Edward Gorman: The Autumn Dead

And I heard then what I should have heard-and understood-back when I was twenty and hoping my frail hopes that she'd somehow fall in love with me: That something central was missing in her-my old man would have called it horse sense-that she was as giddy and unlikely and impossible as any tale ever told in the pages of Modern Screen.

But where most women gave up such dreams under the press of eight-to-five jobs or infants who demanded tits and taters or husbands who made it their business to crush every little hope their wives ever had-Karen Lane had had the sheer beauty and the sheer deranged gall to pursue her particular muses.

That was why, even back in grade school, she'd scared me. She was some kind of combination of Audrey Hepburn and Benito Mussolini.

Then we were sitting at a stoplight, a laundry truck on one side of us, a school bus on the other, and she leaned over and before I knew what was happening, she threw her arms around me and put her tongue, with the precision of a surgical instrument, right inside my mouth.

I could tell when the light changed because the cars behind us started honking and the drivers yelling.

She was soft and tasted great and I was trembling and feeling one of those erections you're only supposed to get when you're sixteen and every bit as daffy, at least at the moment, as she was.

Then, bowing to the authority of horns and curses, she took herself away from me, and I felt as deserted as an orphan.

But before she went back to driving, she patted me on the knee in an oddly cool, almost matronly way and said, "I know you're going to help me, Jack. I just know it."

The east end of the Harcourt sits on a promontory over a lake lost that day in fog and rain. Somewhere in the distance big wooden workboats moved like massive prehistoric animals through haze that blanched everything of colors. Everything looked and felt gray on this March day.

On this side of the vast curved window a waiter who seemed to have watched an awful lot of Charles Boyer movies was making a fool of himself over Karen while trying to keep up a French accent that was falling down like socks that had lost their elastic.

"Ze braised fresh crab claws," he said and rolled his eyes the way he probably did during sex.

"They sound wonderful. Just wonderful." And then she smiled over at me. "Don't they sound wonderful, Jack?"

"'Wonderful' isn't the word for it," I said.

"And ze sautéed fresh prawns with shredded ham and vegetables." He rolled his eyes again. I had decided that if he managed to work "ooh-la-la" into the conversation, I was going to deck him.

While he finished flirting with Karen, I glanced around the Harcourt and knew again that my speed was Hardees. Here you sat on English walnut chairs and stared at paintings by Matisse (whom I happened to like in my uneducated way) and large blow-ups of Cartier-Bresson photographs (which I thought I could probably duplicate with my Polaroid) and ate with forks that weighed two and a half pounds and daubed goose-liver pâté off your lips with brilliant white napkins big enough to double as sheets.

When the waiter finally packed up his French accent and went away, Karen said, "You look uncomfortable."

I sighed. "Can I be honest?"

"Of course. Honesty is something I really value."

I tried not to be uncharitable, but I couldn't keep the hard cold trust-department way she'd assessed her husbands out of my mind. If that was her idea of honesty, then maybe I would have preferred her a bit dishonest.

"Your father," I said.

She looked perplexed. "What about him?"

"He lived in the Highlands, right?"

"Why, yes. Of course."

"The Highlands being the area in this city with the lowest per-capita income and the highest crime rate."

"What's the point, Jack?" Irritation had come into her voice.

"That's where your father was from and my father was from and that's where you're from and that's where I'm from."

"Would you please come to the point?"

"I'm ashamed of you, that's the point."

"What?" She sat back in her chair as if I'd just tried to slap her.

"You've bought into an awful lot of bullshit, you know that? New white Jaguars and measuring people by their bank accounts and indulging silly assholes like that waiter."

"Are you drunk?"

"No.''

"Are you on drugs?"

"No.

"Then you have absolutely no right to speak to me that way."

"Sure I do. I've known you since you were six years old and we made our First Communion together and you were always full of shit, Karen, but you've never been this full of shit before."

So-what else? — she started crying.

There were approximately three hundred other people in the big restaurant, most of them men and most of them with gold American Express cards pulsating in their suits, and now nearly every one of them was staring at us.

If she was faking, she was good at it because she didn't go for any big sobs or anything like that, she just sat there and put her beautiful head into one beautiful hand and small tears rolled down her beautiful cheeks and touched her beautiful red glossy lips.

"I overdid it," I said.

She just kept her head down.

I looked out at the fog and the wooden workboats and the hint of birch-lined shore somewhere in the haze.

I said, "I said I overdid it."

She looked up. "Is that supposed to be an apology?"

"About half an apology."

"I want and deserve more than half an apology."

"Your old man worked with my old man in the same factory. They had Spam for lunch and they played pinochle every Friday night, and even if they weren't smart and they weren't important, they knew enough to hate bullshit. And that's all you seem to know, Karen. Bullshit."'

"'Well, thank you very much."

Our positions had shifted subtly here. Her tears had dried and I was angry again. "You're welcome."

So we sat in uncomfortable silence for a time.

"You're making a lot of assumptions about me, Jack."

"Sure."

"You are. How do you know that I haven't had a lot of pain in my life?"

"You mean in between having your accountant going through your husband's bank account so you can decide if he's worth keeping or not."

"There was a perfectly good reason for each divorce."

"Right."

"Incompatibility."

She said it so fecklessly that it had an odd endearing quality. "Incompatibility? That's legalese, Karen. More bullshit. It's meaningless."

"Well, whether you choose to believe it or not, I was incompatible with each and every one of my husbands for a very simple reason. Because I wanted to find myself and they didn't want me to."

"Finding yourself went out in the seventies, Karen, along with earth shoes."

For the first time, she sulked, beautiful, as always but looking a bit trapped now. "Anyway, Jack, two can play the honesty game."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that I know very well why you're being so mean."

"Why?"

"Because of that night I took your car."

Actually, of all her many betrayals, that had been one that had slipped my mind. Now, though, instead of inspiring pain, it caused me to laugh. It was that outrageous. "I forgot all about that. You said you needed to borrow my car so you could help your mother with grocery shopping because your family car was getting fixed. And then you took my goddamn car-that I'd worked my ass off to buy-and you took Larry Price to the drive-in in it."

She leaned forward and pursed her lips as if she was getting impatient with my misunderstanding of her. "Well, for your information, even if I did use your car to take Larry to the drive-in, it wasn't what you think. The drive-in was just a good place to talk."

"Right."

I sensed but could not define something shift in her gaze.