Dancing with the Dead (12 page)

She sat for a while longer with the TV turned off, sipping coffee and listening to Jake’s snores drifting like muted thunder from the bedroom.

When her cup was empty, she left the apartment, still thinking about the dead woman in Seattle.

T
HERE WAS NO PHOTOGRAPH
of the victim, in fact nothing about the Seattle murder, in the newspaper Mary bought in the hospital gift shop.

She managed to check Angie out of Saint Sebastian without incident, though Angie had to agree to see the gently persistent Dr. Keshna the next week. In the interim, the doctor would phone with the results of Angie’s tests. A young volunteer in a candy-striped uniform brought Angie down to the lobby in a gleaming chrome wheelchair while Mary got the car. Angie didn’t need the wheelchair, but she didn’t object; she had been here before and knew it was standard check-out procedure.

During the drive home, she sat subdued and staring straight ahead, as she had after her previous stays in Detox. There was no way to know how much or often she’d been secretly drinking during the last few years; this might be her first really dry time in months.

While Mary was stopped for a red light, Angie said, “You sweep my apartment clean of bottles?” Her words carried little emotion, the voice of a pull-string doll.

“Got ’em all,” Mary said. She felt the idling car’s vibration running along her buttocks, up her back.

“Bet you didn’t.”

Mary glanced at her. “Five gin bottles, including the one with water in it.”

Angie, still looking older and wearier than Mary could ever remember seeing her, stared over at her and raised her eyebrows in mild surprise. “Well, I guess you did find ’em all.”

Accelerating away from the now-green light, Mary wondered if that was true. Alcoholics were like any other kind of drug addict; though they might be naive in other areas, when it came to their addictions they were incredibly savvy and conniving. Lying to themselves and others was the necessary evil in their lives.

“Still feel okay?” Mary asked, turning a corner.

“Sure.” The same flat tone. Angie screwed up her eyes against the harsh sunlight and gazed intently out at the traffic, as if she’d never before seen a car. “Gets a little tougher each time this happens,” she said. “Or maybe that’s ’cause I’m getting older.” She flipped down the sunvisor.

“Getting older’s better than the alternative,” Mary said, concentrating on her driving.

“That’s what they say. Used to say the earth was flat, too.”

“Don’t talk that way, Angie.”

“Well, why not?”

“For one thing, Fred sure as hell isn’t worth it.”

“Such a wise daughter about other people’s lives. You search my apartment by yourself?”

“Jake helped me.”

“Uh-huh. And I guess he’s home in your bed right now.”

“That’s right, Angie.” Irritation swelled in Mary and became full-blown anger. She stomped down on the accelerator and roared around a bus whose diesel fumes found their way into the car. The lumbering vehicle had a liquor advertisement on its side, a young and gorgeously healthy couple toasting each other by candlelight. “Seems to me you’ve got enough to worry about without concerning yourself with me and Jake.”

Angie said nothing, but she pursed her lips in a way that made them look withered. The mouth of an old, old woman. Mary felt her anger plunge and become pity. She shouldn’t have talked that way to her mother.

She said, “How’d you know Jake and I were back together?”

“Fred told me. He phoned this morning.”

Mary saw her knuckles whiten as she squeezed the steering wheel. Why didn’t Fred mind his own business? Why didn’t they all?

“I’ll drop in on some AA meetings, like I was told,” Angie said. “I won’t drink any booze for a long while, anyways. You know I never do after a hard bender.”

Mary did know. That was a common pattern with alcoholics after a stay at a detox center. It was as if they were immune from their desires for a while. But there were exceptions, and things could become unbearably ugly. Something else might set off Angie again, sending her bouncing from bottle to bottle and bar to bar. Mary didn’t want that to happen. Didn’t even want to think about it.

“I need you to drop by the apartment so’s I can get my mail,” Angie said, “then I gotta go to the bank and cash my pension check. You mind the driving?”

“No.”

“I know you gotta get to work.”

“It’s okay.” Too much snap in her voice. Take it easy, Mary; go with the rhythm and follow the lead, like dancing.
Will the new Latin shoes fit when they arrive?

“I know I’m a pain in the ass in my old age,” Angie said, playing the martyr now.

“I said it was okay!”

