Gossip (36 page)

“Don’t!” snapped Peter. “Stop using me as your excuse. It makes me sick every time you say you screwed Ralph for my sake. If it was for me, you should’ve asked. And I’d have said no.”

Nick looked at him and winced. They must have been arguing about me ever since he told Peter. “Nothing more I can say, Ralph,” he muttered, his eyes still on Peter. “Except that it changes nothing about tonight.”

“You still expect me to attend this thing tonight?”

He looked up without surprise. “Yes. Like I’ve always said, it’s bigger than you. You just have to be there and say thanks.”

“You’ll let me speak!” It seemed the ultimate insult. “You’re not afraid I’ll tell everyone what you did to me? And that one of their top dogs is an FBI snitch?”

Nick remained calm. “No. Because I trust your loyalty.”

“Loyalty to
you?”

“No, loyalty to what this is really about.”

“Jesus, Nick,” snarled Peter. “You won’t be happy until you turn us all into liars.”

Nick swallowed. He could hold his own with me but not with Peter. “All right! I fucked up! What else do you want me to say? I didn’t know what would happen. I grabbed it without thinking. But we’ve come this far. An active campaign? The front page of the
Voice?
Let’s see what else we can pull from this mess. Or are you two both so hot on being pure that you’d throw it away? Go on being morally straight and utterly helpless.”

“Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” charged Peter.

“No, you can’t. The egg’s already broken so we should go ahead and use it. You want to damn me up and down, Ralph, you can start chewing my ass tomorrow. Right now, I have to get your videotape to the club for a sound check. I hope to see you at nine. If you don’t show, we’re still doing this. Your presence is not an absolute necessity. And you still need money for legal costs. Yeah, I put you in shit soup, but I’m doing all I can to get you out. You want to reject my help because it’s me, that’s your decision. Think about it.”

He charged back inside. We heard him make a quick call—“I’m on my way”—then the front door slamming behind him.

Peter remained hunched on the mat, a bony, defeated Buddha. “You see, Ralph. I wasn’t angry at you,” he murmured. “Not you at all.”

“No. I don’t exist. I’m just a thing here. A fucking egg.” I felt gutted, blank, my mind white with anger.

“What’re you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. What about you?”

“Me?”

“He’s your life. You can stay with Nick after this?”

Peter folded his arms and legs around himself. “That’s my shit. You have your own shit right now.”

I attacked Peter because he was still here and I thought I still knew him. But I no longer understood Peter either. “You thought Nick was the killer? You’ve been with him all these years and could think that?”

“Something felt wrong. But unbelievable as that was, it looked cleaner than this. Better to kill a stranger than fuck a friend.” He shook his head. “Nick hates being helpless. It’s made him crazy. But the clumsy bastard does love me. It’s gotten lost under his shit, but it’s buried there somewhere.”

I hated Peter for knowing and not telling me, and then for telling and remaining bound to the man he told on.

“You still skipping tonight?” I said.

“Yes. Aren’t you?”

“Skip it? Skip it? You think I should skip it.” The phrase made it sound so easy. “You afraid I’ll blow the whistle on him?”

“No.” He was surprised I could even suggest it. “He has it coming to him if you did, but—” He grimaced. “No, Ralph. I can’t tell you what to do. But the smart thing right now would be for you to wash your hands of this and just walk away.”

“Walk away? Yeah. You would think that.” I could not trust the judgment of a man who expected to walk away from his life in a year or two. I was so angry I could hate Peter even for that.

I walked out without a word or touch of good-bye.

T
HE ELEGANT, OAK-VENEERED
elevator should have carried me straight down to an airless, stinking cellblock. Instead, it spilled me onto a quiet tree-lined street, into sunlight made unearthly by the red fog in my head: anger, disbelief, humiliation. I thought I’d become a man with no illusions, careful, hard and suspicious. But I’d never suspected the worst. I finally had the explanation I thought I’d never get a human face for my metaphysical
It.
Nick Rosi, who’d lain beside me in the street and alongside me in bed, who had gone beyond the shallow intimacy of sex to share his life and lover with me. I could kill him, only the urge was not just an emotion to someone already accused of murder. The consequences were too real. But I could destroy him in public. “This is a sham,” I’d tell them tonight. “A hoax created by Nick Rosi.” He had handed me a loaded gun and dared me to use it.

