The Lasko Tangent

Twelve

I walked slowly through the hallway to my door, dragging my suitcase. I put the key in, turned it, and pushed. I started to step inside. Then I froze in the doorway. A light was on, casting dim shadows on the wall. Someone was waiting.

Mary stood by the bookshelf, very still. “I heard about Alexander Lehman,” she said simply. “I’m sorry.”

Somehow I was angry. “So is Lehman’s wife. How did you get in?” My voice belonged to someone else. It was dry and scratchy. I realized how scared I had been.

“The manager gave me a key.”

We both waited for the other to speak. She looked at me directly, not stirring. I wanted her to move.

She stepped away from the books, and snapped the spell.

“I shouldn’t have come.”

“It’s OK.” I paused. “Would you like a drink?”

“Are you?” I nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Scotch.”

I pulled a bottle of Scotch from under the bookshelf and went to the kitchen, suddenly glad to be doing something mundane.

“How did you hear about Lehman?” I asked over my shoulder.

“McGuire. He said it was pretty gruesome.”

“Gruesome” seemed arch, like “untidy.” “That’s a way of putting it. ‘Sickening’ is another.” I wanted to shake her; the man was dead.

I splashed ice in the drinks, suddenly alienated by the illusion of routine: “‘And how was your trip, darling?’ ‘Oh fine, dear, but poor Alec got squashed by a car.’ ‘Too bad, I liked Alec. But fine otherwise?’” Something about the scene was out of sync, like roses at an execution. I half-shook my head, as if trying to throw off a tangible strangeness.

I left the kitchen and returned to reality. She was sitting on the living room couch. Her shoulders were turned in and knees together, as if hunched against the cold. I handed her the drink. She clasped it against her lap with both hands and stared into it. I sat down.

“What did you do?” She looked up from her drink.

“I threw up.”

“Do you care to talk about it?”

“No.” She looked hurt. I tried to explain. “Look, yesterday I was sitting with Lehman. He was scared and sick of himself. But he was alive, trying to get something back. When it happened, I was sipping on a martini, stroking my self-esteem. Then there was Lehman, flying through the air. When I got to him, he looked like something people feed to their dogs.” Her fingers squeezed the glass. I rummaged for the words. “It’s not just the finality. It’s that it’s so arbitrary.” It was a meaningless word. I gave up.

“You think he was murdered?”

“I think he was murdered.”

“By whom?”

“Lasko.” And someone else.

“Did you find out anything about Lasko?”

“No. Lehman was killed before he told me anything.” My attache case sat against the couch, a mute reproach.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

In the light her face was softer. She grazed my knee with her hand, then rested it there. I looked at the hand, then her.

“You look tired,” she said. It was a fill-in, as though words would hide her hand.

I pushed Lehman aside. “Did you mean what am I going to do about Lehman, or about you, here?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. Her eyes were wide and watchful. I saw Lehman swimming through them in slow motion. I wanted him to leave. Lightly, I pulled her to me and kissed her once, gently. When she was undressed, I held her for a long time. Then we began to make love.

Afterwards we slept. My sleep was jagged, with strobe light dreams. They were fragments of madness, unbounded by time or place. I kept introducing Mary to Alexander Lehman. My childhood friends came, and we all put on masks and played hide-and-seek. Then Lehman lay in a funny heap. I woke up sweating, to a sudden, angry noise I couldn’t place.

I started and bolted upright, fully awake now and stiff with alarm. My head cleared. The telephone. I hit the lamp switch and squinted at my watch. Four o’clock. It rang again. I answered it.

“Do you know what the hell time it is?” I snapped at the receiver.

No answer. I tried again, calmer. “Who is this?”

Silence. I thought about hanging up. But instinct kept me on.

The voice was very quiet. “You like getting laid, Mr. Paget?”

It didn’t sound like an academic question. My fingers tightened around the telephone.

“She looks like she’d be good. I hope you can do it again.” It was a tone totally without emphasis, as if I had dialed a recorded message. Somehow that made it worse.

I finally tried my voice. “I suppose there’s a point to this.” I already knew half the point; someone was watching my apartment.

“Leave the Lehman family alone, Paget. Otherwise you might spoil your looks.” The voice paused. “Maybe you’d like to look like Lehman. Maybe you’d like to be Lehman.”

I waited for more. There wasn’t any. I had the strange sense of a hand slowly, carefully placing down a receiver. The phone clicked dead. I was still holding it to my ear when the dial tone began.

Mary was stirring drowsily on her side, black hair half-falling across her face. She flicked it away with her fingers, eyes still closed. “What was that?” she murmured.

“Wrong number.”

She reached absently for my shoulder, then fell back to sleep. I looked at her a moment, then flipped the switch.

There were no more callers. I lay back on the bed and wondered how long I would be sleeping with Lehman’s corpse.

