Twenty-Three

Near the end of the final set I found myself wondering what Miss Manners would advise about consulting an ex-husband on a business matter.

Probably to avoid watching him in concert if his bass playing still turns you on. I tried not to watch Cal’s hands, which was impossible.

When the encore ended to scattered applause, the stragglers shuffled through a haze of cigarette smoke, hesitated at the doorway, yanking out umbrellas. I listened to the rain pelt the sidewalk. The waitress yawned as she bused my table.

Cal was arguing with the lead guitar. He reached over and plucked the man’s A string, grimaced at the flat twang. The pony-tailed keyboard player gave me a glance when I stood, and murmured something to Cal, who turned to look at me, shading his eyes from the spotlight glare.

“Carly?”

Nobody calls me Carly. Nobody ever did except Cal.

“Hi,” I said, expelling a deep breath.

There was a pause. He hadn’t read Miss Manners on chatting with ex-spouses either.

“So how are you?” he said finally, taking twice as long as necessary to unhook his bass strap. It was intricately tooled leather. I’d given him that strap.

“Okay.” I walked up the two steps to the stage, taking extra care not to trip over a cable. “You?”

“Okay.”

Another pause. Cal tucked his bass into a hardshell case.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked.

“No.”

“Just no?” I asked.

“Not here,” he said. “They lock up so fast, sometimes I get my foot caught in the door.” Then he lowered his voice so the curious keyboard player couldn’t overhear. “Not anyplace.”

Stung, I said, “Last time I saw you, you wouldn’t turn down a drink.”

“Yeah, well, I’m clean and sober now,” he said. “Stone-cold. Two years, two months.”

“Good for you,” I said, meaning it. “Look, I don’t care about the drink. I want to talk.”

“Not here. And not at my place.”

I wondered if he was living with somebody, married even.

“You have an unlisted number.”

“I don’t have a phone,” he said.

“I wish I’d known you were in town. Would have made my life easier,” I said.

“Yeah, but that’s not my job, is it?”

Two waiters piled chairs on top of tables. The waitress swept underneath as fast as they stacked them. The bar-keep checked the clock.

There aren’t too many joints to hit in Boston at two in the morning. It’s not New Orleans.

“Maybe we could take a walk,” I said.

“Okay.”

I’m a late-night walker. Rain doesn’t deter me. A downpour does. The wind scooped water off the sidewalk and dumped it into my shoes, turned my umbrella into a useless sail. Cal, with no umbrella or raincoat, zipped up his denim jacket and stuck the hand that wasn’t holding the bass into his pocket.

“Do you know any place that’s open?” I hollered into the gale. “A doughnut shop? A diner? All the after-hours places I know are cop hangouts.”

“It’s your call,” Cal said impassively, rain dripping off his chin.

I always try to flag a Green & White out of company loyalty, but this time I grabbed the first available cab, a Yellow, piloted by a Haitian who crept along at half speed.

Cal, sharing the backseat, his knees straddling his bass, seemed like a stranger; everything I remembered about our marriage seemed like something I’d read in a book, like it had happened to somebody else.

I gave the cabbie my address.

“How’d you get clean?” I asked.

“AA.”

“I thought you had to believe in God for AA.”

“A Higher Power. Bothered me some at the beginning, but it turned into an easy choice: believe in something, or wind up dead in some stinking hole with a needle in your arm. AIDS scared the hell out of me. I always thought I’d die young, but that’s sure not the way I want to go.”

“Motorcycle crash,” I suggested with a lifted eyebrow.

“Yeah,” he said. “Blast of glory. James Dean. Dick Farina. Instead I go to AA.”

“Good for you,” I repeated.

“And I play bass with whoever pays,” he said.

We didn’t talk during the rest of the ride. The windshield wipers slapped out a squishy rhythm. I paid the fare.

I’d stuck my duplicate keys into my back pocket. My hair was drenched by the time I got all the locks open.

“Yeah,” Cal said, dripping on the foyer rug. “I remember this. Nice place. Big.”

I stuck my umbrella in the stand, stepped out of my soaked shoes.

“Okay if I take my shoes off?” Cal asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can I leave the bass here? Case is wet.”

“Just leave it,” I said. “I’ll get towels. Be right back.”

“Your aunt would have yelled a blue streak, water all over her floor.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not her.”

I raced upstairs to the linen closet, yanked out two turquoise towels. I bent at the waist to secure one of them around my head, turban style, and headed toward the bathroom.

It was the first thing I saw when I stepped through the door. Across the mirror, someone had printed the words crookedly: “Back off” in blood red. Lipstick, I realized. The floor was littered with broken medicine bottles, assorted tablets. Cough medicine trickled across the tile.

I ran downstairs.

“You always looked good in towels, Carly,” Cal said.

I pushed past him into the living room. The sofa was upended; its weak leg finally split. Cal must have followed. I heard him gasp.

“Call 911,” I said.

“Somebody might still be here.”

“Call 911,” I repeated.

“What the hell are you gonna do with that thing?”

While he was dialing, I’d opened the lower-left-hand drawer of my desk, quickly unwrapping my .38 from its undershirt shroud.

“I had to make sure it wasn’t stolen,” I snapped.

“Is anything gone?” he asked.

I turned in a slow circle, the .38 pointing at the floor. Aunt Bea’s mahogany end tables had been smashed. The Oriental rug looked like it had sprouted a new pattern. From the emptied food jars nearby—peanut butter, mustard, ketchup—I could guess the artist’s medium. The room smelled; he’d used worse. Urine. Feces, maybe.

“T.C.!” I called, while Cal was giving my address to the Cambridge police.

I took off upstairs, gripping the gun. There aren’t a lot of things I care about in that house. T.C., my cat, is one of them. It’s odd that I thought about him before Roz. Maybe not. Roz, with her karate training, can look after herself. And Roz was the one who was supposed to have had the damned locks changed.

I did a room-by-room search, aware that it ought to be left to the cops, aware that I was taking reckless chances. I felt like taking reckless chances. I felt like catching whoever had smashed Aunt Bea’s carefully polished end tables into splinters, turned her prized rug into a spoiled canvas—catching him and hurting him.

Not killing him. Hurting him. Badly.

I heard a noise on the staircase, pivoted. “Carly, they’re on their way.”

“Ten minutes, right?” They always say that.

“Can you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Put the gun down.”

“You do me one too.”

“Yeah?”

“Call me Carlotta.”

“You got the gun, I call you whatever you want.”

I lowered it to my side, feeling angry and foolish. “Damn,” I said. “Dammit to hell.”

T.C. burst out of the linen closet and scooted to my side. He didn’t even yowl and scratch when I picked him up.

“Come downstairs,” Cal said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”