Fists jammed in my pockets, my jaw chewing at air, I must have walked at a killing pace. All too soon I was on my street and climbing my stairs. The surprise of the unlocked door barely registered. But inside, sitting at the table between two windows like empty eyes, her elbows propped around a mug, was Nancy. I’d forgotten Nancy. I wanted to be glad to see her. She stood up with a gravity that implied she already knew.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“Up to my eyes in shit. All this time. Only I thought I knew who my friends were.”

She touched my arm, apologetically. I couldn’t understand why
she
needed to apologize, until I remembered Diaz’s call.

I lowered myself into the chair across from her. “Oh yeah,” I said suspiciously. “Diaz told me you met.”

She sat back down timidly. She thought my anger was about her. “I’ve been out walking, Ralph. Thinking about what he told me and what I should tell you. I couldn’t tell Diaz about Kathleen but I should have told you. I just never believed it would get this far.”

I stopped listening. “Stupid, stupid gossip! A blind item in a footnote has you scared shitless. For fuck’s sake, Nancy.”

But my faith in everyone close to me had been broken. Wisdom was quick and ruthless.

“Fuck,” I said. “You
are
lovers.”

She closed her crepe eyelids. “Was. Were. For two months.”

“When?” Nothing shocked me now. My mouth opened in a scornful grin.

“Last fall. It ended just before you came down to visit.”

“You’ve been lying to me from the start?”

“I couldn’t tell anyone, Ralph. Not even you. You can understand, can’t you? A business-trip affair. Started on a business trip and continued out of town.” She let it spill out, her voice pitched on the edge of tears. “I had a crush and she was touched and we both got tipsy one night and I offered her a back rub and—” She rolled her hand through the obvious. “It was frightening. Exciting. To have a smart, admirable woman suddenly admiring and exploring me. She’d never been with another woman. I was totally new to her.”

I pictured Nancy nude and happy, and a twinge of envy fed my scorn.

“Then other trips, three or four. Until she sat me down and explained how she didn’t feel for me what I did for her and she feared she was using me, and we should stop before it got serious. It was nothing, Ralph. Ultimately. A messy fling. An office romance like millions of office romances, gay and straight. But politics would make it something monstrous if it came out in court.”

So Bill had been right. The bastard had been right.

“And you called me brainless for humping who I humped?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. She angrily drew her lips against her teeth. “It takes one to know one,” she said bitterly. “At least I was in love with mine.”

I struck back with, “Does her husband know?”

“Oh yeah. She told him when the book came out. Not the first time something like this has happened. Only usually it’s him.”

No wonder he’d resented springing me from jail. “So if he already knows, why can’t you testify?”

“I never said I wouldn’t. Kathleen never told me not to. But I’m afraid of what this will do to her career if it comes out.”

“Then lie. You lied to me long enough.”

“I could go to jail for perjury.”

“Only if they have proof.” I knew more of the law’s cynicism than Nancy did. “Or did you take Polaroids of each other?”

She ignored my jab. “Do I lie to Diaz? He said he has to know everything that might come out.”

“Why not tell him? If Jack already knows. Or would it embarrass him that another lawyer in his firm knew?” Then cold wisdom seized a worse possibility. “But that’s all that worries you? That you’ll hurt Kathleen’s career?”

“I don’t care about mine. If it were just me, Ralph, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.”

“No. You’re not keeping something else from me?”

“Like what?”

“Like knowing maybe it was Kathleen who had him killed?”

Her eyes opened wide, her face went slack.

I said it without horror or disgust. It was just an idea, but so brutally perfect: One friend turned me in for a murder ordered by another friend’s lover. He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news? But I wanted to laugh.

“No, Ralph. She’s nothing like that.”

“She was nothing like a dyke, but she went to bed with you. She had the most to lose here.”

“She couldn’t. She didn’t. It’s not her nature.”

“She arranged my bail and lawyer to shut me up.”

“No! She did it because you’re my friend and we thought you were foolishly protecting me. If she were involved in a murder, would she do anything to help? No, she’d let you rot in jail.”

