Gun Church

himself inside her before she’d even gotten to middle school. Now the touching, all the touching, was on her terms.

The deafening music in Cosmo’s that night was a bizarre intergenerational mishmash that blended into an emulsified roar. For Zoe, the louder, the better. Her prey would have to get in close to talk to her, and when the preliminary chitchat was over they would have to move on to conduct business elsewhere. She would press her way through the crowd, taking notice of who noticed her. Then she would work her way to the bar and order a drink. The first time, that was all it took. She was so nervous that she picked up the first man-a college kid, really-who approached her. He proved to be too easy a target. He came almost before she had him fully inside her, and then it took barely fifteen minutes for him to run himself straight into a killing zone. That’s why she had chosen more wisely the next time. He proved to be a real challenge. Took him a long time to come and nearly two hours to kill.

Zoe dreamed of the victim’s kiss. It had been different this week because she knew they were thinking of executing McGuinn tonight as well, that the prey was only meant as a distraction. She wasn’t going to let anything happen to McGuinn. She didn’t love him. She didn’t have love in her. Her father had seen to that, but McGuinn was the only man whose touch didn’t make her retreat into that dark place. So she moved through the bar, her face neutral as a spider’s. Circling back through the crowd, she found her prey. They wanted a distraction and she meant to give it to them, only not the distraction they’d had in mind.

“Hi,” Zoe said, moving in close to a petite brunette seated near the beer pulls. “I don’t even know why I bothered coming here.”

When the brunette looked up and took a close look, Zoe knew she was already entwined in her web.

The pages of Gun Church seemed to be my only retreat for those first few weeks and, like everything else in the surreal world I’d inhabited since September, Stan’s death helped push me to take risks with my work, to edge the plot further out on the limb. That fusion of me and McGuinn that began in the berry patch was nearly complete. The lines between my life and my work were getting awfully blurry. What had started out as a vehicle to tell McGuinn’s story was veering perilously close to autobiography and myth-making, to auto- mythology.

For the first week, I shut myself in my new apartment, unpacking only my laptop and toiletries. I even slept on the floor. Meg tried to get me to come into Manhattan for dinner, but I begged off, explaining to her that I needed time to adjust. Eventually, she stopped asking. I called both Renee and Jim so many times I lost count. I wanted reassurance that everything was all right, that Stan was buried and forgotten, that there was nothing that could lead from him to me. They never answered. They never called back. I found a kind of reassurance in their silence. Whether or not I wanted to put Brixton behind me was beside the point. It seemed Jim and Renee were determined to do it for me, and I stopped calling altogether.

Mid-February in Brooklyn isn’t exactly Paris in the springtime, but that first morning I woke up without Stan Petrovic’s corpse on my back felt like the best spring day ever, in spite of the snow. That was the morning I returned Meg’s calls.

“So, you are alive, Weiler? I was beginning to get concerned.”

“Concerned? No need to speak in code to me anymore, Donovan. I’m not using. The only thing I’ve put in my nose in seven years was a Kleenex and I haven’t had a drink in a month. I’ve just shut myself in to do my work. You’ve gotten the pages I sent you, right?”

“I guess that’s what alarms me,” she said. “Very scary stuff.”

“You have no idea, Meg. No idea.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No, and don’t ever bring it up!” I snapped.

“No need to bite my head off.”

“Sorry. It’s just safer if you think of it as purely fictional, Meg.”

“Safer? Safer for whom?”

“Just safer. Leave it alone,” I said more to myself than to her.

“So I see the book is moving along.”

“It’s getting there.”

“But where is ‘there’ exactly? You were pretty vague about the ending in your plot synopsis and I’m not sure where you’re taking it.”

“You’re worried?”

“It’s my job to worry.”

“Well, stop it. You’re my agent, not my editor.”

“I’m your friend.”

“The ending will be as good as the rest of the book,” I said.

“I think that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“I didn’t call to talk about the book.”

“What then?”

“What’s Amy’s cell number?”

The question has been raised a thousand times: Would Romeo and Juliet’s love have endured had they survived? In Kip Weiler’s uproariously profane and deliciously cruel second novel, Romeo vs. Juliet, he not only restates the question, but uses the answer to absolutely flay the American body politic. Weiler takes to task all the parties insinuating themselves in the divorce proceedings. No group or individual is immune from his scathing wit. With demonic delight, he skewers the Knights of Columbus, ACT UP, Sinatra, Streisand, Jerry Falwell, and even poor Larry King.

— JACKSON DRUM, THE MERTON REVIEW

Thirty-Seven

Lot’s Wife

She didn’t bother hiding the anger. I hadn’t expected her to and she was never very good at faking it. There was never any doubt about when Amy was pissed off. I’d given her ample opportunity to display her many and varied expressions of anger-from slow boil to rage-and by the end of our marriage, angry was her baseline state of being. But there was something else in her tone, a grudging joy at the sound of my voice that made me push her to see me again. I didn’t have to say Please more than ten or fifteen times and I didn’t try to explain why I’d left her standing in the lobby of the Algonquin.

We met on neutral ground, a coffee bar in the West Village. Dressed in paint-speckled jeans, torn running shoes, a back-to-front black Kangol cap, and the weathered Schott motorcycle jacket I’d given to her as a birthday gift twenty years ago, Amy looked more like her old self, more like the woman I fell in love with than the woman I’d fled from eight weeks ago. Just seeing her, her eyes afire, brought it all back-how stupid we’d been for each other, how much we still were. It was as obvious on her face as it must have been on mine.

“God,” she said, taking her green tea from the barista. “I will never understand how you do this to me. Even when I hated you, Kip Weiler, I loved you. That night after the country club, when I told you I couldn’t take it anymore, I would have stayed with you if you had persisted a little longer.”

“I know, but you were right to push me away. I’d been scuttling my ship for a long time and you were getting pulled down in the suck. That last year together was terrible. I was empty and you didn’t even want me anymore. That’s how I knew we were over.”

“Is that introspection I hear from the lips of the Kipster?”

“No … I mean, yes … I mean, it’s introspection but not from the lips of the Kipster. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

“What’s changed?”

“Everything.”

“You used to be succinct.”