Authors: Alison Gaylin

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Sagas

Hide Your Eyes (14 page)

BOOK: Hide Your Eyes

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‘You all right?’ Hermyn said to me. ‘You seem upset.’

‘I’m fine. Just . . . tired.’

‘So where are you two lovebirds headed?’ Sal asked.

‘I’ve
so
got to get back to work,’ Peter said. ‘They think I just went home because I forgot my wallet.’

We drove to Ruby’s in relative silence. When we got there, I saw two police cars parked outside and, through the frosty window, burgundy hair surrounded by blue uniforms. ‘Seems early for a bar brawl,’ Sal remarked.

As Peter left the car, I said, ‘Don’t forget to renew that visa.’

He turned and winked at me, then sprinted into the restaurant.

‘He is so handsome, Samantha,’ said Hermyn. ‘Is he a model?’

‘I think,’ I said, ‘he’s just a normal waiter.’

When I asked them to take me to Yale’s apartment, I realized it was the only safe place I knew.

¢>

I’ll Wait Here, Butterfly

‘Incredible,’ Hermyn kept saying as she circled the great, multicolored pile of broken glass, china, pottery and shredded police tape sprawled at the center of Yale’s living room floor.

Yale and I just looked at each other. When Hermyn had walked through the door and gasped at the jagged mess - which stood a couple of feet high and reminded me of one of the Watts Towers, collapsed - Yale had explained, teeth clenched, ‘It’s art.’ Obviously, he hadn’t expected her to take him seriously.

Hermyn knelt down, and grazed her fingertips over the headless body of Yale’s porcelain dog. ‘Lost love and . . . ohh, yes, regret. Sal would go crazy for this.’

Sal was waiting in the car. Hermyn had insisted on walking me upstairs, and when I’d mentioned several recent auto thefts that had occurred on Eighth Street after dark, Sal had said, ‘I’ll wait here and watch the car, Butterfly!’ I’d felt so sorry for Hermyn’s fiancé, sitting out in the cold with the car turned off (he said he didn’t want to waste gas) that I’d given him my huge, bulky coat, which he’d gratefully accepted.

When I turned around, I’d seen him in the front seat with the coat thrown over him like a blanket, wriggling underneath the folds of black wool, pulling the collar and hood over his small head. He reminded me of some sort of burrowing, baby animal.

Yale’s apartment was barely recognizable. The couch was pushed up against the wall across from his two street-facing windows. But everything else in the room had been carefully swept into the center, including the police tape, which Yale had decimated as well, presumably to make one giant disposal pile. It made sense to me. Why bother with wastebaskets when your entire living room has been turned into one?

Tredwell’s waiter bow tie had been placed at the top of the heap like an angel on a Christmas tree. I pointed at it and remarked, ‘Nice touch.’

‘I thought so,’ said Yale. He was wearing sweatpants that were rolled up at the bottom, an oversized
Cats
sweatshirt and thick ski socks. His face was flushed from stress and cleaning.

‘Who is the artist?’ asked Hermyn, who was still on her knees, stroking a remnant of a tragedy mask that bore a light gray dust from fingerprinting.

‘Oh, Hermyn,’ Yale said, ‘this isn’t art. These are my possessions - or what’s left of them, thanks to a jealous little prick named Tredwell.’

‘Oh, good. Because honestly? It’s kind of over the top.’

‘At least he’s gonna pay for everything.’ Yale looked at me. ‘That’s the one thing Peter really
is
forcing him to do.’

Yale’s buzzer gave off a long, painful bleat. I could tell someone was leaning on it.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Deliberately, Yale walked to his door. ‘Who the fuck is it?’ he shouted into the intercom.

A man’s voice: ‘
I’m bleeding!
’

I looked at Hermyn, saw the color drain from her face in slow motion.

After five years in New York, I still had a California driver’s license. But since Yale’s Wisconsin license had expired two years ago and Hermyn had never learned to drive, it was understood that I would take the wheel of the Cavalier and drive us the few short blocks to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

Sal had been shot. Exactly where, we didn’t know, because blood was all over him and none of us wanted to hurt him more by exploring.

Driving was good because it gave me a place to sit and something to do with my hands, which were trembling so hard I could barely grasp the ignition key.

