Lights Out (15 page)

A man in a gray-flannel suit, yellow tie, and candy-striped shirt sat at the desk, tapping at a keyboard. “Sir?” he said.

“Is this twenty sixty-eight?” Eddie said.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Or maybe twenty eighty-six.”

“They don’t exist,” said the man. “This whole floor is Werner, Pratt. It’s simply two thousand.”

“My brother’s office was here. J. M. Nye. And Associates.”

The man looked blank. A phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” he said, picking it up. He was very polite. Eddie wanted to knock his computer off the desk, not hard, just a polite little toppling. Instead, he picked up a phone book lying on the desk, looked up J. M. Nye and J. M. Nye and Associates, found listings for neither. He closed the book. The man on the phone reached for it and tucked it in a drawer.

Eddie returned to the lobby, hopping over the velvet rope on his way out. The security guards didn’t notice. Anyone already inside was presumed to be safe. That was another thing that differentiated this security check from the ones Eddie knew.

He stood outside the revolving door, lost in thought. He wasn’t aware that he was standing over the man in the blanket until he felt a sharp kick against his ankle. He looked down.

“This is my spot,” said the man, not seeming to recognize Eddie at all. “Fuck off.”

Eddie didn’t like the implication, even though he’d already made the comparison himself, and he didn’t like being kicked. He recalled what he had done to the last man who’d kicked him. But Eddie did nothing this time. The man was protected by his blanket and his sign.

An hour and a half later, Eddie was in Brooklyn, standing outside 367 Parchman Avenue. It was a dirty brick building a few stories high, without a homeless man, revolving door, marble lobby, or security check. There was just an outer door and an inner door, with a row of buzzers in the square hall between them. Eddie checked the label on Prof’s mailing tube and pressed buzzer three. Nothing happened. He pressed it a few more times, then tried the inner door. It opened.

Number three was at one end of the basement corridor. The corridor was dark and full of smells—fried food, spilled beer, cigarette smoke. TV voices came through the door of number three. Eddie knocked.

“Who is it?” A woman’s voice, impatient.

“Ed Nye,” Eddie said, and started to add, “a friend of Prof’s.” The door opened before he could finish.

“I know who you are.” The woman was tall and lean. Eddie
didn’t recognize her at first. She wore a red terrycloth robe, not the reindeer sweater she’d had on in Prof’s photograph. She’d also seemed rounder in the photograph, and darker of hair and complexion, at least the way he remembered it. But he wasn’t sure how well he remembered it, especially since there’d been a little mixing in his mind of her image and the image of the woman in the porn shot that had been taped beside it.

“Tiffany?” he said.

“That’s me.” She had dark eyes, intelligent, alert, even excited, he thought, although he didn’t know what there was to be excited about.

Eddie searched for some way to begin, found none, said, “Here,” and handed her the cardboard tube.

“What’s this?”

“From Prof. I said I’d mail it. But I was in New York anyway, so …” He took a step back, delaying his departure only to think of the phrase that would take him to
good-bye
.

Tiffany put a hand on his forearm, a long white hand, nails painted red. “You’re not running off, are you? You’ve come all this way. At least I can give you coffee.”

“No, thanks.”

She didn’t remove her hand. “Please. Prof would be really pissed if he found out I didn’t even give you coffee.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. She let go.

He followed her inside. She locked the door, slid two bolts into place. That gave Eddie a bad feeling. Cool it, he told himself.

But the apartment did nothing to take the prison feeling away. For one thing, it was small. No hall, just a kitchen he was already in and a bedroom off it. For another, it had no windows. Light came from a fluorescent strip over the stove and the TV glowing by the unmade bed. It could have been midnight. Those reindeer sweaters had led him to expect something better. He glanced around for some sign of the two kids and saw none.

Eddie sat at the kitchen table. Tiffany boiled water, spooned instant coffee into unmatched cups, poured. Through the bedroom doorway he heard the TV voices.

“Milk and sugar?” asked Tiffany.

“No, thanks.”

She came behind him, leaning over to put his cup on the table. He smelled her, felt her breast press lightly against the side of his head. “Back in a sec,” she said.

She went into the bedroom, closed the door. Eddie sipped the coffee. That first sip was good. On the second he realized it tasted like prison coffee, the same brand exactly. He drank it anyway, listening to the TV voices, fainter now. He thought he heard Tiffany’s voice too, maybe on the phone.

