William Lashner - Past Due

I thought about it for a moment. It was a hard question, harder still when you weren’t sure why it was being asked. I drained the rest of my drink and snapped my head at the burn of it and tried to come up with an answer and failed and realized that was what I wanted after all.

“Answers,” I said after a long hesitation.

She leaned toward me. “To what questions?”

“It varies from day to day. Some days I want to know the purpose of existence. Some days I want to know why it seems everyone else is happier than am I. Some days I wonder why God doesn’t seem to go very far out of his way to help those who need it. And some days, most days, I simply want to know why my laundry place keeps using starch on my boxer shorts.

“Victor.”

“Every week I say, ‘No starch, no starch,’ and the lady, she nods yes, yes like she understands, but she doesn’t understand. Why doesn’t she understand? It’s a mystery all right.”

“So what’s today’s great philosophical question, Victor? What is the answer you are looking for today?”

“Today’s question? Today I want to know what the hell happened to Tommy Greeley and why.”

She turned her bright green eyes away from me and bowed her head. There was a puddle of condensation on the bar. She moved her finger across it, her bright red nail leaving a strange trail, up, down, swooping around like a pen on a page. Her expression took on the same serious cast it had taken when she was writing at my desk. I moved my gaze away from her face toward those strange squiggles she was leaving in the damp. I tried to follow the movements of her finger, tried to decipher the strange glyphs she was forming, as if they had great meaning, as if maybe all the answers I had said I was searching for could be found right there.

And as we both stared down at the bar the edges of our foreheads touched.

“I get the feeling, Victor,” said Alura Straczynski, her voice soft, her breath warm, “that you are going to be fatal.”

I WAS DRUNKand I was horny and I thought it more than passing strange, considering what a bad combination those two are, how often they pop up together. Pop up, get it? I did, and I thought it hilarious. I repeated it out loud as I staggered toward my apartment, “Pop up. Pop up,” accompanied by my demented laughter. They say your judgment is the first to go but I’d say it is your sense of humor.

I was laughing at my little pun but all the while, through my drunken fog, I was trying to figure out what I had just been through with Alura Straczynski. It appeared for some reason she wanted to learn of Eddie Dean’s identity. And it appeared she wanted to tell me, she was desperate to tell me, of her peculiar artistic goal of turning her life into a shimmering dream. And it appeared she thought I had something of hers, her notebooks. And finally it appeared, yes it did, that most of all what she wanted was to slip into my sheets.

I am not one who thinks that deep down everyone wants to screw my ears off. You know the type who do, those square-jawed boys who see in every glance, every smile, every nonhostile gesture an invitation. I am not that guy, I’m neither handsome enough nor smooth enough to be that guy, and my chest isn’t hairy enough to be a proper setting for the obligatory gold medallion. Yet, even as she told me of those marvelous early moments with her husband, I had the strange sense that Alura Straczynski was angling to create her own marvelous moments with me. It was in the way she held her head, the way she smiled at me, the way she put her hand on my cheek. And once, when she was whispering in my ear, some funny secret about a man at the other end of the bar, something seemed to catch on my lobe. Was it her teeth? Wowza. Mrs. Justice Jackson Straczynski. When I realized what was going on I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Two, three more drinks, tops, just to be polite, and then I was out of there, yes I was. Out of there.

So I was on my way home, drunk, because Rocco knew how to mix a drink, and horny, because, no matter how much I didn’t didn’t didn’t want to sleep with Alura Straczynski, there still is some strange connection between the ear and the prick so that when the first is turtle-snapped the second stands at attention. I wondered just then if it worked the other way around. Did a bee sting your ear, or are you just glad to see me? I was in a primed state of mind, yes I was, and the images that were floating in my mind just then had nothing to do with Alura Straczynski and everything to do with the photographs pinned to my wall, the legs, arms, breasts, thighs, the lithe lines of desire. Whose desire? Tommy Greeley’s desire? My desire? Was there a difference right then worth noting? Oh yes, I was in quite a riled state, when I turned onto my street and approached my building and saw her on the front stoop, sitting there, waiting, for me.

She didn’t rise when she saw me, she stayed there sitting on the steps as I approached, but she smiled, yes she did, and it whooshed through me and set me to tingling like a blast of radiation pure.

“You look like a mess,” said Chelsea when I sat beside her.

“I’ve been working.”

“At what?”

“Good question. Can I ask you something?”

“I suppose,” she said, warily.

“Does my ear look swollen?”

She leaned close and examined first one ear and then the other. It was as if I could feel her gaze on my skin, warm, probing.

“Not really. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“I wanted to apologize for storming out like I did the other night.”

“I wanted to apologize too.”

“No, it was me. You were right. Even after all these years, I’m only starting to understand what exactly we were doing.”

“And what was that?”

“Screwing up.”

She was still leaning close and I leaned closer and then I kissed her softly on her lips. It was something I had wanted to do from the first time I saw her, and was angling to do during our date at the Continental, and now, filled with the false courage of half a dozen old-fashioneds, and spurred by the desire somehow coaxed out of me by Alura Straczynski but not aimed at Alura Straczynski, a more generalized desire that latched onto anything nearby – small dogs shuddered citywide – I up and did it. I leaned close and gently swept away the long black hair that fell in front of her cheek and I kissed her. I kissed her. And… And… And nothing. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t respond either, she just let me, just let me kiss her. And when I stopped for a moment and pulled back to gauge the effect of my lips on her, she looked at me with a strangely blank expression and continued speaking as if nothing, absolutely nothing, had occurred.

“Sometimes I try to assign blame for what happened to us, to me,” she said. “I blame the strange little agent from the FBI who started knocking it down, the people working with us who made the mistakes that got us noticed in the first place, the creepy money guy who testified against us. I want to blame everyone and everything when what I should be blaming is myself, for getting involved with it all in the first place.”

I leaned in and kissed her again and it was exactly the same, like she was letting me, sure, but what she was really doing was waiting until I stopped so she could go on talking. And even so, I must say, she was delicious. There was something fruity and clean on her lips. I licked them softly, just rubbed the tip of my tongue over the tender ridges. Yes. Fruity, like she had just eaten a bowl of ripe cherries. I pulled back again and tilted my head at her.

“So what I wanted to say was that I am sorry about the way I acted. I’m sorry I left you in a huff like that.”