She stared at him silently. He was shaking terribly.
“Jesus,” she said, softly.
And they stayed that way for a while, without speaking. He had answered her question: More than she wanted to know.
The mood was tainted now. He could feel himself split—one part of him here and now with the naked Martha, in this bedroom with the light low—another part he had thought long gone, in that other bedroom, hunkered down against the baseboard, hands over eyes, whimpering like a crippled dog, Cindy sprawled half on the floor, half on the bed, her face puffed and bloodied. He tried desperately to get control of himself.
After some long moments he was able to breathe regularly. She was still staring at him, her eyes wide. He said, almost with reverence, “Thank God for Marcie.”
She waited and then said, “Who’s Marcie?”
“Who was Marcie. Haven’t seen her in something like fifteen years.”
“Well, who was Marcie?”
“She was the one who picked up the pieces and focused my eyes. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have walked around on my knees for another year… or two… or ten…”
“What happened to her?”
“Who knows? You can take it from our recently severed liaison; I seem to have some difficulty hanging on to good women.”
“Oh, Mike!”
“Hey, take it easy. You split for good and sound reasons. I think I’m doomed to be a bachelor… maybe a recluse for the rest of my life. But that’s okay. I’ve tried it three times. I just don’t have the facility. I’m good for a woman for short stretches, but over the long haul I think I’m just too high-pressure.”
She smiled wanly, trying to ease what she took to be pain. He wasn’t in pain, but she had never been able to tell the difference with him. Precisely that inability to penetrate his façade had been the seed of their dissolution. “It was okay with us.”
“For a while.”
“Yeah. For a while.” She reached across him to the nightstand and picked up the heavy Orrefors highball glass with the remains of the Mendocino Gray Riesling. “It was so strange running into you at Allison’s party. I’d heard you were seeing some model or actress… or something.”
He shook his head. “Nope. You were my last and greatest love.”
She made a wet, bratting sound. “Bullshit.”
“Mmm. Yeah, it is a bit, ain’t it.”
And they stayed that way, silently, for a while. Once, he touched her naked thigh, feeling the nerve jump under his hand; and once, she reached across to lay her hand on his chest, to feel him breathing. But they didn’t make love again. And after a space of time in which they thought they could hear the dust settling in the room, she said, “Well, I’ve got to get home to feed the cats.”
“You want to stay the night?”
She thought about it a moment. “No thanks, Mike. Maybe another night when I come prepared. You know my thing about putting on the same clothes the next day.” He knew. And smiled.
She crawled out of bed and began getting dressed. He watched her, ivory-lit by the single bed lamp. It never would have worked. But then, he’d known that almost from the first. It never worked well for an extended period. There was no Holy Grail. Yet the search went on, reflexively. It was like eating potato chips.
She came back to the bed, leaned over and kissed him. It was the merest touch of lips, and meant nothing. “Bye. Call me.”
“No doubt about it,” he said; but he wouldn’t.
Then she left. He sat up in bed for a while, thinking that it was odd how people couldn’t leave it alone. Like a scab, they had to pick at it. He’d dated her rather heavily for a month, and they had broken up for no particular reason save that it was finished. And tonight the party, and he was alone, and she was alone, and they had come together for an anticlimax.
A returning. To a place neither had known very well. A devalued neighborhood.
He knew he would never see Martha again.
The bubble of sadness bobbed on the surface for a moment, then burst; the sense of loss flavored the air a moment longer; then he turned off the light, rolled over onto the dried wet spot, and went to sleep.
He was hacking out the progression of interrogatories pursuant to the Blieler brief with one of the other attorneys in the office when his secretary stuck her head into the conference room and said he had a visitor. Rubbing his eyes, he realized they had been at it for three straight hours. He shoved back from the conference table, swept the papers into the folio, and said, “Let’s knock off for lunch.” The other attorney stretched, and musculature crackled. “Okay. Call it four o ‘ clock. I’ve got to go over to the 9000 Building to pick up Barbarossi’s deposition.” He got up and left. Kirxby sighed, simply sitting there, all at once overcome by a nameless malaise. As though something dark and forbidding were slouching towards his personal Bethlehem.
Then he went into his office to meet his visitor.
She turned half-around in the big leather chair and smiled at him. “Jerri!” he said, all surprise and pleasure. His first reaction: surprised pleasure. “My God, it’s been… how long…?”
The smile lifted at one corner: her bemused smile.
“It’s been six months. Seem longer?”
He grinned and shrugged. It had been his choice to break up the affair after two years. For Martha. Who had lasted a month.
“How time flies when you’re enjoying yourself,” she said. She crossed her legs. A summary judgment on his profligacy.
He walked around and sat down behind the desk. “Come on, Jerri, gimme some slack.”
Another returning. First Martha, out of the blue; now Jerri. Emerging from the mauve, perhaps? “What brings you back into my web?” He tried to stare at her levelly, but she was on to that; it made him feel guilty.
“I suppose I could have cobbled up something spectacular along the lines of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against one of my competitors,” she said, “but the truth is just that I felt an urgent need to see you again.”
