ONE
1.
Harrison looked at the red light that glowed on his answering machine. Without taking off his wet coat, he sat down on the edge of the bed and, as if hypnotized, gazed at it. The light meant there had been an incoming message, maybe more than one. So soon, he thought. He glanced at Madeleine, who was shaking her damp hair from side to side, drying the strands in the corners of a towel. He wondered why he felt so suddenly nervous, so apprehensive. A message on an answering machine from some anonymous voice out there—wasn’t that what he wanted to hear in any case? Wasn’t that precisely what the whole thing was about? He rubbed his hands together. Then he raised one hand and let it hover above the PLAYBACK button.
“Well?” Madeleine said. She came and sat alongside him on the bed, curling her legs up under her body. The damp towel lay in her lap. She took his hand and squeezed it, as if for encouragement. “Aren’t you going to listen, Harry?”
He smiled. “It’s weird,” he said. “It’s like when you want to start a new canvas, a new painting, and you hold the brush in the air for a long time because you’re not certain you’re going to get it right; you’re conscious of all the things that are going to go wrong—”
“Stage fright,” she said.
“Something like that.” He touched the PLAYBACK button without pressing it. He stared along the floor, looking at the little pile of posters, the ones they hadn’t had time to put up anywhere yet. He remembered going around the streets with Madeleine only a few hours ago, walking in the rain, moving like fugitives through the darkness, sticking the posters up wherever they could. The windows of stores, phone booths, lampposts, the bus terminal, Grand Central Station—anywhere people might find them and read them. He had enjoyed the surreptitiousness of it all, making sure nobody saw them: Secrecy was the most important aspect of everything. Anonymity was the core of it all. On Lexington Avenue he thought somebody had spotted him—a little guy in a store doorway—but then he’d realized the guy was a drunk sleeping off his alcoholic intake. Another time, near Times Square, he was sure a passing patrol car had caught him, but the cops didn’t even stop to ask questions. Now he reached down and picked up one of the posters, which was damp against his fingertips. He looked at the words:
Harry let the handbill slide from his fingers.
“I played my part in this too,” Madeleine said. “Speaking as your partner, I’d like to listen to what’s on that tape. I didn’t exactly scurry around the city for nothing. If you won’t press the button, I will. My curiosity is killing me.”
Harrison turned his face to look at her. Nerves, he thought. Simple uncomplicated nerves, like the kind you always felt on a project when you weren’t sure if you’d considered everything, if you’d taken everything into account. You get so wrapped up in the central focus of things you’re not certain you’ve had time to look around the edges. He reached out and touched her wrist. How did she manage to look so good with her hair streaked and wet? “Okay,” he said. “Here goes.” And he pushed the PLAYBACK button.
Nothing.
There was a short silence, then the click of a receiver being put down and the long sound of a dial tone. Nothing else. No voice, no apology.
Madeleine smiled. “I guess somebody out there got cold feet, Harry.”
“You’ve got to expect that kind of thing,” he said. A little disappointment, an unsettled moment. He tried to imagine somebody inside a phone booth, dialing the Apology number, then becoming hesitant and confused and hanging up. Embarrassed, maybe.
Madeleine said, “I wonder what I’d do if I came across your poster and I had something on my mind. I wonder if I’d like the idea of calling a certain number and talking into a tape recorder. I think I’d get the strange feeling that there was really somebody listening to me, somebody sitting there and looking smug.…”
The dial tone stopped. There was another click.
And then:
HI, I SAW YOUR NUMBER SO I THOUGHT I’D CALL.… I GOT SOMETHING THAT BOTHERS ME.… IT’S NO BIG DEAL, YOU UNDERSTAND, IT’S JUST THAT I’VE BEEN STEALING BREAD FROM MY MOTHER AND SHE DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT IT, BUT WHAT REALLY BUGS ME IS THAT SHE KEEPS GIVING ME MONEY. I MEAN SHE’S REALLY GENEROUS, SHE’S KIND, AND SHE THINKS THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND ME.… I GET GUILTY AS HELL ABOUT IT. I’M SUPPOSED TO BE GOING TO SCHOOL BUT I KEEP CUTTING CLASSES AND SHE HASN’T FOUND OUT ABOUT IT YET AND I GET GUILTY AS HELL ABOUT THAT TOO. THAT’S IT. THANKS FOR LISTENING.
The message ended.
Harrison pressed the STOP button and looked at Madeleine. He had the weird feeling of having eavesdropped on a stranger’s life; it was as if he had stood with his ear pressed to a door and listened to the mumble of voices from the room beyond. Faceless voices. Thanks for listening. He watched Madeleine get up from the bed and walk to the window. Dawn was already in the sky, faint grey lines running like spidery cracks through the dark.
The first Apology message, he thought. A kid who’s cheating on his mother. A kid adored by his mother and who’s feeling bad because he’s a walking disappointment. He stood up and went towards Madeleine, slipping his arm around her waist. He looked at the sky a moment, the makings of a watery morning. Faint rainslicks slid down the pane. The first Apology message—the realization excited him suddenly. The idea that his handbill had inspired somebody to call the number and talk with his answering machine pleased him. Connections, tiny threads: A kid feels depressed, guilty, wants to get something off his chest, comes across the poster, goes inside a phone booth, dials the number, talks.
“I feel a little relieved,” Madeleine said.
“Like how?”
“The message.” She shrugged. “It’s like I expected to hear the voice of a mass murderer or something. Something awful. I don’t really know. And what we get is a poor kid who’s ripping off his mother.”
“He needed to talk to somebody,” Harrison said. “Which is the reason behind Apology. The poor kid needed somebody. Something.”
“Are you going to see if there are any other messages?” she asked.
“Sure.” He turned away from the window and reached out to the answering machine. He pushed the PLAYBACK button again and waited.
I SAW YOUR POSTER.… I WAS OVER IN GRAND CENTRAL AND I JUST HAPPENED TO SEE IT THERE.… I THINK IT’S A TERRIFIC IDEA.… I JUST LEFT HOME. I WALKED OUT. I JUST WALKED OUT ON MY WIFE AND DAUGHTER. I DIDN’T GIVE THEM ANY WARNING OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT; I JUST WOKE UP AND I WAS SICK TO MY HEART WITH EVERYTHING SO I TOOK SOME CASH OUT OF MY SAVINGS ACCOUNT AND I CAUGHT A TRAIN.… I DIDN’T TELL THEM WHERE I WAS GOING. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY I’M IN NEW YORK.… I’M SORRY.…
The message ended.
Madeleine said, “Jesus, that’s sad.”
Harrison nodded. He was trying to imagine—not the face of the caller, not the emotions of the man—but the sudden emptiness of the lives of his wife and daughter, how they’d wake up and find the guy gone, how they’d wonder where he was; if he didn’t go back home, if he didn’t contact them, he’d become a statistic in the ledger of Missing Persons, a casualty of the human accounting system. “Yeah, it is sad,” he said.
Madeleine sat down on the edge of the bed again. “Did you expect to get that kind of call, Harry? I mean, what did you really expect?”
Harrison shrugged. He pressed the STOP button; the machine came to a halt. What did you expect, Harry? What kind of voices, what kind of messages? “I’m not sure,” he told her. “I didn’t really figure on domestic crises, I guess. I imagined the callers would be more inclined to criminal acts—and I don’t really count stealing from your mother’s purse a criminal act. I don’t count walking out on your family either. It’s pretty damn sad, but it’s not criminal.”
Madeleine laid her head against his shoulder. For a moment Harrison stared through the open bedroom door across the dark space of the loft; he could see the window that faced the street. A slight dawn wind had sprung up, carrying rain, knocking against the panes of glass.
She said, “It’s like being a fisherman, Harry. I imagine you trawling with this big net and you’re catching all kinds of things inside it and you’re bound to land your criminal types sooner or later.”
Harrison glanced at the answering machine. He was longing to turn it back on again, and at the same time, like some miser counting pennies, he wanted to dole the messages out sparingly to himself. A kid who steals his mother’s money, a guy who just walks away from his family. Other lives, the misdemeanors of strangers, the tiny acts of betrayal and theft that constitute human behavior. He shut his eyes a moment. What he remembered was the vague origins of the Apology Project, the small perceptions that had led to the installation of an answering machine and the printing of handbills. What he remembered was discussing it all with Madeleine weeks and weeks ago, trying to assuage her puzzlement, settle her bewilderment, win her over to the point where she understood what it was he was trying to do.
I know it sounds pretty strange, Maddy, but it begins with graffiti, graffiti I saw one time on the side of these boxcars. Then I saw the same kind of things in the subway or written in the yard of the school where I teach. And the main impression I got was of all this pent-up violence, if that makes sense. So I wondered about that. It was the same kind of criminal violence I felt when I saw a group of bums standing around just savagely kicking this other bum who was bleeding all over the sidewalk. I wondered about that too. Then one day I was walking down near Battery Park and I saw this derelict guy stroking a bird, a pigeon maybe, and he was touching it lovingly like he really cared about it when all of a sudden he bit its goddamn head off. Just like that. Wham. Out of nowhere. All these acts of violence. Then this kid in my class was caught trying to rape a seven-year-old girl and I had him pegged as an okay kind of kid, pretty studious, decent, and he said something to the cops I’ve never quite forgotten—he said, “I wished I’d had somebody who’d listened to me.” And somehow these things came together in my mind, if you can understand that. It was just like all these tiny connections fused together in one bright explosion and I came up with the idea of Mr. Apology. There’s so much shit going on out there and there’s nobody prepared to listen to the people who are doing all this shit, so I thought about Apology, I thought about a kind of confession line where people could call in and get stuff off their minds without having to be afraid of reprisals.
Madeleine had looked at him for a long time after that before she’d asked: Where does it connect with art, Harry? Where does it connect with your art?
He remembered suddenly that they’d been lying in bed during this conversation; they had just made love and she’d had her head cradled against his shoulder and the palm of one hand spread out across his chest. He’d said: It connects at the point where the tapes are made public, Maddy. Don’t you see it? I put the voices together after I’ve edited them and I play them in some public place—
Harry, I need to hear it a little clearer—
Okay, imagine the human voice as art. You’re too stuck on pictures and statues and things like that. Why couldn’t the sounds of people confessing to their crimes be considered art? Music is art; so is drama. Why can’t my assembled confessions be thought of in the same way?
She had shrugged then and rolled over on her side, propping herself up on an elbow and smiling at him. Let me get it straight, Harry. One, you’re offering a kind of human service. You might say it’s a social service of a kind, right? Two, you see this as a kind of art form. Am I on the right beam, Spock?
You’re close enough.
Why criminals?
Why not? It was the idea of violence that sparked the project. It doesn’t have to stop at physical violence, does it? It can go the whole spectrum of crime. Embezzlers, say. Burglars. Confidence tricksters. Anybody with something lying heavy on his mind.
Maybe she’d been convinced. Maybe not. But at least she’d been pleased enough to help him in preparing the handbills and stalking the dark streets to paste them up. At least she was on his side. If she didn’t exactly share his enthusiasm, at least she wasn’t skeptical, scornful, critical of the whole notion. Now, as he looked at her, he was conscious of some distance in her eyes, as if she were still trying to work something out inside.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked.
“I was just thinking. This whole thing’s so different from what you’ve done in the past, that’s all.” She lay flat across the bed. Her hair was beginning to dry, curling as it did so. “It’s pretty far removed from the canvases.”
She was referring to the pile of unfinished canvases that lay stacked against the walls of the loft. His yellow phase. Everything had been yellow back then—skies, suns, oceans, tides, even the whites of the human eye. It had given the world a jaundiced appearance. Who could explain that now? Who could explain why one color had dominated everything else in the past? The answer was lost to him. Old works didn’t interest him in any case—they might have been the creations of a stranger. They might have been done by someone who’d trespassed in the loft more than a year ago and painted all those canvases while Harrison was out teaching high school art history to pay the rent. You couldn’t identify any longer. Besides, the Apology Project was what captivated him now.
