Killing Johnny Fry (2 page)

But I wasn‘t afraid that day, not at all. I carried the DVD case, titled
The Myth of Sisypha,
to the front of the store, where an East Indian man sat on high so that he could see what was going on down the aisles.

“Yes, sir,” he said with a slight sing to his voice. “Is that all, sir?"

“Yes. That‘ll be all. How much?” I was beginning to get nervous. I worried someone would come in and see me, recognize me.

Instead of answering, the clerk picked up a microphone and shouted something, in Hindi I suppose. He read a number from the back
of
the DVD jacket and stared down the center aisle expectantly.

The glass case in front
of
the cash register was filled with pornographic eye candy. Banana-colored plastic dildos, canisters filled with condoms, a box of tubes containing anal sex lubricants. I wondered if Johnny bought his red condoms and lubricants in a store like this one.

While I was thinking, a young man, also East Indian, came running out of the back somewhere, in his hand a disc that had nothing printed or painted on it.

The young man was quite short and thin. He wore black cotton pants, black tennis shoes, and a white dress shirt buttoned all the way to his throat. He handed up the DVD to the man behind the elevated glass counter.

“R-321-66a,” the young man said.

The elevated clerk entered numbers into the cash register and said, “Thirty-eight dollars and fifty-one cents, sir."

I paid in cash, with exact change.

The cashier snapped my purchase into the jacket, placed the jacket into a brown paper bag that he folded tightly around the DVD, then he taped the package shut, placed it into a flimsy plastic bag that had I LOVE NEW YORK printed on either side, and handed the bag down to me.

“Thank you."

“Thank you."

I came out of the door into the bright light of the sun. I looked around furtively to see if anyone had marked my exit from the sex store. But no one was looking at me: not the housewives or kids out from school, not the homeless man pandering for change or the French tourists reading their map of the city.

No one saw me with the triply wrapped
Myth of Sisypha
dangling from my left hand, the same hand that held my briefcase filled with the photographs of dying African children.

When I got down to 18th Street, I stopped at Dionysus‘s Bounty, a liquor store.

“Do you have cognac?” I asked the dour-faced cashier.

“What kind you want?” he asked with a sneer.

“What‘s good?"

“How much you spend?"

“Hundred dollars,” I suggested, and he smiled. I suspected then that he owned the store.

He went into a back room and I stood there, forgetting momentarily about Jo and Johnny. But then a door or something in the back squealed, and I thought of Jo calling the white man with the red condom Daddy.

Daddy.

“This the best I got,” the owner said. “One hundred eighty dollars, but it‘s eighty years old and smooth like a young girl‘s skin."

I paid in cash.

Telling the man I didn‘t need a bag, I placed my briefcase on his counter and opened it. I put the I LOVE NEW YORK bag in a flap and was about to put the bottle in when the liquor store man put out a hand to stop me.

I thought that he was going to say something about the DVD, but instead he pointed to one of Lucy‘s photographs, which was partially exposed, poking out from the blue folder that held it.

I pulled out the topmost portrait. It was of a very dark-skinned child, maybe eight years old. She was exceptionally thin and her forehead was covered with sores. Fat flies fed on the dripping wounds.

“What is this?” the man asked.

It was only then that I looked at him closely. He was white, European no doubt, with white hair that was thinning down the middle of his head, revealing a pink and freckled scalp. He might have been sixty and at one time he had been powerful; I could tell by the muscles in his forearms and the size of his softening hands.

“Sudanese girl,” I said. “There‘s a war going on over there. Thousands dying."

“Long time ago?” he asked, maybe a little hopefully.

“No. Now. Today,” I told him.

“People can do this to each other?” he said. “They are monsters."

Nodding, I put the picture back in its folder and closed the case. I left the store wondering who he was condemning.

It was a long walk to my apartment in Tribeca. When I crossed Canal at Washington, I remembered how Joelle had told me that we lived the perfect distance from each other.

“This way we can never take each other for granted,” she‘d said, a wisp of her straightened hair bisecting a light brown eye. “We have to work to get to each other."

