Memory (Hard Case Crime) (31 page)

Cole felt good. He felt like a bedridden invalid suddenly healthy and able to walk around again, like a man carrying a heavy sack suddenly relieved of the load. He felt taller, lighter, more sure of himself. He waited, shifting on the balls of his feet, for Loomis to come at him again.

The chair had gone over, and Loomis’ feet were entangled with it. He seemed groggy, too, and in coming back off the wall almost sprawled onto his face. But he got his balance back, and spun around, and let his weight rest on the wall, back to the wall now and enraged face glaring at Cole.

There was silence everywhere now; the party guests had been struck dumb. The fight was still less than half a minute old, and no one yet had recovered sufficiently from surprise to try to stop it. The guests weren’t in Cole’s mind at all now. Nothing was there now but this unexpected physical well-being, and the desire to smash that pig face to ruin.

Loomis picked up the chair.

Cole saw it, saw the intent expression on Loomis’ face and then the chair being lifted, the legs pointing at the corners of a square around his head, and a cold terror filled him, draining him of everything, of purpose and understanding and strength. A shrill shriek ran endlessly from his mouth, and he went down on his knees, down on his face, crouched in a tight ball on the floor with his ineffective arms crossed over the back of his head.

In the pit of his terror he heard angry voices and crashing, and he drew himself in smaller and tighter. Something hit him in the side, half-rolling him over, and he saw struggling above him, his angle of view making them monstrous, two men: Loomis and Fred Crawford. And beyond them Nick’s face, looking down at him with total disgust, his mouth moving as he said words Cole couldn’t hear. Cole rolled onto his face again, and cowered there.

After a while, people were talking in his ear but he wouldn’t listen to them and wouldn’t move. When their hands touched him, he trembled, and bit his tongue to keep from screaming. If they thought he was dead, they’d leave him alone.

But they picked him up, and carried him somewhere. His eyes were closed, he was still curled in on himself; it was as though they were carrying a large medicine ball wearing clothes. They put him on something soft, and then they left him alone. The terror in him ruptured, and he fainted.

When he came out of it, he was in darkness, lying on a bed. A drone of voice came from somewhere, and down beyond his feet a thin line of light outlined a door. He came awake remembering nothing, in total confusion that quickly became fear. He didn’t know where he was, or what the drone of voices meant. Was he in a hospital?

But his shoes were on. All his clothing was on. His left hand ached slightly, particularly the first knuckle of his middle finger. His whole body felt cramped, as though he’d been sleeping sitting up.

What should he do? There was a feeling of danger, but he didn’t know what it meant. Those talking people, he didn’t know whether they were a danger to him or not, and he didn’t dare risk going out to them. He lay on the bed, trying to understand what had happened, remembering only his own apartment and knowing only that he wasn’t there.

He lay there about ten minutes before the door opened and a male silhouette came in and said, “You awake?” It was Fred Crawford’s voice.

Fred Crawford. It all came back then, the party and the fight, but ending with his facing Loomis, who was against the wall. Had Loomis knocked him out? His memory stopped with himself facing Loomis, who was against the wall.

He said, “I’m awake. Did he knock me out?”

“No. He went after you with a chair, and you passed out.” Crawford came farther into the room. “How do you feel?” His voice was neither friendly nor unfriendly, and not particularly curious, perfunctory.

“All right, I guess.” But at mention of the chair he had felt a wave of weakness go through his body, as though he’d faint. He pushed away from thought of the chair. “What time is it?”

“Little after one. You missed the New Year.”

“Oh.”

“You want a cigarette?”

“Yes, please.”

“Okay if I turn on the light?”

“Sure.”

“Watch your eyes.”

The light came on, a blinding ceiling fixture, and Cole squinted away from it. When he could see again, Crawford was holding out a lit cigarette to him. Cole took it and thanked him, and sat up.

He was in the Crawfords’ bedroom, underfurnished like the rest of the apartment. It contained this double bed on which he lay, with neither headboard nor footboard, and a bulky scarred dresser with a mirror, and a small plastic radio on the floor beside the bed. There were venetian blinds on the window, but no curtains or drapes.

