Hush Hush (16 page)

He led Zach through the door and up a stairway to a room on the second floor where seven or eight men and one woman stood and sat here and there in a room about half the size of the lower floor. One of the men was the pale blond boy from the parking lot that Zach had seen four days earlier.

“See anybody you know?” Welch said, happy.

Zach looked sharply away from the boy and back at Welch, with an uncomprehending expression on his face which made no impression on the cop, who looked back down at a piece of paper.

“That’s the way Hodge has it in his notes—Dr. Zachary.’ ”

He grinned. “He’s only working with fifteen watts, if you
know what I mean. Could you wait here a minute?” he said, getting up. Then he walked all the way across the room and out a door opposite the door they had come in.

Smug little shit, Zach thought. It’s one thing to be a big guy and push people around, but it’s even worse to be a little guy. A little guy should know better.

Zach looked around at the boy, who was sitting fifteen feet away in a burnished aluminum frame chair like the ones downstairs, like all the chairs. He was facing straight ahead, occasionally glancing this way or that, like a kid at a party to whom no one was speaking. He didn’t seem to recognize Zach, even though he looked right at him a couple of times. He looked frightened, doomed, the same way he had looked that night in the parking lot. But now he has us shoving him and slapping his face, Zach thought.

Welch came back into the room with another guy in a suit, a tall guy with a pock marked face. He was chewing gum. “Well?” Welch said.

Zach blinked. “Well what?” he said.

The cops looked at each other. “Do you see anybody that you know?” Welch said, slowly, with menace in his voice.

Involuntarily, Zach began shaking his head.

“What do you say?” Welch said.

Zach shook his head. “I thought I was supposed to look at a line-up or something,” Zach said.

The cops snorted. “Maybe you’d like a guest spot on
Geraldo
, too,” Welch said. “Or a maybe a ride with O.J.” He put a hand on the back of Zach’s chair, slipped into a half crouch beside it, lifted his other hand and uncurled a finger to point across at the pale boy sitting terrified. “You see that kid? Is that the kid you saw in the parking lot the other night?” He was pointing at the boy, but looking at Zach.

“No,” Zach said. “No, that’s not him. He was older, and sort of dark.” Zach took a deep, loud breath.

Welch looked at the pock marked guy, then back at Zach. He flicked his coat open. There were handcuffs shining on his belt. “What are you saying, doctor?”

“It’s not him,” Zach said, shrugging, stifling a smile. “I’m sorry.”

Welch straightened up. “We’re going to get him anyway, doctor,” he said. He waved a hand, dismissing him.

•  •  •

Zach drove past his apartment and on to the office. His heart was galloping a little in his chest. It was about nine-thirty when he let himself in and turned on all the lights; it always felt creepy in the office at night in the dark. I want a drink, he thought. I’m so tired of doing what I should do.

There was beer in the small refrigerator in the office kitchen in the back, but he took a bottled water instead. It felt creepy with the lights on, too, like he was too visible, so he turned them off in the front and sat in the dark. After a while he went back to the boarding cages. Hector was still alive, just asleep.

Zach woke the old cat up to bring him out front and set him on the desk behind the reception counter and sat in Stephanie’s chair, but with his feet up to block the cat from jumping from the desk. Hector wasn’t inclined. He lay where he had been put and went back to sleep. As Zach sat in the dark, glancing at the telephone, thinking about her, it was almost as if he was breathing her presence in and out, thinking,
remembering being seventeen, watching the tall red numbers on the digital clock at the edge of the desk registering later and later, trying to quiet his breathing. She’s what I want, he thought, picking up the phone. I might as well start it.

When Paulie, on her way to her interview with the arts people, had stopped by his office at the bank, she laughed and said, “Tilden, when’re you going to move in?” He had ignored it, but now he agreed.

His office was dull, as dull as people had always said it was the first time they saw it. The first six months he had left it as he had found it, the shelves empty, the walls bare. Wooden coat rack in front of the windows. But it drew so many comments and strange looks that he had taken a weekend and moved all the furniture around; everybody else was always doing that. Then he bought Mexican rugs for the walls and, for the table, marketing and shelter magazines which when they were superseded each month moved to tidy stacks on the shelves. Got rid of the damn coat rack.

