And then he faltered. Gina’s mouth was hanging open — and this was a mouth that could cushion any blow, a mouth that knew the taste of leather and the shock of the punch that came out of nowhere. “Christ, Les,” she said. “What happened to you — you’re a mess. Have you looked in the mirror?”
He watched her exchange a glance with the man across the table, and then he was talking again, trying to get it out, the night, the way they’d come at him, and they weren’t just your average muggers, they were the law, for Christ’s sake, and how could anybody expect him to defend her from that?
“Les,” she was saying. “Les, I think you’ve had too much to drink.”
“I’m trying to tell you something,” he said, and his own voice sounded strange to him, distant and whining, the voice of a loser, a fat man, a maker of bad guesses and worse decisions.
That was when the red-haired man spoke up, his eyes twitching in his head. “Who is this jerk, anyway?”
Gina — Gina the Puma — gave him a look that was like a left jab. “Shut up, Drew,” she said. And then, turning back to Lester: “Les, this is Drew.” She tried to inject a little air into her voice, though he could see she wasn’t up to it. “Drew wants to know where he can get a good steak around here.”
Drew slouched in his chair. He had nothing to say. Lester looked from Gina to Drew and back again. He was very far gone, he knew that, but still, even through his haze, he was beginning to see something in those two faces that shut him out, that slammed the door with a bang and turned the key in the lock.
He had no right to Gina or this table or this hotel, either. He couldn’t even make it through the first round.
Gina’s voice came to him as if from a great distance—“Les, really, maybe you ought to go and lie down for a while”—and then he was on his feet. He didn’t say “Yes” or “No” or even “See you later”—he just turned away from the table, wove his way through the restaurant, down the stairs and back out into the night.
It was fully dark now, black dark, and the shadows had settled under the skeletons of the trees. He wasn’t thinking about Gina or Drew or even April and the kid in the Suburban. There was no justice, no revenge, no reason — there was just this, just the beach and the night and the criminal elements. And when he got to the place by the lagoon and the stink of decay rose to his nostrils, he went straight for the blackest clot of shadow and the rasping murmur at the center of it. “You!” he shouted, all the air raging in his lungs. “Hey, you!”
The Love of My Life
They wore each other like a pair of socks. He was at her house, she was at his. Everywhere they went — to the mall, to the game, to movies and shops and the classes that structured their days like a new kind of chronology — their fingers were entwined, their shoulders touching, their hips joined in the slow triumphant sashay of love. He drove her car, slept on the couch in the family room at her parents’ house, played tennis and watched football with her father on the big thirty-six-inch TV in the kitchen. She went shopping with his mother and hers, a triumvirate of tastes, and she would have played tennis with his father, if it came to it, but his father was dead. “I love you,” he told her, because he did, because there was no feeling like this, no triumph, no high — it was like being immortal and unconquerable, like floating. And a hundred times a day she said it too: “I love you. I love you.”
They were together at his house one night when the rain froze on the streets and sheathed the trees in glass. It was her idea to take a walk and feel it in their hair and on the glistening shoulders of their parkas, an otherworldly drumming of pellets flung down out of the troposphere, alien and familiar at the same time, and they glided the length of the front walk and watched the way the power lines bellied and swayed. He built a fire when they got back, while she towelled her hair and made hot chocolate laced with Jack Daniel’s. They’d rented a pair of slasher movies for the ritualized comfort of them—“Teens have sex,” he said, “and then they pay for it in body parts”—and the maniac had just climbed out of the heating vent, with a meat hook dangling from the recesses of his empty sleeve, when the phone rang.
It was his mother, calling from the hotel room in Boston where she was curled up — shacked up? — for the weekend with the man she’d been dating. He tried to picture her, but he couldn’t. He even closed his eyes a minute, to concentrate, but there was nothing there. Was everything all right? she wanted to know. With the storm and all? No, it hadn’t hit Boston yet, but she saw on the Weather Channel that it was on its way. Two seconds after he hung up — before she could even hit the Start button on the VCR — the phone rang again, and this time it was her mother. Her mother had been drinking. She was calling from a restaurant, and China could hear a clamor of voices in the background. “Just stay put,” her mother shouted into the phone. “The streets are like a skating rink. Don’t you even think of getting in that car.”
Well, she wasn’t thinking of it. She was thinking of having Jeremy to herself, all night, in the big bed in his mother’s room. They’d been having sex ever since they started going together at the end of their junior year, but it was always sex in the car or sex on a blanket or the lawn, hurried sex, nothing like she wanted it to be. She kept thinking of the way it was in the movies, where the stars ambushed each other on beds the size of small planets and then did it again and again until they lay nestled in a heap of pillows and blankets, her head on his chest, his arm flung over her shoulder, the music fading away to individual notes plucked softly on a guitar and everything in the frame glowing as if it had been sprayed with liquid gold. That was how it was supposed to be. That was how it was going to be. At least for tonight.
She’d been wandering around the kitchen as she talked, dancing with the phone in an idle slow saraband, watching the frost sketch a design on the window over the sink, no sound but the soft hiss of the ice pellets on the roof, and now she pulled open the freezer door and extracted a pint box of ice cream. She was in her socks, socks so thick they were like slippers, and a pair of black leggings under an oversized sweater. Beneath her feet, the polished floorboards were as slick as the sidewalk outside, and she liked the feel of that, skating indoors in her big socks. “Uh-huh,” she said into the phone. “Uh-huh. Yeah, we’re watching a movie.” She dug a finger into the ice cream and stuck it in her mouth.
“Come on,” Jeremy called from the living room, where the maniac rippled menacingly over the Pause button. “You’re going to miss the best part.”
“Okay, Mom, okay,” she said into the phone, parting words, and then she hung up. “You want ice cream?” she called, licking her finger.
Jeremy’s voice came back at her, a voice in the middle range, with a congenital scratch in it, the voice of a nice guy, a very nice guy who could be the star of a TV show about nice guys: “What kind?” He had a pair of shoulders and pumped-up biceps too, a smile that jumped from his lips to his eyes, and close-cropped hair that stood up straight off the crown of his head. And he was always singing — she loved that — his voice so true he could do any song, and there was no lyric he didn’t know, even on the oldies station. She scooped ice cream and saw him in a scene from last summer, one hand draped casually over the wheel of his car, the radio throbbing, his voice raised in perfect synch with Billy Corgan’s, and the night standing still at the end of a long dark street overhung with maples.
“Chocolate. Swiss chocolate almond.”
“Okay,” he said, and then he was wondering if there was any whipped cream, or maybe hot fudge — he was sure his mother had a jar stashed away somewhere, Look behind the mayonnaise on the top row—and when she turned around he was standing in the doorway.