Afraid to Death Read online

  He closed his eyes. He was twitching like a junkie, his fingers were itchy … benedictus et sanctus … Father Almighty … Deo Deo Deo …

  He opened one eye.

  She was bending over the Mummy, touching his bandages, whispering to him.

  Then it was over. He couldn’t believe it. She was gone! Somewhere in the hospital a bell was ringing. Ding ding ding hah ding ding hah hah …

  She had actually come and gone without seeing him. And he was lying there, right under her nose! Jesus! What luck! Going to Mass every Sunday had really paid off. God was really and truly a neat dude. Yeah! But …

  The Mummy had stopped wheezing.

  5

  ‘It seems to me you tricked her very cunningly,’ Father Patrick said. Not many boys could have reacted that cleverly … uhh … under similar circumstances … uhh … They tell me you left the hospital before you were supposed to.’

  ‘Yeah. To play safe, I split out through the basement.’

  ‘Where did you go? Your dad was frantic.’

  ‘To the library. It was Sunday, but I know how to break in. The lock on the skylight is broken. I hid in stacks all day and read August 1914 by Alexander Solhitsyn.’

  ‘Solzhenitsyn.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  They were sitting in the orchard behind the chapel. This was the first time he’d ever discussed the blonde with anyone. It was easy, talking to Father Patrick. He was always cool. You could tell him anything, no matter how far-out, and he’d just puff on his cigar and say, ‘Uhh’.

  Joe watched the boats on the lake. That’s how the Mummy got hurt. A Yamaha Flyer ran over him, right down there off Dire Point.

  ‘Did I kill him, Father?’

  ‘Nonsense. You didn’t kill anybody.’

  ‘No … but … like …’

  ‘He was killed in the water. Swimming. When they brought him to the hospital, Dr. Roberts said he wouldn’t last the night. You weren’t in any way responsible for that.

  ‘Uhh … look, Joe,’ he relit his smelly cigar. ‘Even if you’re right, if this woman is really … uhh … who you think she is … I’m not saying she isn’t … but I have to admit, I have my doubts.’

  ‘That’s okay. As long as you half-believe me at least.’

  ‘Well, if she is, would she be that easy to fool? Just by changing the clipboards on the beds? What I mean is, if she wanted to find you, don’t you suppose she could? Easily.’

  ‘Maybe not, Father. No. I figure she has so much to do that she just can’t keep track of everybody. If I just stay on the move, she’ll never catch me.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s a question of out-guessing her.’

  ‘But you can’t keep running away forever. There’s no future in that.’

  ‘But I have to!’ Just thinking about it made him jittery. The orchard was beginning to close in on him. The hillside sloping down to the lake was another dead-end. And the chapel’s stained-glass windows seemed to be on fire. ‘I have to keep watching for her and I have to be ready to move. Fast.’

  ‘But you’re going to work yourself into a continuous frenzy and end up having a massive stroke.’

  ‘Yeah right. I have to remember to keep laid back.’

  ‘And no more boozing.’

  ‘No way Jose. Ugh!’

  Father Patrick smoked his cigar and Joe tried to keep his eyes open. Every time he closed them he saw her in the ward. Shit! He had to admit though that it was peaceful here. He could probably take a quick nap. Or maybe he could become a priest. No … that would mean being locked up in some monastery with bars on the windows, like a slammer. Like a hospital. Like the Isle. Like everything.

  ‘Listen to me, Joe. Pay attention now.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s not a question of whether or not I believe you.’

  ‘What’s important is that you believe me.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You’ll see her again.’

  ‘Oh, balls! No!’

  ‘Wait. You’ll see her again, sure. But not for a long long time. She knows you’re waiting for her. That puts her at a great disadvantage, you see, your being aware of her presence.’

  ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’ It did. Like that book on Gettysburg he’d read twice. The Army of Northern Virginia was at a disadvantage and lost the battle. Because the Army of the Potomac knew where the next attack was coming from. Not on the left flank or the right flank but right to the center. Pickett’s charge. A disaster. The old priest was thinking straight, like he always did. Cool reasoning.

