A Dark Matter (25 page)

(The shadowy third shivered with delight. Slowly, it snaked a cold arm over the Eel’s shoulders.)

—You want to be horrified, Ms. Truax? I can probably horrify you, if that’s what you really want. What you’re here about, the reason you asked us to meet you at this hotel, has nothing to do with some vague problem the New York office saw “brewing.” It’s a lot more specific than that, isn’t it? The powers that be want you to investigate the sexual harassment going on in this chapter. A pattern of sexual harassment. Or to be more accurate, Ms. Truax, they want you to ask around, discreetly, without ever doing anything that might actually uncover anything sordid, and after a couple of days go back and report that the rumors are unfounded. But they are not unfounded. One of us makes life very uncomfortable for some of the younger women working under her supervision. I’ve been waiting for someone to come around here looking into this matter, and you’re it, and I’m saying, yes, this horrible behavior is going on. But I’m not going to tell you who it is. That’s your job, Ms. Truax
.

—You want me to tell you something about me that nobody knows? All right, Lee. Why not? I don’t imagine you’re going to tell the police or anything, are you? This is like a trust exercise. It is, right? I know how this works. And I don’t think you’ll blame me, either
.

(Here the shadowy third tightened its grip on the Eel’s shoulders; here, lying between smooth white sheets and too fearful to turn off the bedside light, I closed my eyes.)

—The reason you won’t blame me is because you’re going to understand what I did, even if you won’t precisely see it my way. I lost my vision at about the same age as you, when I was in my early thirties. Well, I didn’t exactly “lose” it. I was attacked and blinded by a man I had just broken up with. Robert didn’t want me to be able to look at another man, so he made sure I’d never see anything again. I turned him in to the cops, and I testified at his trial, and he went bye-bye. His sentence was fifteen to twenty-five, only he got out in seven. You know what he did? He called my mother and told her he wanted to apologize to me, so could he please have my phone number? He paid his debt to society, he’s a changed man, he wants to know he has my forgiveness. Like a dope, she gave him my number
.

—The guy calls me up, asks can he come over? No, I say. You make my skin crawl, of course you can’t come over. He begs me to meet him, anyplace. Please. I just want to say a few words to you, then you never have to see me again
.

—All right, I say, meet me at this café, the Rosebud, and I told him where it was
.

—I didn’t say the Rosebud was half a block from my apartment. Probably had half my meals there, everybody knew me, everybody knew my story. One of the staff, Pete, the son of the owner, used to take good care of me, make sure everything went all right. Look, I was thirty-nine, still reasonably good-looking, I was told, and Pete was twenty-eight, he probably had some older-woman crush on me. Anyhow, when he led me to my table, he said I looked kind of tense, was anything wrong? Not really, but, well … I explained the whole situation, and he said he’d keep an eye on my table
.

—In spite of my tension, the meeting went okay. Robert’s voice sounded different than I remembered it, a little lower, a little softer. Nicer. That threw me off, a little—I tried to remember his face, but it was just a pink blur. He said he knew he’d done a terrible thing, he understood that no apology could ever be adequate, but it would mean a lot to him if I could at least say that I no longer hated him. It’s not as simple as that, I said
.

—We go on talking for a while, and Robert has a burger and a cup of coffee, and I have a tuna salad and a Coke, and he’s telling me how hard it is to get a job
if you’re an ex-con, but he has a line on something good. His parole officer is pretty happy about it. Do I have a job now, what with … you know. Yes, I have a job with a foundation, I say, life is all right for me, it’s a struggle, but I try not to complain, even to myself. He says he admires me. I say, Listen to me, I don’t want your admiration, and I don’t want your respect, either. Just be straight about that
.

—Robert got it, he really did, at least he seemed to. After that, things went surprisingly well. He said that we had a deep connection, we had done certain things to each other, he understood that I’d had to go to the police, he understood that he’d put
himself
in prison, but it was through my agency, which involved a choice. It was interesting to hear Robert say these things
.

—At my insistence we split the bill, whereupon Robert asks if I’d mind if he walked home with me, no more. A farewell gesture, he called it. Come on then, I said, make your gesture. If that’s what you want
.

—Stupid me. Between my place and the Rosebud there’s this enormous empty lot that goes down into a big ravine, and after we get about midway past it, he tells me he wants to take a detour, and before I can say anything, good old Robert clamps a hand over my mouth and puts his other arm around my waist, and he drags me into the empty lot
.