He reached out to the answering machine, touching the PLAYBACK button. He gazed at Madeleine’s face as he listened; she had closed her eyes. The eyelids were glossy, frail; under the skin you could see the thinnest network of veins. He lightly touched the lids: Sometimes you had to marvel at the frailty of other lives, the way they appeared, in certain kinds of light, as insubstantial and yet rich.
WHO THE FUCK YOU THINK YOU ARE, ANYHOW? HUH? I MEAN, JUST WHO THE FUCK YOU IMAGINE YOU ARE, MAN? HEY, YOU LISTENING TO ME? YOU LISTENING TO ME RIGHT NOW? I GOT GOD ON MY SIDE. YOU UNNERSTAND ME? I’M ONE OF GODS VIGILANTES. I SAY YOU GOTTA BE IN LEAGUE WITH FUCKING SATAN, MAN.
The voice stopped. The message was over.
Madeleine said, “Now that’s what I call really sad, Harry. That’s worse than the guy walking out on his family.”
Harrison didn’t say anything for a time. One of God’s vigilantes. The sound of the deranged. It was bound to happen. You were sure to drag in some of the crazies in that trawling net Maddy had mentioned. It was unavoidable. He tried to imagine the mind of this caller, the curious disjointed perceptions, the way he must walk the streets with the umbrella of God perched over his shoulders. He would see satanic flames issue from the doorways of bars and poolhalls and movie houses. What the hell, it was out there, it was out there in its endless varieties and intricate patterns. Dark figures in doorways and frightened faces in desolate subways and the incoherent mutterings of panhandlers that suggested private worlds of sheer insanity. And Madeleine had said it was really sad. He pushed the STOP button.
Madeleine said, “When I hear somebody like that, somebody demented, I’m glad there’s no way anybody can associate you with that telephone number, Harry.”
Harrison nodded. It was true, a necessary precaution he’d thought about from the very beginning. The telephone number on the Apology handbill wasn’t listed in any directory. Nobody could trace his name from the number. It gave him a certain immunity, a distance from the callers—Madeleine had once called it a safety factor, but he was more inclined to think of it as a preservation of the idea of anonymity. If he didn’t know the names of the callers, why should they know his identity? It was important to the whole project. He looked at the answering machine for a second. Briefly, it appeared to have a life of its own—an electronic life suggested by the red CALL button and the green READY button, which might have been two small unblinking eyes. He reached out and touched the machine, a squat oblong box with artificial walnut veneer and metal trim. Then he turned towards Madeleine and stroked her hair, which was slightly damp even now. She was still lying with her eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips.
“Did I ever stop to thank you?” he said.
“Thank me?”
“For your help with this project. Your support.”
“Harry,” she said. “It comes easily.”
“Easily? I lay some off-the-wall idea on you and you don’t have any doubts?”
She turned over on her side, facing him. “I didn’t say I didn’t have any doubts exactly.” She paused a moment. “I have times of what you might call quiet misgivings. Little butterflies.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s the way I was raised, Harry. Something to do with the commandment thou shalt not eavesdrop.”
“You don’t really think about it that way, do you? I mean, it’s more than just some kinky intrigue about other people’s deep secrets—”
She touched the side of his face. Her hand was warm against his skin. “I know it is. I know it is. And I know you care about what you’re doing here.…”
He rose from the bed. He’d forgotten to take off his wet overcoat. Now he slipped it over the back of a chair, then went to the stereo that was beneath the window and put a record on the turntable. Harry closed his eyes a moment, waiting for the music to touch him. Unashamedly romantic, a Schumann piano quintet. He liked the structure of the piece, the organization, even the lingering sentimentality. Once, he’d thought about playing this music behind the sound of his recorded greeting on the answering machine.
HELLO, THIS IS MR. APOLOGY. APOLOGY IS NOT ASSOCIATED WITH THE POLICE OR WITH ANY OTHER ORGANIZATION. RATHER, IT’S A WAY TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOU’VE DONE WRONG AND HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IT. ALL STATEMENTS RECEIVED BY APOLOGY MAY BE PLAYED BACK TO THE PUBLIC, SO DO NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF. TALK FOR AS LONG AS YOU WANT. THANK YOU.
In the end he’d decided against the music: If you had just held up a liquor store and shot the proprietor by accident, if you’d just had sex with your own daughter or whatever, did you really need to hear, the music of Schumann or anybody else for that matter?
He went back across the room to the machine, pressed the PLAYBACK button, sat down on the bed again. There was another voice, a monotone rumbling out of the electronic circuits of the device. A wheezy, asthmatic rattle.
SOMETIMES I GET THIS URGE TO GO INSIDE ONE OF THEM BARS WHERE NIGGERS SIT AROUND … AND I WANNA TAKE OUT A MOTHERFUCKIN’ GRENADE, AND I WANNA TOSS IT RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF THIS BAR AND JUST WATCH … WATCH THEM BIG FUCKIN’ BLACK FACES GO UP IN SMOKE … HA HA HA.… I’LL DO IT ONE DAY, FOR SURE. I’LL REALLY DO IT … AND I AIN’T GONNA APOLOGIZE FOR IT NEITHER.
The message ended. Harry pressed the STOP button and looked at Madeleine. “Heavy,” he said.
“Somebody in need of treatment, Harry,” Madeleine said. “Somebody in need of a cushioned room.”
“Your average bigot.” He shrugged.
“You don’t think that guy might be capable of doing what he says he wants to do?”
“If he wanted to do it, would he tell me about it?”
“On the principle that the guy who intends to commit suicide doesn’t sit around calling his pals to tell them about it?”
“The same thing, sure.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Something in that voice gave me the creeps, Harry. The wheeze. The way the guy seemed to be sucking air. Like he was extremely angry—”
“Or extremely emphysematic.”
Madeleine sat up, her back against the wall. She stared at her fingernails a moment. “There’s a flaw in Apology. Right there. You never have any way of knowing if somebody’s lying to you.”
“I don’t think it matters. The imagined act of violence is just as interesting as the realized. I don’t really see any difference—”
“I do. It’s the difference between a bunch of black guys sitting around peacefully drinking their beer and that same bunch lying around with broken heads.”
Harrison put his arm around her shoulder. He tried to imagine the face of the last caller, tried to visualize some brutal face inside a phone booth, shoulders hunched, skin pale, the mouth slack, the eyes mindless. He could see the dim light of a phone booth at the end of some drab street shining grimly in the rain. Maybe a guy like that only flirted around the edges of violence; maybe Apology provided him with an outlet, a source of release, something necessary that prevented him from following through on his threat. He could talk his violence away; he could go home and fall asleep, perhaps pleased he’d managed to tell somebody—even a recording device—about the hatred he felt. True or false? Harry still wasn’t sure if it mattered whether the caller was on the level or otherwise; from the very outset he’d been aware of the fact that he was going to get a high percentage of liars, bluffers, big talkers on the tapes. Maybe it was enough just to hear the inherent violence in the voice. He lay back alongside Madeleine, closing his eyes. He was tired now; he felt cold. He was aware of Madeleine shifting around and he opened his eyes a little way to look at her. She was touching the answering machine, pressing the PLAYBACK button.
“Let’s just check and see if there are any more,” she said.
She’s into this, he thought. She’s getting into this project the way I am. He closed his eyes again, listened to the hum of the tape, waited. He was aware of the Schumann filling the small room. Rising, falling, the hammering of fingers on the keys of a piano. An intricate, lyrical moment: It seemed to reach out and ensnare him. A strange juxtaposition to the threat of violence.
APOLOGY … I’M A COP.… YOU THINK IT’S STRANGE. A COP CALLING YOU LIKE THIS? I DON’T HAVE A WHOLE LOT ON MY MIND EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT I’VE BEEN TAKING MONEY FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS FROM THESE GUYS THAT OPERATE A NUMBERS GAME.… IT’S THE SAME OLD STORY, I GUESS. I GOT DEBTS. I GOT VARIOUS THINGS I NEED. I CAN’T MAKE THE ENDS MEET.… THIS JUST SEEMED LIKE AN EASY WAY TO MAKE SOME EXTRA BREAD … ONLY I DON’T SLEEP NIGHTS, APOLOGY.… I JUST WANTED TO TELL SOMEBODY.… NOW I FEEL GODDAMN EMBARRASSED.…
The line went dead. Madeleine stopped the tape.
“It figures,” she said.
“What does?”
“Cops.”
Harrison smiled. “You don’t like cops, do you?”
“I can’t put them high on my list of favorite civil servants. They always spend too much time dealing out traffic tickets and not enough time doing the real things. Like catching muggers. Rapists. Killers. I always get the impression that they’re writing tickets with one hand and hauling in crumpled bills with the other.”
A cop, he thought. He opened his eyes. “You know what pleases me, Maddy? It’s got nothing to do with the last message in itself. What pleases me is the whole response so far. The Apology thing is really touching people. People are reading the handbills. They’re reacting to them. And I think we’re going to get a broad spectrum of callers before we’re through.” He felt suddenly elated. He slapped the palms of his hands against his knees. It was going to be a success, it was going to work, it was going to work better than he’d ever imagined—the next step was to convince the people on the grants committee that this was a project worth funding. His elation dissolved a little when he thought of going to the interview and selling Apology to a committee of hardassed professors. He’d never exactly been at ease with academic types. It always seemed to him that they occupied a different world, breathed a distilled kind of oxygen.
He said, “The day after tomorrow.”
“What about it?”
“Professor Hutchinson and his gang.”
“I haven’t uncrossed my fingers in days, Harry.”
He looked at her. “I don’t know what I feel about it. Somewhere between optimism and pessimism.”
“You’ll get lucky. You just go in there thinking positive.”
“Pass me my Dale Carnegie.”
“Seriously.” She nudged his shoulder. “Positive thinking is the answer to a bunch of things. Just go in there and pretend you’re not really begging, just tell yourself that you’re doing them a favor by asking for their money.”
“I’ll try. I promise I’ll try.”
“Smile a lot. Look them straight in the eye. Works wonders.”
“Yes, coach. Sure, coach.”
She laughed at him. She lay with her face across his chest, her hands pressed to his sides. He tried to dismiss the idea of the grants committee; you could lose yourself quite easily in Madeleine, he thought, in making love to her. You could slide down into that cool uncomplicated world where you didn’t have to worry about voices on a tape or professors holding pursestrings or teaching high school to make the rent payments on a loft or entertain concerns about where, from the viewpoint of thirty-five, your future was headed. He shut his eyes and buried his face in her hair, placed his hands against the base of her spine, feeling for that strange spot in her back where a single touch upon some sensitive grouping of nerves and muscles made her shiver and laugh. He found it and she moaned, trying at the same time to twist away from him. I can’t explain it, Harry. It’s something like a ticklish feeling and something like a huge turn-on, she’d told him once. The mysterious quality of her body. The delicate smoothness of her skin. The moisture that lay faintly on her lips. She kissed him, then drew her face away. There was a light in her eyes; it was like a certain light he’d seen once underwater when a spike of sun had pierced the surface and illuminated the tiles of the pool in the manner of a revelation. He touched her breasts, moving his fingers slowly between the buttons of her blouse, undoing them, trying not to be clumsy. The breasts were warm, small, tight. He moved the palm of his hand gently against a nipple. And then he could feel her hand move across his stomach; he could hear the faint rattle of his belt buckle as she worked it open. The room was silent now; the music had stopped. She made a strange sound as he entered her—a sound both detached and intimate, as if she had come to exist in a world where opposites might dissolve. Detached, intimate. He moved inside her, knowing he couldn’t hold on, knowing that her excitement was carrying him along, feeling the sensation of orgasm begin somewhere at the base of his spine and flow like a hot tributary to his groin. She held him tightly against her, arching her back upwards in one sudden thrust. He shut his eyes very tight. It wasn’t between his legs now; it hadn’t anything to do with his body—the sensation was rooted in the dark center of his brain, a burning, fiery, tantalizing feeling that rose the way a firework might. And then he was silent, his face pressed to the side of her neck. This silence, this mutual quiet—as if a tent had been erected over them, a soundproofed cocoon—always filled him with a sense of wonder. Was this love? He wasn’t altogether certain how you defined love. What it was you were supposed to feel. Sometimes it seemed to him that love was a boundary you crossed, a frontier you negotiated, then you were lost in strange, imposing vistas. Sometimes, too, it seemed love was learned behavior, a fact of your life you grew to accept as soon as you understood it.
