Crimson Joy (15 page)

"You were right, you know," Susan said.

"Probably," I said. "About what?"

Susan drank the rest of her martini and motioned with her glass. I poured her a second one and didn't even point out to her that I'd mixed without measuring and come out two glasses to the rim.

"About not letting me deal with Felton alone."

"It wasn't even right or wrong," I said. "I couldn't leave you alone."

"Just like you can't now," she said.

"Yes."

"Even though Hawk is following Felton, and Quirk and Belson will join him."

"Yes."

"Even though you told me Felton couldn't get away from Hawk."

"Yes."

"Why is that?" she said. She pulled the olive jar toward her and put two olives into her martini, which made it too full. She sipped some and put in another olive.

"I lost you for a couple of years back there," I said. "I found out that I could live without you. And I found out also that I didn't want to."

"Because?"

"Because I love you," I said. "Because you are in my life like the music at the edge of silence."

"The music what?"

"I never quite got it either," I said. "I read it somewhere."

I drank some of the Scotch. Susan drank some of the martini. The chicken breasts simmered, defrosting as they went. I mused through the refrigerator again, looking for inspiration. There was broccoli, and one carrot. Under the sink I found an onion, the last survivor in its mesh bag. I got the vegetables lined up and began to search for a knife.

"Let me try it another way," I said. "It is not only that I love you.

It is that you complete my every shortfall." Susan smiled and ate an olive.

"But do you respect me?" she said.

"I respect you like hell," I said. It was one of our thousand catch phrases, remembered from an old Nichols and May routine we'd each seen years before we knew each other. I found a paring knife and began to peel the onion.

"And," I said, "I complete yours. Our strengths and weaknesses interlock so perfectly that together we are more than the sum of our parts."

Susan smiled and ate another olive. Her martini was almost gone. Susan said, "Make some more martini."

I looked at her and raised my eyebrows and mixed up another batch.

"Thank you," Susan said when I filled her glass.

I drank some more of my Laphroig. If it was going to be like that, I didn't want to fall behind.

"It is one of the special ironies of love," Susan said. Her voice had a crystalline sound to it, as if it were coming through a clear filter.

"All the received truths of popular culture presume that successful love is rooted in shared interests. Dating services computerize preference, hobbies, vacations, and such so that they can match like with like."

I had the onion peeled and was looking for a cutting board. I found it behind the toaster, a small fiberglass thing that looked as if it had never been cut on.

"And," Susan said, "in fact, of course, love frequently flourishes most successfully when ying meets yang."

"Ying meets yang?"

"Never mind," Susan said. "And just keep your ying to yourself."

I chopped the onion fine, and scraped the carrot and chopped it. I cut the broccoli into its component florets.

"It's why I was able to let you stay," Susan said.

She was sitting now with her chin in the palm of her hand. She took another olive from her martini and bit half of it off and chewed it while she looked at the other half.

"Stay with you and Felton?"

"Yes. Because it wasn't so much my need as yours."

"My weakness, so to speak."

"Un huh."

She ate the rest of the olive and drank the rest of the martini. I poured a little more Laphroig over ice. Susan poured more martini.

"And it didn't bother you," I said, "the implication that you couldn't handle it alone?"

"No," Susan said, looking hard at her martini.

"Because the implication was true. I couldn't. Not if he attempted to tie me up and shoot me."

"You had a gun," I said.

"If I got to it in time." I smiled suddenly. "For cris sake I said,

"you wanted me there."

"Partly."

"You wanted me to insist. You wanted me to win the argument."

"Wanted is too simple," Susan said. She had shifted her gaze from her martini to the ongoing afternoon outside her kitchen window. "I wanted and didn't want. I needed both my autonomy and your protection. By acting the way I did, I managed to have both."

I took the top off the fry pan and probed the chicken breasts with the tip of the paring knife. They appeared thawed. I swiped the carrots and onions off the cutting board and into the fry pan with the back of the knife. I added a clove of garlic and some dried tarragon and put the cover back on.

