An Accidental Affair (42 page)

I handed him the key to the apartment that we were standing in.

I said, “I don’t need it. No need letting it go to waste. If your
daughter wants to, if you want her to, she can just move up here and get her life back together. Or you can. Up to you.”

“You’re not coming back?”

“I’ll go back to my jungle. This jungle is safer, but I’ll go back to the backstabbing and ruthlessness that I’ve grown accustomed to. It’s too kind over here.”

He said, “I can sublet from you. I can pull a second job to pay you.”

“I’m not doing this for money, Mr. Holder. When a man sees another man who needs help, he should help that man. That would make the world a much better place. A man never knows when the tides will turn and he’ll be the one who will need help.”

When I said that, he pulled his lips in. I’d fed him his own words and it hit home.

He said, “Look, I’m sorry about the things that I said. But when a man loves a woman, and that woman drives him crazy, when that woman that he loves just wants him for what he can do for her and not for love, it makes him want to act a fool. It didn’t matter that she was younger than my daughter. We can’t help who we fall in love with. We just wish that they fell in love with us the same way. I miss her. I miss her kids. But it is what it is, and that’s all it is.”

“Loving a woman makes a man do some crazy shit.”

“You should know, James Thicke. We can agree on that, if nothing else.”

I nodded. I wanted to ask where Vera-Anne had gone, but it wasn’t for me to ask.

He said, “I was jealous of you. I was with a woman who didn’t work and your wife made more money in weeks than I will make in a lifetime. And you make more than your wife makes. Maybe I felt like a fool. Like I had been tricked or something. After I had helped you move in, you told me who you were. That changed things for me, I guess. I thought you were a foolish man down on his luck and I came to help you move things from that U-Haul. You reminded me of my
shortcomings. I saw you and I saw me sixteen years ago, unloading my furniture and moving here. But you could rent every apartment in this complex if you wanted. You could buy the complex, tear it down, and build a better one where we stand. I felt…that made me feel small.”

I nodded. He’d never see me as a human being, not as a regular guy. He didn’t know my family and me when were in the shadows of the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. He didn’t know me when my mother was a Chelsea girl. He didn’t see us walking the cobbled roads of East London. Petticoat Lane. Brick Lane. The Indian shops. The smells. He didn’t see that this place took me back to Hackney, back to Tottenham. I was home here. I grew up in this kind of poverty, so its people didn’t scare me, and I didn’t think that I was that different in character. In money yes, because money was a dividing line, but in the end, we all bled and died.

He asked, “Did you sleep with Vera-Anne?”

Compared to the things that had happened in my life, his problems were small, meant nothing, would all come to pass. Murder never came to pass. Still I gave him an audience and entertained his pain.

I said, “Nope.”

“Did you kiss her?”

“She came to me crying about her life and when I consoled her, she kissed me, and that surprised me, but I pushed her away as soon as she did. So, no, I didn’t reciprocate.”

“She kissed you.”

“Barely. Didn’t last a second. I backed away from her, told her to respect you.”

He nodded, then took a breath. “That’s pretty much what Junkanoo said happened. He said that his momma went to you and she put her arms around you and kissed you.”

“He told you.”

“Because he knows right from wrong. Because I’m the only daddy he knows…he knew.”

I nodded and realized that it was best that I said nothing else. Sometimes when a man’s woman kissed another man, when she kissed him and meant it, when she kissed him and wanted him, the damage was done. He might as well have been taped fucking her three ways to heaven.

For a moment I had to breathe. Johnny Handsome had made my wife come.

He was dead but memories were eternal.

Mr. Holder said, “She lied. She stood in my face and lied on you. She has no character.”

“She was scared. She knew what she had done was wrong. I told her that.”

“But she spent my money then had the nerve to stand in my face and lie to me.”

I nodded. His words were simple but blackness and pain resonated in every syllable.

I said, “She wanted to be out of poverty.”

“We all do.”

“She can’t see that with you.”

“She did nothing to help my situation. And if she won the lottery tomorrow, despite all that I have done for her, despite how I feel about her, she would take her money and move on.”

I let a moment go by. “How do you feel about her?”