He had gone through his thirty-five years without a special commitment to any one woman. There had been several, of course, but they had come and gone, each one playing a mournful second fiddle to his work. Each of these women had shared one common attribute: He had been able to forget them when it came time to doing his work; he had been able to relegate them from his mind to the point where it always surprised him to find that they still lingered in the loft. He looked at Madeleine now and wondered if this one might turn out to be different: Was she going to slip into his life to the point of necessity? He also wondered why he didn’t find this question laughable. She had qualities he liked—she was truthful, loyal, and yet at the same time she could be critical. She enjoyed being involved in his work—unlike some of the past entries who had obviously resented what he did.
He rolled away from her, one leg still stretched across her body. He ran his index finger down her side, the nail lightly touching her skin. Then he turned over on his back and gazed at the ceiling. There was the sudden sound of the telephone ringing. Once, twice—then the answering machine kicked in. He could hear his own recorded message, then the beep, after which there was a period of quiet.
“The Apology line never closes,” Madeleine said.
I SAW YOUR POSTER DOWN AT THE PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL, YOU KNOW? WELL, I DON’T KNOW WHY I’M CALLING.… REALLY I SHOULD BE CALLING MY PARENTS.… I JUST RAN AWAY FROM HOME.… HELLO HELLO HELLO. IS ANYBODY THERE?… I JUST WISH MY PARENTS HAD LOVED ME A BIT BETTER.… GOODBYE.
A young girl’s voice. Hard to guess the age. Thirteen, fourteen maybe. Something in the sound of the voice touched Harrison—the desolation, the loneliness. I just wish my parents had loved me a bit better.
“I feel sorry for her,” he said.
“Me too. The poor kid. It makes you wish you could’ve just picked up the telephone and talked to her, doesn’t it?”
“Then it wouldn’t be the Apology line,” Harrison said.
“I guess.” Madeleine took his hand, pressing it between her own. Then she lay back and pulled a sheet up over her body. Harrison took off the rest of his clothes and settled down beside her. Fatigue was a monster. Something black circling his brain. He covered a yawn with his hand.
“Tired?” she asked.
“Pretty beat,” he said. Beat and satisfied; delighted by the fact that the handbills had already prompted a number of calls.
“It’s damned hard to go to sleep when you know you’ve got to get up in a few hours to go to work,” Madeleine said. She looked at her wristwatch and then unstrapped it. “It’s almost time to get up now.”
She put her arms around him. He watched her face; with her eyes shut there was something peaceful, something timeless, in her expression. He reached out and turned the volume control of the answering machine low. He was too tired now to listen to any more incoming calls. He would check the tape again when he woke.
2.
The man in the grey homburg hat and black overcoat passed under the sign carrying his name and stepped inside the gallery. The little bell that rang above the door had a somehow satisfying sound to it—it was like the discreet note of a muted cash register. As he undid the buttons of his coat he gazed at the midmorning traffic stuttering along 57th Street; it was a damp dog of a Manhattan morning, clouds so heavy and low they appeared to engulf the tops of skyscrapers. He rubbed his cold hands together and turned towards his small office at the rear of the gallery. Ah, the obstacle course—if he could make it back there without having to see any of the paintings that hung on the walls it would indeed be a small victory. They made him bilious; they churned his stomach. For a moment he didn’t even want to bring the socalled artist’s name to mind. Something Japanese. Each vast canvas echoed the last one, predicted the next. Each depicted a rainbow—not the kind of rainbow one might encounter in the natural world, but great arcs of somber colors, browns and blacks and purples, joyless things at the end of which you would expect to find a pot, not of gold, but lead. He stepped inside his office. The girl was already there, straightening papers on his desk. He hung his hat and coat on the hat rack and smiled at her. She reminded him of Ingres’s Comtesse d’Hausonville—the same slightly rounded face, the wide eyes, the hair center-parted and held back with a ribbon.
“There were a couple of calls,” she said.
He looked at the slips of paper she’d placed beside the telephone. He observed that his hand trembled a little. It was called “paying the piper,” he thought. It happened when too many last nights caught up with one. There had been a call from Feldman, Angela’s accountant. Damn, Feldman was always calling, always bitching about cash flow; he talked about this mysterious concept in such a way that he might have been marveling at some wonderful waterfall. Cash flow, Bryant. Cash flow. There was another call from a young lady who wanted to bring her portfolio around. She’d been advised to do so by Fotheringay, it seemed, who had a gallery up on East 74th Street. If the work was so commendable, why the hell didn’t Fotheringay want it for his own place? The waters were filled with sharks.
He put the message slips down and looked at the girl.
“Tell me something uplifting,” he said. “Tell me we’ve already had interested customers this morning. Tell me we’ve had a dozen positive inquiries concerning Tahiko’s rainbows.”
The girl smiled and shook her head. “We’ve had zero customers,” she said and leaned against the front of his desk. Pretty, he thought. She had a rather straightforward quality he enjoyed; she always looked you directly in the eyes.
He said, “In times of recession, my dear, nobody wants to buy pictures, especially pictures of such a depressing kind. Can you honestly imagine hanging one in your living room? They rather remind me of the colors you might see behind your eyes when you’re suffering a morning hangover.”
“Without the benefit of the night before.”
“Exactly.” He stared past her and out into the gallery, looking at the huge rainbows. “For me, the last great art was done by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. I look at those wretched rainbows and I cannot help thinking of Frans Hals’s Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almhouse. Those hands, the worn skin, the way you imagine you want to reach out and touch them. Art pulls you into a picture. It draws you beneath the surface. It most certainly shouldn’t repel you.” He paused; it always excited him to think about the Dutch masters. “Or Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid … the high forehead of the girl, the wide hips, the appearance of the water pouring from her jug. Has anybody ever painted water that way?” He shook his head, turned his face away from the sight of Tahiko’s gloomy canvases. She probably thinks I sound quaint, old-fashioned, perhaps even somewhat didactic. He looked at her, but couldn’t tell from her expression what might be on her mind.
“A question, Mr. Berger,” she said. “Why do we have these paintings anyhow? If you can’t stand them, and nobody seems to want to buy them, why do we have them in the gallery at all?”
“A good question, Madeleine,” he said. He stood up, surveyed the surface of his desk, took a nail file from the middle drawer, held it poised over his left hand. “In horse-racing, in any kind of gambling, you experience this strange and mysterious thing called instinct. An intuition that tells you what’s going to win. So what do you do? You put your money on the nose, don’t you? And, for my sins, my instincts told me that Tahiko was about to become fashionable. In this instance, those small secret voices at the back of my head were terrible liars. I placed my wager on quite the wrong horse.”
“Then we should get rid of them,” she said.
Just like that, he thought. Direct and to the point. He smiled at her in an avuncular way. “I wish to God we could, my dear. However, the ink probably hasn’t dried on the contract yet. And the world is filled with those carnivorous creatures called lawyers, who simply love to instigate lawsuits. Does that explain it?”
“I guess.” She looked at him a moment. “How long are we contracted for?”
“Another three weeks—”
“You could go bankrupt in three weeks.”
He came around the front of his desk and patted the back of her hand. “I think we can hold on a little longer,” he said. Thanks to Angela. Courtesy of my dear wife. Courtesy of the woman who sees the Bryant Berger Gallery as something of a tax scam. He didn’t want to think about Angela now, even if it were only a case of delaying the inevitable. He would have to call her sooner or later. There were excuses to be made.
“What are our plans after we’ve gotten rid of Tahiko?” she asked.
“I don’t have anything definite in mind yet,” he answered. “I’m still fishing, as they say.” Still fishing still trudging around those strange stuffy little lofts in the Village and SoHo and Tribeca, still looking at things concocted out of the bones of old birds and pieces of iron and plastic, at canvases which seemed to have been drooled over rather than painted. Still hoping. He drew the nail file across the fingertips of his left hand. The girl, standing in the office doorway, was gazing out thoughtfully at the gallery. She had an expression which he thought of as contemplative, almost as if something had just occurred to her. But she didn’t say anything. He moved out of the office and into the gallery, where he walked to the window; he stared out to 57th Street. A strident nagging voice inside his mind was harping at him: Call Angela, call your wife, you must get in touch with her. On a morning like this one, he thought, it was difficult to avoid facing the fact that you were nothing more than a middle-aged queer called Bryant Berger who operated—at considerable loss—a gallery in the center of Manhattan. A man hopelessly devoted to a certain school of painting, a man trying to stay afloat on those treacherous windblown tides of changing fashions in art. A man in search of a winner. He glanced around at the rainbows, conscious of the girl watching him from across the gallery. She had her arms folded. That look—one would call it purposeful.
“What’s on your mind, Madeleine?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing.”
“Then I wouldn’t like to see your expression when you did have something going on inside that head of yours.”
She laughed and vanished inside the office. After a moment he could hear her flicking through the pages of a ledger. Was she checking, perhaps, to remind herself of the time—the joyous day—when the Bryant Berger Gallery actually sold a painting? Three weeks ago, he remembered. Before Tahiko. Back then he’d had some rather pleasant pastels done by a young Israeli artist whose name escaped him now. He wished he still had them. He moved slowly towards the office. He remembered that tonight there was some opening he was supposed to attend.
“Where am I invited to tonight, Madeleine?” he asked.
“Hirschl and Adler,” she replied. “Figurative paintings done by Fairfield Porter.”
“Ah, yes.” He sat down behind his desk. He continued to file his nails. Little parings of nail clung to the metal—it was like seeing flakes of yourself as you fell apart, particle by particle. He put the file down. Too depressing. Then he looked at the telephone. Call Angela, tell her something. Anything. Felt a little queasy, my dear. Stayed at my club last night. Would she still buy that old melancholy tune? Got my finger stuck in a rainpipe and it took firemen five hours to cut me free.
He gazed at Madeleine a moment, as if he might find an answer to his dilemma in her face. But then she wasn’t the type who would lie unless perhaps it were a matter of life and death. She just didn’t have the face for it. He watched her as she went out to the gallery where the bell above the door had just rung and two people had come in. Definitely hicks, obviously good folks from Polyesterland. They had the stamp of Kansas or Oklahoma on them. Still, they might be looking for rainbows, God knows. He listened as Madeleine greeted them cheerfully. Then he put out his hand to pick up the telephone. Hesitation: He couldn’t think.
You say the guy that did these is a Jap?
I understand he lives in Brooklyn now.
Brooklyn, huh? What do you think of them, Madge?
Berger moaned to himself, then he punched a number into the telephone. After a moment he heard Angela’s voice—hoarse, distant, emerging from the deep dreamless sleep of Placidyl or whatever her current balm might be. She scares me, he thought. Why does she frighten me? Because she could just snap her fingers and take your gallery away from you, Bryant. She could pull the rug from under your feet, deprive you of your plaything.
“Angela,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“Angela?”
“I’m still here, Bryant. Where are you?” A chill in the larynx. Chips of ice rolling off her tongue.
