The Procane Chronicle

19

There were pork chops for dinner, double-cut ones with ruffled white pants so that you wouldn’t get your hands greasy when you picked them up and gnawed at the meat close to the bone, which everyone did except Janet Whistler who didn’t seem to be too hungry.

There were also mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, and a salad and I ate everything that was set before me, including two pieces of apple pie, not forgetting to compliment Mrs. Williams on her cooking. She shook her head and said, “I don’t think that crust was too good.”

There hadn’t been much conversation at dinner either and there was even less afterward. We had coffee in the living room again. And since there didn’t seem to be anything that we wanted to talk about Miles Wiedstein went upstairs and came back down with a small, portable Sony television set. He plugged it in and we listened to Walter Cronkite skim over the news.

When Cronkite said, “And that’s the way it is, Wednesday, November the third,” Miles Wiedstein turned the set off before Cronkite could tell us what year it was.

“Well,” Procane said, rising, “the world seems no worse than usual — nor better either.” He looked at his watch. “It’s now seven-thirty. We will leave here promptly at eight-twenty. I suggest that we retire for the next forty-five minutes to collect our thoughts and, if possible, relax.” He looked at me. “Mr. Wiedstein will show you your room.”

“This way,” Wiedstein said. I followed him into the hall and up a flight of carpeted stairs. “That one there,” he said, pointing to a door. “We share a bath. If you hear me throwing up, don’t pay any attention. I always throw up before one of these things.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten.”

He shook his head. “I like to throw up. It gives me something to do. It doesn’t mean I’m sick. Not really sick.”

My room had a canopied bed, a bureau, a dresser, two chairs, and a chaise longue. I went through the drawers but they were empty. So was the closet. The two windows were decorated with pale yellow curtains. Their shades were down. I raised one of the shades and saw that I had a view of N Street. It was dark outside. I lowered the shade and stretched out on the bed, staring up at the canopy. I heard some footsteps in the hall. A door closed. Then another one. I shut my eyes and kept them that way, even when I heard my hall door open. I heard movement in the room and someone breathing, but I kept my eyes closed. At the sound of a zipper being unzipped I opened my eyes. It was Janet Whistler and she was half out of her gray pantsuit, the top half. She had nothing on underneath it.

“Move over,” she said, stepping out of her pants. I moved over. She eased herself onto the bed next to me and started working on my tie. “You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “I don’t want you to do anything.”

“I don’t mind doing something,” I said, putting an arm around her. “It gives me a sense of participation.”

“No,” she said, now working on my shirt buttons. “I want it to last.”

“I can cooperate along those lines, too. We’ve got forty minutes or so.”

She started unfastening my belt. “That’s how long it’s got to last. Forty minutes.”

“Why?”

“Because it keeps me from thinking. I don’t want to think. Not until it really starts.”

All of my clothes were off now and we lay on the bed, our arms around each other. I started to say something, to pay her some compliment probably, maybe about how pretty she was, but she shook her head and said, “Don’t talk. I don’t want to talk. I just want to do everything as though it were the last time ever. For both of us.”

She was able to pretend that better than I. There was something frantic about her tongue and hands. Her tongue went exploring, darting into every opening and crevice that she could find. Her nails raked my buttocks and my back again and I had to bite my lip to keep from yelling. But to bite my lip I had to close my mouth and she didn’t like that. She wanted it open so that my tongue could be where she thought it should be.

It went like that for what seemed to me a long time although I didn’t keep track. And then I was inside her and she began to make small little moans as she writhed and clamped at me and crosshatched my back with her fingernails. “Now hurt me,” she said, almost choking on the words, “I want you to hurt me bad.” So I hurt her, but not bad, even though she’d wanted me to, and I felt the spasms start in her belly, once, twice, three times, and I quit worrying about her and started delighting in myself and then it started to be over and then it was and we lay there breathing hard and listening to Wiedstein throw up in the bathroom.

“Jesus,” I said, turned over, and started fumbling through my clothes for a cigarette.

“He always does that,” she said. “I always do this. This is better.”

“Who’s your usual partner?” I said, offering her a cigarette.

“It depends on where I am. Sometimes it’s just me.”

“That’s not much fun.”