Maybe she was seeing Johnny Fry way back then. But no. John Fry came later. She met him for the first time at a party given by Brad Mettleman at his place in Brooklyn Heights. It was what Brad called a garden party. I was invited because I‘d translated a series of letters that Brad had received from Spain and Paris over the last year. He‘d said that I helped him stay on top of the competition. I brought Jo to the party because I brought her everywhere. She told me when we first got together that she didn‘t need to be married or even to live with someone, but she wanted to feel included.

Johnny was there. I had seen him before. He hung around Brad, and for a while there, I ran into him quite often. He had been the personal trainer for one of Brad‘s photographers, a Tino Martinez, at Crunch Gym. Johnny was an aspiring musician, and Tino‘s father was a music producer in Argentina. The elder Martinez got Johnny in touch with a Chicago music label that produced pop jazz. And even though Johnny was more of a classical guitarist, the label, Sun and Moon Records, had made noises about cutting his first album. The deal fell through, as I remembered, and now Johnny was trying his hand at importing folk art.

At that party he was pestering Jo to help him with marketing his as-yet-unproduced album.

“I gave him my card just to shut him up,” she‘d told me after he‘d wandered off to bother someone else.

Was that when it began? I remembered that she‘d complained of a headache and wanted to go home alone. How long ago? Six months, no more. Did he bring her red condoms and lubricant that first night?

Completely out of character for me, I swung my fist into the brick wall to my left. An elderly woman walking a boxer that was too big for her to control said, “Oh my."

The dog started barking at me, but the pain in my fingers was louder. I grabbed my fist and went down to my knees while the elderly woman, clad in a cranberry housedress, struggled and pleaded with her dog.

“Axel! Stop!” she shouted. “Heel! Axel!"

I finally got to my feet and jogged the last two blocks home. The entrance was just a door in a brick wall like the one I had attacked. I hunkered down against the wall and for the next five minutes I concentrated on opening my injured fist. The middle fingers were beginning to swell, and the pain radiated up to the middle of my forearm. Every fraction of an inch hurt more than the last. When I finally got the hand open, I was afraid to close it again. But I did it. After ten minutes I had opened and closed my fist three times.

Nothing was broken—I was pretty sure of that. But my hand would be useless for a while.

I laughed at myself as I tried with my left hand to get the keys out of my right-side pants pocket. After managing that feat, I was fumbling around trying to get the key into the lock when the door came open.

It was Sasha Bennett, the thirty-something law student from the fifth floor.

“Hi, Cordell,” she said, smiling quizzically. “What‘s wrong?"

“I was walking and I fell,” I said. “I put out my fist, don‘t ask me why, and now I can‘t even unlock the door."

I laughed, but she didn‘t smile in return. I must have looked half-mad out there. The grin on my face probably seemed like a lunatic‘s scowl.

“Let me help you,” she said, reaching for the briefcase.

Sasha‘s father was from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Those people were dark-skinned and Asiatic. Her mother came from Indiana. Sasha‘s face was very wide at the cheekbones, and her almond-shaped eyes were darker than brown. We‘d had coffee together a couple of times. She once invited me to come with her and some friends to a summer rental on Fire Island, but I told her my girlfriend wouldn‘t understand.

I followed her up the narrow stairway. She wore tight-fitting gray slacks and a yellow blouse. Even through the pain I admired her generous rolling gait.

The walls, metal stairs, and ceiling were all painted medium gray. The clanging of our shoes on the metal found a resonance with the pain in my hand.

“Give me your keys,” she said when we got to my third-floor door.

Our building had once been the business office for a food distribution warehouse, now also defunct, across the street. It was tall and slender. When it was turned into apartments, there was only enough room for one unit per floor.

I handed over my keychain, saying, “The one with the blue rim is for the bottom lock. The red one is for the top."

“What about the middle?” she asked.

“Never lock it."

For some reason that made her smile, then laugh.

After working the keys in their respective locks, she pushed, but the door didn‘t budge.

“You sure the middle one isn‘t locked?"

