Rabid (37 page)

Her father would have set fire to it and danced around the flames.

Leila asked, “Did you leave your wife?”

Conroy’s blue eyes were too wide. “I needed a place of my own.” He spread his arms as if he expected her to hug him, as if she had ever
hugged
him. “I needed a place to
think
about us.”

“You don’t
think
about
fucking
. There’s nothing to think
about
.”

Conroy sat on a chair and covered his eyes which one vein-riddled hand. “Beverly and that priest ganged up on me. He’s helping her find evidence for a divorce.”

Leila’s rigid, indignant knees kept her standing. “Priests don’t help people get divorced, and so what? We aren’t fucking anymore, and you broke up with wifey-wannabe, didn’t you?”

“Peggy’s gone.”

“Conroy, if you had sat tight, your wife and her lawyer wouldn’t have had anything on you. But now, this,” she whipped her arms around to encompass the generic townhouse. A brass and brittle glass lantern-like fixture glimmered above her head. “You’ve screwed it all up now. You’ve given her the perfect excuse. At best, you’ve got a love shack. At worst, you’ve abandoned her in the legal sense. She’s got you by the
heuvos
now.”

“No, no,” Conroy said. “They ganged up against me. That’s the important part.”

“No, the fact that
you left
is the important part. When she caught you fucking around, she forgave you. After she found Peggy’s panties, she didn’t throw you out.” Leila settled into the creaky couch. The cushions rustled as if there were plastic under the chintz, a sensible precaution in a rental. “Women don’t leave when men screw around. Women leave if men fall in love with another woman. Did she ask if you loved the other woman?”

Conroy nodded.

“And when Beverly found Peggy’s panties, you told her that the screwing was nothing and that you didn’t love that Peggy chick or anyone but her,
right
?”

“She still would have dragged me to counseling.”

“Conroy, you’ve
fucked
this up. You need to
go
home,
right
now, pray to
God
that she hasn’t found that note, a note,
a note!
You coward.”

“I think she already found it.” Conroy rubbed his hands over each other, like washing.

Leila was ready to kick him in the ass if he didn’t start walking to his car. “And you
tell
her that you
love
her and that you’ll never,
ever
do this again, and that
none
of your screwing around ever meant a
damned
thing, because
it
didn’t mean anything
.”

Conroy looked away from the smeared art print, and his eyes acquired a melancholy, lugubrious, sentimental sheen, somewhere between a basset hound and a needle-startled mouse, and Leila started swearing at herself, calling herself a whore and a hungry cunt.

He said, “But it did mean something to me.”

She punched her hand. “Stop it. Stop it
now
.”

“You’re the only one who hasn’t turned against me. No one else cares about me.”

“
Shut up.
”

His hands fell to his sides, palms forward, a studied gesture of baring one’s soul. He said, “I want us to be together.”

Leila should punch that idiocy right out of his head. “
Shut up.
This was nothing but casual fucking, Conroy, nothing more.”

“We could have children.”

“You’re fucked in the head. I don’t want kids.”

“Everyone wants children. They’re fun.”

“Children are not
fun
. The world is a vale of tears that destroys people. Children are people who you create to suffer for your own amusement. Creating new people to watch them suffer smacks of sadism. If you want fun, get a Ferrari. A Ferrari is cheaper.”

“Listen, you can have it all. The career, science, me.” His eyes were wistful, religious.

“I don’t want it all.” Even though she had told him that it was all casual fucking, explicitly, at the beginning, in the interest of full disclose, he had still fucked it up. “Think, Conroy. Even if we did shack up in this insipid condo, how would shagging one of your grad students look to the department chair committee? You wouldn’t get the chair, and you wouldn’t get the resources, your grants will be stripped, and you’ll never make it out of this pretty good university. You’ll have wasted it all for fucking.”

He blinked, as if released from a thrall that he had cast on himself.

She said, “If you ever, ever talk like this again, I’ll switch labs. You won’t have my research. Everyone will wonder why I switched, even if I never say a word.”

He sat on his chintz chair and looked confused, glancing away and around, as if he didn’t understand how he had arrived at the cheesy little townhouse. “But, I love you.”

“Go back to your wife before you fuck everything up.” Leila scooped up her coat.

Conroy grabbed her arm. “I love you.”

Leila dropped the coat, pulled her wrist out of his grip, and punched him in the face. His flesh around his left eye compressed between her knuckles and his skull. He fell down heavily on the floor and held his eye.

“I warned you,” she said. “I warned you never to grab me again.”

He covered his face with both hands. “Why would you have an affair with me?”

