The Joy of Killing (19 page)

The girl on the train is of course the wrinkle. She doesn't easily fit within the view. I see now she's never disappeared; she has
prevented me from sliding into neutral and viewing the experience of living from a transcendent state. She has held me together, really, the glue on the tiny sticks of a toy B-17. Or better, a single thread through the panoply of images and memories and insights and splintered thoughts that allow a quasi-self to form and function. In a manner of speaking, at least. I did care about teaching and writing. I enjoyed the students, elucidating theories of human motivation. But that was because the self I brought in there was not that different from the self that drew stick figures on the living room wall for art, the barely coagulated one. When the dean's people moved in, I was finished. And I was better for it, for it allowed me to walk away from things like the article on the wellspring of human nature. I really don't care if people gain any understanding of why they do what they do; most, in fact, prefer to remain ignorant. You have children out of instinct. You drink because you believe it will make you feel better. You get out of bed in the morning because you think you must have hope.

I understand that the girl—or perhaps the entire night on the train—has evolved into something approaching myth. What was real that night is still part of the story, but ever so much more has been colored in. I can sense her presence here with me now. The beauty in her sad, feeling eyes. The touch of her lovely fingers on mine. The ever-so-slightly plump lips. She's asking me something, waiting for my answer. As if there's something there for me to tell and she needs some help in unwrapping it. We've tasted each other, and with that, I'm beginning to realize, comes some sort of obligation, of exposure, or disclosure. I feel the tremendous pull of her
eyes, which tells me something lies deep beneath them. Me for you. Us for them. The exotic look could easily unravel me. My eyes drop to her breasts, her waist, her bare, tightly closed knees. The experience of her is floating away. I don't know how to hold onto it. Her body is already far beyond the pale.

A loud clatter on the wooden floor startles me. An elongated object. I nudge it forward with my toe. The knife. It must have fallen from my lap, yet I have no memory of putting it there. I lean over and touch the knife. I pick it up by the handle, hold it straight out, let it fall. It sticks in the wood and shivers in a blur.

M
Y FIRST WIFE
'
S
obituary said she had remarried and had two children, two grandchildren, and owned a gallery in Des Moines. Services would be held in two days at a funeral parlor not far from my apartment. After some consideration, I decided to attend the viewing. We hadn't ended up badly, after all, and there had been some good times, although I doubted she would have attended my funeral. When I arrived, all the mourners were gathered in a far corner, on the opposite side of the room from the casket, a shiny gunmetal gray. She lay out in the coffin in a blue dress. Around her neck was a two-strand pearl necklace I had given her for a birthday. Her nails were a bright pink, and rings of diamonds encircled her left finger. Her face wore an unfamiliar look; uneasy, anxious almost. A form beside me said:

“She wanted to be buried in the necklace.”

I turned: it was David, in a tailored blue suit and burgundy tie. He reached out and touched her hand, as if inviting me to do the
same. I glanced at her husband across the way; a short, slightly pudgy man in a sports coat and slacks. We had met once before, in a restaurant. He was a neurosurgeon whom she met shortly after her affair with David ended and married within a matter of months.

“She loved you,” David said. I turned back. The usual smirk was absent from his face.

The husband was looking at us. I touched her ice-cold wrist.

“She didn't want you to know she was dying,” David said.

Why would she care? I wondered, but said nothing.

She loved me, David had said, as if we all understood the meaning of that word. She had an idea in her mind, which didn't pan out. Me? I was only trying the relationship on like a suit of clothes, to see if it could give me a bit of respectability, a bit of continuity. The place was getting thick with people, the air heavy with the humidity of perpetual sadness. Faces I almost recognized floated up and said something, then disappeared. I headed for the door. A touch on my shoulder stopped me.

