The Incrementalists (24 page)

“There are public defenders, if it comes to that.”

“We’ll ask Jimmy to—”

“No.”

He didn’t answer, which didn’t mean he accepted it. It’s not often someone in the Salt has money. It’s hard not to take advantage of it when it happens. Besides, I had money; it’s just that the money I had was my bankroll, and spending that meant being out of action, with no way to make more. Funny how it’s the bullshit that occupies your mind when you don’t feel like thinking about things that actually matter, such as—

“You know, Matt, I’d feel better about what happened if I weren’t so afraid I did just what Celeste wanted.”

“Me too,” he said.

The cab was there. Matt put me in and said, “Drink lots of water.”

“You too,” I told him, and gave the cabbie my address.

Ren

“What?” I said.

Jimmy was sitting in the potted tree, not even trying not to cry. Ramon was gone.

“What?” Oskar demanded, body curled around the phone he clutched to his ear. “Right. Got it.” His eyes scoured my face. “Stay here,” he said. “Don’t move. And don’t try to comfort Jimmy.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But you can sit next to him.”

I perched on the edge of the cement planter and watched Oskar run. He was a large man and not at all averse to using his size to make a statement, but when he ran, it was pure efficiency—graceful, powerful and fast.

I sat next to Jimmy in the too-hot night and pondered what I had meant by saying Phil had killed me. It was a stupid expression, “He kills me,” right? And what had I been ranting about before that? And why had it upset Jimmy so? The wine and the heat made a sleepy combination, but a quick spike of adrenaline, remembering the last time I’d felt so unnaturally weary, popped me back awake.

I scooted fractionally closer to Jimmy, to touch my side to his shuddering one thinking about a night in Dublin when I was on exchange during college. A man, goaded by calls to “give us a song!” had stood up at his table and done just that. And another man at a table several over, who didn’t seem to know the singer, had put his head down on his table and wept. My boyfriend had leaned over to me and whispered, “In Texas, they’d get a beating for that.”

“For singing or crying?” I’d asked, and he’d just nodded. We watched another guy clap the crier on the shoulder and kiss the top of his head, as he passed.

“Him too,” my boyfriend noted.

Oskar pulled up beside us, driving a limousine. He slammed his door, flipped his middle finger at the honking car behind him, and stalked around to open the rear passenger door. He looked again at the driver now waiting quietly, seized Jimmy by the jacket lapels and heaved him to standing.

“Look at me,” he demanded in a gruff whisper.

Jimmy took a shuddering breath and met Oskar’s eyes.

“I can carry you or you can pull yourself together and walk with the dignity you deserve.” He let go of Jimmy’s jacket front slowly enough to verify the man would stay standing, but didn’t move from their navel-to-navel pose.

Jimmy took a brisk breath in through his nose and shook his head as though knocking water from his hair. He smoothed his shirt over his globe of body, stepped delicately around Oskar, and moved with studied precision toward the limo. Oskar touched my arm tactically, and we followed Jimmy, me into the back with him, Oskar to the driver’s seat, and pulled back into very well-behaved traffic.

“I’m taking you to Phil’s house,” Oskar said, maneuvering the obscene length of a car like a kayak.

“Okay,” I said, and tried not to smile. Jimmy and I were sitting side by side, our backs to Oskar, facing empty seats.

“I’m going to leave you there and come back here with Jimmy.”

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Did Phil call you? Is he okay?”

“No.”

“Oskar.” I was starting to get angry, but something in his profile stopped me, and we drove in silence until Jimmy’s phone rang.

Jimmy listened for a while and said only, “Okay.” Then he turned around to Oskar and said, “I must make a call.” He spoke in swift, clipped French, the rest of the drive.

Oskar beached the limo outside of Phil’s house.

“Should there be lights on?” I asked.

“He’s home.” Oskar turned in his seat to look at me. “Phil says you’re strong.” He didn’t sound like he believed it.

“And cute, too!” I said, trying for a smile that wasn’t ever going to come.

“Phil’s in trouble,” Oskar said. “Maybe police trouble, maybe not, but bigger trouble either way.”

“Oh, shit.” This was not the night I was hoping for.

