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:
I met her for lunch the next day.
“I offended you,” she said, as soon as the waiter had left us in peace.
“No.”
“I know I did. I didn’t think. We’ve been so compatible that way, I just got caught up in my own stuff. I was stupid.”
“It’s not that.” I felt she was taking me as puritanical or blinkered. “There are just some things I have in my head.”
“What things?”
“I can’t explain.”
“Try,” she said. “Please. This doesn’t have to be an impasse.”
I avoided several questions and she grew more imploring.
“What is it?” She leaned across the table to touch my hands. “What’s the problem? What aren’t you saying?” In her long face, I saw an urgency no different than my own, a will to connect and to escape the complexities of what had left us alone, to be a better person with a better life. In the end, it was exactly as I had told Elstner. I could not stop halfway, without taking the chance.
“There’s something I’ve been told,” I answered. I was surprised at the smoothness with which the tale emerged. I’d heard a story. From a reliable source. Someone I knew. A former prosecutor. I was so intent on the telling that I did not at first notice her draw away on the other side of the table, but when I finished, she was watching me with a bitter smile.
“That?” she asked. “That ridiculous, moldy rumor? Do you know how long people have been saying that? It’s absurd.”
It was one of those moments. In the crowded dining room, I thought I could somehow hear my watch tick. After a confused instant, I decided she had simply not understood. I repeated myself, more slowly, but her look soon hardened with suspicion. That glass wall I had smashed against so often with Clarissa had descended. Karen stared through it with appalling remoteness.
“And why are you telling me this?” she asked then. “Is that how you see me? Is this something genetic?”
“Of course not.”
“So what is the point? I’m neurotic? Because my father is supposedly some hoodlum?” With vehemence, she shifted in her chair. “You know, every divorced man I meet either has had no therapy or way too much. Go shrink somebody else’s head.” I reached for her as she marched from the table. “No!” she said and swung her arm away violently. “It’s me anyway. You don’t want me. My father is just an excuse.”
She disappeared around a pillar. In her wake, I was miserable, but I knew two things for certain. It was over. And I was never going to tell Paul.
In late March, the Hands ended a dismal season with one more agonizing loss. They took the game to overtime, then, while they were trailing by a single point with only a few seconds left, Pokey Corr, the Hands’ only star, broke free on the baseline and ascended toward the basket. He wound up and slammed his intended dunk shot against the back iron of the rim. Along with everyone else in the stadium, Pokey watched as the ball floated along an arc that brought it down almost at center court as time expired.
Like a losing bettor at the track, Elstner threw the season’s last ticket into the air. Then we started up toward the exit, inching ahead as the crowd merged into the walkways. From one stair above, I felt the weight of someone staring. It was Maurie Moleva.
“Oh, Christ!” he said. “Look at this. The heartbreaker.” His tone wasn’t completely malicious. His crooked brown teeth even appeared briefly as he smiled.
“It was mutual,” I said.
“Not how I hear it. How you keeping?”
I said I was OK.
“Gone back to your wife yet?”
I absorbed Dr. Moleva’s estimate of my situation, which he must have shared with his daughter long ago. With Maurie, anything that came at Karen’s expense was never waylaid by circumspection.
“Not so far as I know,” I told him. Clarissa had lately taken to mentioning counseling, an option she’d adamantly refused during the years I’d suggested it. Now I had no idea how to regard her surrender. I was fairly sure I no longer had the strength or interest. Oddly, though, there were moments when I felt sorry for her, sorry to see that loneliness had broken her will. Clarissa liked to portray herself as a person beyond regrets.
Maurie introduced me to his companion, a woman not quite his age. Reliably himself, Elstner had stood, face averted, as if studying something on the empty basketball court behind us.
“Doctor, did you ever meet Paul Elstner?” Elstner went rigid as I placed my hand on his shoulder, but he turned and greeted Moleva.
“Not so as I recall,” Moleva answered. “But I don’t remember my own name these days. Bad eyes, bad back, bad memory. I’m beginning to think I’m not getting younger.”
We all laughed as if this were original, then, when the crowd began moving, parted with a genial wave.
Elstner was still agitated when we settled in my car. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot. I really needed to renew acquaintances.”
“I didn’t have any choice. And besides — he doesn’t remember you. I really don’t think he does. Not tonight anyway.”
“Probably not most nights,” said Elstner. “That’s how he sleeps.”
I edged my car out of the lot.
“So you never told her?” Elstner asked me. “I’d have bet a whole lot you told her.”
“I told her.”
He swore at me. “I knew you’d tell her.”
“I thought it would make a difference, Paul.”
“Screw you. You’re too old to believe people change because you want them to. They change because they get tired of themselves.”
“She didn’t believe it anyway,” I said. “And I knew you’d be fine, because she’d never tell her old man about it.”
“And how’s that?”
“Because she’d never take the chance on seeing it might be true.”
The remark cast him down into silence as we swept into the lights and rush of the highway. After a few minutes his indignation rose up again.
“I can’t believe you told her,” he said. “Jesus Christ. Why do I put up with you?”
“Why do you?” I asked with sudden earnestness. The question seemed to exasperate him more than anything I’d said yet.
“Because you’re part of my life,” said Elstner. “How many people do we get in a lifetime? And I’m loyal. I’m a loyal person. Loyalty is an undervalued virtue these days. Besides, I have too much respect for myself to think I wasted twenty-five years on you. Or that I just figured you out. You’ve always been trying to find the Holy Grail with women. You haven’t changed either.”
“Well, apparently then, I expected better from her.”
“Don’t laugh, pal.” My sarcasm had provoked Elstner to point a finger. “The older I get, the more I’m just watching the same movie. He’s and she’s, the attraction is that they’re different, right? Everybody’s looking for the other piece. And then nothing makes them crazier. She’s upset because he’s not like she is, or vice versa, and then there are nimrods like you who actually think different oughta mean better, all the time hoping that will make you better, too. Grow up.”
With that blow delivered, he did not speak until we reached his house. I was furious, but also aware that I was due a lashing of some kind. A client, a trader from the exchange, had given me a couple of Cubans. I’d left them on the dashboard for Paul and remembered them now, fortuitous timing. Elstner studied the label with appreciation.
“Smoke one with me,” he said.
Hanging around with Paul, I’d puffed on a short cigar now and then and saw the wisdom of a peace pipe. I rolled down all the windows. It was a fairly mild night for mid-March, and we lit up the Cubans and reclined the front seats and talked in a dreamy reconciled way, reviewing the season. The Hands, who’d been a Final Four team within the last decade, were not even going to the Big Dance this season. We tried at great length to discern the ephemeral difference between winning and losing, how coaching and spirit contribute to talent. We talked about great teams we’d seen and, by contrast, recollected our own failed careers as high school athletes.