Silence except for the clattering hum of the motor. At least Angie was making sense, even if she was grating on exposed nerves. Her mind seemed to be working normally. Enough brain cells had somehow survived the years of alcohol.

“Mary, I appreciate what you’re doing.”

“It’s no trouble. I don’t have to be anywhere until a one o’clock closing.” Mary let herself relax into the car’s upholstery. She’d been sitting with her back muscles tense and her shoulders were sore. It was a strain, fighting Angie and the ghosts of childhood and the spirit of a dark future. There was no point to it, no way to win, like jousting with windmills that continued grinding out the same slow diet of agony no matter what.

“Want me to stay with you this morning after we come back from the bank?” Mary asked.

“It’s not necessary,” Angie said. “Fred’s coming over.”

When Mary got back to her apartment to change clothes and go to work, Jake was up. He was wearing only baggy Jockey shorts and a white T-shirt, standing in the breeze from the kitchen air-conditioner and building himself a sandwich. An open can of Busch beer was before him on the counter, a puddle around it.

As Mary sat down at the table, he stopped spreading mayonnaise and looked at her and smiled. “How’s Angie?”

“Good as can be expected.”

“She gonna be okay at home by herself?”

“Fred’ll be there. Probably is already.”

He placed the top piece of bread squarely on his sandwich, as if precise alignment were crucial to taste. “That’s good; she needs somebody right now.”

“Not Fred.”

“Aw, the old fucker’s not such a bad dude.”

“Angie’d agree with you, but that’s because she’s not thinking straight.”

Jake took a big bite of sandwich, chewed rapidly with his mouth open, then washed down the half-masticated bread and pastrami with a swig of beer. Mary waited for him to belch, but he didn’t. Point for Jake. He said, “You gonna eat lunch, babe?”

“I’m not hungry. Stopped for doughnuts on the way to the hospital.” She was lying; she simply didn’t want to eat with Jake. A hamburger to go, consumed at her desk between phone calls, was more appetizing.

Had she really enjoyed sex with this man last night, or was he a stranger come to repair the dishwasher? Sometimes Mary felt that way about Jake, as if there were nothing between them and never had been. He kept a part of himself intensely private, came and went at odd hours, disappeared for days at a time, going out of town, she was sure. He was as much an unknown to her, as much an alien, as someone she’d happened to glance at on the street and then seen again. Of course, sometimes she felt that way about her entire life, as if it were somebody else’s and she’d somehow become trapped in it. Everything was happening of its own momentum or lack of it, and she had no control. At times Mary thought people’s lives progressed like billiard balls across a pool table—once stroked to travel in a certain direction, all the deflections, spins, hard angles, and collisions were unavoidable. And so was the waiting pocket.

The murder victims who’d danced, had they felt that way in their final moments? Or before? Had they sensed their destinies propelling them?

She realized that at this moment she’d genuinely rather die than lie down again with Jake. Dying couldn’t be worse, and probably not so different. Wasn’t sex—orgasm—much like death only not permanent? A pinnacle of emotion and then a slipping away of self? Death might be like nothing so much as the final, profound orgasm.

Jake said, “You better drive me over to get my car from Fred. I need to go help some guy change his brake linings before I go into the warehouse.”

Mary had forgotten about Fred still having Jake’s car. She’d have to drive back to Angie’s apartment and drop off Jake before going to the title company. “How about getting dressed, then?” she said. “I need to get going.” She had plenty of time, really, but she could stop by the office and do some work before the closing.

He shrugged, scratched his crotch, and took a bite of sandwich. “Sho all right.” Chomp, chomp. Swallow. “Lemme finish my lunch and we’ll be on the road. Won’t take me long to get dressed to work in the warehouse. It ain’t like I meet the public. What you gonna do this evening while I’m working?”

“Dance lesson.”

“Yeah, it figures.”

“It does figure, Jake. If you don’t like it that I dance, I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it’s okay with me, babe, long as it makes you happy and you don’t try talking me into dancing with you. I just can’t see myself tripping the light fantastic and all that shit, you know?”

“Do I try talking you into it?”

“Not anymore.” He grinned to let her know he was kidding, then said, “You still got that same swish instructor?”

“Same one,” Mary said. “He’s not gay, though.”

