Confessions of a Tax Collector (44 page)

“Of course.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“I would love to go.”

“You would?”

“I just have one question. Why are you covered in blood?”

I bought a new sports jacket, a new shirt—one of those collarless numbers that was all the rage—and a new pair of shoes. The jacket was white; the shirt black-and-white checkerboard. I checked it out in the mirror and thought I looked like a waiter. The shoes were a half-size too small: after gaining all that weight, my feet still looked too big for my body. I drank half a pot of coffee; it was going to be a long night. When touring shows came through town, the paper wanted to run the review the morning after the opening, which meant I had to write the review on the same night I saw the show. That morning, Annie gave me directions to her house, after asking, “Are we still going to see this play?” I had avoided her since I asked her out. I answered only if she wanted to: I was determined to leave the door open for a graceful exit.

“Of course I still want to,” she answered.

* * *

She answered the door wearing a sleeveless black dress that accentuated her long legs.

“Hi,” she said. “You look nice.”

“You think so? I think I look like a waiter.”

She laughed. “You want to come in?”

I looked at my watch. “Actually, if we’re going to make it to Orlando by curtain…”

“Okay. Let me grab my purse.”

I barely paid attention to the show. Occasionally my shoulder brushed hers, and I could see her hands folded in her lap, and at some point in the first act I reached over, my heart slamming in my chest, and took her hand, and Annie DeFlorio let me hold it.

As the lights came up at the end of the first act, I leaned over and whispered in her ear, “I guess you’ve figured out by now, I’m just crazy about you.” She smiled and nodded. I put my arm around her and she leaned her head against my shoulder and her hair was soft under my chin. Her hair smelled like raspberries. I closed my eyes and breathed her in. She was going to leave me and, after a few awkward phone calls, she would be lost to me forever. Another man would hold her hand. Another man would stroke her hair and breathe her in and bring her to his bed. I stroked her bare shoulder and thought this might be the last time I touched her.

After the final curtain, as we walked to the car, she asked, “Do you believe everything happens for a reason?”

“I never thought about it.”

She laughed. “Liar.”

“Okay, I have, but the implications terrify me.”

“Why?”

“Because some pretty terrible things happen, Annie.” Her name sounded different to my ears, felt different on my tongue, now. I said it again, softly, “Annie.”

She stopped walking. We were almost to the car. I thought she had stopped so I could open her door. I turned.

“Sometimes,” she said, “sometimes, though, wonderful things happen.”

I walked back to her and kissed her. She opened her eyes and said, “I honestly had no idea, until tonight.”

We stopped at an all-night diner for coffee. We both took ours black. “I never knew a man who didn’t take cream or sugar,” she said. I realized at that moment how deep into the well I had fallen when this remark, spoken in a tone of admiration, made me swell with pride. I ate a piece of apple pie. Annie listened to my confession, smiling while I babbled. She was beautiful. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever known. I recalled all the times I sat in her office, distracted past all reason by the twirling of the ends of her hair and the running of her finger along her lower lip. She laughed and said she wasn’t even aware she was doing it.

I kissed her in the car and again on her front porch. She did not invite me in. “I had a wonderful time.”

“You said I didn’t look like a waiter just to be kind, didn’t you?”

She laughed. “Okay, maybe you do look a little like a waiter.”

“You never lie, do you? Well. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then. At work.”

For some reason, we both laughed.

Three days later, on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, we drove to Sarasota to see another play. Annie wore a green sweater and a short green plaid skirt.

“Green is your favorite color,” I told her.

“How do you know that?”

“You told me. A long time ago.”

“Okay, smart guy, what’s my favorite kind of food?”

“Easy, French. Gimme something tough.”

“My favorite day of the week.”

“Thursday.” I was guessing.

She gasped. “Is that yours, too?”

“I’ve always loved Thursdays.”

She was smiling. “Why?”

“Because it’s the day after Wednesdays.”

“What’s your birthday?”

“November fourth.”

“Mine’s in November, too. November nineteenth.”

“Both Scorpios. You know, they say Scorpios are sexual demons.”

“I know.” She took my hand.

“I feel absolutely great,” I told her.

