William Lashner - Past Due

Her chin is raised, her hands are shaking.

Where is your stuff? he asks.

Here, she says.

Where? he asks.

Look around.

This isn’t yours.

She turns to stare at him, her eyes fierce, rapacious, the eyes of a canine protecting a bone.

He owes me, she says.

She steps toward one of the walls of shelves, takes down a large wooden box, its top precisely ingrained with stones and pearls in the shape of a kneeling Atlas, hoisting on his shoulder a great globe. She places the box on the table, turns on the lamp.

His coin collection, she says, her eyes widening with wonder.

She lifts the top. The interior of the box is divided into a series of equally sized squares and the squares are filled with small, flat velvet sacks, each with its own drawstring. Her hands shaking, she grabs one of the velvet sacks out of the box. She struggles in her haste to loosen its drawstring and pull out a coin. Her hands fumble the sack. It falls on the table with a muffled crack. She picks it up again, succeeds in loosening the drawstring, drops the naked coin into her hand, a golden coin with Lady Liberty holding a torch carved into its surface, the coin’s bright skin glinting under the harsh light of the lamp, the hard yellow light reflecting like a knife’s edge of gold in his lover’s eyes.

“And then the wall,” said my father, struggling now to get the words out. “A doorway of shelves. It swings. Swings open. And the old man. In the opening. The hidden doorway. The old man. Darkness behind him. Darkness streaming in behind him. And he’s smiling. The eyes of a fox. Smiling. The old bastard. At his little treasures. At the coins. At the gold. At her.”

Back from the hospital in the few moments before I had to leave to meet Lonnie and Chelsea, I found myself standing in front of the photographs pinned to my wall. There was something about my father’s story that seemed to resonate in the mosaic of limbs and breasts, of bones and curves and flesh. For the first time I found the array of photographs frightening.

It was the lack of a face in the photographs, the missing lens through which we view another’s humanity. Lies, despair, love, secrets, lust, all of it is found in the one part of this woman at which I couldn’t gaze. I had liked that missing ingredient before, it had allowed me to imagine, to match the perfection of the captured body with my own inventions for her eyes, her cheeks, her nose, her mouth. It had made the pictures all the more alluring, all the more seductive. But right now, I was still suffused with the memory of my father’s old lover standing in that hidden room, leaning over that open treasure box, the glint of gold in her eyes. The recesses of her soul were becoming ever darker and more mysterious to the man who had lay naked with her not a few hours before, and that was what I found frightening.

I wondered again who she was, this woman, whose objective beauty was pinned to my wall. And now I found myself wondering what were the desires, the demons, what were the secrets she kept from the lover who was standing behind the camera, capturing his obsession with obsessive care. It wasn’t just my father’s past that was coming alive for me these difficult days, it was Tommy Greeley’s past too. And if there was an entwining of the two, it was happening here, only here, in the murky confines of my own rattled consciousness. Could one story, as it was being revealed to me by my dying father, incident by startling incident, help me fathom the other? I didn’t know, but I did know that my own obsession with the photographs seemed to grow as my father’s story deepened and darkened, my obsession with the dark limbs, the smooth skin, the missing lens.

I took a step back from the photographs so that the whole array became visible at once. The legs, the torso, the sweet thin arms, the neck. The beauty mark on the edge of the areola of the right breast.

And as I stared at the whole of it, once again the photographs all came together for me, once again all the varied parts of that miraculous body melded into one another and became as one, a vision standing out from the wall, separate now from the individual photographs that inspired it.

Except, this time, there was a difference.

This time I began to see a face, the mysterious missing face. The features weren’t yet clear, the contours of her jaw, the shape of her eyes, it all wasn’t yet clear, but it was slowly crystallizing for me. And damn if she wasn’t starting to look like Chelsea.

“BACK IN THEday, Dude,” said Lonnie Chambers, his eyes wide with excitement, “when the business was really churning, we had us some parties. Girls, booze, spreads to make a sheik sweat. Shrimp, you never saw so much shrimp. Piles. Mountains. Dude. And that was just the shrimp. You should have been there.”

“Were you there?” I asked Chelsea.

Chelsea smiled, gave an expression of fake shock. “No girls allowed, at least no girlfriends allowed.” She sipped her blue martini. “A regular boys’ club.”

We were at the bar of the Continental, a smoky, swanky restaurant carved out of an old chrome diner. I knew the old place, I had eaten there, and generally to see a diner tarted up as some swank joint for a swank crowd made me angry and sad, but this diner had actually been foul, nowhere near as swell as the diner that still parked across the street. And so, as much as it pains me to say it, the Continental, with its power crowd and neon lights, with its padded walls and skewered olive light fixtures and frou-frou food was, actually, an improvement.

“The parties,” said Lonnie, jabbing at me with his lit cigarette, his rough voice rising above the hum of the crowd, “they always started with the cars. Long black limos the twins, that ran the thing, they rented to pick us all up. Each one stocked with alcohol, some powder, and a girl. A sort of stewardess who would plump your pillow, get you comfy, pour your drink, unzip your fly.”

“Lonnie.”

“Victor here asked what it was like back in the day, so I’m just telling him. Drinks, drugs, a long-legged girl with a mouth like a washing machine. And that was just the car. We had it going, Dude. And the chicks at home, they never knew a thing about it.”

“Don’t be stupid, Lonnie,” Chelsea said, standing from her stool at the bar. “We knew everything.”

“No way. No frigging way.” He tilted his head. “How?”

She picked up her glass by the stem, stretched her lovely neck, drained the last of her martini, placed the glass back on the bar. “We paid one of the regular whores to tell us.” She glanced at her watch. “I have to make a call.”

Lonnie’s forehead creased in puzzlement as she walked away from the bar, past the tables, toward the restrooms. She was tall and her back was straight when she walked, but, in the way she gripped her elbows as she moved, there was a sense of her holding herself together, and in her lovely eyes there had been the lovely sadness I had noted before. We both watched her go and then Lonnie shrugged, took a last drag of his cigarette, squashed it among the accordioned remnants of his priors.

“Could be. There wasn’t much they wouldn’t do for money.” A hearty laugh. “Wasn’t much at all. Dude, you really should have been there.”

“Lonnie, what would I have been?” I said. “Ten maybe?”

“Hell, it’s not like you needed a driver’s license. What with the limos driving us down the Black Horse Pike. Others would fly in from all over the country, from Boston, from Miami, from Phoenix. All coming to the same place to celebrate. There’d be a reason, usually a bachelor party, but I’ll tell you this, it was, all of it, just an excuse. Hell, a lot of these guys just got married so we could have the party. Wild times, man, wild. You want a bone?”