In the morning I found her in the kitchen, scrambling eggs. She was wearing a borrowed white dress shirt which turned suddenly into long legs. I watched her, then took my thoughts to a window.

Mary leaned out the kitchen nook. “Is this what they call post-coital tristesse?”

“Hardly that.”

She looked faintly pleased, an almost imperceptible smile. “You know, you’re not much like Frank.” She turned back to her eggs. “In bed or out.”

“Is that good?”

She smiled quickly back over her shoulder. “Very.”

Our breakfast was quiet. We sat at the round white table under the last living room window. Squares of sunlight hit the table and warmed her face. I tried concentrating on that. She looked fresh and good to touch, black hair falling around the collar of the borrowed white shirt. We talked about small things. It had changed between us. But we pretended for a while that the change hadn’t happened. It didn’t quite work. It never does.

We talked softly. She learned where I was from and what I had done in college. I was content with that. But Mary leaned on the table, shirtsleeves carefully rolled back from the slim wrists, looking for more in me. I didn’t have more to give, right then. I was tired, and the scene raised faint ironic echoes of other mornings in another place. I kept hearing the voice on the telephone. And Alexander Lehman was dead.

The last thought crept over me like paralysis. She asked me what it was. I looked at the sun squares on the table. “A lot of things. That Lehman is dead. That I’m alive. And that because of these things, the sunlight looks brighter, as if I hadn’t really looked at it in a while.”

Her eyes consumed me in a deep-black gaze. “You can’t bring Lehman back to life.”

“Ashes to ashes and all that?” I asked.

“Please don’t do that with me, Chris. You know what I meant.”

I wasn’t at all sure. But I was glad to let it go. I analyzed the sun squares some more. I could feel her on the other side of the table, edgy under the cool. The silence swelled.

“Have you ever really cared for anyone?” Her voice was quiet, but the words came with the suddenness of a champagne cork bursting under pressure.

I was caught with my brains on vacation. “Yes. Once. In prep school, for a sheep. Runs in the family. I can still recall running my hands through her wool. My parents found out and transferred me to military school. When I came back at Thanksgiving, all that was left were three lamb chops and a wool sweater. I carried it for years…”

I stopped myself, unhappily. Her face had closed against me. I broke in through a silent impasse. “OK, that was tacky. I’m sorry.”

It didn’t salvage me. She was angry. “Are you always so flip?”

“I’m not flip. I just don’t go in for indecent exposure. And this morning is wrong for ‘This Is My Life.’”

She tilted stiffly back in her chair, arms folded. “Why does my asking throw you off so much?”

“You don’t give up, do you?”

“Just what is wrong with you? You play it cagey about your Boston trip. You can’t talk about anything personal, anything that gets close to you.”

“I’ll bet you were a psych major in college. Anyhow, my mother loves me.”

“It’s not contagious.”

I was about to lose her again. There were reasons that I didn’t need that. I reached for her arm. It felt rigid under my fingers. But she didn’t move it. “Mary, there are certain things that are personal to me. I live better that way. Maybe that makes me unfit company. It isn’t intended to.” I gathered my thoughts. “Some things I can’t cheapen by making them seminar subjects.”

“Is that what I’m asking?” Her voice was shaded by the night before, but crossed with self-control. The question came out intense and uninflected, at once.

I made patterns in the sun squares with my free hand, and thought some unhappy thoughts. She watched me and waited. Finally, I contrived an abridged version. “In Boston, four years ago, I lived with a girl. I wanted to keep her.” I felt somehow that it was slipping from me. Keeping her to myself had pushed away the finality, as if I still had her. “I knew too much about what I wanted and not enough about what she needed. What I should have understood, I saw as things she did to me.” My patterns in the sun had quickened. “It ended badly, in a fight where nothing we said was quite true or quite fair. I invited her to leave. She took me up on it.” Mary’s arm had turned under mine, her fingers touching me. I finished it. “If we ever get to the point where we really need to get into this, perhaps I will. But we’re not there yet.”

“What happened to her?” she asked in a subdued voice.

“The other guy was smarter, and more patient. So now she’s a psychiatrist’s wife in Boston. I never see her.”

“Is that why you came to Washington?” Her eyes had softened into curiosity.

I shrugged. “Not necessarily. I had a lot of reasons.”

Mary looked down at the table. She finally spoke. “I’m sorry, Chris. Perhaps I’ve acted badly this morning-under the circumstances.”

She sounded as if she weren’t sure. But then it was a new situation, I thought. For her and for me. And she didn’t know all of it.

Her fingers held my arm now. I stopped drawing my squares and circles. I reached and pulled her up, suddenly wanting to cheat the voice on the phone. My white shirt fell in the corner. Her hair lay on her shoulders, where the collar had touched. The sun made her skin rich olive. It looked warm.