The door opened. Tiffany came out, her hair brushed, smelling of something floral.

“How’s the coffee?” she said, sitting down on the other side of the table. It was small, about the size of a café table for two.

“Good.”

She added three spoonsful of sugar to her own cup and stirred with her red-tipped finger. “This is great,” she said. “I’m glad you came. Really. Having you here is almost like, having him. Isn’t that weird?”

Eddie nodded.

“How is he?”

“Doing all right.”

“But what’s he doing, what’s he thinking, what’re his plans?”

“He wants to get into politics.”

Tiffany started laughing. Eddie laughed too. He stopped when he got the feeling that she had spent some time behind bars herself.

“He’s afraid, with you gone,” Tiffany said.

“Why?”

“You protected him.”

“I didn’t.”

“Just you being there protected him.”

Eddie was silent.

Tiffany twisted in her chair, reached across to the counter for a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” she said.

“No, thanks.”

“Fifteen years in the pen and you don’t smoke?”

“Trying to quit.”

She lit up, exhaled a blue cloud. The smell reached Eddie.

“Maybe I will after all,” he said.

She regarded him without surprise. “Help yourself.”

He lit up too. Big mistake: he knew that right away, but it went so well with the coffee.

“Habits are hard to break,” she said. “I sure as hell hope Prof can break some of his.”

“Like what?” Eddie didn’t want to seem nosy, but he was curious: he’d lived with Prof for a long time. He and Tiffany had Prof in common. He started to feel a little more comfortable in the dark and tiny apartment.

Tiffany took a deep drag, blew smoke through her nose this time. “Like doing stupid things,” she replied.

“You mean the documents and stuff?”

She squinted at him. “I mean getting caught. The documents and stuff are his job. How he supports us in the standard of living to which we’ve become accustomed.” She stabbed her cigarette, still mostly unsmoked, into her coffee, still mostly undrunk. It hissed. Eddie couldn’t imagine Tiffany in the reindeer sweater at all.

“He’s afraid without you,” she said, “but he was afraid of you, too.”

“Prof?”

“He thinks you’re crazy—reading books all the time and killing people.”

Eddie felt his face grow hot.

She gave him that narrow-eyed gaze again. “You don’t look crazy to me.”

Eddie recalled his image in the polished brass of the elevator and realized he probably did look a little crazy. “I’m coming out of it,” he said. “I’ve been in a crazy place for fifteen years.”

“That’s not the record,” she said.

Eddie laughed, tried a joke of his own. “What’s your personal best?”

Tiffany glared at him and didn’t reply. She picked up the cardboard tube, lying on the table. “Let’s see what this is.”

She picked the plastic cap off one end, slipped her fingers
inside, and withdrew a sheet of scrolled paper, about two feet long. She unrolled it on the table. He felt her go still.

It was a charcoal drawing of a nude woman. She was gazing right into the eyes of the viewer and was unmistakably Tiffany. She was sitting in a kitchen chair, very like the one she sat in now, legs slightly spread and pinching one of her nipples between forefinger and thumb. The drawing seemed professional to Eddie, even artistic. Prof’s inscription wasn’t in the same class: “To Tiff, from her dirty old man.”

Eddie looked up from the drawing to find Tiffany watching him. Their eyes met. She licked her lips. “He’ll always be an idiot.”

“Is he an idiot?”

“Don’t you think so?” In the silence that followed, Eddie and Tiffany didn’t take their eyes off each other. “Don’t you think so?” she repeated, and opened her robe, just enough to expose one breast. She took the nipple between her red-pointed finger and thumb and pinched, harder than in the drawing, much harder. At the same time she stretched her bare foot underneath that little café table and ran it under Eddie’s khaki pants, up his leg.

“Come on, killer.”

Tiffany rose, took him by the hand, led him into the bedroom. Eddie hadn’t been with a woman in a long time, not since Mandy. The sex he had with her seemed so sweetly innocent now, compared to what was about to happen. It was going to happen. He couldn’t stop it. The sight of Tiffany’s breast, in life in color and on paper in black and white, the pinched erect nipple, the red fingernails, the knowledge that the cardboard tube he’d been carrying had had this power the whole time, like an amulet in a story or something: all that, combined with fifteen years of loneliness, the different kinds of loneliness, but especially the loneliness of a man for a woman, added up to much more than he could resist.