“About last night, my dear,” he said.
“Of course, last night, when you were conspicuously absent.”
“I had one of those business meetings. Dreadful affair. With an artist and his agent. You know how those things can just drag on and on.…”
“And you missed your train, didn’t you?”
“I had to stay at my club.” An old chestnut. But what if she’d checked? What if she’d called his club? He shut his eyes, wondering what new fabrications might lie ahead of him then.
“It happens too damn often,” she said. Arctic now. He tried to imagine her sitting up in bed, face puffy from pills, cluster of bags beneath the eyes, sagging neck. “I’m left on my own too many times, Bryant.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry.”
Pause. Silence. He wondered if she believed him. Over his head he pictured the looped shadow of some imaginary noose. A scaffold of his own making. He rubbed his eyelids.
How old is this Jap guy?
He’s quite young. About thirty.
I don’t know.… What do you think, Madge?
“I trust you’ll make your train tonight, Bryant. I hope you’ll be on time. We’re having the Feldmans.”
Dear God, the Feldmans, the accountant and his chintzy little wife and the entire conversation circling such arcane subjects as tax shelters and municipal bonds. “I’ll be there, Angela.”
“Which would indeed be a pleasant change, my dear.”
After he’d hung up he sat back in his chair and looked through the open door to the gallery where Madeleine was showing the hicks out. He rose and, with a sense of some small relief, went inside the gallery.
“They liked the rainbows,” Madeleine said and smiled. “They weren’t happy about having some ‘goddarn’ Jap painting in their house, though.”
“They didn’t buy one, of course.”
She shook her head. “But they said they’d be back. They had some other things to look at first. They come from Nebraska.”
Berger looked out into the street. “Whenever anybody tells me they’ll be back, they invariably never return. I suspect some black hole out there into which potential buyers simply vanish. Besides, can you honestly see one of those paintings adorning the wood panels of a den in some farmhouse out there in the heartland, my dear?”
Madeleine smiled again. “I’ve heard of stranger things.”
Such as? he wondered. He glanced at her. He understood how little he knew about the girl’s personal life. Was there a lover somewhere? He guessed so: Otherwise, how would one explain the kind of cheerful aura she always seemed to emit? Nobody was that happy-looking if they were lonely. He turned his face once more to the street, hands clasped behind his back. Then he realized someone was watching him through the window—
Dear Christ.
Why did he choose to come here, right to the gallery?
Why? It was embarrassing.
He stared at George’s face, the close-cropped red hair, the big grin that suggested all manner of mischief, the yellow windbreaker with the collar turned up under the chin. Was it obvious George was gay? Could somebody look at him and just know?
Berger felt a flush of blood at the back of his neck. He cleared his throat, turned to Madeleine, and said: “I have to go out for a while, my dear. You can handle things here, of course.”
“Of course,” she said.
He moved quickly towards the door and stepped out into the street, thinking of another door he might have to open one day very soon—the door of that strangling claustrophobic space called a closet.
The thought distressed him.
3.
Billy Chapman stared into the window of a store plastered with signs that said FIRE SALE. Handheld calculators and watches that played “Dixie” and video games and miniature cameras no bigger than cigarette lighters. He could see a customer inside, a guy examining an electronic chess game under a fluorescent light strip. He ran a hand through his thick black hair and looked along the sidewalk—but he didn’t really see the Times Square lunchtime crowds just shuffling along; he didn’t see the dopers looking glazed or the pimps scrutinizing their territory like they were lords of everything they surveyed. He turned his face upwards—a couple of gulls flapped towards the clouds. She’s gotta be home, he thought. She’s gotta be home about now. He sniffed a few times, found a crumpled Kleenex inside his jacket, blew his nose. Somebody inside the store, a guy with a salesman’s name-tag, was giving him the old fisheye. What the fuck you looking at, jack? You wanna step out here and say something like get your ass outta my doorway? Go ahead, try it, baby!
Billy stuffed the wet tissue back inside his pocket but he was still sniffing. Cocaine burn. Like they cut the shit with Ajax these days. The salesman turned away and Billy Chapman moved along the sidewalk. The air was filled with the sudden smell of pizza—but he didn’t want to think about food right now. He couldn’t handle the idea.
He turned out of the Square, his eyes watering. He rubbed them with the sleeve of his jacket. Things in front of him—people and traffic and storefronts—every damn thing just seemed to shimmer, like the world was dissolving in front of him. They had a name for this, he thought. They called this being strung-out. Being burned-out. It was like all your nerves were dancing at one time and your body wasn’t working properly and you couldn’t think of a goddamn thing except how the fuck to score.
He stopped on a street corner and looked at the tenement building across the way. Yeah, she was sure to be home now. When he’d called earlier nobody had answered the door. Maybe she’d stayed out all night long, casually screwing somebody, somebody she’d let pick her up and take home—like she was some kinda goddamn takeout order from a deli. He turned up the collar of his jacket and started to move across the street. He thought: People are looking at me. People are kinda looking at me sideways. Maybe because my eyes are watering.
Holy shit, nobody’s looking, Billy.
What the hell would they see anyhow?
Just this guy with long black hair and a pale face and a thin moustache, a guy in an old sportscoat and jeans and scuffed brown leather boots worn outside the pants. Nothing. Just a guy crossing a street.
He went inside the building. It was dark in the lobby. He stepped towards the stairs. He missed his mark as he climbed, stumbling a little, knocking an elbow against the hard edge of a step. Sweet suffering Jesus. You get to the second floor, then the third, then the fourth—and that’s where she lives. Floor number four. A radio was playing. He could hear the voice of that chick who sang up-front for Fleetwood Mac—what the hell was her name? He reached the fourth floor, paused, looked the length of the hall like he was afraid somebody might see him. He leaned against the wall because he felt weirdly weak. Strength just running out of him. Face it, Billy baby, whyn’t you face it? This cunt ain’t gonna give you jack shit.
He moved towards the door of her apartment. He rapped lightly a couple of times. She comes to the peephole, she sees me, she ain’t gonna open the door. Sure she will. Sure she’ll open the door for her own fucking flesh and blood. Waiting, he felt lightheaded, like part of his brain had turned into a bird and was flapping against the bone of the skull. Come on, come on, sister.
He heard a movement from inside the apartment, then the sound of a chain being drawn and the door slipped open. She was standing there in nothing but a slip, a pink slip; she was wearing stockings that were baggy at the knees. What does she look like, Billy? A slut, a goddamn slut. The way she holds her cigarette, like some hardassed hooker you might see strutting her stuff over on Times Square.
“Little brother,” she said. “What brings you here?”
“I gotta talk with you, Camilla.”
She started to shut the door. He forced his knee against it, holding it open. She stared at him, giving him a mean look, then turned away and he stepped inside the apartment. He followed her through the small living room and into the kitchen, where she picked up a knife and began to slice at some vegetables. A dump, he thought. She lives in a fucking dump.
“Only time you come here, little brother, is when you need bread. Well, let me say this straight off, man, I ain’t got any. Dig? I am flat broke.” Chop chop chop—a green pepper was sliced into strips. He stared at her fingers. They were long and pale. Something about the way she held the knife in those fingers made him remember … but the goddamn memory was slippery and elusive and he couldn’t pin it down. He looked past her at the kitchen window—why did it seem so bright outside? Why did there have to be all this light? It pained his eyes.
“Billy, what are you doing to yourself? Look at your condition, man. You are capital w wasted. You are a sad guy.”
“Hey, I didn’t come here to talk about how I appear, Camilla. You ain’t precisely what I’d call a Rembrandt yourself.”
“I had a long night, little brother.”
“In whose bed?”
“Man,” she said. She put the knife down. She shook her head from side to side, as if she were disgusted with him. “Something else, Billy. You smell. You smell of real old sweat. Jesus, when did you last shower? When did you last change your clothes?”
“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”
“Lemme guess, Billy. Lemme see if I can make a guess about what you been doing lately. Hmmmm.” She put a finger up against her lower lip and looked like she was puzzling over something. “It begins with the letter c. It goes up your nose and into your bloodstream. And wait—I’m getting something else. It costs more than a hundred bills a throw. Right?”
Billy Chapman didn’t say anything. The window was still too bright; he had to shut his watery eyes. He felt his sister touch him lightly on the shoulder and when he opened his eyes her face was real close to his and there was a look of sadness in her brown eyes. He couldn’t stand the way she stared at him.
“Billy, listen to me. Listen to your sister. You’re making a fuck-up of everything, you understand me? You’re just throwing your goddamn life away. Okay, so I know I ain’t exactly on the hit parade with my own life—but right now I’m only talking about you. Slow down, Billy. Take it easy. You’re just a bag of nerves, babe. Come on, Billy. Don’t get so strung-out.”
He looked into her eyes. Cow eyes. Dark brown and deep. He remembered. Something about the time when they’d been kids together. What was it?
“I need some money, Camilla,” he said. “That’s what I need. Like a loan.”
“What do you need it for? So you can stuff it up your nose?”
“A loan,” he said again.
“You’re pathetic, babe. Real sad.”
He knocked her hand away from his shoulder. “Where do you keep your bread, sis? Huh? Where do you keep it?” He slammed around the kitchen, knocking against the table, hauling open drawers and rummaging through them. She was moving behind him, clawing at his shoulders, trying to keep him still.
“Billy, come on, kid. This ain’t the way to behave. Sit down, sit down at the table, I’ll get you a beer or something.”
He stopped beside the stove. She had to have money. Tucked away someplace. Hidden. Stuffed inside a canister or stashed under a mattress. Somewhere she had to have some bread. Christ, she got good tips at that restaurant where she worked; she’d said so herself. So what did she do with them? He realized he was trembling, that his eyes were still watering, his nose running. He rubbed the tip of his nose with his sleeve.
“Can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself, Billy? Huh? Can’t you step back and take a long hard look? Come on, Billy. Sit down at the table—”
He knocked her hand away. “I got a meeting soon. I need the bread, you understand that? I got a meeting! I got to have the money!”
What would he do if Sylvester came and he didn’t have the jack? How the fuck could he let Sylvester go and take the merchandise with him? I need the goods, I need Sylvester, I need to make that appointment. He shut his eyes. He leaned against the stove. He realized he was sweating heavily, his shirt sticking to his skin. “Please, Camilla. A loan, that’s all.”
“You never pay back your loans,” she said. “You still owe me three hundred bucks from before, Billy. I don’t have it. And even if I did, you wouldn’t get your hands on a cent of it. I’m not going to see you do this to yourself, Billy.”
Fuck her.
Fuck this bitch.
She don’t understand my needs.
She don’t understand them.
“When did you last sleep, Billy? When did you last lay your head down on a pillow and close your eyes and just sleep?” She put one hand up to the back of his neck and began to stroke his hair quietly. “Sleep, baby brother. That’s what you need. Trust your big sister. Trust me, Billy. Sleep.”
He moved away from her. He saw what she was trying to do. She was trying to hypnotize him. He could see right through that. Don’t touch me again, he thought. Don’t lay your lousy hands on me. He went towards the window, opening the lids of various canisters as he moved. FLOUR. SUGAR. TEA. COFFEE. Nothing. Unless she’d hidden her bread under the surface of the flour or stuffed it down beneath the granules of sugar. “I’ll get the money back to you. I swear I will.”
“Jesus, you need money this bad, Billy, why don’t you go out and rob somebody, huh? Pick any rich-looking old guy walking along some dark street and rob him—why don’t you think about that?”
He closed his eyes. He was shivering. The insides of his head felt like Jell-O that hadn’t set. He heard her feet scuff across the floor and realized he couldn’t take it if she so much as touched him again; he couldn’t stand to feel her hands on his flesh or hair, couldn’t take the hot feel of her breath against his face.
