You Lost Me There (23 page)

Cornelia ran up the stairs two at a time.

And she was right, I realized. I’d been the one who had arranged that night at the Criterion all those years ago. It had been my idea, my initiative.

But then, what was wrong with me? What senescent state had I entered? Of course I’d been the one who asked the manager to open the candy counter. Of course I remembered writing the check out to the Criterion, the manager joking I was welcome to rent it anytime.

Of course I remembered how both Sara and Cornelia had thought the whole idea was corny, a night at the movies with Gene Kelly, but they played along, humoring me, as though I wouldn’t notice.

 

 

 

The phone rang at midnight but I didn’t answer. I was awake, apraxic, unable to doze off or even move from my position, performing every mental exercise I could remember to fall asleep. No messages when I checked forty minutes later. I passed Cornelia’s room. She was snoring loudly. We’d split a bottle of wine and watched
Die Hard 2.
It was the one with the catchphrase “Die Harder,” which Sara used to whisper if we passed old men on the street.

It seemed that if the house were not a living thing, then someone had walked through touching the pottery, making everything quiver. Perhaps I was drunk. I closed up the music room and walked around shutting doors and double-checking window locks. I went into Sara’s office and opened her filing cabinet, pulled out her laptop, and set it on her desk.

I left it alone and instead read through the final batch of index cards, the fourth set. Apparently she never got around to number five.

How disappointed Dr. Carrellas must have been.

I fed them, all of them, into the shredder next to Sara’s desk.

Not a shred of reluctance to hold me back.

 

 

 

At two in the morning, I walked laps along the property line. The night was quiet and brittle, then down near the southeast corner it snapped. I heard a loud smacking noise. In an envelope of yellow light a quarter-mile away, out past the marsh, a shadow leaped around. The sound repeated itself, finishing as soon as it started, like someone being slapped, but it was louder, like a gunshot.

Another one. Then another.

During college I would dream about Ben, the worst nightmares of my life. They’d have me waking shivering, some nights spastically. In the dream, he’d walk me through each step, holding my hand, showing me what he was doing while loading the gun and putting it into his mouth. He’d explain to me what he planned to do next, but I wouldn’t be able to understand him. “You’ve got a gun in your mouth,” I said. I woke up after he fired.

My roommate eventually insisted I visit the health clinic; he was sick of waking up with me screaming.

“Where do you think they come from?” the counselor asked.

I didn’t have an answer. “I want to know how it happened,” I said.

“You’ll never get that,” he said. “The good news is, that’s not what you’re really looking for.”

“What am I looking for?”

He looked surprised. “You want to know the reason why he killed himself.”

On the fourth shot, I jerked around, then I was able to place it: just someone playing basketball.

I tried to work today. I fiddled with some half-baked drafts for two hours, some touch-up work I’ve taken on recently for the hell of it, until once again I realized it was soulless flab. I sent and received e-mails. I was called in for my thoughts about new digital features for a Blu-Ray release of
The Hook-Up’s
DVD. I went to yoga, I watched an old episode of
Moonlighting.
On the kitchen calendar was penned, “Dinner with Toad, 83 Sargent Drive, Northeast.” Toad being Dr. Low, Victor’s boss.

No, all this new Victor wants is to retreat. To put further distance between us when already we’re far apart. To apologize when he’s done nothing wrong so he can be mighty and take more weight upon his shoulders—as though he’s been carrying me these thirty years, so it seems—and abscond. The new remote, reluctant Victor, scuttling back to his desk like a crab, his shell forming since around the time
Woman Hits Forty
went onstage and slowly hardening ever since.

The Toad bore a head of white straw, two black button eyes, and a tie from the Pot & Kettle Club. Uncle Bill in a nutshell. Toad also appeared to have a big appetite for
Entertainment Tonight
when every time I tried to steer the conversation toward Soborg or federal research committees, he took us right back to film. For an hour in the steam room he quizzed me about all the gossip. He was a movie buff and we breezed right through the checkpoints, Hawks and Hitch-cock and
Some Like It Hot
. Victor, meanwhile, sweated through his shirt, watching us talk and drinking whiskey.

“So you wrote
The Hook-Up
,” he said, passing around tiny glasses of cognac. I threw back mine and requested another, seeing where this was going.

“Does
The Hook-Up
qualify?”

“Now, by ‘monster,’ I mean at the box office, of course. You see the grosses right there in the paper these days.” Toad removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “But as to quality, well, it was perfectly watchable, which perhaps is what all movies should aspire to. It’s ninety-five percent of the industry. For example, take
Greed.
Entertaining, of course, but that doesn’t equal great.”