Compromising Positions (17 page)

“Nothing.” We faced moments like these about once a month, and the instigator, usually me, invariably backed off. Was it that we realized it was ridiculous to fight over silly little irritants that would fade away before the next morning’s orange juice? Or did we tacitly recognize the fragility of our union, that despite its calm center, it was surrounded by a wall full of weak chinks; poke any one of them too hard and the whole structure would come crashing down, suffocating us, destroying our children.

“Nothing? Are you sure?” he persisted. Bob was a naturally cautious businessman. If we were entering into a truce, he wanted me to understand that I was abandoning all hostile intent, all hope for further appeal, of my own free will.

“Okay. You want it; you’ll have it,” I announced, pulling the quilt up to my chin to make sure no distracting flesh was showing. “I know damn well what you were doing with your finger. You were checking me out.” I clenched my teeth and my fists, probably so I wouldn’t bite him or scratch him. “You didn’t believe I went to A&S. You really thought I was out having a flaming affair with someone. I absolutely cannot believe it. With whom? The goddamn mailman? The Good Humor man? The teen-age studs at the gas station? Who? Just answer me.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Don’t try to put me on the defensive. I come home, you stick your finger up me, and then you ask me if I’m crazy.”

He slammed his fist down on the mattress. It made a soft thud. “Jesus Christ, I don’t believe you. I really don’t. What the hell is wrong if a husband touches his wife?”

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” forcing my teeth apart so I could talk louder. “In all the years we’ve known each other you’ve never done anything like that. All of a sudden you come on to me like a crazed gynecologist. You didn’t want sex. You didn’t even have a hard-on, and don’t deny it, because I looked. My God, in all the years you’ve been coming home at insane hours I never once suspected that you were working on anything except public relations. And all I do is spend a few hours away from the house and you think I’m carrying on some sort of torrid affair.”

“God,” he said. I had a brief flutter of pity for him; although he was suspicious enough not to even consider accepting my fidelity as given, I was indeed lying to him. I could have told him where I’d been. I could have trusted him. And he could have trusted me. “You’ve gone completely off the deep end,” he continued. “You need a psychiatrist. You really do.”

“Look, when you begin to even approach fifty percent on the scale of normal human response, I’ll go to a psychiatrist.”

He squeezed his eyes until they were just a slit of cold blue light, his best dirty look. He used it sparingly to maximize the effect. Then, sliding down further onto the bed, he turned his back and yanked the yellow quilt over his head.

I pulled into Nancy’s driveway at nine-fifteen the next morning, drove around the side of the house, where Larry had pulled out a graceful old grape arbor, replacing it with a flat slab of metal, a sculpture called Sacre Coeur, and parked the car in the back. Nancy’s office faced the back of the house, and if she was working, I could get her attention by calling her name in my best Delancey Street voice. But I glimpsed her through the kitchen window, wearing a faded Disneyland T-shirt, and before I could ring the bell, she noticed me and walked barefoot to the door.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Aren’t you cold like that?” It was a glaringly bright day, but painfully cold, the ground hard, unyielding, frozen. “You’ll wind up with pneumonia.”

“Why, Judith, thank you. To think, you got up this early just to come over and nag me. I do appreciate it. I mean, you could have just called and read me an article on cirrhosis of the liver.”

“Sorry.” I threw my coat and gloves on a chair and walked over to her cabinets. By pressing the side, a white door sprung open to reveal a set of gleaming white dishes. I took a mug and poured myself some coffee. “I had a fight.”

“Good. It clears the sinuses.” She watched me as I stared into the depths of the coffee. “All right. Tell me about it.”

“It wasn’t just a minor quibble. It was a real fight.”

“Well, that happens here on the average of three nights a week. Larry usually winds up calling me a bohemian. He thinks that’s the cruelest thing you can say to anyone.”

“But we don’t fight. You know that.”

“I know that, Judith. But you have to understand that that’s almost beyond my comprehension. I mean, I cannot begin to imagine being in the same room with Larry for more than an hour without discovering at least five major flaws in his character. So we fight a lot. But then it’s over, finished. We can screw or go out for a pizza.”

“But our relationship is different. I mean, I don’t...”

