Reed Coleman - Gun Church

Mid-February in Brooklyn isn’t exactly Paris in the springtime, but that first morning I woke up without Stan Petrovic’s corpse on my back felt like the best spring day ever, in spite of the snow. That was the morning I returned Meg’s calls.

“So, you are alive, Weiler? I was beginning to get concerned.”

“Concerned? No need to speak in code to me anymore, Donovan. I’m not using. The only thing I’ve put in my nose in seven years was a Kleenex and I haven’t had a drink in a month. I’ve just shut myself in to do my work. You’ve gotten the pages I sent you, right?”

“I guess that’s what alarms me,” she said. “Very scary stuff.”

“You have no idea, Meg. No idea.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No, and don’t ever bring it up!” I snapped.

“No need to bite my head off.”

“Sorry. It’s just safer if you think of it as purely fictional, Meg.”

“Safer? Safer for whom?”

“Just safer. Leave it alone,” I said more to myself than to her.

“So I see the book is moving along.”

“It’s getting there.”

“But where is ‘there’ exactly? You were pretty vague about the ending in your plot synopsis and I’m not sure where you’re taking it.”

“You’re worried?”

“It’s my job to worry.”

“Well, stop it. You’re my agent, not my editor.”

“I’m your friend.”

“The ending will be as good as the rest of the book,” I said.

“I think that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“I didn’t call to talk about the book.”

“What then?”

“What’s Amy’s cell number?”

The question has been raised a thousand times: Would Romeo and Juliet’s love have endured had they survived? In Kip Weiler’s uproariously profane and deliciously cruel second novel, Romeo vs. Juliet , he not only restates the question, but uses the answer to absolutely flay the American body politic. Weiler takes to task all the parties insinuating themselves in the divorce proceedings. No group or individual is immune from his scathing wit. With demonic delight, he skewers the Knights of Columbus, ACT UP, Sinatra, Streisand, Jerry Falwell, and even poor Larry King.

— JACKSON DRUM, THE MERTON REVIEW

She didn’t bother hiding the anger. I hadn’t expected her to and she was never very good at faking it. There was never any doubt about when Amy was pissed off. I’d given her ample opportunity to display her many and varied expressions of anger-from slow boil to rage-and by the end of our marriage, angry was her baseline state of being. But there was something else in her tone, a grudging joy at the sound of my voice that made me push her to see me again. I didn’t have to say Please more than ten or fifteen times and I didn’t try to explain why I’d left her standing in the lobby of the Algonquin.

We met on neutral ground, a coffee bar in the West Village. Dressed in paint-speckled jeans, torn running shoes, a back-to-front black Kangol cap, and the weathered Schott motorcycle jacket I’d given to her as a birthday gift twenty years ago, Amy looked more like her old self, more like the woman I fell in love with than the woman I’d fled from eight weeks ago. Just seeing her, her eyes afire, brought it all back-how stupid we’d been for each other, how much we still were. It was as obvious on her face as it must have been on mine.

“God,” she said, taking her green tea from the barista. “I will never understand how you do this to me. Even when I hated you, Kip Weiler, I loved you. That night after the country club, when I told you I couldn’t take it anymore, I would have stayed with you if you had persisted a little longer.”

“I know, but you were right to push me away. I’d been scuttling my ship for a long time and you were getting pulled down in the suck. That last year together was terrible. I was empty and you didn’t even want me anymore. That’s how I knew we were over.”

“Is that introspection I hear from the lips of the Kipster?”

“No … I mean, yes … I mean, it’s introspection but not from the lips of the Kipster. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

“What’s changed?”

“Everything.”

“You used to be succinct.”

“Believe me, that is succinct,” I said, sipping my coffee. “Everything has changed. Let’s walk.”

“Walk? You used to take a cab to go to the bathroom. Do you have a fever? What have you done with my ex-husband and who are you?”

“Cut it out, Amy.”

“Fine.”

“I even run these days. Well, not for the last month, but I’m getting back to it this week.”

“Not if it keeps snowing like this you’re not.”

We’d both heard the forecast for a lot of snow, but I guess we both sensed that we needed to get this first get-together over with as soon as we could. It was easy to ignore the snow before it started falling. Now, it was fairly impossible to ignore.

We turned south toward Tribeca, snow falling pretty heavily as we walked. There was already more snow on the sidewalk than the combined snowfall in Brixton over the last year. New York City is beautiful in the snow, but it’s a very transient beauty. Nothing stays pure very long in the city once it touches down.

“That night at the Algonquin, when you just showed up like that, what was that about?” I asked.

“I miss you. I’ve missed you.”

“Ain’t memory grand, how time sands off the bitter edges? But you couldn’t miss the Kipster, not really. In the beginning of us, I acted like a sex- and drug-addicted fool because that’s who I was. At the end, I was doing it to hurt you, to make you push me away.”

“I know.”

“So, I don’t get it. I get why you dumped my ass. Best thing, really, but why marry Peter fucking Moreland?”

“I married Peter for several reasons, all good ones, I thought at the time, but none of them having to do with love. He was stable. He understood my work and-”

“-he wasn’t me.”

“Exactly,” she confessed. “He wasn’t you. I married him to punish you.”

“Yeah, and how did that work out?”

“Somebody got punished.”

“Not somebody, everybody.”

She stopped in her tracks, playfully pulling my coat sleeve so that I’d turn to face her. “Okay, this is the last time I’m going to ask: What have you done with my ex-husband?”

“I told you, everything’s changed. Weird thing is, most of it happened in the last few months. I got straight a long time ago, after my second trip to rehab. But I hadn’t really started exorcising the Kipster until about a year ago. I finally got sick of all my old bullshit. In Brixton, I’d had a long series of one-night stands and loveless affairs just like at all the other schools. I had this one terrible affair with a colleague named Janice Nadir. One afternoon, we were lying around in bed in one of those motel rooms with mirrors on the ceiling and I was staring up at myself. I was thinking about you, wondering what you would think of me there doing what the Kipster always did.”

“And what did I think?”

“You were sorely disappointed, but not surprised. I imagined you shaking your head and saying, ‘Same old Kipster.’ I got this notion in my head that I wanted to earn back your respect whether or not you ever knew about it. I didn’t think I would ever write again, but I thought I could at least start acting like a grownup. Your unknowing respect became the central theme of my boring life in Nowheresville.”

Amy stepped close to me, slowly worked her arms around me, and rested her head on the wet, snow-covered shoulder of my jacket. She let her tea fall to the ground. I dropped my coffee too. We didn’t kiss. I didn’t take off her cap and stroke her hair. She didn’t brush her hand against my cheek. We didn’t even move much. We just stood there like that, her head on my shoulder, ten years of hurt and longing condensed into a silent, snow-covered moment on the street.