The Cavanaugh Quest (9 page)

“It depends when you’re talking about. She changed, y’see.” He scooped up a handful of Spanish peanuts and suggested we go outside. He was still lean but there was a little thickening about his waist. I was sorry about his poor damn liver. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he seemed to think. The breeze was cool, the sky bright and spattered with blinking stars which had actually burned away and died a million years ago. He smiled at some of the patio sitters who spoke his name and then we were on the grass, which was moist in the night. The last purple fingers had lost their grip on the western sky. He was heading instinctively for the shadowy bulk of the tennis courts, the high fences.

“When she first showed up here, she was just kitchen help, then she did some waiting on tables, then she came to me in her spare time wanting me to teach her the game. She was very serious and very quiet and determined, very pretty. So I figured, what the hell, I’ll spend a little time on her—I admit it, I liked to watch her move around and work up a sweat. I figured she was safer game than a member—you start messing around with members, wives and daughters, which I’ve done, God knows, you’re running a real risk. You could get fired if you got caught at it … Well, she picked up the game, really showed me something, and she began to loosen up a bit, get a little friendlier, than a lot friendlier—hell, the thing was she wanted to be my assistant.

“She was doing nothing more or less than a little cockteasing and I sure as hell went for it. She seemed to have some real supporters among the members and when I suggested that she’d be a real help to me running the shop, working with some of the members when I was booked solid—when I went to them with the idea, they said fine, she’d be a help, all right. She really impressed them, I think, industrious as hell.”

We’d reached the courts and he hooked his fingers into the fencing and leaned against it as if he were counting the six courts. It was quiet; nothing moved but the wind in the willows.

“Once she was working in the pro shop I sort of waited for a chance and one night it came. I tried a little straight-ahead stuff with her, she yanked away from me and the buttons came off her blouse like machine-gun fire. She wasn’t saying anything and I’d had a few drinks and didn’t know when to quit. I kept at her and pulled her brassiere off and there were these tiny round tits, smooth, with big stiff nipples …” He sighed and turned around to look at me. “I don’t know why I stopped. Maybe it was because she didn’t look flustered, maybe it was because she’d always seemed so distant and seeing her naked was so … unnatural, I guess. Anyway, I was really shocked at what I’d done.” He shook his head as if he were reliving the confusions of that moment years before.

“She just looked at me, watched me looking at her chest, and told me that I was just one step from losing my job and facing a criminal action. She was so composed, Paulie, I just felt like I wanted to hide. She said she had friends among the members who would have me dismissed and give her all the legal advice she wanted. She didn’t seem angry or out of breath or anything. I’ve never felt such a chill—I thought my dick was gonna just drop on the floor.

“I apologized and she said never to mention it again, to forget it. She just stared at me for a while, then she put her brassiere back on right in front of me, took a brand-new tennis shirt out of the cabinet, pulled it on over her head, threw the ripped blouse into a wastebasket, and left. I was absolutely terrified, for my job mainly. But she never did anything about it, nothing more was ever said … but she was a true-blue bitch, I’ve never seen anything to match it. She didn’t have a pot to piss in but she was right at the head of the class and I’ve had to deal with a lot of rich, nasty people in this job. She just threw me the hell away, looked right through me from then on … She doesn’t forget, not ever. Billy Whitefoot really got the full curse, poor son of a bitch. The job she did on him was goddamn incredible. Then when he was all used up, she moved on to Ole Kronstrom and that poor asshole she married, Larry what’s-his-name.”

We eventually walked back toward the clubhouse.

“What brought her up, anyway?”

“Her husband killed himself the other day. Nobody seems to know why. I was just curious.”

“Women. She probably drove him to it.”

“That’s a popular view.”

“Yeah, I can see how she’d make a guy do something like that. Well, she’s one of a kind.”

On the driveway he put his hand on my arm.

“Look, you’re not going to tell this stuff to anybody, are you? I mean, not your father or his cronies? They’re the ones she meant when she said she had friends …”

“No, Darwin, I’m not going to tell anybody.”

“I’d appreciate it.” He chuckled in the dark. “I’ve got enough problems, Paulie. It’s all catching up with me.” Before he went back into the bar, he said something funny: “Women, if they didn’t have cunts, they’d be hunted.”