“You know what I think, Billy? Huh?”
“I don’t give a fuck what you think!”
“I’m gonna tell you, little brother. You’re so far gone you need some kinda treatment. A shrink. A doc. You need professional help, man. You’re gonna kill yourself if you go on like this, Billy. I wish you’d listen to me.”
“Look, I only want some bread, cash, that’s all I want. Give me what you got and I’ll get the hell outta here.”
She was shaking her head. She was standing real close to him and shaking her head. “Nada,” she said. “You won’t get anything here.”
It didn’t take long. It took maybe a minute, hardly longer.
It didn’t take much strength either.
He was surprised how little effort he had to give.
He dug the tips of his fingers into her neck and he pressed, watching the way her mouth hung open and the panicky look came into her eyes, feeling her feet slap painlessly against his shins. He just dug and pressed, gripping her neck between the thumbs and fingers, making hooks of the hands, forcing the points of the thumbs hard and tight against the larynx, listening to the weird gurgling noise she kept making the more he pressed. It felt like the skin would break, that his fingertips would just pierce the soft flesh and blood would come through the broken openings of veins, but that didn’t happen. And then she was down on her knees and he was shaking her head back and forward, forward and back, feeling all the life just run out of her, seeing the light fizzle in her eyes, seeing it change from panic and fear to some cold indifference, a matter-of-fact expression, seeing the corners of her mouth twist downwards and her tongue come out from between her teeth. Then she seemed to sigh and her head was loose between his hands, her neck twisted in a strange way to one side, her eyes popping a little. He slackened his grip, held her face against his thigh a moment, then pushed her away from him.
He stepped backwards into the table.
Jesus Christ!
What have you done, Billy?
She lay propped against the wall. Her legs were spread wide apart. He stared at her for a time, conscious of a slight smell in the kitchen. What was it? The stove. Yeah. A pan of oil was sitting on the stove and the burner was on LOW. She’d never eat her lunch now.
He moved towards her, stood over her, looked down at her spread legs, thighs visible where the slip had slid upwards.
Camilla.
A loan, I needed a loan, I asked you, I gave you a chance!
He shut his eyes a second.
Then he opened them, looked at her.
The wide-spread legs.
That was it. That was what it was. He remembered it all now.
Out on the street a trio of fags brushed past him. They left a smell of perfume in their trail. Blowdried hair and thick makeup and clothes you just knew would glow in the dark, for God’s sake. He walked to the corner. He was dizzy. He put a hand inside the pocket of his jeans and felt the wad of bills. Why didn’t they make him feel as good as they should have done? What was this dizziness, this quick pain in his gut? She’d kept her bread in the most obvious of places, the easiest place in the whole goddamn world to find. Inside her purse. Jesus! Easy as that. Inside her fucking purse. He wanted to laugh about that but the stomach pain seized him again and he doubled over, groaning a little. He had to lean against the window of a store. A sex shop. A black dude stepped out, carrying a brown bag under one arm. Billy watched him pass, then found himself looking through the glass. Lubricants. Amyl nitrate sold in little bottles under weird names. Porn movies. Books and magazines. You could go inside and buy vibrators that emitted milk. You could get whips and masks and plastic dolls you blew up with a bicycle pump, then fucked.
You killed her, Billy.
His mouth was filled with sticky saliva. There were spots in front of his eyes.
He moved along the sidewalk again, pausing at a DON’T WALK sign. Somebody had stuck a poster below the sign. It caught his eye and he read a few lines of it before the light flashed WALK. He tore it down and crumpled it inside his pocket and then crossed the street. Maybe he’d read the rest of it later, maybe not.
He wiped his eyes. It was just another cuckoo, another fucker fallen out of his tree in a city where the sidewalks were already splattered with all kinds of broken eggshells.
4.
When Madeleine left the Bryant Berger Gallery for lunch she went along 57th Street to Fifth Avenue, where she turned north, hurrying through the midday crowds. A great restless river of people; they moved almost as if they were joined together by invisible threads. She was already late, which meant that Jamey would be sitting in the restaurant and becoming more and more fretful with each minute that passed. Impatient girl—there was always a deadline in her life, always some impossible schedule. When Madeleine reached the restaurant she paused outside a moment, wondering about the handbill in her purse, wondering if her idea was right or wrong. It couldn’t hurt Harry, she thought. It could only help him. She went inside the delicatessen and saw Jamey sitting on the far side of the large room. The smell of pickles, dill, smoked sausages, cheeses—a whole rush of scents came in on her at once. She threaded her way through the tables and sat down facing Jamey, who stubbed out her cigarette and smiled and reached out to touch the back of Madeleine’s hand.
“What they say is true,” Jamey said. “Love enhances, makes the eyes bright and the skin clear. I always thought that was an old wives’ tale.”
Madeleine laughed. She gazed at her friend for a moment. The short dark hair, wide cheekbones, an unusual kind of prettiness. “You look good yourself, Jamey.”
“I can’t complain,” Jamey said. “Shit, of course I can. I smoke too much and I cough a lot and Walt has an ulcer, which means we’re suffering through this stupid bland diet together. I give him moral support through the mountains of tapioca and poached eggs.” Jamey opened her purse. It was black and white checks and matched the material of her jacket, the kind of jacket with padded shoulders you sometimes saw in old Joan Crawford movies. Jamey went to great lengths for her clothes, rummaging through thrift stores and garage sales and Salvation Army outlets. Madeleine tried to remember what Walt looked like, couldn’t bring his face to mind; she only knew he worked on the same magazine as Jamey and that they’d been living together for about ten months. She watched her friend slip a cigarette out of her purse and light it. The handbill, she thought. When would she find the chance to bring up the subject of Apology?
“Otherwise, life goes on,” Jamey said. “I just wrote a piece on this former linebacker for the Jets who’s turned to writing poetry. I wouldn’t bother to read it. Besides, his poetry sucks. But I want to know about you, Maddy. I’ve never seen you look quite this—God damn it—vibrant.”
Madeleine glanced at the menu. Corned beef on rye, pickles, cole slaw … vibrant, she thought. Maybe she was. Maybe she did look different these days. It must show on her face, in her eyes, everywhere.
Jamey said, “Sometimes you get this tiny secretive look on your face, Maddy, which absolutely infuriates me. I remember you used to get that same look back at good old Duke when you’d scored perfect on some test and you didn’t want to tell anybody. Well, you’ve got the same damn look now. I’m waiting. Sitting on the edge of my seat even. Tell me all about this wonderful man you mentioned on the telephone. Don’t keep me hanging like this.”
“You mean Harry?”
“Don’t play nonchalant with me and don’t give me that wide-eyed look. I’ve known you too long for that.”
“He’s an artist.”
“What kind of artist?”
“Different things.” Madeleine paused, glancing across the restaurant. A waitress was hovering nearby; she had the vaguely hooded look of an old vulture. “He paints. He does some sculpture in different materials.”
“Would I have seen any of his work?”
Madeleine hesitated. “He isn’t well-known yet, Jamey. But he’s going to be. It’s only a matter of time. I’m sure he’ll be famous one day. He’s got a lot of ability, a lot of talent.”
“What are you, Maddy? His private pompon girl? His personal chamber of commerce?”
Madeleine laughed. “I believe in him, that’s all.”
“All this sounds perilously close to the real thing,” Jamey said. Her face vanished momentarily behind a cloud of smoke.
“I think it is,” Madeleine said. “It depends on how you define the real thing, though.”
“Since you sound like the expert, suppose you tell me.”
“He’s kind. He’s considerate. He enjoys me the way I am. We get along really well together. I keep surprising myself with my own impatience to see him. To be with him.”
“You make him sound like a narcotic, Maddy.”
Madeleine watched the waitress approach. A narcotic, she thought. Maybe it was something like that, but it was a different and better kind of high than any she’d ever had with a drug. The waitress stopped at the table. Madeleine ordered a green salad and Jamey, who gave the menu only a cursory glance, asked for pineapple and cottage cheese.
“He shares his work with me. He makes me happy. I think I make him happy in return.” Madeleine paused. A whole new life, she thought. Harry has given me a whole new life, one filled with color and texture and meaning. “Would you understand it if I told you he lets me breathe? Would that make sense to you?”
“I think so,” Jamey said. “In other words, this isn’t what you’d call a possessive, claustrophobic relationship. The kind that chokes. The kind that strangles.”
“Right,” Madeleine said.
Jamey was silent a moment. “I can’t get over how happy you look. You shine. You shine in this disgusting way.”
Madeleine smiled. She suddenly felt like she was the keeper of some arcane secret, a thing too profound to utter. There was a warmth inside, a glow, the kind of feeling which, only a few months ago, she might have scorned. It happens, she thought. It really happens.
“How did you meet this wonderful man?”
“He came into the gallery where I work,” Madeleine said. “He just started talking to me. I don’t remember what it was—maybe it was something to do with the pictures on display. I don’t recall. Then he went away and I figured, well, that’s that. He was nice, I guess, but I don’t suppose I thought any more about him.” She paused a moment. She could remember the day, the hot weather of the last relics of summer, even the clothes Harry had been wearing—faded brown cord pants, a navy blue shirt, sneakers—but she couldn’t recall anything of their first conversation.
“Then he came back,” Jamey said.
“The next day. He asked me out. We went to an Indian restaurant. Then I went home with him.” She remembered that, the curious nervy sense of sexual tension, the anticipation, a sudden wild desire that had quite astonished her. It was as if in a single moment Harry had made her entirely forget the faces and the names and the performances of any other lovers she might have had in the past. All four of them, she thought.
“Just like that,” Jamey said. She was glancing at her watch now. Why is she always in such a hurry? Madeleine wondered. Always running, jacket flying behind her, purse strung out from her shoulder like a wake she left in her passage.
“It took me by surprise, Jamey. I wasn’t really expecting anything. I wasn’t looking for something hot and heavy. I wasn’t exactly gasping to jump into bed with somebody. But I knew, just as soon as I saw him in the restaurant, I knew we’d become lovers. I don’t quite know how to phrase this. I had this overwhelming desire. It was like a sharp needle inside me. I don’t know if I’m making sense—”
“You were horny,” Jamey said. “You had the hots for him.”
Madeleine smiled. Good old Jamey. She had this way of reducing things, getting back to basic chemistry, stripping things down. “Right. But it was something I’d never felt before. And I keep feeling it, Jamey. It keeps growing. It keeps on getting better.”
“I should have ordered wine and toasted you,” Jamey said. “I’m delighted you’re happy. You need a bridesmaid real soon?”
“A bridesmaid? We haven’t even gotten around to living together yet.”
“You still keep that little apartment of yours?”
“Sure—”
“Why haven’t you moved in with him?”
“It just hasn’t happened. We’ll both know when the time is right for that step. I think there’s this period where people need to adapt to each other, where they need to make adjustments before they plunge into a living situation like that. It’ll come. But not before we’re both really ready.” Madeleine leaned back in her chair a moment, closed her eyes, listened to the din of the restaurant around her. Everything she’d told Jamey was true, everything exactly as it had happened. She hadn’t been looking for anything, hadn’t been living in the unsettling anticipation of love’s landslide, hadn’t been watching the weather for omens of the heart. She had come to New York City from the stultifying safety of Roanoke, Virginia, found a job at the gallery, an apartment in the upper 80s, dated a couple of times in a desultory way—usually with men who’d come into the gallery or someone she’d met at one of those cocktail-drenched openings that were so prevalent in the fixed world of galleries and shows—nothing that was ever serious, ever threatening. It wasn’t such a bad life: She was well paid (a strange miracle, she sometimes thought, considering the amount of business the gallery didn’t do); the apartment was small but pleasant; her social life was under the kind of control she enjoyed. And then Harry … after Harry nothing could ever have been the same; she could never have gone back to a world without him. She even had a hard time remembering life before him, almost as if she were sifting the recollections of somebody unfamiliar. It was like she’d unconsciously erected safety barriers around her existence and Harry had come crashing through.
