“Did Mom know where it came from?”
“All she knew was that the bills got paid. Nobody knew that I shaved points. Until tonight, I never said a word about it to anyone.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Kevin Parmalee said, after a moment. “Not that you never said anything, but that you did it. It seems—”
“What?”
“Out of character, I guess.”
“It seemed that way to me at the time. I don’t know that I can explain it. Maybe Harold was a persuasive guy, or maybe I was easily persuaded.”
“How come—no, never mind.”
“What?”
“I just wondered how come you decided to tell me.”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Really? Because I had the sense there was something.”
“There was, but that wasn’t it.”
“Oh?”
“If I’d called for my pipe,” Richard Parmalee said, “I could fuss with it, and tamp the tobacco down and relight it, and kill a surprising amount of time that way. Sometimes I think that was as much of an addiction as the nicotine. I went to the doctor about six weeks ago for my annual physical, which is a misnomer, because I’m doing well if I get around to it every other year. He called me two days later to tell me my PSA was a little high, if you know what that is.”
“I don’t.”
“You probably will in a few years. I forget what it stands for, but it’s a prostate test. A slight elevation could be the result of enlargement of the prostate, or a sign of the presence of a low-grade infection. Or it could be an indication of early-stage prostate cancer.”
The two men looked at each other. “So he sent me to a urologist,” Richard Parmalee went on, “and he did his own examination and his own test, and put me on an antibiotic for a week in case it was an infection that was causing the high reading. And a week later he took blood for another test, and the result was still the same, so he had me come in for a biopsy.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s a goddam undignified procedure,” he said, “but less painful than a sprained ankle, and you don’t need an Ace bandage. You have blood in the urine for a few days afterward, and in the semen for up to a month. All of that’s nothing compared to waiting for the lab results. I had the biopsy on a Tuesday and I didn’t hear until the following Monday. Not to keep you in suspense, it came back negative. I haven’t got cancer.”
“Thank God.”
“I suppose I could have said that right off,” Richard Parmalee said, “but instead I let you wait and wonder for what, five minutes? If that. Well, that was to give you an idea. I had a full month to wait and wonder, and maybe you can imagine what that was like.”
“You never said anything.”
“There was nothing to say, not until I found out what I had or didn’t have.”
“Did Mom know?”
“I told her the morning I went in for the biopsy. If it was just an infection, or a false positive, why put her through it? By the time I was ready to go in for the procedure, I figured she ought to know. And I was worn out keeping it to myself.”
“But you’re all right?”
“I have to go in every six months,” he said, “for a PSA, which just means they take some blood and send it to the lab. If there’s no change, all I do is make another appointment. It’s normal for the level to increase gradually with age. If that’s all it does, that’s fine. If there’s a big increase, I get to have another biopsy.”
“Every six months for how long?”
“For as long as possible.”
“For as long as . . . oh, I get it. In other words, every six months for the rest of your life.”
“And I hope that’s a long time. That’s one of the things I found out while I was waiting. I didn’t want it to be over. If I have to get a needle in my arm twice a year, well, that’s a pretty small price to pay to stick around.”
“I’ll say.”
“But from this point on my life is different. All of a sudden I’m an old man.”
“The hell you’re an old man.”
“I was a kid with a basketball, and the next thing I know I’m an old fart with a prostate. Well, what’s the difference? Either way you dribble.”
They laughed, the two of them, a little more heartily than the line warranted, and when the laughter stopped they were silent. Then the older man said, “I knew I wanted to tell you. I wasn’t in a rush, but it was something you ought to know. Then you called to say you had Knicks tickets, and while I was making dinner reservations I decided it would be the right time and place for this conversation.”
“I’ll probably be a while taking it all in.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that. Intimations of mortality, and your own as well as mine. I’m in damn good shape, I’m happy to say, but in a sense I feel a good deal more vulnerable than I did a couple of months ago. But there’s something I can’t quite figure out. What made me tell you about my little arrangement with Harold?”
“Maybe you were stalling.”
“Stalling? Telling you the one thing to delay telling you the other? No, I don’t think so. That would have been a reason for small talk, but I wasn’t making small talk.”
“No.”
“And it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. Would my life have been different if I’d told Harold thanks but no thanks?”
“How?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering. I did something that wasn’t honest, and I kept it a secret. How did that affect the choices I made in life?”
“Maybe it didn’t.”
“Maybe not,” Richard Parmalee said, “but I’ll never know, will I? The road not taken. Maybe it’s made a difference, and maybe it hasn’t.”
“Phil Carrigan called me in two, three weeks ago,” the son said. “I’d knocked myself out for him, and he wanted to let me know how much he appreciated it. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I owe you a big one. And Lisa, I want to make up to her for the extra hours you put in. Here’s what you do, Kevin. Take the lovely lady to Lutèce. You can bill the client.’ “
“That’s perfect.”
