Blood Music (24 page)

“I guess so. I don't know.”

“Well, the other night—actually it was weeks ago—I was walking down Hudson Street—is that a bottle cap your daughter has?”

“Oh—no, it's a piece of something. Honey, don't eat that, I don't even know what it is.”

“I was walking down Hudson Street, down by the park? You know, I don't know the name.”

“Stevens Park? By Fourth Street?”

“Yeah. Where you can see the Empire State Building across the river. And there was this van. I don't remember if this was before the papers said that the killer might drive a dark van. I didn't get a real good look at it but it was this dark van. I remember it had lettering on the side, in the front? And it was just sitting there, I didn't even see anything, but I got really freaked out, I couldn't even walk by it. That ever happen to you?”

“No, but I can imagine it.”

“I don't know how to explain this but I got such a strong feeling—like if I walked by that van I would never see my home again. It sounds stupid now but it was really scary. It was almost as though I couldn't walk by it—as though there was a wall or something in the way. So I just stood there and listened to the music.”

“Music?”

“Yeah. The van didn't even look like there was anybody inside it—I didn't see any light—but it was blaring this classical music, really loud. It's just that they're calling him the Symphony Slasher now—but this was before they were calling him that. Anyway, I got really creeped out and went around the block. And I said to Michael that we really ought to get out of the city altogether. It's time—” And over the gentle blur of her voice Zelly heard her own internal voice like a mantra:
Pat has a dark van. Pat has a dark van and it has writing on the front panel. Pat has a dark van and it has writing on the front panel and he plays classical music all the time, Pat has a dark van.
“—thinking of looking in Chatham,” Stacy was saying. WE WILL MEET AGAIN BUT NOT WHEN THE MOON IS FULL. I AM NOT SO SHALLOW WHY A VAN? WE WILL MEET AGAIN.

T
hey had been drinking wine and he had heard her giggle for the first time. The streets were soft and welcoming and there had never been fear; fear had dissipated on the new summer air. June twenty-sixth. Red wine with dinner, they ordered pasta dishes but didn't eat them. Only once—when Madeleine flinched as the waiter leaned his arm in front of her to put down the bread plate—had the wine reminded him of blood.

Madeleine was jubilant. Now they had a real lead, one even the police didn't have. She hadn't told John that the police had contacted her. She was afraid it would stop him and equally afraid it would intensify his efforts. Now she wondered whether they should call the task force; but the wine dissuaded her. Even to Madeleine events had taken on the quality of a dream. Their shared aim was becoming a hard shell around them, like a cocoon; they were in a cocoon and they were dreaming. They had begun from a point of intimacy many never reach. They shared, in a sense, a past, and they shared the same fantastic hope for the future. And wine and hate and unrelenting hope had made them giddy tonight.

“My boyfriend always wanted to have sex in one of those basement entrances, down the steps,” Madeleine said. She was looking at her rape as an objective fact, like weather or a geographical feature of the landscape. From where she was it had no power over her.

“Your boyfriend was an asshole,” said John.

“At least I can joke.” They were silent a moment; she had taken his arm as they left the restaurant and her hand felt like a piece of fire.

Madeleine was looking up at the gingko trees on St. Luke's Place. They shone with an unearthly inward light, like hundreds of tiny green moons. “Where's the strangest place you ever had sex?” she asked.

“At Kennedy Airport. We found a place—a cul-de-sac at the end of a long corridor past the bathrooms. You could feel the planes taking off through your feet.”

“Who's ‘we'?”

“My high school girlfriend.” The jet engines had roared up his legs and exploded into the darkness of the girl he held in front of him.

“My high school boyfriend and I used to climb through one of the windows of the church down the block. We did it on the altar.”

“That's even better.”

“He used to be an altar boy.” The streetlights reeled slowly and she laughed. They were walking down the gently sloping street and she held his arm tighter so they wouldn't begin to run. Everything was very clear and far away and he knew they were going to make love.

