“Do I?”
“I think it’s compulsive.”
The windows of the bar were steamed over and I felt safe. Portland was a fun place with young people. New York seemed far away, at least Boris’s apartment did. Malley had once worked at the bar and convinced the bartender to let him go downstairs to make me some fish and chips, even though the kitchen was closed. The fish and chips came in a little basket. There was ketchup, but Malley hadn’t been able to find any tartar sauce. I lied and said that I didn’t like it anyway.
“Can I call you Kathy?” he asked.
“No one else does. Never Kathy. Never Kate. ‘Katherine’ is solid and respectable.” I was momentarily thoughtful. “That’s what my father says.”
“Any brothers and sisters?”
“I’m an only child.” I smiled, as if this explained something. “My mother wanted to call me Marion, after her great-aunt.”
“Did you like Aunt Marion?”
“Yes, but my father didn’t. Aunt Marion liked to tell dirty jokes.” Aunt Marion had died shortly after I turned eight. I could still conjure up her scent: Youth Dew struggling beneath a cloud of Silk Cut.
“She sounds cool.”
“She was, but she didn’t like her name. According to Aunt Marion, everyone born in 1903 was named Marion; 1903 was the Marion Year, dedicated to Mary.”
“Why weren’t they all named Mary?”
I thought for a moment. “I don’t really know.”
I pushed away my basket, which was now empty except for wax paper and grease.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Malley.
We escaped the bar and stood on the sidewalk.
“Where should we go?” asked Malley.
“I don’t know.” The temperature was dropping and I could see my breath. “Let’s go look at the boats.”
We were quiet. I couldn’t stop thinking about Aunt Marion, but Malley wasn’t bothered by the silence. I guess that’s what people who spend their time with rocks and trees are like.
Aunt Marion always reminded me that she knew how to have a good time. I think she said this because she was worried about my mother, who, even if she’d been in good health, still lived with my father and hadn’t had fun since 1968. She told me stories of riding in cars with boys (I think they were all from Georgetown, except for one football player from Boston College who had huge hands and went by “Honey”) and smuggling liquor into dance halls strapped to her legs by her garters. She said, “I carried it way up there and boy did it tickle.” Women knew how to dress then because they wore hats. Women did not know how to dress now because they did not wear hats. Women didn’t know how to have fun now, because sex was seen as “liberation” instead of “fun.” She said women were now liberated, but were no longer fun.
I wondered if I was fun, if anyone had been fun since 1928.
“Malley,” I said. He was rolling a joint. “Do you think I’m any fun?”
He thought about this for a minute. “Sure.” He lit up.
He offered me a drag and I waved him off. “I think I’m having an existential crisis,” I said.
He was puffed up like a dying a fish, but he nodded sympathetically. Finally, he exhaled. “It’s Bad Billy,” he said.
“Really. Why?”
“Everything gets more important when there’s a serial killer on the loose.”
I thought about this. He could be right.
“I mean,” said Malley thoughtfully. “Why does he have to go around killing people? You can be really mad without killing people.”
“Isn’t it usually something in one’s childhood?” I suggested.
“Like in Psycho?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
Malley nodded thoughtfully. “It doesn’t seem right.”
“Some people kill for love.” I got up and looked at the water, the way the moon reflected up out of the pooling grease and fish guts.
“It’s still not right,” said Malley. He had a fine sense of morality, of right and wrong, like most people who weren’t bright enough to think independently. “You can only kill something because you need to eat.”
“Does that extend to other people?” I asked.
Malley had his lungs full. He shook his head vehemently. “Of course not,” he said, his teeth clenched, the air stuck in his throat.
I sat on a lobster trap and looked into the harbor.
“What if you kill for love?”
“Nah,” said Malley. “Who kills for love?”
“There’s a story, someone called the Monster of Montluel. His real name was Martin Dummolard. He was in love with his landlady.”
“So?” said Malley.
“The two of them terrorized Lyon at the end of the nineteenth century.”
“What did they do?”
“They killed people and ate them.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Malley shook his head. “That’s fucked up.”
I nodded.
“Why’d they do it?”
“For each other?” I pictured young Martin, a country boy coming to Lyon lured by the possibilities of city life. He longed for a place where the people outnumbered the cows, where conversation introduced more than the possibility of arthritis, labor, and the thick taste of onion grass in the last batch of cheese. His hobnailed boots ring on the cobbles of Lyon and he is overjoyed to have finally left the squelching kiss of mud. “Martin killed for love of Justine,” I said.
“How did he meet Justine?”
“I told you that,” I said. “She was his landlady.”
Martin stands at the door of a boarding house. Everything he owns is in a canvas sack. A knock on the door is met with a loud and harsh order to wait. And he waits. And he waits, not knowing the effort being made up from the chair, through the door, along the hallway in somber thumping effort. Because Justine is a massive woman, a behemoth of her kind, and the power it takes to raise her bulk and propel it, heaving and grunting, from the armchair by the mantel, to the parlor door, to the darkly lit hallway, where the paper sloughs from the walls hanging in limp tendrils like kelp in the Sargasso Sea, is an awesome force, as is she, a woman who is seldom pricked with denials. A woman like this, round and pocked like the moon, pulls others—as if they are water in thrall to tides—in her wake.
“And he was in love with her?”
“It happens,” I said. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”
I thought of Martin listening to the awesome groan of wood down the hallway, his anxiety as the door swung open.
Martin’s breath catches in his throat.
Justine Lafayette stuns him in that first and fatal moment. His eyes trace over the breadth of her generous, drooping lips. Her eyes, round in loose, wrinkled sockets, are a winsome shade of green. Perhaps, once, these eyes were sunk deep in flesh, but as if strained by the very heft of her face, a tremendous sighing effort has given up and the flesh, rather than pushing—like leavening bread—beneath the skin, is loose and dimpled, hanging in pouches from her large skull. She has taken effort with her makeup. Her eyes are kohled and her cheeks rouged in outrageous diagonal slashes. This, with the thickly applied lipstick, makes her appear ready for war. She thrusts this great head out at Martin.
“Quoi?”
“Une chambre?”
She retracts her head and nestles her great jowls into the stiff, grimy lace of her collar.
“Nom?”
“Dummolard.”
“Premier nom?”
“Martin.”
She nods as if she has expected this, the name, and the man. She turns and Martin holds his breath as she executes a perfect 180-degree turn within the confines of the hallway. The stiff fabric rustles as she moves and deep within the folds of her skirt, Martin hears another rustle, which must be the inner legs of her linen bloomers rubbing together, pressed and crumpled by her thighs. He follows her down the darkened hallway (as she blocks most of the light that struggles through it) and sighs in joy. He will follow her to this room. He will follow her anywhere.