The Lesson (14 page)

“Please Kevin—hiccup!—I’m trying to have a serious conversation here!” And these blasted hiccups were ruining everything.

“I realize that, Gina.”

“What do you mean they’re good for you?” She’d never heard anyone call hiccups good.

“Some scientists believe hiccups help with peristalsis, though they’re mostly from the evolutionist camp. They say we needed help to get food down our esophagus back in the days when we walked on all fours.”

“Do you sit around—hiccup!—thinking up ways to make fun of me?”

“I would never make fun of you, Gina.” At least he
sounded
serious.

“How do you know anything about peristalsis and evolution and—hiccup!—hiccups?”

“I read the encyclopedia in the ship’s library when I run out of military history books at sea. It doesn’t take long on a six-month Westpac to run out of reading material. Sailors donate all kinds of novels to the library, but I don’t read fiction. There’s the
Navy Times
weekly and
All Hands
monthly. They’re good, but you can go through back issues fairly quickly. And they tend to be a little too focused. You know. On the Navy.”

“You’re a really nice guy—hiccup!”

“Thank you.”

“And I—hiccup!—like you a lot. What’s a
Westpac, by the way?”

“It’s a Navy term for a trip to the West Pacific.”

“Oh ... Kevin, I’ve thought about this, and it’s just that … it’s just that you’re not my—hiccup!—type. I don’t see a future in this for either of us.”

“You think too much. What type do you see in your future? From the sounds of it you might be better off dating a med student type.”

There was a long pause. Hiccup!
Med student.
Gina started to laugh, which certainly didn’t follow the script she had carefully written. But then again, it hadn’t occurred to her that Kevin had a role to play in her little drama. Her mind went completely blank. She had no idea how to respond.

“You dating some law student from the university?” he asked, without waiting for an answer to his other question. He said
law student
as if it were a big hairy bug that squirted something smelly from a gland beneath its shiny black abdomen.

“Would it matter if I was?”

“Well, it would make a lot more sense than, ‘You’re not my type.’ What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t think you know what your type is. For that matter, I don’t think you know what type I am, either. Actually we don’t know each other very well at all. That’s why you ought to go out with me tomorrow night. I have tickets to a Gilbert and Sullivan show at the Montgomery Theater. Why don’t you come? We’ll have a great time.”

“I can’t, Kevin. I’ve made up my mind. I don’t want to string you—hiccup!—along. I’m just trying to be honest with you.”

She felt like she was begging. He didn’t make it any easier by charming her with humor.

“Please. String me along.”

“You’re making this awfully difficult.”

“Exactly.”

“No, Kevin. I can’t go out with you anymore. Please—hiccup!—don’t call again. Please understand. This is best for both of us.”

“This is lousy for both of us.”

“I gotta go, Kevin. Please don’t call me again. I’m going to hang up now. Good night.”

She hung up the phone quickly. She had been worked up before he called. Saying good-bye touched a nerve that was already sensitive. Before she had a chance to dissolve into spasms of sobs, she picked up the phone again to call Bonnie.

The Apartment, Lincoln Street

Another Friday night, another true crime book. Another torpedoed relationship
.

Gina got into her favorite white baby dolls and settled into bed for some pleasure reading. She never opened her textbooks on Friday nights—even the Greatly Dreaded One would never be that desperate. Around eleven-thirty she got hungry and went to the kitchen to bang around the pots and pans, entirely with the lights off. Remembering what Kevin had told her about being able to see into her dark kitchen, she moved quickly, continually looking over her shoulder toward the minipanes, wishing all the while that she had money to cover the windows; asking her parents for it was unthinkable. Hurriedly she popped a little popcorn in vegetable oil in an aluminum pot on the stove and then returned to her bedroom to munch and read.

She was still up around midnight, reading a book she’d picked up at a garage sale. It was a wretched tale of a man who had married a series of women only to kill them soon afterward to collect on their life insurance policies. All of his unsuspecting victims had died violent, macabre deaths, which the man had elaborately staged to look like the work of others less clever than he. Gina kept telling herself to put the book down and get some sleep, as if sleep were possible after she had mentally ingested a plate full of chains awed arms and a few glass jars of severed heads. She had just reached the part where the police were following a trail of blood into the master bedroom when she heard the phone ring in the living room. The unexpected
bbbrrringgg!
caused her heart to pound hard a few seconds, and for a fleeting moment she actually hoped it was Kevin—at least she would be spending the last part of her Friday night with someone who didn’t keep a chainsaw in the trunk of his car. The thought of Kevin that popped into her head surprised her as much as the ringing phone, but she pushed it into her mental filing cabinet. She would make time later to analyze it to death. Right now someone was calling. She hurried to the living room to pick up the receiver.

“Hello?” she said.

“Open your front door.”

The voice was a man’s. She didn’t recognize it, but she was certain it was not Kevin’s. It was deeper than Kevin’s. It could have belonged to any man between the ages of twenty and forty—she couldn’t tell. But she noted also, with
disappointment, that the voice most certainly was not Michael’s.

“Pardon me? Who is this?”

“Open your front door,” the stranger repeated. Then she heard the familiar click of a phone being set on a receiver.

She hung up too and stood there, wondering what to do. Open the front door? Should she open the front door? It was the middle of the night! What was on the other side of the door? Or worse,
who
was on the other side of the door? Who was that guy on the phone? What was going on? Was this a prank?

