Ed McBain - Downtown

Instead, against a wall painted a pale lavender, there was a long low sofa done in a white nubby fabric and heaped with pillows the same color as the wall, and there was an easy chair and a footstool upholstered in black leather and there was a coffee table with a glass top, and a bar unit hanging on the right-angle wall, and several large framed abstract prints on the wall opposite the sofa.

Connie sat, took off her galoshes, and then padded in her stockinged feet to the bar unit.

“This has been some night,” she said, and rolled her eyes, and lowered the drop-leaf front of the bar. “I had a man vomit all over the backseat, did you notice?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I mean that the limo I picked you up in outside the deli wasn’t the same one I’d dropped you off in when you went to see Crandall’s wife?”

“No, I couldn’t tell any difference.”

“Charlie was very upset. Charlie Wong. My Charlie Wong. About the stink in the car.”

“I can imagine.”

“Do you know how to make martinis?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“Why don’t you mix us some very nice, very dry martinis while I go take my shower, and then you can take your shower, and then we can sip our martinis in bed, would you like to do that?”

“Yes,” he said.

His voice caught a little.

Because he was thinking about what she’d just said.

Not about mixing the martinis or taking the showers.

But about sipping the martinis.

In bed.

That part.

“A twist, please,” she said.

You came through the bedroom doorway and the first thing you saw was the bed facing the door, its headboard against the far wall, a window on each side of it, a night table under each window. It was neither a king nor a queen, just a normal double bed. With a paisley-patterned quilt on it. There was a dresser on the wall to the right of the bed, and bookcases on the wall to the left, and a door to the closet on that same wall, and on the entrance-door wall, which he didn’t really see until they got into bed together, there was an easy chair with a lamp behind it to the left of the door, and a full-length mirror to the right of it.

They left the quilt on the bed because it was so damn cold.

Every few minutes, they poked out from under the quilt to take a quick sip of their drinks, and then they hurriedly put the glasses back on the night tables on either side of the bed. They did this until the glasses were empty. Then they pulled the quilt up over their shoulders and settled in close together.

“He turns the heat off at eleven o’clock every night,” Connie said. “There’s nobody cheaper in the world than a Chinaman.”

Under the quilt, the whole world was cozy and warm and safe.

Under the quilt, with Connie in his arms, he felt the way he’d felt long long ago in Boston, when his father was still alive and there to take care of him, and when the house was full of the smells of his mother’s good French cooking and when at night she wrapped him in a big white fluffly towel after his bath, and patted him dry, and then tucked him into bed and pulled the covers to his chin, and told him Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don’t Let The Bedbugs Bite, and kissed him on the cheek. In the darkness, he would smile. And fall asleep almost instantly.

After Boston, he hadn’t slept too well for a long time. That was because the Cong’s main job was keeping the Americans awake all night, never mind killing them. If the Cong could keep the Americans awake, why then they’d have to go home eventually in order to get a good night’s sleep. He was sure that had been the strategy. It worked, too. Even when you knew they couldn’t possibly be out there, even when intelligence reports told you they were fifty miles away, a hundred miles away, retreating even, you still imagined them out there creeping up on you while you slept. So you never really slept. Never completely. You closed your eyes, yes, and occasionally you caught ten minutes here, ten minutes there, even a half hour’s deep sleep sometimes until your own snoring startled you into frightened wakefulness, and you jumped up in a cold sweat, your rifle fanning the jungle even before your eyes were fully open.

When he’d got back home...

Boston.

Home.

Jenny told him he’d filled out a lot.

She had learned how to soul-kiss.

From Cosmopolitan magazine, she told him.

His mother had given away all his clothes.

And his father was sick and dying.

He’d come back to where it was safe — the Boston he remembered. the Boston he’d longed for all those months, the Boston that was the reality as opposed to the jungle nightmare — but his father was sick and dying and his mother, who was only forty-two, looked suddenly old, and the nightmare was here, too, here in Boston where it was supposed to be safe.

They buried his father on a cold November morning.

It was raining.

He remembered thinking he would never be safe again.

He told his mother one night that his dream was to marry Jenny and take her someplace where it was warm all year round. He almost said warm and safe all year round. His mother had looked at him with that sad, grieving expression she wore all the time now, and then she’d merely nodded. He wondered what she was thinking. Was she thinking it did not pay to dream because eventually all dreams die? His father’s dream had been to own a chain of hardware stores all across New England. But cancer had cut him down when he was forty-four, and all he’d left behind him was the big old house and the one store. Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don’t Let The Bedbugs Bite, and don’t let the Cong creep up on you in your sleep, either. How can you dream if they won’t let you sleep?

It took his mother two years to get over his father’s being dead. At the end of that time, she told Michael she’d had a good offer for the store and was going to sell it. Said she could lend him the money for his dream. At prevailing interest rates. Told him to go find his Someplace Warm, take his Jenny there with him. He’d never known whether she was trying to get rid of him or trying to help him. He’d had the feeling that maybe...

Well, he’d discussed this with the shrink.

That somehow his mother blamed him for his father’s death.

That because she’d prayed so hard for Michael to come home safe and sound, the gods had somehow taken payment for his survival. Had spared his life and taken his father’s instead.

That she hated him for this.

The shrink wondered out loud if she’d given away Michael’s clothes the day she’d learned his father had cancer.

Michael said he didn’t know.

In Vietnam, Sergeant Mendelsohnn had told him to shoot first and think it over later. Michael took the money, asked Jenny to marry him, and moved down to Florida with her.

Where he’d felt safe for a while.

Until Jenny started up with James Owington at the bank.

And after that, you know, a man began to think there wasn’t much sense to anything anymore. You go fight a dumb fucking war where nobody will let you sleep and everybody including the people on your own side are trying to kill you, and you get through it by the skin of your teeth and you come home to find your father dying and your mother blaming you for it and your girlfriend soul-kissing her way through Boston and its suburbs, you begin to think. Hey, sheeee -it, as Andrew would have put it. And when even the sweet Florida dream turns sour, when the enemy creeping up on your sleep now is a fat fucking branch manager who’s getting in your wife’s pants, hey, man, what was the sense of anything?

Part of his dream...

Well, he’d wanted to start a family down there.