Calypso (12 page)

    "Want to talk?" he said.

    She nodded.

    "What's the matter?"

    She shook her head.

    "Did I do something?"

    She shook her head again.

    "What is it?"

    She sat up, took a tissue from the box on the bedside table, blew her nose, and then put the tissue under her pillow. Carella waited. At last, her hands began to speak. He watched them. He knew the language, he had learned it well over the years, he could now speak it better than hesitantly with his own hands. As she spoke to him, the tears began rolling down her face again, and her hands fluttered and then stopped completely. She sniffed again, and reached for the crumpled tissue under her pillow.

    "You're wrong," he said.

    She shook her head.

    "I'm telling you you're wrong."

    She shook her head again.

    "Honey, she likes you very much."

    Her hands began again. This time they spilled out a torrent of words and phrases, speaking to him so rapidly that he had to tell her to slow down, and even then continuing at a pace almost too fast for him to comprehend. He caught both her hands in his own, and said, "Now come on, honey. If you want me to listen…" She nodded, and sniffed, and began speaking more slowly now, her fingers long and fluid, her dark eyes glistening with the tears that sat upon them as she told him again that she was certain Augusta Kling didn't like her, Augusta had said things and done things tonight-

    "What things?"

    Teddy's hands moved again.
The wine,
she said.

    "The wine? What about the wine?"

    
When she toasted.

    "I don't remember any toast."

    
She made a toast.

    "To what?-"

    
To you and Bert.

    "To the case, you mean. To solving the case."

    
No, to you and Bert.

    "Honey-"

    
She left me out. She drank only to you and Bert.

    "Now why would she do a thing like that? She's one of the sweetest people-“

    Teddy burst into tears again.

    He put his arms around her and held her close. The rain beat steadily on the windowpanes. "Honey," he said, and she looked up into his face, and studied his mouth, and watched the words as they formed on his lips. "Honey, Augusta likes you very much."

    Teddy shook her head.

    "Honey, she
said
so. Do you remember when you told the story about the kids… about April falling in the lake at that P.B.A. picnic? And Mark jumping in to rescue her when the water was only two feet deep? Do you remember telling…?”

    Teddy nodded.

    "And then you went to the ladies' room, do you remember?"

    She nodded again.

    "Well, the minute you were gone, Augusta told me how terrific you were.”

    Teddy looked up at him.

    "That's just what she said. She said, 'Jesus, Teddy's terrific, I wish I could tell a story like her.' "

    The tears were beginning to flow again.

    "Honey, why on earth
wouldn't
she like you?"

    She looked him dead in the eye. Her hands began to move.
Because I'm a deaf mute,
she said.

    "You're the most wonderful woman in the world," he said, and kissed her, and held her close again. And then he kissed the tears from her face and from her eyes, and told her again how much he loved her, told her what he had told her that day years and years ago when he'd asked her to marry him for the twelfth time and had finally convinced her that she was so much
more
than any other woman when until that moment she had considered herself somehow less. He told her again now, he said, "Jesus, I love you, Teddy, I love you to death," and then they made love as they had when they were younger, much younger.

    

    

    He knew she was on the island, he had heard the launch pulling into the dock more than an hour ago, but she had not yet come to see him, and he wondered about this, wondered if he'd done something to displease her. She had left the island shortly after she'd fed him on Friday night, and he had not been fed since. The clock on the wall-a new acquisition he'd had to beg for-read 9:15. He'd had no breakfast today, and no lunch, and he wondered now if she was going to forget about dinner, too. Sometimes, he cursed the clock. Without the clock, there had been an almost blissful sense of disorientation. Minutes faded into hours to become days and then weeks and months. And years. He had looked up at the clock when he'd heard the launch last night-8:30 p.m., which meant that she'd be on the mainland by 9:00, that's how long the trip took, a half hour. Figure close to two hours into the city, she'd have been in Isola by a little before 11:00.

    He wondered where she went in the city, wondered about her life outside this room and off this island. He had seen her in the city only once, the night they'd met, and that had been seven years ago-she had let him keep a calendar before she allowed him to have the clock. He would try to count the days, but there were no windows in the room and he never knew' when the sun had risen or when it was setting. In the first year, he miscalculated by a month. He thought it was Easter. By his reckoning, trying to keep time without a clock, marking off by guesswork the days on the calendar, he thought it was Easter already. She laughed and told him it was only February the twelfth, he'd been there only five months, was he growing tired of her so soon?

    The room-his cage, he called it-was perhaps fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long, he had paced it off the first time she'd locked him in here. He had been on the island only a week then, and had told her he wanted to go back to the mainland, and she'd said, Sure, she just wanted to make a phone call, why didn't he mix himself a drink, relax a bit, she wouldn't be a minute. He trusted her then; this was after a week of fucking their brains out all over the house-her bedroom, the living room floor, the kitchen with her bare ass on the countertop and her legs wrapped around his waist, the playroom, and
this
room, which had been a guest room before it became his cage and which-she told him-had been a psychiatrist's office before she bought the house. That explained the double doors.

    The doors were massive, made of sturdy oak, one opening into the room with the knob on the left, the other opening out with the knob on the right. If you were inside the room and you opened the first door, you found yourself smack up against the second door. This was for privacy. When the psychiatrist owned the house, he didn't want anyone to hear the rantings of the crazy people who paid him sixty dollars an hour to lie on his couch. Thick double doors. Piano hinges on each of the doors, you couldn't take out any pins and lift the doors off their hinges because there weren't any exposed pins to take out. Locks on both doors, the inside one and the outer one. No windows on any of the walls because this was a room that had been part of a big cinderblock, rectangular-shaped basement with the furnace in one corner before the psychiatrist built some walls around the furnace and divided the remaining space into equal halves-the playroom next door, where Santo had fucked her on the pool table the first week he was here, and this room, his cage, that had once been the psychiatrist's office, but was now a proper guest room with a wall unit opposite the bed, and a couch against one of the walls, and pictures on the walls, and the big double bed itself of course, and the private bathroom with a sink, a toilet, and a tub.