“Isn’t it? His eyes, he was being magnanimous. Giving me something to show his appreciation of what I did for him. So I had his permission to stick it to the client for a couple of hundred dollars. That’s his idea of a grand gesture, and he really thought he was being generous. And maybe he was, because he could just as easily have taken his wife to Lutèce at the client’s expense.”
“That’s interesting. I’m not sure it fits with what we were talking about, but I’m not sure it doesn’t, either. How was the meal?”
“It was terrific, but I’m just as happy with a steak and salad, to tell you the truth.”
“You’re like your old man. And it’s time your old man headed home.”
He raised his hand for the check. “I wish you’d let me get this,” the son said.
“Not a chance. I told you, you got the tickets.”
“And I told you they didn’t cost me a cent.”
“And neither will dinner,” Richard Parmalee said. “The hell, I’ll bill it to a client.”
“Oh, right,” Kevin Parmalee said. “That’s just what you’ll do.”
Sweet Little Hands
Lying there, it seemed to him that he could hear his own cries echoing off the room’s blank walls. His heart was pounding, his skin glossy with sweat. Should he be afraid of this? Could a person actually die at climax?
When he spoke, he did so as if resuming a conversation. “I wonder how often it happens,” he said.
“How often what happens?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d been thinking, and I guess I assumed you could read my mind. And sometimes I think you can.”
For answer, she laid a hand on his thigh. Sweet little hand, he thought.
“My heart’s back to normal now,” he said, “or close enough to it. But I was wondering how often men die like that. If a f
ellow had a weak heart . . .”
“My husband’s heart is strong.”
“I wasn’t thinking of your husband.”
“I was,” she said. “From the moment we got in bed. Longer than that, actually. Since we got here. Since I got up this morning, knowing I was going to be with you this afternoon.”
“You’ve been thinking of him.”
“And of what you’re going to do.”
He didn’t say anything.
“His heart is strong,” she said. “In a physical sense, that is. In another sense, he has no heart.”
“Do we have to talk about him?”
She rolled onto her side, let her hand find the middle of his chest, more or less over his heart. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we have to talk about him. Do you know what it does to me? Knowing what you’re going to do to him?”
“Tell me.”
“It thrills me,” she said. “God, Jimmy, it gets me so hot I’m melting. I couldn’t wait to see you, and then I couldn’t wait to be in bed with you. We’ve always been hot for each other and it’s always been good between us, but all of a sudden it’s at a whole new level. You felt it, didn’t you? Just now?”
“You get me so hot, Rita.”
Her bunched fingers stroked his chest, moving in a little circle. “If I could get him hot,” she said, “so hot his heart would burst, I’d do it.”
“You hate him that much.”
“He’s ruining my life, Jimmy. He’s draining me, he’s sucking the life out of me. You know what he’s done.”
“And you can’t just leave him.”
“He told me what I’d get if I ever tried. Didn’t I tell you?”
“You really think . . .”
“ ‘Acid in your face, Rita. Not in the eyes, because I’ll want you to be able to see what you look like. Acid all over your tits, too, and between your legs, so nobody will ever want you, not even with a bag over your head.’ “
“What a bastard.”
“George is worse than that. He’s a monster.”
“I mean, to say a thing like that.”
“And it’s not just talk, either. He’d do it. He’d enjoy doing it.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “He deserves to die.”
“Tonight, Jimmy.”
“Tonight?”
“Baby, I can’t wait for it to be over. And we have to do it before he finds out about you and me. I think he’s starting to suspect something, and if he ever finds out for sure . . .”
“That wouldn’t be good.”
“It would be the end of everything. Acid for me, and God knows what for you. We can’t afford to wait.”
“I know.”
“He’ll be home tonight. I’ll make sure he drinks a lot of wine with dinner. There’s a baseball game on television and he’ll want to watch it. He always watches, and he never stays awake past the third inning. He settles into his La-Z-Boy and puts his feet up, and he’s out in no time at all.”
Her hand moved idly as she went over the plan, working its way down his chest, down over his stomach, stroking, petting, eliciting a response.
“He’ll be in the den,” she was saying. “You remember where that is. On the first floor, the second window on the right-hand side. He’ll have the alarm set, but I’ll fix it so it’s limited to the doors. There’s a way to do that, in case you want to have a window open for ventilation. And I’ll have the window in the den open a couple of inches. Even if there’s a draft and he gets up and closes it, it won’t be locked. You’ll be able to open it without setting off the alarm. Jimmy? Is something the matter?”
He took hold of her wrist. “Just that you’re setting off my alarm,” he said.
“Don’t you like what I’m doing?”
“I love it, but—”
“You’ll come in through the window,” she went on. “He’ll be asleep in his chair. There’s all this crap on the walls, swords and daggers, a ceremonial war club from some South Sea Island tribe. Stab him with a dagger or beat his head in with the club.”
“It’ll look spur-of-the-moment,” he said. “Burglar breaks in, panics when the guy wakes up, then grabs whatever’s closest and—Christ!”
