A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

He reached into the pocket of his tight jeans and produced several quarters, which he fed to the jukebox. “Crazy” started up again and he pulled me to him. “Are you crazy?”

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

“Try me.” He guided me onto the dance floor, a narrow space between the bar and the pool table.

“It’s hard to know where to begin.”

“I always start with my ex-wife,” he said.

“What about her?”

“She cut the right sleeve off all of my shirts.”

“What did your right arm do?”

“Nothing my left arm didn’t. Your turn.”

“My fiancé was engaged to two women at the same time. He gave us each an identical ring.”

“I see your fiancé and I raise you my ex-wife: she painted the word asshole across the firehouse doors. I’m a firefighter.”

“I see your ex-wife and I raise you my fiancé: he murdered the other fiancée.”

“Whoa.” The guy stopped dancing. “For real?”

“Looks that way. But I came here to not think about that.”

“Is he in jail?”

“He’s dead.”

The guy took my hand and pulled me back to the bar. “What are you drinking?”

I had two more of what I was drinking, and he kept up with me. He lived in Greenpoint near Transmitter Park with two roommates, both firefighters. Neither was home when we got there. His room was a mess and it suited me. So did his kisses. I hadn’t kissed anyone since Bennett. And that thought wouldn’t leave me alone.

Would I rather have been kissing Bennett?

I knew him as well as I knew this firefighter.

I was stuck in my head again and my body just went through the motions. He stopped while we were both still dressed and said, “You’re not here, are you?” He wasn’t angry.

“I wish I were.”

“Why don’t I get you a cab,” he said, no trace of irritation in his voice.

He put me in the cab and gave the driver a twenty.

“Your ex-wife is wrong about you,” I said.

• • •

I was back in the dreaded apartment. Maybe Cilla was right and I should consider moving, but I wasn’t ready, nor could I afford to. She’d had her walk on the wild side, but what steadiness I had now I owed to her. I sat by the living-room window, which looked out onto my neighbors’ backyards — the one with topiary, the one strewn with drying laundry, the one with stones arranged in a Zen garden. There was a half moon and I sat with my untouched cup of tea until dawn.

When I had told Steven that Bennett was suspected of murder, he said, “Those dogs are heroes.” When I told Cilla, she asked if this knowledge helped me forgive myself for what happened. When I told McKenzie, he said, “Now that I can work with.”

We were back at Champs. I had asked him to meet me there. I now wanted him to defend George, too.

“Who is Bennett alleged to have killed?”

I had passed beyond my initial shame at having been duped. “His other fiancée.” I watched this information register with McKenzie. He was studying me to gauge how I was doing. It felt dishonest not to tell him, though I didn’t want to come across as a victim. Ha!

“How did she die?”

I told him what I knew, and he said he’d send for the police report.

“You’ll see in the report that he used a different name with the woman the police think he killed.”

I gave him the name of the Boston detective to contact. I gave him the name of the victim. I could give him no name for my former fiancé.

When I asked if he could defend George, too, he refused to sugarcoat George’s chances, but said he would do what I wanted. This interrupted my despair. I was aware of a kind of intimacy that comes from two people aligned with each other fixing their gaze on something outside themselves. We wanted the same thing.

He walked me outside, and before I headed down Lorimer Street, I offered my hand to shake. But he gave me a hug. That it lasted a couple of beats longer than expected was something that I would think back on in the months to come.

• • •

Usually I walk off bad news, and after leaving McKenzie, the feeling of his arms around me propelled me through the neighborhood. I needed to restock my kitchen; I wanted staples, even though I never cooked. I headed for C-Town on Graham and passed the diner where the old couple sat out front every afternoon. The bench was for customers only, but no one at the diner was willing to send them on their way. A fixture, they had a kind greeting for people who walked by. They were kind to each other, too — every time I saw them I had the same thought: they still love each other. They were the type of old couple meant to elicit just such feelings, and I pushed back against having the response I was meant to have.

A guy with a tattooed spiderweb covering half his face came out the diner door. The old woman said to her husband, “He certainly has made a commitment to his lifestyle.”

• • •

I checked Lovefraud when I got home and found this e-mail:

I have been following your postings about the man you call “Bennett” and I am begging you to stop. Whatever information you think you have about him will not interest me. This man is the last person I would be afraid of, and your implying that he deceives women is a lie. I am engaged to him. I did not pretend to be Susan Rorke, but if you continue to seek her out, you might do better to quiz her crazy friends. I will, however, be willing to talk with you but only because I owe it to him.

I felt as though I were living on the other side of the wall, that I had slept too close to it and, during the night, had passed through into the other world.

I met Samantha the next day at one of the Pain Quotidiens on the Upper East Side. I could never read the sign with its French pronunciation; to me it signified pain , and thus I found it fitting that she had chosen it as our meeting place.

Because we met on a weekend morning, the small, private tables were all taken. We would have to sit at the long communal table. I scanned the patrons for a woman with an empty seat beside her. Three women fit that description. One had her purse carelessly open on the table beside her; one was on a cell phone texting, her nails painted black; one was rearranging a sweater on the back of her chair. The one with the open purse was conventionally beautiful, her features played up by carefully applied makeup. She looked to be about my age, but she also looked too high maintenance for “Bennett.” The one with the black manicure was too Goth for him. That left the nervous woman who, having rearranged her sweater, was now rearranging her silverware. As the knife and fork gleamed, so did the stone in her engagement ring. I watched her until she looked up and met my eyes. She flushed and looked away for a moment — a flush of anger, not embarrassment.

I walked toward the empty chair. “Samantha?”

“I only have fifteen minutes.”

When I agreed to meet Samantha, I wanted to see who else had captured his heart. I wanted to see who else had been taken in by him. I wanted to compare the damage we had suffered at his hands. I wanted to release these women from the illusion of Bennett’s devotion to them. I wanted them to know they were safe. And an ugly part of me wanted to be the one to tell his other women that he was dead.

I flagged a waiter and mouthed, “Cappuccino.”

Not one to bury the lead, and mindful of her fifteen minutes, I told her straight off that “Bennett” was dead.

“No, he’s not,” she said with certainty.

I took out the picture of Bennett I had shown the detective in Boston and asked the woman if this was her fiancé.

She said nothing.