    "Sure," she'd told him, "you just relax, make yourself a drink. I have these phone calls to get off my mind, and then we'll hop in the boat and I'll take you back to the mainland, okay, sweetie?" Sure, sweetie. He'd gone to the bar that was part of the wall unit opposite the bed, and he'd mixed himself a scotch and soda, and then he'd sat on the couch listening to the stereo. This was seven years ago, the record collection was old even then, most of the tunes going back a long, long time. She hadn't replaced any of the records in the past seven years; he listened to the same stuff over and over again, the records worn and scratchy now, the way
he
was worn and scratchy, seven years, seven years in this room. But that night long ago, after they'd spent a week together out here on the island, beautiful that September, woman with her own private little island off Sands Spit, man, he was impressed! Couldn't get enough of him, told him she was twenty-eight years old, but he saw a college graduation picture of her in the living room, and there was a date on the back of it, and he figured a person graduated college when they were twenty-two, right? Well, maybe younger if they were real smart, so okay give her the benefit of the doubt, say she graduated when she was twenty, nobody graduated college younger than twenty, which according to the date on the back of the graduation picture would've made her thirty-two years old and not what she claimed to be, not twenty-eight like she claimed. Which made her thirty-nine years old now, an old lady.

    Where was his dinner, wasn't she gonna bring him no dinner tonight, was she going to starve him the way she did for two weeks that time he almost escaped? Would've made it, too, if it hadn't been for the dog. She knew he was scared of dogs, he'd told her so, pillow talk during their first week together, terrified of dogs, you know what I mean? When I was eight years old, I got bit by a dog on the roof. Goddamn fox terrier, guy had taken him up on the roof to do his business, fuckin mutt came at me and tore a piece out of my leg. I had to get rabies shots, you ever have rabies shots? Christ, the pain. I been scared of dogs ever since, I shit in my pants a dog even comes near me. He was over the wall and out when she let the dog loose-big German shepherd, came after him with his fangs bared, knocked him to the ground, he went tumbling over in the tall sea grass at the ocean's edge, clawing at the dog's big head, trying to keep those teeth away from him, the ocean pounding in, her voice coming in over the roar of the surf, "No, Clarence, no," some fuckin name for a killer German shepherd, Clarence! Picked up the dog's leash in one hand, and told Santo to head back for the house like a nice little boy, saw where he'd picked the locks on both doors and locked him in the bathroom for the night, with the dog sitting just outside the door. All night long, he could hear the dog growling. She starved Santo for the next two weeks, as punishment for having tried to escape, and when finally she fed him again, there was something in the food-it knocked him out completely. He didn't know how long he was out, but when he woke up there were new locks on both doors, dead-bolt locks, he couldn't have picked them even if he was a pro. And from then on, the dog was always outside those big double doors, sitting in the hallway.

    But that was later, that was-he kept losing track of time. The first time she'd locked him in here, yes, he was listening, yes, to her records, and sipping at his scotch, just digging the sound and thinking he'd be back in the city again soon, playing another gig with Georgie and the guys, sipping, smiling, and then becoming aware of time all at once, looking at his wristwatch and realizing she'd been gone a good half hour. Well, leave it to a woman, goes to make a few phone calls and takes forever. Smiling, he got off the couch and went to the door and twisted the knob the way he would have ordinarily, not suspecting a thing yet, and then discovering the door was locked, she had locked the door on him. He began yelling for her to come unlock the door, but if she heard him, she didn't come do it. He doubted if she heard him, anyway, through those big double mothers. She didn't come back till the next morning, to bring him a tray of breakfast. She had a gun when she came into the room, he didn't know whether she'd had it in the house here all along, or whether she'd taken the boat over to the mainland to buy it. He didn't know anything about guns, he couldn't tell one caliber of gun from another. But this didn't look like no dainty little gun a lady would keep in her handbag. This looked like a gun could blow a man's head off. She told him to back away from the door, and he said, "Hey, come on, what is this?" and she wagged the gun at him and just said, "Back." Then she put the breakfast tray on the floor and said, "There's your food, eat it," and went out, locking both doors behind her.

    That breakfast was the first time she put anything in his food. He drank his orange juice, and then he ate his cornflakes and drank his coffee, and he didn't know which of the things he ate or drank was doped, but
something
was because he passed out cold almost immediately afterward, and when he woke up again-he didn't know how many hours later-he was naked on the bed, all his clothes gone, his wristwatch gone, his wrists tied together behind his back, and his feet tied together at the ankles. He started yelling for her again. But again, he didn't know whether she could hear him through those double doors. Anyway, he was beginning to understand that she would come to him only when she wanted to. There was no sense yelling or screaming, there was no sense doing anything except trying to figure a way out.

    He knew what the island looked like; she'd shown him around it during that first week when he was still a guest and not a prisoner, fucked her on the boat and on the beach, fucked her in the little pine forest that ran along the southern shore, fucked her day and night, never met a woman like her in his life, and told her so. But, you know, he missed the city, wanted to get back to the city-"Are you getting tired of me?" she asked. "No, no, just want to walk those streets again, you know, hear those sidewalks humming under my feet, huh, baby? I'm a city boy, born and raised there, my mom's from Venezuela and my pop's from Trinidad-haven't seen
him
since I was three and he took off with a girl used to waitress up in Diamondback-but me and my brother Georgie are one-hundred-percent American Yankee-Doodle Dandy boys, yes-sir," he said, and burst out laughing. "Stay just another day," she said.