The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

32

WHEN I CAME OUT OF THE SHOWER, THE DIRTY JEANS I’D left on the floor had been replaced by a clean pair, laid out on the bed. If I hadn’t already known they were Rachel’s, I would have guessed when I lifted them up and saw they were the style that came only to mid-calf. I was a few inches taller than she, so when I put them on, I was relieved to see they made it that far. The long-sleeved cotton shirt she’d left buttoned down the front. The fit was a little tight for me. Baggy worked better for someone trying to conceal a waist holster and a weapon.

Rachel came in just as I was buttoning up and laid a blow-dryer on the bed. “I thought you might want to use mine. Harvey doesn’t have any around the house. I also put your clothes in the wash.”

“Thank you.” She was being nice, which meant there had to be something in it for her. “Did you talk to Harvey before you came up here?”

“Why?”

“He seems…”

“Sad?”

“Deeply sad,” I said. “Sadder than I’ve ever seen him.”

“That’s because he thinks he’s about to die.”

“What are you talking about?”

She shrugged casually. “I think that’s what he means. He keeps saying he feels a darkness.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. In the past few days.”

“Here I thought he was sad because you dumped him once and he’s about to lose you again.” When I sat up to face the mirror, she was there, too, standing with her arms crossed, her face pulled into a sulk, and one foot thrust forward in case she felt the urge to start tapping.

“I resent the implications.”

“This from a woman who ran around on a man with a critical illness. Pardon me for being skeptical.”

“Is that what you think? You would think that.”

“Tell me you weren’t running around on him before you dumped him.”

“I wasn’t.”

I stared at her in the mirror. She blinked first, coming out of her fighting stance to drop down onto the bed. The pills on the worn chenille bedspread suddenly held great fascination for her. I went back to my grooming task. Getting the knots out of my hair was easier than getting the truth out of her, and I had some serious knots.

“I wasn’t out looking, is what I’m saying, but by the time I met Gary, I already knew it wasn’t going to happen between Harvey and me, so what was I supposed to do? Pass on Gary and end up with neither one? Nuh-uh.”

“How do people like you get to be people like you?”

“You mean someone who takes care of herself?”

“That would be one way to look at it, I suppose.” I leaned forward to check out my face more closely. My skin was stressed and dry. The circles under my eyes had grown a darker shade of dark, and the hints of wrinkles around my mouth were turning to fact. A long weekend at a spa would have helped a lot.

“I worked my ass off to get where I am. How many people in my family do you think graduated from college? None. Not until me. No one in my family had ever even lived outside of Brooklyn. I went to college. I graduated. I earned every penny of my own tuition. I didn’t get any help from anyone.”

“Earned it how?”

“I did the books for my pop’s construction company. I managed the office. I did a little estimating. Whatever he had time to teach me I learned, because that was the real world, and he taught me more than any professor ever did. Do you know how you work construction in New York and New Jersey?”

She was into it now, leaning forward on the bed, schooling me in the catechism of Rachel Ruffielo.

“You make deals. You talk to this guy. You talk to that guy. Another guy comes to see you. Down there, union is just another word for mob, and everyone has their hand out-the local city councilman, the cops, the feds, the zoning commissioner, the building inspectors. If you don’t play, someone comes and burns down your building.” Her voice had grown strong and robust and the New York accent more overt. She was demonstrating the parts she could, holding out her hand for a bribe. “That’s what I learned from my pop. You’re paying one way or the other; it’s a cost of doing business, so just pick your poison and close your eyes.”

I swung around on my bench to face her directly. My hair was just going to have to dry itself. “Everyone makes compromises in life. That’s survival. It doesn’t explain why you have to treat someone who loved you as much as Harvey did-and inexplicably still does-the way you did.”

She looked at me with genuine surprise. “What did I do to him that was so bad?”

“You dumped him. You got tired of him and walked out and married a younger man.”

“Are you so sure that was such a bad thing?”

“I think he would tell you it was a watershed moment in his life, and not in a good way.”

She blinked a few times and looked stricken, but she got over it. She stood and walked over to a framed photo on the wall, a black-and-white of Harvey’s grandfather from a long time ago. Her arms were crossed again, but more in contemplation than defense.

