Goldilocks (18 page)

Her car was parked around the corner, mere steps away, but her strength ebbed while the discomfort from her wound grew as if she still carried the bullet. She took instant refuge on a sidewalk bench, whose last occupant had left behind a crushed Royal Crown Cola can, which she tossed into the gutter. Collecting herself with measured breaths, she watched the unloading of a senior citizens’ minibus, the progress slow, a jolt forward now and then. An old man spryer than the rest scuttled across the street with no mind to the cars and was nearly struck.

“Louise.”

She skewed her head around and saw the narrow figure of Edith Shea in the soiled uniform of a waitress, a hip nearly slicing through the thin nylon where loose change sagged a pocket. Edith smiled. Teeth and gums showed no matter how small the smile. She sat down with a jingle.

“Terrible what happened to you. I can’t imagine being shot.”

Louise said, “I still can’t.”

“I called when you were in the hospital, but they wouldn’t put me through.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I can’t believe you’re waiting for a bus. You’re not, are you?”

“No.”

Edith lit a cigarette and held it at shoulder level, her bone of a hand bent back. Her curly hair, salt and pepper, was cropped close to the skull. She touched it with the hand holding the cigarette.

“I had it cut yesterday. What d’you think of it?”

“Nice.”

“No matter what I do, I still come out the same.” She drew carelessly on the cigarette. “You, on the other hand, you’ve been through hell, you’re pale as a ghost, and you sit there looking more beautiful than ever. Not fair.”

Louise watched a pigeon marbled in greasy colors alight nearby and billow its breast. “I don’t feel beautiful.”

“God, I used to hate you. So sickeningly gorgeous. In the back seat of the car Daisy used to forget himself and say ‘Lou’ in my ear. Drove me nuts.”

Louise smiled, watching the pigeon peck at curbside debris. “I think you’re making that up.”

“Take my word for it. Daisy’s always had a thing for you, and I’ve always had something, more or less, for Barney Cole. How come you didn’t marry Barney?”

“He wasn’t going anywhere. Scampy was.”

“But you didn’t marry him either.”

“It was like a marriage.”

“Now you’ve got a real one.”

“Yes.”

Edith flipped the cigarette away. “We used to be such damn good friends, Lou, but we’re not anymore. I mean, how can we be? Different worlds now. I’d hate to ask how much that dress you’re wearing cost.”

“You’d be surprised,” Louise said tonelessly. “I still look for bargains. Some things don’t rub off.”

Edith nodded with a smile. “Yes, in some ways we’re still on the same level. We both married weak men, didn’t we? We’ve both got sickies for husbands.”

Louise looked at her with fresh interest and, surprising herself, with no anger. “What makes you think that?”

“Talk I’ve heard. Jesus, Lou, you might live clear across the state now, but you’re a legend here. And why shouldn’t you be, the things you’ve done for people? The time Daisy dipped his fingers into that senile lady’s trust fund, he could’ve been disbarred, gone to prison, if it hadn’t been for you. You’re like a little godmother.”

“Is that what you think, Edith?”

“I talk too much, don’t I?”

“You really do resent me.”

“No, Lou, not
you.
“ Edith’s voice stretched thin, as if some fine filament connected their deeper thoughts. “Just the dress you’ve got on. The life you’ve got. I just want a little of it.”

“There’s a price. Always a price.”

Edith said, “I’ve paid it.”

Louise glanced around. A fat man paused on the sidewalk to pant. An old woman appeared with bread for the pigeon. Louise said, “I have to go.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Both women rose and stood at exactly the same height. Louise heard the scuff of a shoe behind her and felt someone had looked at her intently, hungrily, and then moved on.

Edith said, “I’m not supposed to know it’s there, but Daisy’s got a list hidden in his socks drawer. It’s the people he wants at his funeral. You’re on it.”

“I’d be hurt if I wasn’t,” Louise said.

Edith abruptly stepped into her and kissed her cheek. “I’ll tell him.”