“I love her. And right now, no matter what she did or said, that’s the problem.”

“Maybe what she was doing online was just flirting. People do that.”

“She knew that you were my friend. Not some strange guy online. And she kissed you. She had no respect for me. You live one floor above me. And she kissed you.”

He’d exhausted me with his pain. It was a bad time. My freedom was still at stake.

He shrugged. “If I take her back, I’ll just be enabling her to be lazy and do nothing. When you take care of somebody, they get comfortable and think its their entitlement. It’s like being lazy and on unemployment. Most of the people on unemployment don’t look for jobs until the money runs out. Well, my days of socialism are over, so that means that her tax-free money just ran out. She kissed herself out of a free ride. Let’s me know that I was really nothing to her. Nothing at all. I will no long enable her. So hopefully that poverty will motivate her.”

He changed from speaking of Vera-Anne in the tone of a lover to talking about her with the tone of a father who did what he had to do in order to make his child grow up.

I said, “You have a complicated life. As complicated as mine.”

“But it’s my life. It’s ugly. I claim it. I’ll never run from it, no matter how bad it gets.”

“But you did run. It had become so ugly you had to run to keep from going crazy.”

“I’ve never run.”

“You made a choice. I never would have left my child. But it’s easy for a man or woman to say what they would or wouldn’t do when they’re not wearing another man or woman’s shoes.”

“I didn’t run. I did what I had to do.”

“So did I, Mr. Holder. So did I. Nobody chased me. Sure, I didn’t want to go to jail. No one does. But I didn’t want to—” I paused, the memories from all that had happened almost to heavy to bear. “I didn’t want to end up killing a man for sleeping with my wife.”

“That boy killed a woman for making jokes about him and then he killed himself.”

“I didn’t run. I don’t run. And maybe I should have run. But that’s my problem to deal with. I’m going back home. Like a man. But it’s not going to take me twenty years to do it. You left to keep from doing something unforgivable to your wife. I tried to do the same.”

He nodded. That was my victory.

It was a bad week for him as well. Not on the same level as mine, but still horrific.

We all had bad weeks. We were all tested. We were all changed by events.

It just took him twenty years to make it back to the front of the line.

His bad season wasn’t over. Mine hadn’t ended. I had dead bodies behind me. There was a missing video recording in front of me. My bad season was a long way from being over.

“James Thicke.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Holder.”

“Thanks for being my friend.”

Not long after, Mr. Holder left. But his brokenhearted energy remained in the apartment. He left and I was back on task. I searched the apartment once more. I searched in vain.

When I went back inside the bathroom I looked down at the roll of toilet paper.

It hadn’t been torn along the perforated edges.

When he hit me, there was an explosion inside of my head.

The pain muffled his outburst. The blow from his fist had been as solid as it was abrupt. I staggered and I fell into my car, tried to grab the side view mirror to keep myself up. I was in the parking lot at The Apartments, at the side of my Maybach, and I had been attacked. It was Ted. It was Mrs. Patrice Evans’s husband. Another man cuckolded. He had severe anger in his face and a tire iron in his hand. Tears in his eyes, jaw tight, he glowered at me the same way that I had glowered at Johnny Handsome in the rain. I fought to crawl away and the tire iron came down hard, struck me in the middle of my back. Bloodied and defenseless, I looked up at Ted Evans’s wrath. That was when I saw her. Mrs. Patrice Evans. She was in the background, hysterical and crying. Her eyes were blackened, her lips swollen and bleeding profusely. She had on her panties and bra. She’d chased him after he had beaten her. She could barely stand up. My eyes met his. He drew the tire iron back, raised that metal high, spit flying with his every breath as he prepared to strike me in my head, gritted his teeth and prepared to send me to whatever existed on the other side of life. Then he screamed and brought the tire iron down.

