The Prettiest Feathers (2 page)

I heard her move behind the stacks into the shadows farther off to my right.

“There are no Emilys,” I said.

“There are the others,” she said.

There was no laughter, not a hint of humor. I expected at least a chuckle, and I’m seldom wrong about these things. “There are no women,” I said. “Were you looking for a woman?”

“The sign,” I began, then gave it up. “No. Actually I’m looking for Henry Miller.”

“I understand he had a lot of women,” she said. “Including Anaïs Nin. Is she the one you want?”

It
was
humor. Dry and flat and cerebral and funny.

She moved into view in front of me, but was shrouded in the dust and the dim yellow light that filtered through the shade on the plate glass window. She was slender, of medium height, fit in an athletic sort of way—and wore a black skirt that touched her knees, a white blouse with all the buttons buttoned, and a pageboy hairdo. Late twenties, I
guessed. What I could see of her face looked plain, almost austere.

“Only if she’s featured in
The Time of the Assassins”
I said.

“She’s not. That’s his book about Rimbaud. We have a copy. It’s over here with the other New Directions paperbacks. Patchen and Ezra Pound and all of those.”

She walked to my left toward the back of the store. I followed her.

“I read
Crazy Cock”
she said. “One of those old manuscripts they just found and published. It wasn’t very good. I think Miller was anti-Semitic.”

As I approached, the smell of her soap was more noticeable. I had no trouble hearing the flat, toneless voice almost devoid of inflection. But even when I stood two feet away from her, bathed in the same dust and sickly light that shrouded this woman, I still had trouble actually seeing her. It wasn’t that she was nondescript. It was as if she weren’t totally there—elusive somehow, becoming even more vague the closer I was to her.

“My name is Sarah … Sarah Sinclair,” she said, as she handed me the book. “It’s a bit battered. The book, not the name.”

Most of the time when I have been that close to a woman, I’ve slipped something around her neck or between her ribs. It was an odd sensation when, finally, I saw Sarah Sinclair’s eyes. She had no secrets from me. I was surprised by what I read there, but even more shocked by my own feelings. I knew that I would kill her, of course—not right then, but soon—yet there was something else. I wondered if she knew what her eyes were telling me—that she had begun searching the shadows for death a long time ago. I experienced a surge of risk like no other. I was light-headed, slightly dizzy.

“This book is fine,” I told her. “I’m grateful to find it. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“You must have, to come down here.”

She turned and walked toward the cash register, asking me my name as she moved.

I still couldn’t see her clearly. I knew that once I left the shop and tried to picture her in my mind, I would fail.

“John,” I lied. “John Wolf.”

She turned and, for the first time, smiled. “No wonder you were looking for the women.”

The brass bell behind me rang. It was the black slouch from the sidewalk with a friend who looked like Mike Tyson with indigestion. This is one of the reasons I hate the city now. Thugs with nothing to do but make life miserable for everyone else. I decided to handle him with a little less subtlety this time. I pulled the .38 special from its holster against my spine.

I never come into the city without my weapon, which I am licensed to carry.

I flashed a laminated card with a gold seal that looked vaguely official, though it indicated only that I was a lifetime member of the Total Fitness Health Club.

“I’m a cop,” I said. “Where do you want to sleep tonight?”

The big guy started to raise his arms over his head, but the slouch reached up, rapped him on the chest, and gestured with his head toward the door. The bell rang again as they left.

I turned to explain, and to make my apologies to Sarah for the scene, half expecting her to have retreated again into her shadows. She hadn’t moved. Before I could speak, she said, “You’re not a cop.”

Because the gun hadn’t bothered her, I knew she’d been around cops. Maybe her father was a career cop with the city.

“No,” I said. “It seemed necessary.”

She shrugged.

I walked to the counter and paid for the book. Close to her again, I experienced the same feeling as earlier—the sense that I couldn’t take her all in, grasp her, understand the quirks of her personality (something that I’ve been able to
do, effortlessly, with any other woman). For the first time in many years, perhaps ever, I felt a degree of discomfort.

“I keep the Emilys and others back here,” she said. “If you’re ever interested.”

I thanked her and left the store.

On the drive back I realized that I had been right. I could conjure up no image of Sarah.

Once, I selected a victim, decided on a plan, and carried it out in less than two hours. The longest I’ve ever been about it was nine days. This time I had no plan. All I knew for sure was that this victim, this woman, this Sarah, would require something different, something more. A slow dance toward death.

E
arly on in my therapy, Dr. Street asked me what I would be if I could be anything, anything in the world.

“A virgin,” I said.

I think I do pretty well with people, but only until things get physical. When I told Dr. Street that, he asked if I thought that was what went wrong between Robert and me. He’s always bringing up my divorce. But to me, it’s just something that I have, like my diploma or my vaccination scar. It’s there, and in some ways it may be meaningful, but I hardly ever think about it.

I had never worried that my husband would leave me. To my mind, we were married, and that was that. Then one night he told me that he loved another woman: a rookie cop named Lane. She was tall, with auburn hair, and not exactly pretty. But there was something exotic about her—the shape of her eyes (almond) and the color of her skin (olive). I had seen her when I stopped by the police station the night before he told me about her. She smiled at me, and I believe I smiled back.

Robert insisted that he hadn’t set out to be unfaithful; it just happened.

“It was the proximity. The body heat works on you, wears you down,” he said, as if that made it all right. And as if I wouldn’t know about such things.

I sometimes went to the beauty shop just to be touched—to feel someone else’s fingers massaging my scalp, lifting my hair. I required so little, but he gave even less.

