Bob swallowed. Good, actually good. He gave her a nod. In the old days he would have said something like,
Here’s looking at you, kid,
except then she’d be repeating it back to him, ad nauseum, for weeks, raising a Diet Coke to him in a toast, or as a salute when he was putting on a tie in front of the mirror, or as an overworked conversational comma to punctuate her babble. Another bite. Maybe if he ate enough of the steak she’d cut him a little slack on the eggs.
“… right before she began dating him,” Chrissie was saying, “I started noticing packages from
Sephora.com
. I mean, it never ceases to amaze me that there’s a generation that buys makeup online, but there you go.”
He swallowed again. A little too big of a bite, not quite enough chewing. The steak was right there, at the top of his throat, but it wasn’t going down. He tried to cough it up quietly, but that didn’t work, so he coughed harder. Except then he realized he couldn’t cough. She was looking at him quizzically: head cocked to the side so that half her chin lifted up from her hands. Maybe she had a puzzled look in her eyes, but, as her brow had been Botoxed out of commission, he couldn’t be sure.
The steak is caught in my throat,
he started to say, but then realized he couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe.
My airway is blocked!
he thought, amazed because he always thought of that happening in restaurants, seeing all those Heimlich maneuver notices on his way to the men’s room.
No, one good, really hard cough.
Bob brought his fist up to his mouth and almost stabbed himself with his fork, so he let it fall from his hand to clank on the plate. The hardest cough he could manage, but the cough wouldn’t come.
Look! Don’t you see I’m trying to cough up that fucking glob of steak, you stupid bitch?
Chrissie’s hands clutched the edge of the table and she said something brilliant like, “Huh?” Didn’t understand what was happening, because all she did was sit there, her jaw dropping as though she couldn’t believe her eyes. No, more like she was waiting for some terrible, shocking thing to happen as she watched the horror movie.
Bob banged his fist on the table, knocking over his juice glass. She started to look around for a napkin, so he banged it twice more to get her attention, then pointed to his throat.
Yes, yes, that’s right, I’m choking, you idiot, and I can’t breathe and obviously I can’t talk.
“Is something wrong?” she squeaked.
Oh my God, this is a goddamn nightmare
. No air, no air could get through. He’d always been one of those if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed-try-try-again types, but nothing he could do—
His chest felt like it was about to expand, but then it wouldn’t. Trying harder didn’t work.
Be calm. Don’t panic. Maybe try to inhale through my nose.
No. Nothing happened.
He could die. He could. He could actually die. He could choke to death and that moron was just sitting on her tub of a butt asking if something was wrong.
The Heimlich maneuver. He put his hands mid-torso and pushed to demonstrate. No reaction. Okay, maybe her jaw dropped a little more so she looked like the idiot she was. Desperately, he made a grand arc with his finger to tell her,
Come around here. Get off your ass and
… Pushing against the table, he managed to stand, although he was bent over, as if taking a bow. Then he mimed the Heimlich business again.
What do you need, you stupid twit? Written directions? Voice-over narration? How stupid are you that you can’t see that this is an emergency?
He’d show her. He swept his forearm across the table, knocking off plates and silverware, coffee cups and the steak and eggs. The stupid piece of parsley she put on practically everything that came to the table seemed to be in a universe with different gravity. It floated …
I’ll do it myself! Stay calm.
He’d read about it. If you’re alone and you find yourself choking, you do the Heimlich on yourself. But he couldn’t remember illustrations. The same: probably the same way. He pressed his hands against his diaphragm and pushed and pushed. Powerful arms, the guy in the gym told him once, seeming not to hold it against him that even after the free demonstration lesson Bob had decided against one-on-one training.
No. It wouldn’t come out. Nothing he could do … He was starting to feel … lack of oxygen. Woozy. Not faint, he wasn’t going to faint. And it was like getting punched over and over again, fear! fear! fear! as if his panic was a sadist attacking him.
Finally, she was getting up out of her chair, but like a movie in slo-mo. Maybe time was stretching, the way people say it does during a car accident. So Chrissie was finally getting it, and was actually moving, but it was like she was just a fucking fat turtle on two legs.
“I’ll call 911,” she said, as if she were saying something routine, like,
I’ll call my mother
. Now she was strolling—fucking ambling, goddamn it, as if browsing a sale at Bloomingdale’s—to the phone. What was she thinking? Didn’t she get that this was the biggest emergency ever? What did she want him to do, die?
