William Lashner - Bitter Truth

I lay in the bed and shivered from the damp and thought about it all, not even realizing I was slipping into somebody else’s reverie, until I fell, eventually, into a dark, empty sleep. That it was dreamless was merciful, what with all I had been through and learned that night. I slept curled in a ball and stayed like that until I felt the scrape of teeth at the back of my neck.

I sprung awake and spun in the darkness, first this way, then that way, searching desperately for the rat. But it wasn’t a rat. I could only make out the outlines of a figure in my bed and I pulled myself away before I heard a throaty laugh and the soft silvery rustle of metal on metal and smelled the sweet smell of vermouth.

“Jesus dammit,” I said. “I thought you were passed out.”

“I revived,” said Caroline, in a glazed voice. “I didn’t know you’d be so jumpy.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I thought we should maintain our cover with a late-night rendezvous. There are always eyes open in this house.”

“We could have let our cover slide, I think. They’ll know soon enough, as soon as they talk to your fiancé. You didn’t tell me about you and Harrington. Another lie?”

“The love of my life,” she said. “And you’re right, they will tell him, of course, and he will tell them exactly who you are. I guess the jig is up.”

“Are you still drunk?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“You were pounding them down like an Australian frat boy.”

“I have a small problem sometimes. My therapist says I’m a situational alcoholic. It’s one of the many things we’re working on.”

“What situations specifically?”

“Family situations, like tonight.”

“I really can’t blame you, Caroline. This family of yours is the screwiest I’ve ever seen. It makes mine look like the Cleavers, and believe me, no one ever confused my mother and father with June and Ward. And besides their general weirdness, it seems each and every one of them has the damnedest desire to have sex with me.”

She gave a hearty laugh. “You said you wanted to meet them all, so I arranged it.”

“You arranged it?”

“I told them you were a polymorphously perverse sexual addict and hung like a horse.”

I let out a burst of embarrassed angst just as I heard the rustle of covers. I felt her palm land on my stomach and rub and then slip south, reaching under my boxers.

“Well maybe I overstated it a bit,” she said, “but it is mighty perky for this late at night.”

“Cut it out,” I said. I reached down to grab her wrist and brushed her breast accidentally, feeling something hard and cold against the back of my hand, something round, metallic. “You’re drunk and you’re a client. The ethical rules say I can’t get involved with a client.”

I tried to pull Caroline’s hand away but it stayed right where it was. She kissed my nose and cheek and then bit my upper lip. She didn’t bite it hard, not at all like Kendall turtle-snapping my ear, she bit it softly, tenderly, teasing it out from between her teeth as she pulled away.

“Am I?” she whispered in my ear.

“Are you what?”

“A client?”

I thought on it, how she took back her retainer and hadn’t yet signed the contingency fee contract and how our strange business relationship was not so easily described and as I thought on it she bit my lip, my lower lip this time, bit it the same way and teased it from between her teeth the same way and suddenly I didn’t want her hand to leave, just to move, which it did.

“I really don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said.

“Then don’t think.”

“Caroline, stop. Don’t I have any say in this?”

“Not until I sign your contract,” she breathed into my ear. “Until then I’m in control.”

She kissed me lightly and then scooted toward me on the bed, slipped close until our bellies rubbed and her grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross dug into my chest. The springs beneath us creaked loudly.

“They’ll hear.”

“Then be sure to be loud,” she said. “I don’t want them to miss a single groan.”

She kissed me again and dragged her tongue across my gums. I tasted her breath and whatever control had stubbornly remained suddenly shifted out from beneath me and I fell.

“You are going to save me, aren’t you?” she said.

It was phrased rhetorically, which was good, because I couldn’t have answered just then, still falling as I was, falling. I tasted her breath and it tasted sweet from the vermouth of her Manhattans and fresh, like a warm wind off a meadow, and full of mint.

No, not peppermint. Government.

BREAKFAST WAS WAITINGin tarnished silver chafing dishes arrayed on a black marble sideboard in the Garden Room. Consuelo had met me at the base of the stairs and asked, without inflection, how my night had been before directing me to the morning’s regalement. I had been the last to rise that night and I was evidently the first to rise that morning and I had awakened alone.

The Garden Room was an exotic monstrosity, warm, humid, circular, with a grand Victorian glass dome, the panes of which were sallow and sooty and edged dark with fungus. Huge jungle plants, sporting leaves as big as torsos, stood among weedy stalks topped by tiny face-shaped blooms. Behind the jungle plants stooped pale-barked trees, gnarled and stunted. Meat-red flowers drooped from clumps of green sprouting from the crooks of tree trunks, the flowers’ dark mouths yawning in hunger. The place smelled as if fertilizer had been freshly laid in the huge granite pots. I wouldn’t have been surprised if General Sternwood had been there to greet me in his wheelchair, but he wasn’t, nobody was, except for two black cats locked in a large wrought-iron cage. When I approached, one cooed invitingly while another snarled before hurling itself right at me, slamming its face into the iron bars. I guessed they were playing good cat bad cat.

Sunlight glared through the dirty windows. The storm had passed that night just as Nat had predicted. In my suit and day-old shirt and socks and underwear I stepped to the food-laden sideboard. I was ravenous and all too ready to set to, despite the Garden Room’s offal smell. I took a plate and lifted the silver cover off the first of the warming trays.

Eggs, runny and wet like snot, with chips of black mixed in, either chunks of pepper or something else I didn’t want to guess at. In the next were potatoes, wet and hard, swimming in some sort of green-colored oil. In the next, French toast slices with the consistency of cardboard and a reservoir of syrup, slick with the prismatic surface of motor oil. In the last, white slabs of uncooked fat surrounding shivery pink slivers of trichinosis. I put my plate back and looked around for something to drink.

I examined six china cups before I found one crackfree and clean, released a splash of coffee from the urn, and found my way outside to the rear patio and a perfect spring morning. The sun was risen, the damp of the night before was lifting in sheets of fog, the air was filled with the fresh scent of newly soaked loam. A bird heckled. To my right, a large stone wing stretched perpendicular to the rest of the house, its windows covered with white sheets to keep out the sun. An old ballroom, I figured. A few of the windowpanes were cracked and it looked as if it hadn’t been balled in decades. As I examined it I took a sip of the coffee; it spilled into my empty stomach with an acidic hiss. I looked around and found a rusting white cast-iron chair and placed my cup and saucer onto its seat. Then I walked off into the rising fog to explore the grounds.

Behind the house, halfway down the backside of the hill, was a long rectangular pool, surrounded by what looked like a swamp. The water in the pool was a dark algae green and it appeared to be spring-fed because the water had risen in the storm to flow over the top of the pool, flooding the ground beside it. There was no cement or wooden platform around the pool for sunbathing or relaxing with a tall drink of lemonade, just the swamped grass.