The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

  He shot it like a pro.

  II

  Back at their building, Chad raced up the stairs. He felt sure that she wouldn't be there. He had seen her go skimming away at a full-out run, and the mothers had barely given her a look--they were converging on the child she had chosen, a boy of perhaps four--but he was still sure she wouldn't be there and that he would get a call telling him that his wife was at the police station, where she had collapsed and told everything, including his part in it. Worse, Winnie's part in it, thus ensuring it had all been for nothing.

  His hand was shaking so badly that he couldn't get the key in the slot; it went chattering madly around the keyplate without even coming close. He was in the act of putting down the paper bag (now badly crumpled) with the videocam inside it, so he could use his left hand to steady his right, when the door opened.

  Nora was now wearing cutoff jeans and a shell top, the clothes she'd had on beneath the long skirt and smock. The plan had been for her to change in the car, before driving away. She said she could do it like lightning, and it seemed she'd been right.

  He threw his arms around her and hugged her so tightly he heard the thump as she came against him--not exactly a romantic embrace.

  Nora bore this for a moment, then said, "Come inside. Get out of the hall." And as soon as the door to the outside world was closed, she said, "Did you get it? Tell me you did. I've been here for almost half an hour, pacing around like Mrs. Reston in the middle of the night . . . Mrs. Reston if she was on speed, that is . . . wondering--"

  "I was worried too." He shoved his hair off his forehead, where the skin felt hot and feverish. "Norrie, I was scared to death."

  She snatched the bag from his hands, peered inside, then glared at him. She had ditched the sunglasses. Her blue eyes burned. "Tell me you got it."

  "Yeah. That is, I think so. I must have. I haven't looked yet."

  The glare got hotter. He thought, Watch out, Nor, your eyeballs will catch fire if you keep doing that.

  "You better have. You better have. The time I haven't been pacing around, I've been on the toilet. I keep having cramps--" She went to the window and looked out. He joined her, afraid she knew something he didn't. But there were only the usual pedestrians going back and forth.

  She turned to him again, and this time grabbed his arms. Her palms were dead cold. "Is he all right? The kid? Did you see if he was okay?"

  "He's fine," Chad said.

  "Are you lying?" She was shouting into his face. "You better not be! Was he all right?"

  "Fine. Standing up even before the mothers got to him. Bawling his head off, but I got worse at that kid's age when I was clopped in the back of the head by a swing. I had to go to the emergency room and have five sti--"

  "I hit him much harder than I meant to. I was so afraid that if I pulled the punch . . . if Winnie saw I pulled it . . . he wouldn't pay. And the adrenaline . . . Christ! It's a wonder I didn't tear that poor kid's head right off! Why did I ever do it?" But she wasn't crying, and she didn't look remorseful. She looked furious. "Why did you let me?"

  "I never--"

  "Are you sure he's all right? You really saw him getting up? Because I hit him much harder than I . . ." She wheeled away from him, went to the wall, knocked her forehead against it, then turned back. "I walked into a playground and I punched a four-year-old child square in the mouth! For money!"

  He had an inspiration. "I think it's on the tape. The kid getting up, I mean. You'll see for yourself."

  She flew back across the room. "Put it on the TV! I want to see!"

  Chad attached the VSS cable Charlie had given him. Then, after a little fumbling, he played the tape on the TV. He had indeed recorded the kid getting to his feet again, just before shutting the thing off and walking away. The kid looked bewildered, and of course he was crying, but otherwise he seemed fine. His lips were bleeding quite a lot, but his nose only a little. Chad thought he might have gotten the bloody nose when he fell down.

  No worse than any minor playground accident, he thought. Thousands of them happen every day.

  "See?" he asked her. "He's fi--"

  "Run it again."

  He did. And when she asked him to run it a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, he did that too. At some point he became aware that she was no longer watching to see the kid get up. Neither was he. They were watching him go down. And the punch. The punch delivered by the crazy red-haired bitch in the sunglasses. The one who walked up and did her business and then took off with wings on her sneakers.

  She said, "I think I knocked out one of his teeth."

