Loving Time

one

Raymond Cowles died of love on the evening of his thirty-eighth birthday. It happened on Sunday, October 31, after a long battle for his soul. As with many bitter conflicts, the end was abrupt and unexpected. In the same way as love had come on him unexpectedly and caught him by surprise after a lifetime of loneliness and despair, death crept up on Ray from behind without his even knowing that his release from ecstasy and anguish was at hand.

Since his twenties, Ray had flipped past the passages about love in the books he read. The movie versions of passion and lust seemed stupid and unbelievable to him. Love was supposed to happen to men like him when scantily dressed, big-breasted women flashed the look that said “I’ll do anything. Anything at all.”

Lorna had looked at him with those eyes; other women had, too. Many other women. Sometimes Raymond had even thought he’d seen it in the eyes of Dr. Treadwell. He never got it. Love to him was like a foreign language for which he had all the clues but couldn’t figure out the meaning. And he had learned to live without it as his own personal cross to bear, like a dyslexic who could never really read, or a patient with a terminal illness that wouldn’t go all the way and end his misery for a long, long time.

Until six months ago, Raymond Cowles thought he had all his problems solved. He had made work the focus of his life, tried to find the same satisfactions in his personal life other people experienced in theirs. He wanted to feel what other people felt, and when he couldn’t, he acted as if he did.

Then, six months ago, Ray Cowles finally understood what life was all about. He fell in love. The paradox was that real love, the kind that smacked into one so hard it turned a person all the way around, didn’t always happen as it should. The great passion of Raymond Cowles’s life came too late and was spiritually messy. Even though he was a man experienced at battling demons, Ray’s new demon was the worst he’d encountered.

With Dr. Treadwell’s help he’d conquered all the others. First the demons that told him he was a bad child. Then the ones that told him he was stupid, not up to his studies. The big ones that said he was incompetent at his jobs. And always in the background there were those demons that told him he could never attract a girl, never satisfy a woman. These particular demons continued to torture him even after he met Lorna, the endlessly sweet and understanding girl he married.

The killer demon told him he was a failure at everything, even the years of psychoanalysis to which he had resorted half a lifetime ago for a cure. This was the demon that whispered to him in his sleep that his sudden and overwhelming passion at age thirty-seven was beyond disgusting and immoral. Love, for Raymond Cowles, was a fall from grace into the deepest pit of depravity from which abyss he was bound to fall even further into the very fires of Hell.

In the months prior to his death, as Raymond fell deeper from grace into lust and corruption, he wanted nothing more than to surrender at last to the first real feeling of contentment and joy he had ever experienced. But he wanted to fall and be saved with his love absolved. Surely everyone had the right to surrender to passion and be released from the excruciating anguish of sin. He had that right, didn’t he?

But absolution didn’t come, and once again Raymond Cowles’s dreams were full of far-off women—high on cliffs when he was on the ground, or on shore when he was way out at sea. In dream after dream, these women waved their arms at him and told him, “Watch out, watch out.” And each time he awoke in a panic because he didn’t know what to watch out for.

Then on October 31, at the very start of his new life, Raymond’s world collapsed. He felt he had no warning. He was cornered. For a few moments he was alone. And then he wasn’t alone. He was trapped with a person who wanted to kill him.

“Save me, save me.” He tried to scream into the phone, into the hall, into the lobby of the building, out on the noisy street. Save me!

He longed to reach for a life preserver, but there wasn’t one. Where was one? Where was a lifeboat? Where was safety?

Help!

At the end he was mute. He couldn’t cry out for help or make the move to save himself. In his last moments of panic, when Raymond Cowles was too frantic and distraught to make a sound, the very thing he had never been able to watch out for slipped out of the noisy Halloween night of dress-up and reveling on Columbus Avenue and took his breath away.

two

At midnight on Halloween, two hours after Raymond Cowles died, Bobbie Boudreau slouched into the French Quarter. His mood matched the atmosphere of the seedy bar perfectly. To a Cajun from Louisiana, this was as far from the real French Quarter as a place could get The old jukebox was a poor stand-in for even the worst live band and there was no compensation for the lack of a weary stripper migrating slowly back and forth across the bar. Charlie McGeoghan liked to tell Bobbie he’d named his dump the French Quarter because he’d heard New Orleans was a wild place, and even the word French sounded pretty wild to Charlie.

The old Mick got only two things right. It was too dark to see the menu and newcomers’ drinks were always watered. Bottom line was, Charlie hated anything wild, and his hole was nothing more than an advertisement for missed chances. Which was pretty much how Bobbie himself felt tonight. He didn’t like basic principles like justice, wisdom, and truth getting all fucked up.

Bobbie had been told a long, long time ago that the Lord always evened things out in the end. But sometimes it just didn’t seem that way. The Lord’s mysterious ways were awful slow, too slow for Bobbie Boudreau. Bobbie liked to hum a little tune to the words “The Lord’s too slow for Bobbie Boudreau.” When he got tired of the wait, Bobbie had to step in as the Lord’s agent and speed things up. He was working such a case now. In just a few days the coin would drop in the slot, the wicked would slide down the tubes, and the meek would inherit the earth. He was looking forward to it, banged the door of the bar going in.

“Hey, Bobbie.” Charlie’s skinny wuss of a nephew glanced up from mopping the counter. “How’s the war going?”

Bobbie grabbed a stool. “We lost, frere. Lost on all counts.”

“Well, as they say, time heals all wounds. What can I get you?”

Bobbie shook his head. “No, Mick. It don’t. Fact is, time makes it worse and worse.”

“Oh, come on, Bobbie, don’t start that Mick stuff. You know how my uncle feels about that.”

“Fuck your uncle.”

Brian McGeoghan’s nervous eyes raked the murky, nearly empty room. “Good thing Charlie ain’t here, Bobbie. He told me to throw you out when you get like this. He can’t afford any more insurance.”

Bobbie jerked his head at the vacant bar stools around him, his sullen mouth softening at the happy reminder of those occasional, teensy-weensy scuffles that occurred when he was forced to avenge some asshole provocation. “Throw me out with not one soul here to bother me? That’s a good one. Give me a beer. Just one, I’m working tonight.”

“Okay.… One’s fine as long as you don’t make trouble.” Brian McGeoghan smiled suddenly. “Wouldn’t want you drunk in the operating room either, would we?” He pushed a frothy draft across the battered surface.

“Hey frere, I’d never do anything to hurt a patient,” Bobbie intoned solemnly. Bobbie hadn’t been a surgical nurse since his MASH days in ‘Nam a long, long time ago, but Brian didn’t need to know that. “Never.”

The beer tasted like shit. Bobbie drank it down quickly, then had another. The second tasted better. He considered a third. Then two assholes came in, sat a few stools down from him at the bar, and began talking softly. One was bigger than Bobbie was, a mean-looking white with fleshy pockmarked cheeks and a drunk’s red-veined nose. The other looked like an Irish mole. Bobbie didn’t feel like breaking any bones tonight, so he paid up and went outside.

At one A.M. the streets were finally quieter. No more parents hustling along clumps of kids in costumes. Not so many dressed-up faggots. A few here and there. Faggots never bothered him. Anyway, Bobbie had things on his mind. He was working a case, wasn’t looking for trouble. He wandered over to Riverside across the stretch of dead grass to the Henry Hudson Parkway. He liked watching the cars speed along next to the Hudson River, the mile- wide slash of black water that separated New York from the rest of the country. In Riverside Park he would sit on