The Best American Noir of the Century

mattress. “This side is yours.”

“Until Douglas gets back,” I said as I drew in beside her.

“Douglas isn’t coming back,” she said, then leaned over and kissed me very softly.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s dead,” she answered lightly. “He’s been dead for three years.”

And thus I learned of her husband’s slow decline, the can­cer that began in his intestines and migrated to his liver and pancreas. It had taken six months, and each day Veronica had attended him. She would look in on him on her way to work every morning, then return to him at night, stay at his bedside until she was sure he would not awaken, then, at last, return here, to this very bed, to sleep for an hour or two, three at the most, before beginning the routine again.

“Six months,” I said. “That’s a long time.”

“A dying person is a lot of work,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” I told her. “I was with my father while he died. I was exhausted by the time he finally went.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that,” she said. “The physical part. The lack of sleep. That wasn’t the hard part when it came to Douglas.”

“What was?”

“Making him believe I loved him.”

“You didn’t?”

“No,” she said, then kissed me again, a kiss that lingered a bit longer than the first, and gave me time to remember that just a few minutes before she’d told me that Douglas was cur­rently selling software.

“Software,” I said, drawing my lips from hers. “You said he sold software now.”

She nodded. “Yes, he does.”

“To other dead people?” I lifted myself up and propped my head in my hand. “I can’t wait for an explanation.”

“There is no explanation,” she said. “Douglas always wanted to sell software. So, instead of saying that he’s in the ground or in heaven, I just say he’s selling software.”

“So you give death a cute name,” I said. “And that way you don’t have to face it.”

“I say he’s selling software because I don’t want the conver­sation that would follow if I told you he was dead,” Veronica said sharply. “I hate consolation.”

“Then why did you tell me at all?”

“Because you need to know that I’m like you,” she an­swered. “Alone. That no one will mourn.”

“So we’re back to suicide again,” I said. “Do you always cir­cle back to death?”

She smiled. “Do you know what La Rouchefoucauld said about death?”

“It’s not on the tip of my tongue, no.”

“He said that it was like the sun. You couldn’t look at it for very long without going blind.” She shrugged. “But I think that if you look at it all the time, measure it against living, then you can choose.”

I drew her into my arms. “You’re a bit quirky, Veronica,” I said playfully.

She shook her head, her voice quite self-assured. “No,” she insisted. “I’m the sanest person you’ve ever met.”

* * *

“And she was,” I told my friend.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she offered more than anyone I’d ever known.”

“What did she offer?”

That night she offered the cool, sweet luxury of her flesh, a kiss that so brimmed with feeling I thought her lips would give off sparks.

We made love for a time then, suddenly, she stopped and pulled away. “Time to chat,” she said, then walked to the kitchen and returned with another two glasses of vodka.

“Time to chat?” I asked, still disconcerted with how abruptly she’d drawn away from me.

“I don’t have all night,” she said as she offered me the glass.

I took the drink from her hand. “So we’re not going to toast the dawn together?”

She sat on the bed, cross-legged and naked, her body sleek and smooth in the blue light. “You’re glib,” she said as she clinked her glass to mine. “So am I.” She leaned forward slightly, her eyes glowing in the dark. “Here’s the deal,” she added. “If you’re glib, you finally get to the end of what you can say. There are no words left for anything important. Just sleek words. Clever. Glib. That’s when you know you’ve gone as far as you can go, that you have nothing left to offer but smooth talk.”

“That’s rather harsh, don’t you think?” I took a sip of vodka. “And besides, what’s the alternative to talking?”

“Silence,” Veronica answered.

I laughed. “Veronica, you are hardly silent.”

“Most of the time, I am,” she said.

“And what does this silence conceal?”

“Anger,” she answered without the slightest hesitation. “Fury.”

Her face grew taut, and I thought the rage I suddenly glimpsed within her would set her hair ablaze.

“Of course you can get to silence in other ways,” she said. She took a quick, brutal drink from her glass. “Douglas got there, but not by being glib.”

“How then?”

“By suffering.”

I looked for her lip to tremble, but it didn’t. I looked for moisture in her eyes, but they were dry and still.

“By being terrified,” she added. She glanced toward the window, let her gaze linger there for a moment, then returned to me. “The last week he didn’t say a word,” she told me. “That’s when I knew it was time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time for Douglas to get a new job.”

I felt my heart stop dead. “In… software?” I asked.

She lit a candle, placed it on the narrow shelf above us, then yanked open the top drawer of the small table that sat beside her bed, retrieved a plastic pill case and shook it so that I could hear the pills rattling dryly inside it.

“I’d planned to give him these,” she said, “but there wasn’t time.”

“What do you mean, there wasn’t time?”

“I saw it in his face,” she answered. “He was living like someone already in the ground. Someone buried and waiting for the air to give out. That kind of suffering, terror. I knew that one additional minute would be too long.”

She placed the pills on the table, then grabbed the pillow upon which her head had rested, fluffed it gently, pressed it down upon my face, then lifted it again in a way that made me feel strangely returned to life. “It was all I had left to offer him,” she said quietly, then took a long, slow pull on the vodka. “We have so little to offer.”

And I thought with sudden, devastating clarity, Her dark­ness is real; mine is just a pose.

* * *

“What did you do?” my friend asked.

“I touched her face.”

“And what did she do?”

She pulled my hand away almost violently. “This isn’t about me,” she said.

“Right now, everything is about you,” I told her.

She grimaced. “Bullshit.”

“I mean it.”

“Which only makes it worse,” she said sourly. Her eyes rolled upward, then came down again, dark and steely, like the twin barrels of a shotgun. “This is about you,” she said crisply. “And I won’t be cheated out of it.”

I shrugged. “All life is a cheat, Veronica.”