Peril

MORTIMER

Mortimer stared disconsolately at the television. The Yankees were losing, but he didn’t care. He had no money on the game, but that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He had bigger fish to fry than a Yankee win, even if he stood to gain a few bucks in the deal. He had bigger fish to fry. A dreadful sense that Stark had caught on to something, the dark edges of the deal.

“You gonna be home for dinner tonight, Morty?”

He glanced across the room to where Dottie stood, draped in a sleeveless floral housedress, leaning on one flabby arm, her pendulous breasts, as Mortimer saw them, all but touching the floor.

“I don’t know for sure,” he said.

Mortimer returned his attention to the game and tried to put everything else out of his mind, all the thoughts that were rolling around inside his head, banging against his skull like stones. He didn’t want to think about Stark, or what Stark might be thinking, or how what Stark was thinking could affect him. He wanted to think about a horse that won, a bet that netted him a bundle. But his horses had always lost, and he’d netted nothing, and this dreary conclusion turned his thoughts to death.

He was going to die very soon, and he knew that this was a big deal, and yet he seemed unable to focus on it. He was going to die soon and he didn’t have a nickel of life insurance or a nickel in savings, and in fact was in hock to the Prince of Darkness for fifteen grand, and even this seemed little more than a small bump in the road. The problem was that he kept thinking about his life rather than his death. How small and drab a thing it had been. How little he’d gotten out of it. Within a few months it would be over, and yet what exactly was this life that would soon end? What had it amounted to? Nothing, Mortimer concluded, absolutely nothing. But that conclusion did not bring his speculation to an end. Instead, the problem only got larger. If he was nothing, then why was he nothing? That was the one question he wanted answered. How had he come to this bleak place, and was there any way he could escape it, however briefly, before the final curtain fell?

“You can’t give me no idea?” Dottie demanded.

“No.”

Dottie jerked her hand from the doorjamb, clearly irritated. “How about you give me some idea, Morty,” she said. “So I know to make dinner or not make dinner, you know?”

“Don’t make dinner,” Mortimer told her. He knew she was glaring at him, but he didn’t care. Bigger fish to fry, he thought, than a pissed-off wife.

He rose, walked to the door, and yanked his jacket from the wall rack beside it. By then Dottie had swept up behind him in a flutter of garish colors, menacing as a huge, angry parrot.

“Where you going?” she demanded.

“Out.” A sudden pain streaked across his stomach. “Shit.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Dottie said, though with neither sympathy nor concern, his pain just another source of irritation.

He was amazed at how unnerved it made him, this single stinging cramp. “Fucking gas,” Mortimer answered. He placed his hand on his stomach and squeezed. “I gotta go.” He started to open the door, but Dottie closed it.

“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, Morty?” she asked.

“Tell you what?”

“If something was wrong.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wrong, I mean, with us?”

Wrong with us? Mortimer couldn’t imagine such a question. Nothing had ever been right with them. Their marriage had been a long slide down a muddy chute, love and passion only things they saw in movies, people rushing toward each other through woods or on the beach. For as long as he could remember, Dottie had been dull and overweight, like himself, and when he thought of them together, he thought of comic figures, people in commercials. Human jokes.

“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” Dottie insisted. “If something was wrong?”

She looked at him silently, waiting for his answer, and he saw that he’d lied to her so often, she expected only lies, and even thought of them as kindnesses.

“There’s nothing wrong, Dottie,” he growled as he stepped out into the corridor.

“Okay,” Dottie said with a shrug, then softly closed the door.

And so, seconds later, he was standing on Eighty-sixth Street, the usual crowds rolling up and down the busy thoroughfare, but utterly alone in their midst. He had always been alone, he knew. Movies talked about guys who stood alone, and it was supposed to be a good thing, but when you got hit by cancer, or got some other really awful news, when death or something almost as bad stared you in the face, you yearned for someone to share the dark tidings, maybe feel a little bad for you. They didn’t need to lend you money or overdo the pity. You just needed to know that it was bad news for them too.

He thought of the one person in the world who’d probably feel that way. It wasn’t Dottie. And it wasn’t Stark It was Abe who’d looked sad when he’d told him about the cancer, looked sad and poured him a round on the house and then said he could drink for free until he died.

What a guy, Mortimer thought to himself with a surge of true devotion to Abe Morgenstern, my best friend.