When I tried to sleep that night, the picture of a crazed Angela Oliver came into my head, and I had to lie for a long time without stirring, for fear of coming fully awake. I clung to the sight of a small distraught woman in a sleeveless white blouse, standing on a porch with a pistol in her hand. Her brown hair was pulled back from her face with two silver clips.
Despite all its defects, you see, my mind works best in the dark. It is there, in silence, that I have tried many times to understand my past life with Nathalie. How could a thing so simple—the infatuation of a visiting American graduate student with his French classmate at the Sorbonne—turn so mercurial and wrenching in the course of a marriage?
Our plan seemed reasonable enough: a courtship among the cafés of the boulevard Saint Michel, followed by a transatlantic life as Nathalie pursued her assignments for Libération and I attended to my buildings and art gallery in SoHo. How did it lead to the howling nights, the mutual threats, the sex that was more like vengeance than love?
Angela would understand, the Angela who trembled and threatened. I pictured her standoff with a rival as Philip had described it more than once—his slender first wife, with a revolver held level, cursing out the “other woman,” one of many, in front of a tract house in Bronxville. Yes, Angela got it.
Nathalie and I were supposed to be too smart for jealousy, but in fact nobody is. Not for long, anyhow. Not all my wife’s fey Left Bank entourage and not all of SoHo put together. Not Mandy or Claudia—not Philip himself, for that matter. Not even Hogan. That’s why I didn’t for a moment think of Angela as a killer. I thought of her as a woman driven to an act of high drama—a bit of British theater on an American front porch in the suburbs.
I had first heard about the incident a couple years earlier, the night I met up with my Icelandic sculptor friend, the Viking, at an opening at Rush Gallery on Fourteenth Street. The beefy Scandinavian, who makes his work with steel beams and dynamite, wasn’t too impressed with the show’s photographs of skateboarders in the concrete apartment blocks of Frankfurt.
Needing a change, we headed over to the Stockyard. The short walk led past a few shuttered meat-loading stalls, some of them still active during the day, and onward to a desolate corner near a barbeque shed. A red glow of neon led us like a beacon through the fog. When we arrived at the bar, we saw half a dozen Harleys leaning under the bare lights of the old metal canopy. A black stretch limo waited at the curb. It was that kind of mixed-up place, one where the Viking would feel at home. He was constantly on the road, jetting from one country to another, setting off explosions in various landscapes and picking up girls here and there. His hair was blond and bright; his arms erupted thick and bare from a black canvas vest.
We entered to a blast of heat carrying Charlie Daniels music from the jukebox and made our way through the crowd of bikers in leather and lawyers in Polo shirts and art world slackers wearing Goodwill castoffs from the ’70s. The Viking bulldozed our way to the far end of the bar, near the pool table in back.
The barmaids, both in straw cowboy hats, wore halter tops and low-slung jeans. When the Viking ordered beers, one of them immediately upped the ante on him.
“A honcho like you should drink like a man,” she said. “What are you guys, wimps?”
“No,” the Viking said, without inflection—the way you state a plain fact.
She laughed, smacked four shot glasses down on the bar, and grabbed a bottle of Wild Turkey. “You up for it?”
“Surely. If the sweet American ladies will join us.”
The other barmaid came over and glanced the Viking up and down. “Too bad the rodeo left town,” she said. “They need a few more bulls to wrestle.”
Before the sculptor could answer, the girls clinked glasses with us and slammed back the Wild Turkey in unison.
“Shit,” the first one said, “I hope you ain’t this goddamn slow when you lick pussy.”
The Viking and I quickly downed the whiskey, and the first barmaid slid two Budweisers toward us. “Thirty-six dollars.”
“I have it,” a voice said quickly behind us.
One of the cowgirls actually allowed herself a fast smile. “Well, if it isn’t Prince Charming, dressed for the ball.”
I turned to find Philip standing three feet away in a tuxedo. Behind him was Claudia, oozing halfway out of a low-cut sheath. She had stopped to talk to a biker with a gray beard pulled into two points over the crest of his belly.
“We were just at some excruciating reception at the UN,” Philip explained. “Hell on earth.”
“And well deserved,” I said. “So what brings you here?”
“Claudia’s friends in Williamsburg told her about it. She thought it would be amusing.” Half-turning, he called back to her, “What would you like, sweetheart?”
“White wine. Grazie, carino.”
Before I could warn him, Philip called his order to the barmaid over the din.
