The Best American Noir of the Century

2005 THOMAS H. COOK WHAT SHE OFFERED

Sounds like a dangerous woman,” my friend said. He’d not been with me in the bar the night before, not seen her leave or me follow after her.

I took a sip of vodka and glanced toward the window. Out­side, the afternoon light was no doubt as it had always been, but it didn’t look the same to me anymore. “I guess she was,” I told him.

“So what happened?” my friend asked.

This: I was in the bar. It was two in the morning. The peo­ple around me were like tapes from Mission Impossible, only without the mission, just that self-destruction warning. You could almost hear it playing in their heads, stark and unyield­ing as the Chinese proverb: If you continue down the road you’re on, you will get to where you’re headed.

Where were they headed? As I saw it, mostly toward more of the same. They would finish this drink, this night, this week… and so on. At some point, they would die like animals after a long, exhausting haul, numb with weariness as they fi­nally slumped beneath the burden. Worse still, according to me, this bar was the world, its few dully buzzing flies no more than stand-ins for the rest of us.

I had written about “us” in novel after novel. My tone was always bleak. In my books, there were no happy endings. Peo­ple were lost and helpless, even the smart ones… especially the smart ones. Everything was vain and everything was fleet­ing. The strongest emotions quickly waned. A few things mat­tered, but only because we made them matter by insisting that they should. If we needed evidence of this, we made it up. As far as I could tell, there were basically three kinds of people, the ones who deceived others, the ones who deceived themselves, and the ones who understood that the people in the first two categories were the only ones they were ever like to meet. I put myself firmly in the third category, of course, the only member of my club, the one guy who understood that to see things in full light was the greatest darkness one could know.

And so I walked the streets and haunted the bars, and was, according to me, the only man on earth who had nothing to learn.

Then suddenly, she walked through the door.

To black, she offered one concession. A string of small white pearls. Everything else, the hat, the dress, the stockings, the shoes, the little purse… everything else was black. And so, what she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman, the broad-billed hat that discreetly covers one eye, high heels tapping on rain-slicked streets, foreign currency in the small black purse. She offered the spy, the murderess, the lure of a secret past, and, of course, that little hint of erotic peril.

She knows the way men think, I said to myself as she walked to the end of the bar and took her seat. She knows the way they think… and she’s using it.

“So you thought she was what?” my friend asked.

I shrugged. “Inconsequential.”

And so I watched without interest as the melodramatic touches accumulated. She lit a cigarette and smoked it pen­sively, her eyes opening and closing languidly, with the sort of world-weariness one sees in the heroines of old black-and-white movies.

Yes, that’s it, I told myself. She is noir in the worst possible sense, thin as strips of film, and just as transparent at the edges. I looked at my watch. Time to go, I thought, time to go to my apartment and stretch out on the bed and wallow in my dark superiority, congratulate myself that once again I had not been fooled by the things that fool other men.

But it was only two in the morning, early for me, so I lin­gered in the bar, and wondered, though only vaguely, with no more than passing interest, if she had anything else to offer be­yond this little show of being “dangerous.”

“Then what?” my friend asked.

Then she reached in her purse, drew out a small black pad, flipped it open, wrote something, and passed it down the bar to me.

The paper was folded, of course. I unfolded it and read what she’d written: I know what you know about life.

It was exactly the kind of nonsense I’d expected, so I briskly scrawled a reply on the back of the paper and sent it down the bar to her.

She opened it and read what I’d written: No, you don’t. And you never will. Then, without so much as looking up, she wrote a lightning-fast response and sent it hurtling back up the bar, quickly gathering her things and heading for the door as it went from hand to hand, so that she’d already left the place by the time it reached me.

I opened the note and read her reply: C+.

My anger spiked. C+? How dare she! I whirled around on the stool and rushed out of the bar, where I found her leaning casually against the little wrought-iron fence that surrounded it.

I waved the note in front of her. “What’s this supposed to mean?” I demanded.

She smiled and offered me a cigarette. “I’ve read your books. They’re really dreadful.”

I don’t smoke, but I took the cigarette anyway. “So, you’re a critic?”

She gave no notice to what I’d just said. “The writing is beautiful,” she said as she lit my cigarette with a red plastic lighter. “But the idea is really bad.”

“Which idea is that?”