I left him alone with his liver and another gimlet and called Anne. I asked her if I could stop by for a minute on the way home. She said it was okay with her; she was just putting a steak on the grill. I asked her to make it two.

The house sat on a hill behind a vine-covered stone wall with a sharp drop of brambles collapsing downward steeply to Lake of the Isles. I pulled up the narrow driveway with the shrubberies’ claws reaching hungrily for my face, clattering at the sides of the car. The house, which had had a peculiarly crumbly look about it for years, was dark but when I went in I saw the dim glow from Anne’s workroom. The place smelled of airplane glue and there was a Moody Blues record playing. She was bent over a trestle worktable with a complicated lamp jutting out over the fuselage of a large Messerschmitt ME 109 she was repairing. The table was covered with spines of balsa wood, pliers and tweezers and little pots of paint and tubes of glue and wires and Exacto knives and dirty hand rags. A dead joint had burned away in an ashtray, leaving the faint memory of her homegrown grass hanging in the air. She looked up and for a moment I didn’t quite recognize her: She had had her black hair cropped very short and it had been years since I’d seen her without a wig of one kind or another.

“Hi,” she said. “I put the steaks on. Hand me that beer, will you, please?” She put down the needle-nosed pliers and looked at the dismantled airplane the way someone else might sadly inspect a bird with a broken wing.

“Have a crash?”

“A beaut,” she said. “Sheared off a wing and took the undercarriage out. Shit.” She sighed and swigged at the Coors she always brought back from her trips to Aspen, where her parents had a million-dollar retreat. “Well, it’s time to be philosophical—it’s the tinkering that’s fun, right? And how’s that antique carburetor system of yours working?”

“The car runs,” I said. “What can I say?”

“You really should let me look at that for you. The timing is probably all shot to hell, too.”

“I suppose.” She handed me the beer and I remembered too late that it would be sickly warm. She’d probably been pulling at the same can since noon.

“God, how can you live in a world where you don’t know how anything works? You don’t know how your car works, or your television set, or the presses at the paper, or anything … Doesn’t it make you nervous, Cav?”

“Lots of other things make me nervous.” We’d had this conversation before. Many times. Several hundred times. “Knowing would make me nervous.”

She shook her head. Above us a red Focke-Wulf hung by piano wires swayed in the breeze. The night moved stealthily in the brambles outside.

“Let’s go check the steaks,” she said, wiping crud off her hands. “You want to split a joint? Homegrown organic shit,” she offered as a final inducement.

“No thanks.”

“Me neither,” she said. “I’m beginning to believe all the brain-damage stuff.” She was wearing a T-shirt with the big red Rolling Stones tongue dangling obscenely between her breasts; tight Levi’s across her broad, firm hips. Barefoot she was within an inch of six feet. As she passed me, she brushed her lips across my mouth and I could taste the warm beer on her.

The huge kitchen was all ancient butcher block, dirty dishes everywhere, a collander with a wilted clump of lettuce that was probably a week old. She took another Coors out of a case on the counter; impossibly, she always just forgot to put it in the refrigerator; it wasn’t that she even liked warm beer. She asked me if I wanted one and I made a face. She shrugged—“It’s your funeral”—and we went out the back door. The steaks sizzled over reddish coals, there was a glass bowl full of lettuce and tomatoes and green peppers and bits of cheese and pepperoni, and a Dansk bucket with ice and a bottle of something in it, all proving that she could still get it together if inclined to do so.

She ate like a starved lion, demolished her salad. “Come on, eat,” she said. “I made this for you …” She smiled while I ate, finished before me, and lit a normal Winston and leaned back, legs crossed. The small lawn seemed isolated, dark, quiet, nestled between the bramble cliff and the moldering three-story mansion. Something ran across the back, near the thicket, something small and furry.

“Did you just want a free meal?” she asked, relaxed, her voice mellow. “Or is there something on your mind?”

“Something on my mind, something I’m getting into with no particular reason. Just things people have been saying …” I didn’t quite know where to begin.

“So?”

“Larry Blankenship—do you know the name?”

