I wandered into Zeke’s Olde Tavern on a lazy Sunday afternoon, meeting up with Marcie and Vinnie. Manic laughter and loud backslapping assailed me. A crowd of folks, mostly college kids, watched a football game on TV, and the noise slammed me in the face.
This was not my favorite time of day at the Tavern. I liked it later at night, near closing time, a few regulars crowding the bar, the ancient jukebox filling the corners with early Motown and soft rock from, say, The Delfonics. Music to miss the old days you never really had.
Vinnie pushed a chair at me. “Have a seat, sleuth.”
“You making fun of me?”
“Of course.”
“I want to be taken seriously.”
“No chance of that.” Marcie leaned into me, drumming her fingers on my arm, flashing me a big smile.
“You both been drinking here a while?”
“Your tone suggests a new temperance campaign,” Vinnie said soberly. “Carrie Nation lives.”
“We’re married to each other. He votes Republican,” Marcie laughed. “I—we—have to drink.”
Vinnie raised his glass in tribute.
Marcie smiled again. “Vinnie and I both have our pet theories on your little murder. You want to hear?”
“No.” I waved the barmaid to the table. I wanted a long, cool scotch.
Marcie didn’t stop. “Of course you do. There is absolutely no proof, but I know it was murder. It has to be. For one reason alone. Women don’t throw themselves off bridges when they’re on the way to a man’s house. They throw themselves off bridges when they leave men’s houses. Then they have reason to.”
Vinnie scoffed. “And my theory. Simple desperation. Depression. She wanted a man to marry her, and he moved away—rejected her. Women die when men reject them.” Of course, he pronounced this last bit of wisdom facing his wife.
They went back and forth, light-hearted, throwing frivolous barbs. But genially. It amazed me that they had been able to locate and settle into some middle ground where their marriage could survive and thrive. Humor, I guess, and genuine love. I envied them. But then I stopped because you don’t envy friends. Buddha said: Your true friend is only that part of you that is love. I smiled.
Marcie was denouncing Vinnie as “deplorably sexist,” adding, “Women no longer kill because of what men do to them. Women kill to get rid of men. Men are barnacles on the H.M.S. Sisterhood.”
Vinnie insisted women die for love. “In Victorian times they just pined away.”
“Because,” Marcie insisted, “men refused to bathe more than once a year.”
“Women still die for love.”
“Rick, look who’s the romantic in the family. Vinnie, you should write Harlequin romances. E-books for the emotionally challenged. The supermarket shelves await your purple prose.”
Finally, realizing I was sitting there silently, nursing a scotch in which the ice had melted, Marcie turned to me. “And what do you think?”
“Simple. She killed herself to get away from friends who never stopped talking about her private business.”
“Well,” both roared at once, looking at each other and laughing.
“Well,” I concluded, “sometimes bridges look inviting.”
Marcie sneered. “Then you should tell your girlfriends to keep their mouths wide open.”
“That makes no sense,” Vinnie told her.
The afternoon drifted by. Around seven o’clock—long after I’d planned on leaving—I stepped outside and dialed Karen. Marcie and Vinnie were headed off to get pizza in West Hartford after failing to persuade me to join them.
“Did something happen?” Karen asked.
“No, checking in.”
“Come over. Rick. We can go for a ride or something. I’m going crazy here.”
I deliberated. “All right.”
“Just come over.”
“I don’t have anything new to tell you. A little, maybe. My trip to Amherst.”
“I don’t care. I need to talk to a human being.”
“I don’t know…”
Before she hung up she surprised me. “No talk of Aunt Marta. Not one word tonight. Promise me.”
So we didn’t. We caught the late movie at Trinity College, a French farce that bored me. Near the end Karen nudged me, and so we left. She smiled. “I couldn’t follow the plot.”
“I kept spotting grammatical errors in the subtitles.”
She didn’t want to stop for coffee and a snack—we’d munched on leftover pasta at her place just before leaving for the movies—but she didn’t want to go home yet.
“No,” she kept saying, “drive.”
Drive, she said. So I drove. She fiddled with the radio dial and turned up the music. She settled for the Hartford retro seventies station, complete with inane disco patter and soft-rock musings. Turn the beat around…like to hear percussion. She twisted in her seat, but her movements didn’t seem to be in time with the music’s insistent rhythm: in and out of love. This time, baby. Karen mumbled the words. She ignored me.
“I was happy then.” The joke I always made whenever some forgettable decade from the past intruded on my present life. People were always pulling me into their past lives. High times at the old high school. Or senior prom. Or sorority dance. It didn’t matter what past event. I was happy then. Deliriously.
Of course, I was a rag-tag boy running the streets of Saigon during that decade. Ho Chi Minh City.
…boogie nights…
Karen faced me, alarmed. “Why did you stop being happy?”
I didn’t answer her.