“Well, maybe not. But I seen some of them dance instructors that night I went out to the studio to pick you up last year. They look like hair stylists with muscles.”

“You’re a homophobe, Jake.”

“Which is what?”

“Never mind.”

Mary went into the bedroom and put on a clean skirt and blouse, then combed her hair and inserted her tortoiseshell barrette and clipped it tight. She checked her image in the mirror, turning her head quickly, as if to catch herself off guard and glimpse the true Mary. She decided she looked sufficiently businesslike to deal with real estate attorneys.

She phoned Angie to make sure Fred was at her place, then she drove Jake there. She pulled up to the curb and didn’t turn off the motor.

“Sure you ain’t got time to come up?” he asked.

“I’ve used too much time already. Angie understands. She won’t be insulted.”

He popped open the little car’s door, then worked his bulk out and stood on the bright sidewalk. Heat wafted into the car. Before shutting the door, he leaned down and peered in at her. The sun was hitting him square in the face, making him squint. “You sure you’re all right, babe? I mean, after last night?”

“You were gentle enough, Jake.”

He shot her a wicked smile. “More gentle than you like?”

“Shut the door, Jake. I’ve just gotta get to work.”

Still smiling, he slammed the door hard enough to jolt the car and give her a headache.

Hoping she wouldn’t need to buy some Tylenol, she watched him disappear into the sun-washed building before she drove away.

By the time she reached the corner her fingers were manipulating the radio’s pushbuttons, searching for dance music. Tango, if possible.

W
HEN SHE ENTERED
her office she was surprised to see Victor seated behind her desk, gazing up at her like a lonely puppy and smiling as she pushed through the door. His hair lay like a fallen gate over his bald spot, and his wire-rimmed round glasses snagged the sunlight and made his eyes look as human as flashlight lenses.

“Mary, how’s your mother?”

She placed her purse on a desk corner. “She’ll be all right, thanks. I thought you had floor time out at Suncrest subdivision today.”

He stood up out of her chair, tucking in his white shirt, then shrugged. There were yellow crescents beneath his armpits. “When I heard you couldn’t be in till noon, I thought you wouldn’t mind if I used your desk as a quiet place where I could catch up on my paperwork.”

“I mind, Victor.” He said nothing, acted as if she’d approved of his presence. She didn’t like the idea of Victor at her desk, able to search through the drawers. Not that she had anything to hide, but privacy meant something. It was like rape, having your personal belongings handled by a man you despised. She moved around to sit in her desk chair. It was still warm from Victor. She didn’t like that, either.

“You used my desk last month when I was away on vacation,” he pointed out.

He was right, but she said nothing. It had been Gordon Summers who’d instructed her to use Victor’s desk while her office was being painted.

“Buncha memos for you,” he said, pointing to the pink forms on her desk. “Not much important, really. Mr. Summers is still at the seminar in Chicago, and he asked for a copy of the Gratiot contract to be faxed to him. I took care of that.”

As he spoke he was staring at her intensely, making her uneasy. Why did she often attract men like Victor? She wished he’d leave her alone, that he wouldn’t bother trying to hide his bald spot, that he wouldn’t be so ordinary, that he had a chin. Mr. Nice. Mr. Stability. Mr. Monotony. Why wasn’t she ever attracted to men like Victor? Maybe because they were almost always
like
Victor.

“Where you going now?” she asked, trying to hurry him along, thinking, Go anywhere, please!

“Out to grab what’s left of that Suncrest floor time, I suppose.” The sales agents regarded floor time at the subdivisions as gold, where they had a virtual lock on any serious buyer who came along.

“Good luck out there,” Mary told him, with all her might willing him to leave.

“Thanks. I’ve got a couple of prospects from last time I was there. Gave them my card. Oh, by the way, I told Mr. Summers about your mother being sick.”

“What? Why’d you do that?”

“He asked why you didn’t answer the phone. Asked where you were. I mean, I’d of never brought up the subject at all if he hadn’t asked. Boss man asks, we gotta answer. You know that.”

“Yeah, I do know.” She also knew this was no time in her life to change jobs.

“You don’t mind if I said something about your mother, do you? I mean, worst can happen is Summers’ll send her flowers.”