Killing Johnny Fry (30 page)

“About you,” I said.

“You didn‘t even know me,” she said slapping my chest. “I wasn‘t even born way back then."

“I know. But when I was down there on my knees, I remembered all the way back to my dream."

“A little boy, an‘ he thinkin‘ about eatin‘ out some girl?"

“You,” I said again, and she kissed me, and we made love again.

We walked arm in arm over to the East Village. We may have kissed for an hour before she went up the stairs to her apartment.

I walked back, thinking about being alive and making love while Sasha was cold in a locker somewhere, killed by her own dark passion.

I ended up in Battery Park, down west
of
Wall Street.

I sat there on a bench, watching the Hudson River and waiting for the sun at my back. Furtive night figures moved around me: homeless people and other late-night denizens of the city.

No one molested me or even spoke.

As the morning broke, I realized that I was a lost soul, but that wasn‘t so bad. I had in my pocket all of the pertinent information about Monica‘s daughter, Mozelle. She had brought the envelope for me to give Marie Tourneau at the French school.

I thought that if I could just get that one child out of one world and into another, my duty in this life would be complete. Then I could wander and fuck until something happened and I died or changed or got put in a cage.

At home I showered and shaved and ate three scrambled eggs. I went to bed but couldn‘t get to sleep, so Lcalled Ms. Thinnes at the Nightwood Gallery.

“Hello?"

“Ms. Thinnes, it‘s Cordell Carmel. I have some time this afternoon and I was wondering if I could come by to discuss business today."

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, yes, that would be fine. What about two o‘clock?"

“Great."

After that, I called Linda Chou and asked her if we could wait two days before our dancing date. When she asked why, I told her about Sasha. She‘d read about it in the newspapers and was very concerned about my feelings.

“I just haven‘t slept in a couple of days,” I said. “It‘s not that I‘m aware of feeling upset, it‘s just that I find myself awake and tired."

“Call me day after tomorrow,” Linda said. “I‘m looking forward to our dancing and I‘m sure it‘ll take you out of your mood."

I tried to be late for Ms. Thionnes but I was at her gallery door at 2:02. There were a few customers looking at photographs of lichen growing on boulders in different parts of the world. The formations were like maps of alien planets drawn up by astronomers or science fictionists.

“Mr. Carmel,” Isabelle Thinnes said. “So nice of you to be on time. Martin, Martin."

A young white man came out of a doorway that must have led to an office or storeroom. He had glasses with thick lenses, and wild, black hair. The ill-fitting suit he wore was the slightest submission to formality. Anywhere but in an art gallery, he would have been seen as an unkempt Bohemian.

“Yes, Isabelle?"

“Will you look after the showroom for a while, dear? I have to do some business with Mr. Carmel."

He nodded with only the hint of a gaunt smile on his hirsute face.

There was a red door at the back of the gallery. This led to a narrow stair, also carpeted in red. The nineteen stairs led to a small office with a round desk the color of ivory, a red velvet love seat, and a hardwood chair. There were paintings and canvases stacked everywhere and a window with the shade pulled down.

The room was homey and more the flavor of Cape Cod than Midtown Manhattan.

Isabelle was wearing a close-fitting gray dress that came down to her ankles and clung to her slim figure. As I said before, she was handsome and had a nice shape. Her sixty-some years hadn‘t robbed her of all her beauty.

“Have a seat, Mr. Carmel,” she said.

When I moved for the chair, she said, “No, on the sofa. You‘ll be more comfortable there."

I sat where she wanted me to. She took a folder from her desk and handed it to me.

While I went through the papers, she took a seat and watched me.

The folder held documents that were almost exactly the same as the boilerplate contracts that Linda Chou gave me. The cost for each photograph was what I asked for, and the donation to the Lucy Carmichael Foundation was paid for by the customer buying the piece.

I read through them four times and then looked up at the woman, whose eyes were still on me, and nodded.

“Looks good."

“I hold nothing back,” she said, a haughty dignity in her mien. “When I want something, I go for it. It‘s been that way my entire life."

“Can I take these contracts to show to Lucy?"

