Eight Million Ways to Die

On my way out of the park at Columbus Circle a bum with a baseball jacket and one milky eye hustled me for a dime toward a pint of wine. A few yards to the left of us, two colleagues of his shared a bottle of Night Train and watched our transaction with interest. I was going to tell him to piss off, then surprised myself by giving him a buck. Maybe I was reluctant to shame him in front of his friends. He started to thank me more effusively than I could stomach, and then I guess he saw something in my face that stopped him cold. He backed off and I crossed the street and headed home.

There was no mail, just a message to call Kim. The clerk's supposed to note the time of the call on the slip but this place isn't the Waldorf. I asked if he remembered the time of the call and he didn't.

I called her and she said, "Oh, I was hoping you'd call. Why don't you come over and pick up the money I owe you?"

"You heard from Chance?"

"He was here about an hour ago. Everything worked out perfectly. Can you come over?"

I told her to give me an hour. I went upstairs and showered and shaved. I got dressed, then decided I didn't like what I was wearing and changed. I was fussing with the knot of my tie when I realized what I was doing. I was dressing for a date.

I had to laugh at myself.

I put on my hat and coat and got out of there. She lived in Murray Hill, Thirty-eighth between Third and Lex. I walked over to Fifth, took a bus, then walked the rest of the way east. Her building was a prewar apartment house, brickfronted, fourteen stories, with a tile floor and potted palms in the lobby. I gave my name to the doorman and he called upstairs on the intercom and established that I was welcome before pointing me to the elevator. There was something deliberately neutral about his manner, and I decided that he knew Kim's profession and assumed I was a john and was being very careful not to smirk.

I got off at the twelfth floor and walked to her door. It opened as I approached it. She stood framed in the doorway, all blonde braids and blue eyes and cheekbones, and for a moment I could picture her carved on the prow of a Viking ship. "Oh, Matt," she said, and reached to embrace me. She was just about my height and she gave me a good hard hug and I felt the pressure of firm breasts and thighs and recognized the sharp tang of her scent. "Matt," she said, drawing me inside, closing the door. "God, I'm so grateful to Elaine for suggesting I get in touch with you. You know what you are? You're my hero."

"All I did was talk to the man."

"Whatever you did, it worked. That's all I care about. Sit down, relax a moment. Can I get you anything to drink?"

"No thanks."

"Some coffee?"

"Well, if it's no trouble."

"Sit down. It's instant, if that's all right. I'm too lazy to make real coffee."

I told her instant was fine. I sat down on the couch and waited while she made the coffee. The room was a comfortable one, attractively if sparsely furnished. A recording of solo jazz piano played softly on the stereo. An all-black cat peered cautiously around the corner at me, then disappeared from view.

The coffee table held a few current magazines- People, TV Guide, Cosmopolitan, Natural History. A framed poster on the wall over the stereo advertised the Hopper show held a couple years back at the Whitney. A pair of African masks decorated another wall. A Scandinavian area rug, its abstract pattern a whirl of blue and green, covered the central portion of the limed oak floor.

When she returned with the coffee I admired the room. She said she wished she could keep the apartment. "But in a way," she said, "it's good I can't, you know? I mean, to go on living here, and then there'd be people showing up. You know. Men."

"Sure."

"Plus the fact that none of this is me. I mean, the only thing in this room that I picked out is the poster. I went to that show and I wanted to take some of it home with me. The way that man painted loneliness. People together but not together, looking off in different directions. It got to me, it really did."

"Where will you live?"

"Someplace nice," she said confidently. She perched on the couch beside me, one long leg folded up beneath her, her coffee cup balanced on the other knee. She was wearing the same wine-colored jeans she'd worn at Armstrong's, along with a lemon yellow sweater. She didn't seem to be wearing anything under the sweater. Her feet were bare, the toenails the same tawny port as her fingernails. She'd been wearing bedroom slippers but kicked them off before sitting down.

I took in the blue of her eyes, the green of her square-cut ring, then found my eyes drawn to the rug. It looked as though someone had taken each of those colors and beaten them with a wire whisk.

She blew on her coffee, sipped it, leaned far forward and set the cup on the coffee table. Her cigarettes were on the table and she lit one. She said, "I don't know what you said to Chance but you really made an impression on him."

"I don't see how."

"He called this morning and said he would be coming over, and when he got here I had the door on the chain lock, and somehow I just knew I didn't have anything to fear from him. You know how sometimes you just know something?"

I knew, all right. The Boston Strangler never had to break a door down. All his victims opened the door and let him in.

She pursed her lips, blew out a column of smoke. "He was very nice. He said he hadn't realized I was unhappy and that he had no intention of trying to hold me against my will. He seemed hurt that I could have thought that of him. You know something? He had me just about feeling guilty. And he had me feeling I was making a big mistake, that I was throwing something away and I'd be sorry I couldn't ever get it back. He said, 'You know, I never take a girl back,' and I thought, God, I'm burning my bridges. Can you imagine?"

