Al Sarrantonio - Cold Night

Paine ate at the diner on Broadway and 250th Street, then he had more coffee and read the paper and waited for it to get very dark. When it got very dark he paid his check and left.

He parked three blocks from Bravura Enterprises and scouted carefully for the blue Chrysler or red Toyota. Neither was there. The door to the building was locked but it was an easy lock.

Once inside, he went past Mary Wagner's desk and down the hail to Paterna's office. He closed the door behind him. The blinds were already drawn so he turned on the desk light.

The file drawer in the desk had a lock on it, but that broke with only a penknife. Paterna's furniture wasn't so magical after all. Paine pushed back the blue hanging file folders and saw nothing. He rammed the folders back farther, and there, pushed to the back edge of the file, was a brown folder.

As he slid it forward and pulled it out, it slipped from his fingers and fell onto the rug, flipping open to show an empty interior.

"Shit," Paine said.

He picked the folder up and slid his fingernail along the edges. There was no split where something had been hidden. He tore the folder down the middle, telling himself that doing so was not frustration but a final check for a hiding place.

The folder turned into a ripped folder.

Paine threw the pieces into the trash can next to the desk. He started to push the file drawer closed, then stopped. He pushed the hanging folders back again, straining his fingers to the back of the drawer, sliding them from side to side. At first there was just smooth cool metal. Then his fingers found a slip of paper and he pulled it out.

One side was empty; on the other was scrawled the name Izzy, the number 33,000 and a Los Angeles phone number.

Paine put the slip of paper in his pocket and left the office. He turned out the light behind him.

Outside Paine's door someone moved in the shadows. He turned, ready, but it was Rebecca Meyer. "You didn't answer your phone," she said.

"I wasn't home," Paine said. He opened the door for her and she went in. As she passed, something stirred in him, deep down. It was something primal, animal, but it wasn't only sexual. It both frightened and elated him.

She took off her coat. Her hair was more feminine today, brushed back from a center part. She looked older. She was wearing makeup. Her tennis togs were gone, replaced by slacks and a loose cotton blouse that didn't hide the fact that she was not wearing a bra. Paine thought of Ginny, the sweater she had worn, the one that had shown off her breasts.

He decided he had a thing about breasts.

"Do you have anything to drink?" she asked, sitting in one of the armchairs that had held Ginny's bags the day before.

"Ginger ale," he said, turning to get her one from the kitchen before she could say that's not what she meant.

When he turned from the refrigerator with the can, she was standing in front of him. She moved closer. Her face was flushed, through her makeup, as if she had played hard tennis and enjoyed it. Her eyes were filled with intelligence that had been sublimated by something more basic, a human drive that was the basis of life itself.

She took the can from him and he didn't see where she put it.

He didn't need her help this time. There was no laughter between them, no wordplay; there was something frighteningly elemental and unavoidable that removed them from the realm of human debate and made them part of nature. For the first time since he was a young boy and had lain out on the grass under the clouds, imagining himself one with those clouds, moving east with them through the thin pure blue air out to sea, he forgot who he was. He was not Jack Paine but a process, a force like the clouds or wind. There was no thought or time attached to what he was-he was outside thought or time. He was both bathed in release and horribly frightened.

Sometime during the night, it ended, and he became Jack Paine again.

She lay on the bed, and he lay next to her, and there were two of them again instead of one.

Paine stared at the ceiling. "How long did you wait for me outside the door?"

She shrugged, distracted. The flush had receded from her face. She turned gently away from him on the bed, slipping one hand under her head and staring at the window, away from him. For a moment he thought she had fallen asleep.

"I don't know if I'm in love with you or not," she said.

If she had said it a different way, Paine might have laughed. But the way she spoke, as if her mind was as unsure as her body had been sure, made him say instead, "Does it matter?"

She shrugged, or maybe it was a shudder.

"I never loved Gerald," she said.

"That's easy to believe."

"I don't know if I've ever really loved anybody, except maybe Dolores." She spoke almost to herself.

Paine let her have silence.

"When we were little girls, Dolores and I played together when she wasn't reading. We had a cat then, and we dressed him up like he was a baby. Dolores was the father and I was the mother. I had to cook on a toy wooden stove I'd gotten one Christmas. I always had to make turkey, because that was Dolores's favorite meal. We always had it on Thanksgiving and then on Christmas, and Dolores said if we had it all the time then it would always be Christmas. I had a toy ironing board, and a little toy iron from F.A.O. Schwarz that really plugged into the wall and got a little warm on the bottom. I had to iron clothes for the cat, and I had to clean and make dinner. My mother never did those things because we had servants for all that, but in our game that was the way we did it.

"As the father, Dolores would come home from her job, and I would lay out the turkey dinner on our play table, with a real little red checkered tablecloth on it, and with plastic vegetables and even plastic cranberry sauce. Dolores would get my father's Times from the morning and read it at the table. She even had one of my father's old pipes, and she pretended to smoke it after the meal was finished. We always had chocolate cake for dessert, because Dolores liked it. She had chocolate cake every birthday, with chocolate icing. I fought with her sometimes, because I wanted to be the father and try the pipe and read the paper, but she never let me."

She turned her head on the pillow and lay staring at the ceiling, her face suffused with what looked like dreams. Paine watched the track of a single tear ride the corner of her eye down into the trimmed, unbrushed wave of her hair.

"I think she got it all from books," Rebecca said, and then she was quiet for a time before she rolled to Paine like a weeping child.

He held her, felt his hands around her and wanted to take whatever was gnawing through her and tear it out and kill it and then take the ripped pieces of her and fit them back together again. He had never felt like this before.

"I think I'm in love with you," he said.

"Don't say that," she sobbed gently, and he continued to hold her.

At the end of the night, he awoke and looked at her. Sleep, or what they had done, or his words, perhaps, or her words, had loosened the spring that had been wound so tight within her, and had left her limp and free to dream. Her head lay on the side of the pillow, her mouth slightly open. The hollows around her closed eyes, the dark circles of makeup, made her look as if her eyes would be larger than they were. He studied the curve of her nose, the artistic sculpture of her cheek leading to the firmer flesh of her chin and down into the valley of her throat. He thought about how few times in a man's life he was able to study a woman without her knowledge or consent, as merely a work of art.

He watched the coming light through the window play across the landscape of her face, until some relay switched within her and she stirred. She opened her eyes at him, still in her dream or just coming through its portal back into life, and for the tiniest of moments he felt on the verge of revelation. It was like the time Ginny had come into the room as he cocked the gun to his head, the frozen second of time that had forever colored her for him and opened her secret heart to him. It was like that, only it was different, and for the briefest measure of time he was on the edge of knowing what made him feel the way he did about her, and then it was lost to him. It was in his consciousness and then it was gone before he could grasp and know it.