  ‘So she’ll just wait until your guard is down. Years and years will pass before she makes her move. That will give you a whole … uhh … lifetime to think about something else.’

  ‘A whole lifetime?’

  ‘Uhh … practically’

  He was right.

  The years passed like andantes. Only strangers died. Joe graduated from college. Dad married his girlfriend and they sold the house and moved to London.

  Joe went to work for the Esor Tobacco Labs in Raleigh, North Carolina. He came back to the lake only once, to paddle over to the Isle one last time. And to say goodbye to Father Patrick. But the Isle was flooded and he couldn’t go ashore. And the old priest wasn’t as sharp as he used to be and didn’t even recognize him.

  Joe walked along Greenwood Avenue, past the chapel and the country club and Morgan’s house. He stopped and looked around. Where was it? Here somewhere in the middle of the block.

  What’s your name?

  Joe Egan.

  Behold all flesh is as grass and lo the grass withers and the flower decays.

  He walked over to the mailbox. Here. This is where she’d been standing. Exactly sixteen years ago.

  God! Children’s minds were more gruesome than Edgar Allan Poe. What would the shrinks have to say about all that juvenile morbidity? They’d probably relate it to the sex urge. And they’d be right. His memory of her was blurred but he did recall very vividly the curves of her hips moving under her raincoat. And her black stockings. And those purple eyes!

  The poor woman. Today she’d be a plump elderly yuppie with blue hair, without any inkling whatever of the havoc she’d caused him.

  Well, if he couldn’t say goodbye to Father Patrick, he’d at least bid her farewell.

  Hail and adieu!

  6

  He rented a large apartment on the third floor of a high rise on Peace Street. An incredible place, four rooms and two baths, for only five hundred a month. He drove to work, in New Hope, every morning at nine and was home by eight-thirty On Friday nights he’d try to cruise, but there wasn’t much action in Raleigh. Everyone – except the couples – was terrified of AIDS. In fact, so was he. So most of his efforts to pick up girls were half-hearted. It was mostly concerts and parties and dinners and tennis, with even the necking reduced to an absolute minimum. There was a lot of snorting going on, but he avoided that.

  It never occurred to him that it was a dull life. He was comfortable, just vegetating and prowling around. Even the boring routine at Esor was bearable. Computers were always fascinating. And his co-workers weren’t all assholes.

  But his greatest pleasure, the thing that filled most of his voids, was poker. There was a game somewhere almost every night and the pots were stupendous – at first terrifying, but gradually luring him like beckoning sirens. Some weekends he’d go all the way to Goldsboro or Rocky Mount for big all-night sessions. Within less than two years he had thirty grand in his savings account. He bought a BMW.

  So all was well.

  But he was dying for a friendly blow-job.

  Then he met Ada.

  She worked in the financial department. She had short hair and green eyes. They looked at each other one afternoon in the cafeteria and both saw something so compelling that they had to sit at the same table.

  It was from her that he learned that he was well known in all the departments as a champion card player. Everybody had
a different estimate of how much he’d won – some claimed it was over a million dollars. He was astonished. He had no idea that he was a celebrity.

  They went to a basketball game that night and the next to the theatre to see Coriolanus. The third evening they got slightly poleaxed on bourbon, but not enough to go to bed. That was out of the question. But they discussed it.

  ‘I’m clean,’ Ada admitted.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘How can either of us be sure though?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Maybe the last girl you slept with slept with someone else who slept with someone else and so on all the way back to Peter the Positive.’

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘It’s just too risky. I mean, hey! It’s a plague. Even with those awful ski-masks you guys put on your tools. They make penises look like KKK Grand Dragons.’

  ‘Have you ever used a vibrator?’

  ‘I’d be afraid of electrocuting myself. What do you do to relieve yourself?’

  ‘Poker. No pun intended. My lust is sublimated.’

  ‘Speaking of poker, aren’t we a sorry pair of jokers?’

  She went home alone. So did he.