  He shrugged. "Good news for the Tooth Fairy."

  After the fifth viewing, she said: "I want to get the red out of my hair. I hate it."

  "Okay--"

  "But first, take me in the bedroom. Don't talk about it either. Just do it."

  *

  She kept telling him to go harder, almost belting him with her upthrusting hips, as if she wanted to buck him off. But she wasn't getting there.

  "Hit me," she said.

  He did it. He was beyond rationality.

  "You can do better than that. Fucking hit me!"

  He hit her harder. Her lower lip split open. She dabbed her fingers in the blood. While she was doing it, she came.

  *

  "Show it to me," Winnie said. This was the next day. They were in his study.

  "Show me the money." A famous line. She just couldn't remember from where.

  "After I see the video."

  The camera was still in the crumpled bag. She took it out, along with the cable. He had a little TV in the study, and she connected the cable to it. She pushed Play, and they looked at the woman in the Mets cap sitting on the park bench. Behind her, a few children were playing. Behind them, mothers were talking mommyshit: body wraps, plays they had seen or were going to see, the new car, the next vacation. Blah-blah-blah.

  The woman got up from the bench. The video zoomed jerkily in. The picture shivered a bit, then steadied.

  That was where Nora hit the Pause button. This was Chad's idea, and she had agreed to it. She trusted Winnie, but only so far.

  "I want to see the money."

  Winnie took a key from the pocket of the cardigan sweater he was wearing. He used it to open the center drawer of his desk, switching it to his left hand when the partially paralyzed right one wouldn't do his bidding.

  It wasn't an envelope after all. It was a medium-sized Federal Express box. She looked inside and saw bundled hundreds, each bundle secured with a rubber band.

  He said, "It's all there, plus some extra."

  "All right. Look at what you bought. All you have to do is push Play. I'll be in the kitchen."

  "Don't you want to watch it with me?"

  "No."

  "Nora? You appear to have had a small accident yourself." He tapped the corner of his mouth, the side that still turned down slightly.

  Had she thought he had a sheep's face? How stupid of her. How unseeing of her. Nor was it a wolf's face, not really. It was somewhere in between. A dog's face, maybe. The kind of dog that would bite and then run.

  "I ran into a door," she said.

  "I see."

  "All right, I'll watch it with you," she said, and sat down. She pushed Play herself.

  They watched the video twice, in complete silence. The running time was about thirty seconds. That amounted to about sixty-six hundred dollars per second. Nora had done the math while she and Chad were watching it.

  After the second time, he pushed Stop. She showed him how to eject the small cassette. "This is yours. The camera has to go back to the guy my husband borrowed it from."

  "I understand." His eyes were bright. It seemed he'd actually gotten what he'd paid for. What he wanted. Incredible. "I shall have Mrs. Granger buy me another camera for future viewings. Or perhaps that's an errand you'd care to run."

  "Not me. We're done."

  "Ah." He didn't look surprised. "All right. But . .
. if I may make a suggestion . . . you may want to get another job. So no one thinks it odd when those bills begin getting paid off at a faster clip. It's only your welfare I'm thinking of, my dear."

  "I'm sure." She unplugged the cable and put it back in the bag with the camera.

  "And I wouldn't leave for Vermont too soon."

  "I don't need your advice. I feel dirty and you're the reason why."

  "I suppose I am. But you won't get caught and no one will ever know." The right side of his mouth was drawn down, the left side lifted in what could have been a smile. The result was a serpentine S below his beak of a nose. His speech was very clear that day. She would remember that, and ponder it. As if what he called sin had turned out to be therapy. "And Nora . . . is feeling dirty always a bad thing?"

  She had no idea how to answer this. Which, she supposed, was an answer in itself.

  "I only ask," he said, "because the second time you ran the tape, I watched you instead of it."

  She snatched up the bag with Charlie Green's videocam inside and walked to the door. "Have a nice life, Winnie. Make sure you get an actual therapist as well as a nurse next time. Your father left you enough to afford both. And take care of that tape. For both our sakes."

  "You're unidentifiable on it, dear. And even if you weren't, would anyone care?" He shrugged. "It doesn't depict a rape or murder, after all."