Still they told him it was dull, and although he thought their offices no more interesting than his—Loeffler’s MOMA calendars and butterfly chairs—he now agreed with them about his own. Dull. Maybe a two-headed secretary out front. But where would Kelli sit? Where would she put her cat snapshots and dead seashells? Maybe some posters, for some television religion or a fifth-rate rock group, one he had never heard or heard of, which wouldn’t be hard to find, as he never listened to the radio anymore or watched the music channels or turned on the stereo for that matter. Silence, Tilden thought, was sweet, like Saturday mornings had been.

The Saturday that Paulie had first arrived at his door, he had ignored her knock, sat beside the plants sipping coffee in the slanting light from the mini blinds over the windows, but she would not go away, so he finally got up and went to the door and opened it, then stood there denying he was her father, she, who should have been more embarrassed than he was, because she was outside and he was inside, just as adamantly, one foot up on a suitcase, asserting it.

He had shut the door on her, at least twice, then looked out through the blinds in the vain hope that she’d go away. She was tall, nearly six feet, muscular, dark-haired, Italian. Jeans and khaki shirt. She had settled on the top step and lit a cigarette, coughed, then, after five minutes or so, knocked again.

“Tilden,” she said, through the door. “This is silly. You think you can ignore me and I’ll go away? I’ve got no place to go.” More knocking. “Nineteen sixty-six. Boston. My mother’s name was Tina. You were drunk. You made a big thing about never drinking anything but vodka. Stupid, right? But what can you expect from a twenty year old? You had a show on the college radio station; you played Doors records, over and over. You have a big scar across the back of your neck. They took off a birthmark or something. Let me in.”

It had ruined his morning, and all the mornings since, because now she was up before seven every day, with the blinds open and coffee brewing, like one of those women in the ads on the Weather Channel, leaping out of bed, where she had somehow mysteriously washed her face—there was never any oil on it—and her nightgown unwrinkled, so that he wondered if she had slept in it at all. He had been married twice, and women just didn’t look like this in the morning, and their voices weren’t light and had no lilt, and their eyes were bleary. Like his own. But Paulie came out of the back bedroom
of the small apartment new born, every morning. It was misery.

One Friday, before leaving for work, she said, “Still don’t like me, do you?” and he had said, “You get in my way,” and then he had thought about it all day at the office.

When he got home, she wasn’t there yet, so he went to the market around the corner and bought a loaf of his bread, and a jar of his brand of peanut butter, and two rib eyes, meat, and a case of Schaefer, which he counted on to have all the additives and unnatural junk which she claimed gave her headaches. He was arranging it all on the kitchen counter when she got back.

“Where’ve you been?”

“What’s all this stuff?” she said, throwing her hair back with her hand. “Steaks, no less. You’re showing the flag, right? That’s so cute!”

“Where have you been?”

“Had to work late. Some very important cultural stuff happening next week, some kind of meeting. I met this very sexy British guy. His name is Ryan. Only he’s short. Comes to here,” she said, drawing a hand across her breasts. “If you didn’t want me to work late, you shouldn’t have gotten me a job.”

“Does this little guy have a little apartment?”

“You mean,” she said, “a little apartment I could move into? Let’s not rush things. I only just met him. When do we eat?”

They ate the steaks—he cooked—and then drank the entire case of beer, save one, until to her, the headache she planned became somehow uproariously funny, and to him, she began to look more like a woman, and less like a problem, or at least like a different kind of problem, until he was shaking his head, mostly to stop looking at her, stop noticing how pretty
and how perfect she was, like the pretty, perfect vegetables she brought home from the natural store, or her sweet breath which he knew came from some kind of natural toothpaste she got at the same place.

He got up and walked from the front room into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator. “You want this?” he said, holding the last can of Schaefer up in the triangle of light from the refrigerator, above the door.

She shook her head. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?” she said. “Of Ryan? You don’t want your daughter going—”

“Oh no,” he said. “I’ve gotten rid of two wives. I’m not going to have a daughter. The price is too high.” And that ended the party.

She stopped, blinked, looked at him, then started to cry, quietly.

