Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

He changed and came back to the living room. A commercial for a car company was on, but Marlene seemed to be watching it raptly, as if it were a complex metaphor for the ultimate secrets of existence. Karp observed his wife for a while as he sat next to her. Except that she took a sip of cognac at regular intervals, she could have been a waxwork.

"How are you?" he said tentatively. His eye went, against his will, to the cognac bottle, which was about a third gone.

"Fine."

"How did it go with the…"

"The shooting. That went fine. Lou was very understanding and complimentary. He said to take off as much time as I needed."

"That's good. You could use a break."

"We closed at sixty-one and one-quarter today," she said in the same dull voice.

"That's good."

"Yes, it's good for business when we save a client with lots of bloodshed all around. Did you know that Oleg killed twelve people getting Richard Perry out in Kosovo? I only killed four. Still, a six-point rise on the day isn't bad."

"You didn't kill anyone. It wasn't your fault."

"Yes, that's what Lou said. He said it about fifty times. He kept watching the stock tape on the TV screen while he was telling me it wasn't my fault." She took a gulp of her drink and splashed some more into the snifter. She fingered the material of her robe.

"I picked this up on the way home. I was thinking about getting someone to drive me back to the Volvo, and then I thought, hey, I don't need to do that. So I called a limo service and came home in a white Caddy with smoked windows. Did you know people stare at you when you're in a car like that, trying to see who's in it? And I had him stop off at Bendel's and I bought this outfit. This is pashmina. It cost twenty-five hundred. The pj's were seven-fifty."

Karp didn't know what to say. A strange, tight feeling was in his chest.

She said, "I want to go away, take a trip. Paris, we'll rent an apartment, or we could get a place in Tuscany." She turned to face him for the first time, a weird light in her eye, and grabbed his arm. "Let's go, Butch! Let's shitcan the whole mess and go!"

"You're kidding, right?"

"No, I was never more serious."

"Marlene, what're you talking-I have a job, you have a job, we have kids, they're in school. We can't just take off."

She dropped his arm and turned back to the television, which was playing a generic sitcom. The canned laughter was like some insect burrowing into his brain.

"Fine. I'll go myself."

"Marlene? What's wrong? Why are you acting like someone you're not?"

She shrugged. "I'm rich. Very rich. Very rich and very drunk, and the very rich and very drunk are very different from you and me."

"Oh, horseshit, Marlene! You're not rich. You have a bunch of stock options that you can't sell for six months."

"Untrue. I have a bank account with five and a half million in it, plus a credit card that they never send you a bill on, you buy what you want and Ms. Lipopo takes care of it. Five and a half million, less what I spent on what I'm wearing, less the five hundred bucks I jammed into Wayne's sucking chest wound, but I'll probably get that back."

"You borrowed against the stock?" said Karp, horrified.

"Yep. That's how it's done, buster."

"Oh, Christ! What if the stock goes down? What do you do then?"

"It doesn't go down. It only goes up." She made a little swoop with the glass in her hand to demonstrate the difference in the two directions. Cognac splashed on the pashmina robe, but she didn't seem to notice.

He stood up, glared at her, and turned to walk away, and she said, "And if it starts to go down even a teeny bit, we'll shoot a few more people. Then it'll go up up up again until it hits the sky."

The next morning Marlene awoke to pain and nausea and a gap in her memory where living, breathing neurons used to be. She groaned and opened her eye. In her field of vision was the nightstand on her side of the bed. On the nightstand was a light, a couple of magazines and paperback novels, and an empty bottle of Hennessy. Empty. That was impossible. The bottle was one of those Lou had given out to the troops when the IPO went through, and she had opened it just last night because she needed a drink after. After what? She rolled over, carefully, and checked out the other side of the bed. The pillow was undented, the sheets and blanket and bedspread undisturbed. Butch had not slept here last night. Uh-oh. Now she noticed that she was dressed in an unfamiliar robe and heavy silk pajamas, both smelling unpleasantly of stale cognac, and she noticed also a faint and nauseating odor coming from somewhere below. The dog? She licked her dry lips and managed a weak whistle. Thump thump and a whine at the door. Holding her head so that it would not fall off, she swung her legs out of bed and took a couple of tottering steps, whereupon her bare foot landed in a generous pool of vomit. Uh-oh again. She flung off her clothes and staggered into the bathroom, where she ate four aspirins and got into the shower, first hot and then, for punishment, ice-cold for as long as she could stand it.

The previous day's and evening's events now started to arrive at the conscious layers of her brain, like static-ridden communications from a war zone. Coleman; Wayne; Lou Osborne; the $3,000 lounging ensemble; the fight with Butch. That one was hard to remember. Did she throw things? Did she follow him around the house clutching a bottle of booze and shrieking? Impossible; obviously some of those false memories you heard so much about. She should call him and find out what had happened, apologize if required. Or maybe later, after she had cleaned up this mess.

She dressed in painter's overalls and an old pink T-shirt, scrubbed what needed to be scrubbed, and some things that didn't, such as the kitchen, including the stove and the refrigerator. Marlene considered herself something of a slob compared to her mother and her married, stay-at-home older sister, but she was actually fairly neat, and she had a husband who cleaned up after himself and a daughter who was practically an obsessive. She now demonstrated where her daughter got it from. Polishing the refrigerator racks with tiny pieces of steel wool. By noon she was done, and dissatisfied. Clean enough, but there was something wrong, displeasing, a little tacky? That couch, for example. The bedroom furniture. Some of it was actual junk from when she had been a struggling single, and the rest was over ten years old.

Suddenly she was restless. She had to get out. She walked the dog, then called the limo service. What to wear? She had nothing to wear. A rampage through her closet. Aiiii! She must have been insane to have gone out in public in these rags. What was she thinking? Living in a crumbling loft in Chinatown? In Chinatown? You couldn't even say it was SoHo with a straight face. She was shoving clothes into plastic trash bags when the buzzer rang. The dog looked up expectantly and fawned. Marlene ignored this, and the creature slumped away to its lair under the kitchen table. She threw on her coat, grabbed her bag, and was off.

The driver was a short, tan man named Patel. He seemed glad to see her as he opened the door. She told Patel to take her to Bloomingdale's.

"So we are going shopping today, madame?" asked Patel.

"Yes, shopping, just a couple of things."

Marlene ordinarily was not much of a shopper. She had little time for it, and she harbored a secret contempt for women who spent a lot of time buying stuff, or talking about buying stuff. Marlene had been a poor girl at a rich high school, rescued from shame by the school uniform, and after school hours by defiance. She had adopted the garb of the tough-Italian-neighborhood semislut, which had the additional virtue of being cheap. She had gone to college and graduate school during an era when nearly everyone wore boho rags, and afterward there was another kind of uniform: severe suits by day, retro-thrift-shop finds at other times. Marlene did not care much about clothes. Or so she imagined.