Sometimes the only thing worse than losing the woman is winning the woman.
—French saying
Embrace your fate.
—French saying
I GUESS the first thing I should tell you about is the plastic surgery. I mean, I didn't always look this good. In fact, if you saw me in my college yearbook, you wouldn't even recognize me. I was thirty pounds heavier and my hair had enough grease on it to irrigate a few acres of droughted farmland. And the glasses I wore could easily have substituted for the viewing instruments they use at Mt. Palomar. I wanted to lose my virginity back in second grade, on the very first day I saw Amy Towers. But I didn't lose my virginity until I was twenty-three years old and even then it was no easy task. She was a prostitute and just as I was guiding my sex into her she said, "I'm sorry, I must be coming down with the flu or something. I've got to puke." And puke she did.
This was how I lived my life until I was forty-two years old—as the kind of guy cruel people smirk at and decent people feel sorry for. I was the uncle nobody ever wanted to claim. I was the blind date women discussed for years after. I was the guy in the record shop the cute girl at the cash register always rolls her eyes at. But despite all that I somehow managed to marry an attractive woman whose husband had been killed in Vietnam, and I inherited a stepson who always whispered about me behind my back to his friends. They snickered mysteriously whenever they were around me. The marriage lasted eleven years, ending on a rainy Tuesday night several weeks after we'd moved into our elegant new Tudor in the city's most attractive yuppie enclave. After dinner, David up in his room smoking dope and listening to his Prince CDs, Annette said, "Would you take it personally if I told you I'd fallen in love with somebody?" Shortly thereafter we were divorced, and shortly after that I moved to Southern California, where I supposed there was plenty of room for one more misfit. At least, more room than there had been in an Ohio city of 150,000.
By profession I was a stockbroker, and at this particular time there were plenty of opportunities in California for somebody who'd managed his own shop as I had. Problem was, I was tired of trying to motivate eight other brokers into making their monthly goals. I found an old and prestigious firm in Beverly Hills and went to work there as a simple and unhassled broker. It took me several months, but I finally got over being dazzled by having movie stars as clients. It helped that most of them were jerks.
I tried to improve my sex life by touring all the singles bar that my better-looking friends recommended, and by circumspectly scanning many of the Personals columns in the numerous newspapers that infest L.A. But I found nothing to my taste. None of the women who described themselves as straight and in good shape ever mentioned the word that interested me most—romance. They spoke of hiking and biking and surfing; they spoke of symphonies and movies and art galleries; they spoke of equality and empowerment and liberation. But never romance and it was romance I most devoutly desired. There were other options, of course. But while I felt sorry for homosexuals and bisexuals and hated people who persecuted them, I didn't want to be one of them; and try as I might to be understanding of sado-masochism and cross-dressing and transsexualism, there was about it something—for all its sadness—comic and incomprehensible. Fear of disease kept me from whores. The women I met in ordinary circumstances—at the office, supermarket, laundry facilities in my expensive apartment house—treated me as women usually did, with tireless sisterly kindness.
Then some crazy bastards had a gunfight on the San Diego freeway, and my life changed utterly.
This was on a smoggy Friday afternoon. I was returning home from work, tired, facing a long, lonely weekend when I suddenly saw two cars pull up on either side of me. They were, it seemed, exchanging gunfire. This was no doubt because of their deprived childhoods. They continued to fire at each other, not seeming to notice that I was caught in their crossfire. My windshield shattered. My two back tires blew out. I careened off the freeway and went halfway up a hill, where I smashed into the base of a stout scrub pine. That was the last thing I remember about the episode.
My recuperation took five months. It would have been much shorter, but one sunny day a plastic surgeon came into my room and explained what he'd need to do to put my face back to normal and I said, "I don't want it back to normal."
"Pardon me?"
"I don't want it back to normal. I want to be handsome. Movie-star handsome."
"Ah." He said this as if I'd just told him that I wanted to fly. "Perhaps we need to talk to Dr. Schlatter."
Dr. Schlatter too said "Ah" when I told him what I wanted, but it was not quite the "Ah" of the original doctor. In Dr. Schlatter's "Ah" there was at least a little vague hope.
He told me everything in advance, Dr. Schlatter did, even making it interesting, how plastic surgery actually dated back to the ancient Egyptians, and Italians as early as the 1400s were performing quite impressive transformations. He showed me sketches of how he hoped I'd look, he acquainted me with some of the tools so I wouldn't be intimidated when I saw them—scalpel and retractor and chisel—and he told me how to prepare myself for my new face.
Sixteen days later, I looked at myself in the mirror and was happy to see that I no longer existed. Not the former me anyway. Surgery, diet, liposuction, and hair dye had produced somebody who should appeal to a wide variety of women—not that I cared, of course. Only one woman mattered to me, only one woman had ever mattered to me, and during my time in the hospital she was all I thought about, all I planned for. I was not going to waste my physical beauty on dalliances. I was going to use it to win the hand and heart of Amy Towers Carson, the woman I'd loved since second grade.
It was five weeks before I saw her. I'd spent that time getting established in a brokerage firm, setting up some contacts and learning how to use a new live phone hookup that gave me continuous stock analysis. Impressive, for a small Ohio city such as this one, the one where I'd grown up and first fallen in love with Amy.
I had some fun meeting former acquaintances. Most of them didn't believe me when I said I was Roger Daye. A few of them even laughed, implying that Roger Daye, no matter what had happened to him, could never look this good.
My parents living in Florida retirement, I had the old homestead—a nice white Colonial in an Ozzie and Harriet section of the city—to myself, where I invited a few ladies to hone my skills. Amazing how much self-confidence the new me gave the old me. I just took it for granted that we'd end up in bed, and so we did, virtually every single time. One woman whispered that she'd even fallen in love with me. I wanted to ask her to repeat that on tape. Not even my wife had ever told me she loved me, not exactly anyway.
Amy came into my life again at a country club dance two nights before Thanksgiving.
I sat at a table watching couples of all ages box-step around the dance floor. Lots of evening gowns. Lots of tuxedos. And lots of saxophone music from the eight-piece band, the bandstand being the only light, everybody on the floor in intimate boozy shadow.
She was still beautiful, Amy was, not as young-looking, true, but with that regal, obstinate beauty nonetheless and that small, trim body that had inspired ten or twenty thousand of my youthful melancholy erections. I felt that old giddy high school thrill that was in equal parts shyness, lust, and a romantic love that only F. Scott Fitzgerald—my favorite writer—would ever have understood. In her arms I would find the purpose of my entire existence. I had felt this since I'd first walked home with her through the smoky autumn afternoons of third and fourth and fifth grade. I felt it still.
Randy was with her. There had long been rumors that they had a troubled marriage that would inevitably disintegrate. Randy, former Big Ten wide receiver and Rose Bowl star, had been one of the star entrepreneurs of the local eighties—building condos had been his specialty—but his success waned with the end of the decade and word was he'd taken up the harsh solace of whiskey and whores.
