Damnation Street

34.

Now I have to say just a word or two here about what was happening to me, only because it eventually came to play a role in the central story-a minor role, I admit, but a role all the same.

Weiss, at this time, had just exited Olivia Graves's office and was driving out to Sky Harbor Airport, where he hoped to meet with the Shadowman. In San Francisco, meanwhile, where it was an hour earlier, Sissy and I had just returned to her apartment. We had left work on the early side. With Weiss gone and the business suffering, there wasn't much to do. The Agency had become a depressing place to hang around.

When we got in, Sissy went to the bathroom to take a shower. I changed into jeans and a T-shirt and plunked down on her four-poster bed to read. And I tried to read. I went through the motions. Stretched out on her fluffy bedspread, my head propped up on her fluffy pillows with a fluffy cat kneading my belly with her claws and another fluffy cat sleeping on my crotch. I held the book in front of me, and my eyes went back and forth over the words. But my mind was too full to pay attention to them, and my heart was too heavy. My heart weighed a ton.

I was thinking about Emma, about what she'd said to me. I could hardly think about anything else anymore. I kept asking myself: how was I supposed to become the sort of man she could look up to and admire? It was not a very comfortable question. The thing was, once I began to consider it, I found myself thinking of all the ways in which I was not very admirable at all. It's funny, you know: I had always been a sort of self-deprecating person, the kind of guy who made a great fuss about my foibles and tried to be honest about my weaknesses and mistakes. But underneath that, in my heart of hearts, I always figured I was a pretty great guy at the very basic level. Now, as I began to really think about it, to think about how I might be more admirable to Emma, it occurred to me to wonder: how great are you really, even at the basic level, if you don't try, at least, to do the right thing?

I knew what right thing I had to do, of course. I knew the first right thing I had to do anyway. I lay there sunk in smothering fluff, and I could hear Sissy singing in the shower, some girl song, some happy girl song, because she was so happy to be in love and have the right man in her life finally and, sure, I knew exactly what I had to do.

Then the shower stopped. Sissy went on singing. Drying herself now, preparing to come out to me. I was filled with dread.

My eyes continued to move back and forth over the lines of type. The book I was reading, the book I was pretending to read, was Patrick McNair's book, Emma's father's prize-winning novel. It was called The Celestial Fugue of Bugger O'Reilly. It was about an alcoholic college professor with writer's block. Go figure. I'd tried to read it once before, but I never could get to the end of it. I thought I'd try it again because-I don't know-I thought maybe it would help me understand Emma better, why she'd rebelled against the old man and gone Christian and all that. Anyway, the story followed this professor through a series of dissolute picaresque adventures until in the end he finds himself standing knee-deep in a lake grasping wildly at the pages of his unfinished manuscript as they blow away in the wind. Well, all right, as I say, I never actually finished it, but that's how all these novels about blocked college professors end. The fact that unfinished manuscripts tend to be stored on computers nowadays doesn't seem to make any difference.

The novel was written with that languid acerbic eloquence that alcoholics seem to be so good at. And then there were all the usual passages where the languid acerbic eloquence suddenly gives way to a more heartfelt but still acceptably ironic eloquence with which the professor affirms the beauty of this meaningless spark of a meaningless flame that was the life of the imagined soul in the accidental universe, which was really only the novel he was writing, which was this novel, which was this universe and so on. My eyes, as I say, went over the words without really taking them in. I was thinking about Emma instead, Emma in that clapboard house in Berkeley. Kneeling with her hands clasped before her and her green eyes turned up to the ceiling and her face like the face of an angel.

So now I was not only filled with dread; I was also filled-I was overflowing-with confusion over the purely practical difficulties I had gotten myself into. What was I going to do about Emma's father? I couldn't betray her conversion to him, and I couldn't betray to her the fact that he'd hired the Agency. And I couldn't very well keep either secret and actually have a relationship with her. It was a genuine mess, and I had no idea how I could get any of it to work out in a way that would make me "admirable."

But I couldn't let that distract me. I knew what I had to do first. I had to break up with Sissy.

The bathroom door opened, it seemed to me, with shocking suddenness. Even the cats jumped off me and ran for cover. Out stepped Sissy. She was wearing a short silver nightie, ready for action. Already, on the way home, in that whispery voice of hers, she had gone on at some length about the things she was planning for us to do before dinner. As always, given the limited number of parts and possible combinations involved, her creativity was impressive.

She came toward me very slowly, putting one toned white leg directly in front of the other. Her spun gold hair hung loose at her cheeks. Her gentle, delicate face was all smiles and fire.

It struck me suddenly, as I lay there in my dread and confusion watching her approach, that her bedroom was like a stage in some ways. The four-poster with its white lace canopy. The fluffy bedspread and the fluffy pillows, at least one of them shaped like a heart. The fluffy white shag rug, the white dressers. The posters on the wall-I remember one was a print of people dancing and another was of a tree-canopied dirt road-which somehow managed to seem fluffy too. It was like a setting she'd created in which we were supposed to play out her wished-for moments. All that white, all that fluff, the heart-shaped pillow. It was the furniture of a fantasy-this fantasy of something she had missed, the sort of giddy young girl's love for which, in truth, she had grown too old.

Sissy reached the end of the bed. She took hold of the post and leaned against it, letting it press into the silver nightie, bringing out the shape of her breasts.

"Hi there, sweetiekins," she said in that singsong maternal whisper. "Whatcha reading?"

I had the awful sense that it was not just the fluff I was sinking into, that her very dreams were closing in around me. Yet, for all my honorable intentions, I couldn't help noticing: she looked awfully good, standing there. Plus it was flattering, the way she wanted me all the time. Plus, as I say, her creativity was truly impressive.