“You mean you don’t have any lovers to take up the slack? Judith, I’m not saying my way is right and yours is wrong. Look, I average a new man about every eight months, and while it does add a certain degree of enjoyment, it surely doesn’t make my life any more meaningful. But I have them, and when I periodically get my act together and do an article, I have my work. I’m not saying I’m in any way measurably happier than you, but at least my energies are diffused. And I’m not putting all my eggs in Larry’s basket. He’s sweet and he’s interesting and I love him, but he’s in no way equipped to take responsibility for my happiness.” She sighed and scratched the slightly upturned tip of her perfect nose. “Look, tell me what happened. I want to be able to understand.”

So I told her, giving her a word by word, gesture by gesture account of Judith and Bob in Their Bedroom. She concentrated intently, nodding and saying “Mmm” at several strategic junctures. “See why I’m upset?” I asked finally.

“I see why you had the fight,” she said. “But I don’t see why you’re still so miserable. He didn’t pack his bags, did he?”

“No. He even gave me a peck on the cheek before he left for the office. But it wasn’t sincere.”

“It wasn’t sincere,” she repeated to the ceiling, a WASP Tevye talking to a blond God who might possibly comprehend why people behave with such gross excesses of emotion. Then, peering at me again, she added: “You want nooky and sincerity too?”

“Yes. And a flat stomach.”

“Done,” she proclaimed. “Now, would you care to tell me where you were last evening? I’d be pleased to listen.” She took her hands and pushed her long auburn hair behind her ears. “Unless you really were shopping at A&S, in which case you can skip it.”

“No. I was at the Duncks’ house, interviewing them about Fleckstein.”

“Well, I’ll be,” she breathed. “You really did something.”

“You didn’t think I would?” I asked lightly, trying to sound indifferent.

“Judith, I don’t have the energy to make assumptions and then deal with the consequences. But let’s say I find it interesting that you actually whipped it up to visit the Duncks. Now, I have to go upstairs and take a shower because the exterminator is coming.” She gazed at me seriously. “Larry was lying in bed last night and thought he heard termites breathing. That shows the level at which we concentrate on each other. Look, walk me upstairs and talk while I’m getting ready.”

We climbed the plastic staircase and ambled down the long hall to the master bedroom. I flopped on the bed, the room’s only piece of furniture, a huge square covered in a white furry throw that rested on a white lacquered platform, about a foot off the floor.

“You made your bed already?” I shouted to Nancy, who already had the water running in the bathroom.

“No,” she yelled back. “Larry makes it each morning before he goes to work. He’s afraid someone will come in and see I use pastel sheets. God, the shame of it. Now, what happened at the Duncks’?”

“Do I have to shout?”

“Yes.”

In my loudest voice, I gave a synopsis of the interview, as well as a finely drawn description of Dicky’s toenails.

“That has to be one of the most nauseating things I’ve ever heard,” Nancy remarked. She walked to the wall opposite her bed and kicked it gently. A door swung open, revealing a large walk-in closet with built-in alcoves for shoes, handbags, and sweaters. “I’d take two nose-pickers and an ass-scratcher to that any day. Oh, speaking of the Family Fleckstein, I saw Little Cupcake yesterday.”

“I don’t believe you. I really don’t believe you,” I said. “I’ve been here for at least twenty minutes and you haven’t said a word about him. You know how interested I am in the murder, Nancy.”

She pulled on a pair of burgundy corduroy jeans and, zipping up the fly, gazed at me with an expression midway between mild pain and resigned tolerance. “It was you, not I, my dear friend, who dashed to my doorstep in a veritable snit because you had a fight with Bob. Therefore,” she cleared her throat, “I merely sat and listened to your plaint, virtually brimming with sympathy and warmth, while you spewed out all the venom in your system.”

“Eat it,” I suggested. She ignored me, turning her back and pulling a cream-colored turtleneck over her head. “Anyhow,” I continued, “what did Cupcake have to say?”

“He said ‘Hey, Nancy, baby, how’s it going?’” she replied, forcing her voice to its lowest register and putting on a thick Brooklyn accent.

“Is that how he talks?”

“No. But that’s how he thinks,” she said, her voice reverting to its flower of southern womanhood tone. “In any case, our beloved friend has managed to keep her bony ass out of a sling.”

“Who? What?”

“Mary Alice. It seems that our crackerjack police department, through unstinting devotion and tireless investigation, has come up with the names of four of Brucie’s fuckees.”