Susan drank the rest of her martini. Her pupils were very wide. She put the glass down and got off the stool and walked to me and leaned against me, with her arms around my waist. I put my arms around her and we stood like that for a time. Then Susan raised her face and I kissed her. She opened her mouth and tightened her arms and kissed me back for a long time. Then her body went nearly limp and she broke the kiss and hung her head back and looked up at me. Her pupils were now so big that her eyes seemed without iris.

"Bed," she said.

With my arms still around her I detached my left arm and shut off the flame under the chicken. Then I slid my left arm down her backside and scooped her into my arms. She pushed her head against my shoulder and locked her arms around my neck. I carried her through the living room and down the hall to her bedroom.

It's not as easy as it looked in Gone With the Wind.

Susan's bed was made of dark wicker and covered with a brown paisley spread, which she made up with the spread turned back, exposing a cobalt sheet. There were maybe eight oversized pillows covered in the same paisley. I eased her down onto the bed and she lay back flat with her arms out and her legs flaccid against the bed. She looked up at me with her eyes wide open. I took my gun from its holster and put it on the matching wicker table by the bed. I took off my clothes. Susan lay without movement, watching me. Only her eyes moved. Her body was without tension and seemed to be blending into the bed. Then I was undressed and she was fully clothed.

"Undress me," she said. Her voice was soft but it still had that odd clarity.

I nodded, feeling the little feeling I always did when I was undressed and my companion was not. I took Susan's shoes off. They were blue, with short heels. I put them carefully on the floor under the bed where neither of us would step on them. I got off her jacket. Susan made no move to help or hinder but lay loose and still, watching me with her huge unfocused eyes. The sweater had to come off over her head, and unless she helped it would present a problem. I started to raise her from the bed with my left hand under her shoulders.

"Leave the sweater," she said.

"Sure," I said. My voice sounded a little hoarse.

"Do the skirt," she said.

"Sure," I said. My voice was hoarser.

I've always been clever with my hands, and in a bit I had everything off but her sweater. Through it she lay as limp and passive as a teddy bear, her eyes wide open. I lay on my left side on the bed next to her and propped my head with my elbow.

"Now what?" I said.

She turned her head loosely on the pillow. Her unfocused eyes were looking through mine at something far away.

"Everything," she said. . In the mirror the dark blank eye of the gun barrel was steady. He put it back in his belt and then practiced taking it out and bringing it to position. He did this over again. He experimented with the teacup grip, left hand cupping the handle, the two-hand hold where the left hand wrapped around the right after cocking the piece. He tried the target stance, turned sideways, one hand.

"You motherfucker," he said into the mirror. "How tough are you now?"

He put the gun back, tried it again, bending his knees. In her office, her boyfriend hadn't said a word during the whole scene. Just stood there against the wall with his arms folded. Fucking forearms like Popeye for cris sake He turned his back to the mirror and pulled the gun and spun toward the mirror, gun in his right hand, butt of the gun rested in the palm of his left. Knees were flexed, weak eye, the right one, squinted, sighting with his left. The boyfriend hadn't looked nervous. He'd looked, shit, what had he looked?

"He looked like he knew he could take me."

He dropped the gun to his side and then brought it up slowly, smiling.

"You think you can take me, motherfucker?"

His stomach dropped nearly out of him. It had been doing that since She threw him out. Now they were together and he was here. Probably fucking right now, and he was here. And the black guy is still there.

Jesus, he was bigger than the fucking boyfriend. He looked at the gym bag, picked it up, and looked in at the coiled clothesline and the roll of duct tape. He put the gun on the nightstand and undressed and taped his own mouth and tied himself as best he could and lay on the bed and thought of the shrink, with the rope cutting into her thighs.

"I'll get you, you bitch, sooner or later." He said it as loud as he could, and inside the tape it sounded only like muffled groans. Like she'd sound. Lying on the bed, he squirmed one hand loose from the clothesline and masturbated, thinking of how she would sound groaning through the tape.

