Looking for Mr. Goodbar (2 page)

At first it didn’t even hit me. The words. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I’m out of it, y’know? Then she starts tapping my arm. I don’t say nothing. Then she says, “Hey, don’t fall asleep.”

I’m beginning to think there’s something wrong, but still it don’t really hit me. I say something. I don’t know, like, Why shouldn’t I—I don’t know. I figure maybe I’m taking too much space on the bed, I never think . . . (Voice trembles again.) Then she says, cool as anything, “Because you ain’t sleeping here.”

That really jolted me. It was like . . . like . . . all of a sudden I’m wide awake and spinning. My head. The rest of me is . . . I’m paralyzed. I’m so tired I can’t move. I remember this picture went through my head of my buddy Ralph who got it in the spine in Nam, and I caught his face when they was lifting him up onto the stretcher to the copter, and his face, you know, he can’t move
anything,
he
knows,
and his face . . . but he can’t move. . . .

“Why?” I ask her.

“Because I don’t want you to.”

“Why don’t you want me to?” I’m stalling. I mean I can’t do it. I don’t give a fuck why. My head is . . . the blood’s pounding in my head.

“ ’Cause I hardly know you,” she says. (His laugh crosses with a sob. Then there is another long pause.)

“I just fucked you pretty good, didn’t I?”

“Okay,” she says. “Just okay.”

That really . . . anyhow . . . I say to her, “Fuck you, I ain’t going nowhere.”

That blows her mind. “What’re you talking about?” she screams at me. “Where the fuck do you think you are?”

She sounds
scared,
y’know? I remember I thought that was funny. Like, what was
she
scared of?
I
was the one getting kicked out.

“I’m right here, cunt,” I say to her. “And I’m staying until I get some sleep.” I don’t know what the hell I said it for. I was wide awake by this time. I shoulda just . . . but the idea of this lousy broad shoving me out (voice cracks again) . . . like I was a piece of shit. Shoveling me out like a piece of shit, that’s what she was doing.

Then she says, “If you’re not up in one minute I call the cops.” And she reaches for the phone near the bed like she’s gonna really do it and I grab the phone and pull it so hard the fucking thing comes right outa the wall, I had no idea, and I threw it across the room. Then I think I went out for a minute . . . no, I mean blank . . . I don’t remember . . . everything was red or something . . . and the next thing I know she’s half across the room and I’m going after her and she starts screaming and I gotta cover her mouth so the neighbors don’t hear. By this time all I want is out. For her to shut up so I can let her go and get the fuck outa there. I swear to you, that’s the truth, all I wanted was out and she wouldn’t let me out. If she would’ve just stopped struggling I woulda got outa there. But she wouldn’t stop. She was trying to bite my hand that’s over her mouth. (Long silence. The other voice asks a question.) Mmm . . . Yeah . . . that’s when I decide I better tie her up. Just tie her and gag her good enough to get outa there before she gets loose. I get her back to the bed so I can do it. (Long pause. When he resumes, his voice has gone completely dead. As though he’s reporting something seen at a distance and not of any particular interest.) I get her back with my arm around her face. I get her down. I don’t know how to tie her, to tie her first or gag her first. Gag her. I figure I can use the phone cord to tie her hands . . . and then . . . I don’t know what happened next. . . . (The other voice says something, and for the first time he sounds angry at the intervention.) What difference does it make? I killed her, I said I killed her, I don’t know, I . . . (subsiding) Yeah . . . I know, I know. All right.