“Phil’s life is in the balance, just as much as yours was the other night when Irina poisoned your tea. If this breaks him, he won’t come back out of stub. And we need him. We need Phil, not somebody else in his Primary, do you understand? Phil.”

“I understand.”

“So you better be as strong as he thinks you are.”

I returned Oskar’s steady glare. “I am.”

“Every time I’ve heard you let Celeste through it was because you were excited about something.”

“Celeste?” I said.

“When you talk, and it’s not you, when you hear yourself saying things. When you get carried away.”

“Okay.”

“You must not let that happen. Not tonight. Not ever again. But absolutely not tonight. It would kill him.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“So whatever it takes, you keep calm. Choose your words and make damn certain it’s you choosing them. Or stay silent.”

“I will.”

“We must go,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah,” Oskar said. “Yeah, I know.”

I said good-bye and walked up the drive to Phil’s door. It was open before I reached it. And I was in his arms.

Phil

After what seemed a long time but not long enough, she said, “We’re letting all the A/C out.”

I nodded and moved back so she could close the door, then held her again. Can I be trite? It was like she was my anchor on reality, like she was keeping me from flying away into IwishI and whydidn’tI. In two thousand years, you build up a lot of regrets. It doesn’t make the generation of a new one any easier, and when you’ve just done that, there’s nothing, nothing, nothing like the touch of someone to whom you matter more than whatever your latest fuckup was.

“What happened?” she said after a while.

I disengaged and went and sat on the couch, hoping she’d take it as an invitation. She did.

“I shot Irina,” I told her.

“Are you all right?” She took one of my hands in both of hers.

“If you mean physically, yes.”

She nodded. “Why?” There was no change in how tightly she held my hand.

“I was angry. Furious. There was a gun—Jesus. I’m a walking cliché. There was a gun in my hand and it went off. Christ.”

I had all of her focus, like she could keep me tethered to the ground with her eyes and her hands, and it almost seemed like she could.

She said, “I’ve never been, well, in whatever position you were in.”

“So angry you couldn’t count to eight? I don’t know, Ren. I’m afraid I did what she wanted, which is worse than what I did. I feel like, I don’t know, like I’ve ruined everything.”

“What do you need right now?”

“I need you doing just what you’re doing. Holding me, touching me, convincing me that—shit. I don’t know what you’re convincing me of, but it’s a good thing, and it’s working.”

“It’s not that hard,” she said, rubbing her forehead against mine, just a few inches from the Incrementalist Handshake.

“Celeste was never a good person,” I said. “You probably don’t remember her right now, but it doesn’t matter. She was never what I would call good. But the point is, it’s like, she didn’t have to be good for me to love her. She was just her. She got there, somehow, into me, and that was that.”

“That’s—”

“Let me finish, Ren.”

“All right.”

“My point is, now I’m in love with someone who is good. And I like that. Turns out, that isn’t a problem for me.” She pressed me a little closer. “The problem is, I don’t want to fuck it up. I’m scared. I’m more afraid about you, about losing you, then I’ve been—”

“Phil.”

I stopped. “Yes?”

“I adore you. I love you. But, Jesus Christ, sometimes you talk too much.”

She stood up and reached a hand out. I took it, and she led us into the bedroom.

Ren

I deposited Phil at the foot of his bed and went back to close the door. He stood where I’d left him, eyes held to mine like an umbilicus. I leaned against the door and considered whether I was being pigheaded. Maybe I should wait for a better time for our first time? Maybe a night when Phil wasn’t afraid, and I wasn’t half-listening for cops at his door? Maybe after a nice dinner-and-a-movie, rather than dinner-and-a-murder. Yeah, bullshit, Ren.

I straightened up and pulled my shirt over my head.

Phil dropped my eyes. “Gha,” he said.

I walked to him and felt his eyes creep back up to my face, but what he most needed to say there aren’t words for, so I just watched the fragile hollow where the strong cords of his neck and the hard bones of his chest met, not quite hidden in the few slender, curling hairs. I kissed him there, and he raised his chin and let his arms hang at his sides.

I unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off him, letting the tips of my breasts brush his chest. It hitched up his breathing when I kissed him—his chin and nose—and tasted his lips, like Jimmy’s wine, in thoughtful, elongating mouthfuls.

