Derailed

TWELVE

I called Lucinda at the work number she’d given me.

Hello, this is Lucinda Harris at Morgan Stanley. I’m not here at the moment, but if you leave your name and a brief message, I’ll get back to you.

So I did leave a brief message of sorts. Help. Not saying the actual word, of course, but then it’s the thought that counts.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” I said. “That . . .person from the hotel called me.” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, the same way I’d tried to keep it out of my voice when Deanna had told me that Mr. Vasquez had called. I failed both times.

Are you okay? Deanna had asked me.

It’s the codeine, I'd said. It's making me woozy. I had wanted to say, It's Mr. Vasquez, he’s making me terrified.

Eliot came into my office to offer condolences about my nose. Maybe to try to patch things up, too — after all, we were friends, weren’t we? More than co-workers, than simple boss and employee. Eliot had been my rabbi all these years — hadn’t he promoted me and talked me up and provided me with more than generous raises? I’d been mistaken to blame Eliot for my dismissal from the credit card account — that had been their doing, not his. Ellen Weischler and her gang of four. Eliot was burying the hatchet and saying let’s be friends again.

And I needed a friend right now.

How much do you love me? I used to ask Anna when she was very small.

From the earth to the moon, she'd answer me. And sometimes, To infinity.

Which might be how much I needed a friend right now. A need as infinite as it was immediate.

I felt like unburdening myself to him. I'd like to tell you something that happened to me, I’d say to him. I know it’s hard to believe — I know it’s kind of ridiculous. I met this girl. And Eliot would wink and nod and smile, because Eliot had met girls before, too — three marriages to prove it and number three on life support these days.

I met this girl, I'd say, married, and Eliot’s smile would grow only wider, if that were possible, because he’d met married girls, too. We went to a hotel together — and here Eliot would lean in even closer, all ears, because was there anything quite as delicious as listening to a buddy give up the details, other than recounting the details yourself?

We went to a hotel together, I'd continue, only when we got to the room, someone else came in there with us.

And Eliot would lose that smile. Because this story took a vicious left turn and ended with this someone who came into our room raping the woman and calling my house. Talking to my wife.

Eliot asked me if something was the matter.

“No,” I said.

“Maybe you ought to go home,” Eliot said. “You look a little pale.”

“The nose,” I said.

“Yeah — the nose doesn’t look so good.”

“No.”

“Well, go home, then.”

“Maybe I will.”

Eliot patted me on the back — friends again, after all.

So I went home.

Why did he call you at home, Charles?

To prove that he could, Deanna.

I took money out of petty cash to pay for the train ride — the scene of the crime. The crime of coveting — another man’s wife, another man’s life. One night when I was eight years old and my parents’ constant sniping had reached a full-out conflagration, I’d packed my football helmet with a change of underwear and announced I was running away from home. Down the block I went — one block, two blocks, long enough to realize that no one was going to be coming after me. Eventually I stopped amid the swirling autumn leaves and started back. Thirty-five years later, I’d run away from home again. But this time I was running back.

My cellular phone rang. For a second, I wondered if it was him — my business associate from the Fairfax Hotel. But it couldn’t be him, he didn’t have the number. But someone else did.

“Hello,” Lucinda said.

She sounded different from this morning. Emotion was back in her voice after all, only a different kind from what I was used to. Dread, I’d say. First dead, then dread, all in the space of one afternoon.

“He called my house, Lucinda,” I said.

“Welcome to the fucking club,” she said.

“What?”

“He called mine, too,” speaking in a whisper, as if she were trying to keep someone else from hearing. Was her husband somewhere in the house?

I’d been very much hoping that Mr. Vasquez hadn’t called my house. Or that a Mr. Vasquez had, but that it was simply someone who’d found my discarded wallet in a vestibule of the Fairfax Hotel and called as a Good Samaritan. Or for a reward. Ridiculous, maybe. But there was always hope, wasn’t there?

Not anymore.

“You spoke to him?”

“Yes.”

“What did he want?” I asked. That, after all, was the million-dollar question here — you have to know what a man wants before you know what to do.

“I don’t know what he wanted.”

“Well, what did he say? Did he — ”

“He asked me how he was.”

“How he was? I don’t — ”

“Did I enjoy it? He wanted to know if I enjoyed it. He wanted affirmation — isn’t that what men ask you after they . . .” But she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. I guess even false bravado has its limits.

