Russell Banks - The Darling

I knocked lightly at first. No answer. Maybe she’s asleep. I knocked again, more forcefully. Someone, a woman in high heels, approached from inside. That’s not Carol, I thought. A barefoot gal, Carol never wore shoes at home, let alone high heels. Someone’s replaced me, someone kinder than I, someone who, late at night, tells her the truth about herself.

A familiar, lilting voice called, “Who’s there?” It was Carol.

“It’s me. Dawn.”

“ Don? Oh, my God! Don!” The door swung open, and she came rushing towards me. We flung our arms around each other and kissed on the lips, and then stepped back and looked at each other, grinned shyly like kids, and hugged again. “I can’t believe it!” she said. “Wow! Don! You look the exact same as you used to. Except your hair’s a lot longer.” She lifted my hair off my shoulders and hefted it in both hands, framing my face.

“It’s gotten pretty gray,” I said, and felt oddly conscious of my looks. “In this light you just can’t see it.”

Laughing, she pulled me into the apartment and locked the door. In high heels, she was as tall as I. Her hair had grown out, too, a mass of dark curls that she wore loose over her shoulders like a shawl, and she was wearing makeup, elegantly applied eye shadow and rouge, which was new, and a simple black dress with spaghetti straps. Very chic. I touched the tattoo of a rose on her bare shoulder. “I remember that,” I said softly. “Look at you. How beautiful you are. You must be just going out. Or just coming in?”

“These are my work clothes,” she said brightly.

“Oh.”

She saw my expression and hurried to explain that she was still working at the same restaurant, the old Clam Shack. She’d been promoted from waiting tables to assistant manager and hostess. “But it’s a kind of like a fern bar now, called The Pequod. I’ll tell you everything,” she said. “There’s so much news. And I can’t wait to hear all about you. I’m sure you’ve got news. I’ve even heard a little of it already,” she said and walked down the hall ahead of me.

“What? Who from?”

“You’ll see,” she answered and disappeared into the living room. I could hear the television, the chatter and buzz of a baseball game. “Guess who’s here,” she sang. Bettina must be about nine now, I thought.

But no child was there. The person slumped in the couch watching television was Zack. My one-time comrade-in-arms, my fugitive traveling companion. Impossible , I thought. I’m dreaming . But no, it was he, all right, the grand deceiver and unapologetic schemer, just as shocked to see me standing in the doorway off the hall as I was to see him slouched on Carol’s couch in front of the TV, a big blue can of Foster’s lager in one mitt, a bunch of pretzels in the other.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “The gang’s all here.” He smiled broadly, flashing those fabulous teeth and glittery blue eyes, then stood up and wrapped me in his long arms. He was unshaven and had put on weight and developed an early paunch, which made him seem not merely a very tall man, but a very large man.

Carol beamed like a proud parent. Zack aimed the remote at the TV and snapped off the sound. “So, babe, what brings you to our fair city?” He lighted a cigarette, sat back down, stretched out his long legs and crossed them at the ankles. He wore khakis and a tee shirt and sneakers, and looked like a factory worker after a long day on the line.

“I should be asking that of you,” I said.

“ Me? I live here. Welcome to our humble abode,” he said, and then added, “Missus Sundiata.”

Mrs. Sundiata? I laughed, as if he’d been uncannily witty, and quickly asked Carol, “Where’s Bettina? How old is she now?”

“Nine and a half, in fourth grade. Amazing, huh? She’s at my mom’s. She stays there ’cause we both work nights on Fridays and Saturdays. Me at The Pequod and Zack in his cab. We only just came in ahead of you,” she said. “You hungry? We were gonna order in Chinese.”

I said sure, and Carol kicked off her shoes and headed for the kitchen, and I followed. Zack hit the remote and went back to his game.

As soon as we were out of his hearing, I said, “So he’s actually living here? With you and Bettina?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of weird, I guess. But we’re okay together. For now, anyway. What do you want, fish or meat or what?” She pulled a Chinese restaurant flyer from a stack of take-out menus on the table by the phone. The kitchen smelled of fresh paint and looked clean and well kept. More so, certainly, than when I lived here.

“I don’t care. Anything. You know me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know you.”

She dialed and ordered, and when she hung up the phone I asked her how long she and Zack had been together. “As a couple, I mean.”

“Only about six weeks. Since he got out.”

“Out?”

“I’ll let Zack tell you the whole story. It’s pretty complicated. But he was in prison over in Plymouth, the federal prison, sort of a minimum-security place.”

“Prison?”

“He’ll tell you. Six months was all. Anyhow, one day out of the blue he calls me up, and we talked, and then I started going out there to visit him. He didn’t have anyone else to visit him, and I felt sorry for him. Even though him and you ran out on me like you did. But he explained all that. I got over it.”

“I… I’m sorry about that, Carol. At the time—”

“Yeah, it’s okay. I’m over it. Anyhow, we started writing letters and all, and before you know it we’d gotten real close and all. So when he was released, it seemed sort of natural for him to move in with me. He’s been real sweet. He helped fix up the apartment and everything. He even got his old job back driving a cab. Different company, of course. The other company went out of business, so nobody remembered how he ran out on them. When you and him went to Africa back then.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “You do know Zack lied to me about that. We never really had to leave, or at least I didn’t. But I thought—”

Zack suddenly appeared beside me. “Fucking Yankees,” he said and grabbed a fresh can of beer from the refrigerator. “You filling in the details for ‘Dawn’?” he asked Carol.

“You tell me your story, Zack, and I’ll tell you mine,” I said.

He sat down at the table. “You’ll show me yours if I show you mine? Sounds fair. Except I already know yours.”

“C’mon, Zack, be straight with me.” I sat across from him and gave him a hard stare. Carol stood behind me with a friendly hand on my shoulder. “How do you know my story?” I asked him.

“A guy I met knows you.”

“And who might that be?”

“Okay, babe, I’ll tell you everything,” he said. He had done very well in Accra buying and selling Ghanaian arts and antiquities. He’d bought himself a house, set up two galleries and a warehouse for selling work wholesale to galleries in the U.S. and Europe. A year ago he’d come across a private collection of very old gold and bronze masks and plaques and other artifacts from Benin owned by a retired British army colonel who had stayed on in Ghana after independence. The colonel had died, and his widow had asked Zack to sell the collection abroad. For his trouble he was to receive a third of the selling price. “This was a major collection, man. Museum-quality stuff. Off the scale. Probably worth two, two point five million at auction. But you’d have to show provenance, pay the auction house a fat commission, pay New York and federal taxes, all that. By the time I got my piece, it’d be a small piece. Besides,” he said, “I didn’t have an export license and couldn’t move the stuff out of the country myself without a Ghanaian partner, who’d probably want half of whatever I got. So I guess I had what you’d call a Maltese Falcon moment.”