"I think so."

"Because he's such a con artist. Like I'm walking away from a great job and forfeiting my stake in the corporate pension plan. I mean, come on!"

"When do you have to be out of the apartment?"

"He said by the end of the month. I'll probably be gone before then. Packing's no big deal. None of the furniture's mine. Just clothes and records, and the Hopper poster, but do you want to know something? I think that can stay right here. I don't think I need the memories."

I drank some of my coffee. It was weaker than I preferred it. The record ended and was followed by a piano trio. She told me again how I had impressed Chance. "He wanted to know how I happened to call you," she said. "I was vague, I said you were a friend of a friend. He said I didn't need to hire you, that all I'd had to do was talk to him."

"That's probably true."

"Maybe. But I don't think so. I think I would have started talking to him, assuming I could work up the nerve, and we'd get into this conversation and gradually I would turn around and the whole subject would be shunted off to the side. And I'd leave it shunted off to the side, you know, because without ever coming out and saying it he'd manage to give me the impression that leaving him wasn't something I was going to be allowed to do. He might not say, 'Look, bitch, you stay where you're at or I'll ruin your face.' He might not say it, but that's what I'd hear."

"Did you hear it today?"

"No. That's the point. I didn't." Her hand fastened on my arm just above the wrist. "Oh, before I forget," she said, and my arm took some of her weight as she got up from the couch. Then she was across the room rummaging in her purse, and then she was back on the couch handing me five hundred-dollar bills, presumably the ones I'd returned to her three days earlier.

She said, "It seems like there ought to be a bonus."

"You paid me well enough."

"But you did such a good job."

She had one arm draped over the back of the sofa and she was leaning toward me. I looked at her blonde braids coiled around her head and thought of a woman I know, a sculptor with a loft in Tribeca. She did a head of Medusa with snakes for hair and Kim had the same broad brow and high cheekbones as Jan Keane's piece of sculpture.

The expression was different, though. Jan's Medusa had looked profoundly disappointed. Kim's face was harder to read.

I said, "Are those contacts?"

"What? Oh, my eyes? That's their natural color. It's kind of weird, isn't it?"

"It's unusual."

Now I could read her face. It was anticipation that I saw there.

"Beautiful eyes," I said.

The wide mouth softened into the beginning of a smile. I moved a little toward her and she came at once into my arms, fresh and warm and eager. I kissed her mouth, her throat, her lidded eyes.

Her bedroom was large and flooded with sunlight. The floor was thickly carpeted. The king-size platform bed was unmade, and the black kitten napped on a chintz-covered boudoir chair. Kim drew the curtains, glanced shyly at me, then began to undress.

Ours was a curious passage. Her body was splendid, the stuff of fantasy, and she gave herself with evident abandon. I was surprised by the intensity of my own desire, and yet it was almost wholly physical. My mind remained oddly detached from her body and from my own. I might have been viewing our performance from a distance.

The resolution provided relief and release and precious little pleasure. I drew away from her and felt as though I was in the midst of an infinite wasteland of sand and dry brush. There was a moment of astonishing sadness. Pain throbbed at the back of my throat and I felt myself close to tears.

Then the feeling passed. I don't know what brought it on or what took it away.

She said, "Well now," and smiled, and rolled on her side to face me and put a hand on my arm. "That was nice, Matt," she said.

I got dressed, turned down the offer of another cup of coffee. She took my hand at the doorway, thanked me again, and said she'd let me know her address and phone once she got relocated. I told her to feel free to call anytime for any reason. We didn't kiss.

In the elevator I remembered something she'd said. "It seems like there ought to be a bonus." Well, that was as good a word for it as any.

I walked all the way back to the hotel. I stopped a few times along the way, once for coffee and a sandwich, once in a church on Madison Avenue where I was going to put fifty dollars into the poor box until I realized I couldn't. Kim had paid me in hundreds and I didn't have enough in smaller bills.

I don't know why I tithe, or how I got in the habit in the first place. It was one of the things I began doing after I left Anita and the boys and moved into Manhattan. I don't know what the churches do with the money and I'm sure their need for it is no greater than my own, and of late I've tried to break myself of the habit. But whenever some money comes in I find there's a restlessness that comes with it that I cannot shed until I've handed over 10 percent of the sum to one church or another. I suppose it's superstition. I suppose I think that, having started this, I have to keep it up or something terrible will happen.

God knows it doesn't make any sense. Terrible things happen anyway, and will go on happening whether I give all or none of my income to churches.

This particular tithe would have to wait. I sat for a few minutes anyway, grateful for the peace the empty church provided. I let my mind wander for awhile. After I'd been there a few minutes an elderly man seated himself on the other side of the aisle. He closed his eyes and looked to be in deep concentration.