“Paulie, this conversation never happened.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“I believe you’re going to keep that promise, Paulie. I always liked and trusted you.”
“You did? I thought you had a thing against slants.”
“Me? No,” I said. And earnestly. I have no idea what I’m feeling. Random stabs of love and hate. But I gave the cop shrug and said, “No, Paulie. It’s just that you seemed so absorbed in your job.”
“That’s true.”
“This has been nice and we’ll do it again soon. But just so we understand each other. You keep your mouth shut about Jennifer Rockwell. Or Colonel Tom will put you out. Believe it, Paul. You won’t be cutting on Battery and Jefferson. You’ll be bucket boy at Final Rest. But I trust you and I know you’ll keep your promise to me. That’s what you got my respect for.”
“Have another one, Mike.”
“For the road.”
I felt relief like luxury when I added, “Just a seltzer. Yeah, sure, why not?”
Tobe is attending a video-game tournament and will not be home till eleven. It’s now nine. At ten I have a phone date with Colonel Tom. So it should work out. I’m sitting here at the kitchen table with my notebook, my tape recorder, my PC. I’m wearing my latest golf pants, with the big gold check, and a white Brooks Brothers shirt. And I’m thinking… Oh, Jennifer, you wicked girl.
It’s a phone date with Colonel Tom because I won’t be able to do this face to face. For several reasons. One of them being that Colonel Tom always knows when I’m not telling the truth. He’ll say, “Meet my eye, Mike”—like a parent. And I wouldn’t be able to do that.
Today in the Times there’s a piece about a recently recognized mental disorder called the Paradise Syndrome. I thought: Look no further. That was what Jennifer had. Turns out it’s just this thing where ignorant billionaires—stars of soap and rock and ballpark—succeed in rigging up some worries for themselves. Some boobytraps—pitfalls in paradise. Zugts afen mir. Say it about me. I look around the apartment—the hip-high heaps of computer magazines, the dust on my framed commendations. No less than what you’d expect, in the habitat of half a ton of slob and slut. No Paradise Syndrome here. We’re clean. In the Times there’s also a follow-up report and an editorial about the microbes on the rock from Mars. A single smear of three-billion-year-old jizz, and suddenly they’re all saying, “We are not alone.”
I don’t personally believe that her work—her bent, her calling—had much to do with anything, except that it lengthened the band. By which I mean something like: The intellectual gap between Jennifer and LaDonna, Jennifer and DeLeon, Jennifer and the thirteen-year-old girl who murdered a baby over a diaper—that gap feels vast, but might be narrowed by habitual thoughts about the universe. In the same way, Trader was “the kindest lover on the planet”—but how kind is that? Miriam was the sweetest mother—but how sweet is that? And Colonel Tom was the fondest father. And how fond is that? Jennifer was beautiful. But how beautiful? Think about this human face anyway, with its silly ears, its sprout of fur, its nonsensical nostrils, the wetness of the eyes and of the mouth, where white bone grows.
In suicide studies there used to be a rough rule that went: The more violent the means, the louder the snarl at the living. The louder they said, Look what you made me do. If you left your body whole, merely mimicking sleep, then this was considered a quieter reproach to those who were left behind. (Left behind? No! They stop. We go on. The dead are those who are left behind.)… Still, I never believed that. The woman who cuts her throat with an electric carving knife—you’re telling me she’s got a thought for anybody else? But yet, three bullets, like the opposite of three cheers. What a judgment. What…highness. What ice. She hurt the living, and that’s another reason to hate her. And she didn’t even care that everyone would remember her as just another mad bitch. Everyone except me.
-+=*=+-
Unfair. She was the daughter of a police—her father commanded three thousand sworn. She knew that he would follow her trail. And I believe she knew also that I would play a part in the search. Sure. Who else? If not me, who? Who? Tony Silvera? Oltan O’Boye? Who? As she headed toward death she imprinted a pattern that she thought would solace the living. A pattern: Something often seen before. Jennifer left clues. But the clues were all blinds. Bax Denziger’s mangled algorithm? A blind (and a joke, saying something like: Don’t grind your ax against the universe. I grind mine against mother earth). The paintings she bought? A blind—an indolent afterthought. The lithium was a blind. Arn Debs was a blind. Man, was he ever. For days I have hated her for Arn Debs. Detested her, despised her. Hated it that she thought I’d swallow Arn Debs—that I’d reckon he’d do, even as a decoy. But then again: Shit, who did she ever see me run with? From the age of eight she watched me hanging on the arms of woman-haters and woman-hitters. Me with my black eye, and Duwain with his. Deniss and myself, holding hands as we limped off to join the line outside Emergency. These guys didn’t just slap me around: We had fistfights that lasted half an hour. Jennifer must have thought that black and blue were my favorite colors. What would you expect from Mike Hoolihan—a woman who was gored by her dad? Sure I’d go for big Arn Debs. And why wouldn’t I figure, being so fucking dumb, that Jennifer might go for him too? Did she not see intelligence in me? Did she actually not? Did nobody see it? Because if you take intelligence from me, if you take it from my face, then you really don’t leave me with very much at all.