They still looked like everybody's dream of the perfect romantic couple, and more than one person on the dance floor nodded to them as the band swung into a Bobby Vinton medly, at which point Randy began dancing Amy around with Technicolor theatrics. Lots of onlooker grins and even a bit of applause. Amy and Randy would be the king and queen of every prom they ever attended. Their dentures might clack when they spoke, Randy's prostate might make him wince every thirty seconds, but by God the spotlight would always find its ineluctable way to them. And they'd be rich—Randy came from a long line of steel money and was one of the wealthiest men in the state.
When Randy went to the John—walking right meant the bar; walking left meant the John—I went over to her.
She sat alone at a table, pert and gorgeous and preoccupied. She didn't notice me at first, but when her eyes met mine, she smiled.
"Hi."
"Hi," I said.
"Are you a friend of Randy's?"
I shook my head. "No, I'm a friend of yours. From high school.'
She looked baffled a moment and then said, "Oh, my God. Betty Anne said she saw you and—oh, my God."
"Roger Daye."
She fled her seat and came to me and stood on her tiptoes and took my warm face in her cold hands and kissed me and said, "You're so handsome."
I smiled. "Quite a change, huh?"
"Well, you weren't that—"
"Of course I was—a dip, a dweeb—"
"But not a nerd."
"Of course a nerd."
"Well, not a complete nerd."
"At least ninety-five percent," I said.
"Eighty percent maybe but—" She exulted over me again, bare shoulders in her wine-red evening gown shiny and sexy in the shadow. "The boy who used to walk me home—"
"All the way up to tenth grade when you met—"
"Randy."
"Right. Randy."
"He really is sorry about beating you up that time. Did your arm heal all right? I guess we sort of lost track of each other, didn't we?"
"My arm healed just fine. Would you care to dance?"
"Would I care to? God, I'd love to."
We danced. I tried not to think of all the times I'd dreamed about this moment, Amy in my arms so beautiful and—
"You're in great shape, too," she said.
"Thank you."
"Weights?"
"Weights and running and swimming."
"God, that's so great. You'll break every heart at our next class reunion."
I held her closer. Her breasts touched my chest. A stout and stern erection filled my pants. I was dizzy. I wanted to take her over into a corner and do it on the spot. She was the sweet smell of clean, wonderful woman flesh, and the even sweeter sight of dazzling white smile against tanned, taut cheeks.
"That bitch.'
I'd been so far gone into my fantasies that I wasn't sure I'd heard her properly;.
"Pardon?"
"Her. Over there. That bitch."
I saw Randy before I saw the woman. Hard to forget a guy who'd once broken your arm—he'd had considerable expertise with hammer locks—right in front of the girl you loved.
Then I saw the woman and I forgot all about Randy.
I didn't think anybody could ever make Amy seem drab, but the woman presently dancing with Randy did just that. There was a radiance about her that was more important than her good looks, a mixture of pluck and intelligence that made me vulnerable to her even from here. In her white strapless gown, she was so fetching that men simply stood and stared at her, the way they would at a low-flying UFO or some other extraordinary phenomenon.
Randy started to twirl her as he had Amy, but this young woman—she couldn't have been much more than twenty—was a far better dancer. She was so smooth, in fact, I wondered if she'd had ballet training.
Randy kept her captive in his muscular embrace for the next three dances.
Because the girl so obviously upset Amy, I tried not to look at her—not even a stolen glance—but it wasn't easy.
"Bitch," Amy said.
And for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for her. She'd always been my goddess, and here she was feeling something as ungoddess-like as jealousy.
"I need a drink."
"So do I."
"Would you be a darling and get us one, then?"
"Of course," I said.
"Black and White, please. Straight up."
She was at her table smoking a cigarette when I brought the drinks back. She exhaled in long, ragged plumes.
Randy and his princess were still on the dance floor.
"She thinks she's so goddamned beautiful," Amy said.
"Who is she?"
But before Amy could tell me, Randy and the young woman deserted the floor and came over to the table.
Randy didn't look especially happy to see me. He glanced first at Amy and then at me and said, "I suppose there's a perfectly good reason for you to be sitting at our table."
Here he was flaunting his latest girlfriend in front of his wife, and he was angry that she had a friend sitting with her.
Amy smirked. "I didn't recognize him, either."
"Recognize who?" Randy snapped.
"Him. The handsome one."
By now I wasn't looking at either of them. I was staring at the young woman. She was even more lovely up close. She seemed amused by us older folks.
"Remember a boy named Roger Daye?" Amy said.
"That candy-ass who used to walk you home?"
"Randy. Meet Roger Daye."
"No way," Randy said, "this is Roger Daye."
"Well, I'm sorry, but he is."
I knew better than to put my hand out. He wouldn't have shaken it.
"Where's a goddamned waiter?" Randy said. Only now did I realize he was drunk.
He bellowed even above the din of the crowd.
He and the young woman sat down just as a waiter appeared.
"It's about goddamned time," Randy said to the older man with the tray.
"Sorry, we're just very busy tonight, sir."
"Is that supposed to be my problem or something?"
"Please, Randy," Amy said.
"Yes, please, Dad," the gorgeous young woman said.
At first I thought she might be joking, making a reference to Randy's age. But she didn't smile, nor did Roger, nor did Amy.
I guess I just kind of sat there and thought about why Randy would squire his own daughter around as if she were his new beau, and why Amy would be so jealous.
Six drinks and many tales of Southern California later— Midwesterners dote on Southern California tales the way people will someday dote on tales of Jupiter and Pluto—Randy said, "Didn't I break your arm one time?" He was the only guy I'd ever met who could swagger while sitting down.
"I'm afraid you did."
"You had it coming. Sniffing around Amy that way."
"Randy," Amy said.
"Daddy," Kendra said.
"Well, it's true, right, Roger? You had the hots for Amy and you probably still goddamned do."
"Randy," Amy said.
"Daddy," Kendra said.
But I didn't want him to stop. He was jealous of me and it made me feel great. Randy Carson, Rose Bowl star, was jealous of me.
"Would you like to dance, Mr. Daye?"
I'd tried hard not to pay any attention to her because I knew if I paid her a little I'd pay her a lot. Wouldn't be able to wrench my eyes or my heart away. She was pure meltdown, the young lady was.
"I'd love to," I said.
I was just standing up when Amy looked at Kendra and said, "He already promised me this one, dear."
And before I knew what to do, Amy took my hand and guided me to the floor.
Neither of us said anything for a long time. Just danced. The good old box step. Same as in seventh grade.
"I know you wanted to dance with her," Amy said.
"She's very attractive."
"Oh, Jesus. That's all I need."
