There's Something I Want You to Do (18 page)

“Well, yes.”

“My dear,” he said, his voice coming out of eternity. “Oh, my dear.” He opened his mouth and exhaled, and his breath smelled of Catherine’s grave, and then, as Amelia drew back, the grave started to laugh at her.

PART TWO

Lust

“Sir,” the security guy says, “please move away from the gaming table while you are on the phone.” Benny finishes his call to his friend Dennis, who has been giving Benny advice, and he slips his phone into his pocket.

The guard, dressed in a tight sport coat, nods affably, an action that does not seem to come easily to him. He looks like a college-educated brute. He has a crew cut, a Bluetooth in his ear, and a thick neck that tests the collar button on his white shirt. Like those of every other mean motherfucker Benny has ever known, the guard’s eyes are as blank as the lens of a camera.

Benny returns to the blackjack table in the Gray Wolf Casino outside the town of Phelps Lake, Minnesota, where he has been trying to lose all the money he has in the world and to mess up his life in a thoroughly convincing way. He’s acting out, and he knows it, and his friend Dennis, over the phone, has been telling him so. Nevertheless, he’s not succeeding. Two guys seated at the blackjack table have observed Benny with polite disbelief. He had been hoping for a spell of bad luck, but all he can do is win.

Quoting from
Touch of Evil,
he texted Dennis a few hours ago to say that his future was all used up, but he was winning at blackjack nevertheless. Dennis called him right back.

“What’s this about your future being all used up?” he asked. “That’s from
Touch of Evil
.”

“Well, she left me, didn’t she?”

“You are in the grip of romantic mindlessness,” Dennis told him. “I like that.” The man has earned the right to say such things to him. After all, he’s attached to a morphine drip and is lying in a hospital bed. “Go on playing if you’re winning, Sport,” Dennis advised, between coughs. “Never buck a winning streak.” Dennis, who is Benny’s age, likes to make pronouncem
ents. They’re part of his impeccable style.

“I’m roadkill,” Benny said.

“No. You’re just aggrieved.” Dennis coughed again. “Don’t forget: the best part of breaking up with a girl and finding a new girl is that all your stories are fresh again.”

Black crows of the spirit have been pecking at Benny for eighteen hours—his imagination is inflamed with metaphors, and the metaphors themselves are vampires, sucking the blood from his veins. His girlfriend, Nan, the former love of his life, a tall black-haired beauty in her first year of law school, good-hearted but fickle, broke up with him last night, having traded in Benny for a fellow law student, a triathlete. Nan, too, is a triathlete. “The stars aligned,” she told Benny with faux sadness that masked her glee. “His stars and my stars.”

Despair seized hold of Benny. Who fights the stars?

The previous night, Benny could see that Nan was doing her best to be diplomatic and kind, a misguided charity that made everything worse. She said, almost in sorrow, that this brand-new fellow with a body she couldn’t quite get over was her fate, her
destiny.
What sealed the deal—Nan’s phrase—was that the new guy is wildly compassionate and wants to practice what she calls “poverty law” once he passes the bar, making him a shining-armor knight riding to the rescue of the creepazoidal unwashed. Whereas Benny, as a boyfriend, constituted something else: a little oasis where her caravan had briefly stopped, one of those nice-guy interludes for which she would always be grateful.

“I just never fell in love with your niceness,” Nan said. “I tried. I guess I couldn’t. You’re not to blame—you’re a great guy, a model citizen. This is all my fault. I’m impaired.”

Sitting in a downtown Minneapolis bar with large plate-glass windows, over drinks, she had announced her breakup intentions and in a moment of possibly indeliberate cruelty had held up an iPhone photograph of the shining-armor knight triathlete in question. She displayed her phone full-frontally with the screen facing Benny. Benny ignored it, and he ignored her unsettled facial expression as she said, “There he is. That’s him. He’s crossing the finish line. Really, can you blame me?”

No one stages a scene in front of plate glass during happy hour, and Benny did not. He sat listening with studied impassivity and noted glumly that Nan had prettied herself for this confrontat
ion—blouse with plunge, heels, necklace, red nail polish—in case of a scene. She’d want to make a good impression on witnesses if there was a first-ever Bennyish outburst. Her lacquered beauty enraged him, so he sat quietly seething, radiating bogus serenity.

“You’re not looking at the picture,” Nan said. “I
said
I was sorry about all this.”

“Exactly right. I accept your apology.”

“Please don’t shout.”

“You
wish
I were shouting,” Benny said, ostentatiously whispering. “You can hardly hear me. My dial is turned all the way down. We’re in the negative numbers now.” His hand shaking, Benny took a sip of his festive Bloody Mary. “So what’s this guy’s name?”

Nan peevishly put her phone back into her purse. “What? His name?”

“Yeah. You know, his
name
.”

