“Look, I’m sorry. I’d really rather talk about the cockroach problem some other time. Right now I’m gonna grab a shower and mount a major assault with heavy artillery on your body.”
Later, in bed, she lay in the crook of my arm. She was a great lover, good for what ailed me after a twenty-four- hour shift. Now, I thought, I could sleep. But again I found myself thinking about us, our situation, permanence, and me., I was in the middle of a vast sea change. I wondered what she would think of me if I suddenly wasn’t a cop anymore. She had been a tomboy: being a cop was all she’d ever wanted. She had never mentioned children: we had simply never talked of it. In my mind I could hear her saying, I’ve got to tell you. Cliff, I don’t want kids—I’m just not cut out for the motherhood bit. I could see her staring in disbelief when I told her I’d rather be a bookman, I think, than a cop, and not thirty years from now. Maybe she wouldn’t do any of those things. She had been in the department long enough now—almost eight years—to be building up her own case of burnout. Maybe she was getting ready to hear what I was thinking but was still not inclined to talk about.
“What’re you thinking?” she said.
“Think I’m gonna turn in my badge and become a book dealer,” I said.
But I said this in a safe, singsong voice, the same tone you use when you say you’re going to the policeman’s ball with Jackie Newton. She couldn’t do much with it but laugh.
Only she didn’t laugh. She just lay there in my arm and we didn’t speak again for a long time.
It was the telephone that finally broke the spell.
“God Almighty,” I said wearily. “If that’s Henness;ey I’ll kill the bastard.”
“I’ll get it,” she said, reaching over me. “I’ll tell him you’ve died and the funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”
She picked up the phone. I heard her say hello and then there was a long silence. Without saying another word, she hung up.
“What’s that all about?”
“A guy trying to sell me a water softener.”
“At two o’clock in the morning?”
She didn’t say anything.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“I seem to’ve got myself a heavy breather. That’s why I couldn’t sleep. It started about eight o’clock and he’s been calling back every hour or two.”
“Does he say anything?”
“He whispered once.”
“What’d he say?”
“The usual stuff. Cunt, bitch, whore. Some other stuff.”
“Did he say anything personal… anything to indicate that he might know who you are?”
“Why would he know who I am? Those kinds of calls are mostly random, you know that.”
“I don’t think this one is.”
She sat up and turned on the light.
“What happened out there today?”
I told her about my day with Jackie. I could see it wasn’t convincing her that Jackie had taken up telephone harassment for revenge.
“I’m taking the phone off,” she said. “If you don’t get some sleep you’ll be a zombie tomorrow.”
The phone rang.
“Let it go,” she said. “He’ll get tired of it and hang up.”
But I picked it up. Didn’t say anything, just listened. He was there, listening too. This went on for almost a minute. Then I said, “You having fun, Newton?”
He hung up.
“It’s Newton,” I said. “He hung up when I called him by name.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“All right, then, I can smell the son of a bitch, okay?”
“Okay, Cliff. I’m sure not going to argue about it at two o’clock in the morning.”
“Listen,” I said sometime later. “Jackie and me, we shifted gears out there today. There never was any love lost between us, you know that. But it’s different now, it’s on a whole new plain.”