"This book," I said. My voice seemed to come from someplace far away. "By Patrick McNair, that guy McNair."

"That professor? The one who came in?"

"Who hired me to follow his daughter, yeah."

"Mm, right, right." Her chin went up and down, her cheek rubbing slowly against the bedpost. Then she came around the edge of the bed to me, her fingers trailing over the post until they let it go. "Well, work is over now, puppy dog. It's time for baby to put his book away…"

She sat down beside me on the edge of the mattress. She smelled good. Have I mentioned that? Sissy always smelled exceptionally good. She lifted the book out of my unresisting hands. She placed it gently on the bedside table. She considered my face fondly, sweetly, her blue eyes bright. She stroked the hair up off my forehead. She gave a satisfied sigh and smiled.

"Oh," she said, "you make me so happy."

She leaned down and kissed me very gently on the lips. I don't know how she did these things: it was absolutely electric. Suddenly, I couldn't remember what it was I'd been thinking about a moment before. Emma-admirable-the right thing to do-what was all that about? Why was I always making such a big deal out of these things? All it came down to was a little sex, after all. What was I, some kind of Puritan, some kind of fogey? Life was short, man, you had to carpe the old diem while you may. Or something.

She kissed me again, gave me a taste of her tongue this time. She pushed her hand up under my T-shirt. Her fingers were cool and dry against my belly.

"Don't you want to take this off, you silly puppy?" she whispered.

How could I crush her fluffy white dreams?

I often think back on that moment. Actually, it's the T-shirt I think about most, an old ratty black one I've long since thrown away. I think about the fact that if I had taken that T-shirt off that night, my whole life would've been different. To be precise, all the best parts of it never would have happened. The T-shirt, I guess, was sort of like the coaster from Carlo's: a little thing on which a lot of big things depended. I had blown the coaster. I don't know why I got a shot at the T-shirt. It was an unlooked-for second chance.

"No, no, no," I heard myself say hoarsely. I put my hand on her hand as she tried to push the T-shirt up. I drew it out from underneath the cloth and held it. I looked into her sweet blue eyes. "You're going to have to fire me," I told her.

She gave a sort of half laugh. She half thought it was a joke, half knew it wasn't.

"You're going to have to kick me out of the Agency."

"What are you talking about, goofy? What's the matter? You sound so serious all of a sudden."

"It's the professor," I said, holding on to her hand, looking into her eyes. I inclined my head toward the novel on the bedside table. "McNair."

"What about him? Do we have to talk about this now?"

I brought her hand down and held it against my heart. She must've felt how hard my heart was beating. She looked to where our hands were, and I saw fear come into her eyes.

"Yes," I said. "We have to."

Well, she knew right away what was coming. It had happened to her too many times for her not to know. For one more second, I considered letting it go until another day. But really, there was no stopping now.

"I can't do what the professor hired me to do," I said. "I took the case under false pretenses. It was the damnedest coincidence, an incredible coincidence, him coming in, him asking me to follow his daughter. I never should've taken the case-because I already knew her."

"You already…?"

"I was already in love with her."

Her gaze, which had clung for all these moments to our hands, our hands pressed to my heart, now flickered back to me, my face, my eyes.

"Emma McNair," I said. "I love her, Sissy."

She crumbled. Just like that. It was horrible. I wished she would've handled it any other way. I wished she would've hit me. I wished she would've given me the hell I deserved. But it was like watching one of those buildings you see get demolished with dynamite on the TV news sometimes. She just collapsed inward, just slipped to her knees by the side of the bed, dropped her head into her folded arms, and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Every now and then, she would look up and plead with me. She would clutch at my arm, beg me to stay with her. Again and again, she asked me: What was wrong with her? Why didn't I love her? Why couldn't I just please love her, just please try?

Who knows what mealy-mouthed garbage I answered her with. Mostly, I lay there and watched her, watched the shuddering top of her head, guilt-ridden and appalled. If I could've magically melted through the mattress and reappeared at a nearby saloon with a whiskey in my hand, believe me, I would've. It was unbearable. It went on and on and on.

After maybe about twenty minutes-twenty minutes that felt like an hour and a half-the phone began to ring. The phone was right near us on the bedside table, right by McNair's book. It was white and, yes, fluffy: it had this strip of fluffy stuff glued to the top of the handset. Sissy usually turned the ringer off when we made love, but she hadn't gotten around to it yet tonight. It rang very loudly. It startled me.

Sissy, though-she didn't even seem to hear it. She didn't lift her face from her arms or try to choke back her sobs or anything. She cried and cried, clutching and kneading the soaked bedspread beneath her. The phone kept ringing and ringing.

Finally, I had to grab the damn thing myself.

"Hello?"

I couldn't hear the woman on the other end of the line at first-Sissy was weeping too loudly. "I'm sorry?" I said.

I stroked Sissy's hair, hoping it would quiet her, but she only seized my hand in both her hands and held it against her wet cheek. I had to pull free so I could press the heel of my palm to my ear, so I could hear.

The woman on the other end of the line spoke for less than a minute. She spoke in a professional tone of regret. When I hung up, my hand was shaking.

I guess my reaction was visible on my face-I guess she could hear it in my voice, because when I spoke Sissy's name, she looked up at once-and as soon as she saw me, her sobs began to slow at last.

Wiping her nose with her knuckle, she managed to force some words out. "What? What's the matter? What's happened?"

"That was a hospital in Phoenix," I told her. "Yours was the only number they had."

Sissy stared at me, dazed and exhausted.

"It's Bishop," I said. "He's been shot."

"Oh my god!"

"They think he's dying, Sissy."