Nathan Hill - The Nix

“This isn’t what I want anymore.”

“We’ll keep it, you know, loose. Informal. You can be with this new person and me, right?”

“That’s not going to work.”

“Why? You haven’t given me any good reasons.”

“I no longer want to be with you. Isn’t that a good reason?”

“No. Absolutely not nearly good enough. Because there’s no explanation. Why don’t you want to keep doing this? What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing. You did nothing wrong.”

“Exactly. So you can’t punish me like this.”

“I’m not trying to punish you. I’m trying to be honest.”

“Which is having the effect of punishing me. Which is not fair. I did everything you asked. Even the weird stuff. I did everything, so you can’t just up and leave for no good reason.”

“Will you please stop whining?” she said, and she jumped off the car and walked a few paces away. Her sudden movement caught the dog’s attention; it tensed, evaluated her intentions, guarded his scraps. “Will you please be a man about this? We’re done.”

“All those things we did together, all those strange things. They made a promise. Even if you never said it out loud. And now you’re breaking that promise.”

“Go home to your wife.”

“I love you.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“I do. I love you. This is me saying I love you.”

“You don’t love me. You’re just afraid of being alone and bored.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you. Please don’t leave. I don’t know what I’ll do. I said I love you. Doesn’t that mean something?”

“Would you please please stop it?”

To Alice, he seemed on the verge of something substantial: crying or violence. You could never be sure with men. Across the alley the dog seemed satisfied that she did not have designs on its food. It resumed eating the thrown-out burgers and cold limp french fries and coleslaws and tuna melts at a velocity both ferocious and probably vomit-inducing.

“Listen,” she said, “you want a good reason? Here’s the reason. I want to try something new. It’s the same reason I started things with you. I want to try something I haven’t tried before.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“Girls.”

“Oh, give me a break.”

“I want to try girls. I feel very motivated to do this.”

“Oh my god,” he said. “Please tell me you don’t think you’re all of a sudden a dyke now. Please tell me I haven’t been screwing a dyke.”

“Thanks very much for the good times. And I wish you all the best.”

“It’s not the neighbor girl, is it? What’s her name. Faye, right?”

She stared at him, confused, and he laughed. “Don’t tell me it’s her,” he said.

“How do you know about Faye?”

“She’s the one you spent the night with. Monday night? Don’t tell me you’ve fallen in love with her. ”

Everything about Alice now seemed to steel and harden at this moment. Whatever softness she had, whatever openness she ever felt with him, all at once disappeared. Her jaw clenched, her fists balled.

“How the fuck do you know about that?” she said.

“Please tell me you’re not leaving me for Faye Andresen,” he said. “That’s rich.”

“You’ve been watching me, haven’t you? You’re a goddamn psychopath.”

“You’re no dyke. I can tell you that for sure. I’d know.”

“We are done. I am never speaking to you again.”

“That is not going to happen,” he said.

“Watch me.”

“You leave and I’ll arrest you. I’ll arrest Faye too. I’ll make your lives hell. Both of you. That’s a promise. You’re stuck with me. This is over when I say it’s over. ”

“I’ll tell all your cop buddies how much you liked screwing me. I’ll tell your wife.”

“I could have you fucking killed. Easy.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

“Goodbye.”

She walked away from the squad car. Her back tingled in expectation of something — a chase, a nightstick, a bullet. She ignored the alarms inside her to turn around and see what he was doing. She heard her own heartbeat in her ears. Her hands were stuck in tight fists. She couldn’t unclench them if she wanted to. The road was another twenty paces away when she heard it: the sharp pop of his pistol.

He’d fired his gun. A gun had been fired. Something had been shot.

She turned around, expecting to see his corpse on the ground, his brains on the wall. But there he was, staring down at the trash can behind the diner. And she gathered what had happened. He didn’t shoot himself. He shot the dog.

She sprinted away. As fast as she could. And she was two blocks from the alley when his squad car screamed by. He passed her and sped west, in the general direction of the Circle campus, in the direction of the dorms, where Faye, cleaned, spritzed, floral-smelling, her makeup done, her fanciest clothes on, waited for Sebastian to arrive. Alice had given her two more of those red pills, and she’d taken them before her beauty routine. Now their warmth and optimism were spreading. Her excitement at this moment was unbearable. Lonely her whole life, expected to marry a man she didn’t really love, waiting now for this guy who seemed like a fairy-tale prince. Sebastian seemed like a kind of answer to the question of her life. The nervousness had passed and now she was thrilled. Maybe it was the pills, but who cared? She imagined a life with Sebastian, a life of art and poetry, where they debated the merits of movements and writers — she’d defend Allen Ginsberg’s early work; he, of course, would prefer the later — and they would listen to music and travel and read in bed and do all the things that working-class girls from Iowa never got to do. She fantasized about moving to Paris with Sebastian and then coming back home and showing Mrs. Schwingle who the real sophisticate was, showing her father how she was pretty damn special indeed.

It seemed like the beginning of the life she actually wanted.

So she was elated when her phone rang and it was the front desk downstairs saying she had a visitor. She left her room and flounced down the stairs to the ground-floor lobby, where she found that the visitor was not Sebastian. It was the police.

Imagine the look on her face at that moment.

When this big crew-cut cop put her in handcuffs. Led her out of the dorm in silence as everybody watched and she cried, “What did I do?” How could he bear it, her shattered heart? How could he shove her into the backseat of his squad car? How could this man call her a whore over and over for the entire ride downtown?

“Who are you?” she kept saying. He’d removed his badge and name tag. “There’s been some mistake. I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re a whore,” he said. “You are a fucking whore.”

How could he arrest her? How could he book her for prostitution? How could he actually go through with it? She tried to keep her face calm and defiant when they took her picture, but in the jail cell that night she felt an attack coming on so strong that she curled up in the corner and breathed and prayed she didn’t die here. She prayed to get out. Please, she said to God, or the universe, or anyone, rocking and crying and spitting into the damp cold floor. Please help me.

JUDGE CHARLES BROWN WOKE before dawn. Always before dawn. His wife slept in bed beside him. She would stay sleeping there another three hours or more. It had been this way since they were first married, when he was still a Chicago beat cop working the night shift. Their schedules rarely overlapped back then, and it stayed that way all these years — habituated, normalized. Recently he’d been thinking about it, for the first time in a long time.