Emma Goss shuddered as Henry Witlo gripped the back of her shoulders with both of his hands. Always he seemed to be pushing her somewhere, directing her feet, moving her to his music. The mirror in the bedroom flashed bright. “Look at yourself,” he said, forcing her almost against the glass. “Look at those dark circles. Trouble is you’re not getting enough natural sleep.” His voice was dark, full of reprimand. “And look at your hair. You’re letting yourself go again.”

She screwed her head to one side and protested, not to him, but to the picture of her husband, which he had moved from the den and placed on the dresser. A kind of static cruised through her brain, as if Harold were trying to communicate back to her through too dense a darkness. Suddenly Henry’s hands slid off her shoulders.

“Come on, we’re going to bed.”

“It’s too early,” she said.

“All the better,” he said, tossing off his shoes, Harold’s.

“I want to sleep alone.”

“We’ve been through that.”

He undressed quickly, his chest bursting our of his shirt, his knees stabbing free of his jeans. It was always the same. She did not know where to put her eyes. He padded to a window and lowered the shade. When he turned around she held Harold’s picture high in front of her.

“What are you doing with that?”

He moved toward her with his genitals suspended in exaggerated isolation and stripped the picture from her hands. A terrible inertia, like a final defense, came over her. She watched him perch the picture on the bedside table, Harold’s side.

“There,” he said. “He wants, he can watch us.” He turned to her. “Come on. You don’t want me to do it for you, do you?”

She picked at her dress with a grim unnaturalness as if guns were pointed at her, but her fingers were too clumsy for results. Nor could she keep the tears out of her eyes when a commotion of hands fell upon her, as if Henry were more than one person. Racing through her mind when he unlatched her bra was the horrible thought that Harold was helping him.

“You got nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “Plenty of women half your age don’t look as good.”

Her wraith of hair topped her round loose nakedness. A chill in her spine plummeted into her knees, which knocked against each other as he walked her to the bed. She shivered, and his arms girded her.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Goss, I’ll warm you.”

He angled her athwart the bed, where she was startled by the white of her own legs. She wanted a sheet on her, but he pushed it away. She tried to knock her husband’s picture over, but he would not let her. “I don’t want him to see us,” she protested, distorting her mouth as if to disguise her face.

“He wants, he can close his eyes.”

She accepted the queen-size pillow beneath her but rejected the grip of his hand, her breast still sore from the last time. From his knees, he gave her a grand look that turned painstaking and made her feel that he was writing his name on the soles of her feet, on the lazy parts of her thighs, on the soft mass of her stomach. “Please,” she said, jiggling a half-clenched fist, “let me do this.”

He floated over her. “Trust me.”

With no slickness to ease his entry, he delivered nothing but a bolt of pain, another bolt when, with his full width upon her, he pried her up for a tighter fit. His breath fell hard between them. He tried to rouse life from her, but she closed her eyes to him, then her mind. He mouthed things into her ear, but she was conscious only of the essence of his underarms and a sepulchral wail from the picture.

She knew it was over when his breath collapsed against her throat.

A while later he drew the sheet up and tucked it around her. She lay with her back to him, stiff and straight, on Harold’s side of the bed. He said, “Know what, Mrs. Goss? It’s getting better each time.”

“You bastard,” she said quietly.

“
Me
, Mrs. Goss?” he said in a playful tone.

“The both of you.”

TEN

K
IT
F
LETCHER
woke with a start to Barney Cole’s alarm, snugged her legs into the warmth of his, and whispered her sudden decision to take some days off, a bunch due her. Cole killed the alarm and overslept an hour. She rose when he did and made the coffee. When he came into the kitchen after a quick shave and a shower, he said, “I don’t get it. What about the
Globe
case?”

She poured coffee. “It’s on hold.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“I want to protect my interest.”

“That’s in Boston, isn’t it? Pullman and Gates.”

“It’s here too,” she said. She placed the cups on a tray and added cream. He knotted his necktie.

“I don’t know whether to be flattered or suspicious.”

“Be neither. Feel loved.” She lifted the tray. “Shall we?”

He looked at his watch.

“Please,” she insisted.

They settled in the sun room. It was a watery-looking morning, glassy and green, with the whole notion of summer laced into the moist restless air flowing through the wide screens. Spiders abounded, especially daddy-longlegs, which scaled the screens, some making their way inside. Kit sat in a wicker chair with her legs thrown under her. Seated in an identical chair, Cole said, “You look solemn.”