Isabel was sleeping, her head resting on my chest when I jerked awake. My breathing was fast. It took moments to calm down and realize where I was. I was inside of Isabel’s apartment. I’d come here
after I’d collected the Post-its and left Mr. Holder. Ted’s killing me had been a dream. A nightmare. Guilt. Fear. Isabel stirred, and then she shifted. She woke smiling. Her short dream had been peaceful. She adjusted her head on my chest as her fingers danced across my belly. Her hand touched me for a while and my mind let go of the nightmare. Isabel touched my penis, traced her finger along its length, and then she held its girth inside of her hand. The last of the nightmare abandoned me and I teased my fingers though her hair.

She said, “So you turned the apartment over to Mr. Holder.”

“His daughter is pregnant. And she’s between jobs.”

“So I heard. More than likely he’ll forgive Vera-Anne and take her back at some point.”

“He hacked her e-mails. He knows too much to ever feel comfortable with her. He knows the truth. He knows how she feels about him. And since he did that, she wouldn’t trust him.”

“When people no longer trust each other, it’s a different ballgame.”

In the background, from her record player, Bill Withers sang “Lean on Me.”

Isabel whispered, “Tea?”

“In a moment. Your skin feels good next to mine. Let’s enjoy being naked in your bed.”

“Well, Varg, I’m glad you came to visit me.”

“I was worried when I didn’t see you, Sweet Isabel. I had looked for you in the crowd.”

Isabel said, “Your wife. Stunning. She really made these flats a lively place for a while.”

“Despite all that has happened, despite her dark clouds, she made the sun come out.”

“Such a bloody scandal. Now the man she was with has killed a girl and killed himself.”

“It will die down at some point. The public gets bored very easily. They will move on.”

“You’ll have to forgive your wife. In order to make your marriage work, as James Thicke, you will have to forgive your wife. We all make mistakes. That’s why pencils have erasers.”

“I know.”

“Just don’t forgive her too soon. Don’t stop being Varg Veum too soon.”

“Aren’t you a tad bit selfish?”

She kissed my chest. “Just to let you know, I’ll be here a while. Open invitation to you.”

“A while? Going somewhere?”

“Soon I will put on my Union Jack T-shirt and travel back across the pond.”

“Leaving America?”

“Yes. I should’ve returned home after my husband died, but I didn’t. I thought that I’d become a teacher and change the Yanks. Well, I tried. Hopefully I made a difference. But I’ve overstayed my welcome here. I miss the dreariness of the UK. I miss all of my family as well. I miss the West End, Piccadilly Circus, riding the tube, the whole lot. My heart is in Great Britain.”

“Sorry to hear that you’re leaving.”

“I’ll be moving to Canvey Island. Would be nice to see you before I leave.”

“That would be nice.”

She said, “If only you were a tad bit younger. If only.”

“And if only you were a tad bit older.”

Sweet Isabel mounted me.

Soon I’d leave, not sure if I’d ever be able to become Varg Veum again. But for now, I clung to being Varg Veum. I clung to him the way I held onto Isabel.

* * *

Mrs. Patrice Evans lived in building K on the second floor, apartment K-269. I went to the apartment where she lived with her husband. There was a lot of foot traffic on her floor. And as people passed me and stared, I decorated her door with the hundred Post-its that she had put on my door. On the one right below the peephole I wrote one word in bold letters:
GOODBYE
.

That done, I put the Domino’s hanger on the doorknob and headed toward my car.

Sometimes less was more.

But I knew that tonight there would be more, not less.

I tried calling my wife’s assistant. I called her a dozen times before she answered.

She heard my voice and hung up on me.

I tried again and she did the same.

She knew too much.

She had been in the center of it all.

Anger simmering, stress rising, heart aching, I headed toward a confrontation that could rival my night with Bobby Holland. With Downey in my rearview mirror and the Hollywood sign growing larger with each passing second, I clenched my teeth and headed toward Los Feliz.

When I made it back to my estate, I stood in the garage for a while. Each wall in the structure was a work of art, the building fit to be a wing inside of the Uffizi. The Bentley had been returned and rested comfortably with the rest of my fleet. Windshield and headlight had been replaced. Bullet holes mended. No traceable paperwork. As if there had never been a shootout on Skirball Center Drive. Regina hadn’t been in the repaired car yet. I looked in the trunk and saw the computer that I had hidden there when I had left Bobby Holland’s home a week ago.