Karp stood up suddenly, shaking the coffee table. He took a deep breath. “Look,” he said, not looking at her, “let’s just clear some of this shit away. You killed a guy on the street. It was a justifiable homicide, legally. But … Jesus Christ, Marlene! You shot him in front of your own children. There could have been bullets flying all around. He could’ve turned around and shot back at you. What if Lucy or the babies had caught a round? Didn’t you think? Okay, you have some … need to go out and risk your ass on this crusade of yours, okay, you’re an adult, but to put your own children at risk …”
She regarded him stonily. “So what’s the moral calculus here, Butch? I should just stand by, let an innocent woman go down because there’s a faint chance that one of my kids could get hurt?”
“Yes!” shouted Karp. “Yes! There were nine hundred and sixty killings in Manhattan last year, and there’ll probably be more this year. You know what one or three or seven extra mean to me compared to the safety of my kids? Nothing! Zilch!”
“I see.” Marlene spoke in the unnaturally even voice she used when she was angry beyond passion. “Well, it seems we have a difference of opinion. And it’s nice of you to remind me of my deficiencies as a mother. Which you never fail to do when something like this happens.”
“You obviously need reminding!” Karp snarled back.
Marlene looked at him and then back at the TV screen. “Uh-huh. Then in that case you’ll be happy to learn that I will not be endangering them anymore in the near term. I’m leaving.”
Karp felt an icy spear penetrate his vitals. “You’re what?”
“Leaving. As in not being here. Oh, I don’t mean leaving leaving. Edie Wooten just called. Her admirer dropped by yesterday evening and trashed her bedroom. Slashed her clothes up and generally wrecked things. She’s moving out to her family’s island in Gardiner’s Bay out on the Island, and she wants me to come and guard her. Actually, she just wanted a guard, and I thought okay, Wolfe can go, but we’ll be doing that tennis star and I think Wolfe is getting stale behind watching Edie, and I haven’t got anyone I can spare, and fuck it anyway, I need to get out of here, away from the jackals down there, and I can help Harry guard his kraut tennis girl wonder out at Southampton too, and so it all works out. Lucky me.”
“You’ll be gone for what? The whole summer?” Karp asked uneasily, feeling things slipping out of control, wanting to hug her, wanting things to return to what he considered real life, but unable to make the necessary effort.
She shrugged and stared blankly at the screen. “I don’t know,” she said. The news started. The lead-off tape showed fifteen seconds of the scuffle in the courthouse hallway. Marlene watched without comment. Karp got up and went to the phone and ordered Chinese food delivered.
Marlene stayed in front of the set, drinking wine, while Karp ate and fed himself and his sons and Posie. Lucy would not come out of her room to eat. Marlene finished her bottle and opened another one and drank half of that. At eleven-forty or so, she switched the set off in the middle of Johnny’s monologue and went into the kitchen, where she ate some white bean soup and bread. The loft was quiet, the only sounds the perpetual whir and dull rumble of the city outside, elevator sounds, refrigerator sounds.
And faint steps. Lucy came into the kitchen. She was wearing a green Notre Dame T-shirt that reached to her knees. She said, “Oh,” when she saw her mother. Without a word Marlene ladled warm soup into a bowl, buttered some bread, and poured out a glass of chocolate milk. Lucy sat down and ate.
“You smell drunk,” said Lucy.
“That’s because I am drunk,” said Marlene. “I think I am entitled to tie one on every time I kill somebody and spend a night in jail.”
Lucy said, “How come Daddy’s mad at you?”
“Well,” said Marlene, “he thinks I shouldn’t have gotten involved in shooting somebody when my family was around. He was worried that you or the babies would get hurt. Also, I think he thinks it’s bad for you to see somebody get shot. He would rather I was in a different business. Also, I don’t think his trial is going real well. This garbage outside, all those news guys hanging around, bothering us-it was the last straw.”
Lucy thought about this. “Is why they call it the last straw because if there aren’t enough straws, like, somebody has to drink out of the glass and the ice cubes clunk against their teeth?”
Marlene laughed and explained. Then she grew serious and said, “I’m going to go away for a while, to help Uncle Harry guard somebody and guard some other lady too. It’s a nice place, and when school is over next week, you can come out and visit me.”
A long pause. Then, suspiciously, “You’re not getting divorced or anything, are you?”
“No, we’re not,” said Marlene with a sigh. “Your father and I are tied to each other for all eternity. We may kill each other, but we’re not breaking up.” Marlene rose and lit a cigarette, a rare event in the loft, which she smoked standing in the corner of the kitchen, thus reducing her daughter’s cancer risk to some extent.
“How’s your eye?” Marlene asked.
“Okay, I guess. A little sore.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. This fifth-grader boy got in my face, talking bad about you, and I said something back and he pushed me-”
“This was a Chinese kid?” Marlene said in surprise.
“No, a bokwai, an American kid, so he pushed me and I pushed him and then he hit me in the face and I punched his nose out. He was bleeding like crazy.”
“Okay. I should thank you for sticking up for me, but you can’t fight in school, babe. You should have walked away.”
“You didn’t.”
“No, you’re right. But that wasn’t a schoolkid fight. A man was going to commit murder, he was going to kill a woman that relied on me to protect her, so I took him down. And you can make a case that it was a risk to you all. Your daddy’s right. Anytime bullets start flying, you can never be sure where they’ll end up. But I figured the risk was worth it because it was a sure thing that the woman was going to be dead, and I was between him and you all, and I thought I was a better shot too.”
“What if a bullet hit me and killed me, what would you do?”
Marlene put out her smoke in the sink and sat down next to Lucy. She said, “I would cry for a year and a day, and tear all my hair out, and then I would have another little girl.”
“Better than me?”
“Oh, far, far better than you. You have a smart mouth and you’re much too skinny. Look at this! Ribs!” Tickling.
“And you’re much too fat!” giggled Lucy, tickling back.
The next morning before dawn, Marlene wrote out notes for Karp, Lucy, and Posie and slipped out of the loft with a duffel bag over her shoulder and her dog at heel. By the time it was full day, she was tooling East on the Long Island Expressway, watching as the westbound lanes made their daily transformation into the world’s longest parking lot, and feeling nearly herself again, whatever that was. Although she was going to work, it felt like a vacation, the first break from daily domesticity in nearly ten years. It was a nice day, warm, fleecy clouds overhead. The idiot light for the electrical system flickered on and stayed on; Marlene cared not for idiot lights. She turned the radio up high. The dog stuck its great head out the rear window and lolled its tongue, attracting startled looks from the drivers of the passing cars.
At Riverhead, she turned south and joined the Southern State Parkway, which she took into Southampton. She had no trouble finding the South Shore Club, a huge, glittering-white, over-architected, angular structure on a private road just northwest of Southampton village. The Meadow Club is the place where old money plays tennis in Southampton, and they don’t let just anybody in, and those that they do let don’t get to play tennis in anything but white. In contrast, anyone who has the $150,000 fee can play at South Shore, and they can hit the courts in Day-Glo knickers if they so desire. The management of this club had worked long to capture the women’s professional tennis tour as a symbol that the arrivistes who made up their membership had indeed arrived and to give the snoots at Meadow one in the eye.