"Did I say something wrong?"
"No—it's just that nobody notices me anymore. I know that's a shitty thing to say about my own daughter, but it's true."
"You're a very beautiful woman."
"For my age."
"Oh, come on now."
"But not vibrant, not fresh the way Kendra is."
"That's a great name, Kendra."
"I chose it."
"You chose well."
'"I wish I'd called her Judy or Jake."
"Jake?"
She laughed. "Aren't I awful? Talking about my own daughter this way? That little bitch."
She slurred the last two words. She'd gunned her drinks—Black and White straight up—and now they were taking their toll.
We danced some more. She stepped on my foot a couple of times. Every once in a while I'd find myself looking over at the table for a glimpse of Kendra. All my life I'd waited to dance like this with Amy Towers. And now it didn't seem to matter much.
"I've been a naughty girl, Roger."
"Oh?"
"I really have been. About Kendra, I mean."
"I suppose a little rivalry between mother and daughter isn't unheard of."
"It's more than that. I slept with her boyfriend last year."
"I see."
"You should see your face. Your very handsome face. You're embarrassed."
"Does she know?"
"About her boyfriend?"
"Uh-huh."
"Of course. I planned it so she'd walk in on us. I just wanted to show her—well, that even some of her own friends might find me attractive."
"You felt real bad about it, I suppose?"
"Oh, no. I felt real good. She naturally told Randy and he made a big thing over it—smashed up furniture and hit me in the face a few times—and it was really great. I felt young again, and desirable. Does that make sense?"
"Not really."
"But they got back at me."
"Oh?"
"Sure. Didn't you see them tonight on the dance floor?"
"Pretty harmless. I mean, she's his daughter."
"Well, then you haven't had a talk with good old Randy lately."
"Oh?"
"He read this article in Penthouse about how incest was actually a very natural drive and how it was actually perfectly all right to bop your family members if it was mutual consent and if you practiced safe sex."
"God."
"So now she walks around the house practically naked, and he rubs her and pats her and gives her big, long squeezes."
"And she doesn't mind?"
"That's the whole point. They're in on this together. To pay me back for sleeping with Bobby."
"Bobby being—"
"Her boyfriend. Well, ex-boyfriend I guess."
Kendra and Randy came back on the floor next dance. If any attention had been paid to Amy and me, it was now transferred to Kendra and Randy. But this time, instead of the theatrical, they embraced the intimate. I was waiting for Randy to start grinding his hips into Kendra dry-hump style, the way high school boys always do when the lights are turned down.
"God, they're sickening," Amy said.
And I pretty much agreed with her.
"She's going to try to seduce you, you know," Amy said.
"Oh, come on now."
"God, are you kidding? She'll want to make you a trophy as soon as she can."
"She's what? Twenty? Twenty-one?"
"Twenty-two. But that doesn't matter, anyway. You just wait and see."
At our table again, I had two more drinks. None of this was as planned. Handsome Roger would return to his hometown and be-guile the former homecoming queen into his arms. Technicolor dreams. But this was different, dark and comic and sweaty, and not a little bit sinister. I could see Roger touching his nearly nude daughter all over her wonderful body, and I could see Amy—not a little bit pathetic—hurtling herself at some strapping college student majoring in gonads.
Jesus, all I'd wanted to do was a little old-fashioned home wrecking… and look what I'd gotten myself into.
Kendra and Randy came back. Randy abused a couple more waiters and then said to me, "You having all that plastic surgery—surprised you didn't have them change you into a broad. You always were a little flitty. Nothing personal, you understand."
"Randy," Amy said.
"Daddy," Kendra said.
But for me this was the supreme compliment. Randy Big Ten Carson was jealous of me again.
I wasn't sure where Kendra was going when she stood up, but then she was next to me and said, "Why don't we dance?"
"I'm sure Rogers tired, dear," Amy said.
Kendra smiled. "Oh, I think he's probably got a little bit of energy left, don't you, Mr. Daye?"
On the floor, in my arms, sexy, soft, sweet, gentle, cunning, and altogether self-possessed, Kendra said, "She's going to try to seduce you, you know."
"Who is?"
"Amy. My mother."
"You may not have noticed, but she's married."
"Like that would really make a difference."
"We're old friends. That's all."
"I've read some of your love letters."
"God, she kept them?"
"All of them. From all the boys who were in love with her. She's got them all up in the attic. In storage boxes. Alphabetized. Whenever she starts to feel old, she drags them out and reads them. When I was a little girl, she'd read them out loud to me."
"I imagine mine were very corny."
"Very sweet. That's how yours were."
Our gazes met, as they like to say in novels. But that wasn't all that met. The back of her hand somehow passed across the front of my trousers, and an erection the goatiest of fifteen-year-olds would envy sprang to life. Then her hand returned to proper dancing position.
"You're really a great-looking man."
"Thank you. But did you ever see my Before picture?"
She smiled. "If you mean your high school yearbook photo, yes, I did. I guess I like the After photo a little better."
"You're very skilled at diplomacy."
"That's not all I'm skilled at, Mr. Daye."
"How about calling me Roger?"
"I'd like that."
I wish I had a big capper for the rest of the evening at the country club, but I don't. By the time Kendra and I got back to the table, Amy and Randy were both resolutely drunk and even a bit incoherent. I excused myself to the John for a time, and as I came back I saw Amy out on the veranda talking to a guy who looked not unlike a very successful gigolo, macho variety. Later, I'd learn that his name was Vic. Back at the table good old Randy insulted a few more waiters and threatened to punch me out if "I didn't keep my goddamned paws" off his wife and his daughter, but he was slurring his words so badly that the effect was sort of lost, especially when he started sloshing his drink around and the glass fell from his hand and smashed all over the table.
"Maybe this is a good time to leave," Kendra said, and began the difficult process of packing her parents up and getting them out to their new Mercedes, which, fortunately, she happened to be driving.
Just as they were leaving, Kendra said, "I may see you later," leaving me to contemplate what, exactly, "later" meant.
After one shower, one nightcap, most of a David Letterman show, and a slow fall into sleep, I found out what "later" meant.
She was at the door, behind a sharp knock in the windy night, adorned in a London Fog trench coat that was, I soon learned, all she wore.
She said nothing, just stood on tiptoes, wonderful lips puckered, waiting to be kissed. I obliged her, sliding an arm around her and leading her inside, feeling a little self-conscious in my pajamas and robe.
We didn't make it to the bedroom. She gently pushed me into a huge leather armchair before the guttering fireplace and eased herself gently atop me. That was when I found out she was naked beneath her London Fog. Her wise and lovely fingers quickly got me properly hard, and then I was inside her and my gasp was exultant pleasure but it was also fear.
I imagine heroin addicts feel this way the first time they use—pleasure from the exquisite kick of it all but fear of becoming a total slave to something they can never again control.