There was no hurry. Her hand was on his arm and he could see the line of her cheekbone and the flow of her dark gold hair as she walked beside him. She was really very small.

They came to her building and went up the steps; they were quiet because they knew they were going to make love. They were shy with each other and she would not raise her face toward his. She fumbled with the key and she stumbled over the familiar threshold.

Madeleine's apartment was small, a space before a window and a loft bed only. The room was cluttered with books and papers and clothing strewn across chairs; the kitchen counter was hidden beneath cups and hand towels and open containers. John wanted to take her on the floor.

She was standing with her back to him in front of the sink; she held a yellow china cup in her hand. She held it uncertainly, and her head was bowed. John moved up behind her and slid his arms in a ring around her waist and buried his face in her neck. She raised her head back like a cat stretching, rubbing her head against his face, and she put down the cup and put her hands on his hands where they lay around her waist.

Like lightning in his brain he saw her, for an eternal instant, supine, her back against the cement, the man over her. Then it was gone and she was soft in his arms. He turned her, gently, and lifted her chin and looked at her eyes. She was crying. When he kissed her he tasted her salt. She put her arms around him and he saw it again in an instant's illumination, legs spread under the man, and felt a swift involuntary pull at the groin and he didn't know if it was the man's hands on her throat or her tongue in his own mouth.

They kissed across the room and he ran his hand over her body and it wasn't him it was the man, wherever he touched her she had been burned. The probing of her tongue excited him, and he thought of what had been done to her and she moved her breasts under his hand and her head hit the cement and she was very dear to him, he wanted to protect her, he wanted to take her like a whore. And her kiss was like a sacrament in his mouth.

He pulled her gently away from him and saw that she was still crying. “I'm sorry,” she said, and he felt ashamed. He wanted to say something—“I love you”—but he didn't say anything. Even “I love you” would be an insult to her wound. He kissed her forehead. She put her head down against his chest.

“Is that your only bed?” he asked her. She looked surprised but she nodded, still crying soundlessly; her shame was more than he could bear. If he had to he would gladly wait forever.

“It's just as well,” he said. “I'm afraid of heights.”

S
he thought it would be safest just to take the whole key chain: If he were awake when she got back it would be more difficult to slip the single key back on to the ring than it would to put the ring back on top of his dresser. And if he noticed the ring was missing she could just say she hadn't seen it; Pat had put his keys down in exactly the same spot so many times that it wouldn't be hard to shake tonight's memory: the hands reaching out to lay the keys down, the tiny metallic clink, the mind already on dinner and the game and maybe a cold beer. The image the mind replays when asked to remember setting down the keys—is that the most recent image or one of a thousand images overlaid from a thousand days of setting the keys down just so, in exactly the same spot? What other images overlay one another in Pat's mind, each reflexively similar to the last? The mundane tasks of washing up; balling a rag in his hand to wipe the blood from his arms; changing his uniform and tossing it in with the others on Saturdays to take to the Laundromat; washing his face, his hair (or would he drive around a while, rubbing his fingers across his cheek, rubbing the sticky palm of his hand—DID YOU TASTE HER BLOOD?)?

Coins and a hairbrush and a couple of Band-Aids and four stamps. And the key chain coiled like a little cobra in the middle. She picked it up and it weighed a universe in her hand. This was the final betrayal, as real as sweat in a motel room: no matter what she found or didn't find it was the end of her marriage. Maybe it would be better after all just to take the one. She slid the van's key off the ring, working it while she listened to the shower run in the bathroom; Pat was singing. Wordless, low, something she didn't recognize. She was nauseated. She slipped the key into her pocket and it lay along her thigh, the flat cold metal would surely show through her summer shorts, it burned her thigh. He would know she had it. Would he kill her then?

She was in the living room when he came out of the bathroom. He went into the bedroom and she could not move at all. He went over to his dresser; she couldn't see him but she could see his shadow through the doorway; it was a blot, a negative image against the white wall. Zelly looked away, out the living room window, and was surprised to see that it was still light outside.