“Me, too.”

After the show, we drove to a restaurant in Tampa. We sat in the parking lot and talked. We kissed. I stroked her hair, whispered in her ear, “Annie.” An hour went by.

“Are we going in?” she finally asked.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“Neither am I.” She sounded relieved.

“Let’s drive back to Lakeside,” I said. “We’ll stop somewhere on the way.”

On the interstate, the conversation lagged. She took my hand and gently kissed my fingertips. I drove straight to her house. She invited me inside for a drink. Inside, the drink I requested was a glass of ice water. We sat on the sofa in the living room. We were alone; her children were visiting with their father. Neither of us had eaten since lunch. Neither of us was hungry.

Later, long after it had become March 18, she clung to me, running her fingers over my bare chest.

“Why did you do it, this bodybuilding thing? Not that I mind exactly.”

“I wanted you to notice me.”

“Seriously.”

“I wanted to be perfect.”

“Nobody can be perfect, Rick.”

“You are. I’m in love with you, Annie.”

She placed a finger on my lips. “I need to tell you something. I never cheated on him.”

“You’re not cheating on him now.”

“No, I mean, I was faithful in my marriage. And I married very young, Rick; I don’t have much experience.”

She was lying on her back, the covers pulled to her chin, her hair a shimmering brown halo beneath her head, her face a pale, exquisite outline against the darkness. I leaned over her and ran my fingertips along her brow, across her eyelids. She shuddered.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered.

Beth sat on my left at Annie’s farewell luncheon. Annie sat on my right. After our orders were taken, Beth leaned over and whispered, “You’re holding Annie’s hand under the table, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I answered. I should have lied.

During the meal a man walked into the restaurant. He was alone. He sat down and chatted with the waitress. He looked vaguely familiar. At first I thought he might be one of my tax protestors; I had definitely seen him somewhere before. I nudged Beth and said, “That guy over there, sitting by himself, I’ve seen him somewhere before.”

“That’s Peter Watson,” she said casually, without looking up from her salad.

I remembered him now. Peter Watson was Culpepper’s boss, the head of Inspection for the North Florida District.

Annie summoned me to her office that afternoon and closed the door. I tried to kiss her and she pushed me gently away.

“It’s begun,” she said.

“We haven’t done anything wrong.”

“That isn’t the point, Rick. You’ve been here long enough to know that.”

“It’s just a scare tactic.”

“Beth called Culpepper, or maybe she called Peter. They’re friends. I just got off the phone with Jim Neyland. He spent twenty minutes screaming at me.”

“Why?”

“He asked if we were dating. I told him the truth. I wasn’t supposed to tell the truth. He said, ‘Come on, Annie, you’re supposed to laugh and roll your eyes and say nothing.’ He wants me to overnight him a copy of your EPF
[58]
.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s started a file on us, for referral to Inspection. He’s interviewing everyone in the group, and they’re telling him we’ve been having an affair for months.”

“I’ll call him,” meaning Jim Neyland.

“That would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, Rick.”

“I’ll talk to Peter Watson.”

“You will not. In another week, I’ll be gone and all this—”

“Don’t say it, Annie.”

“You’ve been here long enough to know this would happen. We crossed them, Rick. You don’t cross them,” she said, echoing Culpepper. “They are going to do whatever they’re going to do, regardless of what we do now.”

“Then I know what to do.”

I kissed her hard on the mouth, my hand on the back of her neck. Her hair was up and thin strands fell on either side of her face.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said. “They don’t understand what they’re dealing with.”

Jim Neyland called me a few days later to counsel me. It was a typical Jim Neyland counseling session.

“You know, when I heard about that assault, Rick, my first thought was, ‘Well, Jesus, that poor kid just ruined his life,’” referring to the nurseryman’s son. “But then I decided, for your first assault, you did okay.”

I thanked him. From Jim Neyland, “doing okay” was the highest praise.

“But I didn’t call to talk to you about that. I actually called to talk to you about Annie.”

“I have nothing to say to you about Annie.”

“Well, I have something to say to you.”

“Not without the Union present, you don’t.”