“Certainly."

I replaced the contracts in the folder and smiled.

“This is a great little office,” I said.

“This gallery belonged to my uncle,” she said, and then, “Tell me something, Cordell."

“What‘s that?"

The blue of Isabelle Thinnes‘s eyes had a lot of gray in it. There was something almost preternatural about them.

“You,” she said, and then paused, “ . . . you aren‘t a political man, are you?"

At any other moment in my life, I would have felt that the gallery owner was testing me, that she was probing to see what I was made of. I do believe that I was being tested, but not by the woman sitting there before me. In my mind I was brought to that small office to answer for myself, to prove something to the world, to prove that I could speak for myself.

“No,” I said. “Not in the least."

“And you‘re not really interested in art,” she said, more as a statement of fact than a question.

“I don‘t know about that. I don‘t think you can be a human being and not be concerned with art."

For some reason, this made Isabelle smile.

“I mean, you‘re not like Martin downstairs,” she said. “He went to art school and did a dissertation on Roy Lichtenstein. He lives and breathes for what he believes is transcendent creation."

“No,” I said. “It‘s not that I don‘t believe in it; it‘s just that all that kinda thinking is beyond me."

Isabelle Thinnes crossed her left leg tightly over her right. She laced her elegant, aged fingers across the kneecap. Then she took in a deep breath through her nostrils, which flared sensually. It was almost as if she was inhaling me.

“Then how did you get here?” she asked.

I gave up on the $5,000 I‘d paid Lucy Carmichael. It was worth it just to consider Isabelle‘s question. It didn‘t matter if I got the show. What mattered was that this woman was looking inside me, into my motives. She didn‘t know what it was that she beheld, and so she asked.

“I . . .1 was . . . I don‘t know. I guess you could say that I got lost, and you and Lucy were people, places, that I stumbled into."

The smile on Isabelle‘s face became a grin.

“It‘s not that I don‘t care,” I continued. “It‘s just that I‘m not sure."

“Not sure about what?” she asked.

“I can hold a woman in my arms and be transported by her kisses,” I said. “That‘s something I can be sure of. But Lucy‘s pictures are something that I don‘t know, not really. I want to know, and so here I am. It‘s like I‘m putting a jigsaw puzzle together having no idea what it will be."

“Do you care about those children?” she asked. “About the art of her photographs?"

“I want to care."

Even after all the sex I‘d had, I‘d never been so naked. Isabelle seemed content just to sit there looking at me. I believed that she saw more than I could know.

“The photographs are excellent,” she assured me, “and the intentions are noble and, more importantly, they‘re smart. But what about you, dear Cordell? Can anything you‘ve done help you?"

“Maybe,” I said. “I don‘t know."

I wanted to kiss Isabelle. If I had, I think she would have understood that it was because of the deep impact her questions had on me.

“I have to get back to the gallery,” she said.

“Yeah. I should go too."

That night I slept for twelve hours. My dreams had nothing to do with the experiences of the past ten days. The images that came to me in sleep were of a carnival my father took me to when I was only five, somewhere near Walnut Creek, California. He wanted me to get on the rides and feed the animals, but I was only interested in the greasy cogs and gears beneath the great machines and the horse dung that was everywhere. I liked the mud and the scuttling beetles that were almost the same color. There were bright red ants sifting through green, green patches of grass.

The cotton candy was nothing compared to the sky.

The elephants looked miserable. I saw them, then and in my dream, as sad kings that had been defeated by the treachery of little men who wanted the kings to suffer because they were jealous
of
their magnificence.

The next morning, I realized that my house was a mess. I wanted to clean but there was something else I had to do, something much more important.

I hunted up Sisypha‘s letter and brought out the red capsule she‘d enclosed. I swallowed it without hesitation. Sisypha demanded trust; that was my only thought. I had to contemplate everything I‘d experienced and that capsule was supposed to help me do it.

I don‘t know what I expected. Maybe I thought that the moment the chemicals reached my stomach, I would be imbued with omniscience. But nothing happened at first.

