“Yeah.”
“Did I call you back then?” I asked, a tremor playing on my diaphragm.
“You mean one’a them midnight rambler calls you was so famous for?”
I hadn’t thought about those calls since my drinking days. They were a symptom of the alcohol — the only really hard evidence I had that I was experiencing blackouts.
At first I only phoned my parents in the dead of night from my L.A. apartment and, after that, from Colorado; I would call them, waking them up. I’d blather and cry, curse and condemn them. I could not remember later when they’d tell me about it.
“You call up here usin’ all kinds of language,” my father would say to me. “Cussin’ your mother, tellin’ me that I’m the reason you dropped out of college. Sayin’ that we hurt you in your mind.”
Not long after I moved to Colorado they stopped answering the phone past ten. I think that they must have unplugged it. And so then I began calling my brother. He was just a pot dealer at that time and the police didn’t pay much attention to him. He’d call me a few days later and tell me what I’d said. In that way I kept up with myself, my brother being a kind of auxiliary memory device.
“Yes,” I said. “Did I call you around that time?”
“Uh-huh. You sure did. I remember because it was a collect call. But I didn’t think it was one’a your drunk rambles. You sounded stone-cold sober.”
“What did I say?”
“You wanted to know how easy was it to get blamed for a crime,” Briggs said. He was enjoying the talk now, now that he was in charge.
“What crime?”
“That’s what I asked you, but all you would say is, ‘Somethin’ serious.’ ”
“What did you tell me?”
“That the best way to catch a man is his fingerprints or an eyewitness.”
“What about a witness?” I asked.
“You cussed out some woman, said that she wasn’t about to say a thing.”
“What woman?” I asked.
“It was a long time ago, bro. I didn’t write it down. I figured you stole some shit or somethin’ like that. You know you always was small-time. Oh yeah,” he said then, “I remember. The woman’s name was Star.”
The blood felt as if it were congealing in my veins. I slammed my fist down on my knee and ground my teeth until they hurt.
“Are you sure of that?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. You said, ‘that bitch Star,’ about a hundred times. I guess that should’a told me it wasn’t one’a your rambles. But otherwise you sounded sober as a judge.”
I wandered after that for some time. My head ached but the feeling was far-off, inconsequential. Barbara Knowland knew something about me that I myself did not know. I had called my brother and told him that it was a crime. But that was more than twenty years ago. How bad could it have been?
I didn’t know.
I thanked God for my Lucky Strikes; without them I might have run out into traffic or down in front of a train.
I woke up with her kissing my ear. She kissed it again and again, cooing softly. I had no idea where I was or whom I was with.
“Ben?”
I turned over to see Svetlana lying next to me.
“Are you better?”
“Better than what?”
“Last night when I came in, you were in the bed crying.” She reached out, cupping my jaw with her hand.
“Did I say anything?”
“Not that I could understand. But you were so sad. I held you for a long time.”
I sat up, hurting everywhere, it seemed: my face, my chest, my feet from all that walking.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Ten, a little after.”
“Don’t you have a class?”
“I did not go,” she said. “I was worried about how you felt.” That set off my sobbing again. When I started crying, I remembered the night before; not why, but that I was crying, moaning, sorrowful beyond measure.
Svetlana held me, humming along with the song of lament. Her strong hands were a solace to me but I could not tell her that: I couldn’t speak. After what seemed like a long while, she put on her robe and prepared breakfast: cornflakes with skim milk and black coffee.
When I lit a cigarette, she was startled.
“What is this? You are smoking now?” she asked.
“Oh... yeah. I need it. I need it bad.”
“But you have quit for so long,” she said.
“The stuff on my mind is from so long ago that only smoking and drinking can get to it,” I said, realizing that there was more truth to those words than I had considered.
“You are drinking too?”
“Not until I’m ready to die,” I said.
“Ben,” she said, a cry in that deep shadow of my dream. “Ben, why are you so sad?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mind,” I said. “Something happened a long time ago. Something that I’ve forgotten. There’s a woman who I ran into who knows what that something is. She thinks I remember too. When I told her that I forgot, she got worried.”
“Can you ask her what this is?”
“I’m afraid to.”
Svetlana’s response was a smile, then a toothy grin.
“This is funny to you?” I asked.
“No, darling.” It was the first time she had ever called me darling. “It is just that you are like a new boyfriend to me. Dark and filled with secrets, smoking at my table and crying in my bed. You are a new man for me, a second secret lover who throws me down on the floor and takes me.”
We made love after that. And when we were finished, she kissed me, got dressed, and walked out the door without saying good-bye. Ten minutes later the phone rang. I answered, certain that she was calling to mend the oversight.
“Yes?” I said into the receiver.
“Who is this?” a man with a heavy Russian accent asked.
“My phone, your name,” I said.
The caller hung up. It was no wrong number, surely. The Russian accent meant that it was some &end or acquaintance of Lana’s. While I pondered this, the phone rang again.
“Yes?”
“IS Svetlana there?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Who are you?”
“My phone. Your name first.”
“I am Sergei, Lana’s... friend.”
“I am Ben. I pay for this phone.” After these words, I hung up. There was a cold darkness in me. Not the darkness of race but the moonless night of a hunter looking for warm blood. There was no mistaking the thrumming in my chest. My fingers wanted to close on a throat, any throat.
It wasn’t that I felt jealousy. I didn’t care if Lana had a “friend.” She was young and very pretty. I was getting on toward the later years when the body, mind, and heart start to wind down. I wanted to hurt someone, but not for revenge.
I reached for my Lucky Strikes, but the pack was empty.
Four blocks away I stopped at a kiosk to buy cigarettes. It was a very small stand that sold chewing gum and newspapers, instant lottery tickets and racing forms. I bought a pack of filterless Camels. Three blocks later I picked up a free copy of the Village Voice. I took the paper over into Central Park and sat down at another bench.
It occurred to me that Lana was right. I was a much different man than I had been just a day before. Yesterday I had been all herky-jerky, skipping down the street and lamenting my wife’s betrayal. Today I had woken up devastated, blubbering like a child, but now I was as calm as a contract killer on the old TV show Kojak, waiting for his next job.
I smoked three cigarettes, found what I was looking for in the performances section of the paper, and watched a big blustering pigeon try time after time to mount shy and reluctant hens.