She had to find out where he parked the van. The shadow wobbled and swayed, and Pat came out of the bedroom. She didn't know how to find out, what to ask. She thought of one thing, too late, the key burning her thigh: “Are you going to have to go out tonight?”

“Not tonight.”

“Good, because I told Stacy I'd try to have dinner with her.”

“Who's Stacy?”

“Just one of the moms from the park. I've mentioned her.”

“I don't remember. I guess so. You're going just like that? Why does it have to be tonight?”

“Stacy said she'd let me know if she could ever get a sitter. It's one of those fluke things. Her next-door neighbor is available tonight. Her husband works late a lot, so he can't watch the baby.” She was appalled at how easily she was lying, and she couldn't stop. “Isn't it okay? If you don't have an appointment tonight.”

“You're going without the baby?”

“If it's okay with you. Just to the Japanese place up on Washington. It's only a few blocks, and we won't be late.”

“I don't mind.” He moved up behind her where she was looking out the window instead of at him; he put his arms around her waist. He rubbed her hips and her belly and then he slipped his hands inside the elastic waistband of her shorts. The key burned. She leaned back against his chest and he rested his chin on top of her head. She could smell his skin and his aftershave—those smells were like the smells of her own skin. A memory smelled like that: There had been a summer, and a fight in the summer, a long time ago. Somewhere near the water. And she had cried and he had come up behind her and rested his chin on the top of her head. The wind had whipped around in a frenzy and she had forgiven him. She closed her eyes.

As if on cue the baby began to whimper: she was done with her supper. “I won't go until I clean up after Mary,” Zelly said. That had been a long time ago and at the table Mary was painting yam into her hair.

“I'll give her a bath,” Pat said. He seemed reluctant to take his hands off her belly. That long-ago summer day came back again for an instant: the absolute luxury of his arms. She made her voice empty. “Did you have trouble finding a parking space?”

“Hmm?”

“Were you able to find a parking spot close to the house?”

“It wasn't too bad.” Pat relaxed his grip and they both moved away, she forward and he back.

“Stacy told me they had signs up all over different streets saying no parking—they're repaving the streets or something.”

“No, there weren't any signs on Hudson.”

Relief made her dizzy for a minute. She went over to Mary and began to wipe her sticky face. “No, they're not doing anything on Hudson. I think it was Bloomfield.”

“I have to move the van before ten tomorrow, though, that's the only reason I got something even remotely close to the house.”

“I wish I could drive the stick, I'd move it for you.” Adrenaline was making her weak, she knew she could find it now but she didn't want to waste time, she wanted him to tell her. Mary waved her arms frantically to avoid the washcloth and gurgled delightedly. Pat went into the kitchen with Mary's dirty dishes. “It's not bad,” he said, “it's only by the park at Fourth Street—” and he said something else but she didn't hear it because of the sudden ringing in her ears and then a silence so complete she thought he might have left the apartment. But he was still in the kitchen and he hadn't heard anything, of course. Hudson and Fourth, her palms were sweating. She leaned her head into Mary's where it rested against her shoulder. Her hair was impossibly soft, like kitten's fur.

“You going to get sushi?” Pat came out of the kitchen toward her and Zelly saw him a thousand times, every time he had ever walked toward her, across a room or a crowd or an empty beach, on their honeymoon in Santo Domingo, with a nimbus around his head from the setting sun; out of the kitchen so many times and the fluorescent light always made a halo; when she was in labor with Mary and he had to go to the bathroom and when she saw him coming back through the delivery-room door she suddenly started crying.

Had they also seen his face?

“You okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.” He moved to the stereo and became engrossed in choosing something to hear. Zelly shifted Mary onto the other shoulder and said no, nothing, but he wasn't listening. He didn't suspect anything. Her heart was beating in her ears again. She kissed Mary's head and felt as though if she put her down she might never get to pick her up again. “Here, take the baby,” she said; she kept her own head down so that he wouldn't see that she was almost crying.