Koko (58 page)

Judy lapped at him with her tongue and pushed her breasts into his face. He had forgotten
how Judy’s nipples felt in his mouth, round and sly. For an instant filled with danger
and violence he remembered how her breasts had swelled early in her pregnancy, and
his cock stiffened in her hand. But she shifted, and he felt how her real emotions
turned her body to steel and balsa wood, and his cock went back to sleep. Judy labored
over him for a long time, and then she gave up and merely hugged him. Her arms were
trembling.

“You hated doing that,” he said. “Let’s tell the truth. You detested it.”

She uttered a low, feral sound, like a thick fold of silk being ripped in half, hoisted
herself up onto her knees and struck him very hard in the middle of his chest. Her
face was distorted by passion and her eyes were wild, glowing with hatred and disgust.
Then she scrambled off the bed and her solid little body flashed through the room.
He wondered how many times in the past four years he had, with increasing tentativeness
and foreknowledge of failure, tried to have sexual intercourse with that body. Maybe
a hundred times—not at all in the past year. Judy snatched up her nightgown and slipped
it unceremoniously over her head. She slammed the bedroom door.

Michael heard her stamping across her dressing room. The chair creaked beneath her.
She dialed a local number on her telephone. Then she slammed the receiver down so
forcefully that the telephone clanged like a bell. Michael’s body began to relax and
became his own body again. Judy dialed a local number again,
presumably the same one. He heard her inhale, and knew that her face was rigid as
a mask. The receiver clanged down once more. He heard her say
“Shit.”
Then she dialed a nine-digit number, probably Pat Caldwell’s. After a few suspended
seconds, she began to speak in a low, choked, barely recognizable whisper.

Michael picked up the James novel and found that he could not read it—the words seemed
to have come alive, and to squirm around on the page. Michael wiped his eyes and the
page cleared.

Strether was at a party in the city garden of a sculptor named Gloriani. Brilliant
beautiful people drifted through the garden, lanterns glowed. Strether was talking
to a young American named Little Bilham, whom he rather cherished. Michael wished
he were there in the garden, holding a glass of champagne beside Little Bilham, listening
to Strether. Had other people read this book in this way, or was it just him? “What
one loses, one loses, make no mistake about that,” Strether said. He could hear Judy
muttering and mumbling, and her voice was that of some destructive ghost.

He realized what he was thinking just as Judy hung up the telephone and padded across
the dressing room, opened the door, and flashed through again, her head turned away
from him. She went out into the upstairs hall. He heard her descending the stairs.
A series of taps and rattles came from the kitchen. Whatever had happened, Poole was
back in his real life. His body felt like his own real body again, not an actor’s.
He closed his book and got out of bed.

In Judy’s little dressing room, the telephone rang. Michael thought to pick it up;
then he remembered that the answering machine would get it. He moved to the door of
the dressing room. Then a male voice spoke.

“The world goes backward and forward at the same time, and is there any sorrow like
unto my sorrow? I will wait, I am waiting now. I need your help. The narrow path vanishes
beneath my feet.”

This voice too, it struck Michael, was the voice of a ghost.

When he walked into the kitchen Judy backed away from the stove, where a kettle had
been put on to boil, and stood with her back against the window and her arms dangling
at her sides. She stared at him as if he were a savage animal who might attack her.

If she had smiled or said anything conventional, he would at once have felt again
like an actor in a role, but she did not smile or speak.

Michael circled around the butcher block counter and leaned
on its far side. Judy seemed smaller and older than the fierce wild-eyed woman who
had hit him.

“Your crazy man called.”

Judy shook her head and walked back to the stove.

“Seems he can’t find his way. I know what he means.”

“Stop it.” She raised her fists.

The kettle began to whistle. Judy put her fists down and poured hot water over instant
coffee. She stirred it with short choppy strokes.

Finally she said, “I’m not going to lose everything I have. You might have lost your
mind, but I don’t have to give up everything I care about. Pat says I should just
calm down, but then Pat never had to worry about anything, did she?”

“Didn’t she?”

“You know she didn’t.” She sipped her coffee and made a face. “I’m surprised you managed
to put down your stupid book.”

“If you thought it was stupid, why did you give it to me?”

Her eyes flew sideways, like those of a child caught in a lie. “You give books to
your little girlfriend all the time. Somebody gave that one to me. I thought it might
help you settle down again.”

He leaned on the butcher block counter and looked at her.

“I’m not leaving this house,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m not going to do without anything just because you’re sick.” Her whole face blazed
at him for a moment, then shrank back into itself. “Pat was telling me about Harry
the other day. She said he repelled her—she couldn’t stand the thought of his touching
her. You’re that way about me.”

“It’s the other way around. You feel that way about me.”

“We’ve been married for fourteen years, I ought to know how I feel.”

“I should too,” he said. “I’d tell you how I feel, how you make me feel, but you wouldn’t
believe it.”

“You should never have gone on that crazy trip,” she said. “We should have stayed
at home instead of going up to Milburn with Harry. That just made things worse.”

“You never want me to go anywhere,” he said. “You think I killed Robbie, and you want
me to stay here and keep on paying for it.”

“Forget Robbie!”
she shrieked.
“Forget him! He’s dead!”

“I’ll go into therapy with you,” he said. “Are you listening to this? Both of us.
Together.”

“You know who should have therapy!
You!
You’re the sick one! Not me! Our marriage was fine before you went away.”

“Went away where?” Michael turned away, left the room, and went up the stairs in silence.