“I don’t know. Would she?” But I knew. She wouldn’t. The idea hadn’t horrified me because I couldn’t make myself believe it. I had imagined it simply to cut myself and get at Nancy.

She angrily shook her head. “Ralph, I will testify. I told you I would. I’m your only alibi. But I want you to know how much is at risk here. Public humiliation and the end of Kathleen’s career. But I’m not going to sacrifice you for the love of a woman who doesn’t love me.”

“If she did love you? Would you sacrifice me then?”

She hesitated. “No. I wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty to think you wouldn’t.”

She clenched her teeth. “All right. All right,” she told herself. “I deserve this. I lied to you. I turned you into an asshole of paranoia. If I’d told you what was happening, if I hadn’t felt so threatened and angry when you came down to help—” She grabbed at explanations. “You’re going to be all nerves today anyway. I wasn’t going to hit you with this until tomorrow or later tonight,” she said. “After your thing.”

Mention of the fund-raiser knocked me from scorn into something like shame. Her lie was the least of the crimes against me. She was not the source of my anger.

I lowered my head. “I’d rather you didn’t come tonight,” I said coldly.

“Why?
I said I’d testify. I told you what I was risking. Doesn’t that count for something?” She sounded more hurt by this than anything else I’d said.

“I just—cognitive dissonance,” I lied. “Oh, I’ll forgive you,” I claimed. “In time. But not tonight.”

She hesitated, trying to read the truth in my face. “Okay. If you prefer I wasn’t there—”

“It’ll be bad enough without you in the crowd.”

“The sight of me hurts you that much?”

“Tonight it would. Yes.”

She accepted my rejection as just what she deserved. “Then I’ll take the next shuttle.”

“If you don’t mind.”

My courtesy was chilling, my dishonesty cruel. My coldest cruelty was refusing to tell Nancy that her lie was not why I didn’t want her there. I didn’t know if I’d be there or what I’d say or what would remain afterward. Whatever happened, I did not want Nancy to know what else had been done to me.

“I didn’t want to come anyway,” she said. “But I thought my presence would remind us both that we were in this together and—all right. All right. If it’s what you want.” She stood up.

“It is. Tonight anyway. Sorry.”

“Then I better be going. Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

“Good-bye.”

I walked her to the door. I watched her descend the steps with her head and shoulders bent with guilt. What was this masochistic egotism that made us blame ourselves when we were hurt by others?

I closed the door. I fell on my bed, exhausted, hoping sleep would save me from my freezing contempt for everyone I’d ever loved and trusted. I wanted sleep to decide what I’d do about tonight. But I only lay there on my back, cold anger weakening enough for sympathy to flow again.

I slowly acknowledged just how much Nancy had offered me. She would testify, despite the risk. “Doesn’t that count for something?” It did. Why couldn’t I forgive her? I felt like an idiot for not realizing sooner that she had lied and Bill had told the truth—his presence added to the pain—but Nancy did not deserve my righteous contempt.

I wanted to hurt Nick, not Nancy. But Nick couldn’t be hurt. And I needed Nancy, more than Nick needed me. I was caught in a chain of obligation and blame, a circle jerk of people using people. What else are other people for? I didn’t know anymore.

I needed to break the circle and save myself. How? Staying away tonight while people batted my name around was too much like the rest of my life. Watching the light fade on the ceiling, I rehearsed phrases to myself. “This is a hoax. A lie. But you shall know
the
truth and the truth shall set
me
free….”

A
N ELECTRIC BASS THUDDED
and thumped in the brickwork like a bad heart. The cobblestone street by the river, a tilted zone of loading docks and stranded tractor trailers, looked more like the scene of a crime than part of the club scene. I stood outside the public lie, by the rows of posters stuck to tarred bricks. “Free Eckhart,” they whispered over and over. Right, I thought.

Latecomers came up the street in isolated twos and threes without making the street look less deserted and sinister. A pair of muscle boys walked blithely past me and released a blast of dance noise before the door swung shut.

“Ralph!” a female voice shouted from the shadows.

Shoes slapped the pavement. Erica and Alec raced out of the darkness, breathless and laughing.