He went into the bedroom. She helped him strip off the clothes the state had given him. She looked him over.

“He’s right to be afraid of you,” she said. Even that couldn’t stop him.

Outside: Day 3

13

E
ddie awoke in complete darkness. The phone was ringing.

“Tiffany?” he said.

He felt the space beside him and discovered he was alone. The phone kept ringing. The sound came from somewhere on the other side. He crawled across the bed, reached down for the phone, and knocked the receiver out of its cradle.

A telephone voice, small and faint, spoke from down on the bedroom floor. “Hello? Tiff? Is that you? Tiff?”

It was Prof. Eddie could picture him, standing at the pay phone outside the rec room, other cons in line behind him waiting their turn, not patiently. Eddie fumbled for the receiver, got it in his hand.

“Tiffany?” said Prof.

Eddie hung up.

He got out of bed, moved through the darkness toward the kitchen, stepping over something that felt like satin on the way. He bumped into the stove, ran his hand along the control panel to the light switch, flicked it. The fluorescent strip buzzed on, radiating a tremulous blue-white light. It was an old stove; the clock had hands. They said ten to eleven, but Eddie didn’t know if it was day or night.

There was a sandwich on the table and a note beside it. The note read: “Gone to work. Back at noon. Get some rest. You’re going to need it. T. Oh yeah—I’m taking your clothes to the cleaners. Sit tight.” His possessions—the two hundred-dollar bills and the Speedo—lay on the table too.

The sandwich—white bread, peanut butter and jelly—was not unlike a prison sandwich. Eddie opened the fridge. There
wasn’t much in it. Ultra Slimfast, a container of yogurt, a pint of milk, two lemons, an unopened bottle of maple syrup. Maple syrup from Vermont. Real. Genuine. Eddie opened it, poured some inside the sandwich. He sat down and ate. Delicious. He filled a tablespoon with maple syrup and had some straight.

The clock on the stove still said ten to eleven.

There was a tiny bathroom off the tiny bedroom, with toilet, sink, and shower stall all jammed together. Eddie had a shower, washing himself with a bar of soap that smelled like a freshly split coconut. After, he opened the bedroom closet. Women’s clothes hung from the bar, women’s shoes were scattered on the floor. At the back lay a cardboard box that had once contained a twenty-four-inch Gold Star TV. On top was an envelope. Eddie opened it, found ten or twelve blue Social Security cards with no names on them. Underneath were Prof’s clothes.

Eddie tried on a blue shirt with yellow parrots, and a T-shirt that read “Rust Never Sleeps—Neil Young 1978,” both too small. There was a pair of black Levi’s he couldn’t get into and baggy corduroys that he could fasten but were four inches too short. He settled for thick gray sweats that looked new—a hooded sweat shirt and drawstring pants with deep pockets at the front and a zippered one in back. Eddie put on Prof’s sweats and a nice pair of wool socks he found at the bottom of Prof’s box, laced on his own sneakers, stuck the Speedo in a front pocket and zipped the two hundred-dollar bills in the back, and sat down at the table to write Tiffany a good-bye note.

What to say? How to begin? Eddie didn’t know. All he knew was that he couldn’t stay. Not when the phone could ring at any time with Prof on the other end. What he’d done was wrong, even though Tiffany had been the one to start. All he had to do to know it was wrong was to put himself in Prof’s position, and he could do that quite easily. Choosing the right words to tell her was the problem.

Eddie sat at the table, a blank sheet of paper in front of him, a pencil in his hand. He doodled. He doodled a flower, a burning
cigarette, a bird. A big bird with an enormous wingspan, gliding over a calm sea.

“Dear Tiffany,” he wrote. “I’m—”

There was a knock at the door. Eddie got up, sticking the sheet of paper in his pocket. It was probably noon—it could be anytime at all in Tiffany’s little bunker—and that was probably her. Eddie opened the door.

A woman stood outside, but it wasn’t Tiffany. This woman had thick black hair, red lips, smooth double-cream-coffee skin, and a voluptuous body under her short fur jacket and tight jeans.

“Whoop-dee-do,” she said. “My long-lost high-school graduate.”