“I’m sorry it happened. Did anything get broken?”

“A glass, that’s all. Don’t worry about it, it wasn’t your fault. Loomis got thrown out.”

“What about the girl?”

Crawford looked puzzled. “What girl?”

Cole shook his head. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“You okay?”

“I guess so. Where’s Nick?”

“He left. Took Angie home.”

“Oh. He was mad at me, wasn’t he?”

Crawford shrugged. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“Wait, I’ll get it for you.”

Crawford left, shutting the door behind him. Cole patted his pockets, found his cigarettes, and lit one. Crawford didn’t want him to go out with the other guests, but that was all right; Cole didn’t want to go out there either.

It was Mattie who brought the coffee. “You all better now?”

“I’m sorry about the fight. I didn’t mean it to happen.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Paul,” she said. She was smiling brightly, but she looked uneasy. “It was Fred’s idea to invite that idiot, and this is the absolute last time.”

Cole got up from the bed, feeling faint pins-and-needles sensations in his legs. He took the coffee cup from Mattie and said, “Nick’s sore at me, isn’t he?”

“That’s just his way. When you’re all better, you two’ll be friends again.”

“I guess so.”

“Well...I’d better get back to my guests.” She closed the door behind her when she left.

Cole drank the coffee, and smoked his cigarette, and walked across the room, walking off the shakiness and nervousness in his body. When coffee and cigarette were both finished, it was time to leave the room.

He went down the narrow hall, which split at the end, opening onto both the kitchen and the living room. Fred Crawford intercepted him at the living room entrance, saying, “I’ll take the cup. You okay now?”

“I’m fine. Thanks a lot.”

“That’s okay. Can you find the subway?”

It took him a second to realize what Fred meant, and then he understood that he, too, was to be thrown out, but gently, because of his condition. He wished he could say that he could find the subway, that he needed no help, but if he left here alone he knew he would get himself hopelessly lost. He didn’t even know the name of the subway. Hating this helplessness, this dependence on people who would prefer not to be his keeper, he nevertheless said, “I don’t think I can. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right, I’ll walk you. Wait there, I’ll get rid of this cup and get your coat.”

Cole waited. He could see into the living room, and into the kitchen. The party had thinned out a little, but was still noisy and animated. He saw Rita, talking with a tall thin man, but he didn’t see the other girl, the one who had started the trouble. No one in either room seemed to notice him.

Crawford came back, with his coat, and Cole shrugged into it. Crawford led the way through the living room, which was somewhat less populated than the kitchen. He opened the front door, and started out, and when Cole moved after him someone plucked at his sleeve. He looked around and it was the girl who’d started the trouble.

She looked more drunk now, and somehow bitter. Chal-lengingly she said, “What’s my name?” She said it like a demand for a password; give the countersign and you can come in.

He shook his head, not wanting to think about her or be involved any further with her. He pulled his arm away, and went out the front door. He went down the steps to where Crawford was waiting impatiently on the sidewalk, and behind him the girl came out on the narrow porch and shouted down, “What’s my name? What’s my name?”

Crawford was looking up at her in bewilderment. Cole brushed by him and walked away down the block, remembering which direction he had come from, walking with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched to keep his coat collar up and around his neck.

Behind him, the girl was screaming with increasing urgency, “
What’s my name? What’s my name?
”

Crawford caught up with him and said, “What the hell is that all about?”

“Nothing. She’s crazy.”

“She’s something.”

Behind them, the girl kept screaming.

He was impaled on dreams, dark shadows and sharp stab-bings and great white squares of gleaming metal while he slept at night, pointless rambling fantasies of an unknowable past and an unguessable future while he worked around the apartment by day.

He had sold the rest of the books, all the paperbacks, carrying them on two trips crosstown to Fourth Avenue, selling each load in a different store, getting eighteen dollars for them. The empty bookcase scraped at his mind, and he filled it again, with anything, with the records from the table, with dishes from the kitchen cabinet, with odds and ends from the desk drawers. Empty, it ached at him like a sore that wouldn’t heal, and it would be even worse if he just dismantled the bookcase and left a great blank empty space along the wall. Filled with bits and pieces from all over the apartment, there was a comfortable deceptive look to it, counterfeiting the original closely enough to give him ease of mind.