“You only have one,” she said with total confidence. “That everything ends badly, no matter what we do.” Her face tight­ened. “So, here’s the deal. When I wrote, I know what you know about life, that wasn’t exactly true. I know more.”

I took a long draw on the cigarette. “So,” I asked lightly. “Is this a date?”

She shook her head, and suddenly her eyes grew dark and somber. “No,” she said, “this is a love affair.”

I started to speak, but she lifted her hand and stopped me.

“I could do it with you, you know,” she whispered, her voice now very grave. “Because you know almost as much as I do, and I want to do it with someone who knows that much.”

From the look in her eyes I knew exactly what she wanted to “do” with me. “We’d need a gun,” I told her with a dismiss­ing grin.

She shook her head. “I’d never use a gun. It would have to be pills.” She let her cigarette drop from her fingers. “And we’d need to be in bed together,” she added matter-of-factly. “Naked and in each other’s arms.”

“Why is that?”

Her smile was soft as light. “To show the world that you were wrong.” The smile widened, almost playfully. “That something can end well.”

“Suicide?” I asked. “You call that ending well?”

She laughed and tossed her hair slightly. “It’s the only way to end well,” she said.

And I thought, She’s nuts, but for the first time in years, I wanted to hear more.

“A suicide pact,” my friend whispered.

“That’s what she offered, yes,” I told him. “But not right away. She said that there was something I needed to do first.”

“What?”

“Fall in love with her,” I answered quietly.

“And she knew you would?” my friend asked. “Fall in love with her, I mean?”

“Yes, she did,” I told him.

But she also knew that the usual process was fraught with trial, a road scattered with pits and snares. So she’d decided to forgo courtship, the tedious business of exchanging mounds of trivial biographical information. Physical intimacy would come first, she said. It was the gate through which we would enter each other.

“So, we should go to my place now,” she concluded, after offering her brief explanation of all this. “We need to fuck.”

“Fuck?” I laughed. “You’re not exactly the romantic type, are you?”

“You can undress me if you want to,” she said. “Or, if not, I’ll do it myself.”

“Maybe you should do it,” I said jokingly. “That way I won’t dislocate your shoulder.”

She laughed. “I get suspicious if a man does it really well. It makes me think that he’s a bit too familiar with all those fe­male clasps and snaps and zippers. It makes me wonder if per­haps he’s… worn it all himself.”

“Jesus,” I moaned. “You actually think about things like that?”

Her gaze and tone became deadly serious. “I can’t handle every need,” she said.

There was a question in her eyes, and I knew what the question was. She wanted to know if I had any secret cravings or odd sexual quirks, any “needs” she could not “handle.”

“I’m strictly double-vanilla,” I assured her. “No odd fla­vors.”

She appeared slightly relieved. “My name is Veronica,” she said.

“I was afraid you weren’t going to tell me,” I said. “That it was going to be one of those things where I never know who you are and vice versa. You know, ships that pass in the night.”

“How banal that would be,” she said.

“Yes, it would.”

“Besides,” she added. “I already knew who you were.”

“Yes, of course.”

“My apartment is just down the block,” she said, then of­fered to take me there.

As it turned out, her place was a bit farther than just down the block, but it didn’t matter. It was after two in the morning and the streets were pretty much deserted. Even in New York, cer­tain streets, especially certain Greenwich Village streets, are never all that busy, and once people have gone to and from work, they become little more than country lanes. That night the trees that lined Jane Street swayed gently in the cool au­tumn air, and I let myself accept what I thought she’d offered, which, for all the “dangerous” talk, would probably be no more than a brief erotic episode, maybe breakfast in the morning, a little light conversation over coffee and scones. Then she would go her way and I would go mine because one of us would want it that way and the other wouldn’t care enough to argue the point.

“The vodka’s in the freezer,” she said as she opened the door to her apartment, stepped inside and switched on the light.

I walked into the kitchen while Veronica headed down a nearby corridor. The refrigerator was at the far end of the room, its freezer door festooned with pictures of Veronica and a short, bald little man who looked to be in his late forties.

“That’s Douglas,” Veronica called from somewhere down the hall. “My husband.”

I felt a pinch of apprehension.

“He’s away,” she added.

The apprehension fled.

“I should hope so,” I said as I opened the freezer door.