He opened and closed the top drawer of his desk, to buy a few seconds. Then, carefully avoiding her gaze, he said, “What is this, Jerri? Christ, isn’t there enough crap in the world without detouring to find a fresh supply’!” He said it softly, because he had said I love you to her for two years, excluding the final seven months when he had said fuck off, never realizing they were the same phrase.
But he took her to lunch, and they made a date for dinner, and he took her back to his apartment and they were two or three drinks too impatient to get to the bed and made it on the living room carpet still half-clothed. He cherished silence when making love, even when only screwing, and she remembered and didn’t make a sound. And it was as good or as bad as it had ever been between them for two years minus the last seven months. And when she awoke hours later, there on the living room carpet, with her skirt up around her hips, and Michael lying on his side with his head cradled on his arm, still sleeping, she breathed deeply and slitted her eyes and commanded the hangover to permit her the strength to rise; and she rose, and she covered him with a small rap-robe he had pilfered off an American Airlines flight to Boston; and she went away. Neither loving him nor hating him. Having merely satisfied the urgent compulsion in her to return to him once more, to see him once more, to have his body once more. And there was nothing more to it than that.
The next morning he rolled onto his back, lying there on the floor, kept his eyes closed, and knew he would never see her again. And there was no more to it than that.
Two days later he received a phone call from Anita. He had had two dates with Anita, more than two-and-a-half years earlier, during the week before he had met Jerri and had taken up with her. She said she had been thinking about him. She said she had been weeding out old phone numbers in her book and had come across his, and just wanted to call to see how he was. They made a date for that night and had sex and she left quickly. And he knew he would never see her again.
And th
e next day at lunch at the Oasis he saw Corinne sitting across the room. He had lived with Corinne for a year, just prior to meeting Anita, just prior to meeting Jerri. Corinne came across the room and kissed him on the back of the neck and said, “You’ve lost weight. You look good enough to eat.” And they got together that night, and one thing and another, and he was, and she did, and then he did, and she stayed the night but left after coffee the next morning. And he knew he would never see her again.
But he began to have an unsettling feeling that something strange was happening to him.
Over the next month, in reverse order of having known them, every female with whom he had had a liaison magically reappeared in his life. Before Corinne, he had had a string of one-nighters and casual weekends with Hannah, Nancy, Robin and Cylvia; Elizabeth, Penny, Margie and Herta; Eileen, Gail, Holly and Kathleen. One by one, in unbroken string, they came back to him like waifs returning to the empty kettle for one last spoonful of gruel. Once, and then gone again, forever.
Leaving behind pinpoint lights of isolated memory. Each one of them an incomplete yet somehow total summation of the woman: Hannah and her need for certain words in the bed; the pressure of Nancy’s legs over his shoulders; Robin and the wet towels; Cylvia who never came, perhaps could not come; Elizabeth so thin that her pelvis left him sore for days; having to send out for ribs for Penny, before and after; a spade-shaped mole on Margie’s inner thigh; Herta falling asleep in a second after sex, as if she had been clubbed; the sound of Eileen’s laugh, like the wind in Aspen; Gail’s revulsion and animosity when he couldn’t get an erection and tried to go down on her; Holly’s endless retelling of the good times they had known; Kathleen still needing to delude herself that he was seducing her, even after all this time.
One sharp point of memory. One quick flare of light. Then gone forever and there was no more to it than that.
But by the end of that month, the suspicion had grown into a dread certainty; a certainty that led him inexorably to an inevitable end place that was too horrible to consider. Every time he followed the logical progression to its finale, his mind skittered away… that whimpering, crippled dog.
His fear grew. Each woman returned built the fear higher. Fear coalesced into terror and he fled the city, hoping by exiling himself to break the links.
But there he sat, by the fireplace at The Round Hearth, in Stowe, Vermont… and the next one in line, Sonja, whom he had not seen in years, Sonja came in off the slopes and saw him, and she went a good deal whiter than the wind chill factor outside accounted for.
They spent the night together and she buried her face in the pillow so her sounds would not carry. She lied to her husband about her absence and the next morning, before Kirxby came out of his room, they were gone.
But Sonja had come back. And that meant the next one before her had been Gretchen. He waited in fear, but she did not appear in Vermont, and he felt if he stayed there he was a sitting target and he called the office and told them he was going down to the Bahamas for a few days, that his partners should parcel out his caseload among them, for just a few more days, don’t ask questions.
And Gretchen was working in a tourist shop specializing in wicker goods; and she looked at him as he came through the door, and she said, “Oh, my God, Michael! I’ve had you on my mind almost constantly for the past week. I was going to call you —”
And she gave a small sharp scream as he fainted, collapsing face-forward into a pyramid of woven wicker clothing hampers.
The apartment was dark. He sat there in silence, and refused to answer the phone. The gourmet delicatessen had been given specific instructions. The delivery boy with the food had to knock in a specific, certain cadence, or the apartment door would not be opened.