Half an hour later, I was still waiting for the drug to take effect. But the only thing I felt was hunger. Actually, I was ravenous. I didn‘t have anything to eat in my kitchen, but I didn‘t want to go out, because Sisypha had told me that I needed to concentrate while I was under the influence of her designer narcotic. But soon I couldn‘t wait. I went outside and down to Dino‘s diner, where I had last eaten with Sasha.

The same waitress seated me at the same booth I had shared with Sasha. The old couple that had been arguing about a cousin were in the booth that they occupied before; they were still arguing about something.

I ordered steak and eggs with a short stack of pancakes and hot chocolate and coffee too. Before the waitress went away, I asked her for orange juice, a large glass.

I sat there thinking about Sasha‘s death. She had been so angry about her mother so many years after. The anger and pain in her was worked out on her brother, it seemed, and now he had brought that rage back to her.

I wondered if I was doing something like that with my half-baked plan to kill Johnny Fry. If I had walked into the room and challenged them when I had first seen them, it would have been the right thing to do. Maybe we would have fought, but at least I wouldn‘t have scurried off like a scared schoolboy.

There was a right way of being, and I had missed it . . . but if I had stood up and faced them, I would never have walked past that video store; I would never have found Sisypha.

I loved Brenda Landfall and she loved me, I knew. She needed my clumsiness and inexperience, my desire to withhold. She wanted someone to recognize the mind behind her rampant sexuality. I needed someone to see my pain and not to turn away out of boredom.

“You were with him,” the old man in the adjoining booth said to the woman. “I know that you and Paul Medri went to Hampton Bays together."

“That was almost sixty years ago, Roger,” she said. “Why can‘t you let it go?"

“You went behind me,” Roger said. “You and him made me into a fool."

“If you were a fool, you were before we went off. And anyway, I thought that you were having an affair with Cynda MacLeish."

“But I wasn‘t."

“But I thought you were."

“I hate you, Merle,” Roger said. “I hate your guts."

I wondered how I could hear them so clearly, just like they were speaking into an amplifier.

My senses were somehow heightened. Or maybe it was a hallucination. Maybe Roger and Merle were figments of my imagination. Maybe they were there, speaking softly, and I was inventing their words of hatred.

Did I hate Jo? No. Did I hate Johnny Fry? At one time, yes, but no more. Their love, or whatever it was, was separate from me. I couldn‘t come between them. I had no desire to be him.

“Here you are,” the waitress said, placing two plates, two cups, and a juice glass before me.

I ate greedily, rapaciously, devouring the food with such vigor and passionate abandon that people from other tables were glancing at me. One little girl was staring, rapt.

Was this like my brief stint on the small stage of the Wilding Club? Were they seeing something bestial? Was this my sexuality expressing itself in another form?

I gulped down the orange juice and then guzzled the water, crunching the ice cubes after it was gone.

My heart was pounding.

A man behind me asked a woman if she loved him, his voice sounding like mine and a million million million others like me.

The waitress walked up to my table and smiled lasciviously (or maybe it was me smiling like that).

“What‘s your name?” I asked the brown-skinned Hispanic girl.

“Nina,” she said.

“You‘re beautiful, Nina."

She smiled and turned her head without taking her eyes off
of
me.

“I have a boyfriend,” she said. It was merely a suggestion.

“And still you‘re beautiful,” I replied. “You‘re the reason I and so many other men come to this little place. It‘s just so nice to see you and to see your smile."

“You‘re sweet,” she said. “Do you want anything else?"

“Another stack of pancakes and a side of bacon."

“All that?"

“When a man is stripped of love, he turns to food, they say."

“Did your girlfriend break up with you?” she asked.

“No. Not yet. But the love disappeared and became something else. It got lost and turned into, into . . . I don‘t know."

I looked down at the table, and when I raised my head again, the waitress was gone. The old couple were still arguing, but I could no longer make out—or make up—their words.

It was wrong of me not to confront Joelle and John Fry, but in being wrong I found myself. Using that as the equation to figure out what I should do, I wondered again about killing John Fry. Maybe, even though I was no longer angry, I should shoot him anyway, kill him dead.