  She was twenty-eight years old, originally from Oklahoma City. She’d been with Esor for five years and was in charge of payrolls.

  Before Joe, she’d been going out with a lawyer from the legal department. ‘Paul and I never had coitus either,’ she told him. ‘We decided to date simply as a career move. We didn’t want the Powers That Be to think we were gay. Well, I did play with him a couple of times. Wearing a rubber glove dipped in suntan lotion. But we stopped that, it was too painful. Then he got hooked on crack and showed up at the office one morning in his pajamas. They carried him away in a strait-jacket. You can imagine what that did to my reputation. Career move indeed! The Board of Directors actually had me investigated. Honestly! A private eye was following me around for months.’

  She’d always planned to marry and have a child before she was thirty, but the Big Scare disrupted the scheme. ‘Living a normal life,’ she said, ‘has become as difficult as running for President of the United States. My entire life is a god-damned sham. Six hours a day at Esor, watching the clock, and the rest of the time total vacuity. My salary has doubled since last year, but so what! If I can’t even get laid once in a while, what’s the point? That’s why I cut my hair. I’m a nun. Aside from poor Paul, you’re the first guy I’ve even talked to intimately since college.’

  But things weren’t as desperate as all that. She knew a nurse who worked at Rex Hospital and one Sunday she gave them both an AIDS test. On Monday a.m. they were pronounced pure. On Monday p.m. they took a shower together and had their first soaring orgasms on the bathroom floor.

  So now they were a couple.

  They made up for lost time with rabbit-like zeal – at her place, at his, in his office, in hers, in parking lots, in elevators, in closets, on tennis courts.

  They married that summer. They went to London on their honeymoon to visit his father and Mom II. They found Dad living in a drab flat with a black violinist from Haiti. Mom II had run off to Madrid with a lover.

  Dad was overjoyed to see them. He confessed that he was broke. He wanted them both to quit their jobs and stay in England. Joe could support them all – including the violinist – by playing poker.

  Joe gave him ten thousand dollars and whisked his bride off to Venice and Rome.

  When they returned to Raleigh Ada gave up her studio in Millbrook and moved into his apartment on Peace Street.

  All that January Raleigh was buried in snow. Esor closed down at noon and by three o’clock the streets were as dark as the Yukon. That afternoon – the 17th, Joe remembered – Ada was already home when he came stumbling in, soggy and frozen. He stripped and stretched out in front of the blazing fireplace. When she saw him, lying there, bare-assed and shivering, events took their usual turn.

  ‘Let’s pretend we’re horny sailors on a whaling ship,’ she suggested. ‘Locked in the ice of the Arctic Ocean. You haven’t seen a woman since you left Nantucket. And I’m that cute little cabin-boy who’s been flirting with you since the beginning of the voyage.’

  ‘I can’t wait to shout, “That she blows.’”

  ‘If you do, it’s all over between us.’

  ‘How about, “Spouting to starboard!”’

  ‘How about just shutting up? If the Captain finds us down here in the hold like this, he’ll put us in irons.’

  ‘Do I at least get to toss my harpoon?’

  ‘Aye! Aye! But first, I’ll thaw you out.’

  Afterwards, she reminded him that they were supposed to go to a party tonight. They considered calling it off, but it was only a block away, on Oberlin Road, so they decided to go.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘You had a phone call.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Some woman.’

  ‘Christ, I really don’t feel like facing the elements, it’s ninety-below out there.’

  ‘We’ll leave early. You can wear one of your Italian neckties.’

  ‘It was probably Miss Suffolk’s secretary. About my vouchers.’

  ‘She wouldn’t give me her name. In fact, it was very suspicious. You’re not thawing out with some other broad, are you?’

  ‘You flatter me. Who do you think I am, Hercules?’

  She reached for him. ‘Sure. I bet I can get it up again in ten seconds.’

  She was right. But suddenly her fingers turned to ice and he lost it. ‘A woman? You’re sure it was a woman?’

