Apartment Seven (2 page)

I slowly descended the stairs.

About halfway down I was able to make out most of what my wife was saying, so I stopped, waited and listened. Interlaced with girlish laughter I hadn’t heard from her in years, her voice held the nuance of a teenager sneaking a phone call to a boyfriend her parents had forbidden her to see.

My breath caught in my throat as a sudden wave of panic and disbelief slammed into me. I knew what this sounded like but it didn’t seem possible.

“Just jammies,” she giggled. “It’s the middle of the night, what were you expecting, a ball gown? No, I don’t have panties on. You’re
so
bad.”

When I stepped out into the meager light of the den, Jenna saw me immediately. All the blood drained from her face.

“I have to go,” she said flatly, then hit the disconnect button. With shaking hands, she put her cell on the coffee table and slowly rose from the couch. Dressed in lightweight pajama bottoms and a sheer tank top T-shirt, she looked maddeningly gorgeous. A nervous smile cut across her pretty face like a spasm as she tensely straightened her bed-mussed hair. “Hey, what are you—”

“Who was that?”

Jenna barked out a horrified laugh and sauntered closer, reaching out as if to kiss me. “Nobody, just a friend.” When I sidestepped her advance she cocked her head in faux confusion. “What’s wrong?”

“
What’s wrong
? Are you out of your mind? Who was that on the phone?”

“Nancy,” she said, referring to one of her friends from work, a woman I barely knew. “She’s having serious troubles at home and she needed to talk.”

“At three-thirty in the morning?”

Words began to spill from her mouth in a frantic stream. “This is the only time she could talk without her husband finding out and I didn’t want to bother you with it so I just told her we could talk really late and that it wouldn’t be a problem so—”

“Why would Nancy want to know if you have panties on?”

Jenna grinned like a mental patient who’d just raided the med cart. “What?” She waved at the air as if to clear it of what was happening. “I think she really might leave him this time which is exactly what she should do because—”

“Stop.” I moved by her and dropped down onto the couch. “Just stop.”

“Charlie, please don’t make a big deal about this. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? How about I pick up the phone and hit redial? Or maybe I should check your text message history with that number, how’d that be?”

“This is ridiculous.” She laughed lightly. “Come on, let’s go back to bed.”

I motioned to the chair next to the couch. “Sit down, Jenna.”

She remained standing and folded her arms across her chest. “There’s no reason to get upset and make more of this than it is, OK?”

“I’m not going to ask again. Who were you on the phone with?”

She was cornered, had no means of escape, and knew it. Very softly, she said, “You don’t know him.”

A rush of emotion surged through me but I did my best to conceal it. I’d been completely blindsided. We were so happy. We were in love. We’d just had a wonderful evening. How could the same woman who had snuggled with me on the couch, crawled into bed with me, kissed me and told me she loved me with such sincerity only a few hours later be on the phone with another man?

I’m dreaming about what happened
, I told myself,
that’s it, and it isn’t quite right, it’s—it’s wrong, it’s not right—because in dreams things never are.

But this was real and happening right before my eyes. I dropped my face into my hands as shock and disbelief gave way to crippling pain and sorrow. “What in God’s name is happening?”

“
Nothing
is happening. Nothing has happened. Nothing’s going on.”

“You sneak out of bed in the middle of the night to call some man and you expect me to believe nothing’s going on?”

Jenna drew a deep breath then let it out slowly, her previous psychotic smile replaced with a genuine frown. “He’s just someone I met while I was out one day. We struck up a conversation and hit it off. We started exchanging texts and emails, that sort of thing, just as friends. Then it graduated to harmless banter—even when it got sexual it was always framed in humor—and it just escalated from there. It was fun and it became, well,
addictive
, I guess you could say. It was a way to break up the monotony without really doing anything wrong. I admit it was nice to have another man paying attention to me. It felt good. It felt harmless. When he’d text me it was with the nickname Mysteryman2000, it—I know it sounds silly and immature—and it was—but it was like a game, that’s all. We started talking on the phone a few weeks ago and it just got out of hand. It meant nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Have you been seeing this man?”

“We had lunch a couple times but that’s it. The rest was by phone or text.”

“You had lunch together?”

“Only a couple times.”

“Last time I checked that’s called a date.”

“We’re just friends. OK?”

“No, it’s not OK. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“You know I love you.” She bowed her head and fiddled with her hands. “And
only
you.”

“Maybe that’s not enough.”

“You promised it would be.”

I looked at her, unsure of what to say.

Suddenly, Jenna scooped up her phone and hit redial. “Hey,” she said a moment later. “It’s me. No, I’m all right, it’s just—look—this has to stop, OK? It’s gotten out of hand and I can’t do it anymore. No more calls, texting or emails. I’m sorry.” She hung up, looked at me. “OK?”

“Let me see the phone.” I held my hand out. Eventually she placed it in my palm and moved away. I checked the text history for Mysteryman2000 and found so many messages it would’ve taken me hours to read them all. I scrolled through a few, scanning them enough to get the gist, which was exactly what I’d thought it would be.

“It’s done,” she said. “It’s over.”

“Yeah,” I said, rising from the couch. “I think it just might be.”

“Charlie, please don’t do this. It was nothing, nothing at all.” She touched my arm, tenderly at first, and then harder, as if determined to hang on no matter what. “Don’t go.
Please
, don’t leave me all alone. We can’t make it without each other.”