She opened her eyes. The waitress placed food in front of her. She watched Jamey pick at her cottage cheese. A late-season fly, glossy as a bat, hovered over the piles of cheese and chunks of pale pineapple. Madeleine placed a fragment of limp lettuce inside her mouth.
Jamey said, “What does he feel about you? Has he told you he loves you?”
“He hasn’t said it in so many words.…”
“No?” Jamey raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
Madeleine didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I’m not sure he absolutely realizes it himself yet.”
“Meaning what? He’s in love with you only he doesn’t know it?”
“It’s all a matter of recognition, Jamey. He needs a little time to get used to the idea. Then he’ll tell me.”
“You sound pretty sure.”
“It’s a feeling.”
“Women’s intuition.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“I’d never laugh at you, Maddy.” Jamey gazed down at her food.
Madeleine said, “He’s too accustomed to his loft. Living alone. The solitary projects. He just needs time to get really accustomed to the fact of what he feels. Then he’ll tell me.”
Jamey was silent for a while, picking at her food. “I’ll have to take your word on that,” she said eventually. “If you can stand a change of subject, how’s the job?”
“It’s just fine. I don’t know how the gallery survives, but it does.” The gallery, she thought. She remembered the idea that had come to her only that morning when she’d been talking with Berger. Maybe. Just maybe it would work. She’d talk to Harry about it later. She nibbled on some more lettuce, then was thinking about the Apology handbill in her purse. It was burning a hole in there. It was all a matter of the right approach now. A matter of getting Jamey’s interest. How could she do that? She opened the purse, then hesitated. There was a roundabout way of doing this—there was also a pretty straightforward manner. But which? Look what I found inside a phone booth today, Jamey. Isn’t that interesting? Wouldn’t that make a terrific story? A small deceit, a trifling mischief. But she’d never been very good at juggling such things.
“What are you working on now, Jamey?” she asked.
“I’m supposed to be finishing up a story about this old longshoreman who’s also a sculptor. He’s an interesting guy. Energetic as hell. He makes his work out of any old material he can find around the docks. I hope I have that kind of energy when I’m his age.” She looked at her watch. “Speaking of work, I don’t exactly have a lot of time. The story’s supposed to be ready this afternoon.”
“What are you writing after that?”
Jamey shrugged. “I’m not sure yet.”
Madeleine hesitated. There was an opening here, a place she could jump into. She took the handbill from her purse and slid it across the table to her friend. Jamey picked it up and read it through.
“What’s this? A joke?”
Madeleine shook her head. “It’s no joke.”
“Why are you showing it to me?”
“I thought it might make an interesting story for you, Jamey. You know, the idea behind it, why it exists, the mysterious identity of the person who runs the Apology line.”
Jamey stared at the handbill again. “Where did you get this?”
Madeleine didn’t say anything.
“You’ve got that secretive look on your face again, Maddy.”
“I do?”
“Sure you do. You want to tell me about this Apology business in a couple of short sentences?”
Madeleine hesitated again. Then she said, “If you decide to write a story, you’d have to keep his identity hidden.”
“You’re getting ahead of me, kid. Whose identity?”
“Harry’s.”
“Harry is behind this?” Jamey stared at her.
“Yes.” A whisper.
Jamey pushed her chair back from the table, lit a cigarette, crossed her legs. “Are you perfectly serious?”
“Perfectly.” Madeleine nodded.
Jamey was silent for a moment. She scanned the handbill a third time, shaking her head from side to side. “Let me get this straight. He’s got this confession line going, right?”
“Look, I was as puzzled as you at the start—”
“People call in and confess things?”
“I’ve heard the tapes, Jamey.”
“Does your boy know what he’s doing?”
“Talk to him. He can explain it far better than me.”
Jamey folded the paper, stuffed it into her purse, looked at her watch again. “It sounds pretty wacky, Maddy.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“It’s out of left field.”
“I know.”
“You feel he needs some publicity?”
“It can’t hurt him, can it?”
Jamey shook her head. “I don’t suppose it can.”
“You sound uncertain, Jamey.”
“If I think there’s a good story behind this and I decide to do it, I have to keep his identity concealed, right?”
“Right.”
“Because there are some real loonies out there running around.”
Madeleine nodded. “And secrecy is part of the whole deal.”
“I can understand that.”
“Will you do it? Will you do it, Jamey?”
Jamey snapped her purse shut. “I can’t promise. I’ll look into it.”
“You wouldn’t print his name?”
“I didn’t say I’d print anything, did I?”
Madeleine smiled at her friend. She watched as Jamey rose from the table and slung her purse over her shoulder. She knew it, she just knew it: Jamey is intrigued—it’s written all over her face—there’s that small concentrated light in her eyes she gets when she’s onto the scent of something good, something she can bite into.
“God, you really are Harry’s private booster, aren’t you? Does he pay you for doing his PR work?”
“I don’t think he even knows what PR stands for.”
“The detached artist, huh? The ivory tower approach.”
Madeleine reached out to touch the back of her friend’s hand. “He deserves some recognition—”
“Even of the anonymous kind?”
“Even that.”
Jamey shook her head. “It’s such a bizarre thing to be doing.”
“It’s not so weird when he explains it.”
“I’m sure,” Jamey said. “Look, kid, I need to rush. I’ll read the paper over again. Then I’ll be in touch. Okay?” She leaned over and kissed Madeleine on the side of her face and then was gone, hurrying across the restaurant, brushing past waitresses, skirting tables, dashing through the front door to the street. Madeleine watched her go, then pushed her salad aside. It was a risk, she thought. Cold print was always a risk, but she knew Jamey and knew that she wouldn’t divulge Harry’s identity. Madeleine knew that much. So the secrecy, the anonymity, of the Apology project would be preserved. And Harry, even if indirectly, would get some decent publicity. How could that fail to help with the members of the grants committee? She sat back in her chair, feeling good, feeling somewhat pleased with herself. She’d just done the kind of thing Harry wouldn’t have done for himself. She’d just helped move him a little closer into the kind of spotlight she thought he deserved. And he does deserve it. He does.
She picked up her purse and rose from the table.
5.
The woman, Camilla Darugna, lay with her head propped up against the kitchen wall and her legs splayed. Her pink slip had risen up her thighs and her arms were spread at her sides. A saucepan filled with oil smoldered on the stove. Black smoke hung heavily in the kitchen; it was drifting slowly towards the window Moody had opened earlier but was still dense and choking. Nightingale watched as the Boy Wonder stepped over the body of the woman and gazed at her upper thighs. You need a gas mask in here, Nightingale thought, something to keep the fumes out of your lungs.
“When did you last see one of them?” Moody asked.
“One of what?”
“A garter belt. A garter belt in the age of panty hose.”
“I thought they were before your time, Doug.”
“I’ve seen movies of the period.” Moody turned his young face away from the remains of Camilla Darugna and smiled at Nightingale; that face, that young face, smooth skin and bright eyes and a baby’s mouth—did Moody shave yet? Going around with Moody made Nightingale feel older than forty-nine. Old, overweight, and looking along the borderline to fifty, the magic five-oh, the mystical number. He wondered why he felt fond of Moody. Maybe it was because they were both, in a sense, victims of their last names. People made jokes, always the same ones. Depressed today, Moody? Or, Hey, Nightingale, whistle something for us. A buck for every one of those he’d heard and he wouldn’t be standing in this smoke-filled kitchen right now—he’d be out in Palm Springs with Bob Hope and Gerald Ford, playing some casual rounds of golf. He coughed into his hand, looked out the window. On the street below he could see the lights of two cop cars flashing and the usual small gathering of those with a morbid interest in the movements of policemen. Did they smell death in the air, those ghouls? He turned away from the window. As if it were a valuable museum piece, the garter belt still held Moody’s attention. Gruesome, Nightingale thought. He stretched out his hand and tugged on the dead woman’s slip, drawing it down to her knees. She deserves something, he thought. A little bit of dignity. He stared at the bruises on her throat. If it hadn’t been for the smoke you could never tell how long she might have lain here, undetected, rotting away, deteriorating. The smell would have brought the neighbors buzzing around finally. The terrible smell.
“Strangulation isn’t as fashionable as it used to be,” Moody said.
“Fashions come and go in murder,” Nightingale said. There was something aloof about Moody, about the way he looked at death. It was like he surveyed the world from behind the safety of a plastic sheet. He should have been an undertaker, maybe, or an embalmer. Something suitably morbid.
Moody looked thoughtful a moment. “We live in times of technology running amok, Frank. We invent new weapons and we make them easy to get. Which means people can distance themselves from their victims when they get into a killing frame of mind. That’s why it’s so unusual to see a victim whose assailant employed such an intimate technique of murder.”
“The laying on of hands,” Nightingale said. Moody was given to such ruminations from time to time. Given to little speeches that tended to ramble. Speculative outbursts. He’ll mellow with time, Nightingale thought. He glanced at the dead woman. Thirty maybe. Black hair held back by a little plastic clasp. Somebody had come in here and strangled her, put his hands up around her neck and squeezed and squeezed until everything was gone out of her—the fight, the struggle, the will to survive. He looked through the open kitchen doorway. A uniformed cop was rummaging around in the living room. A clumsy big guy.
“What do we know about her, Doug?”
“Camilla Darugna. Thirty-one, according to her driver’s license. Lived alone. It seems she was separated from her husband, who had returned to his native Mexico. No offspring. She worked nights as a waitress at a place called Leaves and Shoots, a vegetarian restaurant on Bleecker Street. That’s about it for now. We’re checking for next of kin.”
“Did she have a boyfriend? Anybody special?”
“The neighbors are like brass monkeys, Frank. See nothing, hear nothing, do nothing.”
“It figures.” Nightingale went back to the window. The crowd below had grown; the spoor of a fresh murder had drawn them from the safety of their little locked boxes. “So how do you see it, Boy Wonder?”
Moody shrugged. “Passion. Hatred. No premeditation. A lover maybe. He comes in, jealous, outraged, discovers the evidence of his own cuckoldry and ties his fingers in a knot around the woman’s neck.”
Oil on the stove and a sliced green pepper; she had been about to make herself some lunch. Fried peppers, maybe. A few pieces of sliced onion, a couple of dissected mushrooms. A lunch she never ate. Nightingale wandered around the kitchen. Why hadn’t the killer used the kitchen knife that lay on the counter beside the veggies? Passion, like Moody said. Blind rage, torrent of anger, wham. You don’t think in those situations, do you? You yield to the blood urge. The hunger to hurt. “A lover,” he said, more to himself than to his young partner.
“That’s conjecture,” Moody said.
“She opens the door for him and he comes in.”
“Yeah. She knows him.”
“And we go from there. An argument.”
“Right. He says, ‘What the hell, you’ve been fooling around’ and she denies it and from there it escalates into total war.” Moody stepped over the corpse.
“The knife,” Nightingale said. “Why didn’t he use that?”
“Could be he didn’t think about it. Or, more premeditatively, he didn’t want to get blood all over himself and go walking around this city of ours.”
Premeditatively, Nightingale thought. What a mouthful, what an ugly word. He smiled to himself. He strolled across the kitchen, paused at the refrigerator, stared at the message board held there by a magnet in the shape of a butterfly. The scribblings were mainly connected with the woman’s work, the hours of her shift and her nights off. There was a tiny shopping list: broccoli 3 carrots potatoes milk
He tried to imagine her counting carrots in a supermarket.
Call Alex was written beneath the list.
Just that. No number. Nothing else. Man or woman? he wondered. How could you tell in this age of unisex names?
