“Let me fix you a drink,” she said. “What can I get you?”
“Anything, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’ve got.”
“Vodka?”
“Sure, if you’ve got it.”
She put him in the overstuffed chair in the living room, came back with his vodka and a Coke for herself. And sat down across from him and listened to him talk, or tried to look as though she was listening.
“Another drink, Marty?”
“I better not,” he said. “That one hit me kinda hard.” He yawned, covered his mouth with his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “I feel a little sleepy all of a sudden.”
“Go ahead and close your eyes.”
“No, I’ll be fine. ‘Sfunny, vodka never hit me so sudden.”
He said something else, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then his eyes closed and he sagged in his chair.
She was sitting across from him when his eyes opened. He blinked a few times, then frowned at her. “Keisha,” he said. “What the hell happened?”
“You got sleepy.”
“I had a drink. That’s the last thing I remember.”
He shifted position, or tried to, and it was only then that he realized he was immobilized, his hands cuffed behind him, his ankles cuffed to the front legs of the chair. She’d wound clothesline around his upper body and the back of the chair, with a last loop around his throat, so that he couldn’t move his head more than an inch or two.
“Jesus,” he said. “What’s going on?”
She looked at him and let him work it out.
“Something in the vodka,” he said. “Tasted all right, but there was something in it, wasn’t there?”
She nodded.
“Why, Keisha?”
“I didn’t figure you’d let me tie you up if you were wide awake.”
“But why tie me up? What’s this all about?”
That was a hard question, and she had to think about it. “Payback,” she said. “I guess.”
“Payback?”
“For Darnell.”
“Keisha,” he said, “you want to blame me, go ahead. Or blame boxing, or blame Darnell, or blame the Molina kid, who feels pretty terrible, believe me. Son of a bitch killed a man in the ring and didn’t even win the fight. Keisha, it’s a tragedy, but it’s not anybody’s fault.”
“You could have stopped it.”
“And if I had? You think it would have made a difference if I threw in the towel when you told me to? He didn’t get hit more than a couple shots after that, and Molina didn’t have anything left by then. The damage was already done by then. You know what would have happened if I tried to stop it then? Darnell would have had a fit, and he probably would have dropped dead right then and there instead of waiting until he was back in his dressing room.”
“You could have stopped it after the knockdown.”
“Was that my job? The ref looked at him and let him go on. The ringside physician looked at him, shined a light in his eyes, and didn’t see any reason to call a halt.”
He went on, reasoning with her, talking very sensibly, very calmly. She stopped listening to what he was saying, and when she realized that he was waiting for a response, an answer to some question she hadn’t heard, she got up and crossed the room.
She picked up the newspaper and stood in front of his chair.
He said, “What’s that? Something in the paper?”
She rolled up the newspaper. He frowned at her, puzzled, and she drew back her arm and struck him almost gently on the top of the head with the rolled newspaper.
“Hey,” he said.
She looked at him, looked at the newspaper, then hit him again.
“What are you doing, trying to housebreak me?”
The newspaper was starting to unroll. She left him there, ignoring what he was saying, and went into the other room. When she returned the newspaper was secured with tape so that she wouldn’t have to worry about it unrolling. She approached him again, raised the newspaper, and he tried to dodge the blow but couldn’t.
He said, “Is this symbolic? Because I’m not sure I should say this, Keisha, but it doesn’t hurt.”
“In the ring,” she said, “when a fighter tries to indicate that a punch didn’t hurt him, what it means is it did.”
“Yeah, of course, because otherwise he wouldn’t bother. And they all know that because they notice it in other fighters, but they do it anyhow. It’s automatic. A guy hurts you, you want to make him think he didn’t.”
She raised the newspaper, struck him with it.
“Ouch!” he said. “That really hurt!”
“No, it didn’t.”
“No, it didn’t,” he agreed. “Why are we doing this? What’s the point?”
“You don’t even feel it,” she said. “That’s what Darnell always said about blows to the head. Body shots hurt you, when they land and again after the fight’s over, but not head shots. They may knock you out, but they don’t really hurt.”
She punctuated the speech with taps on the head, hitting him with the rolled newspaper, a little harder than before but not very hard, certainly not hard enough to cause pain.
“Okay,” he said. “Cut it out, will you?”
She hit him again.
“Keisha, what the hell’s the point? What are you trying to prove, anyway?”
“It’s cumulative,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“The same as it is in the ring,” she said. “Rubén Molina didn’t kill Darnell. It was all those punches over all those years, punches he didn’t even feel, punches that added up and added up and added up.”
“Could you quit hitting me while we’re talking? I can’t concentrate on what you’re saying.”