  She stood in the doorway, wanting to be gone but curious. Still curious.

  "Winnie, how will you square this with your God? How long will it take to pray it off?"

  He chuckled. "If an outrageous sinner like Simon Peter could go on to found the Catholic Church, I expect I'll be fine."

  "Yes, but did Simon Peter keep the videotape to watch on cold winter evenings?"

  This finally silenced him, and Nora left before he could find his voice again. It was a small victory, but one she grasped eagerly.

  A week later he called the apartment and told her she was welcome to come back, at least until she and Chad left for Vermont. He hadn't hired anyone else, and if there was any possibility she might change her mind, he wouldn't.

  "I miss you, Nora."

  She said nothing.

  His voice dropped. "We could watch the tape again. Wouldn't you like to do that? Wouldn't you like to see it again, at least once?"

  "No," she said, and hung up. She started toward the kitchen to make tea, but then a wave of faintness came over her. She sat down in the corner of the living room and bent her head to her upraised knees. She waited for the faintness to pass. Eventually it did.

  *

  She got a job taking care of Mrs. Reston. It was only twenty hours a week, and the pay was nothing like what she had been making as Reverend Winston's employee, but money was no longer the issue, and the commute was easy--one flight of stairs. Best of all, Mrs. Reston, who suffered from diabetes and mild cardiac problems, was a featherbrained sweetie. Sometimes, however--especially during her endless monologues concerning her late husband--Nora's hand itched to reach out and slap her.

  Chad kept his name on the sub list, but cut back on his hours. He set aside six of those newfound hours each weekend to work on Living with the Animals, and the pages began to mount up.

  Once or twice he asked himself if the weekend pages were as good--as lively--as the work he had done before that day with the video camera, and told himself that the question had only occurred to him because some old and false notion of retribution was lodged in his mind. Like a kernel of popcorn between two back teeth.

  *

  Twelve days after the day in the park, there was a knock at the apartment door. When Nora opened it, a policeman was standing there.

  "Yes, Officer?" she asked.

  "Are you Nora Callahan?"

  She thought calmly: I will confess everything. And after the authorities have done to me whatever they do, I'll go to that boy's mother and stick out my face and say "Hit me with your best shot, Mama. You'll be doing both of us a favor."

  "Yes, I'm Mrs. Callahan."

  "Ma'am, I'm here at the request of the Walt Whitman branch of the Brooklyn Public Library? You have four library books that are almost two months overdue, and one of them is quite valuable. An art book, I believe? Limited circulation."

  She gawked at him, then burst out laughing. "You're a library policeman?"

  He tried to keep a straight face, but then he laughed too. "Today I guess I am. Do you have those books?"

  "Yes. I forgot all about them. Would you care to walk a lady to the library, Officer--" She looked at his nametag. "Abromowitz?"

  "Happy to. Just bring your checkbook."

  "Maybe they'll take my Visa," she said.

  He smiled. "Probably will," he said.

  *

  That night, in bed.

  "Hit me!" As though it wasn't lovemaking she had in mind but some nightmare blackjack game.

  "No."

  She was on top of him, which made it easy to reach down and smack him. The sound of her palm hitting the side of his face was like the report of an air gun.

  "Hit me, I said! Hit m--"

  Chad slapped her back without thinking. She began to cry, but he was stiffening under her. Good.

  "Now do me."

  He did her. Outside, someone's car alarm went off.

  *

  They went to Vermont in January. They went on the train. It was lovely, like a picture postcard. They saw a house they both liked about twenty miles outside of Montpelier. It was only the third one they looked at.

  The real estate agent's name was Jody Enders. She was very pleasant, but she kept looking at Nora's right eye. Finally Nora said, with an embarrassed little laugh, "I slipped on a patch of ice while I was getting into a taxi. You should have seen me last week. I looked like a spouse-abuse ad."

  "I can hardly see it," Jody Enders said. Then, shyly: "You're very pretty."

  Chad put his arm around Nora's shoulders. "I think so too."