“I’m going to sleep,” he said. “I’m sorry. You forced your way in here. I got you a job. I had a nice, quiet, sensible life, before. Peaceful, goddamn it. I pay the rent. I like you, but …”

“But?”

“I’m going to sleep,” he said. “There’s one more can of beer. On the top shelf. And some bourbon in the cabinet. And I sleep all day Saturday, so if you get up at the crack of dawn, don’t start playing the radio and singing, for God’s sake.” He looked at her. “Tiptoe, for God’s sake. Understand?” He looked away, and walked back to his bedroom and took his clothes off and got into bed, and fell asleep before he could get angry. She was right; he was jealous, but only a little. It would pass.

•  •  •

The next morning, he woke up at eleven, with a headache. When he got to the front of the apartment the glare from the windows hurt. He closed the blinds, twisting one of the plastic wands until he felt it break up at the top behind the sheet metal where you couldn’t see what was going on. He thought, briefly, of going to the other windows and breaking the other two, on purpose, but let it go, settled down into the couch.

“Aspirin?” she said, from the kitchen.

He nodded.

When she brought him the pills and a glass of water, she was decked out in high heels and a long rayon dress, black, all open lace over a black slip, or a bodystocking, or something. “Anything else you want?”

He squinted and blinked. “What is this?” he said, waving his hand at her clothes.

“This is the Forties look. You like it?”

“On Saturday?” he said. “Anyway, I thought high heels were unnatural. A chauvinist conspiracy or something.”

She gave him a blank look, and then said, “I need the car. Okay? I’m not walking nineteen blocks looking like this. I have to go in today. Big project.” When she saw his squinting, smug expression, she said, “I’m going to work because Ryan will be there and I put on some stuff because Ryan will be there, fancy stuff, this dress, the stockings. I feel stupid enough without you staring at me.” She stood looking at him. “Why’re you shaking your head?”

He smiled. “I’m remembering the years I spent worrying about whether women cared about me, noticed me. The work they must have been doing that I never saw.” He shut his eyes.

“If it’s non-effective, I’ll put my soviet outfit back on. If it’s—”

“It’s effective,” he said. “Maybe too effective. Just make sure old Ryan’s got a nice apartment.”

“I told you last night. He lives in a hotel.”

He nodded. “I figure about twenty minutes for the aspirin to work. Ten more minutes.”

“Tilden? Tell me something.” She picked her purse out of the seat of the armchair at the end of the couch, stood pushing things around in the purse until she came up with a tiny maroon brush. She drew it slowly through her long, dark hair. “Why do you live this way?”

There was a time when a woman brushing her hair was the most beautiful thing in the world to him. “This way?”

“In the dark,” she said.

“I’m a mole,” he said, and pointed to his eyes.

“Don’t you ever want to dance? Or go to a movie or—Or a woman? People die, you know? Then it’s over. I mean, you bought a brown car, for God’s sake. Mama—She told me you used to be brash. What happened?” She dropped the hairbrush back into the purse and zipped it, put her hands on her hips. “All you do is work and eat. And sleep.”

“I drink.”

“Not very much,” she said. “Never enough.”

“If you drink too much, you have to think about it.” He looked up, but the light still hurt. “The car keys are on the hook, by the door.” Squinting.

“Yeah, I got them.” She shook her head, opened the purse again. “I’ve gotta go.” She leaned over him and gently kissed his hair. “I could stay home. We could drink up the bourbon. Go to bed.”

“Get out!”

“Just kidding, Tilden, Jesus. Calm down. You’re acting like my father or something.” He lifted his feet up on the couch
and turned to face the back, heard the purse zip closed again, and then her heels on the hardwood floor, finally the spring slip the bolt into the latch of the door.

•  •  •

Paulie was gone all day, and all day Sunday. Some time during the night she had returned the car, because when he looked out the blinds on Sunday morning, there it sat in front of the building. Brown.

He tried not to wait for her, even tried
Sixty Minutes
after the football games were over, but got distracted trying to tell whether the newsmen’s suits were expensive, and their watches and their haircuts. He even thought of trying to call the hotel—but then remembered that he didn’t know the kid’s last name. He used to read, but that was no good either, he couldn’t concentrate, so finally he got out the vacuum cleaner.