It was back in Philadelphia where Gant wished he could still be. Young again, cruising the mean streets. Not the Philadelphia of Market and Broad Street, the corporate towers, not the place the rich yuppies had once commuted to from the suburbs, not the weekday morning traffic jam brought to you by BMW and Mercedes and Lexus. Gant’s part of town was North Philadelphia. It was the drug deals going down in the shadows of burnt-out row houses. It was the homeless men sleeping under highway overpasses. It was the emaciated crack whores plying their trade in the alleys and vacant lots. It was chalk outlines on bloody sidewalks. It was booming hip-hop from tricked-out lowriders and the night he caught two carjackers single-handed.
He savored that night like he savored fine whiskey.
1990, or thereabouts – a long time ago now. A couple of gangbangers took a new Toyota at gunpoint near the bombed-out Amtrak station, but they didn’t know there was an infant in the back seat. The daddy lost his car OK, but went hysterical when he realized he lost his baby too. It became a wild all units call. The bad boys broke a hundred miles an hour on the wide lanes of North Broad, hung a turn and disappeared like smoke. Gant in an unmarked car heard it on the radio and made a guess. He was four blocks away. He roared the wrong way down a one-way, headlights off through the low-slung housing projects, engine screaming and here came a car burning up the street toward him. He guessed again – it had to be them. He hit the flashers and jammed the brakes, skidding sideways, blocking the whole street.
They plowed into a parked sedan, heavy metal crunch at high speed. He leaped out ahead of them, a gun in each hand, running crazy on fear and adrenaline. One move, one funny twitch, and he would kill them both.
‘Freeze motherfuckers! Out of the car! Down on the ground!’
He had guessed right both times. Back-up units showed a minute later, and Gant already had both suspects cuffed and in custody. The baby was fine, still strapped into the child restraint, goggling at all the curious onlookers.
Gant felt his heart beating at the memory. It was one of his favorites. He imagined pro athletes had memories like that – moments when, either through luck or experience or a little of both, they did everything right and for a brief time were unbeatable.
He opened his eyes and the girl had climbed on top of him again. He welcomed her there. It went on between them for a long while, and at some point he slept. When he woke, she was on the terrace, nude in the night air, leaning against the stone railing and smoking a cigarette. A bright quarter moon hung low in the dark sky. When she finished her cigarette, she pitched the butt out into the night then came back inside. She saw Gant was awake.
‘You work for him, right?’ she said.
‘I work for myself. He’s a client of mine.’
‘So you work for him.’
Gant nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘I hear things, from the cleaning ladies. They’re going to kill him. The islanders. They think he wants to starve them to death, so they want to kill him first.’
‘He doesn’t want to starve them,’ Gant said. ‘Believe me.’
‘I don’t care. I hope they get him. He’s a terrible, evil man. He can send me away from here anytime he wants. One day, after he’s used me up enough, and my youth is gone, he’ll sell me to somebody worse and they’ll make me a whore on the street.’
‘Who told you that? Howe?’
‘You don’t listen. I said the cleaning ladies.’
Gant reached over and poured himself another sip of whiskey. ‘You know what? It’s a strange world. You never know what’s going to happen next. If I were you, I guess I wouldn’t worry about things so much. And I’d stop listening to the cleaning ladies.’
Waves of pleasure rolled through Katie’s body, one after another after another. She was on her stomach, her face in the pillow, her free hand gripping the bedsheet, pulling it loose from the mattress. She was a rich lady, on a weekend trip to a fancy desert spa. She had gone in for a hot oil massage, but when she was on the table, it turned out that three men, three masseuses, would work on her. They turned down the lights in the room, and she couldn’t see their faces. At first they just rubbed her down, but soon they were saying things to her, things that embarrassed her. Then they were doing… things… to her, things she had never done before. She couldn’t protest. She didn’t want to.
It went on and on, and she went with it, higher and higher. She arched her back, eyes squeezed shut. At long last, one final, intense shudder went through her, and she collapsed onto the bed.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, and no one was there to hear it. She felt her heartbeat slowing down, her breathing coming deeper and slower. She opened her eyes. It was dark. The digital clock on the bedside table told her it was 3:15 in the morning.
The high was fading, and thoughts began to intrude, as they always did. In fact they rushed in, like cascading water. The thoughts were never good.
She was a failure. It was amazing to think of herself this way. An outsider might say that she had many of the things people wanted from life – she was attractive, she was rich, she lived in this big house, and she was still young. But she had wanted, and still wanted, so much more. From her own perspective, her life was empty. She had failed at nearly everything.
She was a failed artist.
That was one of her greatest failures. She had been a working artist in various media, trying different things, for close to ten years. She thought – no, she knew – that she was good at it. Back in Dewey Beach, and since they moved down here to Charleston, she’d taken part in numerous shows. And in all that time, she’d sold only three paintings, for a grand total of less than $2,000. Even worse, she suspected that Tyler had secretly bought the paintings through intermediaries. When she confronted him, he denied it, but that didn’t mean anything. That little conversation had taken place nearly two years ago – she hadn’t sold a painting since then.
She consoled herself. Maybe she wasn’t commercial, but so what? Or maybe she just wasn’t a saleswoman. She knew that selling yourself was a big part of success, but she just wasn’t that person.
She had also failed at love. The man she had finally married, she realized now, was like a more distant version of her father. Capable, supremely confident and in charge, very good-looking in a distinguished, hair- graying-at-the-sides sort of way. A man who, like her father, made a lot of money. A man who people worked for and looked to for leadership. A man who knew what to do.
But he was cold and unemotional. He was distant, and increasingly so. It seemed that he no longer cared what she did. It seemed that all he’d ever really wanted her for was to show her off – a trophy wife – and to make a baby with her. A son. Which was yet another way that she had failed. There wasn’t going to be a baby.
And that led to the final failure, ironically the one thing she had always succeeded at, had always been confident about. She had always prided herself on being great in bed, a wonderful lover. Of being able to make a man feel like a man, while at the same time feeling like a woman, incredibly so, and loving to feel that way. She knew she had a beautiful body. She’d had some amazing sex in her life, and some amazing men. She could have powerful orgasms, over and over again, for as long as her man’s stamina could hold out. She’d read about all the problems women sometimes had in bed, she’d read about them in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle, and yet these were problems she’d never experienced, not until this past year.
After she’d lost the baby for the second time, Tyler had become ever more distant and consumed in his work. He didn’t want to talk about the options available to them – weird science, he called it. He didn’t want to talk about anything anymore. He took no interest in what she did. It was like they were two roommates in this lovely spacious home they shared, nearly strangers. They almost never had sex, and when they did – four months ago was the most recent time – it was perfunctory, a formality, maybe just a physical release for Tyler, but not for Katie. Katie needed more than a twenty minute session every four months to get a release.
In recent months, a funny thing had occurred to her – maybe she could take a lover. Of course she wouldn’t do anything to risk the marriage, but Tyler was away a lot. If it were the right person, someone who was discreet, and who wouldn’t get too attached, it was just possible that she could do it. At first, she pushed the thought away, was almost embarrassed by it, even though no one could possibly know she was thinking it. But after a while, she