  "What do you do for a living, Mr. Callahan?"

  "I'm a writer," he said.

  They made a down payment on the house. On the loan agreement, Nora checked OWNER FINANCED. In the DETAILS box, she wrote simply: Savings.

  *

  One day in February, while they were packing for the move, Chad went into Manhattan to see a movie at the Angelika and have dinner with his agent. Officer Abromowitz had given Nora his card. She called him. He came over and they fucked in the mostly empty bedroom. It was good, but it would have been better if she could have persuaded him to hit her. She asked, but he wouldn't.

  "What kind of crazy lady are you?" he asked in that voice that people use when they mean I'm joking but not really.

  "I don't know," Nora said. "I'm still finding out."

  *

  They were scheduled to make the move to Vermont on February 29. The day before--what would have been the last day of the month in an ordinary year--the telephone rang. It was Mrs. Granger, Pastor Emeritus Winston's housekeeper. As soon as Nora registered the woman's hushed tone, she knew why she had called, and her first thought was What did you do with the tape, you bastard?

  "The obituary will say kidney failure," Mrs. Granger said in her hushed someone's-dead voice, "but I was in his bathroom. The medicine bottles were all out, and too many of the pills were gone. I think he committed suicide."

  "Probably not," Nora said. She spoke in her calmest, surest, most nursely manner. "What's more likely is that he became confused about how many he'd taken. He may have even had another stroke. A small one."

  "Do you really think so?"

  "Oh yes," Nora said, and had to restrain herself from asking if Mrs. Granger had seen a new video camera around anywhere. Hooked up to Winnie's TV, most likely. It would be insane to ask such a question. She almost did, anyway.

  "That's such a relief," Mrs. Granger said.

  "Good," Nora said.

  *

  That night, in bed. Their last Brooklyn night.

  "You need to stop w
orrying," Chad said. "If someone finds that tape, they probably won't look at it. And if they do, the chance they'd connect it with you is so small as to be infinitesimal. Besides, the kid's probably forgotten it by now. The mother too."

  "The mother was there when a crazy lady assaulted her son and then ran away," Nora said. "Believe me, she hasn't forgotten it."

  "All right," he said in an equable tone that made her want to hike her knee into his balls.

  "Maybe I ought to go over and help Mrs. Granger neaten the place up."

  He looked at her as if she were mad.

  "Maybe I want to be suspected," she said, and gave him a thin smile. What she thought of as her inciting smile.

  He looked at her, then rolled away.

  "Don't do that," she said. "C'mon, Chad."

  "No," he said.

  "What do you mean, no? Why?"

  "Because I know what you think of when we do it."

  She hit him. It was a pretty good thump on the back of the neck. "You don't know shit."

  He turned over and raised a fist. "Don't do that, Nora."

  "Go on," she said, offering her face. "You know you want to."

  He almost did. She saw the twitch. Then he lowered his hand and unrolled the fingers. "No more."

  She said nothing but thought: That's what you think.

  *

  Nora lay awake, looking at the digital clock. Until 1:41A she thought, This marriage is in trouble. Then, as 1:41 became 1:42, she thought: No, that's wrong. This marriage is over.

  But it had another seven months to run.

  *

  Nora never expected any real closure in her association with the Right Reverend George Winston, but as she went to work rounding the new house into shape (she was going to put in not one but two gardens, one for flowers and one for vegetables), she had days when she never thought of Winnie at all. The hitting in bed had stopped. Or almost.

  Then, one day in April, she got a postcard from him. It was a shock. It came in a US Postal Service envelope, because there was no more space on the card itself to scribble forwarding information. It had been everywhere, including Brooklyn, Maine, and Montpeliers in Idaho and Indiana. She had no idea why it hadn't reached her before she and Chad had left New York, and, considering its travels, it was a wonder it had reached her at all. It was dated the day before his death. She googled his obituary online just to be sure of that.

  Maybe there's something to the Freud stuff, after all, it said. How are you?

  Good, Nora thought. I'm good.

  There was a woodstove in the kitchen of their house. She crumpled up the postcard, tossed it in, and set a match to it. That's that.