasn’t.