He lay in bed a long time, listening in the dark. Chinks and rattles and the opening
and closing of cabinets came from the kitchen. Eventually Judy came up the stairs.
To Michael’s surprise, her footsteps came toward the bedroom door. She leaned in.
“I just want to say this even though I know you won’t believe it. I wanted this day
to be special for you. I wanted to
make
it special for you.”

“I know.”

Even in the darkness he could see rage, disgust, and a kind of disbelief go through
her body.

“I’m going to sleep in the guest room. I’m not sure we’re married anymore, Michael.”

Michael lay awake with his eyes closed another half hour, then gave up, switched on
his light, and picked up the Henry James novel. The book was a perfect little garden
glimpsed far down at the bottom of a landfill. Seagulls screeched over the landfill’s
great mountains of garbage, rats prowled through it, and right at the bottom, safe
within the page, men and women clothed in an intellectual radiance moved in a beautiful,
inexorable dance. Poole went cautiously down the hills of garbage toward the perfect
garden, but it receded backward with every step he took.

He woke to the sounds of Judy showering. A few minutes later she came into the bedroom
wrapped in a long pink towel. “Well,” she said, “I have to go to work. Are you still
going to insist on going to New York this morning?”

“I have to,” he said.

She took a dress from the closet and shook her head, as if at some hopeless case.
“I imagine that you won’t have time to go to either your office or the hospital this
morning, then.”

“I might drop in at the hospital.”

“You might drop in at the hospital and then drive to New York.”

“That’s right.”

“I hope you remember what I said last night.” She tore the
dress off the hanger and slammed through the door to the dressing room.

Michael got out of bed. He felt tired and depressed, but he did not feel like an actor
or that he had been placed in an unfamiliar body. Both the body and the unhappiness
were his own. He decided to bring Stacy Talbot another book, and searched his shelves
until he found an old underlined copy of
Wuthering Heights.

Before he left home he went down into his basement to open a trunk where he had placed
a few things after Robbie’s death. He had not told Judy that he was doing this, because
Judy had insisted that they give away or destroy everything their son had owned. The
trunk was an awkward relic from the days when Michael’s parents had taken cruises,
and Michael and Judy had filled it with books and clothes when they had moved to Westerholm.
Michael knelt down before the open trunk. Here was a baseball, a short-sleeve shirt
with a pattern of horses, a worn green Dimetrodon and a whole set of smaller plastic
dinosaurs. At the bottom of these things were two books,
Babar
and
Babar the King.
Poole took out the books and closed the trunk.

An hour and a half later, driving as if on automatic pilot toward Manhattan, Michael
finally noticed the worn old Riverside Edition of
Wuthering Heights
on the other seat and realized that he had held it in his hand during the whole of
his visit to the hospital. Like glasses their owner searches for while wearing, the
book had become transparent and weightless. Now, as if to make up for its earlier
tact, the novel seemed denser than a brick, nearly heavy enough to tilt the car on
its springs. At first he felt like pitching the book out the window, then like pulling
up at a gas station and calling Murphy to tell him that he could not make the line-up.
Beevers and Linklater could identify Victor Spitalny, Maggie would say that he was
the man who had tried to kill her, and that would be that.

His next thought was that he needed something to fill up his day with reality, and
driving to New York to attend a line-up was as good as anything else.

*  *  *

He put the car in a garage on University Place and walked to the precinct house. The
weather had brightened in the past few days, and though the temperature was still
under forty, warmth had begun to awaken within the air. On both sides of the narrow
Greenwich Village streets, people of the generation just younger than Poole’s walked
coatless, smiling, looking as if they had been released from prison.

His idea of police stations had been formed by movies, and the flat modern façade
surprised him when he came upon it. Lieutenant Murphy’s precinct building looked like
a grade school. Only the steel letters on the pale façade and the police cars drawn
up before it declared the identity of the building.

The interior was another surprise. Instead of a tall desk and a bald veteran frowning
down, Poole first saw an American flag beside a case of awards, then a uniformed young
man, leaning toward him from the other side of an open window.

“I’m supposed to meet Lieutenant Murphy for a line-up at eleven,” he said.

The young man disappeared from the window; a buzzer went off. Poole opened the door
beside the window, and the young man looked up from a clipboard. “The others are on
the second floor. I’ll get someone to take you up.” Behind him plainclothes officers
glanced at Poole, then away. There was an impression of busyness, conversation, male
company. It reminded Poole of the doctors’ lounge at St. Bart’s.

Another, even younger, policeman in uniform led Poole down a corridor hung with bulletin
boards. The second policeman was breathing loudly through his mouth. He had a lazy,
fleshy, unintelligent face, olive skin, and a fat neck. He would not meet Poole’s
eyes. “Up da stairs,” he said when they arrived at a staircase. Then he labored up
beside Poole and slouched off through another school corridor. Soon he stopped at
a door marked B.

Poole opened the door, and Beevers said, “My man.” He was leaning against the wall
with his arms crossed over his chest, talking to a small round-faced Chinese woman.
Poole greeted Beevers and said hello to Maggie, whom he had met two or three times
at Saigon. A little ironic breeze seemed to blow about her, separating her from Harry
Beevers. She shook his hand with a surprisingly firm, competent grip. One side of
her face dimpled in a lopsided smile. She was extraordinarily pretty—the impression
of her intelligence had momentarily filtered out her good looks.

“It’s nice of you to come in all the way from Westchester County,” she said in a flat
accentless voice that sounded almost English in the precision of its consonants.