“Well, his name isn’t
him.
A name is so…whatever. His identity is his own,” Nan said in a vague monotone, watching a toddler walk by outside clutching a teddy bear in one hand, his other hand in his father’s. “Okay,” she said, apparently gathering her thoughts while rubbing her left knuckle with her right thumb. “So maybe I’ll tell you.” Clearly the name constituted a difficulty, a distraction. Benny waited for whatever she would say, and while he waited he noticed that she gave off a scent of lavender, which, he feared, was from massage oil.

“Go right ahead,” Benny said, sensing an advantage.

“Okay, but you’re going to laugh. I
know
you. His name’s Thor.”

“Thor?”
Benny exclaimed. “That’s a good one. He must be from around here. That’s a real Minnesota name for you. Is he a Lutheran?”

“See, I
knew
you would be like that. Under your nice hides the snide. And I have to point out that you’re being defensive. Talk about the predictability factor! Like I said, I feel bad for you and I blame myself, but I’m glad I’m moving on to those green pastures they all tell you about.”

On the other side of the plate-glass window, civilians went about their business, seemingly indifferent to the wars of love, and from time to time they glanced in at Benny and Nan, the pleasant-looking young couple sitting at a bar table, apparently lost in conversation. The midsummer sun eased itself behind an office building, casting a conical shadow that pierced Benny with melancholy, while the bar slowly filled up with professional-managerial types getting off work in time for happy hour, the men loosening their collars, the women quickly, almost surreptiti
ously, checking their faces in the mahogany-framed mirror above the bar. To the side, a couple of outcast full-figured ladies in slimming dresses leaned toward each other in the corner, whispering.

The stars wheeled in the empty space of Benny’s desolation. He would tell Dennis about the wheeling stars. Dennis would be amused.

He took another sip of his drink as he fought off soul-nausea and the urge to beg. The in-surge of employees getting off work was tidal now. They were making a racket. He would not tell Nan how much he had loved her, the size and mature intensity of that love, its ability to give his life meaning. A man does not beg to be taken back, he reminded himself. Begging qualifies as
the
primary criterion for admission to loserdom, that territory inhabited by platoons of nice vanilla guys who belong in civilized places like Denmark and Sweden, not here in the United States, where they are held in contempt and trampled.

He habitually carries images around in his head. Chained to his consciousness at that moment as he sat across from her was one of Nan. The morning after their first night together, she had stood over his little apartment’s gas stove scrambling some eggs for them both, the sunlight streaming through the east window backlighting her hair in glory. She wore a cream-colored nightgown that set off her tanned skin to good effect. Benny and Nan had shared a nearly sleepless night of lovemaking. By morning they were love gods. He rose out of bed with the succulent sea urchin taste of her clitoris still on his tongue. Inspired by the sunlight and her bare feet on the linoleum and her expression of sleepy sensual concentration and the smell of the garlic and the salsa in the eggs, he thought he was the luckiest man alive at that particular hour, that morning, on the planet. Wilhelm Reich was correct: orgasms constituted the meaning of life. The kindly knife of sentiment stabbed at him again and again.

It occurred to him that maybe he hadn’t actually known Nan as a person, despite his memories of her. She had said, several times, jokingly, that he was self-deluded. Perhaps she was inexplicable, or maybe he was. Returning to the present moment from his reverie, he tried to look at her across the bar table. Her inexplicable mouth was moving in a half smile: she was saying inexplicable things about how she had felt
that
way then and felt
this
way now. More apologies came out of her.

Following the nausea and the stabbing and the pecking crows and the murderous rage, sadness dropped over him like a cone, inside of which all the oxygen consisted of more sadness. Time undoubtedly passed at Whiskey Sour’s, and the waitress replaced his drink with another. Had he said anything? He couldn’t remember if he had spoken up or had remained silent as the bar filled with merrymakers, and Nan continued to explain whatever she was explaining. His Bloody Mary glass somehow emptied the Bloody Mary into his mouth. The celery stick in the drink poked at his lip. His mind raced and stopped, raced and stopped. Nan—composed, elegant—sipped her Tom Collins and dabbed her bread in olive oil as she spoke.
What was she saying now?
One woman over at the bar suddenly screamed with laughter. Thank God, Benny thought: someone can scream.

As the bar grew noisier, Benny and Nan gazed at each other without tenderness, in the hard labor of separation. He felt the first wellsprings of hatred—lib
erating, a breeze from the soul’s window. You have to hate them first if you’re going to break up with them. Gathering himself, he nodded at her, stood up with what he hoped was quiet dignity, and left her with the bar bill. At the entryway, like Orpheus, he turned to see her one last time. Would she follow him or at least keep an eye on him as he walked away? Certainly not: she was gazing through the window glass toward the street, studiously ignoring his departure and, worse, wearing a grim smirk as she reached back down into her purse for her phone. She’d give this Thor the good news: free, now and forever. Free to be you and me! No more Benny! She didn’t look up as she tapped the letters.