Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

“They lived in this walled compound on the edge of town. It had to be huge to accommodate all the servants. I’m a kid from Bergen Street, I grew up sharing a room with my brother, and here are these cousins of mine and they’ve got something like five servants for each member of the family. That’s including children. No exaggeration. I was uncomfortable at first, I thought it was wasteful, but it was explained to me. If you were rich you had an obligation to employ a lot of people. You were creating jobs, you were doing something for the people.

“ ‘Stay,’ they told me. They wanted to take me into the business. If I didn’t like Togo, they had in-laws with the same kind of operation in Mali. ‘But Togo’s nicer,’ they said.”

“Could you still go?”

“That’s the sort of thing you do when you’re twenty years old, start a new life in a new country.”

“What are you, thirty-two?”

“Thirty-three. That’s a little old for an entry-level slot.”

“You might not have to start in the mailroom.”

He shrugged. “Funny thing is Francine and I discussed it. She had a problem with it because she was afraid of blacks. The idea of being one of a handful of white people in a black nation was frightening to her. She said, like, suppose they decide to take over? I said, honey, what’s to take over? It’s their country. They already own it. But she was not completely rational on the subject.” His voice hardened. “And look who she got in a truck with, look who killed her. White guys. All your life you fear one thing and something else sneaks up on you.” His eyes locked with mine. “It’s like they didn’t just kill her, they obliterated her. She ceased to exist. I didn’t even see a body, I saw parts, chunks. I went to my cousin’s clinic in the middle of the night and turned the chunks into ashes. She’s gone and there’s this hole in my life and I don’t know what to put in it.”

“They say time takes time,” I said.

“It can take some of mine. I got time I don’t know what to do with. I’m alone in the house all day and I find myself talking to myself. Out loud, I mean.”

“People do that when they’re used to having somebody around. You’ll get over it.”

“Well, if I don’t, so what? If I’m talking to myself who’s gonna hear me, right?” He sipped from his water glass. “Then there’s sex,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell to do about sex. I have the desire, you know? I’m a young guy, it’s natural.”

“A minute ago you were too old to start a new life in Africa.”

“You know what I mean. I have desires and I not only don’t know what to do about them, I don’t feel right about having them. It feels disloyal to want to go to bed with a woman whether I actually do it or not. And who would I go to bed with if I wanted to? What am I gonna do, sweet-talk some woman in a bar? Go to a massage parlor, pay some cross-eyed Korean girl to get me off? Go out on fucking dates , take some woman to a movie, make conversation with her? I try to picture myself doing that and I figure I’d rather stay home and jerk off, only I won’t do that either because even that seems like it would be disloyal.” He sat back abruptly, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to spout all this crap at you. I hadn’t planned on saying any of that. I don’t know where it came from.”

I called my art historian when I got back to the hotel. She’d had her class that night and wasn’t back yet. I left a message on her machine and wondered if she would call.

We’d had a bad time of it a few nights before. After dinner we’d rented a movie that she wanted to see and I didn’t, and maybe I was bitter about that, I don’t know. Whatever it was, there was something wrong between us. After the movie ended she made an off-color remark and I suggested she might make an effort to sound a little less like a whore. That would have been an acceptable rejoinder under ordinary circumstances, but I said it like I meant it and she said something suitably stinging in return.

I apologized and so did she and we agreed it was nothing, but it didn’t feel that way, and when it got to be time to go to bed we did so on opposite sides of town. When we spoke the next day we didn’t say anything about it, and we still hadn’t, and it hung in the air between us whenever we talked, and even when we didn’t.

She called me back around eleven-thirty. “I just got in,” she said. “A couple of us went out for a drink after class. How was your day?”

“All right,” I said, and we talked about it for a few minutes. Then I asked if it was too late for me to drop over.

“Oh, gee,” she said. “I’d like to see you, too.”

“But it’s too late.”

“I think so, hon. I’m wiped out and I just want to take a quick shower and pass out. Is that okay?”

“Sure.”

“Talk to you tomorrow?”

“Uh-huh. Sleep well.”

I hung up and said, “I love you,” speaking to the empty room, hearing the words bounce off the walls. We had become quite adept at purging the phrase from our speech when we were together, and I listened to myself saying it now and wondered if it was true.

I felt something but couldn’t work out what it was. I took a shower and got out and dried off, and standing there looking at my face in the mirror over the bathroom sink I realized what it was I felt.

There are two midnight meetings every night. The closest one was on West Forty-sixth Street and I got there just as they were beginning the meeting. I helped myself to a cup of coffee and sat down, and minutes later I was hearing a voice I recognized say, “My name is Peter and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.” Good, I thought. “And I have one day back,” he said.

Not so good. Tuesday he’d had two days, today he had one. I thought about how difficult it must be, trying to get back in the lifeboat and not being able to get a grip on it. And then I stopped thinking about Peter Khoury because I was there for my own benefit, not for his.

I listened intently to the qualification, although I couldn’t tell you what I heard, and when the speaker finished up and opened the meeting I got my hand up right away. I got called on and said, “My name’s Matt and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober a couple of years and I’ve come a long way since I walked in the door and sometimes I forget that I’m still pretty fucked up. I’m going through a difficult phase in my relationship and I didn’t even realize it until a little while ago. Before I came over here I felt uncomfortable and I had to stand under a shower for five minutes to dope out what it was I felt. And then I saw that it was fear, that I was afraid.

“I don’t even know what I’m afraid of. I have a feeling if I let myself go I’ll find out I’m afraid of every goddamned thing in the world. I’m afraid to be in a relationship and I’m afraid to be out of it. I’m afraid I’ll wake up one of these days and look in the mirror and see an old man staring back at me. That I’ll die alone in that room some day and nobody’ll find me until the smell starts coming through the walls.

“So I got dressed and came over here because I don’t want to drink and I don’t want to feel like this, and after all these years I still don’t know why it helps to run off at the mouth like this, but it does. Thank you.”

I figured I probably sounded like an emotional basket case, but you learn not to give a rat’s ass what you sound like, and I didn’t. It was particularly easy to spew it all in that room because I didn’t know anybody there other than Peter Khoury, and if he only had a day he probably couldn’t track complete sentences yet, let alone remember them five minutes later.