He twisted his head around quickly when he heard the sound of something breaking in the living room; he saw the uniformed cop standing there looking like a wet St. Bernard that has spotted a leak in its brandy barrel. He held a shattered picture frame in his hand; a print of the Virgin Mary hung halfway out of broken glass.
“Sorry, lieutenant,” the cop said. “I don’t know how it happened. This madonna fell on my head when I was bending over.”
“You a Catholic, Seitzman?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you can bet your ass it wasn’t meant to be an omen.” Nightingale turned away from the cop and looked across the kitchen at Moody, who was sifting through a drawer and making mmmm noises.
“This must have been her all-purpose drawer, Frank. Nails. Coupons. Safety pins. Plastic Baggies. Ah-hah, what have we here? A roach clip that still contains the relic of a joint. Want to light up and get stoned?” Moody was holding the clip in the air.
“I never use the stuff,” Nightingale said.
“Never tried it?”
Nightingale shook his head. “It’s no big deal she smoked dope anyhow. Christ, millions of Americans go around red-eyed all the time. It just never appealed to me.”
Moody put the clip back in the drawer. “I used it at college,” he said. “I had this girl friend who was something of a small-time dealer. She’s an instructor there now. Every so often I get this funny notion.…” Moody laughed to himself. “I get this funny idea I’ll go back to Buffalo and pretend to just bust her. I like the prospect of seeing her expression.”
“Then you say April Fool,” Nightingale said. What was the goddamn point in making an issue out of something like grass, in any case? He saw it in terms of a waste of manpower. You bust some kid for a couple of lids and you only clog up the system and waste a hell of a lot of time. He looked out the window a moment. Then he said, “What was the name of that restaurant?”
“Leaves and Shoots. Bleecker Street.”
“Let’s run over there.”
Nightingale went inside the living room where the big cop was trying to hang the broken picture back on the wall. He stepped out of the apartment and into a long hallway that led to the stairs. Neighbors were standing around, talking in the kinds of whispers people reserved for funerals. There were a couple of uniformed cops relentlessly taking statements. The scene would be photographed, the place dusted for prints, the statements read and weighed and compared, a bunch of people would begin to ask a bunch of questions; none of this activity would restore life to Camilla Darugna. He began to go down the stairs. He thought: Somewhere in this city there’s a guy with the flesh of a dead woman under his fingernails.
In the street the wind was chilly. Frank Nightingale could smell winter on it. The season’s turning, he thought, the coming of snow, the last leaves dying on branches. He turned up the collar of his coat and shivered, then slid onto the passenger seat of the car. Moody could drive. Moody enjoyed the plotting and the scheming that went on against his fellow drivers, that whole struggle for survival in the bedlam and kamikaze assaults of city traffic. The small crowd on the sidewalk was staring at him—it was almost as if he were expected, like some courtly physician, to read a bulletin from a prepared statement. I have to inform you that the condition of Camilla Darugna is now stable. Permanently so.
Moody got in and started the car, moving it away from the sidewalk. When he’d gone a couple of blocks he reached inside the pocket of his coat and fished out a crumpled piece of paper. He passed it to Nightingale. “I’ve been meaning to show you that. You seen it already?”
Nightingale smoothed the paper out against his knee. He read it through. “This city’s filled with jokers, Doug. We got standup comics coming out the kazoo.”
“And you think that’s a joke?”
“Why not?”
“A damn elaborate joke. You go to all the trouble of printing the thing, then you need to run around putting it up on display. I’ve seen it in a few places already.”
Nightingale stared at the sheet again. The tone of the thing—what could you say about it? Shrill? Melodramatic? It sounded crazy to him.
Nightingale passed the paper back to Moody. “Maybe you could use it, Doug. You look like a guy with something heavy on his mind.”
“And here I figured I was doing you a favor,” Moody said.
Nightingale stared out the window. Already there were lights in restaurants, glimmering against the oncoming dark. WHEN YOU CALL YOU WILL BE ALONE WITH A TAPE RECORDER. Guaranteed anonymity, the privacy of an electronic confessional. You call the guy’s answering machine and you apologize for something and then you hang up. What was the point behind it all? Maybe the guy got his jollies listening to people saying they were sorry, itemizing their assorted misdeeds. Voyeurism of a kind. Peeping Tom replaced by Telephone Tom.
He watched as they approached Sixth Avenue. ATTENTION CRIMINALS. What kind of calls did the guy get? And what kind of people would call him anyway? He said, “If he’s serious, Doug, I figure he’s asking for trouble. Would you go around giving out your phone number like that?”
“I guess he’s installed a private line or something,” Moody said. He slowed the car at a red light, tapping his fingers on the rim of the wheel. “I don’t see it as a joke. I think he might be offering a genuine service. I could see that. You get your disillusioned, your lonely—”
“‘Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”
“Seriously, Frank. Take a guy with something on his conscience, okay? He doesn’t give a monkey’s fuck about church because God hasn’t kept him supplied in the folding green and every priest he ever met was a raging queen, and he doesn’t trust the state because he doesn’t like cops and all the lawyers he ever knew only wanted his bread and all the judges he ever saw had electric chair shining in their eyes. Where does this guy turn when he wants to let some of the pressure out?”
“You’re saying he might turn to a tape recorder?”
“Damn right,” Moody said. “It’s the same distancing I talked about before, Frank. The priest updated. Why not confess to a goddamn machine? Why not say you’re sorry to a recording device?”
Nightingale sat back, closed his eyes. He tried to imagine himself dialing the number of this Apology character. He tried to imagine what he might say. Hi, this is one of New York City’s so-called finest, and what I’d like to do is apologize to my wife Sarah for all the unholy hours of this profession and for all the loneliness she had to put up with, and how sorry I am she walked out. I’d also like to apologize to my mother for slipping a buck out of her purse when I was nine years old.…
Sarah.
Four months ago she’d moved out of their apartment on 72nd Street; she’d gone upstate to the town of Fulton, the original one-horse, tightassed dump which had the balls to bill itself as The City with a Future. It was what lawyers called a trial separation. Twenty-four years of marriage, he thought: There shouldn’t be a trial anything after that length of time. And what was she doing in Fulton? Pursuing this folly of opening a small gift shop that also purveyed health foods and freerange eggs and protein drinks. Tourist items as well. But you couldn’t expect tourists in Fulton unless you had a couple of bewildered Canadians who’d strayed off the interstate. He turned to look at Moody and said, “I went up to see Sarah last weekend.”
“Yeah?”
“Last week her enterprise took in the princely sum of seventy-three bucks. Hardly enough to pay the electric bill.” He sunk down into his seat. Why did he feel this need to talk to Moody about the bruised condition of his marriage? Somebody, Frank, you got to talk to somebody.
“What kind of place is Fulton?” Moody asked.
“Shit. You know the kind of joint. It’s like the whole town’s got lockjaw.”
Moody smiled. “Is she coming back home?”
“She gives me this rap about how she just can’t take the pressures of the city anymore. She can’t put up with my absences. I said it was all I ever knew. Being a cop was the only thing I’d ever done. What else am I supposed to do, Doug?” Nightingale gazed at the storefronts. He felt uncomfortable talking like this.
“Meet her halfway,” Moody said.
“Which would be roughly around Utica.”
“You know what I mean. Get her to come home, start trying to find more free time, take her out to the theater. That kind of thing. Pay more attention to her.”
Nightingale said nothing for a while. He puffed his cheeks and whistled tunelessly a moment. He didn’t want to think about Sarah and the emptiness of the apartment and the ketchup labels he read when he sat down to some half-defrosted meal. “She’s a beautiful woman. She gets better as she gets older, Doug. I never figured it would work like that.”
The car was on Bleecker Street now. Nightingale thought about Camilla Darugna. That’s the place to put your mind, Frank. Turn it in the direction of the victim. Just keep thinking about Camilla lying there in her kitchen.
“Maybe you should call this Apology guy,” Moody said. Nightingale laughed. “Would you call him if you had something on your mind?”
“Why not?” Moody said. “I’ll say one thing, though. It would be damn interesting to listen to his tapes.”
6.
Harrison stepped towards the figure that sat in the chair by the window. The lamp in the corner glowed dimly: You could see the uncombed dark hair, the hands dangling over the side of the chair, the shadows made by the bones of the knuckles. Harrison paused halfway across the floor. In his right hand he held a surgical scalpel. Warm steel, a thin mirror smudged by his fingerprints. It glinted in a pale way. A vehicle passed in the street below; lights flickered quickly across the ceiling. He watched them go. They reminded him of sudden shapeless butterflies. Then he was thinking about the figure in the chair again. Albert. Albert Somebody. He’d never had a last name. What the hell—that didn’t matter anyhow. He turned the blade over in the palm of his hand and wondered why he felt so tense, an electric tension that seemed to start, in a tingling way, in the soles of his feet and then work up his legs, through his arms, fingertips, reaching finally to the middle of his chest, to his heart. Strange, he thought. His mouth was dry and the palms of his hands itched. He moved closer to the chair, closer to Albert. He looked at the top of Albert’s head; this close, you could see the hair was a wig, a thatch of dark matting. Harrison smiled. A cheap wig. Albert, you poor bastard. He stared at the dark hairpiece for a long time. Maybe it feels this way, he thought. Maybe this is how it feels. Could you imagine it, work your way into it, pretend? He passed the surgical scalpel from one hand to the other, then back again. He was conscious of a wind rising outside, the way the whole building seemed to creak. He moved slightly to one side. Albert sat motionless: He was like a man sleeping off a heavy meal. Sleeping it off in complete silence. From this angle he could see the sharp point of Albert’s nose, the thick lower lip, the threadbare elbows of the old denim workshirt. He could see the old grey flannel pants and the tattered sneakers. Then he stepped a little to the side, so that he was directly behind Albert again.
A guy kills somebody. What does he feel at that moment? In that split second of time when you know there’s no going back, when you realize that life has gone out of the victim, what do you feel?
Harrison shut his eyes a moment. Outside, the wind died. There was a silence. He remembered how earlier, when he’d gone out to buy the scalpel, the wind had driven scraps of paper along the street, scraps that flapped madly like tiny ghosts hurrying from an exorcism. He remembered the scent of garbage filling the darkness, a smell rising from trashcans and plastic bags along the sidewalks. He’d been able to smell the river too, the dampness, stumps of mildewed wood, rotted planks. You could imagine skeletal figures trapped in the holds of sunken barges, old bones enclosed in weighted caskets, corpses drifting through the poisonous silt of the riverbed. And then he’d walked back, the scalpel strangely heavy in the pocket of his overcoat. And yet it was light, almost without weight.
He opened his eyes, looked at Albert.
It must feel like this.
Tension, unbearable tension, as if the room were filled with a hundred clocks and every one of them was ticking at variance with every other.
A slick of hot sweat slid over his eyelid and he wiped it away. A muscle moved in his throat. He was conscious of a square of pale light that fell through the open bedroom door behind him.
He raised the blade.
Then he froze. It seemed to him that his muscles atrophied and his body wouldn’t respond to his own messages. Bring the damn thing down quick and hard!
He struck.
The blade entered the side of Albert’s head, tearing at fiber, ripping, creating a gash from ear to neck, neck to jaw, a gash with the appearance of a grotesque second mouth. He pulled the blade free and stepped back. He was breathing quickly, his lungs tight, as if a fine string had been pulled inside his chest.
He stepped around Albert. The eyes were open and glassy. The mouth was hollow, like a small space that might recently have been vacated by a bird. You could see the uneven dentures that had been cemented to pink gums. Harrison stared at the face for a bit, turning the blade over and over in his hand. Then he moved forward quickly, driving the instrument into the center of Albert’s chest, tearing the material of the faded blue shirt, puncturing the surface of the skin. Albert slipped sideways in the chair.