Veronica’s husband faced me again when I closed it, the ice-encrusted vodka bottle now securely in my right hand. Now I noticed that Douglas was somewhat portly, deep lines around his eyes, graying at the temples. Okay, I thought, maybe midfifties. And yet, for all that, he had a boyish face. In the pictures, Veronica towered over him, his bald head barely reaching her broad shoulders. She was in every photograph, his arm always wrapped affectionately around her waist. And in every photograph Douglas was smiling with such unencumbered joy that I knew that all his happiness came from her, from being with her, being her husband, that when he was with her he felt tall and dark and handsome, witty and smart and perhaps even a bit elegant. That was what she offered him, I supposed, the illusion that he deserved her.

“He was a bartender when I met him,” she said as she swept into the kitchen. “Now he sells software.” She lifted an impos­sibly long and graceful right arm to the cabinet at her side, opened its plain wooden doors and retrieved two decidedly or­dinary glasses, which she placed squarely on the plain Formica counter before turning to face me. “From the beginning, I was always completely comfortable with Douglas,” she said.

She could not have said it more clearly. Douglas was the man she had chosen to marry because he possessed whatever characteristics she required to feel utterly at home when she was at home, utterly herself when she was with him. If there had been some great love in her life, she had chosen Douglas over him because with Douglas she could live without change or alteration, without applying makeup to her soul. Because of that, I suddenly found myself vaguely envious of this squat lit­tle man, of the peace he gave her, the way she could no doubt rest in the crook of his arm, breathing slowly, falling asleep.

“He seems… nice,” I said.

Veronica gave no indication that she’d heard me. “You take it straight,” she said, referring to the way I took my drink, which was clearly something she’d noticed in the bar.

I nodded.

“Me, too.”

She poured our drinks and directed me into the living room. The curtains were drawn tightly together, and looked a bit dusty. The furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than for style. There were a few potted plants, most of them brown at the edges. You could almost hear them begging for water. No dogs. No cats. No goldfish or hamsters or snakes or white mice. When Douglas was away, it appeared, Veronica lived alone.

Except for books, but they were everywhere. They filled shelf after towering shelf, or lay stacked to the point of top­pling along the room’s four walls. The authors ran the gamut, from the oldest classics to the most recent best sellers. Stendahl and Dostoyevsky rested shoulder to shoulder with Anne Rice and Michael Crichton. A few of my own stark titles were lined up between Robert Stone and Patrick O’Brian. There was no history or social science in her collection, and no poetry. It was all fiction, as Veronica herself seemed to be, a character she’d made up and was determined to play to the end. What she of­fered, I believed at that moment, was a well-rounded perfor­mance of a New York eccentric.

She touched her glass to mine, her eyes very still. “To what we’re going to do,” she said.

“Are we still talking about committing suicide together?” I scoffed as I lowered my glass without drinking. “What is this, Veronica? Some kind of Sweet November rewrite?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“You know, that stupid movie where the dying girl takes this guy and lives with him for a month and-”

“I would never live with you,” Veronica interrupted.

“That’s not my point.”

“And I’m not dying,” Veronica added. She took a quick sip of vodka, placed her glass onto the small table beside the sofa, then rose, as if suddenly called by an invisible voice, and of­fered her hand to me. “Time for bed,” she said.

“Just like that?” my friend asked.

“Just like that.”

He looked at me warily. “This is a fantasy, right?” he asked. “This is something you made up.”

“What happened next no one could make up.”

“And what was that?”

She led me to the bedroom. We undressed silently. She crawled beneath the single sheet and patted the mattress. “This side is yours.”

“Until Douglas gets back,” I said as I drew in beside her.

“Douglas isn’t coming back,” she said, then leaned over and kissed me very softly.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s dead,” she answered lightly. “He’s been dead for three years.”

And thus I learned of her husband’s slow decline, the can­cer that began in his intestines and migrated to his liver and pancreas. It had taken six months, and each day Veronica had attended him. She would look in on him on her way to work every morning, then return to him at night, stay at his bedside until she was sure he would not awaken, then, at last, return here, to this very bed, to sleep for an hour or two, three at the most, before beginning the routine again.

“Six months,” I said. “That’s a long time.”

“A dying person is a lot of work,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” I told her. “I was with my father while he died. I was exhausted by the time he finally went.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that,” she said. “The physical part. The lack of sleep. That wasn’t the hard part when it came to Douglas.”