Kirxby had locked himself away. The terror was very real now. It was impossible to ignore what was happening to him. All the birds were coming home to roost.
Back across nineteen years, from his twentieth birthday to the present, in reverse order of having known them, every woman he had ever loved or fucked or had an encounter of substance with… was homing in on him. Martha the latest, from which point the forward momentum of his relationships had been arrested, like a pendulum swung as far as it would go, and back again, back, back, swinging back past Jerri and Anita, back to Corinne and Hannah, back, and Nancy, back, and Robin and all of them, straight back to Gretchen, who was just three women before…
He wouldn’t think about it.
He couldn’t. It was too frightening.
The special, specific, certain cadence of a knock on his apartment door. In the darkness he found his way to the door and removed the chain. He opened the door to take the box of groceries, and saw the teenaged Puerto Rican boy sent by the deli. And standing behind him was Kate. She was twelve years older, a lot less the gamin, classy and self-possessed now, but it was Kate nonetheless.
He began to cry.
He slumped against the open door and wept, hiding his face in his hands partially because he was ashamed, but more because he was frightened.
She gave the boy a tip, took the box, and edged inside the apartment, moving Kirxby with her, gently. She closed the door, turned on a light, and helped him to the sofa.
When she came back from putting away the groceries, she slipped out of her shoes and sat as far away from him as the length of the sofa would permit. The light was behind her and she could see his swollen, terrified face clearly. His eyes were very bright. There was a trapped expression on his face. For a long time she said nothing.
Finally, when his breathing became regular, she said, “Michael, what the hell is it? Tell me.”
But he could not speak of it. He was too frightened to name it. As long as he kept it to himself, it was just barely possible it was a figment of delusion, a ravening beast of the mind that would vanish as soon as he was able to draw a deep breath. He knew he was lying to himself. It was real. It was happening to him, inexorably.
She kept at him, speaking softly, cajoling him, prising the story from him. And so he told her. Of the reversal of his life. Of the film running backward. Of the river flowing upstream. Carrying him back and back and back into a dark land from which there could never be escape.
“And I ran away. I went to St. Kitts. And I walked into a shop, some dumb shop, just some dumb kind of tourist goods shop…”
“And what was her name… Greta… ?”
“Gretchen.”
“… Gretchen. And Gretchen was there.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, my God, Michael. You’re making yourself crazy. This is lunatic. You’ve got to stop it.”
“Stop it!?! Jesus, I wish I could stop it. But I can’t. Don’t you see, you’re part of it. It’s unstoppable, it’s crazy but it’s hellish. I haven’t slept in days. I’m afraid to go to sleep. God knows what might happen.”
“You’re building all this in your mind, Michael. It isn’t real. Lack of sleep is making you paranoid.”
“No… no… listen… here, listen to this… I remembered it from years ago… I read it… I found it when I went looking for it…” He lurched off the sofa, found the book on the wet bar and brought it back under the light. It was The Plague by Camus, in a Modern Library edition. He thumbed through the book and could not find the place. Then she took it from him and laid it on her palm and it fell open to the page, because he had read and reread the section. She read it aloud, where he had underlined it:
“‘Had he been less tired, his senses more alert, that all-pervading odor of death might have made him sentimental. But when a man has had only four hours’ sleep, he isn’t sentimental. He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice—hideous, witless justice.’” She closed the book and stared at him. “You really believe this, don’t you?”
“Don’t I? Of course I do! I’d be what you think I am, crazy… not to believe it. Kate, listen to me. Look, here you are. It’s twelve years. Twelve years and another life. Bu
t here you are, back with me again, just in sequence. You were my lover before I met Gretchen. I knew it would be you!”
“Michael, don’t let this make you stop thinking. There’s no way you could have known. Bill and I have been divorced for two years. I just moved back to the city last week. Of course I’d look you up. We had a very good thing together. If I hadn’t met Bill we might still be together.”
“Jesus, Kate, you’re not listening to me. I’m trying to tell you this is some kind of terrible justice. I’m rolling back through time with the women I’ve known. There’s you, and if there’s you, then the next one before you was Marcie. And if I go back to her, then that means that after Marcie… after Marcie… before Marcie there was…”
He couldn’t speak the name.
She said the name. His face went white again. It was the speaking of the unspeakable.
“Oh God, Kate, oh dear God, I’m screwed, I’m screwed…”
“Cindy can’t get you, Mike. She’s still in the Home, isn’t she?”
He nodded, unable to answer.
Kate slid across and held him. He was shaking. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”
She tried to rock him, like a child in pain, but his terror was an electric current surging through him. “I’ll take care of you,” she said. “Till you’re better. There won’t be any Marcie, and there certainly won’t be any Cindy.”
“No!” he screamed, pulling away from her. “No!”
He stumbled toward the door. “I’ve got to get out of here. They can find me here. I’ve got to go somewhere out away from here, fast, fast, where they can’t find me ever.”
He yanked open the door and ran into the hall. The elevator was not there. It was never there when he needed it, needed it badly, needed it desperately.