“I had a bad dream.”

“What was it?”

“I dreamed I was still married. I did something my husband hated, and he was about to throw a punch.”

Cole gazed at her over his coffee cup. “That was a nightmare.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have many?”

“No.” She gave out a loose careless smile that seemed to spill out her words. “The beatings were bad, but worse was the way he could shake every vital thought out of my head. For such a stupidly long time I never considered divorce. The world was all male, all my professors at Suffolk were, and I pictured all judges as men who would pick me apart like sections of an orange.”

“You’ve come a long way.”

“Do you want to hear the irony of it?” Again she smiled carelessly. “I went to a male shrink. That’s something I haven’t told you. It was like stretching out on an anvil and being hammered back into shape, and afterwards he’d place his hand on the back of my neck and try to knead courage into me. Yes, we had sex. He had no qualms, no apologies. Everybody’s a user. He was using me, he said, and I should use anybody and everybody, especially men. It’s how the world works.”

“Nice guy,” Cole said tightly, crowded by his own thoughts.

“He did his job well, and I did mine better. I hit him with a lawsuit on the sex thing and got a big settlement. That’s how I bought my condo.”

“Why don’t I want to congratulate you?”

“Because you’re a man.”

He nodded. “That’s probably the answer.”

“I
have
come a long way, Barney. I work harder than anybody else at Pullman and Gates, and I’m probably brighter than most of them. I impress my clients, and I invest a third of my salary. If I had to,
really
had to, I could live alone the rest of my life. I could die alone. Death doesn’t scare me.” Her eyes turned playful and droll. “I figure heaven is Boston without crime. No gobs of spit on the sidewalk and no homeless people. Everybody has a dreamy apartment and theater tickets.”

Cole was listening hard for false notes, but each word she uttered seemed to have its own irrepressible truth, its own unstinting way of revealing her. He said, “How do you use me?”

“Always with care. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Now that you mention it.”

“I don’t want to marry you, Barney, but I don’t want to lose you. You’re good with a woman, and I don’t mean just with your hands.”

He swallowed the last of his coffee and, rising, put the cup aside. “I’ll try to figure most of that out on my way to work.”

She put her cup down. “I trust you, Barney, or I want to trust you, the reason being I love you, or I think I love you, which often amounts to the same thing.”

He smiled. “I think I love you too.”

“Do you trust me?”

“You make it damn hard and too easy at the same time.” He looked at his watch. “I have to go.”

Her eyes were on the carpet. A daddy-longlegs was sprinting in a silly fashion into his path. “Don’t step on it,” she said, getting out of her chair.

“I never do,” he said and kissed her.

• • •

Court was in session, a full docket of divorce libels, mostly uncontested. Lawyers sat in a line inside the rail, and nearly every seat in the back of the court was filled. The demurely dressed young woman nervously stepping to the stand looked drained, as if she had pulled her own plug. She avoided looking at the bench, where the judge sat godlike in his robes. In a low-pitched voice she swore to tell the truth and, questioned by Attorney Cole, testified that two weeks after her marriage her husband went to jail for having brutally assaulted his best friend at the wedding reception. When a tremor tripped into her voice, Cole smiled encouragingly.

“Would you like a chair, Mary Jane?”

She shook her head, standing wide-eyed, flimsy, reduced. Only her bright lipstick added to her.

“Why did your husband assault his friend?”

“I don’t know,” she said hoarsely. “Tommy had been drinking.”

“Tommy’s your husband.”

She nodded.

“Did Tommy serve his sentence, the full year, at the Lawrence House of Correction?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Cole retreated a number of steps to make her raise her voice, though the judge did not seem to mind one way or the other. His drooping ears looked worn out from too many years of listening, and his eyes were closed. Cole said, “Did you visit him there?”

“Yes, sir. As often as I was allowed. And I always brought packages.”

“Things you baked?”

“Yes, sir. And personal articles. And one time I brought him a sweater.”

“One you knitted?”

“No, sir. I bought it at Marshall’s.”