"I'll get you, bitch, I'll get you."

It was a long, exploratory, surprising, flung-open afternoon, and when we were through Susan fell asleep on the bed, in her sweater. I got up, took my gun, and went into the kitchen and examined the chicken breasts.

They had not suffered from marinating and might even have benefited. I let them sit and went to Susan's bathroom, put my gun on the toilet tank, moved three pairs of pantyhose, and took a shower. I shampooed with French Walnut Oil, which I found on the tub, and when I was through I put on the green terry cloth robe I keep there and took a bottle of club soda out from under the bathroom sink, where Susan kept it, picked up the gun, and went back to the kitchen. I made a light Scotch and soda and stood in her front window and looked out. The gun was on the coffee table behind me. Trees along Linnaean Street were beginning to bud. They were mostly maples, a few oak, and at least one horse chestnut. Across the street in front of the brick apartment building a Hispanic woman wearing a down vest over a print dress was rocking a baby in its carriage. She rolled the carriage back toward her and pushed it away as she leaned against the building. There was no sound in the apartment. I felt the sense of peace and disconnection that I felt after Susan and I made love. A Federal Express truck pulled up next door and a young woman in the FedEx uniform got out and headed up to the front door with one of those urgent-looking envelopes. Directly opposite me on the ledge outside the second story of the apartment building, four pigeons sat and craned their necks about and teetered like they do. I looked back down in the street. No one came along with a gun and a coil of rope.

"Goddamn," I said aloud in the quiet room.

If he'd make a move at us, I could kill him and it would be over. I didn't think Hawk would lose him and I didn't think Quirk would either.

But it happens. It's very hard to stick with someone who knows you're there and who wants to lose you and doesn't care if you know he wants to lose you. If the guy you're tailing is resourceful, it is in fact impossible. I knew that and Quirk knew and Belson knew it. Hawk knew it, though Hawk never really believed that he could be thwarted.

It was why I wouldn't leave her.

I went back to the kitchen and made another light Scotch and soda, and walked back to the window and looked down some more.

What if he killed me?

I shook my head sharply. Thinking about that was too painful. It wasn't too productive either. To be who I was and do what I did had to assume I'd win.

"Just because he could jump a fence better," I said. There was no other sound in the apartment.

It was like a lot of things: you felt fear not when it was most likely but when it was most awful. If he got past me to Susan… I shook my head again. He had to shake Hawk, and he had to be able to get past me.

And he had to get Susan before she got the gun. Could she shoot? Yes.

She could. If she had to. And if she had to, she'd be calm and steady and the gun wouldn't waver.

I looked down in the street again.

"Come on," I said. "Come on and do it."

I heard my own voice in the room and felt foolish, but my teeth were still clenched hard and the trapezius muscles were bunched up near my neck.

From the bed I heard Susan's voice.

"Hello," she said. It was a very small sound.

I walked down the hallway and into the bedroom. She lay on her back on top of the covers, wearing only her sweater.

I said, "It is wanton and shameless to make love while wearing a sweater." She said, "Tell me there is a Diet Coke somewhere in this house."

"I saw one under the sink in the bathroom," I said. "I assume you want it warm."

"Yes, and at once," she said.

I went and got the Diet Coke and poured it into a large glass and got a lemon from the refrigerator and cut her a wedge and put it in the Coke.

Actually I got a third of a lemon that had dried out slightly, which Susan had left in one of the egg-keeper pockets inside the door. I brought it to the bedroom and put it on the night table beside her bed.

She was still flat on her back. I collected some of the pillows I had cast aside earlier and plumped them around her and put my hand behind her back between her shoulder blades and sat her up and slid the pillows behind her.

"Jesus Christ," she said.

I pushed the Diet Coke an inch closer to her. Her eyes slowly focused on it. She took it from the night table and drank and put it back. She was the only human I've ever seen who liked Diet Coke warm. She breathed deeply and let it out.