I was going to fall disastrously in love with Kendra, and I knew it that very first moment in the armchair when I tasted the soft, sweet rush of her breath and felt the warm, silken splendor of her sex.
When we were done for the first time, I built the fire again, and got us wine and cheese, and we lay beneath her trench coat staring into the flames crackling behind the glass.
"God, I can't believe it," she said.
"Believe what?"
"How good I feel with you. I really do."
I didn't say anything for a long time. "Kendra."
"I know what you want to ask."
"About your mother."
"I was right."
"If you slept with me only because—"
"—because she slept with Bobby Lane?"
"Right. Because she slept with Bobby Lane."
"Do you want me to be honest?"
I didn't really, but what was I going to say? No, I want you to be dishonest. "Of course."
"That's what first put the thought in my mind, I guess. I mean coming over here and sleeping with you." She laughed. "My mom is seriously smitten with you. I watched her face tonight. Wow. Anyway, I thought that would be a good way to pay her back. By sleeping with you, I mean. But by the end of the evening—God, this is really crazy, Roger, but I've got like this really incredible crush on you."
I wanted to say that I did, too. But I couldn't. I might be a new Roger on the outside but inside I was strictly the old model—shy, nervous, and terrified that I was going to get my heart decimated.
By dawn, we'd made love three times, the last time in my large bed with a jay and a cardinal perched on the window watching us, and soft morning wind soughing through the windbreak pines.
After we finished that last time, we lay in each other's arms for maybe twenty minutes until she said, "I have to be unromantic."
"Be my guest."
"Goose bumps."
"Goose bumps?"
"And bladder."
"And bladder?"
"And morning breath."
"You've lost me."
"A, I'm freezing. B, I really have to pee. And C, may I use your toothbrush?"
In the following three weeks, she spent at least a dozen nights at my place, and on those nights when one or both of us had business to attend to, we had those lengthy phone conversations that new lovers always have. Makes no difference what you say as long as you get to hear her voice and she gets to hear yours.
Only occasionally did I pause and let dread come over me like a drowning wave. I would lose her and be forever bereft afterward. I was suffused with her tastes and smells and sounds and textures— and yet someday all these things would be taken from me and I would be forever alone, and unutterably sad. But what the hell could I do? Walk away? Impossible. She was succor, and life source, and all I could do was cling till my fingers fell away and I was left floating on the vast, dark ocean.
The eighth of December that year was one of those ridiculously sunny days that try to trick you into believing that spring is near. I spent two hours that afternoon cutting firewood in the back and then hauling it inside. Fuel for more trysts. On one of my trips inside, the doorbell rang. When I peeked out, I saw Amy. She looked very good—indeed, much better than she had that night at the country club—except for her black eye.
I let her in and asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee, which she declined. She took the leather couch, I the leather armchair that Kendra and I still used on occasion.
"I need to talk to you, Roger." She wore a white turtleneck beneath a camel hair car coat and designer jeans. There was a blue ribbon in her blond hair, and she looked very sexy in a suburban sort of way.
"All right."
"And I need you to be honest with me."
"If you'll be honest with me."
"The black eye?"
"The black eye."
"Who else? Randy. He came home drunk the other night and I wouldn't sleep with him so he hit me. He sleeps around so much I'm afraid he's going to pick up something." She shook her head with a solemnity I would never have thought her capable of.
"Does he do this often?"
"Sleep around?"
"And hit you."
She shrugged. "Pretty often. Both, I mean."
"Why don't you leave him?"
"Because he'd kill me."
"God, Amy, that's ridiculous. You can get an injunction."
"You think an injunction would stop Randy? Especially when he's been drinking?" She sighed. "I don't know what to do anymore."
This was the woman I'd come back to steal, but now I didn't want to steal her. I didn't even want to borrow her. I just felt sorry for her, and the notion was disorienting.
"Now, I want you to tell me about Kendra."
"I love her."
"Oh, just fucking great, Roger. Just fucking great."
"I'm know I'm a lot older than she is but—"
"Oh, for God's sake, Roger, it's not that."
"It isn't?"
"Of course it isn't. Come over here and sit down."
"Next to you?"
"That's the general idea."
I went over and sat down. Next to her. She smelled great. Same cologne Kendra wore.
She took my hand. "Roger, I want to sleep with you."
"I don't think that would be a good idea."
"All those years you were in love with me. It's not fair."
"What's not fair?"
"You should have gone on loving me. That's how it's supposed to work."
"What's supposed to work?"
"You know, lifelong romance. We're both romantics, Roger, you and I. Kendra is more like her father. Everything's sex."
"You slept with her boyfriend."
"Only because I was afraid and lonely. Randy had just beaten me up pretty badly. I felt so vulnerable. I just needed some kind of reassurance. You know, that I was a woman. That somebody would want me." She took both my hands and brought them to her lips and kissed them tenderly. I couldn't help it. She was starting to have the effect on me she wanted. "I want you to be in love with me again. I can help you forget Kendra. I really can."
"I don't want to forget Kendra."
"Deep down she's like Randy. A whore. She'll break your heart. She really will."
She put two of my fingers in her mouth and began sucking.
She was quite good in bed, maybe even better technically than Kendra. But she wasn't Kendra. There was the rub.
We lay in the last of the gray afternoon and the wind came up, a harsh and wintry wind suddenly, and she tried to get me up for a second time, but it was no good. I wanted Kendra and she knew I wanted Kendra.
There was something very sad about it all. She was right. Romance—the kind of Technicolor romance I'd dreamed of—should last forever, despite any and all odds, the way it did in F. Scott Fitzgerald stories. And yet it hadn't. She was just another woman to me now, with more wrinkles than I had suspected, and a little tummy that was both sweet and comic, and veins like faded blue snakes against the pale flesh of her legs.
And then she started crying and all I could do was hold her and she tried in vain to get me up again and saw the failure not mine but her own.
"I don't know how I ever got here," she said finally to the dusk that was rolling across the drab, cold Midwestern land.
"My house, you mean?"
"No. Here. Forty-two goddamned-years old. With a daughter who steals the one man who truly loved me." A gaze icy as the winter moon then as she said, "But maybe things won't be quite as hunky-fucking-dory as she thinks they'll be."
Later on, I was to remember what she said vividly, the hunky-fucking-dory thing, I mean.
Kendra appeared at nine that same night. I spent the first half hour making love to her and the second half trying to decide if I should tell her about her mother's visit.
Later, in front of the fireplace, a wonderful old film noir called Odds Against Tomorrow on cable, we made love a second time and then, lying in the sweet, cool hollow of her arms, our juices and odors as one now, I said, "Amy was here today."
She stiffened. Her entire body. "Why?"
"It's not easy to explain."
"That bitch. I knew she'd do it."
"Come here, you mean?"