Robert didn’t leave after he told me about Lane. Not right away. He went on like before, as if the words had never been spoken. As the days rolled into weeks, I waited and watched, wondering when he intended to finish ripping my heart from me. Eventually I realized that the act itself couldn’t possibly be as agonizing as the wait, so I forced the issue. I sent a note to his girlfriend, telling her that I would appreciate it if she would stop by the following Saturday to pack his belongings and move them to her place. Without a word, Robert moved out late Friday night. When I heard the door close behind him, cells throughout my body seemed to shut down, suffocate, die.

Before Dr. Street, there had been many others: white-coated professionals intent on telling me how well I was doing—but, with each reassurance, I felt more deeply troubled. I wondered why they didn’t
see
, why they didn’t
know
how sick I was.

One Monday morning when I was still married, I awakened feeling thoroughly committed to my hopelessness. I felt that I had to live up to it, prove it true. By ten o’clock I was still in bed. I was supposed to be at work at nine, but couldn’t decide what to wear. I was certain that whatever I chose, it would be permanent; I would wear it to my grave.

I hated my work. Hated Mondays. And I hated walking to the bus stop, getting aboard with all those strangers, standing body to body with them all the way to the building where I worked, getting off, going in, pressing for the elevator, riding to the eleventh floor, getting off, turning left, entering my
office, hanging up my coat, and sitting down to do nothing of consequence, absolutely nothing, until it was time for lunch.

That’s why I telephoned the personnel department. I identified myself as my sister and announced that Sarah had died, suddenly, during the night. I was surprised that the woman at the other end of the line was so shaken by this news. She mentioned that she had spoken with Sarah only a few days earlier, on Friday, in the elevator. That was untrue, and I wondered why she had said it. Then I thought that perhaps it
was
true, and I just hadn’t noticed her or heard her. I was doing a lot of that in those days—tuning out.

A week later Robert opened an envelope that arrived in the mail. It held my final check (payable to me, a dead woman, making the situation even more surreal), plus a letter from the woman in Personnel. She expressed her sympathy, and repeated the story of how she had talked to Sarah only a few days before the terrible event.

Robert must have been wondering why I wasn’t going to the office anymore, but he had been careful not to mention it. After the final check arrived, he was unable to discuss the matter for several days. When, at last, he did mention it, he was unable to admit just how crazy he thought my behavior was.

All he said was, “Why.” But because he had said it more like a statement than a question, I didn’t even try to answer. Except to myself.

Tonight I felt the opposite of crazy. Almost sane.

I settled back in the leather chair opposite Dr. Street’s desk.

“I met someone,” I told him. “Oh?”

“His name is John Wolf. You should hear how he says it—drawing out the ‘ooul’ sound, down deep in his throat.”

I was talking too fast, and with too much animation. I didn’t want Dr. Street to think that I was manic again. I made a conscious effort to breathe deeply, to slow down, to
sound less excited. I didn’t want him to start writing a prescription for lithium.

“He came into the shop today,” I said. “Looking for women.”

“Hmmm?”

I giggled. “Female authors.”

“Oh.”

“But what he really wanted was Henry Miller. I just finished reading
Crazy Cock
last night. Isn’t that amazing?”

Dr. Street lifted one eyebrow, slightly, but didn’t say anything.

“I mean it,” I said, leaning toward him. “There was something predestined going on today … something magical.”

No response.

I hate it when he does that, and decided that two can play his game. I made up my mind to just sit there in silence until he said something.

But he said nothing.

Because I detest sitting in silence with Dr. Street, I was the first to give in. I started talking, rambling, making things up, hoping that something in what I was saying would please him, win his approval. But I withheld what I really wanted to discuss—because I couldn’t stand the thought of Dr. Street ruining it with his questions.

I knew what he would say if I were to describe for him how I had felt when I first looked into John Wolf’s eyes. It was as if I had found myself there, my destiny, but Dr. Street would have made it sound like a symptom, something to be cured. John Wolf brought out an unfamiliar side of me. I had an almost irresistible urge to touch him. And I felt so female, so thoroughly female. It was wonderful. It was terrible.

But the gun: what was he doing with a gun? I know he’s not a cop. He’s nothing like Robert. Cops walk with an air of arrogance, moving their shoulders oddly, as if they’re made of wood. And they like to narrow their eyes when they look at you, pretending they’re thinking deep thoughts when all
they’re really doing is sizing you up. But John Wolf moved toward me with a friendliness and a warmth that cops don’t understand. I could see the acceptance in his eyes.

And then there were his hands. No cop, ever, has had hands like John Wolf’s. They belong to an artist or a musician. I imagined them reaching for me; I could almost feel the heat of them on my skin. I remembered what Robert had said about Lane—how he had explained their affair: “The body heat works on you, wears you down.”

These were the thoughts spinning through my mind as I left Dr. Street’s office, as I walked toward my car, as I became aware of the footsteps behind me.

Pulling away from the curb, I glanced in my rearview mirror. A man in a dark-colored car, something small and foreign-looking, was following me. I turned down a side street, but so did he. My world tilted. I forgot to breathe. At the next corner, I turned left; he turned left. I speeded up; he speeded up. I circled through narrow residential streets, back to the highway. I saw a patrol car facing toward me, stopped at a red light just ahead.

The man in the foreign car moved into passing gear, slipping past me as I pulled up opposite the patrol car. I honked, rolled down my window. The officer was young, grinning at me as if he thought that I had stopped to tell him a joke.

“A man has been following me,” I told him, surprised that I sounded so excited, so breathless.