“Punch after punch after punch,” she said, continuing to hit him as she talked. “Down all the years, from playground fights to amateur bouts to pro fights. And then there’s training, all those rounds sparring, and yes, you wear headgear, but there’s still impact. The brain gets knocked around, same as your brain’s getting knocked around right now, even if you don’t feel it. Over a period of years, well, you got time to recover, and for a while that’s just what you do, you recover each time, and then there’s a point where you start to show the damage, and from that point on every punch you take leaves its mark on you.”
“Keisha, will you for Chrissake stop it?”
She hit him, harder, on the top of the head. She hit him, not quite so hard, on the side of the head. She hit him, hard, right on the top of the head.
“Keisha!”
She sat down the rolled-up newspaper, fetched the roll of duct tape, taped his mouth shut. “Don’t want to listen to you,” she said. “Not right now.” And, with Marty silent, she was silent herself, and the only sound in the room was the impact of the length of newspaper on his head. She fell into an easy rhythm, matching the blows with her own breathing, raising the newspaper as she inhaled, bringing it down as she breathed out.
She beat him until her arm ached.
When she took the tape from his mouth he winced but didn’t cry out. He looked at her and she looked at him and neither of them said anything.
Then he said, “How long are you going to do this?”
“Long as it takes.”
“Long as it takes to do what? To kill me?”
She shook her head.
“Then what?”
She didn’t answer.
“Keisha, I didn’t hit him. And I didn’t try to make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Keisha, there was no damage showed up in the MRI, nothing in the brain scan.”
“I said for you to let an expert examine him. Study his speech and all. But you wouldn’t do it.”
“And I told you why. You want me to tell you again?”
“No.”
“Keisha, he had an aneurysm. A blood vessel in the brain, it just blew out. Maybe it was from the punches he took, but maybe it wasn’t. He could have been a
hundred miles away from Rubén Molina, lying in a Jacuzzi and eating a ham sandwich, and the blood vessel coulda popped anyway, right on schedule.”
“You don’t know that.”
“And you don’t know any different. Keisha, you want to let me up? I gotta go to the bathroom.”
She shook her head.
“It’s your chair. You want me to make a mess on it?”
“If you want.”
“Keisha—”
“Some of them,” she said, “the ones who took too many punches, they get so they can’t control their bladders. But that’s a long ways down the line. Slurred speech comes first, and you aren’t even slurring your words yet.”
He started to say something, but she was pressing the tape in place. He didn’t resist, and this time when she picked up the rolled newspaper he didn’t even attempt to dodge the blows.
It Took You Long Enough
When the telephone rang she was sitting on the couch in a flannel robe struggling with a double-acrostic. The television set was on but she wasn’t paying any attention to it. She turned the volume down before she picked up the phone.
“Shari? This is Howard Messinger.”
“And so it is,” she said.
“Shari?”
“What a stroke of luck,” she said. “You’re probably the only person I know who can tell me who commanded the Austrian forces at the battle of Blenheim.”
“Prince Eugene.”
“I somehow knew you would know that.”
“Did you? The reason I called . . .”
“Only it doesn’t fit.”
“It has to.”
‘Three words.”
“Eugene of Savoy.”
“Just a minute.”
“Shari . . .”
“Just a minute. Ha! It fits.”
“Shari?”
“Yes. The reason you called.”
“I’d like to see you.”
She took a breath. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“I know what you’re thinking. But it’s important. I have to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“I don’t want to go into it over the phone. Christ, I’m in a booth, it’s noisy here . . .”
“You sound a little shaky, Howard.”
“I am a little shaky. Please?”
“I suppose so.”
“I can be at your apartment in ten minutes.”
“Well, don’t. Give me at least a half hour. Have a drink or something. Or is that a bad idea?”
“Huh? Oh, am I drunk? My dear, I am so sober that it hurts.”
“Well, have a drink and give me a half hour. Oh, if you want something to drink here you’d better pick up a bottle. I only have things like crème de banana.”
He gave her forty minutes, and she used almost all of them to dress and straighten the apartment. She put on a little makeup, decided against perfume.
This is Howard Messinger. Always the announcement, always his full name. As if she could fail to remember the voice.
He called her every now and then. The calls always surprised her, although by now she felt she ought not to be surprised. He was likely to call every three or four months, usually late at night, usually after he’d had a great deal to drink. He would talk with her for a few minutes and then hang up and it might be months before she heard from him again. This pattern had established itself over the past five years and she supposed that she should have grown used to it by now.
But he had never before asked to come up. And she had never before heard this urgency in his voice.
He buzzed from the vestibule. She buzzed back to unlatch the downstairs door. He climbed the stairs, knocked on her door. She opened it, stepped back and motioned him inside. He took off his coat and looked around for a place to put it. She took it from him and hung it in the closet.
He said, “Stand still a minute. Let me look at you. You look the same.”
“The hell I do.”
“You do. When did you cut your hair?”
“God! Years ago.”
“I liked it better long.”