"Come here and put the shot on you. Which she did, right?"
"Right."
"But you didn't—"
I'd never had to lie to her before and it was far more difficult than I'd imagined it might be.
"Things get so crazy sometimes—"
"Oh, shit."
"I mean you don't intend for things to happen but—"
"Oh, shit," she said again. "You fucked her, didn't you?"
"—with all the best intentions, you—"
"Quit fucking babbling. Just say it. Say you fucked her."
"I fucked her."
"How could you do it?"
"I didn't want to."
"Right."
"And I could only do it once. No second time."
"How noble."
"And I regretted it immediately."
"Amy told me that when you were real geeky-looking that you were one of the sweetest people she ever knew."
She stood up, all beautiful, brash nakedness, and stalked back toward the bedroom. "You should have kept your face ugly, Roger. Then your soul would still be beautiful."
I lay there thinking about what she said a moment, and then I stalked back to the bedroom.
She was dressing in a frenzy. She didn't as yet have her bra on completely. Just one breast was cupped. The other looked lone and dear as anything I'd ever seen. I wanted to kiss it and coo baby talk to it.
Then I remembered why I'd come in here. "That's bullshit, you know."
"What's bullshit?" she said, pulling up the second cup of her bra. She wore panty hose but hadn't as yet put on her skirt.
"All that crap about keeping my face ugly so my soul would remain beautiful. If I hadn't had plastic surgery, neither you nor your mother would have given me a second glance."
"That's not true."
I smiled. "God, face it, Kendra, you're a beautiful woman. You're not going to go out with some geek."
"You make me sound as if I've really got a lot of depth."
"Oh, Kendra, this is stupid. I shouldn't have slept with Amy and I'm sorry."
"I'm just surprised she hasn't managed to tell me about it yet. She's probably waiting for the right dramatic moment. And in her version, I'm sure you threw her on the bed and raped her. That's what my father told her the night she caught us together. That I was the one who'd wanted to do it—"
"My God, you mean you—"
"Oh, not all the way. They had one of their country club parties, and both Randy and I were pretty loaded and somehow we ended up on the bed wrestling around and she walked in and—Well, I guess I tried very hard to give her the impression that we'd just been about to make it when she walked in and—"
"That's some great relationship you've got there."
"It's pretty sick and believe me, I know it."
I felt tired standing in the shadowy bedroom, the only light the December quarter moon above the shaggy pines.
"Kendra—"
"Could we just lie down together?" She sounded tired, too. Or course.
"And not do anything, I mean?"
"I know what you mean. And I think that's a wonderful idea."
We must have lain there six, seven minutes before we started making love, and then it was the most violent love we'd ever made, her hurling herself at me, inflicting pleasure and pain in equal parts. It was a purgation I badly needed.
"She's always been like this."
"Your mother?"
"Uh-huh."
"Competitive, you mean?"
"Uh-huh. Even when I was little. If somebody gave me a compliment, she'd get mad and say, 'Well, it's not hard for little girls to look good. The trick is to stay beautiful as you get older.' "
"Didn't your dad ever notice?"
She laughed bitterly. "My father? Are you kidding? He'd usually come home late and then finish getting bombed and then climb in bed next to me and feel me up."
"God."
Bitter sigh. "But I don't give a shit. Not anymore. Fuck them. I come into my own inheritance in six months—from my paternal grandfather—and then I'm moving out of the manse and leaving them to all their silly fucking games."
"Is now a good time to tell you I love you?"
"You know the crazy goddamned thing, Roger?"
"What's that?"
"I really love you, too. For the first time in my life, I actually love somebody."
On the night of 20 Jan, six weeks later, I went to bed early with a new Sue Grafton novel. Kendra had begged off our date because of a head cold. I'm enough of a hypochondriac that I wasn't unhappy about not seeing her.
The call came just before two a.m., long after I was sleeping and just at the point where waking is difficult.
But get up I did and listen at length to Amy's wailing. It took me a long time to understand what the exact message her sobs meant to convey.
The funeral took place on a grim snowy day when the harsh, numbing winds rocked the pallbearers as they carried the gleaming silver coffin from hearse to graveside. The land lay bleak as a tundra.
Later, in the country club where a luncheon was being served, an old high school friend came up and said, "I bet when they catch him he's a nigger."
"I guess it wouldn't surprise me."
"Oh, hell, yes. Poor goddamned guy is sleeping in his own bed when some jig comes in and blasts the hell out of him and then goes down the hall and shoots poor Kendra, too. They say she'll never be able to walk or talk again. Just sit in a frigging wheelchair all the time. I used to be a liberal back in the sixties or seventies, but I've had enough of their bullshit by now. I'll tell you that I've had their bullshit right up to here, in fact."
Amy came late. In the old days one might have accused her of doing so so she could make an entrance. But now she had a perfectly good reason. She walked with a cane, and walked slowly. The intruder who'd shot up the place that night, and stolen more than $75,000 in jewelry, had shot her in the shoulder and the leg, apparently leaving her for dead. Just as he'd left Kendra for dead.
Amy looked pretty damned good in her black dress and veil. The black gave her a mourning kind of sexiness.
A line formed. She spent the next hour receiving the members of that line just as she'd done at the mortuary the night before. There were tears and laughter with tears and curses with tears. The very old looked perplexed by it all—the world made no sense anymore; here you were a rich person and people still broke into your house and killed you right in your bed—and middle-aged people looked angry (i.e., damned niggers) and the young looked bored (Randy being the drunk who'd always wobbled around pinching all the little girls on their bottoms—who cared he was dead, the pervert?).
I was the last person to go through the line, and when she saw me, Amy shook her head and began sobbing. "Poor, poor Kendra," she said. "I know how much she means to you, Roger."
"I'd like to visit her tonight if I could. At the hospital."
Beneath her veil, she sniffled some more. "I'm not sure that's a good idea. The doctor says she really needs her rest. And Vic said she looked very tired this morning."
The bullet had entered her head just below her left temple. By rights she should have died instantly. But the gods were playful and let her live—paralyzed.
"Vic? Who's Vic?"
"Our nurse. Oh, I forgot. I guess you've never met him, have you? He just started Sunday. He's really a dear. One of the surgeons recommended him. You'll meet him sometime."
I met him four nights later at Kendra's bedside.
He was strapping arrogant was our blond Vic, born to a body and face that no amount of surgery or training could ever duplicate, a natural Tarzan to my own tricked-up one. He looked as if he wanted to tear off his dark and expensive suit and head directly back to the jungle to beat up a lion or two. He was also the proud owner of a sneer that was every bit as imposing as his body.
"Roger, this is Vic."
He made a point of crushing my hand. I made a point of not grimacing.
