“I think I should quit,” he said.
“Quit?” Marcella Ahn snapped. “You can’t quit. Not
“She’s not doing anything. You’ve gotten my reports.”
“Maybe she suspects. Maybe she’s stopped because she thinks she’s being watched.”
“I seriously doubt it.”
“Why won’t you believe me?” Marcella Ahn asked. “Why?” And then she began to weep.
“Is it too late?”
“No, I was awake.”
“You sound tired.”
“Long day. I drove down to see Mom.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Better, I guess. Still kind of frail.”
“What else you been up to?”
“The usual. Work. You?”
“Nothing too exciting.”
“You know you can’t keep calling like this.”
“Is he there?”
“Not the point.”
“Is he?”
“No.”
“How is Pritchett?”
“Stop.”
“Ana, I still love you.”
“I know.”
“You know? That’s it? You know?”
“I don’t want to keep doing this. It’s painful.”
“Let me see: you cheat on me, with Pritchett of all people, you kick me out, and you’re the one in pain.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Say…say there’s a chance.”
“There’s not. Not right now, there’s not.”
“But maybe things will change?”
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
“This is all I have, Ana. This is all I have.”
He watched her. He monitored her e-mail. He listened to her calls. He logged the numbers from the water meter every day. He talked to her, once more sat in the garden with her.
He had let Marcella Ahn persuade him to stay on, particularly after, as an additional incentive, she had offered him more money. Yet increasingly he felt it was a pointless exercise. He was convinced more than ever that Caroline Yip was oblivious to any of the transgressions of which she was being accused, oblivious to the fact that Toua was working for Marcella Ahn or even knew of their past. He was bored. At the end of the week, he would quit for good. By then he’d have the security deposit for an apartment.
Thursday night, Caroline Yip knocked on his door. “I’m going to the Cantab. Wanna come?”
The Cantab Lounge was a dive bar in Central Square, known for its music and cheap drinks. The last time he fell off the wagon, Toua had been a regular there. He’d bar-hop down Mass. Ave., beginning with the Cellar, then moving on to the Plough & Stars and the People’s Republik, ending the night at the Cantab, each place seedier than the last.
It was early still at the Cantab, the first set yet to begin, and they decided to first go across the street to Picante for a bite. They ordered chicken tostadas with a steak quesadilla to share, and they sat at a table beside the front window after loading up on salsa.
“How’re your poems going?” he asked.
“Asi asi.”
“What?”
“So-so,” she said. “Find a job yet?”
“Not yet.”
“I imagine it’d be easy for you to do something in security. What about private investigator work?”
Was she being coy? “I’ll look into it.”
“I have a question for you,” Caroline said. She wiped guacamole from the corner of her mouth. “What is it that you fear the most?”
“Like phobias?”
“No, about yourself. About your life. How you’ll end up.”
It was an awful question, one that immediately dropped him into a funk. And although he didn’t realize he had been ruminating on it, he knew the answer right away. “Dead man walking,” he said.
“What? As in being led down death row?” She laughed nervously. “Feeling homicidal these days?”
He shook his head. He told her about the look he’d seen in some perps, the MOD gangbangers in particular, the vacancy in their eyes, a complete lacuna, devoid of any hope or humanity. “I’m afraid I might become like that. Dead. Soulless.”
“The fact that it worries you insures you won’t.”
“I don’t know.”
Caroline took a big bite of the quesadilla, chewed, swallowed. “I fear that all the sacrifices I’ve made for my poetry will have been for nothing, that really I have no talent, that someday I’ll realize this but won’t be able to admit it, because to do so would invalidate my life, so instead I’ll become resentful of anyone who’s had the slightest bit of success, lash out at them with stupid, spiteful acts of malice, rail against an unfair system and world and fate that’s denied me my rightful place of honor and glory. I’ll become a cold, bitter person. I’ll never find peace, or love, or purpose. I’ll die alone.”
He nodded. “I’m glad you brought this up. I’m feeling really good now. Very cheerful.”
Caroline giggled. “Let’s go listen to some music.”
The Cantab was in full swing now, and Toua and Caroline squeezed through the crowd to the bar. “Yo, Toua- Boua, long time no see,” boomed Large Marge, one of the bartenders. “What’s your pleasure?”
He got a rum and Coke for Caroline, a plain Coke for himself. Miraculously, they found a couple of chairs against the far wall, and they listened to the R &B band on the stage. The place hadn’t changed a bit, the green walls, the faux-Tiffany lamps with the Michelob Light logos, the net of Christmas lights on the ceiling, the usual barflies and post-hippy gray-beards in the audience.
Sitting there, it did occur to Toua that Caroline had implicated herself, expressing exactly the vindictive mindset that Marcella Ahn had described. What did it matter, though? What did it matter? It was all so trivial.
When he went to the bar for another round, he ordered two rum and Cokes. It tasted like crap-Jameson, neat, with a chaser of Guinness had been his poison of choice-but since Caroline was drinking it, she wouldn’t be able to smell the alcohol on his breath.
After several more rum and Cokes, Caroline hauled him onto the dance floor, and they swayed and bumped against each other, jostled by the sweating couples around them.
Caroline hooked her arms around his neck. “I like you,” she shouted.
“I like you too,” he said, and they kissed.
It was so good to feel something, he thought. To feel anything.
They woke up together the next morning on Caroline’s futon. “Was this a mistake?” she asked.
“Probably.”
