The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
“That’s my father,” she told me when she caught my eye. “I just put up his picture a couple of days ago. We’re having a rapprochement. My mother died and so we’re being nice to one another. It might not last. We didn’t speak for two years before this.”
She asked if my parents were living. Neither was. Like her, I’d lost my mother recently. I wondered all the time if I would have left Clarissa but for that, if I’d hung on to my marriage for years for my mother’s sake. I thought I might have. I told her that — I seemed willing to say anything, and she to listen to it appreciatively.
“I’m trying to figure out if my father is why I have trouble with men,” she said.
She didn’t seem to me to have much problem with men. She knew what she was doing.
“Three-time loser,” she added and waggled the fourth finger of her left hand.
“God, three times,” I said, before I could catch myself. “I’d throw myself under a train.”
That could have gone badly, but her look was sadly sympathetic.
“It gets easier,” she said. “Unfortunately.” She didn’t have kids, though. That was different. She asked if I was thinking of going back. I wasn’t, although Clarissa, after weeks in which she’d been shrill and recklessly accusing — no one person could ever love me as much as I wanted to be loved; I was trying to change her because I could not change myself — had recently turned plaintive. After all this time, she asked me. After all this time? It was the only thing that ever had any resonance.
When I got ready to leave, Karen emerged from another room with an umbrella.
“I won’t melt,” I said.
“You can bring it back.” She smiled, enjoying the fact that she was so far ahead of me. Walking me to the door, she took my arm.
I was quite happy until, halfway downstairs in the elevator, it came to me that she looked a good deal like Clarissa.
I brought the umbrella back, naturally. I called ahead, and then it started to rain as soon as I got there, which led to a pretty good laugh. We just dashed around the corner and sat on the stools in a little coffee bar, talking about ourselves.
She ran the sales division of a chemical company her father had founded and sold several years ago to a big conglomerate. I figured she was one of those sleek women I noticed in airports, always looking resourceful and self-possessed in their dark tailored suits, able to climb onto the plane at the last instant and still somehow get 1 heir luggage into the overhead.
“You don’t really seem like a salesman,” I told her. “Too sincere.”
“That’s why I’m good. I don’t lie,” she said. “I never lie.” Her dark eyes rose over her paper cup in a measured warning. “I didn’t believe I could handle sales. But I needed a job after my first divorce. And when I was a kid, I was always jealous that my brothers went to the office with my father.” Her father, pushing seventy-five now, still ran the company under the terms of his buyout.
“How’d that work when you weren’t talking to him?”
“E-mail.” She laughed.
I was impressed with her rugged sense of humor about the way life had turned out. Her last name, for example, was her second husband’s.
“You really wouldn’t really call that a marriage. He was a country-club buddy of my father’s, older and very polished, but it just never took. We were together six weeks, and kind of split up at a party one night and never were under the same roof again. I thought, Oh god, I’m not going to change all my credit cards again. I just did that. They were still coming in the mail, a different one each day. At some point, you have to start moving forward.”
As we walked back to her place, a huge clap of thunder rattled the street, and the rain suddenly fell as if poured from a bucket. The small umbrella offered little protection, and I pushed her into a street-corner bus shelter, where I kissed her. I was afraid it might seem like a moment from a movie, but I guess everybody wants some of that in her life.
“That was very stylish,” she said, and rubbed one finger under her lip to deal with the lipstick smudge. “You’re a stylish guy.”
The next time I saw her, we ended up walking down to the river. It was drizzling again, but there’d been plenty of winter weather, and the River Kindle was covered by a solid frozen sheet. Standing on the ice, you could still feel the lurking movement beneath, the vibration of the Cory Falls a hundred feet away, the telltale swirls of the water and its many enigmas.
Rain glossed the surface, refracting the lights of Center City and making it possible to skate along. Karen had trained as a girl and did wonderful, graceful movements, skidding ahead on a pair of Keds, encouraging me to follow her. She’s an adventure, I thought. This woman’s an adventure. My skin went electric, not just about her but for myself.
“You’re not going to say anything to her. Tell me you’re not.” Elstner and I had stopped for a beer after the basketball game, mostly so Paul could have a final cigar before he got home, where Ann did not permit them. “Maurie will dissolve my bones in a vat of acid.”
I had figured it out a while ago, probably by the second time I saw Karen. The details were a while coming back to me. But by then, as I told Elstner, I was involved.
“For crying out loud,” I said. “I won’t say anything. I thought you’d think it was funny.”
“Sure. Funny. I’ll laugh as soon as I change my diaper.” Elstner blustered his lips. “Have you met Dr. Moleva yet?”
I had, in fact, only a few days before, when I’d picked Karen up at their Center City office. His smile was disturbing. He had bad teeth, like a farm animal whose poor bloodlines couldn’t be concealed. To his daughter, he was a source of never-ending vexation. At work he was imperious, then blamed his subordinates when his orders turned out to be wrong. As a father, he attacked her often and made a habit of overlooking what was important to her. He hadn’t been able to remember my name, although she gave it to him three times in the few minutes we were together.
“Kind of your run-of-the-mill jerk,” I said.
“And murderer,” added Paul.
“She hates him, I think. You know. Underneath.”
Elstner shivered again. “Christ,” he said. “Why don’t you go out with twenty-five-year-old women like other guys your age?”
“Hey, cut me some slack. It won’t make any difference.”
Elstner groaned. “You think you can just know something like that about somebody and it won’t matter?”
“Paul—”
“Listen. Did I ever give you advice about women?”
In our third year of law school, Elstner went out with a tall dark girl, an undergraduate who had the lean elegant moves of a whippet. Very moody. Very attractive. She smiled with notable reluctance. She seemed exotic because she knew a lot about motorcycles and introduced us to mescal — the saltshaker, the lime, the worm in the bottle. After their third date, I told Elstner I didn’t think she was really right for him. To this day he seemed to agree, but two or three months later, on a whim, I called her myself. That was Clarissa. Elstner for one reason or another never said much, not even the kind of jokes you might expect, not when I married her or lived with her for twenty-two years, not even when I told him that our life together had become a barren misery and that I’d asked for a divorce. Maybe he thought I’d saved him. Or used him. He never said. I never asked.