The three of us then stared down at Kendra in her bed, Amy leaning over and kissing Kendra tenderly on the forehead. "My poor baby. If only I could have saved her—"
That was the first time I ever saw Vic touch her, and I knew instantly, in the proprietary way he did, that something was wrong. He probably was a nurse, but to Amy he was also something far more special and intimate.
They must have sensed my curiosity because Vic dropped his hand from her shoulder and stood proper as an altar boy staring down at Kendra.
Amy shot me a quick smile, obviously trying to read my thoughts.
But I lost interest quickly. It was Kendra I wanted to see. I bent over the bed and took her hand and touched it to my lips. I was self-conscious at first, Amy and Vic watching me, but then I didn't give a damn. I loved her and I didn't give a damn at all. She was pale and her eyes were closed and there was a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her head was swathed in white bandages of the kind they always used in Bogart movies, the same ones that Karloff also used in The Mummy. I kissed her lips and I froze there because the enormity of it struck me. Here was the woman I loved, nearly dead, indeed should have been dead given the nature of her wound, and behind me, paying only a kind of lip service to her grief, was her mother.
A doctor came in and told Amy about some tests that had been run today. Despite her coma, she seemed to be responding to certain stimuli that had had no effect on her even last week.
Amy started crying, presumably in a kind of gratitude, and then the doctor asked to be alone with Kendra, and so we went out into the hall to wait.
"Vic is moving in with us," Amy said. "He'll be there when Kendra gets home. She'll have help twenty-four hours a day. Won't that be wonderful?"
Vic watched me carefully. The sneer never left his face. He looked the way he might if he'd just noticed a piece of dog mess on the heel of his shoe. It was not easy being a big blond god. There were certain difficulties with staying humble.
"So you know Kendra's surgeon," I said to Vic.
"What?"
"Amy said that the surgeon had recommended you to her."
They glanced at each other and then Vic said, "Oh, right, the surgeon, yes." He gibbered like a Miss America contestant answering a question about patriotism.
"And you're moving in?"
He nodded with what he imagined was solemnity. If only he could do something about the sneer. "I want to help in any way I can."
"How sweet."
If he detected my sarcasm, he didn't let on.
The doctor came out and spoke in soft, whispered sentences filled with jargon. Amy cried some more tears of gratitude.
"Well," I said. "I guess I'd better be going. Give you some quality time with Kendra."
I kissed Amy on the cheek and shook Vic's proffered hand. He notched his grip down to mid-level. Even hulks have sentimental moments. He even tried a little acting, our Vic. "The trick will be to get her to leave before midnight."
"She stays late, eh?" I said.
Amy kept her eyes downcast, as befitted a saint who was being discussed.
"Late? She'd stay all night if they'd let her. You can't tear her away."
"Well, she and Kendra have a very special relationship."
Amy caught the sarcasm. Anger flashed in her eyes but then subsided. "I want to get back to her," she said. And Mother Theresa couldn't have said it any more believably.
I took the elevator down to the ground floor, then took the emergency stairs back up to the fourth floor. I waited in an alcove down the hall. I could see Kendra's door, but if I was careful neither Amy nor Vic would be able to see me.
They left ten minutes after I did. Couldn't drag Amy away from her daughter's bedside, eh?
In the next six weeks, Kendra regained consciousness, learned how to manipulate a pencil haltingly with her right hand, and got tears in her eyes every time I came through the door. She still couldn't speak or move her lower body or left side, but I didn't care. I loved her more than ever and in so doing proved to myself that I wasn't half as superficial as I'd always suspected. That's a good thing to know about yourself—that at age forty-four you have at least the potential for becoming an adult.
She came home in May, after three intense months of physical rehab and deep depression over her fate, a May of butterflies and cherry blossoms and the smells of steak on the grill on the sprawling grounds behind the vast English Tudor. The grounds ran four acres of prime land, and the house, divided into three levels, included eight bedrooms, five full baths, three half baths, a library, and a solarium. There was also a long, straight staircase directly off the main entrance. Amy had it outfitted with tracks so Kendra could get up and down in her wheelchair.
We became quite a cheery little foursome, Kendra and I, Amy and Vic. Four or five nights a week we cooked out and then went inside to watch a movie on the big-screen television set in the party room. Three nurses alternated eight-hour shifts so that whenever Kendra—sitting silently in her wheelchair in one of her half-dozen pastel-colored quilted robes—needed anything, she had it. Amy made a cursory fuss over Kendra at least twice an evening, and Vic went to fetch something unimportant, apparently in an attempt to convince me he really was a working male nurse.
More and more I slipped out early from the brokerage, spending the last of the day with Kendra in her room. She did various kinds of physical therapy with the afternoon nurse, but she never forgot to draw me something and then offer it up to me with the pride of a little girl pleasing her daddy. It always touched me, this gesture, and despite some early doubts that I'd be able to be her husband—I'd run away and find somebody strong and sound of limb; I hadn't had all that plastic surgery for nothing, had I?—I learned that I loved her more than ever. She brought out a tenderness in me that I rather liked. Once again I felt there was at least some vague hope that I'd someday become an adult. We watched TV or I read her interesting items from the newspaper (she liked the nostalgia pieces the papers sometimes ran) or I just told her how much I loved her. "Not good for you," she wrote on her tablet one day and then pointed at her paralyzed legs. And then broke into tears. I knelt at her feet for a full hour, till the shadows were long and purple, and thought how crazy it all was. I used to be afraid that she'd leave me—too young, too good-looking, too strong-willed, only using me to get back at her mother—and now she had to worry about some of the same things. In every way I could, I tried to assure her that I'd never leave her, that I loved her in ways that gave me meaning and dignity for the first time in my life.
Hot summer came, the grass scorching brown, night fires like the aftermath of bombing sorties in the dark hills behind the mansion. It was on one of these nights, extremely hot, Vic gone someplace, the easily tired Kendra just put to bed, that I found Amy waiting for me in my car.
She wore startling white short-shorts and a skimpy halter that barely contained her chewy-looking breasts. She sat on the passenger side. She had a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
"Remember me, sailor?"
"Where's lover boy?"
"You don't like him, do you?"
"Not much."
"He thinks you're afraid of him."
"I'm afraid of rattlesnakes, too."
"How poetic." She inhaled her cigarette, exhaled a plume of blue against the moonlit sky. I'd parked at the far end of the pavement down by the three-stall garage. It was a cul-de-sac of sorts, protected from view by pines. "You don't like me anymore, do you?"
"No."
"Why?"
"I really don't want to go into it, Amy."
"You know what I did this afternoon?"
"What?"
"Masturbated."
"I'm happy for you."
"And you know who I thought of?"
I said nothing.
"I thought about you. About that night we were together over at your house."
"I'm in love with your daughter, Amy."
"I know you don't think I'm worth a shit as a mother."
"Gee, whatever gave you that idea?"
"I love her in my way. I mean, maybe I'm not the perfect mother, but I do love her."
