Cold Night

'We've been through this. Forget it.'

Now she was defiant. 'Goddammit, Jack, what do you want me to say?'

'I've thought a lot about this, too, and I want you to finally admit to yourself that you don't love me.' She started to protest but he continued through it. 'You've never loved me, Ginny. That's the problem, it's always been the problem.' He singled each word out. 'You don't love me. You've never been able to admit that to yourself. You always thought that if you messed with me a little more, changed me around a little more, that I'd be what you wanted. You've never looked at me and said, 'Here's Jack Paine, he's really fucked up, but I love him.' I never tried to change you, Ginny. I saw you that first time, and I fell in love with you, and that was it. I took you, Ginny, but you never took me.'

There were things she was going to say. She ran through her gamut of expressions, from anger to denunciation, ending on the verge of tears.

'It's done, Ginny,' he said to her quietly.

She stood with the coffee mug in her hand, and Paine wanted, as badly as he had wanted to put the gun to his head or the bottle to his lips the night before, to go to her and put his arms around her and say, 'Yes.' He wanted to say, 'I still love you, and I'll try to change, I'll try not to be fucked up anymore and we'll try to make it work.' But he knew what would happen if he did that. Someday he would see that frozen look on her face again, the one that said, 'Go ahead, pull the trigger, get it over with,' and he would pull the trigger for her. Finally, he would have changed for her, and he would no longer be her failure and she would be rid of him because she would possess him in the way she had always desired, which was to possess him so that he no longer possessed himself. She would own, not a piece of him as Barker did, but, in the end, all of him.

'Please go, Ginny,' he said, and she stood a moment more and then she put the mug of coffee down and walked to the bags of clothes and gathered them up in her arms and opened the door and was gone. Paine heard the elevator work, but this time it was not leaving to take her away from him. It was simply leaving.

He walked to where she had put her coffee mug, and as he picked it up some of the coffee spilled out onto the carpet. He thought of Gloria Fulman and her Persian rug.

He went to the kitchen, and he poured the coffee into the drain, watching it spiral down to the depths of the earth, and said, 'Good-bye, Ginny.'

He showered California off his body, then dressed in a suit and tie and went to his car.

He drove to the Bronx in the dark. No stars to look at through the windshield tonight; a little of that low, angry, hot weather had followed him across the country. The back of his neck was pooled with sweat again. Muggy was muggy.

There was a white car far back that might be pacing him. He slowed, trying to lure it past, but it stayed stubbornly back. On the Major Deegan Expressway it disappeared from his rearview mirror, but when he got off he spotted it again, mounting the off-ramp as he turned onto Fordham Road at the top. The car was a BMW or Mercedes.

He waited ten minutes in the shadow of a White Castle hamburger joint, but it didn't pass. Then he pulled out conspicuously, hoping to flush it out. It was gone.

Thompson's Funeral Home was only two blocks from the Bronx Zoo. Paine pulled into the driveway, past the sign. The signs on funeral homes are all the same, bright white bordered in black. You don't have to read the name to know where you are.

The parking lot in back was big for the Bronx. He pulled into a spot bounded by bushes that had no cars to either side of it. He got out, straightened his suit and went in.

A young man with a sad face and hands folded permanently in front of him dispatched him solemnly in the right direction. He walked into a crowded room. There were a lot of high school students, some weeping onto each other; the rest were adults clustered to one side in shocked groups of three or four. The casket was closed. Paine looked at the name on the white-lettered sign at the entrance and discovered that he had walked into the wrong chapel. Closed casket. Teenager, probably; car collision, through the windshield.

He found Jimmy's chapel next door, and it was what he had expected. Small room, low lighting, taped organ music. The air smelled like refrigerant. The casket was open, and even from the doorway he could see Jimmy propped unnaturally high, compensation for his shortness. The chapel was empty.

Paine walked on the red plush carpeting and listened to the organ music. Just audible, like Rachmaninoff in Barker's office. Muted weeping filtered in from the auto death next door.

There was a kneeler before the casket. Paine stood. Jimmy's eyes were paraffined closed. His head was tilted to the left; one of the slugs had caught him just above the ear on that side and the boys in the cellar had done what they could. It wasn't all that great. Jimmy looked like waxed fruit.

'So long, Jimmy,' Paine said, and with the common trick of anticipation, Jimmy's resin smile seemed to widen.

Paine left the empty room. A couple in dress and suit passed him, holding each other up; they entered Jimmy's chapel, realized their mistake and backtracked to the automobile accident next door. Organ music soothed. The ventriloquist dummy with the folded hands bowed his head at Paine as he passed.

'Good evening, sir.'

'Sure,' Paine said, and went into the night.

There were two of them, and they had waited for him in the stand of bushes in front of his car. It was easy for them. They stepped out as he put his key in the lock; he heard them but when he looked up there was an arm in front of his face and that was the last thing he saw. One of them hit him in the face to get him to cover up, and then the other one pumped blows to his belly and groin. Paine heard a grating laugh. They worked on him methodically, and when he was finally down they kicked him toward unconsciousness. Just before he went there, he felt a burning explosion in his groin and heard one of them say, 'Hit me in the hangers?'

Lights passed overhead. He thought someone was shining a light in his eyes, flashing it back and forth. He reached up his arm to push away the flashlight. His arm hurt, and he couldn't raise it up. 'Stop,' he tried to say, but his mouth didn't work well, either. It tasted like it was filled with bloody sponges.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the lights were still flashing. But his eyes worked better now. They focused for him. The flashing lights were streetlamps, passing overhead. He was staring through the back windshield of a car. It was clean, and had defogger wires embedded in it. He tried to look closer at the defogger wires but his eyes unfocused again, and his body told him to return to unconsciousness.

When he opened his eyes this time, they stayed focused. The streetlights were gone. Up through the windshield was crisp dark sky. He recognized a turn of diamond stars shaped vaguely like a W. The constellation Cassiopeia.

Someone opened the car door.

The night that came into the car was as cool and dark as it looked through the windshield.

He expected rough hands to pull him out of the car onto the pavement, but instead, a head stared upside down into his face, and kissed him.

'You're alive.' Rebecca Meyer smiled.

'Yes,' his mouth tried to say, without success.

'Can you sit up?' she asked. She put her hands under his arms and pulled, but he must have cried out because she took her hands back. He tried to sit up. The world wheeled and his eyes threatened to unfocus but he made it to a sitting position and rested his head on the back of the seat. She sat next to him.

'How did you find me?' he asked thickly.

'Bob Petty said you'd be at your friend's wake. I found you in a pool of your own blood. I thought you were dead.'

'I am.'

He looked into her brown turbid eyes that he already knew so well. He was very tired. She was speaking slowly, but he couldn't hear her. He looked at her mouth, and it looked like she said, 'Oh, shit,' and, as the blurry world of unconsciousness claimed him yet again, he was sure he fell into her arms.