It was her husband. He said my name. Reached in his pocket and pulled out a white envelope. On the front in large black letters was my name. “She left a note for you,” he said, handing it to me. He started to say something else, “She . . . ,” but touched his forehead with a hanky and left. I slipped the envelope in my pocket and walked out the door, down the red-carpeted hall past tall vases of artificial flowers and large, gold-framed paintings of angels floating in billowy clouds. Outside, I paused. I pulled the envelope out, studied the lettering—it was her handwriting—and held it up to the light, looking for what, I didn't know. A plastic toy. A joint. A photo, of
us. I tossed it in an aluminum bucket stuffed with sand and butts. She wanted to say good-bye, but on her terms, a one-way conversation. She did it to make herself feel better, I thought, to unload something before the finality. Nothing good could come from reading it. Although there had been no recriminations or accusations at the end, I remember the gradual sinking of hope in her eyes, and it was killing me. I began the process of ending it. I stopped fucking her. I left early and stayed late at the college. On the weekends I read and drank. She was smart enough to see the plan, and she went along with it, a shared delusion that I had once been there but was leaving, or had left. That I had never been there was a truth better left unsaid. She was dying from lack of oxygen and needed out the door, and we conspired silently to make it as respectable an exit as possible. We went five days without speaking, two unleavened ghosts wandering alone in the same house. On the sixth day I awoke to an empty bed, an empty house. No note, no message on the machine. It was painful, yes, but feelings of relief flowed in like a rushing tide. I had never misled her, misrepresented who I was or what life would be like with me, I told myself. I never assured her that despite her doubts
I was really there
. True enough. But I didn't dispel the notion either. I never said, “You're falling for an empty box, a contrivance.” Perhaps deep in the miasma lay the hope that she could provide the substance, the ground. If so, it was a stupid hope, a cruel hope.

Halfway across the parking lot I turned back to the parlor. I couldn't have someone else finding and reading the note, whatever it said. I pulled it from the sand, shook it out, and stuck it in my coat pocket. I skipped the ceremony at the cemetery.

That had been, what, a month ago? Two months? I still hadn't read the letter.

I
LEAN OVER
in the chair, hook the handle of the knife back with my forefinger, pull it back, and let it snap forward. The tip stays stuck in the wood as the handle whips and blurs.

As for David, he had caught me in the funeral parlor parking lot and invited me to his house for a drink. I declined, and he persisted, and I said I would think about it, and drove off. We hadn't talked of Willie since I went away to prep school. The myth of our friendship evaporated when I came to see him as a truly a selfish prick. Now, I wish I had gone, to study him like a bug stuck on a slide. I believe now David was trying to recruit me for Willie back then. He saw nothing wrong in it, like he saw nothing wrong in fucking my wife, and in fact no one is in a position to judge him for it. And perhaps screwing my wife was his way of getting even with me for bailing out of Willie's room, or showing me that in fact he liked pussy. Although why David cared what I thought I can't imagine. I admire him, really, for the blasé way in which he carries himself. The look of sincerity on his face when he said my ex-wife had loved me. He doesn't feel bad about anything he's done; he is without guilt or remorse. David is the Professor's prototype of the morally neutral actor. If he killed Willie, it was not an act of rage, an explosion, or even revenge for harm suffered. He did it because Willie's time was over. He accurately predicted that he would feel better for it, for clearing the stage of a no-longer-useful prop. David was simply acting out his lines, following the stage direction.

Feelings of betrayal and revenge are worthless feelings, are they not? They only serve to bring you low, to hide the beauty of the world from your sight.

I reach for the knife. It has sunk in deeper in the plank than I thought. I jerk it hard, back and forth. It flies from my grip and clatters across the room. Let it lie, I think. No more blood, for now. When I left the alley, where did I go? I only remember realizing that Willie's death made sense, but still there was an uneasy feeling of lack of completion. It must have been then that I decided to leave town and come up here to the lake in the north woods. But hadn't I taken Thesis to a friend's house earlier? I turn back to the typewriter, as if it held the answer to all the questions, which in fact it did.