"Is that why you won't put any makeup on her? She's in a fucking wheelchair, and you're still afraid she'll steal the limelight."
She surprised me. Rather than deny it, she laughed. "You're a perceptive bastard."
"Sometimes I wish I weren't."
She put her head back. Stared out the open window. "I wish they hadn't gone to the moon."
I didn't say anything.
"They spoiled the whole fucking thing. The moon used to be so romantic. There were so many myths about it, and it was so much fun thinking about. Now it's just another fucking rock." She drained her drink. "I'm lonely, Roger. I'm lonely for you."
"I'm sure Vic wouldn't want to hear that."
"Vic's got other women."
I looked at her. I'd never seen her express real anguish before. I took a terrible delight in it. "After what you and Vic did, you two deserve each other."
She was quick about it, throwing her drink in my face, then getting out of the car and slamming the door shut. "You bastard! You think I don't know what you meant by that? You think I killed Randy, don't you?"
"Randy—and tried to kill Kendra. But she didn't die the way she was supposed to when Vic shot her."
"You bastard!"
"You're going to pay for it someday, Amy. I promise you that."
She still had the glass in her hand. She smashed it against my windshield. The safety glass spiderwebbed. She stalked off, up past the pines, into invisibility.
I didn't bring it up. Kendra did. I'd hoped she'd never figure out who was really the intruder that night. She had a difficult enough time living. That kind of knowledge would only make it harder.
But figure it out she did. One cool day in August, the first hint of autumn on the air, she handed me what I assumed would be her daily love note.
VIC CHECK
FIGHT
$
I looked at the note and then at her.
"I guess I don't understand. You want me to check something about Vic?"
Her darting blue eyes said no.
I thought a moment: Vic, check. All I could think of was checking Vic out. Then, "Oh, a check? Vic gets some kind of check?"
The darting blue eyes said yes.
"Vic was having an argument about a check?"
Yes.
"With your mother?"
Yes.
"About the amount of the check?"
Yes.
"About it not being enough?"
Yes.
And then she started crying. And I knew then that she knew. Who'd killed her father. And who'd tried to kill her.
I sat with her a long time that afternoon. At one point a fawn came to the edge of the pines. Kendra made a cooing sound when she saw it, tender and excited. Starry night came and through the open window we could hear a barn owl and later a dog that sounded almost like a coyote. She slept sometimes, and sometimes I just told her the stories she liked to hear, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" and "Rapunzel," stories, she'd once confided, that neither her mother nor her father had ever told her. But this night I was distracted and I think she sensed it. I wanted her to understand how much I loved her. I wanted her to understand that even if there were no justice in the universe at large, at least there was justice in our little corner of it.
On a rainy Friday night in September, at an apartment Vic kept so he could rendezvous with a number of the young women Amy had mentioned, a tall and chunky man, described as black by two neighbors who got a glimpse of him, broke in and shot him to death. Three bullets. Two directly to the brain. The thief then took more than $5,000 in cash and traveler's checks (Vic having planned to leave for a European vacation in four days).
The police inquired of Amy, of course, as to how Vic had been acting lately. They weren't as yet quite convinced that his death had been the result of a simple burglary. The police are suspicious people but not, alas, suspicious enough. Just as they ultimately put Randy's death down to a robbery and murder, so they ultimately ruled that Vic had died at the hand of a burglar, too.
On the day Amy returned from the funeral, I had a little surprise for her, just to show her that things were going to be different from now on.
That morning I'd brought in a hair stylist and a makeup woman. They spent three hours with Kendra and when they were finished, she was as beautiful as she'd ever been.
"We greeted Amy at the vaulted front door—dressing in black was becoming a habit with her—and when she saw Kendra, she looked at me and said, "She looks pathetic. I hope you know that." She went directly to the den, where she spent most of the day drinking scotch and screaming at the servants.
Kendra spent an hour in her room, crying. She wrote the word pathetic several times on her paper. I held her hand and tried to assure her that she indeed looked beautiful, which she did.
That night as I was leaving—we'd taken dinner in Kendra's room, neither of us wanting to see Amy any more than we needed to—she was waiting in my car again, even drunker than she'd been the first time. She had her inevitable drink in her hand. She wore a dark turtleneck and white jeans with a wide, sash-like leather belt. She looked a lot better than I wanted her to.
"You prick, you think I don't know what you did?"
"Welcome to the club."
"I happened to have fucking loved him."
"I'm tired, Amy. I want to go home."
In the pine-smelling night, a silver October moon looked ancient and fierce as an Aztec icon.
"You killed Vic," she said.
"Sure, I did. And I also assassinated JFK."
"You killed Vic, you bastard."
"Vic shot Kendra."
"You can't prove that."
"Well, you can't prove that I shot Vic, either. So please remove your ass from my car."
"I really never thought you'd have the balls. I always figured you for the faggot type."
"Just get out, Amy."
"You think you've won this, Roger. But you haven't. You're fucking with the wrong person, believe me."
"Good night, Amy."
She got out of the car and then put her head back in the open window. "Well, at least there's one woman you can satisfy, anyway. I'm sure Kendra thinks you're a great lover. Now that she's paralyzed, anyway."
I couldn't help it. I got out of the car and walked over to her across the dewy grass. I ripped the drink from her hand and then said, "You leave Kendra and me alone, do you understand?"
"Big, brave man," she said. "Big, brave man."
I hurled her drink into the bushes and then walked back to the car.
In the morning, the idea was there waiting for me.
I called work and told them I wouldn't be in and then spent the next three hours making phone calls to various doctors and medical supply houses as to exactly what I'd need and what I'd need to do. I even set up a temporary plan for private-duty nurses. I'd have to dig into my inheritance, but this was certainly worth it. Then If drove downtown to a jeweler's, stopping by a travel agency on my way back.
I didn't phone. I wanted to surprise her.
The Australian groundsman was covering some tulips when I got there. Frost was predicted. "G'day," he said, smiling. If he hadn't been over sixty with a potbelly and white hair, I would have suspected Amy of using him for her personal pleasure.
The maid let me in. I went out to the back terrace, where she said I'd find Kendra.
I tiptoed up behind her, flicked open the ring case, and held it in front of her eyes. She made that exultant cooing sound in her throat, and then I walked around in front of her and leaned over and gave her a gentle, tender kiss. "I love you," I said. "And I want to marry you right away and have you move in with me."
She was crying but then so was I. I knelt down beside her and put my head on her lap, on the cool surface of her pink quilted housecoat. I let it lie there for a long time as I watched a dark, graceful bird ride the wind currents above, gliding down the long, sunny autumn day. I even dozed off for a time.
At dinnertime, I rolled Kendra to the front of the house, where Amy was entertaining one of the Ken-doll men she'd taken up with these days. She was already slurring her words. "We came up here to tell you that we're going to get married."
