Foul Matter (33 page)

He had a vague and shifting scene in his mind of police trolling by after somebody had shot somebody and Clive didn’t want them to know he was carrying a .22.
Good thinking, Clive.
(His addresses to himself had grown increasingly sarcastic ever since Bobby’s “plan” had been put into operation.)
Good thinking. You hold the book the wrong way and the gun falls out at their feet.

So nobody’s perfect, big deal.

He ran a finger along the row of
P
s, looking for that book of Saul Prouil’s that had received so much praise. Here it was in the first edition and it was expensive. That didn’t surprise Clive, given the landslide of awards it had won, that and the fact that Saul Prouil had up to now not published another book. It probably took him decades to write one, and no wonder.

Clive walked up to the cash register where now a beetle-browed old man was taking money from a woman with a coil of dark red hair. He was about to tap her on the shoulder and ask her how she could keep her eye on her mark when she turned and looked at him blankly, as if he were indeed not worth the change the old man returned to her. He had been so certain that she was Pascal.

He paid for his Prouil book, the old man fussing over the AmEx card and finally putting the books in a worn paper bag and handing them over.

Clive took them and left, glancing at the beggar woman and taking out some coins—even this act of mild kindness surprised him. He thought of a line of Yeats—“the rag and bone-shop of the heart”—and dropped the coins in a little metal box. The clothes fairly swarmed on the old woman, layers and layers of cloaks and scarves. There were additional garments in a baby carriage nearby.

“Seventy-seven cents, geez, thanks a lot.”

Sarcasm? Clive was about to say “Ungrateful wretch!” when he realized it was Pascal who’d said it. “Ah, Pascal. This is truly a marvel of disguise; who’d ever have thought of a beggar?”

“Fuck you. A cigarette? I’m all out.” She held out her mittened hand, and he handed her the pack that he carried for emergencies (though hard to explain to himself what constituted a smoking emergency). She took one from the tight pack and wiggled it for a light. “Thanks. Nice talking to you.”

Clive walked on by, shaking his head. He should write a book.

Purchasing a red Porsche was not one of his better ideas, but Saul had gotten tired of standing in the snow and trying to hail a cab, so the WHITE GLOVE SERVICE sign over the Porsche showroom had seduced him. Lord, but weren’t those beautiful cars! He had entered the showroom with a view toward renting a car for the day and had become more and more enamored of them.

Put it this way: he might need to yank Ned from the sidewalk where he was so determinedly standing but that would be difficult in a cab, even if he could find one. One needed one’s own vehicle if one were rescuing somebody. That still didn’t explain buying one.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught a figure moving in Ned’s direction. But when Saul turned his head, the person was gone. It had looked almost as if he were shadowing Ned.

Ned was at the end of
Separation
and didn’t know what to do about it. He was walking around Shadyside, stalling. All of Pittsburgh was a stall. Or maybe not, maybe not. Maybe Nathalie was thinking what to do as he stood staring at the ice cream store before going in. He had found another Isaly’s.

Sally watched from the doorway of a hairstylist’s, fingering her wig as if the stylist had misplaced the curls.

In the bookstore down the block she had bought
Pittsburgh: Little Known Facts.
She was hoping a knowledge of arcane facts would make her appear more interesting to Ned, if not more lovable. Another red sports car—was everybody in Pittsburgh driving one?—came out of an alleyway up ahead and turned onto this street. Where did all these Porsches come from? It could be the same one—she couldn’t see the driver—but she didn’t think so; no Porsche owner would drive about aimlessly at 25 mph. He wouldn’t be caught dead.

Personally, Clive disliked ice cream but it served as rather a good cover, he thought. He was licking a cone of vanilla, that being the blandest of all in those tubs at the Isaly place. He was clutching the book. It made him snigger when he thought of asking Dwight Staines to autograph it, and Staines opening it and finding the center cut out (minus the gun, of course).

He was keeping a good way back from Ned, thinking he must be wrong, that Candy and Karl had had several opportunities to plug Ned and if they hadn’t done it by now, they probably wouldn’t. They must have decided Ned was okay and they’d let him live. God, he hoped so. Never having handled a gun in his life, the idea of having to shoot one made his adrenaline pump.