“I just grabbed whatever was closest,” she said innocently. “Jimmy, I can’t help it. It gets me all excited thinking about it.” Her lips brushed him. “We may have to stay away from each other for a while,” she said, “while I do the Grieving Widow number.” Her breath was warm on his flesh. “So I’ve got an idea, Jimmy. Suppose we have our victory celebration now?”
“A splendid dinner,” George said, pushing back from the table. He was a large and physically imposing man, twenty years her senior. “But you didn’t eat much, my dear.”
“No appetite,” she said.
“For food.”
“Well . . .”
“I guess it’s almost time,” he said, “for me to adjourn to the library for brandy and cigars. Except it’s a den, not a library, and brandy gives me heartburn, and I don’t smoke cigars. But you know what I mean.”
“Time for you to watch the ballgame. Who’s playing?”
“The Cubs and the Astros.”
“And is it an important game?”
“There’s no such thing as an important game,” he said. “Grown men trying to hit a ball with a stick. How important could that possibly be?”
“But you’ll watch it.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Another cup of coffee first?”
“Another cup? Hmmm. Well, it is exceptionally good coffee. And I guess there’s time.”
This is crazy, he thought.
There was her house, and there, in the second window on the right-hand side, was the flickering glow of a television screen. The garage door was closed, and there were no cars parked in the driveway, or at the curb. Nobody walking around on the street.
Crazy . . .
He drove halfway around the block, found a parking place out of the reach of the streetlights. He left the car unlocked and circled the block on foot, his heartbeat quickening as he neared her house.
Anyone who saw him would see a man of medium height and build dressed in dark clothes. And he’d burn the clothes when this was over. He’d assume there were bloodstains, or some other sort of physical evidence, and he’d leave nothing to chance.
Impossible to believe he was actually going to do this. Going to kill a man, a man he’d never met. And would never meet, because with any luck at all he’d strike the fatal blow while the man slept.
Not a man, not really. A monster. Acid on that beautiful face, those perfect breasts . . .
A monster.
Was it murder when Beowulf slew Grendel? When St. George struck down the dragon? That was heroism, not homicide. It was what you had to do if you wanted to win the heart of the fair maiden.
Or he could go home right now and forget about her. There were plenty of women out there, and most of them never asked you to kill anybody. How hard would it be to find somebody else?
Not like her, though. Never anybody like her. Never had been, and he somehow knew there never would be.
Never an afternoon like the one he’d just spent. Never. Drained him, emptied him out—and, even so, just remembering it was getting him stirred up again.
He was at the window now. It was open a few inches, as she’d said it would be, and through it he could hear the voices of the baseball announcers, the crack of the bat, the subdued roar of the crowd. The mindless prattle of the commercial. “Bud.” “Wei.” “Ser.”
He strained to hear more. Movement from the man. The husband.
The monster.
He got up on his toes, hooked his hands under the bottom edge of the window. He was standing in a bed of shrubbery, and it struck him that he was leaving footprints. Have to get rid of the shoes, too, he thought, along with the rest of his clothes.
Unless he gave it up and went home right now.
B
ut how much better he’d feel if he went home in triumph, with the monster slain and the maiden won!
Besides, he realized, he wanted to do it. Wanted to thrust with the dagger, to flail away with the war club. God help him, he couldn’t wait.
He took a full breath and eased the window all the way open.
She hadn’t been able to eat. Now, upstairs in the bedroom she shared with her husband, she found herself unable to sit still. Her pulse was rapid, her mouth dry, her palms damp.
Any minute now . . .
She stripped to her skin, let her clothes lie where they fell. She sat up in bed and gazed down at her naked body, as if with a lover’s eyes. And touched herself, as if with a lover’s hands.
Remembering:
Crouching over him, she’d reached to probe with a finger, felt him stiffen and resist. Probed again, not to be denied, and felt him open up reluctantly to her. Unwilling to respond, unable to keep from responding . . .
Her own excitement was mounting now. He was at the window now, he had to be, she was sure of it. But she was stuck up here, unable to know what was happening downstairs in the den. His den, George’s den, and her lover was at the window, must be at the window, had to be at the window . . .
She looked down at her hands, then closed her eyes, remembering:
“God, Rita, what you do to me.”
“I had two fingers in you.”
“God.”
“First one and then two.”
“I wasn’t expecting that.”
“You liked it.”
“It was . . . interesting.”
“You didn’t want to like it, but you liked it.”
“Well, the novelty.”
“Not just the novelty. You liked it.”
“Well.”
“Next time I’ll use my whole hand.”
“Rita, for God’s sake—“
She made a fist, opened it and closed it, opened it and closed it, watching the expression on his face.
“You’ll like it,” she said.
And he was down there now. She knew he was, she could tell, she could feel him there. She cupped her breasts, felt their weight, then let her hands slide lower. Let her fingers move, let her fantasies build, let her excitement mount . . .