“What was?”

“Making him believe I loved him.”

“You didn’t?”

“No,” she said, then kissed me again, a kiss that lingered a bit longer than the first, and gave me time to remember that just a few minutes before she’d told me that Douglas was cur­rently selling software.

“Software,” I said, drawing my lips from hers. “You said he sold software now.”

She nodded. “Yes, he does.”

“To other dead people?” I lifted myself up and propped my head in my hand. “I can’t wait for an explanation.”

“There is no explanation,” she said. “Douglas always wanted to sell software. So, instead of saying that he’s in the ground or in heaven, I just say he’s selling software.”

“So you give death a cute name,” I said. “And that way you don’t have to face it.”

“I say he’s selling software because I don’t want the conver­sation that would follow if I told you he was dead,” Veronica said sharply. “I hate consolation.”

“Then why did you tell me at all?”

“Because you need to know that I’m like you,” she an­swered. “Alone. That no one will mourn.”

“So we’re back to suicide again,” I said. “Do you always cir­cle back to death?”

She smiled. “Do you know what La Rouchefoucauld said about death?”

“It’s not on the tip of my tongue, no.”

“He said that it was like the sun. You couldn’t look at it for very long without going blind.” She shrugged. “But I think that if you look at it all the time, measure it against living, then you can choose.”

I drew her into my arms. “You’re a bit quirky, Veronica,” I said playfully.

She shook her head, her voice quite self-assured. “No,” she insisted. “I’m the sanest person you’ve ever met.”

“And she was,” I told my friend.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she offered more than anyone I’d ever known.”

“What did she offer?”

That night she offered the cool, sweet luxury of her flesh, a kiss that so brimmed with feeling I thought her lips would give off sparks.

We made love for a time then, suddenly, she stopped and pulled away. “Time to chat,” she said, then walked to the kitchen and returned with another two glasses of vodka.

“Time to chat?” I asked, still disconcerted with how abruptly she’d drawn away from me.

“I don’t have all night,” she said as she offered me the glass.

I took the drink from her hand. “So we’re not going to toast the dawn together?”

She sat on the bed, cross-legged and naked, her body sleek and smooth in the blue light. “You’re glib,” she said as she clinked her glass to mine. “So am I.” She leaned forward slightly, her eyes glowing in the dark. “Here’s the deal,” she added. “If you’re glib, you finally get to the end of what you can say. There are no words left for anything important. Just sleek words. Clever. Glib. That’s when you know you’ve gone as far as you can go, that you have nothing left to offer but smooth talk.”

“That’s rather harsh, don’t you think?” I took a sip of vodka. “And besides, what’s the alternative to talking?”

“Silence,” Veronica answered.

I laughed. “Veronica, you are hardly silent.”

“Most of the time, I am,” she said.

“And what does this silence conceal?”

“Anger,” she answered without the slightest hesitation. “Fury.”

Her face grew taut, and I thought the rage I suddenly glimpsed within her would set her hair ablaze.

“Of course you can get to silence in other ways,” she said. She took a quick, brutal drink from her glass. “Douglas got there, but not by being glib.”

“How then?”

“By suffering.”

I looked for her lip to tremble, but it didn’t. I looked for moisture in her eyes, but they were dry and still.

“By being terrified,” she added. She glanced toward the window, let her gaze linger there for a moment, then returned to me. “The last week he didn’t say a word,” she told me. “That’s when I knew it was time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time for Douglas to get a new job.”

I felt my heart stop dead. “In… software?” I asked.

She lit a candle, placed it on the narrow shelf above us, then yanked open the top drawer of the small table that sat beside her bed, retrieved a plastic pill case and shook it so that I could hear the pills rattling dryly inside it.

“I’d planned to give him these,” she said, “but there wasn’t time.”

“What do you mean, there wasn’t time?”

“I saw it in his face,” she answered. “He was living like someone already in the ground. Someone buried and waiting for the air to give out. That kind of suffering, terror. I knew that one additional minute would be too long.”

She placed the pills on the table, then grabbed the pillow upon which her head had rested, fluffed it gently, pressed it down upon my face, then lifted it again in a way that made me feel strangely returned to life. “It was all I had left to offer him,” she said quietly, then took a long, slow pull on the vodka. “We have so little to offer.”

And I thought with sudden, devastating clarity, Her dark­ness is real; mine is just a pose.