—No matter how I thrash around, I can’t break his grip. The bastard pulls me clear across the lot and down into the ravine, where he throws me down and jumps on top of me with his hands pinning my shoulders. I’m sure he’s going to rape me, and I say everything that comes into my mind, mainly a lot of begging him not to do it. It’s no use screaming, because no one could hear me
.

—Shut up, he said. I’m not going to rape you. I just wanted to scare you so bad you’d know how I felt almost every day during the past seven years. Scared shitless. Being blind can’t be as bad as some of the shit that happened me. I just evened the score. Now get up and get out of here. I never want to see you again
.

—I sat up and put my hand on a rock I didn’t know was there. That rock moved right into my hand
.

(The figure crowded in beside the Eel snickered in delight. I was seeing a ghoul with his arm around my wife.)

—YOU never want to see ME again?

(Then—right then—I could feel someone next to me, the Eel said. It wasn’t just them, those women from Delaware, who sensed the presence of someone else in that room, it was me, too. And the figure that joined me was nothing like the judge I had been counting on, not at all. It was sick, it was disgusting … it was what we call evil because we don’t have any better words for it.)

—I was furious! My body acted before my mind could tell it what to do. I swung my arm around toward his voice, and Robert must have turned his head away, because he didn’t stop my arm or duck or anything, and before I realized that I was trying to hit him in the head with that rock, I felt the rock smash against something hard. I yelled in shock, but my body kept moving—I slid forward and swung that rock down again, and this time I felt something crack up like an eggshell, and my hands were all wet. I started making some kind of noise, not yelling, not crying, something messier and less articulate than those—I was down in that
ravine
, for God’s sake, and I’d just killed a man who had once been violently in love with me. And you know what? I was glad
, violently
glad, that he was dead
.

(The disgusting figure clutching the Eel shivered in ecstasy, then disappeared, having obtained what it wanted.)

—Someone pounded down into the ravine, and I screamed and struggled to stand up. It had to be a cop, and I’d go to jail for a lot longer than that asshole ever had. A man was saying, My God, my God, over and over, and I realized he wasn’t a cop. It was Pete from the diner! He had come out to make sure nothing funny happened to me, and when he couldn’t see me on the street, he ran into that enormous lot. Pretty soon, he heard me making that noise, and here he was, my savior!

—Pete got me home unseen, and he got me into my apartment and let me clean up and change into fresh clothes. He put all the bloody stuff in a garbage bag and told me he was going to burn it all after he dragged the body deep into the ravine and covered it up, or put it in a cave, or hid it somehow, so nobody would find it for a long time. And I guess he did a good job, because Robert’s body is still down there. No policemen ever came around asking tough questions. I got away with murder. Is that secret enough for you, Ms. Truax?

The next lady said:

—This is funny, it makes me smile when I think about it. The strange stuff that happens in your life! So, anyhow. When I was a little girl, my mother used to take me into her favorite stores so I could shoplift things for her
.

Eel had her thief
.

“She got her to confess?” Don asked, next to the dark windows in the lounge.

“That she did,” I remembered saying, all the while feeling, far too near, the beating of enormous wings. “It took her twenty minutes. The woman broke down. She said she only stole a little at a time, and she hadn’t really noticed how the amount grew. By now it scared her, but she didn’t know how to stop. ‘You’ve already stopped,’ Lee told her. ‘It’s over.’ They worked out a repayment schedule, never brought in the police, solved the whole problem in one afternoon. The lady went away shaken but reformed. You know, she had kept on shoplifting through her whole life. Like Boats!”

“Yeah, like Boats,” Olson said. “But this lady got caught.”

He smiled, then looked upward, distracted by a thought. “What year was this, again?”

“Nineteen ninety-five. October, I think.”

“That’s interesting. I have the feeling that in October of 1995, Spencer and I were visiting this patron of his, an old lady named Grace Fallow. She was rich, and she liked Spencer to come to her and give consultations. This was way at the end of the time I was working with him.”

“Yes, and?”

—Yes, and? Meaning, what is this to me?

“Grace Fallow lived in Rehoboth Beach. She put us up in a hotel called the Boardwalk Plaza.”

—Grace Fallow lived in Rehoboth Beach … Boardwalk Plaza
.