I was pushing him. I knew I was. I was egging him to some sort of breaking point, and for a terrible moment I thought it was that other person of whom Oskar had spoken reaching her needles through me. But he put his hands on my hips and pulled away to look into my eyes. And that was her. That was the other. That gesture. I was reaching out, and he was pulling back. Not from me. But because of me.

I wasn’t going to tell him who he was, but I knew he wasn’t that. He wasn’t someone who sat out games.

I held his eyes and smiled. “I love you,” I said.

His smile wobbled.

He could cry or he could fuck me, I didn’t care. I just wanted whatever it was dammed up in him to break. But fucking would be more fun.

“I love you,” I said again.

He closed his eyes.

Then, because he couldn’t yet pull me against him and hold me like I knew he needed to, or because I could see he was starting to believe it, or because there’s some stupid fairy-tale magic to saying anything three times, I said, “I love you,” and his phone rang. And of course he had to answer it, because jail would be even less fun than crying.

Phil

I just never learn: When you’re about to finally get what you’ve been wanting, and when it’s what you need like you’ve rarely needed anything, turn off your fucking phone.

The caller ID said it was Oskar, who was just exactly the person I least wanted to talk to, but I had no choice. “Yes?” I said, trying to keep my voice normal.

Oskar said, “We need to know who saw you. I mean, people who know you, between when you entered and left The Palms today.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. Ren’s head was on my shoulder, my right arm around her, and her breasts pressed against my chest. And Oskar expected me to tell him what?

“All right,” I said. “On the way in, Richard Sanderson and Yehia Awada waved to me. On the way out, I have no idea. Someone said something as I passed the poker room, but I don’t know who.”

“Crap,” he said.

“I’m not done. You’ll need the security tapes, or CDs, or whatever they use, which are going to be damn near impossible to get.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“I said damn near.”

She moved a little, rubbing against me, and I almost squeezed the phone in two.

“Go on,” said Oskar.

I reached in front of me and unsnapped Ren’s jeans, then slid my hand down to grab her ass. She made little mewing sounds and pressed against me harder.

“The guy who can get them for you is Andy Harmon. All of his switches are in the red ceramic jar next to the hand pump in my kitchen. Getting him to give you access, especially now, is going to be major work, but—”

“You just happened to have his switches?”

Ren started kissing my collarbone.

“Head of security at the place I count on for my sugar spoon? Yes, I just happened to have his switches.”

“Are you all right, Phil? Your voice—”

“Jesus, Oskar. I am not all right. But I’ll be much better the instant you hang up.”

“All right,” he said, and disconnected. I turned off my phone and threw it over my shoulder. I ran my hand along Ren’s scalp, grabbed hold of her hair, and brought her head back and my mouth down on hers.

Ren

After that, I didn’t need to push him.

FOURTEEN

Love Is Only a Game

Phil

I remember the ’60s, which, according to Wavy Gravy, means I wasn’t there. I remember being accosted on Forbes and Murray in Squirrel Hill by a Buddhist who expressed a desire to know if I wanted to be at peace with myself. I didn’t answer him, and I didn’t think much about it until I was reminded, thirty or forty years later, by a rant on the subject in a trashy sci-fi novel I happened to read. In general, I agree with the author of said trashy sci-fi novel: I don’t want to be at peace with myself. I want to be fighting with myself, struggling, looking for answers; I want to be discontented and busy making my discontentment into something worthwhile. It is our discontent that drives us.

But, every now and then, after being whipsawed by life, and betrayed by those you love, and smacked down hardest by your own irrationality, well, a bit of peace isn’t all that bad a thing. She moved a little in my arms, shifting closer to me, and her face twitched as she slept. I brushed a hair away from her eye and watched her for a while. Her hand moved, looking for mine. She found it and rested her cheek on it.

A little later she woke up partway, and pressed back against me, and I wasn’t at peace anymore. But that was all right, too.

Ren

There was a funny-colored stream of light coming through the outdated curtains of Phil’s bedroom window; I loved that he had bad curtains. I closed my eyes and wrapped my body around his, feeling the way the relaxation deepened, even from sleep, being closer to him.