When I first put the pillow down over her face it was just to shut her up. I tried one hand but she kept biting. I put the pillow over her . . . it was, like, her mouth. I mean, I thought in my mind I was covering her mouth. Then, I don’t know, we was both naked. I got turned on. (Other voice.) Yeah. That’s what I mean . . . mmmm . . . So I (voice) No. I tried but while I’m trying to . . . get in . . . (he chokes on the words) . . . all of a sudden she makes a big kind of . . . I don’t know, I’m not thinkin’ about the pillow and she gets it off and starts screaming and I’m scared shitless because of the neighbors and before I know it I pulled the lamp off the table and smashed it down on her head. It was like I wasn’t thinking. I swear to God. It was like someone else was doing it. I remember I’m looking down at her just before I bring it down and I’m looking at her face . . . she’s so scared . . . but it’s like I had nothing to do with it. It’s like I’m a million miles away. Then, when I saw the blood . . . I saw she was out . . . I got scared more. The phone was ringing, maybe it was the doorbell, I don’t know, something was ringing and it didn’t stop. I got crazy. I was afraid to leave. I started, I don’t know, running around the place, then I wanted to . . . (breaks) . . . make sure. . . . I knew how bad it was and I . . . I better make sure. I got out my knife and I stabbed her. (He is crying as he talks.) I stabbed her all over. I don’t know why I stabbed her. I stabbed her in the . . . all over. I don’t know why, I don’t know if I knew she was dead. There was no life in her. I think I went to sleep.

(Here there is a lengthy silence. The other voice says something.) When I woke up . . . (He breaks off, again a silence and then the other voice.) I still don’t see what difference it . . . all right, all right. (But now there is a huge effort involved in his speaking, and his voice breaks frequently.) I was freezing. When I woke up I was freezing . . . I was . . . (voice) . . . I was in her . . . I was coming . . . I don’t know how . . . (voice) . . . Yeah. I knew. I was crying . . . I was . . . I think I was trying to warm her up. It was weird ’cause it was like . . . she was my friend. Then I, it hit me what a spot I was in. I had to get out fast. I got dressed and I went downstairs. The doorman wasn’t there. I walked. I had a couple of bucks George gave me but I was scared to get on a bus or anything where there was people. I figured something might show. So I walked but it was rough because my leg was killing me. I don’t know, I must’ve strained something. I couldn’t walk straight. I was limping. I still am. I don’t know what she did to me. When I got to George’s he let me in. There was no one else there. I told him. He gave me all the money he had in the house. He said if they tracked him down he’d tell them I was just some guy he met that day.

I don’t know how I ended up in Cleveland. I meant to go to Miami.

THERESA

T
hey didn’t look at her for almost two years and then it was too late. Besides, once they understood what had happened there was nothing but guilt in their eyes so that when she saw them looking at her she had to turn away in shame and confusion. If it hadn’t been for her brother’s death they might have realized sooner that she needed help. She was willing to forgive them but they couldn’t forgive themselves.

When she was four her limbs had been briefly paralyzed by polio. She remembered none of it. Not the hospital, not the sisters who took care of her, not the respirator she’d needed to breathe. The illness was said to have altered her personality, and maybe that was why she couldn’t remember; she’d become another person. A quiet, withdrawn little girl with kinky red hair and pale green eyes and pale, pale skin beneath her freckles. Not the same child as the little girl who’d babbled incessantly in a near-language for months before she could slow herself down enough to attempt
English. And let the water run over the rim of the tub into the hallway because she wanted to “make a ocean.” And showed up in the living room one night naked and covered with flour, saying, “I’m a cookie, eat me.”

She began school two months late catching up quickly with the other children. She was one of the first to learn to read and preferred reading and solitary make-believe to playing with others. (Later, her first vivid memory, aside from one bright flash of being at the beach when she was little, would be of telling the priest at her first confession how she read with her father’s flashlight under the covers when she was supposed to be asleep. She could see herself at confession long after she’d lost the image of herself reading.)

She grew overweight from inactivity so that her parents began urging her to go out and play with the other children (she was the only one who was urged; the others got orders) but she didn’t like the games they played, although she couldn’t tell this to her parents. Hide-and-seek frightened her—the part where you were It and everyone else went away. Games that demanded that you move fast were difficult too, because of her weight and because she got out of breath very easily. When that happened she got upset and then angry and had to run into the house before anyone could call her a bad sport.

Brigid, who was only a year younger than Theresa, was exactly the opposite. Restless, athletic, totally uninterested in reading any more than she had to to escape punishment by the sisters, she spent almost as much time out of the house in the winter as she did when it was warm. She got along with everyone. There wasn’t a child in the neighborhood who wasn’t her friend or an adult who didn’t consider himself some sort of godparent of Brigid, who from the time of Theresa’s first illness, when she herself was three, seemed always ready to leave home and find herself a healthier family.

