Lawrence Block - Getting Off

Still, she held the knife under running water for a few minutes, then closed it and stowed it in her purse. She added the ring from her finger and went back for the one she’d placed on Kellen’s. The rings and the knife could all go in a storm drain, or could as easily be abandoned in some public place where they’d be quickly scooped up and carried off by new owners.

She left, and locked the door after herself. With any luck at all, she’d be long gone before anyone unlocked that door, or broke it down.

Zero.

“The Sumatra Blue Batak Tarbarita Peaberry,” the man said. “Could you describe that for me?”

It’s coffee, she thought. From Sumatra. What more do you need to know?

“Well, it’s a sort of medium roast,” she said. “And it has a good deal of body. I would say that it’s assertive without being overbearing.”

He nodded encouragement. He had a high forehead and an academic presence, the latter reinforced by his clothing — an olive-brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches, owlish glasses with heavy tortoiseshell frames, clean jeans, chukka boots. A strip of lighter skin on the appropriate finger showed he’d once worn a wedding ring. But the lighter skin was starting to blend in, so he’d stopped wearing it a while ago.

“As for the taste,” she went on, “that’s always hard for me to describe.”

“It’s so subjective. And yet I’ve a feeling you’ll get it right.”

Getting ready to hit on her. Well, she’d seen that coming.

“Hmmm. Well, how can I put it? I’d say it’s autumnal.”

“Autumnal.”

“And…dare I say plangent?”

She caught a glimpse of Will, the shop’s co-owner, rolling his eyes.

“Brilliant,” her customer said. “Let me have a pound, then. Who am I to pass up a beverage that’s at once plangent and autumnal? And that’ll be whole bean, please. It’s the sheer aroma of freshly ground beans that gets my heart started in the morning, even before I get the coffee brewing.”

As she was ringing up the sale he asked her name, and she provided one. He said he’d remember it, and that his was Alden.

When the door closed behind the man, Will said, “Cordelia, eh? When did your name become Cordelia?”

Will was tall and thin; his lover and business partner, Billy, was short, with the muscularity of a relentless weightlifter. They’d both gone by Bill when they met, but found it confusing, so one became Will and the other Billy.

Will — and Billy, for that matter — knew her as Lindsay. And she might have given that name to Alden, but there was an instant when she couldn’t think of it. Not Lynne, not Linda, now what the hell was it? And the result was Cordelia.

“I don’t know,” she said. “For some reason I didn’t want to give him my name. And what came out was Cordelia.”

“Better than Regan or Goneril, I suppose. This way you’re the good daughter.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she often didn’t. Better than gonorrhea? What was that supposed to mean?

“Anyway,” she said, “I figured it had a nice autumnal sound to it.”

“Oh, that it does. Not to mention plangent. Where the hell did you come up with that one, sweetie?”

She shrugged, but she knew exactly where she’d gotten it from. A few years ago, a very brief stint in a seafood restaurant in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. A customer had never had orange roughy before, and asked what it was like. A firm, white-fleshed fish, she’d told him, which was something you could say about almost everything but salmon and squid. And as for the taste, well, dare I say plangent? The line, she remembered, had gone over well enough. If it worked for a fish she’d never eaten, why wouldn’t it do for a beverage she’d never tasted?

“Plangent. Do you even know the meaning of the word?”

“It’s hard to define.”

“Oh, really? Try plaintive. Think of a sort of lingering sadness.”

“So? He’ll be having a cup of coffee on the porch, with his feet up on the railing, and he’ll find himself thinking about the woman he used to be married to, and wondering why he married her in the first place, and why the marriage failed, and why all his relationships seem to fail. But he won’t be heartbroken, because he’s got tenure at Willamette, and everybody says he looks good in corduroy, and he grinds his own coffee beans every morning, so it’s a good life, even if it is a sad one.”

He stared at her. “You did all that on the spur of the moment,” he said, “just to cover the fact that you’d been caught using a word you couldn’t define. There’s a short story of Saki’s that you remind me of. ‘Romance at short notice was her specialty.’ That’s the last line, and doesn’t it just fit you to a tee? Aren’t you the plangent queen of romance at short notice? Now don’t go rolling your eyes, sweetie. That’s my trick. I’ll tell you this, Cordelia, or Lindsay, or whoever you are this afternoon. You’re the tiniest bit scary.”

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “You’re safe.”

She was in Salem, the capital of Oregon, working afternoons at the Bean Bag, and living in a rooming house near the Willamette University campus. When she left Provo she’d planned on heading back east, but the first bus available took her north to Salt Lake City, and from there she continued north and west to Boise, and she’d kept gradually drifting north and west, and here she was in Salem, and Google Maps had already informed her that she was less than two hundred fifty miles from Kirkland, Washington.

Not hard to see a pattern here.

When her shift ended she picked up a small pizza and a fruitflavored iced tea on her way home. She ate in her room, took a shower, and wrapped up in a towel. She picked up her phone, then decided she wanted to be dressed for this conversation. She put on clean underwear, jeans, a loose-fitting top, and was on her way to the mirror when she told herself she was being ridiculous. She sat down in the room’s one chair and made the call.

“Kimmie, two calls in what, three days?”

“I guess. Listen, if you don’t feel like talking—”

“You’re kidding, right? There’s never been a time when I haven’t felt like talking to you.”

It was the same for her. But she wasn’t ready to say it.

There were things, though, that you had to say whether you were ready or not. If you waited until you were ready they would never get said.

She said, “Rita, there’s a conversation we need to have.”

“Should I put on a nightgown? And get my toys ready?”

“Not this time.”

“Kimmie, this sounds serious.”

“Sort of, yeah. See, there’s things you don’t know about me. I was never a graduate student, I didn’t have a thesis to write.”

“Well, duh.”

“You figured that much, huh?”

“Kimmie, every time I hear from you you’re someplace else and you’ve got a new phone number. It’s pretty obvious you’ve got a whole life that I don’t know anything about.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“It makes me wonder. And, you know, I can’t help having my own fantasies.”

“Oh?”

“Which I’m sure are miles from the truth.”

“For instance?”

“This is just crazy guessing, but—”

“Go ahead, Rita.”

“Well, what I decided is you’re sort of a spy. Like with some super-secret government agency? And you travel around on assignments, and when I don’t hear from you for a really long period of time, that’s because you’re out of the country.”

“Wow.”

“I told you it was crazy. And then I thought — now this is even crazier, and maybe I shouldn’t say it.”