“It depends on your imagination. Don’t worry, you’re not cutting out either Wiedstein or Procane.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

The bathroom door opened and Wiedstein stood there, looking a little pale. I’m not sure that he noticed we were naked. I don’t think he cared. He was sponging off his face with a wet cloth.

“You’d better get ready,” he said.

“Are you okay now?” Janet Whistler said, propping herself up on one elbow.

“I think it’s over. I thought my goddamned appendix was coming up.”

“What time is it?” she said.

He looked at his watch. I thought about covering myself with something, but decided that if it wasn’t bothering them, it shouldn’t bother me. “Eight-ten,” he said, turned, and closed the door behind him.

Janet Whistler turned toward me and stretched. “God, I feel better.”

“Why don’t you go in the bathroom and see if you can find something to put on my back,” I said. “I think I’m bleeding all over the counterpane.”

“Turn over.”

I turned over and she said. “How’d you ever do that?” I think she really didn’t know.

I sighed. “It’s something like stigmata except that I get it on my back every time I screw.”

“You mean I did that?”

“Didn’t anyone ever complain before?”

“No. Never. Really they didn’t.”

“Am I bleeding?”

“Not really. They’re just scratches, but I’ll put something on them.”

“Don’t bother,” I said, swinging my legs over the bed and reaching for my shirt.

“Did I do that before?” she asked. “I mean when we were up at your place?”

“Yes.”

“I never did it to anyone else. Honestly.”

“Maybe they were too polite to complain.”

“They weren’t that polite. Nobody is.”

“Forget it.”

“I think I know why I do it.”

“Why?”

“It’s like I told you before. You’re such a good fuck. But you know what you can do next time?”

“What?”

“You can buy me some gloves.”

Mrs. Williams fetched our coats from the hall closet and we shrugged into them in the living room and then stood around, a little awkwardly, like guests at a party that has lasted too long.

Procane turned to Mrs. Williams and said, “The car will be by for you at ten.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be back in New York some time tomorrow.”

“In time for lunch or dinner?”

“Dinner, I think.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you for coming down, Mrs. Williams, and for the fine dinner.”

“You welcome, Mr. Procane.”

He turned to us then and said, “We can go out through the back.”

We followed him through the dining room, a pantry, and the kitchen that had one of those large, commercial stoves that can cook for four or forty. There was also a big freezer, an outsized refrigerator, and two automatic dishwashers.

“They entertain a lot,” Procane said, apparently referring to the absent owners of the house. He opened a door that led outside and we went down a flight of wooden steps from a small porch into a back yard. Procane had switched on an outside light and I could see that the term back yard wasn’t quite grand enough for the small, carefully laid out informal garden that had cost somebody a great deal of money and even more time. It was too dark to recognize the shrubs and bushes, and I’m not sure that I could have anyhow, but some of them were cozily wrapped up in burlap against the winter frost. There were five or six tall shade trees, nearly bare now, and curving in and out of the shrubs and the trees was a walk of white gravel that sparkled in the artificial light.

We followed the walk until we came to a brick garage. Procane used a key to unlock a door and we went inside. He turned on another light and it revealed two three- or four-year-old Chevrolet Impalas. One was black and the other was green. There was still space enough in the garage for a third car, a big one such as a Cadillac or an Imperial. There was even enough space for the long workbench that ran along one side of the garage and which had enough tools to put a shade-tree mechanic in business.

Procane moved over, inserted another key in a wall lock of some kind, pushed a button, and the garage’s overhead door rose smoothly. “We’ll take the green one, Mr. St. Ives,” he said and motioned for me to get in. He went around to the driver’s side. Wiedstein and Janet Whistler got in the black car, Wiedstein at the wheel.

Procane waited until Wiedstein backed out of the garage and started up the alley. Then he started our engine and we followed, turning left and then right on N Street and then left on Wisconsin Avenue and right again on M Street, which, along with Wisconsin, is one of the two main drags through Georgetown.

Wiedstein stayed in the left lane. He signaled for a left turn just before we got to Key Bridge, but had to wait for a red light. We waited, just behind him.

“What’s it going to be,” I said, “Maryland or Virginia?”

“Virginia,” Procane said. “Do you have a preference?”

“No.”

“Have you been in Virginia before?”

