Peril

TONY

He was on his fourth drink and nothing was getting better. If anything, he could feel his mood darkening, growing dense, with something hateful rising out of the smoky depths, the red-eyed terror of his father.

“Hey, Tony.”

He looked up from the glass and saw that she’d swung into the booth and was now sitting firmly opposite him.

“You been nursing that one for a while,” she said.

Her name was Carmen, and she worked for some guy who kept a boat in the marina, or maybe she was his girl. Anyway, she was dressed in bright colors, as always, with huge hoop rings that sparkled in the smoky light.

“You wanna buy me a drink?” she asked.

Tony straightened himself abruptly and pressed his back against the wooden booth. “Carmen, right?”

The woman laughed. “As in Miranda. That woman with the fruit basket on her head.” She laughed again. “And some opera singer too.”

Tony blinked absently. “So, what’ll you have?”

“How about a Bloody Mary?” Carmen said.

“Done.” Tony snapped his fingers and Lucky, the waiter, came trotting over. “Bloody Mary for the lady.”

“Coming up, Tony,” Lucky said, then trotted away again.

Carmen brought a long, bright-red fingernail to the corner of her right eye. “So, you out alone tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“She lets you off the leash like that, your wife?”

Tony nodded.

The bright-red fingernail made a slow crawl down the side of Carmen’s face until it came to rest at her lower lip. “Not me. If I had a handsome guy like you, I’d hold tight.”

Tony considered the options, his eyes lingering on the face before him, the dark brown eyes and black hair and slightly olive skin. Carmen wasn’t bad looking, and she would probably get a real kick out of being with him, even if for only a night. She would tell her girlfriends about it, and in the story he would be stronger and more handsome and better in bed than he really was, because Carmen Pinaldi needed to believe that the guy she was with was strong and handsome and great in the sack, because if he were less than that, then so was she. So he should just do it, he told himself, just take her back to his house or to some motel and just do it. Sara had left him, after all. So why shouldn’t he just buy Carmen another drink, chat her up for a few minutes, then whisk her away to a shadowy bedroom and huff and puff and get it done and feel the sweet revenge of having done it?

Revenge, Tony thought. That was the problem. He would do it only for revenge, a way of getting back at Sara. And because of that it would be without pleasure, and laced with pain, and during every moment of it he would be thinking of Sara.

He took a long draw on the cigarette, then crushed it in the square glass ashtray. “I better be going,” he said.

Carmen looked surprised and offended and seemed to see her face in a mirror and not like what she saw. “Oh, okay,” she said coolly.

He didn’t want to hurt her but knew he had. “Sorry,” he said quietly.

She shrugged dryly. “You gotta go, you gotta go.”

He rose and paid the tab and walked out of the bar and into the dark, dark night. He could hear the muffled sound of the jukebox in the bar, the equally muffled sound of the people inside, little bursts of laughter that seemed aimed at him, at his situation, at how much he’d screwed things up. He turned and walked toward his car, away from the music and the talk and the laughter until he was safely beyond all these things and stood alone in the silence, beneath a canopy of rain-gray sky. Briefly, he peered upward and in his mind painted his wife’s face in the low-slung clouds, the weight of her loss growing ever more immense, crushing him beneath it, grinding him to dust-the tiniest speck, the blindly whirling atom-becoming smaller and smaller with each passing second until at last he felt smaller than the smallest thing that ever was.

He got into the car but couldn’t turn the key or press his foot down on the accelerator. And so he sat, frozen behind the wheel, remembering their first days together, the later wedding with its ecstatic night, the morning after, both of them famished, laughing over toast and orange juice, the long walk along the Bermuda shore, the azure water lapping at their feet, and then the parade of days that followed, all that happiness, her sparkling eyes, the smile, the way she raked her finger along his chest, the sound of her quiet sigh, all of it coming back to him in wave after shuddering wave so that later, when he’d finally turned the key, pressed the pedal, pulled away, he couldn’t recall the actual moment that he’d begun to cry.