Ransom should have had the answers ready. Moping around the city in that cab, and all those nights alone on Jane Street, when he closed his eyes and screened the tape, he’d had ample time to work them out. What he’d imagined, though, were tender declarations delivered in a moment of passion and shared sympathy, not being put on the spot like this and answering in self-defense. Yet Ran was forty-five and knew he ought to make those tender declarations anyway, knew full well the better man he’d always hoped to be—despite Mel Hill and Clive DeLay and many more—would say them anyway, despite the circumstances. But the real man Ransom was was too hurt and frightened by that “whatever happens between us,” and he said, “You know, Claire, I’m really not that sure.”
“Yeah, okay, great, whatever.”
And at that moment, as she rolled away toward the window, as Ransom hit the trail into the hall, something white flashed along the wall in front of him, moving toward the stairs. For an instant, only one, he felt a sense of free fall. Then the explanation came—headlights—and he reached out and grabbed it like a branch and stopped himself. That was all it was—someone passing on the road outside. He started to relax, and then there was a crash downstairs.
Claire sat up. “What was that?”
“Stay here.”
Blindly patting down the library wall, he stumbled over something on the threshold. The first switch clicked without result, the second brought on the brass portrait lamps. By that light, Ran found himself straddling an antique double-barreled shotgun lying in a scattered pile of books. Bemused, he studied it, and then a trail of plaster dust led him to a hook above the door and the small hole where the second hook had been. He knelt.
“What are you doing with that?”
Claire stood in the doorway, her hand over her breastbone. The barrel, as it leaned against his knee, pointed straight at her.
“It fell.”
Claire frowned, as though inclined to doubt his explanation. The tension, for that moment, was like a spell.
Then he nodded to the place the gun had hung, and she stepped in and looked. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, right, the Purdey.”
“The what?”
“It’s an English bird gun, Ran. It was made for one of the DeLays. Have you got this?”
He nodded. “I’ve got it. Get some sleep.”
After she left, he stacked the fallen books and laid the shotgun carefully beside them on the antique partners desk. “I doubt the damn thing even works,” he muttered to the empty room. A twenty-five-pound bag of 08 shot presently contradicted this assertion, as he opened the side drawer. A UPS box with several other items—a tin of FFG black powder, five hundred packs of overshot and overpowder wads, percussion caps, a brass ramrod still in shrink-wrap—was addressed to Clive DeLay from Dixie Guns in Tennessee. There, too, quarter-folded on slightly yellowed paper, was a diagram entitled “The Proper Sequence for Loading a Muzzle-Loading Shotgun.”
An indefinable misgiving stole over Ran as he examined this. A lover not a fighter, he shut the drawer, poured a drink, and sat down on the scuffed green leather sofa. There were five thousand volumes in this room, Clive had told him once. Looking at the shelves, it was easy to believe. Ran preferred to close his eyes. Sipping Clive’s old single-barrel Kentucky whiskey, he settled back, and his exhaustion overcame him. Within a second and a half, he was back at CBGB, 1982…. Someone led him to her table between sets. (This is where the tape began.) Amidst the Capuchins in downtown black, Claire wore a pastel linen summer dress with her heavy hair pulled forward over one bare shoulder. A critic of no less chops than Lester Bangs at Creem had just called Talking in My Sleep “the debut of the year,” but Claire, a pianist at Juilliard, did not read Creem. “Hello, Mr. Hill,” she said in a voice that conjured fountains plashing in the courtyards of gated Charleston homes, and cream-cheese-and-olive finger sandwiches on crustless triangles of white bread. “Hello, Mr. Hill”—at CBGB, on the Bowery, amidst the Capuchins, at two A.M. And then regarding him, the young rock wunderkind, with a deflationary but warmhearted irony, she pursed her lips around the straw in her Coke and Maker’s Mark and took a sip. That was it for Ran.
Within a month, she’d moved into his apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park. They were so wild for each other then that sometimes he looked up and found her watching and groaned, “Oh, Jesus, not again.” Her eyes would widen with malevolence and she’d punch him—playfully, then hard. “Quit, DeLay.” Under pressure, he regressed to the idiom of Bagtown.
“Quit, DeLay?” she mocked. “Quit?”
And he remembered those OshKosh overalls, how the button—the original they never found—made a tinny ping on the wood floor as he ripped the strap. Claire reached out and slapped him hard across the mouth, and they ended wedged against the armoire with Ransom’s white-knuckled hand atop the bathroom door, straining into her as Claire fought back, exhorting, “Come on, come on,” desperate to shed some skin and merciless on both of them till they broke free.
With a soft groan, Ran, working himself between three fingers and a thumb, came now, alone on the sofa, as he had then, when they fell down, drenched, together, on the bed. As they lay there, “Talking in My Sleep”—not Mitch Pike’s version, but the true, original, and only: his—had drifted up from a boom box or a car passing on Avenue B, and it seemed to them that this was the beginning of an arc that could only rise. The certainty of it was tinged with a ferocious joy, like found religion. And she left school and played keyboards in