Harrison, drawing the blade free, stepped back towards the window. He watched the dangling hands as they swung slightly from the force of the last blow. Then he shut his eyes and laid his forehead upon the cold surface of the glass. When he opened his eyes again he looked at Albert. He thought how well he knew that face, how long he had dreamed it, how intimately he understood its contours and shadows.
Albert Nobody. A victim.
Something else is needed. Something else.
Something vicious.
He swung his arm in a sudden arc and the blade glinted abruptly between Albert’s legs, searing the old grey flannel pants, severing the buttons, laying the groin bare. The scalpel fell from his fingers and rattled on the bare wood boards. He felt dizzy all at once, lightheaded—it was as if he had a sense of some distant muted exaltation, a freedom. The freedom of the kill, the blood game. Something that rose inside him and spread through him and made his nerves sizzle, his senses reel.
There was a noise from behind.
He swung around.
Madeleine was standing in the bedroom doorway, leaning against the jamb. “Finished?” she asked.
Harrison nodded. He was suddenly tired now.
“What are you going to call it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. ‘A Victim.’ Maybe. How does that sound?”
Madeleine folded her arms under her breasts and came into the loft. She was wearing one of Harrison’s old paint-stained shirts. She approached the chair and walked around the figure a couple of times, frowning slightly.
“What do you think?” he asked. It was always important for him to know what she thought; her approval made him feel as if he were high. He was a little tense as he waited.
“I think you’ve got the right title for it,” she said. “Poor old Albert.”
“Do you like it?”
“I like it,” she said.
“Why are you frowning? Though you look beautiful even when you do frown.”
She smiled at him. “I was watching you. You were really getting into it, weren’t you?”
Harrison bent down and picked up the scalpel, which he weighed in the palm of one hand. She was right. For a moment there, a fraction of time, it had been easy to imagine he was killing a real human being, not some papier-mâché dummy he had spent weeks shaping and molding and getting exactly right. Carried away, transported, drifting over into a world of violence. He put the scalpel down again: He didn’t want to look at it. Some strange strain far inside him, something that had come up suddenly to the surface, a mad thing, a deranged quality. Why had it fascinated him like that? You make believe a papier-mâché thing is solid flesh and blood …
“I guess I was,” he said. “Take some consolation from this fact, my love. I don’t have the nerves to be a killer. Look.” And he spread one hand out: It was trembling. Madeleine caught it, held it against her breasts, a singular fluid movement that touched him inside.
“You were pretty intense,” Madeleine said.
“Well, I’ve been putting it off for weeks. Maybe it just built up inside me to a point where I had to explode, you know? I had an idea in my head, something vague—maybe I didn’t want to let it drift on any longer. Maybe I just wanted to be finished with the whole Albert project.” He put his arm around her shoulder, and drew her near to him. “Chalk it up to art, not the killer instinct.”
“I don’t get the concept, Harry. You spent weeks making the figure. I watched you. I was so impressed with the care you took—then you carve him up. If I came in from a different perspective, love, I could say you’d spoiled your own handiwork.”
Harrison wiped his forehead. Worrisome, unsettling to get carried away, but perhaps there hadn’t been any other way to do it. Perhaps there was only one frame of mind you could work yourself into with a project like Albert. “I built him for this one purpose, Maddy. Even when I was making him I knew he had to be disfigured. A victim of crime. I knew it would have to end up like this. I don’t see it as a waste of my work.”
Madeleine didn’t say anything. She moved away from him and circled Albert again. She paused, chewing on her lower lip.
“What’s on your mind?” Harrison asked.
She shrugged. “You really did a number on him.”
“It has to look convincing.” Then he remembered: There was one last thing left to do. He hurried inside the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took out two plastic bags filled with chicken blood. He carried them back to the loft, pierced the plastic with the scalpel, then drenched Albert with the blood. Ragged trails slithered across the chair, the floor, the material of his shirt. He let the empty plastic bags fall from his hands. Finished, he thought. Over and done with. It was a project that had occupied him for too long, almost as if he’d been afraid to take the final step, the act of mutilation. Now he felt a sense of relief. A sense of completion. There was nothing between him and the Apology project now. He had tied up a loose end.
Madeleine stood behind him, massaged his shoulders. “You’re very tight. Try and relax. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so involved in anything, Harry. For a moment there, you even scared me.”
“I think I scared myself,” he said. “Let’s go into the bedroom and lie down. I’m beat.”
They moved towards the bed. Harrison lay flat on his back and stared up at the ceiling. Drained. I think I scared myself. He shut his eyes and imagined people dying from acts of violence—they were happening even now, even as he lay here with his eyes closed and felt Madeleine’s fingers stroke the side of his face; people were being killed in acts of violence. It was more horrifying, more repulsive than the act he’d performed himself on a figure created out of nothing more than paper and paste and old dentures and threadbare clothes. You couldn’t compare Albert with the real thing.
“I like the blood,” Madeleine said. “Pretty authentic. I just wish you weren’t such a slob and dripped the stuff all over the place, Harry.”
“Nag nag nag, it’s all I ever hear.” He raised his face and kissed her, then glanced past her at the light of the answering machine. Red. The CALL light. Tired as he was, he realized he wanted to listen to the tape. He reached out, but before he could press the button Madeleine stopped him.
“I’ve got something to tell you, Harry.”
“Why does that sound ominous?”
She hesitated. “It isn’t really. Do you remember a friend I once mentioned? Jamey Hausermann? She’s a journalist. She writes for New York magazine.”
“Vaguely,” he said.
“I had lunch with her today. I think …” She paused again. “I think I talked her into writing a piece about Apology. I hope you don’t mind.” She was biting her lip, looking worried; the expression made him want to laugh.
“She wants to write about me?”
“Why not? I think Apology would be of interest to a lot of people.”
The notion pleased him. He hadn’t ever imagined anything being written about the project. “What about the identity thing?” he asked.
“She’s an old friend, Harry. We went to school together. She won’t mention you by name. I promise.”
He was quiet a moment. Publicity. He’d never thought about publicity before now; it was as if he’d become totally accustomed to working in obscurity. What was it about the idea of celebrity that appealed to him anyway? A definition of yourself, a projection of your work in front of thousands of people, people reading about you, calling the Apology number in the hundreds, thousands.… Wait, he told himself, don’t get so carried away. It would have to be a weird kind of celebrity anyhow; he might just as well be a masked wrestler, someone whose face is never seen and whose real name has to remain unknown. Still, it excited him. “Sure she won’t mention my name?”
“Positive. Otherwise I wouldn’t have shown her the poster.”
He lay back down and looked at Madeleine. He could tell from her expression that she still had something else to say. What was she up to now? He liked the way she looked, a vague mischievousness on her face—she might have been a little kid caught playing some forbidden game.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m waiting.”
“Am I so transparent?”
“Like clear glass.”
She tucked her legs up under her body, placed the palms of her hands against the sides of her face, smiled at him. “I was talking with Berger this morning and I discovered an astounding thing. He doesn’t have anything planned after those miserable rainbows are removed from the premises. He doesn’t have anything planned next, Harry. Do you know what that means?”
A faint, preposterous light dawning. He shook his head. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why not? It’s a big place. It would be perfect for Apology.”
“Jesus,” he said. “I hadn’t imagined playing the tapes in a place like that.”
“It would be a wonderful spot for them.”
“He’ll never go for it, Maddy. He’s too conservative.”
“Maybe. But he’s also confused. He doesn’t know what’s going to sell, he doesn’t know how the public is going to swing, and he’s in a bad position right now because he needs something terrific after the Tahiko disaster. He needs something that’s going to get public attention, publicity.” She paused. He could see a light in her eyes, a quality that was a mixture of determination and optimism.
“Those gallery owners are pretty damn fickle,” he said.
“You forget, Harry. I work in the place. I know the man. It’s not going to cost me my job just to put a word in for the project, is it?”
“I guess not.” The Bryant Berger Gallery. Midtown Manhattan. A prestigious spot. Critics attended shows there. They wrote about those shows in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The American Art Journal, Arts Magazine. What was this vague thrill he suddenly felt? He imagined the idea of fame thrust upon him, the sight of his face staring out from magazine photographs. He imagined going to parties, opening nights, doing interviews. It was a strange sensation—it was like seeing a shadow of yourself in the future, a faint projection, a different Harry Harrison—someone with some clout in the world of art, someone known as an innovator of some daring, prepared to take risks and chances for the sake of extending the boundaries of his craft. For a moment he allowed himself the luxury of tasting these perceptions, wallowing in them. God, you try for years to hack something out of your perceptions, try to construct links between your imagination and your fingertips, and nothing you create or construct ever satisfies, things hardly ever get finished, you drift into a half-world where you feel overlooked, abandoned, a world wherein younger artists clamber over you and have their works written about. Maybe, just maybe, he thought. Maybe this was an opening into a world he felt had neglected him. He hadn’t become bitter about it, merely a touch disappointed. No, don’t let yourself get too excited, Harry, when you start to think this way you court the specter of further disappointment. The one positive thing you could find to say about obscurity was that you never felt let down, because you had no expectations to start with.
“I’ll talk with Berger when the time is right,” Madeleine said.
“I’m wondering about something,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m wondering how the hell I ever managed without you.”
“Ah, but you didn’t, Harry.”
“I guess I didn’t,” he said. He reached out and hugged her. “I can’t believe the things you do for me.”
He closed his eyes. He felt Madeleine’s lips brush against the side of his face, then she moved away from him. He heard the slight clicking sound as she pushed the button on the answering machine.
“You want to hear from your latest fans?” she asked.
He nodded. “It’s hardly lullaby stuff.”
She lay down beside him as the tape whirred. There were a couple of hang-ups, one heavy breather, then silence for a while. He felt himself drift to the edge of sleep, to the black margin of unconsciousness, but then the sound of a voice jolted him back.
APOLOGY? APOLOGY, YOU LISTENING TO ME, MAN? IF YOU’RE A GODDAMN MAN AND NOT SOME FUCKING MACHINE …
Pause. He opened his eyes. This voice had an edge to it, a sharp quality, something harsh and unpleasant. It disturbed him. He sat upright, staring at the machine.
LISTEN TO ME, MR. APOLOGY. KNOW SOMETHING? I GET THE FEELING YOU’RE THERE, MAN. I GET THIS DISTINCT FEELING YOU’RE JUST SITTING THERE LISTENING.… WHY DON’T YOU PICK UP THE TELEPHONE? OR IS THAT SOMETHING YOU NEVER DO? WE COULD HAVE A NICE LITTLE TALK, YOU AND ME. I’D LIKE THAT. ASSHOLE …
Harrison had an impulse to turn the tape off, but it held him, fascinated him; he had the strange feeling that the caller was inside the bedroom right now, standing just inside the doorway or hiding in the closet. Ridiculous, he thought. But he couldn’t get past this sense of violation, intrusion. This disquieting sense of a presence somewhere in the loft. He held Madeleine’s hand, squeezed it.
HERE’S ALL I GOT TO SAY TO YOU … UNTIL THE NEXT TIME ANYWAY.… I’M GONNA KILL SOMEBODY. I MIGHT USE MY KNIFE, I MIGHT JUST USE MY BARE FUCKING HANDS, BUT IT’S GONNA HAPPEN, APOLOGY, AND YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT IT IN ADVANCE … AND THERE’S NOT A GODDAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.…
Harrison raised his hand and let it hover above the machine. It seemed to him he could feel a faint electric current issue from the answering device, almost as if something quite malevolent were trapped within the coils and circuits of the gadget, something that had a faintly pulsing life of its own.
WE’LL BE TALKING AGAIN REAL SOON, MR. APOLOGY.
WE’LL BE TALKING AGAIN REAL SOON.
And there was laughter, cruel, broken, unpleasant.
He reached up and turned the machine off.