“It sticks,” I said, wincing at the pain in my hand. “You got to push hard."

Grunting, she applied her shoulder and the door gave way with a cry that would from that day forward always remind me of Joelle and Johnny.

Sasha put my briefcase down on the small walnut table that sat in the little foyer. I shambled past her, going to open the drapes that covered the westward-facing windows. The great thing about my apartment is the light. The living room has a window that looks out on the Hudson to the west, and my bedroom window faces the east. I get it coming and going: sunup and sunset.

“You want a drink?” I asked Sasha.

She cocked her head as if I had said something odd.

“I bought this really old cognac and I‘d like to try it."

“Why don‘t you invite your girlfriend over?” she asked.

“I‘d rather drink it with you."

That look again.

“I have to, to study,” she said. “If I have anything to drink, the whole night‘ll be shot."

I walked over to her then and kissed her on the lips.

“Thank you for saving me, Sasha."

“Okay.” She took half a step backward.

“Maybe we could have that drink some other time,” I suggested.

“Yeah.” Her smile warming. “I‘d like that."

After she left I took three ibuprofen tablets, choking them down with three two-finger shots of cognac. I was sweating and cold, and my hand ached, but if you asked me, I would have said that I was feeling no pain.

My one indulgence is my television. It‘s a sixty-inch plasma screen with DVD, TiVo, full cable connection, CD player, computer connection, and satellite radio. It‘s set up against the windowless wall of my living room, and more nights than not I fall asleep on my futon couch watching a movie or late-night cartoons meant for adult audiences.

After the painkiller began to kick in, I closed the drapes and put
The Myth of Sisypha
into the DVD player.

I hadn‘t seen many pornos. The only time I‘d ever sat through one was at the rare stag party I attended. What I remembered was lots of genitalia, garish makeup, and disinterested men and women going through the motions. But this one seemed different.

In this film a bronze-hued black woman, Sisypha, and her husband, Mel, a rather paunchy white man, started out sitting at a dinner table. The meal had been served and they were eating. There were no opening credits, no sound track other than the noises that people make. The effect was that you felt that the cameras were spying on actual people just living their lives.

The couple talked about their day and seemed to be very close. At one point Mel asked Sisypha if she was unhappy because they hadn‘t been able to conceive. Her response was that they loved each other and that was the most important thing.

Later on, lying in the bed, they kissed goodnight and embraced as if they were about to make love, but then the scene switched to the morning.

At this point I began to wonder whether a mistake had been made at the sex shop. Maybe they gave me the wrong disc. Maybe there were R-rated versions of their triple-X-rated movies. Maybe I had gotten one of these by mistake. I thought that I‘d have to take it back. But the story was still interesting to me. It was a lot like my story with Joelle. She always said that she loved me, that she was satisfied with our situation. She was still young enough to have children but said that she wasn‘t interested.

The next morning Mel left for work, and Sisypha went about her day. Sometime in the afternoon, a workman knocked at the front door. He was young and Mediterranean, muscular in his overalls and T-shirt. His aquiline nose and perpetual sneer gave the impression of an ugly nature, but Sisypha seemed to like him.

“Hi, Ari,” she said. “Have you come about the pipes?"

“Yes, miss,” he said in a definite Greek accent.

By now I knew what would happen. They‘d kiss once or twice, the scene would flip away and then come back to find them lying naked under the blankets. I was about to turn it off when the worker tore off her skirt, got down on his knees, and began teasing her clitoris with the tip of his very large and pointed tongue.

Sisypha‘s breathing was laced with her orgasm. The way her legs twitched and her eyes gorged themselves on the vision of Ari‘s tongue proved that she was either a consummate actor or that she really loved having sex with this man. Her passion was at least as convincing as Jo‘s when Johnny Fry entered her rectum.

The sex between Sisypha and Ari escalated over the minutes. His erection was long, hard, and crooked. It bent downward but then turned up again toward the head. She rode him, rubbed his cock between her well-formed, light-brown breasts, took half of his enormous member down her throat. All the while Sisypha moaned and Ari grunted like a big dog warning off an intruder.