“I don’t even remember what made me cut it. You’re looking very good yourself, incidentally.”
And indeed he was. His face was drawn, but he had the sort of dark good looks that were enhanced by stress. He had lost a bit of hair in front and his face had a few new lines in it but there was no denying that she still found him attractive. She was both pleased and distressed to discover this.
“I picked up a bottle of scotch,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re drinking these days.”
“Scotch’ll do. How do you want it? Rocks?”
“Fine.”
She made drinks. He took his and sat down in an armchair. She seated herself on the couch. She thought of several cute things to say and left them unsaid.
He said, “Thanks, incidentally.”
“For letting you come over? You didn’t give me much choice.”
“Thanks all the same. Well. The only way to say it is to say it. My marriage is over.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Well, that wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know what I did expect but certainly not that.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“I don’t suppose I am. Well, it took you long enough, Howard.”
“Took me—oh. No, that’s not the way it was, I’m afraid. I didn’t do anything. It got done.”
“Lynn left you?”
He smiled. “I suppose I should be flattered that it surprises you. Yeah, she went and walked. For better than a dozen years I did not quite leave her. I kept wanting to and kept not doing it, until I reached the point where I even stopped leaving the woman in fantasy. And now she has flown de coop.”
“She’ll be back.”
“No.”
“Of course she will.”
He was shaking his head. “No. No way. Damn, this turns out to be hard to say. The old macho pride.”
“Oh.”
“Uh-uh. She didn’t just leave me, she left me for another guy.”
“Somebody you know?”
“No, thank God.”
“Is he married?”
“Divorced. She met him through the fucking PTA, if you can believe that. I think I need another drink.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
She stayed an extra moment in the kitchen after replenishing his drink. She scrutinized the palm of her left hand. A couple of years ago someone had taken her to a pricy restaurant on First Avenue where a palmist had given her a reading. “Your head rules your heart,” the palmist had told her, among other things. She studied her hand and hoped the old woman had spoken the truth. Just now would be a very bad time to let her heart get the upper hand.
When she was seated again on the couch she said, “Then it’s definitely over?”
“No question. She wants to marry him, he wants to marry her, and I think we should raise our glasses to the happy couple.”
“How do you feel about it, Howard?”
“That’s the question, all right.”
“Do you have an answer to go with it?”
He shrugged. “I always thought I did. Before it ever happened. When I used to think about leaving her, and when I began to reach the point where I knew it was never going to happen, I managed to dream up a lovely little scenario in which she fell in love with somebody else and so informed me, and I manfully accepted my fate while secretly rejoicing.”
“Because you knew that was the only way you would get out of it.”
“Right.”
“But now you’re not secretly rejoicing.”
“I’m still rejoicing, damn it. But I’m also, I don’t know, a little shaky. I don’t know how much of this is wounded male pride. I’ve tried to allow for that and I still seem to feel something else.”
“Not a question of suddenly realizing you love her?”
“
Christ, no. But a sense of loss. And what the hell did I lose? A bad marriage to a woman who bored me to tears? I’m lucky to be out of this.”
“You don’t need to convince me. I thought you should have left her years ago.”
“Nine years ago.”
She forced herself to meet his eyes. “Nine years ago,” she said.
“I wonder if it would have worked.”
“No.”
“You’re awfully positive, Shari.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How can you be so sure?”
She thought for a moment. Then she said, “Do you know the story about the violinist? Once upon a time there was a great violinist who held a concert, and after the concert a young man came backstage for advice. He explained that he was studying the violin, that he had been told he had great talent, but that before he committed himself to a life on the concert stage he wanted to know if he had the potential to become truly great, as he didn’t want to waste his life if he was doomed to be second rate. So the great violinist listened to him play, and then he said to him, ‘Young man, your technique is excellent, you play very pleasingly, but you will never be truly great because you lack the fire. You just do not have the fire.’
“So the young man was crushed but he bore up manfully, thanked the great violinist for his candor, and left. He put his violin in the closet and applied himself to the business world where he was very successful. Many years later he met the great violinist at a benefit concert and told him that he owed all his success to him.
“ ‘How can that be?’ asked the great violinist. ‘Because I once came to you and played for you, and you told me I didn’t have the fire, and so I gave up music and went to work in the widget business.’ ‘Ah,’ said the great violinist. ‘But one thing I always wondered,’ said the businessman. ‘How could you tell that I didn’t have the fire just by listening to me for a few minutes?’
“The old violinist shrugged. ‘I could tell nothing,’ he said. ‘In fact I barely listened to you. Whenever a young person plays for me I tell him the same thing. I tell him he does not have the fire.’
“The businessman was stunned. ‘But that’s terrible! I could have been a concert performer, I could have been a virtuoso! All my material success, it’s nothing to me compared to the life I dreamed of, and I could have had it except that I believed you!’