Noah's Turn (19 page)

Noah lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. It was two in the afternoon. The day before he had withdrawn cash from a bank machine and his balance showed that he
was getting to the bottom of his overdraft. He hadn't deposited the money he had promised his bank manager and had no clue where he was going to get it. “I have committed murder and have avoided Hopwood's net—how difficult could a robbery be?” he thought. He found it amusing that he was lying there planning a robbery. “That's what I'd call moving on in life,” he said aloud. He ran through as many robberies as he could remember from the cop show he had written, but they were all tied to “relatable” sociological and psychological “issues” that had nothing to do with his circumstances. “Guy needs money” is not, after all, a hot storyline. Where were the straight-ahead robbery blueprints he could draw on? The reality of his situation quickly gave way and collapsed on top of him from its ceiling perch. He closed his eyes and was asleep in minutes.

He woke up at six-thirty and rolled out of bed. Without shaving or a shower, he went downstairs and crossed the street to a Lebanese takeout place that catered to students. He picked up a shawarma with hot sauce, which he ate on the street, then moved back down the block
and took his regular seat at the window bar with a pint and double vodka. The early evening air was pleasant and the street was crowded with pedestrians who passed close enough to give him the feeling that he was in the world. None of them had a clue that they were passing a cold-blooded killer.

Sitting at the window bar, Noah had abandoned any hope of a meaningful future. He accepted, at least intellectually, a life from day to day. He had no choice. If someone engaged him in conversation, he would now tend to go along, without judging them or their beliefs. He now seemed to accept people as equals, all in the same boat, all trying to make sense of an absurd world.

He checked his tab and realized that he could no longer afford the luxury of these daily bar bills. His energy was now going to go into keeping himself in booze, much like he remembered George Orwell's energy had gone into finding food in
Down and Out in Paris and London.
But there was no overriding literary purpose in Noah's quest. Nor was there anything to learn, or sacrifice to make. There was only common drunkenness. He finished his drinks and returned to his apartment, where he discovered that he didn't have any beer left.

He checked his cash situation and had enough for a taxi. He went back down to the street and stopped one, got in and directed the driver to the closest liquor store and asked him to wait. When the driver looked back at him through his rearview mirror, Noah could see a certain apprehension in his eyes. Noah's messy hair and stubble didn't inspire confidence that he would return to pay up, but he was out the door before the driver could make a decision. He took a cart and picked up a forty-ounce bottle of vodka and twelve large cans of Czech beer. This was strictly a drinker's load, he thought as he wheeled the cart to the cash. No cautiously picked bottles of wine to go with a meat or fish or aperitif to precede the meal. No single-malt bottle of Scotch to be sipped during conversation. This was a cart full of “fuck the world” booze. As he turned out of an aisle of cheap local wines on his way to the cash, Noah bumped into exactly the kind of person he didn't want to meet looking like he looked and carrying what he had in his cart. Tim Wentworth was an old private-school classmate he had always hated. Wentworth also pushed a cart, but his was full of what looked like vintage wines. He wore a suede windbreaker, suit pants and tasselled loafers. His salt-and-pepper grey
hair was perfectly styled and his wire-rimmed glasses were corporate.

“Noah?” he said with a questioning tone as if to say, “Is that you? You look like shit.”

“Tim,” Noah replied, revealing nothing. No interest. No question as to how Wentworth had changed, since he hadn't really. He had simply become the adult version of his high school asshole self.

“I hardly recognized you.”

“It must be the accident,” Noah said. He didn't know where this response came from. It was something instinctive he spat out to make sure that the conversation didn't take a path of Tim Wentworth's choosing.

“What?”

“I had a motorcycle accident while shooting in Spain. The actress on the bike with me was pretty banged up but okay. I broke my jaw, shoulder and four ribs. We were hit by a guy in a Ferrari and the insurance settlement was pretty fucking huge. I have to get going—I have to make martinis at a producer's birthday party.” Noah indicated the forty-ounce bottle of vodka. “That should make about a dozen birdbaths, don't you think?”

“I guess,” Wentworth said. He was unable to get a fix on Noah.