Gina was overcome with the heart-pounding realization that she, or at least her apartment, was being watched. Someone whom she did not recognize knew where she lived. Likely that person was outside right now and knew she was home—alone. Her car was parked at the curb as it always was, and the glow of her bedroom lamp could easily be seen from the street. Perhaps this sinister character was watching right now to see what she would do. How great a risk, was it, to open the front door? She could see the door from where she stood by the phone. She stared at it, half expecting it to burst open on its own, something unspeakable rushing through it, something with knives and a chainsaw and crazed eyes and …

Should she open it?

She stood, feet frozen to the floor, for a very long time, staring at the door and listening for the slightest sound that might come from that direction.
She heard nothing but her own breathing. Finally she decided to take a few, tiptoed steps toward the door. No. Bad idea. She reversed herself and tiptoed to the kitchen. Nothing was more than a few steps away in her cracker box apartment. In the pale streetlight that streamed through the curtainless wall of windows, she slowly opened the oven door to retrieve the cast-iron frying pan. The grating metal of the door mechanism made an awful racket. Worried that her movements might be heard from the stoop, she froze in place to listen. She heard nothing, so she reached into the oven and grabbed the frying pan, but she left the door wide open so that whatever or whoever was on her stoop wouldn’t hear the sound of her raspy oven door closing and guess which room of her apartment she was in. Gripping the lethal cookware in her right hand, she crept silently back to the living room. She stopped several times to listen for sounds coming from the door. When she sensed that her movements weren’t causing anything monstrous to burst through it, she took a few more light steps, each time stopping to listen for sound outside the door. Finally she was within reach of the chain. She hesitated again, figuring whatever horror lurked on the other side of the door would hear her fumbling with the chain and prepare to pounce.

She whispered a prayer and then reached for the chain and pulled it quickly. While gripping the frying pan above her head with her right hand—poised to whack the daylights out of anyone waiting
on the other side of the door—slowly, ever slowly, she opened it a crack with her left.

“Whoever you are, you should know that I’m armed!” she yelled through the crack in the door, using an air of authority every bit as menacing as any Hollywood police officer. She glanced up at the cast iron frying pan in her hand. ”I’m trained to use it too!”

She was almost surprised when, from the black stillness of Lincoln Street no one returned a threat. She stood a moment more, the frying pan still poised to bash the brains of any unsuspecting bad guy. But when nothing reached into the apartment to grab her, she bent her head a little closer to the door, but not so close as to risk thrusting any part of her body outside the apartment, not even a nose.

Gina glanced left then right. More darkness. Then she shifted her eyes downward to her narrow strip of concrete stoop. She saw bags. Two big, brown, paper grocery sacks, bulging with groceries. She stared at the bags for several seconds to check for movement. When she was fairly confident that they contained nothing inclined to jump out and attack a terrified, shivering co-ed, she opened the door a little more, enough to
surveil a few hundred feet of Lincoln Street. She glanced around slowly to see if anyone was watching. She saw no signs of life and no strange cars parked anywhere, so she figured she was alone and that it was safe to step out on the stoop in her baby dolls.

She moved quickly to pick up one bag. It was heavy, filled to the top with groceries. Still gripping
the frying pan in one hand, she carried the first bag through the door, which she immediately turned around and locked, and then set the bulging bag on her kitchen table. She went back for the second bag and set it also on the table, but as before, she made sure she locked the door before she returned to the kitchen. She never let go of the frying pan. She latched the chain before she set down the second bag.

Groceries! Someone had brought her groceries! Delighted, she madly pulled one item after another from those lovely bags. Everything, it appeared, was frozen, canned, or vacuum-sealed, and all of it was prepared food, the kind of items one usually finds at a late night convenience store—not a fresh piece of meat, fruit, or vegetable in those sacks, though she did find one-half gallon of milk. It was strange that whoever had determined to bless her with groceries had selected almost exclusively prepared food, but she was so happy to get it that she didn’t think much about it.

As she pulled the various items from the first bag, a small white envelope fluttered to the bottom. It must have been placed on the top of the groceries, and likely she had disturbed it when she picked up the sacks. She ripped open the envelope and read, in handwriting she did not recognize: “This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.”

She didn’t know who had delivered the bags, but when she saw the scripture, she knew one heart-sinking fact for certain: not Michael.

The Launderette, Lafayette Street

Around nine-thirty the next morning Gina arrived at Bonnie’s place. As usual, she wasn’t ready to leave, but Gina was used to Bonnie’s tardiness. Gina did what she could to finish dressing Benjamin, stuffing his fat little legs into a pair of toddler jeans. Then she filled the diaper bag with supplies while Bonnie finished dressing Sarah. In twenty minutes they were caravanning toward the Launderette on Lafayette Street. Gina drove her own car because there wasn’t enough room in either girl’s compact for their bulky laundry baskets, two adults, one infant seat, a diaper bag, and sundry toys and snacks for the little ones. They were fortunate this morning: two parking spaces were available at the curb directly in front of the Launderette.

They sorted their laundry by color, and while it agitated in the large white washing machines, the girls sat down on stackable plastic chairs set in a row against the wall. Bonnie plopped Benjamin on the chair beside her to the right, and, to keep him
busy, handed him a picture book about an elephant who takes a monkey to a tea party. Sarah sat on the floor by her mother’s feet, content to do nothing more than suck on a bottle and look adorable, just so long as her mother was nearby. Gina sat on Bonnie’s left. Bonnie wanted to know what was happening with Kevin and Gina. She was all questions this morning.

“So you met him at the Menzies?”

“I said two words to him at the Menzies. Mrs. Menzies introduced us at the breakfast bar and we exchanged a few words, that’s all. Later he followed me home. Ten-thirty at night and there’s this strange guy in polyester pants knocking on my front door.”