“I stopped at Bull Run once.”

“Was it interesting?”

“Sort of.”

The light turned green and we crossed the Potomac over the bridge that was named after the composer of our national anthem who, I’ve always suspected, had a tin ear. At the Virginia side of Key Bridge we turned right and about half a mile later edged on to the George Washington Memorial Parkway.

“No last-minute instructions?” I said. “Not even a pep talk?”

“They really don’t need it,” Procane said, holding the Impala to a steady fifty miles per hour about five car lengths behind Wiedstein.

“They seemed a little nervous to me,” I said.

“Of course they are, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m just scared.”

Procane chuckled. “I can’t decide whether what I feel is apprehension or anticipation. Perhaps a little of both. Whatever it is, I like it. I really do.”

“Maybe you’re just a born thief.”

Procane chuckled again. “Maybe I am at that.”

We drove for nearly fifteen minutes until we came to a fork in the parkway. To the right lay Maryland; to the left, Virginia. We went left down a two-lane, one-way road that hooked sharply left again. The rear stoplights on Wiedstein’s car flashed on as he slowed down.

“The beltway,” Procane said. “U.S. 495. It goes all the way around Washington.”

It was a six-lane highway, three lanes on each side, and a sign I spotted put the speed limit at sixty-five, but nobody but Procane and Wiedstein seemed to observe it. Cars flicked by us going at least eighty or even ninety. The traffic was moderate for that time of night.

Procane drove well and I was a little surprised because not too many New Yorkers do, probably because not many of them own cars. The last car I had owned had been when I’d lived in Chicago, nearly fourteen years ago. It had been a Studebaker. They don’t make them like that anymore and I can understand why.

“I’m really surprised, Mr. St. Ives,” Procane said.

“At what?”

“That you didn’t back out. I thought you might have second thoughts.”

“I did.”

“But here you are.”

“Yes, here I am.”

“What you’re doing is really quite criminal, you know.”

“I suppose it is.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Not much. Maybe because my values are twisted.”

“You mean stealing a million dollars from drug merchants is quite different from stealing a million dollars from — say — a bank?”

“That’s what I keep telling myself.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Part of it.”

“Which part?”

“About the drug dealers,” I said. “It’ll hurt them. Not much, but some. I don’t want to be preachy and all that good shit, but heroin’s nasty stuff. It wrecks too many lives and the people whose lives it wrecks are usually those who have everything going against them anyway.”

“And that’s what you’ve used to justify your coming along?”

“It doesn’t justify it, but it helps explain it. I tell myself that there’s something redeeming about what I’m doing. Not much maybe, but something.”

“Of course, it might just increase the price of heroin. That means that the addicts will have to steal more to feed their habits. More crime will result. If the addicts resort to armed robbery, some innocent persons may get killed. Have you thought about it in that light?”

“No.”

“It’s better not to.”

“How do you think about it?”

“I accept what I am first. I’m a thief. But I steal only from those who’ve done something illegal. That way I salve my conscience.” He paused. “If I have one.” He seemed to brood about that for a few moments and then said, “Tell me something.”

“What?”

“When was the last time you stole something?”

“What makes you sure there was a last time?”

Procane chuckled again. “Don’t fence with me. When was it?”

“Not counting the pencils I used to take home from the office?”

“Not counting those.”

“It was 1944 in Columbus, Ohio.”

“You were a child.”

“That’s right.”

“What did you steal?”

“A magazine from a drugstore.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted it and I didn’t have a dime.”

“How bad did you want it?”

I thought about that. “I think I wanted it more than anything I ever wanted in my life.”

“And after you stole it how did you feel?”

“Scared. Remorseful. Guilt-ridden.”

“Did you enjoy the magazine?”

“No.”

Once more Procane chuckled, this time deep down in his throat as if he really found something funny. “I’ll tell you one thing about yourself, Mr. St. Ives.”

“What?”

“You’ll never make a proper thief.”

“Why, because stealing makes me feel guilty?”

“No, you could probably live with that. It’s something else.”

“What?”

“You don’t really like it. To be a good thief you’ve got to really enjoy your work.”

I remember thinking that that was the first time I’d ever heard Procane split an infinitive, but I decided that he’d probably done it on purpose.