The conversation, as Noah had hoped, was changing course a bit too quickly for the ploddingly well-organized and obviously well-heeled Wentworth. This was coke speed and not sipping a Châteauneuf-du-Pape speed. The bottle caught Noah's eye from Wentworth's cart. Before Wentworth could respond to any of the lies, Noah reached out and touched his arm and, with a warm smile and a hint of sympathy, said, “You're looking older, but who isn't. Time is the most democratic of all laws. We're all treated equally. I'm late.” He turned and pushed his cart to the first cashier and prayed that his debit card would go through. Wentworth had entered the next cash line and refused to even glance in Noah's direction. The last thing Noah needed was a rejected card that would force him to leave empty-handed and likely blow his cover. His card went through, and all he could think on the way to the waiting taxi was how deeply he despised that man.

Back home where so much could be flushed down the toilet with a long satisfying piss, Noah cracked a beer and poured a vodka on ice. He put the rest of the beer
into the fridge and the vodka into the freezer and sat down in front of CNN as if being a viewer fulfilled his obligations as an active citizen. He suspected that this notion was the symptom of a dying soul but pushed the idea out of his mind with a substantial gulp of vodka. The phone rang.

It was Andrea Scott. She wanted to know whether she could come over the next day. She was by now Noah's only contact with the outside world, and her voice reminded him of his mother's “I'm home!” when she got back from shopping.

Noah buzzed Andrea up and went to the door and let her in. She gave him a kiss, and then exhaled a breath of relief as if he had just rescued her from something. She dropped her purse where she always did, on a chair by the door, then emptied a large brown-paper shopping bag of groceries.

“You never have anything to eat. I worry about you.”

“Are you kidding? I live on calorie road here. Sugar and fat in every imaginable form.”

“This isn't exactly health food, but at least it's good.”

She unpacked prosciutto, Italian salami, a large jar of grilled Italian artichokes, a jar of antipasto, a jar of Italian tuna in olive oil, a Dijon mustard, four different cheeses, four different boxes of pasta from Italy, two large jars of tomato sauce also from Italy, two plastic containers of olives and a baguette.

There was something about Andrea Scott that Noah appreciated beyond the sex. She had a good sense of balance. She knew exactly how close to get to him without compromising this situation that worked well for both of them. She was sensible and sensitive and this made her appear oddly sad to Noah, because in mastering her universe she had eliminated something else. He didn't know what it was—those were subjects they didn't get into—but it was clear to him that she had left something behind when she made her deal with the world. Noah knew he wasn't going to provide what was missing. At best he was a place she could go and forget herself, and this made him feel good and needed in just the right measure. These thoughts about her today made her seem more sexy than usual, and he couldn't wait to crawl into bed with her.

She curled up to him. They held onto each other without talking for a number of minutes. Lying there,
Noah wondered if Andrea's unexpected call might be some kind of harbinger. He had never before taken seriously this kind of spiritual conjecture, but he now felt like a maximum security prisoner in the corporal world, paralyzed by his circumstance. So he decided to acknowledge the sign. He didn't know where it would take him, but at least it was an attempt to move.

“Can we talk for a second?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“I have something unsettling to tell you. Don't worry, I don't have AIDS. This is nothing that can touch you. But when you hear it you may walk out of here and never come back, and I'd understand that. A university professor was killed a number of months ago with a machete. It was a pretty dramatic news story for several days, and the police eventually arrested a suspect. Do you know the story I'm talking about?”

“Yes. Vaguely. With kids, I don't like to follow morbid crime stories. I get too nervous about them, even though that's crazy.”

“I can understand that.” Noah hesitated. He wasn't sure how on earth she would take this. He hadn't even thought of her children and how she might react because of them.

“Are you going to continue?”

“Yes. You are the only person who will know this, and I hope I'm not dropping way more on you than I should. They arrested the wrong person. I killed him. I don't want to talk about why I did it. That's too complicated and perhaps not even the point. I'm not a dangerous person, and you have nothing to be afraid of.”

She didn't pause. “Just fuck me,” Andrea Scott said as she rolled over on top of him and kissed him deeply.

As they fucked more violently than ever before, Noah thought, This is
Belle de Jour.
This is life as art. And whatever Andrea Scott thought were her thoughts. They didn't exchange them.

They fell asleep for an hour, then Andrea got up and left as always and nothing of Noah's confession was mentioned.