Lawrence Block: Manhattan Noir

“Another Manhattan?” the kid asked, picking up the empty glass. Definitely not Mensa material. Esther nodded. He said he’d be right back.

Yeah, Esther thought. It had taken seventeen minutes to get the first one, the kid everywhere but at her table. She had to remind him, too, then listen politely while he pretended he hadn’t forgotten, while he told her there was a backup at the bar, the place half empty. Maybe she’d insist on paying just so she could stiff him on the tip. No way was Esther going to be here again, no matter what she tipped the kid.

She looked over toward the door to see if Harry had come in. Maybe he was there already, looking around for her, not seeing her sitting in the far corner. But there was no Harry standing at the door, and anyway, the maître d’ would have brought him over. They wouldn’t leave him there on his own. Not Harry. Not at his favorite restaurant.

Esther checked her watch and then adjusted her scarf, the silk one he’d gotten her ten years ago when they were in England, the same kind the queen wore. That was when she was still running the office, still doing Harry’s books. That was before Cheryl.

Peering out into the dark, as dark as New York City ever gets, which is not very, Esther caught her own reflection in the pane, her droopy eyelids, the soft jaw line, her thinning hair, the crosshatching of wrinkles over her pale, thin lips, all the little tricks Mother Nature plays on you as you age, followed by the little tricks your husband plays on you when he notices.

Esther took the little pot of lip gloss out of her purse, dipping one finger in, absentmindedly refreshing the color of her mouth, feeling hungry as soon as she did, checking the door again. Where the fuck was Harry?

Dropping the lip gloss into the inside zippered pocket so that it wouldn’t get lost, Esther took out her pen, then snapped the purse closed. She put the pen on her napkin, where Harry would be sure to see it. She wanted him to know the arguing was over. She wanted him to feel at ease. Enough was enough, Esther thought, turning back once more to look at her reflection. He wanted her to sign the papers, she’d sign the papers. What difference did it make now anyway? Sign them or not, Harry didn’t want her anymore and nothing was going to change that. Anyway, she’d made her decision, and once Esther made up her mind, there was no going back.

When another fifteen minutes had passed and there was still no Harry and still no second Manhattan, Esther began to daydream. Ever since Harry left her, she had been concocting ways to bump him off. In the beginning, it was the only way she could fall asleep, and later on, Esther found it elevated her mood any time of day. Looking out into the night through the oversize windows, Esther thought that might be a pleasant way to spend the time while she waited for the pimply waiter and her bald, overweight, philandering, estranged husband to show up.

When Harry first told her about Cheryl, Cheryl who worked for Harry as she herself had done until recently, Cheryl his bimbo, his chippy, his fiancée and about to be his next wife as soon as Esther signed the papers Harry was bringing along, she would write a new story every night. Lying in bed in the apartment she once shared with Harry, the apartment where she now lived alone, staring at the ceiling unable to sleep, Esther began killing Harry. She stood behind him, unseen, and pushed him in front of the Ninth Avenue bus, off the balcony of their penthouse apartment after he’d come crawling back to her, begging her to forgive him, even off the High Line, the old tram tracks the city kept promising to turn into a public space one day. She watched him die slowly at the hospital of some terrible, painful, incurable, slow-acting disease, and she gained access to the penthouse he shared with Cheryl, that tramp-who names a kid Cheryl, anyway?-and killed him there, tossing Cheryl’s hair dryer into the bathtub, holding a pillow over his face, even shooting him the moment he came home from work, alone, for once, Cheryl doing some retail therapy or getting the liposuction she, Esther, had refused when Harry suggested it. She’d killed him in Washington Square Park, right near the famous arch that all the Japanese tourists came by the busload to see. She’d killed him on the refurbished Christopher Street pier, once a gay sunbathing and pickup site, now a park where you can walk with your aged mother or bring your kids; Esther finding a time when the place was deserted, a time when she could be there alone with Harry and end his life. That’s the thing about stories, Esther thought, unlike real life, you can make them turn out just the way you want them to. Fiction, she’d come to see, was preferable to fact, at least the facts of life as Esther knew them.

Struggling for the peace of mind that would let her sleep, Esther had killed Harry at The Strand, the world’s biggest bookstore, at The White Horse Tavern, one of many places where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank himself to death, at Pastis, the popular restaurant in the meat market where young people talked on their cell phones instead of to each other, and even at one of the few remaining wholesale markets where Harry ended up hanging on one of those nasty-looking meat hooks alongside some hapless cow. There probably wasn’t a place left in the Village that Esther hadn’t used as a venue for killing Harry-not a seedy bar, an after-hours club, a back cottage, a pocket park; not a street, an avenue, a lane, an alley, a square, a mews.

In her desire for sleep, Esther had devised more ways to kill Harry than you could shake a scimitar at, a new one every night for the first three months. But then she saw that it was even more delicious to repeat a favorite story-there were so many of them, all so scrumptiously detailed and satisfying. That’s when she began to name them, then tweak the names, amusing herself with each title change. God knows, she needed a few laughs in her life. A while after that-she had been a bookkeeper, after all-Esther gave them each a number. That’s when “Am I Blue?”-formerly “Tampered”-in which Harry accidentally buys a bottle of Viagra that has been tampered with by a vindictive crazy person and falls down dead just as he’s about to join the voluptuous slut Cheryl under the sheets, that story became “One.” After that, on nights when Esther had done her yoga, taken a hot bath, and washed down an Ambien or two with some of that nice citron vodka she kept in the freezer, on those nights sometimes she could just slip under the comforter, close her eyes, and think “One,” and just like that she’d be off to dreamland. Esther, it seemed, had finally found something she was good at. In her stories she didn’t just murder Harry, she did it with grace, style, and wit, except perhaps for the one where she’d pulled up a loose cobblestone on Jane Street, one of the most charming of Greenwich Village’s many charming blocks, and bashed Harry’s stupid head in. That, of course, was the night he’d told her that he and Cheryl wanted to get married. That, Esther thought, had been the beginning of the end.

What used to work, worked no more. Even Esther’s favorite plots now left her wide awake. For the last month or so, long nights of sleeplessness had turned into longer days of exhaustion, the tiredness pulling on Esther like a double dose of gravity, her heavy legs feeling like tree trunks, her dry skin sallow now, her eyes dull, making Esther plod through her own life without energy and without hope. Friends told her things would get better, that time heals all wounds, or that time wounds all heels, but either way things only got worse, and in the end Esther could see only one way out, only one way to stop her pain.

That very afternoon, Esther had tossed the perishables and taken out the trash for the last time. And on the way to meet Harry, to do this one last thing, she’d packed Louie into his carrier and taken him over to that nice Mrs. Kwan at the deli a block from her apartment, a Korean deli a block or two from everyone’s apartment in Manhattan, and told her that if she kept Louie in the basement, she’d never have a problem with the Department of Health again. Mrs. Kwan had looked inside the bag, startled at first, then laughing, covering her mouth with one hand, nodding yes, thank you, a cat, good idea. Outside the deli, Esther had dropped her keys down a sewer grating, something else she wouldn’t need after her last supper with Harry.