Her head dropped back, eyes unseeing- and I suffered a memory of Wilson Doan Jr.
Cold fright now. 'Allison? Hey!'
I sat up. She lay collapsed on the bed, arms akimbo. I turned on the table lamp. She breathed slowly, eyes closed, twitching infrequently. I took her hand, worried that I'd done something wrong, had somehow hurt her, that she was dying or in danger.
'Allison?' Nothing. Then a slow blink, tongue on her bottom lip. If I act a little weird, take care of me.
'You okay?'
Nothing. A tremor of a smile played strangely at the side of her mouth.
It occurred to me that when she'd gone to the bathroom a few minutes earlier she hadn't flushed the toilet.
I jumped up, entered her bathroom and closed the door, fanned the wall for the switch, and was shocked by the sight of a naked man in front of me. He didn't look too good, either. Eyes wild, hair a mess, a bit of a gut. The mirror. I let my eyes adjust to the light, and then searched the bathroom cupboard. Makeup, birth control pills, Tylenol, the usual. Nothing interesting. I stared into the toilet. Nothing there. Nothing in the pocket of the bathrobe on the back of the door. Maybe I simply had- maybe I'd better look in the trash. I knelt down. Yes, there, dropped into a nest of tissues and dental floss lay a little wide-mouthed jar with a lid screwed on tight. I held it up to the bright light and swished around some flecks of white stuff and a piece of cabbage in some sort of vine-gary liquid. I unscrewed the lid and smelled the contents of the jar.
Fishy. Yes, fishy. What was left of a small bit of fish, no doubt. Shao-tzou fish.
If I were a man different from the one I am, I might have taken furious advantage of Allison in some way. She lay insensate on her sheets, deep tremors occasionally playing across her face, utterly undefended, fuckable, murderable. I could have done anything to her, rifled her drawers, shaved her head. And I won't pretend I wasn't angry, either; on the pretense of sexual affection, she'd coldly duped me into being her hospital orderly while she departed on a drug trip. Is this what she did with all her men? Fluffed them up so that she could overlay one pleasure with another? The fish must really be good, I realized, for her to undergo such risk. I rolled Allison on her side, on the off chance she would vomit, and doing this, I saw that she'd urinated a bit in the sheets. This was sad and a little sweet and deeply weird, and my anger toward her melted away. What a lovely, lonely woman. What a waste of her vitality. I covered her with the blanket, made sure that she was warm. She didn't wake. I checked her pulse every few minutes for almost an hour. It was steady. Her respiration held steady, too. How much fish had she eaten? Enough to have a strong effect, much stronger than the effect the men had experienced earlier. But not so much that she was in danger. An amount that was- well, perfect. An art, she'd said, an art.
An hour later I got Allison to sit up once and have a little water, and she muttered something half coherent and told me thank you, she was fine, please forgive her, and fell asleep again, this time holding me tight- as if I mattered to her.
I woke a little after six, bolt upright, and for a moment didn't know where I was. Then I saw Allison next to me, clutching a silk pillow. She breathed easily, and had put on a nightgown. Or had I put it on her? I couldn't remember. I studied her. She was fine now. Warm, breathing easily. I eased out of the bed, feeling a ghost of that old domestic rhythm. Man, woman, bed. Coffee, sunlight, and where are my pants? It had been a weird night, and I wanted to retreat to my apartment, get a shower and shave. In the kitchen I nabbed a few swallows of orange juice in the refrigerator and incidentally perused Allison's books, which seemed to lean toward Catholic mysticism and novels by the tough-chick literary crowd.
I drifted along the bank of windows in the living room, watching the day begin outside, the sun hitting the bricks and rainspouts, the taxis denser on the avenue. I confess my melancholy in this moment. You reach a certain age and you know that jumping into bed isn't as simple as it used to be- not that it ever was. But now reality seeps in more quickly. People grind against each other, expectations limited, patience provisional. She'd lured me back to her apartment so that she could get a fix of her dangerous fish, getting fucked as she dropped off to sleep. Fish- fucked. Did this explain the parade of kindly, ineffectual men she'd seen before Jay Rainey? Guys who could be depended upon not to take advantage of a tripped-out Allison Sparks?
And how much did I mind? I wasn't sure. I dropped my forehead against the cool glass, fogging it a bit, and let my eyes drift to the other side of the street. Across from me I saw a woman in a white robe pouring coffee into a mug. The morning light was such that I could see her rather well. Young, but not that young. She was not my wife. But she might have been, once. The demographics weren't far off. I watched her pour milk into her coffee. She reached into her kitchen cabinet and pulled down four cereal bowls, one after another. Here was a mother, dutifully meeting the day. Not a woman who dragged in lonely fish-fuck partners. Her wholeness saddened me, made me think not only of Judith in the good days but also of little Wilson Doan's mother. I'd killed her son. Who can measure a mother's grief? Who can find its bottom? Now the mother looked at her wall clock and left the kitchen. What had happened to my life? That expected trajectory, the planned vector, was abandoned, a weed-cracked highway to nowhere.
Yes, the domestic tableau across the street filled me with longing and misery- there it was, as close as balcony seats at a Broadway show- and I was about to turn away when I saw the woman enter a room two windows down from her kitchen. She leaned softly over a bed and seemed to be waking someone, who then got up, shrugged on some clothing, and left the bedroom. A light went on in a larger window closer to the park. The figure appeared, wearing a man's oversized plaid flannel shirt, and sat down before a piano. She was a young woman, a girl, really — Sally Cowles.
Yes, that was Sally Cowles, sitting down at a piano, in profile to me. The woman- her stepmother, I assumed- appeared again with a glass of juice, encouraging, nodding, pointing to a page of music. Sally Cowles was practicing the piano. Sally Cowles lived across the street from Allison Sparks. Jay Rainey was obsessed with Sally Cowles. I remembered Allison's story about how she'd met Jay in the little breakfast place near her apartment. He'd told her that he was in the neighborhood because of a deal he was doing nearby. But what reason would Jay have to be in this neighborhood, except for Sally Cowles? He had no deal, other than the building on Reade Street, no reason to be on the Upper East Side.
Now Allison came out of her bedroom in her silk gown.
'Morning!' she called cheerily.
'Hi.'
She came up to me from behind, rubbed her hands across my chest. I turned. Allison smiled up at me, searching for my mood, as if in a kind of penance. Don't be mad at her, I told myself. It's just loneliness. The whole goddamned thing. On her part and on mine.
'Oh, you men are all alike.'
'We are?'
'Well, mostly.'
I made some sound. 'And why are we all alike, mostly?'
'Oh, nothing. It's just that Jay used to do this, too.'
'What?'
'Stood here and looked right across the street.'
Yes, of course, I thought, all my anxieties amping back through my head, of course he did. That's why he let you think you seduced him, so that he could come up to your apartment and watch young Sally Cowles.
Seven
I hurried out of Allison's apartment a few minutes later, wondering which was more disturbing, Allison's calculated seduction, or the fact that Sally Cowles lived directly across the street from her. Allison had seen me stare at the girl, seen it all too well, and after her initial banter about Jay doing the same thing- a naked attempt to reassure herself- I'd said nothing, had only glanced stupidly at her, then stared again across the street. At this, Allison took two shocked steps backward, arms suddenly crossed in front of her, eyes jittery and defensive, as if she'd been struck in the face. Why had the two men who'd recently come to her apartment both been fixated on a