“K, is there something about all this that strikes you as awful peculiar?” Candy was looking up and down the street.

Karl was looking, too, but he was watching through the binoculars. “What do you mean?” Funny that there weren’t more people around, but that’s the only thing he thought at all peculiar. There was Clive over there doing God knows what, in and out of that bookstore, then the ice cream place (another one of those!), now carrying a cone and a book. The blonde they’d seen in Schenley Park leaving a hairdresser’s where he didn’t think they’d done much of a job on her. A woman in dark glasses, pushing a baby carriage along their side of the street, and now here came that goddamned red Porsche again. He sighed. “Sweet ride,” he said.

“What?”

“That Porsche.”

“Again? Uh.”

Candy was reaching beneath his jacket to one of his rear trouser pockets to get his Juicy Fruit gum when he felt something sting him. He slapped his face. “Goddamned mosquitoes this cold—?”

Karl stared. Had the binoculars not been on a strap around his neck, he would have dropped them to the ground. There was a red streak, a blood streak across Candy’s face. “No mosquito, C. Look.”

Candy pulled his hand from his face and saw blood. “Wha—”

Their hands went for their guns, Karl’s to his shoulder holster, Candy’s hand dove to the belt at his back. They didn’t fire because they weren’t sure what they should be firing at.

Then their mouths fell open.

The woman several yards away sent the baby carriage flying toward them, just after she’d pulled a gun from beneath the blanket and rags. The blonde on the other side was pointing a small gun in their direction; even old Clive had pulled a gun out of the book he was carrying, and in the course of doing so shot the book, which made a wide spiral in the air before landing.

Candy’s voice was just flirting with hysteria. “What kinda city
is
this, Chrissakes, everybody’s packin’ heat?”

The red Porsche, as if it had lost both driver and direction, was coming straight at them, its erratic path from street to pavement to street again forcing everyone to drop back into doorways and press against walls.

Guns went back into purses, holsters, baby carriages, and books.

Ned came out of Isaly’s with his ice cream cone (pistachio again). He stood there licking it and meditating on the end of
Separation.
He was walking along the street, away from this block of businesses when he heard what sounded like a shot, but turned too late to see (it was over in five seconds) anything but the aftermath of this brief melee. He did see the fleeing Porsche, however, and thought he’d seen it before. Whoever was driving had to be drunk or crazy or both.

There were Candy and Karl, and there was the woman he’d spent a blissful hour with last night—Rhoda? Rhonda? She was righting a baby carriage that must have fallen on the pavement. My God, had a
baby
been killed?

B
ack in his room, Ned packed his duffel bag. He disliked leaving the packing until the morning as it made him feel rushed, even though all he’d brought along was an extra shirt, shorts, socks, and an electric razor. He never packed more than would take five minutes to repack, yet he always felt pressured. No matter whether he liked the place or not, knew it well or not at all, there was the same sense of loss.

Finished with the packing, he sat on the edge of the bed thinking about Pittsburgh, the usual signs of anxiety creeping over him. It was anxiety about something left undone, unfinished; something attempted but not, in the end, accomplished, as if he had failed to do what he had come to do.

Maybe he should stay another day.

Solace,
Ned had thought, would be somehow cathartic and would relieve him of such feelings. It had done, while he was writing it. It was a story of a man and a woman who, by all the rules of life, should have fallen in love, married, had children. Yet they kept touching and slipping away, passing and not stopping. They were kept apart both by their failure to see how important it was that they meet and by an inability to rise above conventions. One day the brown paper bag of groceries she was carrying broke, spilling cans and boxes. He was there; he helped her pick up the groceries. They smiled at each other; she thanked him sincerely. It was a situation wherein the next thing said could easily have been, “Let’s have coffee,” but he didn’t. She didn’t. They recognized in each other’s glance something familiar, something they had lost, although neither could have put it that way because each was self-involved, no more than the average person, perhaps, but then the average person is much too caught up in himself. They did not recognize signs and portents. They could literally have fallen over each other and still wouldn’t have figured it out. Their solace was forgetting.