Nick came around no more. No one called, not even Helen Arndt. Sometimes, following the instructions on one of his notes, he called his answering service, but there were never any messages, and he knew now that when this current paid-up period was finished he would let the service lapse.

He had left the apartment only twice since Wednesday, when he had sold the rest of the books, and those were the only times he had spoken to anyone, in the short empty conversations with the terse man who had bought them. He was closing in on himself, closing in. How could he get better this way, living like a hermit? But every time he tried to enter his old life, he destroyed a part of it. With Rita, with Nick, with all the people at the party, all the people he’d met in his first week of wandering. They didn’t think of him now as they had thought of him in the past, as Paul Cole, their friend and the actor. They thought of him now as that silent stumbling freak, plodding his small apologetic circle.

Where was the
memory
? He’d been back now over two weeks, and there was practically no improvement. His memory was still bad, and his physical contacts with his past had deteriorated. Even the apartment no longer looked as it had when he’d first come back to it; the books all gone, notes on all the walls. Surely, with his incessant cleaning, there were other differences as well, subtler but just as damaging.

On Sunday, four days after the party, he could take it no longer. He had to get out, had to break free of this stupid circle. For one day at least, he had to refuse to clean the apartment, had to go outside, had to move about the world, had to alter the inevitability of his days.

The routine was so strong in him that he felt a nervousness, an unease, when he left the apartment immediately after breakfast instead of getting out the cleaning tools. He went down to a gray overcast day, and began to walk.

The Village was in its Sunday morning hush, the streets nearly empty. Cole walked along, smoking, looking at the old buildings, enjoying the walk for its own sake and very nearly forgetting what trouble he’d had driving himself out here.

After a while he stumbled across Minetta Lane, that tiny L-shaped side street in the heart of the Village. The street attracted him, pleased him; it made him feel buoyant merely to walk back and forth on its narrow sidewalk. He spent nearly half an hour there, with only an occasional hurrying pedestrian to interrupt him, and finally emerged on Mac-dougal Street refreshed and happy. Macdougal, the self-conscious center of the bohemian Village, made him nervous, and he hurried north out of that section as quickly as he could, coming to Washington Square Park, another oasis of calm, where he strolled back and forth amid the families and policemen until hunger pangs told him it was time to go back to the apartment.

He left the park on the wrong side, but didn’t realize it till he’d walked three or four blocks and made at least one turning. Gradually it came to him that the quality of the streets had changed, that he was no longer in the neighborhood he’d been limiting himself to. Warehouses and display rooms and office buildings crowded together here, and even on Sunday there were trucks parked along the curb.

When at last he realized his mistake, he tried to reverse direction, but that only made things worse. He walked and walked, this way and that, while panic grew in him, and the sudden sure knowledge that he could get just as brutally, just as totally, lost only a few blocks from home as if he were a thousand miles away.

All the policemen seemed to be in the park. It was twenty minutes before Cole saw one walking ahead of him on the sidewalk. He could have asked directions of some passing pedestrian, but some self-consciousness had made him wait till he could find a cop.

He hurried to catch up to this one, and said, “Excuse me. Pardon me, I’m looking for Grove Street.”

“Grove Street?” He was middle-aged, very tall and somewhat overweight, with an expression of wary coldness. He said, “Over in the Village?”

“Yes. That’s right, the Village.”

“You want to go that way,” the policeman said, pointing. “The Village is over that way.”

“Thank you very much.”

Cole hurried on in the direction the policeman had indicated, and after several blocks he began to recognize buildings, intersections, signs. He had to ask directions once more, this time of a young woman wheeling a baby in a stroller, and eventually found Grove Street and home. He was trembling with nervous anticipation as he raced up the stairs and unlocked his apartment door, and once inside, the door safely shut behind him, he felt as relieved as if he’d just crossed no-man’s land at the height of a battle.