“What?” she asked, making him shout even louder.
“Two white wines, please. Do you have a decent chablis?”
At that precise moment, the cowgirl reached under the bar and turned down the jukebox. Philip’s words suddenly sang out, bringing jeers of laughter from every corner of the room. The second barmaid snatched a red-and-white bullhorn from beside the cash register.
“Did you hear that?” she scoffed to the crowd. “Sir Prissy over here thinks he’s in the goddamned Sonoma Valley. Don’t worry, hoss, she looks like she can swallow more than chablis.”
More laughter, and a foul name or two.
“Who wants a beer?” the barmaid shouted.
The music came swelling back up, but not before I heard Claudia’s biker friend start to hassle the barmaid.
“Hey, you scag,” he said, “that’s no way to talk about a real lady.” He stepped toward the bar.
Philip, who probably couldn’t guess how close we were to disaster, nevertheless showed the right instincts. “No harm done,” he said, heading off the biker with a smile. “My mistake, really. Let’s all have something more respectable. Whiskey, is it?”
Philip turned and flagged down the first barmaid. “All right then, beer and whiskey all around for my friends here. For everyone.”
That got him a cheer.
The girls lined shots and bottles from one end of the bar to the other. The crowd came up in waves, downing the booze and laughing. Meanwhile, touching her bare arm, the biker resumed talking intently to Claudia. His voice was low as he hovered protectively, his eyes darting repeatedly to her luscious half-exposed bust. Claudia, in contrast, seemed oblivious to the whole situation. She was rather accustomed to causing a stir in public places just by arriving.
“All in good fun,” Philip said. He handed more brimming shot glasses around. “Cheers, one and all.”
The good times escalated when the barmaids ordered all drinks off the counter. Someone cranked up the jukebox with a fast Dwight Yoakam number, and the two girls climbed up on the bar.
They whooped, the crowd whooped back, and the girl on the right poured a cold beer over her shoulders and halter top. Sweat trickling on their bare bellies, the cowgirls began a lurid, clogging stomp up and down the bar, making the wood bend and the bikers holler.
“I can’t hear you,” the taller one said through her bullhorn. “What? Not goddamn hot enough for you?”
“No,” yelled our bearded outlaw biker. He had an arm around Claudia.
“All right, then, you hog jockeys. Step back.” The girl handed her drenched friend the bullhorn and took a swig from an unmarked green bottle. Pulling a cigarette lighter from her jeans pocket, she flicked it in front of her mouth and blew a stream of flame halfway along the length of the bar.
“Hot damn,” her accomplice shouted into the bullhorn. “Ladies, don’t leave us up here alone.”
The two started pointing at women in the crowd—“you, you, up here.”
They reached out to haul the candidates—some reluctant, some quite eager—up onto the creaking bar.
“If you’re bitchin’, you dance. If you’re chicken, you sing. Two choices. Otherwise, haul your ass outside. Come on, you sluts, don’t be shy.”
The barmaid’s persuasion, if that’s the right term, proved unnecessary. Dancers were already lining up on the bar—a Jersey girl with volcanic hair, a woman in her twenties who could have been a corporate secretary or maybe a junior PR flack, another whose tan slacks and demeanor signaled department store clerk, and even a female attorney I knew. All that was missing was an art babe, and then suddenly Claudia was being hoisted past me with a heaving assist from the biker. She popped up and turned with a smile and blew Philip a kiss.
“Well, this is novel,” he said to no one in particular.
Claudia was the only girl in a dress, a garment the bikers seemed to appreciate—loudly. It wasn’t hard to see why.
The next song kicked in, a live Farm Aid recording of Willie Nelson’s “Whiskey River.” The room sang along with each chorus as the girls shook and flaunted their stuff. The Viking, keeping time with his beer bottle, wailed away with the rest.
Philip nodded his head and did his best to get into the spirit.
“You know, it’s bizarre,” he shouted into my ear. “I mean, look at Claudia up there. Don’t you think she’s superb?”
“You don’t want to know what I think right now, Phil.”
“Yes, well, there you have it. Claudia’s enough to drive any man crazy. I couldn’t be happier.”
“You’re a lucky man.”
“Oh, I am. Truly blessed.” He took an elegant pull from his beer bottle. “But do you know, the oddest thing happened tonight. After the UN, we stopped first at some fashion shop just over there across from the meat stalls.”
“Jeffrey.”
