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
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.”
“Believe me, that is succinct,” I said, sipping my coffee. “Everything has changed. Let’s walk.”
“Walk? You used to take a cab to go to the bathroom. Do you have a fever? What have you done with my ex-husband and who are you?”
“Cut it out, Amy.”
“Fine.”
“I even run these days. Well, not for the last month, but I’m getting back to it this week.”
“Not if it keeps snowing like this you’re not.”
We’d both heard the forecast for a lot of snow, but I guess we both sensed that we needed to get this first get-together over with as soon as we could. It was easy to ignore the snow before it started falling. Now, it was fairly impossible to ignore.
We turned south toward Tribeca, snow falling pretty heavily as we walked. There was already more snow on the sidewalk than the combined snowfall in Brixton over the last year. New York City is beautiful in the snow, but it’s a very transient beauty. Nothing stays pure very long in the city once it touches down.
“That night at the Algonquin, when you just showed up like that, what was that about?” I asked.
“I miss you. I’ve missed you.”
“Ain’t memory grand, how time sands off the bitter edges? But you couldn’t miss the Kipster, not really. In the beginning of us, I acted like a sex- and drug-addicted fool because that’s who I was. At the end, I was doing it to hurt you, to make you push me away.”