Lana was breathing hard. She took a deep draw on her cigarette.
“Love is when I call you in the bed with your wife and tell you to come to me.”
She was lying. No, not lying, but saying what she thought I needed to hear. And she was right. I needed an example of someone giving up everything for another.
“And if I go to prison in Colorado?” I asked.
“You must ask me to come with you to see if I love you.”
“But you’d be throwing away your life.”
“No... I wouldn’t,” she said.
This answer was enigmatic but I had no desire to decipher it.
I leaned over and kissed her between her breasts. She crushed out her cigarette, then mine, and hugged me like a man hugs a woman.
In the morning I thought about young Star Knowland. I imagined her, tried to remember her for over an hour. I got nowhere and so I took out the beat-up cell phone that Magda gave me and called information.
“Plaza Hotel. How may I direct your call?” a woman asked.
“Winston Meeks,” I said.
“One moment please.”
“Hello.”
“Ben Dibbuk here, Mr. Meeks.”
The straight line of words stopped there for a moment. Meeks was shocked into silence.
“Where are you?” he asked slowly, deliberately.
“I’m willing to be debriefed here in New York,” I said.
“My boss now says that he would like to see you in Denver.”
“One step at a time, Mr. D.A. Promise me that I can leave and that you will not get the police to arrest me and I’ll come over, today if you like.”
“How can I get in touch with you?”
“You can’t.”
“Call me back in two hours,” he said. “Call me then and I’ll tell you.”
Lana went off to school and I sat in the bed thinking about love. I was almost happy that I’d run into Star Knowland. She opened my life up like an overripe fig. I had been festering inside. I was rotting and didn’t even know it.
I believed that I could never really love anyone but now I saw that I could if I allowed myself to feel the pain. This was a wholly new concept for me and it was astonishing that a virtual child had shown me the way. My careless generosity with her, my callous treatment of her life, created something that marital vows and fatherhood had not given me.
It was almost beyond belief that I could have lived for forty-seven years in backward stupidity about something as simple as this.
My father beat me and I loved him for it. Not in spite of the pain but because he touched me with care, no matter how violently. He needed me to crawl and so I crawled. He needed me to hide from the light of others’ feelings and so I built myself a shell out of alcohol and then later with that feeling in my shoulders.
It didn’t matter. I had loved him from the first moment we met. I would keep on loving him until breath left me.
I called Cass at Our Bank and asked him to ask Joey for one more favor.
“Sure thing, buddy,” he said. “It’s no fun around here without you.”
“We are willing to make the deal,” Winston Meeks told me.
“Okay,” I said. “A lawyer will call you this afternoon at four. He will lay down the terms for any meeting I agree to take. When he calls me and tells me that it’s okay, I’ll come over.”
“You don’t need a lawyer just to talk to us, Mr. Dibbuk.”
“Oh yes I do. And you know it too.”
It took three days to work out the agreement. Meeks had to promise to leave the NYPD out of it and also to allow a “crew” (Cass’s word, not mine) to come with me to the Plaza suite.
In that time I got my life together as much as I could.
I went to Augie’s coffee shop at four fifteen on Friday afternoon. Mona was there. Her visits to that coffee shop were like my tight regimen of going to work. If I had wanted to kill her, I could have done it then. I thought about it but there was no reason really. Svetlana had taught me something about love — enough to know that I had never really experienced it as an adult. I couldn’t blame Mona for that. I asked her if she knew about the article they published on me.
“Yes,” she said, once again holding her phantom cigarette.
“Did you write it?”
She seemed like a computer program in a loop then. Her face and hands were stock-still; her eyes didn’t even blink.
“Yes,” she said, looking down. “What of it?”
“Are you back with Harvard Yard?”
“His name is Rollins.”
“I know what the fuck his name is. I even know that you lick the end of his cock and tell him how much you like the taste.”
Mona made to rise but I took hold of her forearm.
“Let me go.”
“This is the last time we’re ever going to speak, Mona. Let me get a little angry, huh?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m going to see the D.A. from Denver tomorrow. He’ll try to figure out if I should be extradited and put on trial. So either I’ll be in jail or otherwise gone.”
“What about Seela?”
“Why didn’t you tell Seela’s father that there was a woman who was blaming him for a murder that he doesn’t know anything about?”
Mona’s face shifted then. It dawned on me that she had had a strange look on her face ever since she’d heard Star’s story.
“You think I did it?” I said.
“You didn’t?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t remember her. I certainly don’t remember killing anyone.”
An unspoken, maybe even unconscious, apology crossed her face. She brought her fingers to her lips, the invisible cigarette forgotten.
“How could we be together for so many years and have this little trust?” I asked her.
“Harv said that there had to be something to it. Barbara knew too much about you.”
It’s funny how words are so delicate and still powerful. I could see Star at that moment lying across a couch or a bed. She was naked, big boned but young and also handsome. I did know her back then.
“But that doesn’t mean I killed anybody.”
“But...” Mona said. Here we were having our last verbal joust and she had just lost.
I smiled, relishing the empty victory.
“Could it be that you betrayed me because you love him, Mona?” I asked. “That all those years we spent building this life were nothing?”
“You never loved me, Benny,” she said.
“No. But we made Seela, we made a home for her.”
“I was sure that you were a murderer,” she said. “I was frightened.”
“Because if you told me, you thought I might have to kill you?” I asked. “Because you never knew me and you were &aid of your own mistakes?”
“I just didn’t feel safe,” she said. “That’s all.”
I was intent on allowing Mona to have the last word. It seemed right, especially since I had won our last argument.
I stood up from the stool. She touched my forearm.
“Where are you going?”
“That’s not really up to me, honey.”
“You smell like cigarettes,” she said, and I turned away.
We’d probably see each other again. In lawyers’ offices, in courts, at our daughter’s graduation if I was free, but the relationship ended there. I could feel it.
Svetlana made a home for me in her apartment. She cooked every night and bought me new clothes. When I tried to tell her that I might go away to prison, she wouldn’t listen.
“You and I are in love,” she’d say. “God wouldn’t take something like that away.”
“Do you believe in God?” I asked.
“He believes in me,” she said with unqualified conviction.
We set the meeting with Winston Meeks for that Saturday. I overslept but that was my only symptom of fear. I met Cass’s “crew” at a coffee shop around the corner. Cass was wearing black slacks and a black turtleneck, like I was used to seeing him in.