“That’s it. And while Claudia was in the changing room trying on skirts, I found myself flirting with the sales clerk. A girl from Mumbai, not even particularly pretty. Dark and done up with rings and piercings, you know. Exotic, if you go for that look. Nothing like my Claudia. It was the damnedest thing, though. I couldn’t stay away from her. Even took her phone number. How peculiar is that?”
“Pretty normal, I’d say.”
“Is it? Something similar happened when Angela was in the hospital giving birth to Melissa. I ended up having an affair with her OB/GYN nurse. I mean, what the hell, Jack?”
“Forget it. You’re all right,” I shouted back over the clamor. “Just like the rest of us, only a little meaner.”
“Am I?”
“You’re rich. You can afford to be.”
Philip nodded, not hearing or understanding really, just trying to look as though he enjoyed the music. “Sometimes I wonder what ever became of that poor nurse,” he said.
“Why?”
“Angela found her name in my address book.”
“How’d she react?”
“Went to the girl’s place and gave her quite a scare. I’m sorry I can’t remember the young lady’s name.”
As the music grew louder, a terrible kind of relief welled up in me. At least Nathalie’s death had brought an end to certain grueling battles. I had no one to answer to now, and no one to care what I did. No one to welcome me, or to threaten me either.
“Did Angela do that kind of thing often?” I asked.
“Often enough to keep me on my toes.”
“Pretty effective, I suppose.”
“I never heard from the nurse again. She wouldn’t even answer my calls.”
“Maybe she needed some time.”
Philip shook his head. “I went back to the hospital to look for her once. No dice, as they say. It was as though she’d fallen off the edge of the earth.”
“What would make her do that?”
“Angela on her porch with a gun.”
“A gun?”
“Oh, yes, Angela used to belong to a shooting club in Westchester. Something to fill the long days up there, I suppose.”
In its odd way, it was typical. Philip, a dedicated sportsman, liked his wives to share his hobbies, if not his soul.
“Later, after I left, she even took Melissa with her sometimes. Signed her up for some youth affiliate. National Organization of Girls United for Feminine Firepower—NOGUFF. A lovely group, though the young things got a bit touchy at times. The acronym is more or less the agenda.”
“They shared their mission with you?”
“Oh, yes, insistently. It seems there are all sorts of awful female problems that we men are responsible for. Who knew?”
“I’ve heard some talk.”
“Are you aware, for example, that there’s such a thing as mental rape? Quite a traumatic experience, I gather.”
“Did Angela ever forgive you—for the nurse and such?”
“I never asked.”
Silent, I contemplated my beer for a moment. “It’s been a while, Philip. A decade or so. Maybe you should.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know where to begin. For me women are a foreign country, Jack. Exciting to visit, useful to colonize, but that’s about it. You can’t let yourself go native. If you do, you’re doomed. Pussy-whipped and all that.”
Just then the noise level went higher, and I glanced up to see several girls unhooking their bras under their tops and tossing the loosened lingerie in the general direction of the stuffed moose head behind the bar. A couple of the bolder ones, smiling, flashed their breasts. At that, Claudia looked at once delighted and perplexed—the artist in her, stirred by her comrades’ audacity, craving to invent some bold variation on the Stockyard ritual.
Her solution was to hike her dress high and extend one leg, exposing a swath of pale flesh above patterned hose slung from an old-fashioned garter belt. At her beckoning, the fat biker stepped forward to unfasten the clasps for her, and that’s when things got truly rowdy.
A whistle started blowing, and the music stopped. The barmaids, who enforced a strict no-touch policy, were not about to exempt an overdressed foreigner and her fat Harley Davidson swain. One of them trained a long-handled flashlight straight on the biker’s face, turning his beard a more ghostly gray. Two enormous bouncers moved swiftly toward him through the crowd.
Acting quickly, I pulled Claudia from the bar and told the Viking to block for us, and somehow—thanks to his blond bulk—the four of us got through the crush and out to the night air, ducking swiftly into Philip’s limousine.
“What happened to Mr. Pete?” Claudia asked. Curled in the far corner of the rear seat, she tried to peer out through the tinted glass.
Philip covered her shoulders with his jacket. “I’m sure he explained it was all quite harmless.”
The car pulled away smoothly, circling up to Fourteenth Street and cruising east toward the Village, where Philip knew a quieter membership bar.
“Mr. Pete is a very nice man. Did you know his left leg is wooden?”
“You don’t say.”
“Oh, we do have a good time together, don’t we, amore?”
“The best.”