The doll-man, not understanding the human politics here, said in a Hollywood kind of way, "Well, congratulations to both of you. That's wonderful." He even toasted us with his martini glass.
Amy said, "He's actually in love with me."
Doll-man looked at me and then back at Amy and then down at Kendra.
I turned her chair sharply from the room and began pushing it quickly over the parquet floor toward the hallway.
"He's been in love with me since second grade, and he's only marrying her because he knows he can't have me!"
And then she hurled her glass against the wall, smashing it, and I heard, in the ensuing silence, doll-man cough anxiously and say, "Maybe I'd better be going, Amy. Maybe another night would be better."
"You sit right where you fucking are," Amy said, "and don't fucking move."
I locked Kendra's door behind us on the unlikely chance that Amy would come down to apologize.
Around ten, she began to snore quietly. The nurse knocked softly on the door. "I need to get in there, sir. The missus is upstairs sleeping."
I leaned over and kissed Kendra tenderly on the mouth.
We set the date two weeks hence. I didn't ask Amy for any help at all. In fact, I avoided her as much as possible. She seemed similarly inclined. I was always let in and out by one of the servants.
Kendra grew more excited each day. We were going to be married in my living room by a minister I knew vaguely from the country club. I sent Amy a handwritten note inviting her, but she didn't respond in any way.
I suppose I didn't qualify as closest kin. I suppose that's why I had to hear it on the radio that overcast morning as I drove to work.
It seemed that one of the city's most prominent families had been visited yet again by tragedy—first the father dying in a robbery attempt a year earlier, and now the wheelchair-confined daughter falling down the long staircase in the family mansion. Apparently she'd come too close to the top of the stairs and simply lost control. She'd broken her neck. The mother was said to be under heavy sedation.
I must have called Amy twenty times that day, but she never took my calls. The Aussie gardener usually picked up. "Very sad here today, mate. She was certainly a lovely lass, she was. You have my condolences."
I cried till I could cry no more and then I took down a bottle of Black and White scotch and proceeded to do it considerable damage as I sat in the gray gloom of my den.
The liquor dragged me through a Wagnerian opera of moods— forlorn, melancholy, sentimental, enraged—and finally left me wrapped around my cold, hard toilet bowl, vomiting. I was not exactly a world-class drinker.
She called just before midnight, as I stared dully at CNN. Nothing they said registered on my conscious mind.
"Now you know how I felt when you killed Vic."
"She was your own daughter."
"What kind of life would she have had in that wheelchair?"
"You put her there!" And then I was up, frantic, crazed animal, walking in small, tight circles, screaming names at her.
"Tomorrow I'm going to the police," I said.
"You do that. Then I'll go there after you do and tell them about Vic."
"You can't prove a damned thing."
"Maybe not. But I can make them awfully suspicious. I'd remember that if I were you."
She hung up.
It was November then, and the radio was filled with tinny, cynical messages of Christmas. I went to the cemetery once a day and talked to her, and then I came home and put myself to sleep with Black and White and Valium. I knew it was Russian roulette, that particular combination, but I thought I might get lucky and lose.
The day after Thanksgiving, she called again. I hadn't heard from her since the funeral.
"I'm going away."
"So?"
"So. I just thought I'd tell you that in case you wanted to get hold of me."
"And why would I want to do that?"
"Because we're joined at the hip, darling, so to speak. You can put me in the electric chair, and I can do the same for you."
"Maybe I don't give a damn."
"Now you're being dramatic. If you truly didn't give a damn, you would've gone to the police two months ago."
"You bitch."
"I'm going to bring you a little surprise when I come back from my trip. A Christmas gift, I guess you'd call it."
I tried working but I couldn't concentrate. I took an extended leave. The booze was becoming a problem. There was alcoholism on both sides of my family, so my ever increasing reliance on blackouts wasn't totally unexpected, I suppose. I stopped going out. I learned that virtually anything you needed would happily be brought you if you had the money, everything from groceries to liquor. A cleaning woman came in one day a week and bulldozed her way through the mess. I watched old movies on cable, trying to lose myself especially in the frivolity of the musicals. Kendra would have loved them. I found myself waking, many mornings, in the middle of the den, splayed on the floor, after apparently trying to make it to the door but failing. One morning I found that I'd wet myself. I didn't much care, actually. I tried not to think of Kendra, and yet she was all I did want to think about. I must have wept six or seven times a day. I dropped twelve pounds in two weeks.
I got sentimental about Christmas Eve, decided to try to stay reasonably sober and clean myself up a little bit. I told myself I was doing this in honor of Kendra. It would have been our first Christmas Eve together.
The cleaning lady was also a good cook and had left a fine roast beef with vegetable and potato fixings in the refrigerator. All I had to do was heat it up in the microwave.
I had just set my place at the dining room table—with an identical place setting to my right for Kendra—when the doorbell rang.
I answered it, opening the door and looking out into the snow-whipped darkness.
I know I made a loud and harsh sound, though if it was a scream exactly, I'm not sure.
I stepped back from the doorway and let her come in. She'd even changed her walk a little, to make it more like her daughter's. The clothes, too, the long double-breasted camel hair coat and the wine-colored beret, were more Kendra's style than her own. Beneath was a four-button empire dress that matched the color of the beret—the exact dress Kendra had often worn.
But the clothes were only props.
It was the face that possessed me.
The surgeon had done a damned good job, whoever he or she was, a damned good job. The nose was smaller and the chin was now heart-shaped and the cheekbones were more pronounced and perhaps a half inch higher. And with her blue blue contacts—
Kendra. She was Kendra.
"You're properly impressed, Roger, and I'm grateful for that," she said, walking past me to the dry bar. "I mean, this was not without pain, believe me. But then you know that firsthand, don't you, being an old hand at plastic surgery yourself."
She dropped her coat in an armchair and fixed herself a drink.
"You bitch," I said, slapping the drink from her hand, hearing it shatter against the stone of the fireplace. "You're a goddamned ghoul."
"Maybe I'm Kendra reincarnated." She smiled. "Have you ever thought of that?"
"I want you out of here."
She stood on tiptoes, just as Kendra had once done, and touched my lips to hers. "I knew you'd be gruff the first time you saw me. But you'll come around. You'll get curious about me. If I taste any different, or feel any different. If I'm—Kendra."
I went over to the door, grabbing her coat as I did so. Then I yanked her by the wrist and spun her out into the snowy cold night, throwing her coat after her. I slammed the door.
Twenty minutes later, the knock came again. I opened the door, knowing just who it would be. There were drinks, hours of drinks, and then, quite before I knew what was happening and much against all I held sacred and dear, we were somehow in bed, and as she slid her arms around me there in the darkness, she said, "You always knew I'd fall in love with you someday, didn't you, Roger?"