Nightlines

'I never met anyone actually named Aloysius. I'm sorry for you.'

'Will you tell me your first name?' He felt like a teenager coaxing a reluctant sophomore virgin.

'It's Claudia,' she said. She spoke the name as if she disliked it.

'Would you like to have my phone number, Claudia? In case you want to get in touch with me during the day.'

'No.'

'Can we talk again this way, then? I'll tell you more gorilla jokes.'

'We can talk again only if you do not tell me more gorilla jokes.'

'That seems unreasonable.'

'Most of the good things in life are unreasonable.'

Nudger had never really thought about that. It might be true. 'Will you tell me more about yourself, Claudia?'

'No.'

'That leaves me as the subject of conversation. I'm quite handsome, with a large disposable income, and enough suffering in my past to be graced with wisdom and nobility.'

'Bullshit.'

'That, too.'

'Your suffering is going on right now, only you seem to have learned to live with it, almost to regard it as an unwelcome old acquaintance that's moved in with you and won't go away. You've come to an accommodation. Maybe that's what there is about you that is more interesting than your gorilla jokes, so-called.'

Nudger smiled slightly and licked his lips, tasting the salt of his perspiration. This wasn't suicide talk at all. 'You're a damned good psychoanalyst,' he said.

'I've learned from experts.'

'Why don't you tell me-'

'Tomorrow, Nudger.'

'-at least some trivial thing about yourself?'

But she had hung up. The vacated line sighed in Nudger's ear like the plaintive echoes of a vast lifeless ocean heard in a seashell. It was a lonely sound, a residue of pain.

He replaced the receiver in its cradle and leaned back in his swivel chair. He was pleased. Claudia was her name and for the moment she was no longer bent on suicide. That was progress. Gorilla jokes seldom failed altogether.

Nudger rested his elbows on the desk, stared at the telephone and wondered. Why did he care about her to such a large degree? Claudia was, after all, a stranger to him. Even she had referred to herself as such.

But he knew better. She actually was more than a stranger. Rapport, subterranean rivers flowing to a dark confluence, mystical oneness. He did feel that way. And so must she. Maybe that was all that was keeping her alive. Maybe. What was he to her? Who was she, really? What was she to him? Could the rights to this be sold to one of the networks for a new soap opera?

No, Nudger didn't feel as if he were embroiled in a soap opera. This was more of a Greek tragedy, with its bizarre upstage chorus and an innate engine of fate propelling its characters to destinies they didn't understand and couldn't escape. Sophocles by phone.

He stood up and stretched, then exhaled with a great rush of breath. It was frustrating to sit at his desk and think about Claudia. He didn't want to think about anything at all. He wanted to sleep.

After turning out the lights and locking the door carefully behind him, Nudger descended the dimly lit narrow stairway to the street, drove to his apartment and went immediately to bed.

The telephone shrilled beside him like a nagging wife. 'Eileen…' he muttered. But it had been years since she'd shared his bed. Nudger came awake enough to realize that the phone was ringing and lifted the receiver to quiet the damned thing.

Morning light was angling in where the drapes didn't quite meet, lancing across the bedroom to lie in a streak of brilliance across the foot of the bed. Nudger looked at his watch. Ten forty-five. He put ear to receiver and said a sleep-thickened hello.

'Mr. Nudger, this is Jeanette. I've got two.'

'You've got to what?'

'No, no. T-w-o. Two men made dates with me over the lines last night. I'm supposed to meet them this afternoon by the fountain in the Twin Oaks Mall.'

'Good,' Nudger told her. 'I'm assuming you made these dates for different times.'

'Of course.' Jeanette's voice was icy enough to wither the last vestiges of sleep in Nudger's mind. 'I'm to meet the first one at two o'clock, the second at two-thirty. Frank and Sandy, but that's not their real names.'

'Did you learn anything else from your conversations with them?'

'Only what they like.'

'Do they like the same things?'

'No.'

'Do either of them like what Jenine liked?'

'I don't know,' Jeanette said. 'Jenine and I never talked about things like that. Frank seems pretty conventional. Sandy suggested-'

'Never mind,' Nudger interrupted, 'I don't want to know. Who's the two o'clock?'

'Frank. He'll be wearing brown slacks and a yellow sweater. At two-thirty Sandy should show up wearing vinyl boots and a black vinyl cowboy hat.'

'Did you say vinyl?'

'That's right. Maybe he's too poor to be into leather.'

Nudger realized with incredulity that she seemed serious.

'I'll be at the mall to look these two hopefuls over,' he told her.

'If one of them fits the description,' Jeanette said, 'phone me as soon as you learn anything about him.'

'That's what you're paying me for.'

'That's right, Mr. Nudger. Good-bye.'

Nudger hung up the phone, rolled onto his side in the fetal position and tried to go back to sleep. He seemed to get wider awake by the minute. Finally he got out of bed and showered and dressed.

The shopping mall was only half an hour from his apartment, so there was no rush. He went through the routine with Mr. Coffee, poured himself a cup of the strong brew, disdaining cream and sugar, then sat in the living room, sipping while he watched the news on cable TV. Big trouble. There was big trouble everywhere.

After a while Nudger used the remote control to switch off the TV and then simply sat in the increasing warmth of the living room. The apartment was small and cluttered, comfortable by chance. The furniture was a potpourri of styles and periods, running to overstuffed and old. Nudger figured that in a few years he and the furniture would be perfectly compatible. There was nothing in the apartment left over from his days with Eileen. He had gotten rid of all that in the first year after the divorce.

When his cup was empty, Nudger got up and went into the kitchen to prepare brunch. He poured another cup of coffee and a tall glass of chilled orange juice, then broke four eggs and got out some cheese and cooked up an omelet.

He had never acquired the knack in the kitchen. He cooked the omelet too long and it took on the thickness and texture of leather, but it tasted like vinyl.

VII

Nudger decided to drop by his office on the way to Twin Oaks Mall and look over his mail. He was expecting a check from a Mrs. Mallowan, a West Side woman whose stolen Pekingese he'd traced and recovered. She'd said that Ringo was a pedigreed show dog, leading Nudger to believe that the animal was worth hundreds of dollars per pound and that Mrs. Mallowan could well afford his fee.

As he cornered the Volkswagen, he noticed that the bite marks on the back of his hand had almost faded