She turned the music louder when the Bee Gees suddenly somersaulted from the backseat into the front. I almost went off the road. Stayin’ Alive. Stayin’ alive…ooh ooh ooh…I thought of crisp white suits and black dress shirts.
Karen made me drive aimlessly for an hour. When I stopped to refill the tank, she bought junk food and soda. Then I took her home. Watching me closely, she invited me into the apartment, but I hesitated. I didn’t know why.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
We stood for a moment on the sidewalk while she groped for keys. It was bone-marrow cold, with knife-like wind, and I suddenly felt the coming assault of winter. I got depressed standing in the ink-black night, the groaning wind rustling in the trees nearby. I was staring at Karen who looked helpless, fumbling in her purse, swearing, twitching her head in frustration. She looked ready to cry, her jaw tight, tucked into her neck.
Inside, she seemed relieved to be out of the cold. Taking her time, measuring and nodding, she made me delicious hot chocolate laced with real cream. I was still chilled, and my body shook from a cold spasm. I remembered a line my adopted mother used to say late at night when a chill went through her body: Somebody just walked on my grave. That was always a conversation stopper in the old New Jersey household.
But now I think I understood it. I slurped down the hot drink while Karen watched me, peering over her cup. She took the cup from me and refilled it. She poured herself some liqueur that looked sticky and smelled sweet. It seemed medicinal, so I refused the glass she offered me.
I hated her apartment, a sterile modern box, all angles and lines, none of them graceful, with redundant off-white walls. Everything was in block form, from the square windows to the boxy kitchen cabinets. The awful sameness was lightened, but only slightly, by her own huge abstract oil paintings gracing every wall. Phantasmagoric splashes of primary color. It was the stuff of serious nightmare. I tried to convince myself it all dated from an earlier, disturbed period, now happily past.
“Are you nervous?” she asked, sitting down near me, her arms folded against her chest.
“No.”
“You look nervous.”
But I wasn’t. In fact, she looked nervous, squirming around, sitting, standing, folding and unfolding her arms, tossing her head back, pursing her lips. I sat stone-like, concentrating on my hot drink, happy with it, and my head swam a bit. I was relaxed now. I wasn’t cold any longer.
“You look nervous,” I told her.
“I’m not nervous.” Too loud. She suddenly jumped up and walked behind me. Had I been some devotee of Hollywood’s Friday the 13th/Nightmare on Elm Street horror flicks, I would have expected a brutal cleaver severing my fragile neck. That was really the way she moved. Instead I felt a soft hand on my shoulder and I smelled a hint of sweet perfume. Roses, I thought. And sweet powder. Her breath was hot with sweetness—that green liqueur. I closed my eyes.
She leaned over and kissed the nape of my neck, her hair brushing my cheek. She had her hands on my shoulders, so I reached back and covered them with mine. Her skin was soft but the hands, fluttery now, slid out from under mine and disappeared back into the folds of her dress. I turned to face her. Eyes closed, mouth open, she looked drugged, a face melting from its own warmth.
I left the chair and walked back to her, taking her hands into mine. She opened her eyes and for a moment looked startled, as if seeing me for the first time, as if coming out of a narcotic stupor. But then there was the slight sliver of a smile, the gray-blue of her eyes becoming dark and cloudy.
I kissed her and felt her mouth tighten. She didn’t seem to want this, but then slowly, as though forcing herself, she slackened her mouth, her jaw.
“Yes,” she whispered.
She kissed me, almost panicky, out of breath, and then stopped, afraid of something. She didn’t move. A chill spread through me.
She said nothing but her hand lifted to her face, and she sighed.
“Karen.”
Silence for an answer.
Surprising me, she walked into the unlit kitchen and stood in the darkness. She lit a cigarette in the dim light, and the match and cigarette lit the dark with such deliberate movement it seemed as if she were landing airplanes. She drew ambitious arcs in the darkness, ovals and circles and stabs at the night. Red-glow punctuation. She was starting to scare me.
“Yes, I wanted it like you,” she said finally, talking to the wall in front of her, away from me.
“And?”
“But you have to leave. You can’t stay.”
“Karen,” I began, but stopped.
She was shaking her head. I thought she might be crying, but no sound came from her. The dim light of the cigarette made her shadowy, ghostlike. The cigarette waved me out the door, pointing the way.
Buddha talked to me: Abstain from sexual misconduct.
I closed my eyes.
He had a point, that wise man. What had I missed here? I was never good at reading women, I knew that, always off-center, insecure, afraid my moves were—what?—too obvious, too boyish, too something. But Karen had played this her own way, and I couldn’t follow. Suddenly I thought of Davey’s line about her: Karen runs from everything while she actually thinks she’s running to it.
I found myself thinking about Liz. Every woman I would ever meet would pale beside her.
In the parking lot, sweating in the cold wind, I looked up at the darkened window and I swear I saw a shadow fall away, behind the drawn curtain. Suddenly the window was dark again. No movement. I shivered. A ghost had walked into my shadow.