“The first time I ever met Harvey, he looked at me with those big cow eyes. I didn’t want anything to do with him. But then there was this one time when my whole department went out to a little club down the street from the office where we liked to go sometimes. Here comes Harvey, out of the blue, dressed in a gray suit and a low-key tie, looking like some kind of undertaker at a wedding.”

Her head tipped ever so slightly to go with the tinge of wistfulness that had crept into her voice. If I could have seen her face, I probably would have seen a smile. But when she turned to slouch against the wall, all she showed me was her poker face.

“He asked me to dance. I couldn’t believe it. This schleppy guy with toner on his fingers and a suit that didn’t fit had the balls to come up and ask me to dance. I was hot, too, back then.” She put her shoulders back and thrust out her chest. “I mean, what’s he doing there in the first place? It’s not like anyone asked him to come. I sure as hell didn’t ask him. So, I decided I was going to teach him a lesson. Take him out on the dance floor and show him up so he would never come near me again.”

She was talking to me now as if we were old pals sharing the warm and funny stories from our past. I hated her for it. I understood how hard it must have been for Harvey to follow her to that bar. I hated her for wanting to punish and humiliate him for it. I hated her more for expecting me to laugh about it with her.

“Anyway, we went out on that dance floor, and he just…he blew me away. Have you ever seen Harvey dance?”

I had barely ever seen him walk.

“Harvey has moves. When he was coming up, they had sock hops and school dances and stuff like that, and he really took to it. So, here we were out on the floor doing twirls and dips, and I was having fun with this mope if I just kept my eyes shut. And then he asked me out on a date.”

That might have been even harder to fathom than Harvey dancing.

“He caught me in a moment of weakness. I said, ‘Yeah, what the hell,’ figuring we’d go dancing again and I wouldn’t have to talk to him. Do you know what he did?”

In spite of myself, I leaned forward, waiting for the next verse.

“He showed up at my house with this big bouquet of flowers. He was wearing one of his dopey suits, but he walked me to his car and opened the door for me. He bought me dinner and poured my wine. Then he took me to this little jazz club I had mentioned I always wanted to go to. They had a trio playing there. We danced for hours. Then he took me home and gave me a sweet little peck on the cheek.”

“It sounds nice.”

“I had fun.” She shook her head and smiled, just thinking about it. “With him, it was never like ‘Let’s get a pizza, go to your place, and fuck like rabbits.’ He was sweet to me.” She reached back to touch the hair on the back of her head, then left her hand clamped around her neck. “He was always sweet to me.”

“So, you just had to throw him over for a younger stud.”

The smile faded, and whatever image she had in her mind was gone. “I was thirty-three years old. I didn’t have that many years left to attract a man.”

“You had a man.”

“A man who would stay with me.”

“Oh, come on. You can’t tell me you believed Harvey would walk on you.”

“I didn’t believe it. I knew it.”

“Well, that just strikes me as so much horseshit.”

She drifted back to the photograph. I didn’t know if it held a specific fascination or if it was just something to focus on. “I wouldn’t have given him any choice. I would have made it so hard on him that he would have had to leave me.”

“What, you were possessed?”

“If I had stayed with Harvey, I would have just ended up hurting him. The nicer he was to me, the more I would hurt him.”

“Why?”

“Because I hurt people. That’s what I do. I couldn’t stand knowing how much he loved me and knowing how much I was going to hurt him. Every day it got harder. I couldn’t stand it, so I left.”

This time, when she turned to look at me, I saw something in her eyes that might have passed for pain. I never knew with her what was purposeful manipulation and what was genuine, but I did know what she was talking about. I was on to that theory of hurting someone before they had a chance to hurt you first. She had, however, let him down in the most brutal possible way.

“If you were trying to make him stop loving you, you failed.”

“Story of my life. I couldn’t even do that right. But I give myself credit. At least I was smart enough to figure it out and leave before I hurt him any worse.”

“I don’t think there is a way you could have hurt him any worse.” I started to turn back to the mirror but had another thought. “I take that back. There was one thing you could have done to hurt him worse.”

“What would that be?”

“Come back. You never should have come back.”