I had never seen so much blood in my life. Thick as paint and still warm and slick, it covered the front seat and both driver’s side doors of the Cavalier. A few stray shards s stpaiof glass clung to the left window, coated with the same bright, sick red. The rest had been shattered by the bullet. I felt ice-cold wind on my face and the tiny, prickly pieces through my pants and sweater, but it didn’t hurt. And I wasn’t cold. All I could hear or feel or think of was Hermyn’s moaning, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ over and over again from the backseat while Sal, in the state he was in, tried to comfort her. ‘It’s okay, Butterfly, I’m just . . . just a little dizzy is all . . .’

At one point, Sal said, ‘Did they steal my car?’ and I realized how delirious he actually was.

Yale kept silent. His jaw was slack and I thought he might faint.

I wondered how Sal had been able to make it to the door and press the buzzer. His blood was all over the steering wheel. How horribly intimate it is to feel another person’s blood, slippery and warm, on the palms of your hands.

The car screeched into a U-turn on Eighth Street. I said, ‘You never really do forget how to drive.’

‘Is that so?’ Yale said. I glanced at him. Two tears trickled down his cheeks, but he seemed unaware of them.

‘Did they steal my car? ’Cause I have insurance so it’s okay. Lotsa car thefts on Eighth Street. Shouldn’t park cars there, but that’s okay. It’s okay, Butterfly . . .’

‘We’re almost there,’ I said, and ran a red light to make a left on Seventh Avenue and narrowly avoided smashing into a taxi.

‘Hey, Butterfly, what do guns say when they don’t know the answer?’

‘Oh, God, Sal.’

‘I don’t know, but I’ll take a shot! Get it? Boy, am I queasy . . .’

By the time I braked in front of St. Vincent’s, Sal had passed out. Hermyn rushed in to get the paramedics as Yale and I hopped out of the car and opened the back door. ‘Oh, please don’t die,’ I whispered to his still, frail body.

Yale just stared at him, his face gray beyond emotion.

In the waiting room at St. Vincent’s, the air was hot and a little moist. ‘I feel like I’m inside someone’s mouth,’ Yale said. ‘It can’t possibly be sanitary in here.’

I probably would have smiled, if the situation had been different. But I couldn’t even work up a response. It was hard enough to breathe.

‘I mean a human’s mouth, you know. Not a dog’s mouth. Dogs’ mouths are supposed to be extremely sanitary. You could probably eat out of a dog’s mouth and be safer than you would be at most delis. Of course, the dog probably wouldn’t be too pleased . . .’

Yale kept talking and I just sat there, staring straight ahead at the blackness that pressed against the windows of the swin"3" hospital waiting room. I wondered if they were bulletproof.

At least Sal wasn’t dead. The bullet had entered the shoulder, breaking his collarbone but missing his vital organs. Hermyn was with him in the emergency room, even though visitors weren’t technically allowed in there. There was a sign that said as much, but Hermyn didn’t care. ‘Let me through, motherfuckers!’ she’d yelled in her clear, piercing voice, like an opera singer playing
Shaft
. The ER staff had looked at her, admiring and afraid at the same time, and absorbed her into their group.

Yale and I had gone into the waiting room and received sporadic updates from the doctor who was working on Sal.

Sal had been hit in the left shoulder, which connected to his left arm, which connected to his left hand, where Hermyn would eventually place a wedding ring after the rabbi called her Amy and asked if she would take this man. That was her real name, Amy. She’d given it to the admitting nurse. ‘I’m his fiancée, Amy Rosensweig,’ she’d said, shedding the name by which we’d always known her as if it were a costume she’d been wearing for too long.

‘Now, cats’ mouths on the other hand.
Filthy
. . .’

A woman two seats over was holding a little boy who was probably her son. They both had the same huge, shiny black eyes, and the little boy was shaking. He was absolutely tiny.

The woman was talking very softly to the boy. I could hear her say
mi hijo
, a phrase I remembered from high school Spanish. My child.

‘Strike that. A cow’s mouth would be filled with cud, which is far more wholesome and probably smells better than anything in this so-called health care facility. Are you listening to me?’ Yale hadn’t stopped talking, not even to inhale. I’d never expected him to react this way in a crisis situation, which proves you can’t truly know anyone, even your best friend.

‘Mouths, right?’ I said.