I gently removed her hand from my arm. I’d never felt such pain in all my life. And this from my wife, my best friend, a woman with whom I’d spent the majority of my adult life, been through so much with, kicked a terrible habit with, built a home with and loved and trusted with my life. All I kept asking myself was how could she do such a thing? And why?

Even with the time that had passed since, it still didn’t seem real. But then, when you’re walking straight into Hell nothing ever does. You convince yourself it’s a nightmare and you grovel for temporary damnation, all the while still not really believing any of it. And then you start to burn and you realize there’s no turning back, no way out, no do-overs or prayers that will save you. It’s real.

And the night, beautiful slayer that it is, it survives too.

“
Read any good books lately?”

The harsh baritone came from my left and belonged to a grimy, disheveled old man who sounded as if he’d spent the better part of his life gargling crushed glass. He flopped onto the barstool next to me with the grace of mashed potato hitting pavement, stuffed an unlit, saliva-soaked cigar butt into the corner of his mouth and chomped away. I did my best to ignore both his question and the grotesque slurping sounds emanating from him, and signaled the bartender for a refill on my vodka on the rocks.

It was late afternoon when I’d gotten there. Dusk had already arrived and was becoming a cold and unforgiving winter night, and although I’d never been to this dreary little bar before, it seemed as good a place as any to escape the chill awhile. A tiny hole-in-the-wall tucked between a derelict three-story walkup and a boarded-over video store, it had no jukebox or dance floor, not even a TV above the bar, and catered to what appeared to be a limited clientele of grizzled regulars, including the man on the stool next to me who for some reason had interest in my reading habits.

The man asked his question again. “Read any good books lately?”

I offered an insincere but polite smile. “Not really, no.”

“Funny,” the man said, scratching at the gray stubble along the loose skin on his face, “took you for a reader.”

“I used to be. Lately, not so much.”

“Once a reader always a reader, that’s what I say.”

For the first time I really looked at him. Of average height and weight, he had big, wide-set gray eyes, a pug nose and a thin-lipped slit of a mouth that barely contained a set of huge false teeth. Clad in a long overcoat that was once a cream color but had since faded and stained its way closer to brown, a rumpled shirt, threadbare workpants and a pair of black, badly worn army boots, I put him somewhere in his middle to late sixties. His hands were outfitted with fingerless knit gloves, and he wore a classic (though filthy and tattered) navy blue captain’s hat with a black brim, gold cording and a worn patch of an anchor on the front. Sprigs of white hair jutted out from beneath his hat, which reminded me of Mabel and only added to the man’s somewhat menacingly comic appearance.

“Me, I like the classics.” He dug a paperback from his coat pocket and tossed it on the bar. “Ever read this one?”

I glanced down at a dog-eared copy of Dickens’
A Christmas Carol
and gave a nod. “Long time ago. When I was a kid.”

He gnawed on his cigar with a disturbing sucking sound. “Read it every Christmas. A gift to myself, you could say.”

I halfheartedly motioned to an old string of multicolored Christmas lights strung across the back of the bar. “Well, tis the season.”

He scooped some shelled peanuts from a bowl on the bar with thick, rough fingers, the nails longer than necessary and caked with dirt. “Name’s Payens,” he said, offering a hand. “Cap Payens.”

Thankfully, before we could shake, the bartender, a young guy with a perpetually startled look, showed up with my drink and a bottle of beer for my new friend. I thanked him, flipped a couple bucks on the bar and took a long swallow of vodka.

“How is it out there tonight, Cap?” the bartender asked.

The old man powered down some beer then belched loudly. “All kinds of cold, Dewey, all kinds of cold. Busy, too. Ain’t nobody walkin’. Night like this,
everybody
wants to ride, right…” he hesitated and motioned to me, waiting for me to say my name.

“Charlie.”

“Charlie. Right, Charlie?”

“Sure,” I said, eyeing the bartender for assistance.

“He’s a cabbie,” Dewey explained, as if this information might help.

“Been drivin’ cab forty years now,” Cap added.

I raised my glass in congratulations as Dewey slid down the bar to refill a gin and tonic for a middle-aged woman a few stools away.

“I know every inch of this city,” Cap said. “Every alley, every corner. City don’t have no secrets from me. Not one.”

“You sure about that?” I asked.

“I’m sure.” He swigged his beer then cracked open a peanut. “Gonna be a crazy night out there, Charlie. I can feel it.” He popped the peanut into his mouth without removing the cigar and chewed noisily. “Something about cold winter nights that’s kinda spooky anyway, don’t you think?”

“Spooky?”

“It’s a different world at night, especially in winter.”

“That much is true.”

“Better off getting under the covers and staying sleeping on a night like this. Can never be sure what’s out there in the cold.”

“Can never be sure what’s waiting on you once you’re asleep either.”

“Good point.” He tapped the cover of
A Christmas Carol
with his finger and grinned. “Like the book says
…‘
There are some upon this earth of yours, who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’
Think about it.”

“Will do.” I slid down off my stool.

“Need a ride?”

I gulped down the remainder of my drink. “All set thanks.”

He leaned closer and I could smell cigar smoke mixed with the pungent stench of bad breath. “You don’t wanna be walking this neighborhood at night.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Suit yourself.” He sat back and took another pull on his beer.

Just as I put a tip down, Dewey rejoined us. “Leaving so soon?”

“Afraid so. Goodnight.”

“I’ll see ya again,” Cap said.

I turned to leave. “You never know.”