“What did you do?” my friend asked.

“I touched her face.”

“And what did she do?”

She pulled my hand away almost violently. “This isn’t about me,” she said.

“Right now, everything is about you,” I told her.

She grimaced. “Bullshit.”

“I mean it.”

“Which only makes it worse,” she said sourly. Her eyes rolled upward, then came down again, dark and steely, like the twin barrels of a shotgun. “This is about you,” she said crisply. “And I won’t be cheated out of it.”

I shrugged. “All life is a cheat, Veronica.”

Her eyes tensed. “That isn’t true and you know it,” she said, her voice almost a hiss. “And because of that you’re a liar, and all your books are lies.” Her voice was so firm, so hard and un­relenting, I felt it like a wind. “Here’s the deal,” she said. “If you really felt the way you write, you’d kill yourself. If all that feel­ing was really in you, down deep in you, you wouldn’t be able to live a single day.” She dared me to contradict her, and when I didn’t, she said, “You see everything but yourself. And here’s what you don’t see about yourself, Jack. You don’t see that you’re happy.”

“Happy?” I asked.

“You are happy,” Veronica insisted. “You won’t admit it, but you are. And you should be.”

Then she offered the elements of my happiness, the sheer good fortune I had enjoyed, health, adequate money, work I loved, little dollops of achievement.

“Compared to you, Douglas had nothing,” she said.

“He had you,” I said cautiously.

Her face soured again. “If you make it about me,” she warned, “you’ll have to leave.”

She was serious, and I knew it. So I said, “What do you want from me, Veronica?”

Without hesitation she said, “I want you to stay.”

“Stay?”

“While I take the pills.”

I remembered the line she’d said just outside the bar only a few hours before, I could do it with you, you know.

I had taken this to mean that we would do it together, but now I knew that she had never included me. There was no pact. There was only Veronica.

“Will you do it?” she asked somberly.

“When?” I asked quietly.

She took the pills and poured them into her hand. “Now,” she said.

“No,” I blurted, and started to rise.

She pressed me down hard, her gaze relentlessly deter­mined, so that I knew she would do what she intended, that there was no way to stop her.

“I want out of this noise,” she said, pressing her one empty hand to her right ear. “Everything is so loud.”

In the fierceness of those words I glimpsed the full measure of her torment, all she no longer wished to hear, the clanging daily vanities and thudding repetitions, the catcalls of the inferior, the trumpeting mediocrities, all of which lifted to a soul-searing roar the unbearable clatter of the wheel. She wanted an end to all of that, a silence she would not be denied.

“Will you stay?” she asked quietly.

I knew that any argument would strike her as just more noise she could not bear. It would clang like cymbals, only add lo the mindless cacophony she was so desperate to escape.

And so I said, “All right.”

With no further word, she swallowed the pills two at a time, washing them down with quick sips of vodka.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Veronica,” I told her when she took the last of them and put down the glass.

She curled under my arm. “Say what I said to Douglas,” she told me. “In the end it’s all anyone can offer.”

“What did you say to him?” I asked softly.

“I’m here.”

I drew my arm tightly around her. “I’m here,” I said.

She snuggled in more closely. “Yes.”

“And so you stayed?” my friend asked.

I nodded.

“And she… ?”

“In about an hour,” I told him. “Then I dressed and walked the streets until I finally came here.”

“So right now she’s…”

“Gone,” I said quickly, and suddenly imagined her sitting in the park across from the bar, still and silent.

“You couldn’t stop her?”

“With what?” I asked. “I had nothing to offer.” I glanced out the front window of the bar. “And besides,” I added, “for a truly dangerous woman, a man is never the answer. That’s what makes her dangerous. At least, to us.”

My friend looked at me oddly. “So what are you going to do now?” he asked.

At the far end of the park a young couple was screaming at each other, the woman’s fist in the air, the man shaking his head in violent confusion. I could imagine Veronica turning from them, walking silently away.

“I’m going to keep quiet,” I answered. “For a very long time.”

Then I got to my feet and walked out into the whirling city. The usual dissonance engulfed me, all the chaos and disarray, but I felt no need to add my own inchoate discord to the rest.

It was a strangely sweet feeling, I realized as I turned and headed home, embracing silence.

From deep within her enveloping calm, Veronica offered me her final words.

I know.