“This isn’t a contractual matter,” he said. “Far as I know, there’s nothing in the contract about plugging your boss.”

“You know, Mr. Neyland, just when I thought you couldn’t be more offensive, you surprise me.”

“Don’t mention it. Look, kid, here’s the deal. Nobody is going to believe this story. Nobody in the Service is gonna buy you and her hooking up right as she’s leaving. I mean, what kind of nutcase does that?”

You would,
I thought, remembering the rumors about him and women in the service, the pending sexual-harassment suit against him filed by three female managers, and Annie’s story of his making a pass at her one day in Jacksonville.

“And now I hear you’re going to put in for a hardship to North Carolina.”

“What if I am?”

“Well, that would be an incredibly stupid thing to do!” He finally lost it. “Christ, you wanna talk contract, let’s talk contract. Under the contract you can’t get a hardship based on the fact that you have the hots for someone!”

“You can if those hots lead to marriage.”

“Oh, yeah, right, you’re gonna marry her.”

“Maybe I am.”

“Look, Rick, you’re coming dangerously close to proving me wrong. Nobody I hired has ever proved me wrong. Didn’t I tell you that once? I’m trying to give you some friendly advice, for your own damn good and for hers, too. A lot of damage has already been done, but this thing will all blow over without much more trouble if you break it off now.”

“Dear Jesus,” I said, more to myself than to him. “Who do you people think you are? Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m the goddamned branch chief, that’s who I am, and I can and I, by God, will do everything in my power to stop you two from—”

I hung up on him. I had never hung up on a branch chief before. It felt good.

She put her children on a plane to Greensboro; they would live with her parents for a week before she joined them. I would arrive at her house after sunset, cook a meal for her (anything with chicken, her favorite), a bottle of cabernet by the fireplace, then make love, holding her afterward as she slept, nestled against my shoulder. She had thrown away the bottle of sleeping pills prescribed during the divorce and its aftermath. There were things about her marriage she would never tell me. She was the most honest person I had ever met, but also the most private. Though she had opened herself to me as she had to no one else, she remained aloof, mysterious, a naked riddle curled in my arms. And she was smarter than I was, smart enough to fear the future. I pressed my lips against her cool forehead. Under the bed was the short iron bar from my exercise machine: a few days before, a neighbor had seen her ex-husband parked in the driveway, standing on the hood of his car, trying to peek through the garage door windows.

· · ·

I drove her to Greensboro and helped her move into her rental house. She drove me to the airport and waited with me for the plane to board. The terminal was practically deserted; I was taking the red-eye to save money. She cried. I held her. She asked when I would be coming back. Soon, I told her. I flew home. My vision was coming true: we talked for hours on the phone, running up hundreds of dollars in long-distance charges. I passed on news from the office. She talked about the Greensboro POD and the single Exam manager who kept hitting on her.

Then, one night, she ended the call with “Goodnight, sweetie.” The next morning I typed my hardship request and faxed it to Jim Neyland’s office.

Around this same time, I received a card in the mail with a return address I didn’t recognize. As I opened it, I thought of Toby saying taxpayers sent him thank-you cards for putting them out of business. The card wasn’t from a taxpayer. It was from a dog.

It read: “Thank you for saving my life!” There was a picture included of that large black mutt with the ridiculously big ears lolling on the bed with Cassie, her thin arms wrapped tightly around its neck.

Why are you covered in blood?
Annie had asked the day I saved the dog. It was unavoidable, I had explained. Sometimes it is inevitable, the blood on our hands. We cannot choose. But there are times when we can. I had a dream in which I shared a drink with William Culpepper in a place that existed only inside our heads, where I imagined the unimaginable: a human sacrifice upon the altar of my ambition.

The seizure file was returned to me, reviewed and approved by the District Director. Byzantium had blessed my decision to take Laura Marsh’s house. It was paid for, after all, with money belonging to the American people and the American people wanted it back.
Imagine you’re IRS Man, champion of the oppressed government…
The manual recommended I deliver the paperwork in person, but it wasn’t a requirement. I only had to sign the form and drop it in the mail. It was like dropping a laser-guided missile on a hovel half a world away. There was no alternative except to fifty-three the case.