“Of course,” she said patiently. “He was married to a friend of mine.”

“Well, he killed himself a couple of days ago.” She froze the cigarette on the way to her mouth and stared at me, her face a mask of surprise and paling shock. “What?”

“He shot himself in the lobby of my building.”

“Well, for God’s sake … Larry. He was such a simple guy, so worried about everything.”

“I wanted to ask you about your friend Kim Roderick.”

“What about her? Do you know her?”

“No, I don’t know her, but somebody mentioned that you knew her. People have been telling me that she may have driven Blankenship to kill himself …”

She shook her head and dragged on the cigarette. “No, I don’t think so. I’m not saying Kim wouldn’t be capable of doing that to a guy—but not to Larry.” She shook her head more vehemently, stubbed out her cigarette. “If you’d said that poor Indian kid, Whitefoot, had killed himself or drunk himself to death, that I could have attributed to Kim, at sort of second or third hand, you know. But not poor Larry … he was a Kigmy—”

“A what?”

“A Kigmy. Remember Al Capp? He had the Schmoos and the Kigmies. The Schmoos were just too good to be true—they laid bottled Grade A milk and when you broiled them they tasted like sirloin; fried, they tasted like chicken. The Kigmies were the perfect masochists—they wanted only to be kicked, that was their mission, they were there for the world to take out aggressions on, just waiting to be kicked. He made people nervous. And Kim usually treated him pretty benevolently—sort of like brother and sister. It was hard for me to imagine them in bed, he was so passive. But, then, she was always terrified of sex—or, anyway, I’d have bet on it. She seemed frigid to me, she always seemed so tightly controlled …” She cocked an eye at me. “You’d have liked her, maybe. She was—is—very neat, determined, but there were signals every so often that something pretty spooky was going on underneath. That would appeal to you.” Her eyes gleamed with the happy malice of people who knew each other overly well.

“Some people think she was a slut, a temptress, and I quote.”

“Well, live and let live. I’m just telling you what I think.” She paused. “Poor Larry. I never told you but when he was going through one of his depressions and you and I were on the verge of murder, I met him at Norway Creek, it was around Christmas, when your emotions are all shot to hell, and we were both lonely and kind of drunk and I felt this big surge of pity for him, the earth mother in me, and I brought him back here and plied him with hot buttered rum before the fireplace. I told him I had a special Christmas present for him, and I took off my clothes—pretty neat scene, actually—and I was going to do a couple of things he wouldn’t soon forget. But he started to cry and talk about Kim and couldn’t get a twitch out of his little thing.” She picked some cheese and lettuce out of the salad bowl and licked the dressing off her fingers. The last piece of steak disappeared. “Now he’s dead and never knew what he missed.”

“Does Kim know that?”

“Sure, he told her, part of the Kigmy thing. He was that type, rubber mouth. But you know what Kim did? She came over very formally and told me that she appreciated what I’d done for Larry. We weren’t seeing each other at all in those days, our friendship was from our teenage years … but she thanked me. Now, in the last few years since you and I split up, we’ve sort of renewed our friendship, carefully but for real. Of course I’m always optimistic about things like that.”

“Is she one of your trophies?” I said. “Noblesse oblige and all that, befriending the friendless and whatnot?”

“Not really,” she said without anger at my cheap shot. “I think I’ve passed through that phase. She started out that way but not anymore.”

“Doesn’t her relationship with Kronstrom bother you?”

“My God, you have been doing your homework, little man. But no, why on earth should it bother me? From what I can tell you, whatever they have works pretty well for them. I’m just in no position to judge her, or anyone else, on moral grounds. People just do what they do …” She smiled sadly. “But I’m terribly sorry about Larry. As for blaming her, though, you’ll have to ask somebody else.”

We went back inside and stopped in the darkened front hall.

“I wish I hadn’t started all this,” I said quietly. “It just keeps me going round and round. It doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. I keep hearing all these conflicting attitudes about this woman and she’s a ghost, I’ve never seen her, I don’t even know what she looks like …”

“You can always just stop worrying about it. You don’t have to do this, Cav.” She was talking to me now as she’d done in the old days, when we’d been in love.