I turn the knob on the roller, then turn it again, until the paper pops out and flutters off the edge of the table and onto the floor. I pick it up and lay it on the stack, which is now close to an inch. On the train that night, I didn't think much about who the girl was, or why she was doing what she was doing, until we were sitting in the train car after having sex in the vestibule and the sadness of the aftermath threatened to give way to an intimacy more intense and beguiling than when we were fucking. I sometimes lost track of her words, not just to the steady clickety-clack of the wheels, but in her eyes, which never left me, which seemed to be on the verge of consuming not only me but the entire rocket and all in it. She would catch herself, smile, sit back a little, and sigh. “Well,” she would say, her eyes recovering, “tell me about you.” I would tell her something unimportant, like I played first base on the baseball
team, because I was left-handed, but that I couldn't hit, or that I had earned only two merit badges in Boy Scouts before being kicked out. She asked what for.

“Smoking.”

Her blue eyes glistened in the lights of a passing town. “Luckies?” she asked.

I nodded.

She reached in the seat behind her, and her breasts turned with her shoulder, and suddenly I wanted desperately to touch them. Before my hand could even think of rising, she turned back with a smile and the pack of Luckies. She tapped the silver paper on her finger, until one slid out. She held it lightly between her fingers, ladylike.

“It needs to be packed,” I said.

She handed me the Zippo. “Show me.”

“You hold the cigarette loosely in one hand,” I said, managing it between the thumb and forefinger. “Like this.” She leaned a little closer. I dropped my hand, released the butt at the last second, it smacked the lighter, and I caught it expertly on the bounce. Then I whacked it again on the case, harder this time. Her breath caught, as if she were witnessing a high-wire walker, and I made the mistake of looking at her, and the butt slipped from my fingers and onto my lap. My cheeks flamed. How many hours had I spent perfecting that move? Four or five good whacks, while you were talking to someone or gazing nonchalantly across the room, and the weed was hard as a pencil, with a slight flare of paper on the other end to blaze up when you struck the fire. All in a few seconds, unless you purposely drew it out, lingering, with pauses, for effect.

The girl laughed, not unkindly, and plucked the weed from my lap, brushing the tip of my dick in the process, a little more roughly than was necessary. Her eyes were merry as she reached for the Zippo. When she first whacked the weed on the lighter, it flew from her fingers on the bounce, and I went to retrieve it from her lap, perhaps to brush her breast, but she was too quick for me. By the third try she caught it.

I reached for the weed and the Zippo. I whacked the weed two, three times, each one harder than the one before, the sound now like a muffled gunshot. I turned the end around to face her. She touched it, then let her fingers slide down the length of it, and then back up. I don't lust for you, I wanted to tell her; I just want to feel your breasts without desire or need. Them and me. No you.

To avoid a feeling of loss, I realize now, with some clarity. A foolish hope.

The Zippo was heavy in my hand, and she tapped it with her nail, as if to say, “Now?”

T
HERE IS, AND
was then, and always will be, an art to handling a Zippo. You hold the metal case with your three fingers on the back edge and your thumb resting on the crack separating the lid from the case. With one smooth motion, without looking, you brush the lid up with your thumb, and as it clinks open you brush the same thumb down on the wheel. The flame shoots up. Glancing to bring the tip of the smoke to the flame, you hold the fire there just long enough for one short pull—if it had been packed right, that was all you needed—and then you snap the lid
shut with your first finger. Clunk! And the lighter disappears into your pocket. As the smoke hits the back of your throat, you take the cigarette from your lips, drop it to your side, and exhale. Two seconds at most.

A few days after the detectives showed up at our house, my father gave me his Zippo for good. He was, in his own way, telling me it was OK. I would work it in my pocket. Clink-clunk, hard and clear, it rang out. I rubbed my thumb over the Marine Corps emblem until it grew shiny and almost smooth, except for the top of the anchor.