“Who? Who?” I realized as I said it that I sounded like an overwrought owl.

“Well, there was his nurse,” she said, holding up a thumb as she began her count.

“That’s Lorna Lewis.”

“Right. I hate alliterative names. They suck.”

“Okay,” I said, not daring to interrupt her flow to examine this latest addition to Nancy’s long list of strange opinions.

“Well, according to the precinct gossip, which, I gather, comes straight from the geniuses on the homicide squad, Brucie was humping her two, three days a week. Now, it seems she had the bad judgment to confide in one of the nurses who works in the office next door, and that broad told the cops that Lorna believed he was going to dump Norma and make her an honest woman. Lord, have you ever heard of such incredible self-deception?”

“All the time,” I said. “What else did Cupcake say about Lorna?”

Nancy disappeared into her closet and returned with a pair of brown leather boots. She placed them on the floor and sat next to them. Then she pointed her toes and aimed for the inside of the boot. “Well, not much else. He did say she didn’t seem so insanely in love that she wasn’t protecting her own ass. Apparently, she’s on her second marriage, and she was in no way going to say goodbye to number two until number three made the break with Norma. Lorna is not one to burn bridges, it seems. But according to this other nurse, she had given Brucie a deadline. If he wasn’t out of his house by Easter, she would stop playing with him and quit.”

“What was so significant about Easter?”

“How should I know? Judith, by now it should be screechingly obvious that all these people are totally off the wall, and that any statement they make is by definition fraught with irrationality. Who knows? Maybe he had plans to stick a cottontail up her ass and photograph it. I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“All right. Anything more on Lorna Lewis?”

“No. Let’s go downstairs. I want a piece of halvah.”

“Feh,” I remarked. “How can you eat halvah in the morning?”

“By opening my mouth, inserting a piece, and chewing slowly and carefully.” We returned to the kitchen, Nancy sprinting delicately down the plastic stairs, me clutching the handrail as I went gingerly from one slick step to another. “Want a bite? This is the marbleized kind. The best,” she declared, her mouth full of the rich, crumbly candy.

“No. Nancy, why don’t you eat something nourishing in the morning? Grits. You could eat grits.”

“Grits taste like ground-up horse shit. Want to hear more?”

“Yes. This instant. Chew fast.”

“Relax. Well, two of the other women I never heard of. One of them belongs to Brucie’s club. Her husband’s said to be
the
king of preteen fashions.”

“What’s her name?”

“I forget. Some Jewish name.”

“Great. That’s really terrific. I marvel at your powers of recollection. If it was Belinda Jo Slattery, Jr., you’d remember it.”

“Women can’t be juniors. Anyway, it was Naomi Goldberg.”

“Really?”

“No. But if you think I’m going to sit here and take shit from you, you’re whistling Dixie.”

“I would never whistle Dixie,” I vowed.

“I know that.” Nancy smiled. “Do you actually think I could sustain a fifteen-year friendship with someone who even knew the words? Anyhow, do you want to know how they came to recognize this petunia? It seems she’d been over to the Sixth Precinct a few times having fits because she said her neighbors had trained their dogs to crap on her lawn. She wanted them arrested and executed.”

“Oh my God,” I interrupted.

“What?”

“I know who that is. Linda Berman. Fay Jacobs’ husband’s sister. You know Fay, the history teacher at Shorehaven High.”

“So?”

“So, Fay told me about her. She’s supposed to be very attractive and very crazy. And very rich. She’s had all types of plastic surgery, and just because she doesn’t look like Catherine Deneuve, she has about four malpractice suits going. None of the plastic surgeons around here will operate on her any more. The last I heard, she was going to Argentina or some place to get dimples put in.”

“On her face or her ass?”

“I didn’t ask. But Fay told me she’s really bananas. She actually hired a private detective to spy on her neighbors when they walked their dogs.”

Nancy stretched her legs and lifted her feet onto a kitchen chair. “Did Fay say anything about her and Brucie?”

I sat quietly for a moment. Fay had told me about Fleckstein’s overtures to her, about his affair with Jean Burns, and had alluded to others. But nothing about crazy Linda. Perhaps she didn’t have a confidential relationship with her sister-in-law. Or she felt constrained by family loyalties. Or her abhorrence of what Bruce Fleckstein stood for was so great that she simply didn’t want to discuss the subject further. “How did the police get on to her?”