“I’m sorry, Lucinda.”

Another apology. I had the feeling I could apologize to her every day for the rest of my life, then keep on apologizing to her into the afterlife, and it still wouldn’t be enough. And then I’d have all those other people to apologize to as well.

“I think he wanted to know . . . ,” she said.

It suddenly occurred to me that I was speaking louder than I should’ve been. Either louder or softer — because I was drawing glances from the sparsely filled train — from the woman surrounded by Bloomingdale’s shopping bags sitting across from me and the two girls with nose earrings holding hands on the other side of the aisle.

“What did he want to know?” I asked.

“Whether we’d done anything. Gone to the police. . . .”

We won’t go to the police, I'd promised him. The kind of promise most victims of violent crime probably make in the heat of terror. Only in this case, a promise Vasquez could more or less believe if he chose to. This woman don’t look like you, he’d said to Lucinda. And this man — he don’t look like you.

Vasquez might’ve jumped anybody this morning. But he’d gotten lucky. He’d found the perfect victims. Because we had to hide the fact we were victims.

“What do we do now?” Lucinda asked me now, the same question I’d asked her back in the hotel room. Because suddenly nothing wasn’t enough. Not anymore.

“I don’t know.”

“Charles . . .”

“Yes?”

“What if he . . .”

“Yes?”

“Never mind.”

“What if he what, Lucinda?” But I think I knew what she was going to ask me. I just didn’t wish to hear it said out loud — not now, not yet.

“Okay, so what do we do, Charles?”

“Maybe what we should’ve done before. Maybe we have to go to the police.”

“I’mnot telling my husband.”

She’d gotten real emotion back in her voice after all. A sudden and undeniable firmness that brooked no further discussion. “IfI can manage it, then you can." I was the one raped, she was saying to me. I was the one raped six times while you sat there and did nothing. If I can choose to be quiet about it, then you can. Then you have to.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. If he calls again, I’ll talk to him. I’ll find out what he wants.”

Deanna mothered me when I got home. So did Anna — maybe she was finally happy to see someone else in need of medical attention. She brought me a warm compress to lay against my swollen nose and gently rubbed my arm as I lay half-dead on the bed.

I was back in the bosom of my family — content, grateful, the very picture of domestic bliss.

Except each time the telephone rang, I flinched as if punched in the stomach.

A friend of Deanna’s. A mortgage broker’s cold call. My secretary wanting to know if I was all right.

But there was always the next call, wasn’t there?

And they insisted on hearing about the accident. Anna wanted to know how I could have been so spastic. Stepping out of a cab, for God’s sake. Into a hole?

I said I didn’t want to talk about it. And I wondered if repeating the same lie was the same as telling different lies. If one was worse than the other. Neither one felt particularly good, not when my daughter was offering me a warm towel and my wife her unconditional love.

I tried to watch some basketball in the den, to root for the struggling Knicks. But I found it hard to focus; my mind kept wandering. There was a player on the Indiana Pacers, for instance, who looked a little like . . . Black, but Hispanic. Lopez, his name was — a backup guard. Taller of course, but . . .

“What’s the score?” Anna asked me. She’d stopped watching basketball with me at age nine, but I supposed she was trying to be kind to her bruised and battered father.

“We’re losing.” It was a safe answer these days, even if you didn’t actually know what the score was.

Just then it turned up in the left corner of the screen. The Knicks had rallied within four.

“Eighty-six to eighty-two,” Anna recited.

“A close one,” I said. “We’ve got a shot.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Daddy — did you ever play basketball?”

“Sure.”

“On a team? ”

“No. Not on a team.”

“Then how’d you play?”

“With friends. At the park — you know.” Murray Miller, Brian Timinsky, Billy Seiden. They were my best friends growing up — but slowly, one by one, they’d faded away. Years ago, I’d seen Billy Seiden in a Pathmark supermarket, but I’d left without saying hello.

I hugged Anna. I wanted to tell her something, about love and life and how it can be fleeting if you don’t hold on — that you have to jealously guard what’s important to you — but I couldn’t think of the right words.

Because the phone rang.

Anna picked it up after the second ring.

“Foryou, ” she said.

“Who is it?”

“Some Spanish guy,” Anna said.