Theresa didn’t like Brigid too much, not because of any one thing Brigid did but because she felt reproached in some way by Brigid’s
existence. Her parents never asked her why she wasn’t like Brigid but the question somehow hovered in the air every time Brigid hit another home run or was invited someplace. Not that Theresa minded her sister’s popularity; if anything she minded those rare periods when Brigid spent a lot of time at home.

Thomas and Katherine were something else. They were like a second set of parents to her and she adored them both, particularly Thomas, who never bossed her around. Thomas had been eleven and Katherine six when Theresa was born. (The Missus’ Second Thoughts, Mr. Dunn had once called Brigid and Theresa, and their mother had gotten very angry. Later, when the company was gone, she’d accused him of making it sound as though it happened that way on purpose. And then her father had said, “Indeed,” which no one understood except maybe their mother, who was the only one supposed to hear it, anyway.)

Thomas was her mother’s favorite of them all and his death in a training-camp gun accident when he was eighteen dealt her the most staggering blow of her life. She turned gray almost overnight, a woman thirty-seven years old. She lost her famous temper but she lost her liveliness, too. At first she cried all the time. Then she stopped crying and there was a period when she just sat on a hard chair in the living room, staring at the rug. Which had no pattern.

Her father grieved too but couldn’t match the length or depth of her mother’s mourning and became for a while like a ghost around the house. Hovering gray in the black shadow of her mother’s grief.

Katherine doing the ironing
and watching TV.

Her mother sitting looking at the rug.

Theresa on the floor in one corner of the room, curled up with
Nancy Drew,
looking up occasionally to catch the thread of the movie on the TV.

Brigid out somewhere in the neighborhood.

Her father comes in from work.

Katherine puts down the iron and runs to kiss him. He hugs Katherine, fondles her long silky auburn hair. Her hair which is the way red hair is supposed to be when it doesn’t go wrong, like Theresa’s, and become fly-away kinky and orange. In this period Katherine is the only one who dares demand affection from their father. And she gets it. She’s his favorite, anyway. She knows it and Theresa knows it. If Brigid knows it she doesn’t care. Katherine goes back to her ironing. For a moment her father just stands there, uncertain whether he must come further into the room. Penetrate the shroud of its atmosphere.

“Look at her,” Mrs. Dunn says. “Reading. Do you remember the way Thomas read to her all the time when she was sick?”

Thomas spent more time in the hospital with her than anyone except her mother. Thomas read to her for hours at a time, holding up the books for her to see the pictures. Thomas brought her flowers from the lot on the corner. Thomas was a saint. Thomas had thought he might be a priest when he got out of the army but didn’t mention this to the recruiting officer. Theresa had loved Thomas very much but when her mother recited the Thomas litany Theresa wished that he had never lived so that this could never have happened.

After the first year
her father began keeping longer hours at work. Or wherever. Sometimes she heard her mother accuse him of being delayed by drink, not work. The accusations were dull and toneless, not as they’d been in the days before Thomas’s death. If they were made in Katherine’s presence Katherine would take her father’s side or try to mediate between them.

Sometimes Theresa’s back hurt,
particularly if she tried to sit straight and still for a long time. It wasn’t the kind of thing
you bothered your parents with, even in normal times. It wasn’t bad enough. Besides, it might be something you were doing that was causing you the pain, and then to tell them would just bring anger and recriminations down on your head. At home she lay curled on her side whenever she could to accommodate the discomfort, but in class Sister Vera was always telling her to sit up straight. She began sitting on one foot or wedging a book under her left buttock so that she would appear to be straight. Then one day she forgot to remove the book when Sister Vera came around checking homework, and Sister Vera saw it and sent her to the office. There, so frightened that she had to cross her legs for fear of wetting her pants, she haltingly explained to the Mother Superior, who, unlike Sister Vera, had known her since she began school, that she couldn’t actually sit the way Sister Vera wanted her to without doing that thing with the book.