William Lashner - Past Due

So I didn’t kiss her. So what I did instead was back away.

She stared at me for a moment, puzzlement at first creasing the moist expectation in her face and then she smiled with a peculiar amazement, like a scientist finding a strange and wondrous result in the most banal of places, Alexander Fleming examining his spoiled petri dish.

“Is that how you seduced Tommy Greeley?” I said. “With your journals.”

“I didn’t seduce Tommy,” she said. “He seduced me.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“As if the bed wasn’t sign enough of your willingness?”

“There was no bed then. It was open space, with a mirror on the wall and a barre. I was then primarily a dancer. He was my husband’s friend. We double-dated. Occasionally, on the walks to one restaurant or another, we would have a private talk. And then one night he quietly asked if he could come to my studio and watch me dance. I looked away, shyly, I was very shy in those days, but I whispered yes. And as I danced for him, I realized how much I liked being at the center of his attention. He read me poems, Byron – ‘And the midnight moon is weaving her bright chain o’er the deep’ – and I danced to the rhythms of the verse, and it was strange and magical and I liked it in a way that shocked me. Then said he wanted to photograph me. He said he admired my lines.”

“That’s a pretty good one right there.”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it? He photographed me dancing at first. In my leotards. My movements, my positions. And as the session wore on, I could feel his emotions veer out of his control, as if my very movements conjured up his desire. But then he had a different idea. At first I said no. Absolutely not. I was happily married, devoted to my husband, why would I allow that? But when I woke up in the middle of the night and tossed in my husband’s arms, I imagined the emotions of it, the vulnerability of it, the thrilling sense of violation. I wrote and wrote, pages, whole sections, working it out in my journals, what it might mean, stepping over the boundaries, opening my life up to what? And then, after enough thought, I found I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Is that always your excuse?”

She laughed. “Of course you are right. Remember when I said I have a harder time being honest with the spoken word. The rationalizations slip in without my even realizing it. I didn’t want to stop myself. He threw a carpet down on the floor and then a sheet over the carpet and he laid me down in various poses. The bright lights, the soft linen beneath me, the sound of his camera clicking and spinning, the movement of my naked body, his presence hovering above me with that hard black object and its single thrilling eye. The sex seemed an inconsequential step after opening myself to him that way.”

“Did your husband know?”

“What happens here is private. That was our agreement from the start. I rented this studio before I ever met Jackson. This has always been a room of my own. So no, he has never been up here, has never known what has gone on here.”

“Never?”

“Once, and not again. What happens here is completely separate from my marriage.”

“Did anyone else know about you and Tommy?”

“I told no one. Tommy promised to tell no one too. In fact, I insisted he give me all the photographic prints that showed my face. No one was ever to know that we were together. Only one other man might have found out.”

“Who?”

“Some ruffian, some bearded motorcycle maniac. He came up here one afternoon looking for Tommy, banging on the door. Yelling. Said he had followed Tommy. Said he had to talk. Called him a bastard. We stayed silent, didn’t let him in no matter how long he banged. When he stopped, I watched through the window as he left the building. He looked up, spied me staring down at him.”

“Lonnie.”

“I never knew his name.”

“He told your husband.”

“He didn’t know me, didn’t know who I was.”

“Don’t be a fool. And the bed only came into the studio after Tommy?”

“Yes.”

“So there were others.”

“I don’t go chasing. They simply appear. If I wait long enough the world appears. As did you. And sex is merely a tool, Victor. Like a chisel cutting through opaque stone. It is a method of exploration, nothing more.”

“I’m sure that gives your husband great comfort as he lies alone in his bed at night.”

“My husband has his own ambitions to keep him warm.”

“How did it finish between you and Tommy?”

“I ended it.”

“Why?”

“He wanted us to be together. He told me so. It was quite charming, and at first I was almost willing. He painted such a romantic picture and he could be very convincing. But I knew it would be wrong for me. I loved my husband and I suppose I was more interested in exploring my being than in being with Tommy.”

“He took it well?”

“I don’t know. Once I decided, I didn’t see him again before he disappeared. Now if you don’t mind, Victor, I have work to do.”

“You going to write up our little moment?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “It is not often I am face-to-face with such a perfect example of an emotionally stilted coward.”

I let loose a burst of laughter. I couldn’t help myself, I laughed and shook my head and headed toward her door. “Maybe you’re right. I cheerfully admit to being both emotionally stilted and a coward. But not today.”

“You’ll find them for me, won’t you?” she said.

“Your precious notebooks.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have enough here to keep you busy?”

“The work continues. I am distilling a life, my life. Those months are precious, crucial, defining.”

“Who killed Joey Parma?”

“Who is Joey Parma?”

“A loser of no apparent worth.”

“Then why would I be concerned with him?”

“You wouldn’t,” I said. “If I find your precious notebooks I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you, Victor.”

“Today it wasn’t so much cowardice as good taste.”

“With that tie, Victor? I hardly think so.”

I laughed again as I closed the door behind me. Just then I felt like a cockroach in Teflon boots, climbing to freedom out of a sticky mess of a web even as the spider, with all her venom, looked on with helpless contempt.

But I didn’t worry much about Alura Straczynski anymore. I had lost the fantasy of the pictures but I had gained another piece of the puzzle. She had brought me one step closer, so close I could feel the answer to it all coming upon me. I needed only to dot one more i, cross one more t, and the word “guilty” would be writ large upon the forehead of the man who had set up Tommy Greeley’s death.

“ALL RISE.”

Those damn words again. I should have been on my guard, but what could I have to fear here, in the Criminal Courts Building, standing before the august Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas?

Dour Clerk Templeton did the whole “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” thing as Judge Wellman stepped into the courtroom. That word never failed to crack me up, Oyez. Like two old crones discussing their ailments. You think you have oyez? You don’t know from oyez. Vayzmir, I have oyez. I must have been finding it so amusing, and my work that day so routine, because it was only later that I registered the clerk’s hard stare or the judge’s dark countenance as he ascended to the bench.

“What do we have?” said the judge.

“Your Honor, we’re here today for the sentencing of Rashard Porter,” I said, as I put my hand on Rashard’s shoulder. I had him dressed in gray pants, green crewneck sweater, blue oxford shirt. He looked as if he had walked off the set of Ozzie and Harriet, if black men had ever been allowed on the set of Ozzie and Harriet.