Leila gathered her coat off the floor. “We were nothing but a casual fuck. I thought you understood that it was
just fucking around
. I always end up in bed with men, every time. From the way you drooled on Valerie Lindh at every conference and the two of you strutted around arm in arm blabbering in French, I figured you were fucking her already.” 

He nodded.

“Then why did
you
do it, if it wasn’t just fucking? You’re the one who’s married.”

“It was just screwing around, but when you said you wanted to break it off, I couldn’t stand it.” He prodded the flesh around his left eye. “I want more, and I want you.”

Shrieking filled her throat at this net he was throwing around her, trying to drag her down into the rip tide of everyone else’s life, but she widened her eyes and, though her breathing rattled in her chest, she said, “Stay away from me.”

She walked out into the February night that had turned ice-floe frigid, leaving him alone in that asinine townhouse.

~~~~~

Conroy stood at the front window and watched Leila stalk between the dead bushes and cold-charred grass toward her car. He touched the skin around his eye. A ring on her hand had abraded his temple, and the skin was sore over the orbital.

Blindsided.
She had blindsided him. She hadn’t seen that he was free, unencumbered, and ready to face the world.

Outside on the sidewalk, Leila stretched her fingers into her gloves.

A harridan’s clawing hand grabbed Leila’s arm.

Conroy stepped back and watched from a slit between two vertical blind slats.

The window turned the sordid scene into a silent movie. Beverly’s face dilated and released a howl that popped back Leila’s head, but Leila shook Beverly’s hand off her arm. Leila drew herself up like climbing into her own slender, dusky skin, glared down at Beverly, and mouthed something that infiltrated Beverly and twisted down her body to her feet. Beverly, coatless, hunched against those words and the cold, turned away, and ran to Conroy’s door.

Leila started forward, but she saw Conroy peeking through the slats in a reflection of their eyes as tangible as a touch of fingertips, and she retreated. Headlights from the parking lot beyond illuminated her like a lighthouse beacon.

The doorbell chimed. The door thundered.

No use making her stand out in the cold and angering her further.

He turned the cold knob.

~~~~~

As soon as the doorknob clicked, Bev shoved the door open.

In less than three weeks, the whole sham had fallen apart. Her whole marriage, her whole life, every choice she had ever made, all sucked away.

She shoved that cheap door in his bony face. The door thumped Conroy, and he stumbled and reached behind him, flinging one arm to the ceiling.

He should stumble, damn him. He should fall. He should fall and keep falling like she was falling and there was no one to catch her, though she prayed
Hail Mary full of grace, be with us now and at the hour of our death
under her breath into the silent ether.

Conroy slammed his open hand against the wall. “What the hell?”

Bev grabbed the doorjamb to steady her shaking legs.
“Why?”

Conroy squirmed like poison wormed in him. “You and that priest thought you could catch me. You two were working together.”

“That Leila is your mistress, too, isn’t she?” Nerves alongside Bev’s eyes spiked into her temples, and she rubbed the left one, trying to rub away the stabbing. “You’re screwing her.”

“What if I was?” Conroy slammed his palm against the wall. “Would you tell the priest? Would he go to Leila’s apartment
again
and interrogate her
again
?”

Bev’s horrified eyes hurt, leaked heat. The stone of her heart pounded in her chest, battering her ribs.

The lantern-shaped light fixture above Bev threw glassy light on the two-story ceiling of the living room. If she had a golf club, she would piñata-whack that brassy light fixture.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,
the violence swayed her.

Our Father, who art in Heaven,
she tried to pray but her thoughts seemed to go nowhere, like talking into a dead phone. The flesh of her back felt striped, and she tried to reach around to feel if blood were soaking through her white shirt, dripping crimson slashes. She shut the door behind her and walked through the gray and white rental.

The condo came equipped with the fake apples on the coffee table and shiny, framed Impressionist prints on the walls, an artificial milieu, a play house.

The coffee table was stacked with entertainment magazines, diverting digests, popular ephemera. She picked up one of the slick, fake apples. A velvet leaf dangled from the plastic stem. She wanted to throw it at the staircase wall with a sideways whip of her right arm that would have smacked a golf ball in a duck hook, wanting a splatter of red molten wax, but it would probably pop and roll down the stairs intact.

She wanted
splatter
.

She tossed the apple and swiped it out of the air. “Was it something I said? Is it because I’m not a scientist? Is it because I believe in God?”

“You forced me out. You and that priest.”

She turned and found Conroy halfway to the kitchen. “Don’t you blame it on Dante.” She followed Conroy as he walked away from her.

Later, she thought that
following
him was the mistake she had made: following him back East, to the apartment, and into the kitchen.

“Don’t blame it on the Church. You weren’t supposed to leave. We’re married. We promised.”