  ‘I know the difference between a man and a woman, even though I am a cabin-boy of doubtful gender.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Hey!’ she bent over him. ‘Where did it go?’

  ‘What did she say, Ada?’

  ‘That she’d see you later.’

  7

  Even a blizzard couldn’t keep people away from one of Stan and Mabel Stokowski’s potluck soirées. The food was always fabulous. There were fifty guests crowded around the buffet when Ada and Joe arrived.

  ‘Hold me back,’ she whispered. ‘Caviar! And pâté de campagne! And a salade niçoise! I’m going to help myself before these hungry hogs devour everything.’

  And she disappeared into the mob.

  Joe leaned against a wall and tried to bring his jerking muscles under control. Who could have called? It must have been one of the girls who played poker … Charlotte or Mona or Michele or Carrie or … But why wouldn’t she leave her name? Or it could have been somebody from the bank. Or, for that matter, just someone selling subscriptions or something. And what about an overseas call? London. Mom II or Dad’s violinist. Or somebody they’d met in Italy? Or a friend of a friend …

  Anyway, there was no reason to get frantic about it. That way lay madness!

  ‘I think it’s revolting.’

  He jumped. One of his bosses, Miss Suffolk, was glaring at him.

  ‘Are you referring to my necktie, Miss Suffolk?’

  ‘No, your tie is very pretty.’

  ‘I bought sixteen of them in Rome. On my honeymoon.’

  ‘You look livid. Are you drunk?’

  ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘Good. A boozer is always a loser.’

  She ought to know. She kept a bottle of Johnny Walker in her desk and by four o’clock every afternoon called computers ‘compooters’ and programs ‘pogroms.’ According to rumor, she owned 51 percent of Esor.

  ‘Look at him,’ she hissed. ‘Smirking and simpering like the lord of the manor. Pride cometh before the fall.’

  What the fuck was she talking about. ‘Who?’

  ‘Tony Waterman. The insipid cockroach. He shouldn’t be here, showing off like that.’

  ‘Why not, Miss Suffolk?’

  Tony Waterman was in charge of the personnel department. He wore Miama Vice outfits, even in midwinter, and smoked grass in public. Ada called him Stony Tony.

&nbs
p; ‘Because it just isn’t gentlemanly behavior, that’s why not.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He happens to be banging Mabel Stokowski. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. If you want to succeed you must take heed.’

  ‘I beg your pardon …’

  ‘You won’t climb the ladder in this corporation, young man, if you aren’t aware of what’s going on around you. Let me remind you, Joe, that you haven’t been promoted, not once, in two years. The heedful are never needful.’

  ‘Yeah right, but if one to the grindstone keeps his nose, one never has time to take off his clothes.’

  ‘Poor Stan is heartbroken.’

  ‘Because I haven’t been promoted?’

  ‘No, you ass, because that smug fink is balling his wife.’

  After ransacking the buffet, the guests converged on a boy rapping on an xylophone, accompanying a girl in overalls singing Yugoslavian folksongs.

  Joe found himself standing next to Mabel Stokowski.

  ‘I phoned you this afternoon,’ she whispered.

  An enormous flood of relief washed over him. ‘Oh, that was you. I was wondering …’

  ‘I want to borrow three hundred dollars.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Stan won’t give me any money, the tight-ass bastard. He told the bank not to accept my checks. But that’s only one of the reasons I loath him. Do you want to know the other reason?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Cunnilingus disgusts him.’

  ‘Oh. Well … listen, Mabel, I’m sorry I wasn’t home. But why didn’t you just ask Ada?’

  ‘She wasn’t home either.’

  ‘No?’ his stomach heaved. ‘She wasn’t? Then who answered the phone?’

  ‘Nobody?’

  He pulled open a window. He refused to panic. Fuck that! The wind stung his eyes. It was beginning again, after all these years … but he wouldn’t panic. He took a deep breath of freezing air. It was just a question of thinking clearly and holding funk at bay. Blue funk. Cold blue funk. Keep her at bay too. Her. Jesus! He mustn’t let her into his thoughts. Keep out!