“Did you know this was there?” I asked.
“No,” she said, with a laugh. “But good thing it is.”
“And you want us to hide from Chet in there?”
“I’m not the type to stay in closets,” she said. “I want you to hide from Chester in there. Thirty minutes.”
She left me in that closet, telling me that she would get Chet out of there before he saw me with her. I stood tall in the darkness, surrounded by the sweet menthol smell of urinal cakes, wondering at how far I had fallen that I had to hide from my clients in closets. This Veronica thing was impossible, I had told myself before and repeated it to myself inside that dark mentholated cave, but even as I swore to end it I knew I wouldn’t. It was something obsessional and foolish and perverse, but it had evolved into something else too, it had evolved into something close to love. Twisted, yes, forged from depravity and desire, yes, but there it was, like a nugget in my chest. And no matter how impossible it might have been, no matter how doomed, I would stay in that closet to keep it alive as long as I had to. When by the green glowing hands of my watch I could tell a half-hour had passed, I straightened my jacket and opened the door.
A woman standing in the hallway waiting for the ladies room saw me emerge from the closet and screamed.
“Funny,” I said with a shrug. “I thought it was the men’s room.” And then, with all the dignity I could muster, I walked past her back into the bar.
So, for safety’s sake, we didn’t meet in bars or restaurants anymore. When she called for me I came running to her apartment, straight as if on a string, and the night I was bang banging on my walls in frustration was no different from any other night. She called, I ran, and we rolled around her bed like cats, sometimes playful, sometimes lupine, always carnal, and it was worth everything.
And when it was over it was always the same.
“You have to go,” she said.
“Why?” It came out in a half-moan, dragged from the recesses of my sleep, a sleep that was eluding me in my own apartment but that attacked me as I lay in the warm muskiness of her bed.
“Because you do,” she said.
“Let me stay. Let me sleep just a little bit more.”
She pushed me hard, rolling me over toward the end of the bed, and I jerked awake in a panic of falling. “What?”
“You have to go,” she said,
“Just one night,” I begged. “Let me spend just one night over.”
“Absolutely not.” She rose from the bed and put on a heavy terry cloth robe. She took a cigarette from the pack on her bedside table and lit it, inhaling deeply, and then leaned against a wall with her arms crossed. Smoke leaked out of her mouth, covering her face like a veil. “Your clothes are scattered here or there. Pick them up on your way out.”
Generally, I had always believed there was no greater luxury after sex than to be alone. It is something about men, about the way our bodies work, about the physiological effects of orgasms in our brains. The neurotransmitters that are released by sex trigger those neurons that say turn over, pretend to sleep, maybe she’ll just go away. Give us a beer afterwards and a remote control and an empty bedroom and we’re halfway to heaven. Which is why men have invented the great after-sex lies: “I have to be at work early,” or, “I’m allergic to your cat,” or “I have to pick up my laundry before the dry cleaner closes.” The problem had always been getting away. Now I was desperately disappointed that she wouldn’t let me stay.
The reason for the desperation was clear to me that night, and it was more than just that nugget of love in my chest. Nothing existed in my life that I could yet be proud of and nothing ever had. Who I was just then, Prescott’s cabana boy, was no one I ever thought I’d ever want to be. But in her touch, her warmth, in her wet embrace, with Veronica I could lose myself. Her apartment had become a magic wonderland of sensuality and vice, a place separate from the rest of the world, which had suddenly turned even uglier for me. With her I was not Victor Carl, the shady lawyer who had been passed over by the profession, first duped and then bought by those he would have had as peers, instead I was part of something wild and lost and satisfyingly perverse. With her I metamorphosed into a piece of a puzzle that promised so much and that only the two of us could possibly solve. With her I… let’s just say with her I was someone else and someone else was very much what I wanted then to be. To force me to leave was to force me to become myself again. She didn’t know how cruel she was being.
“Don’t do this to me,” I pleaded.
“I’m doing.”
“You can’t just use me and then toss me out. I’m not a tampon.”
“No, you’re not as useful.”
“Why do you make me leave each night?”
She sucked smoke. “I like to wake up alone.”
“Well, tonight I’m staying.” I lay back in the bed, my arms crossed beneath my head.
“Then tonight’s your last night.”
I sat up. “You’re not serious.”
“I’m as serious as celibacy.”
“I bet Jimmy stays over.”
“Never,” she said.
“Really? What’s he like in bed?”
“The thing about men,” she said, holding the cigarette in her lips while she stooped to pick up my T-shirt and then tossed it into my face, “is that they see sex as a competitive sport. They want scores from the judges, a set for technical merit and a set for artistic impression.”
“I’m just curious,” I said, starting to dress.
“Well, how do you think he is?”
“Passionate. He’s a very passionate man.”
“He is.”
“Yes?”
“So are you, Victor.” With one of her bare feet she nudged a sneaker toward me. “Now put on your shoes and go.”
“When will I see you again?”
“When I call,” she said.
“I’ll be waiting.”
“Surprise me sometime, Victor,” she said dryly, holding the cigarette in front of her face. “Let the phone ring more than once before you answer it.”
Ever since the incident with the hatchback I had developed a small ritual upon leaving Veronica’s apartment. There were no windows in the hallway, but the elevator had a scuffed Plexiglas side from which the residents could see out as they descended to the cobblestone plaza. When the elevator opened for me I slipped in and searched through the Plexiglas to see if anyone was waiting for me outside. My plan, if I saw anything suspicious, was to get off at a lower floor and cower, but that night, as best as I could see in the uneven light, the plaza was deserted. When the elevator reached the ground floor I looked carefully out the front glass door before I opened it. Again there was nothing.
Slowly I slid out the door and walked along the shadowy edge of the plaza to Church Street, the little cobble-stoned street on which Veronica’s building sat. Like a little boy I looked both ways. Nothing, no car idling malevolently, no shadowy pedestrians lurking, no stray raccoons. Relieved, I walked down Church Street to 3rd, where my car was parked. I was leaning over, my key in the driver’s door, when I felt the hand clamp onto my shoulder.
I jumped, or I tried to jump, but the hand kept me pressed down on the ground like the gravity of some giant planet. I turned to see who was there. It was a tall bruiser, an older man with sallow yellow skin, a tan fedora, a loud plaid jacket, yellow pants, white shoes, a nose that had been run over by a forklift. He looked like an aging heavyweight retired to Miami Beach.
“You’re Victor Carl,” the man said in a ragged, nasal voice carved by one too many shots to the schnozzola.
“No,” I said. “You got the wrong fellow.”
Without taking his hand off my shoulder, the man reached into his plaid jacket and pulled out a piece of newspaper that he showed to me. It was a picture of Jimmy Moore and William Prescott talking to the press outside the courthouse, and there, behind Moore’s shoulder, inside an ominous circle drawn with black, was me. Not a bad likeness, I thought as I stared at it. The paper made me look heavier and more handsome.