‘Right.’

Yale, the woman, the boy and I were the only people in the waiting room, which had to be rare. I looked at the big clock on the wall and saw it was just about eleven.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Didn’t Peter get off at ten? Why don’t you call him? You can use my cell phone.’

‘Already spoke to him, after Tredwell finished
crying
at me. I mean, can you believe the absolute nerve of him - he destroys my valuables and I’m nice enough to drop the charges and then he expects me to feel
sorry
for him because Peter didn’t want to play spanky-spanks or drip candle wax on his skinny ass—’

‘
Mi hijo, mi hijo. Te amo. No llores
.’

‘I think you should go over to Peter’s tonight.’

‘Well, my God if I wasn’t sitting here I’d sttihei never
believe
you just said that. Too bad I don’t have a
tape recorder
to document you of all people telling me to go over to Peter’s, the
hostile, misogynist asshole
as you put it—’

‘I like him. I made a mistake. You need a rest, and I don’t think you should go back to your apartment.’

‘Why, Sam? I don’t have a car. There have been four car thefts on Eighth in the past three weeks, two of them involving guns.’

‘Then why didn’t they take Sal’s car? He got out of the fucking car and rang your buzzer after he got shot, with the keys still in the ignition.’

‘They probably thought the cops would show up with all that hollering, and who could blame them? Good lord, that woman can
project
.’

I just looked at him.

Yale took his time, breathing between words as if someone were extracting them from his mouth. ‘Sal was hidden beneath your coat.’

‘You figured it out.’

‘I was hoping you hadn’t.’

It was the last thing he said for a long time.

‘Give me a cigarette.’

‘But you don’t smoke.’

‘I don’t care.’

Yale raised his cupped hand against the wind, lit two cigarettes in his mouth and handed me one. The cigarettes glowed warm orange in the purplish night, and, for a second, I felt like the heroine in a noir movie. Only this was real, and the lighting was a lot worse.

It was nearing midnight, and we were just outside the emergency room door. It felt good to be there, or at least less suffocating. ‘Aren’t you freezing?’ Yale said.

My coat was somewhere in the ER, covered in Sal’s blood and destined for an evidence bag. But I wasn’t freezing. The cold was there, of course, cutting through my thick sweater, biting my face and bare hands. But it didn’t touch me, not really. Maybe the woman at the river had felt this way in her shortsleeved red dress. Surrounded by cold, but somehow beyond it.

I brought the cigarette to my mouth, took a deep drag and held it in. The smoke felt like hot, toxic liquid in my throat, but I didn’t cough. I exhaled slowly, took another drag.

‘My God, you’re smoking,’ Yale said.

‘Will wonders never cease.’

‘Sam, please don’t start smoking. Between that and the way you eat, you’re going to—’

‘Die early?’ For some reason, I found that incredibly funny. Laughter bubbled in my throat and spilled maniacally out of my mouth, and the grave way that Yale stared at me only made me laugh harder. ‘Oh, come on. Where’s your sense of humor?’

I sat down on the sidewalk and leaned up against the emergency room window. The ash at the end of my cigarette extended at least an inch, so I tapped it and took another deep drag. ‘If you tell me it’s unsanitary to sit on the sidewalk,’ I said, ‘I’m going to hit you.’

Yale sat down next to me.

I liked the feel of the warm cigarette butt between my cold, gloveless fingers. I decided I could get used to smoking, if I were to have the luxury of getting used to anything. The butt was down to the filter, though, so I took another quick puff and reluctantly stubbed it out.

I stared out at Seventh Avenue, which looked strange and haunted without any people on it. A car drove by, its stereo blaring, and the thumping bass hung in the air for a few moments after it disappeared. I recognized the song. The Beastie Boys. ‘Sure Shot.’

I pulled the cell phone out of my pocket and handed it to Yale. ‘I want you to call Peter - now.’

‘I . . . I don’t have his number.’

‘Bullshit.’ I reached into the side pocket of his sweats. ‘You talked to him just before Hermyn and I showed up.’

‘Get your hand off my groin.’

At the bottom of his pocket, I could feel a sharply folded piece of paper.

‘Jesus, cut it out.’

There was enough streetlight for me to read the printing on it:
Peter
, it said, along with a phone number.

BOOK: Hide Your Eyes

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