Die? No. She loved him, which showed how dumb she was, because he’d fallen out of love … What did she have to gain by his death? Nothing. Freedom. What would she do with freedom? Who the hell would want her? No, ridiculous. But she was taking her time. He couldn’t see her face because the phone was on her stupid little bill-paying desk that she called
command central,
as if she were a person who could command anything.
Bob shook the table to get her attention but it barely moved. Not much sound. Swept everything off except her water bottle and the salt and pepper. Getting worse than woozy now. Hurry, bitch. She had nothing to gain by—
Aunt Beryl’s money. The last statement, bottom line. Three mil something. Can’t remember. He managed to grab the salt and pepper shakers, bang them together, and they made a dull, ceramic clonk. Clonk, clonk, clonk. Chrissie stank in a crisis, froze, but she did love him. Some things you just know.
She turned toward him with the last clonk. “You should see yourself,” she said. “Your face is a weird dark color.” She squinted. “Your lips are actually turning blue.”
What? What is this, some kind of deranged power play in which she shows she has the power of life and death? And then she’ll come running over and squeeze and then when I cough it out she’ll say something like,
This is to show you what it feels like when someone acts like they don’t give a shit about you.
Doesn’t she get it? I am dying
. Dying.
“Don’t worry,” Chrissie said, “I’m going to call 911 … the second you stop breathing.” She ran her hands over the lapels of her bathrobe as if they were the collar of a sable coat. “If this surprises you, it shouldn’t. Do you know you treat me like I’m nothing? How long I’ve hated you?” She asked it so casually, like,
Do you know how long it’s been since you got the car washed?
“Your contempt, your absolute contempt for me.” Strange, her voice wasn’t a screech, but lower, much lower than he’d ever heard it. “When we go out with
Times
people, you’re embarrassed by me.”
Then she gave him the finger. Standing there, three feet from the phone, sticking it up high.
“Did you think you were dealing with such an idiot that I didn’t see it? Or someone without feelings? I can’t tell you how many nights I prayed you’d get run over by the 34th Street bus.” He tried coughing again, but he couldn’t. “This is a gift from God, you bastard. Your birthday, my gift. Half the time you say something and I’m thinking,
Drop dead, you cheap fuck.”
She smiled, her face luminous. “And now you are!”
Last ounce of life. Bob lurched toward his wife knowing she was probably thinking,
He’s walking like Frankenstein,
but he was dizzy and his legs … his pants had turned to lead and every step … Lift the leg up, put it down, now the other leg.
“I tried so hard! And the harder I tried, doing new sex things, reading every single boring section of the
Times
and trying to make meaningful conversation, the more disgust I saw in you. But you never had the balls to leave me, did you? You know why, Mr. Hyena Breath? Because you knew nobody else would have you.”
He wasn’t going to make it over to her. So dizzy, and falling …
Bob fell over one of her Shaker chairs that she said went absolutely perfect with the Tuscan farmhouse look. The chair crashed to the travertine floor and he collapsed on top of it. A microsecond before his forehead banged onto the cold tile, his stomach and chest hit the back post. The force of his almost-dead weight against the wood was so violent that even as two ribs cracked, his torso was rammed in such a way that all the air in him was pushed up and out, along with Chrissie’s overdone steak.
She must have thought he was dead, or so close to it, because she turned her back to him and went to the phone. She was pressing the 9 and didn’t see Bob Geissendorfer take three breaths and put his hand over the big new lump on his forehead. Only when he began to rise, lifting himself off the floor with surprising ease, and emitted only a soft “ug” of effort—not a word precisely, but also not a sound made by a dead body—did Chrissie turn.
He was moving toward her, not lurching at all. In seconds he was beside her, grabbing the phone from her hand, slamming it back into its cradle. She took a step, a prelude to running from him, but his hands were already around her throat. “I’m going to kill you!” he blared, perhaps unnecessarily, as his thumbs began compressing her larynx. “Choke to death? You want to see choke to death? I’ll give you choke to death!” He thought of her vicious “Mr. Hyena Breath” and he bellowed, “Choke to death, fatso!”
The doorbell rang, but naturally in the heat of the moment neither Bob nor Chrissie heard it. He was too intent on strangling her and she was engaged, unsuccessfully, in trying to knee him in the testicles. Then she attempted something she must have seen on a self-defense segment of
Oprah
, putting her thumbs into his eyeballs, but he simply stretched out his arms further and continued to snuff out his wife’s life.
“Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you …” Chrissie and Bob stared, huge-eyed, at each other. Two voices moved from the front door toward the kitchen. His thumbs lost their strength and his hands fell to his sides. Chrissie took a step back and massaged her throat. Bob comforted the lump on his head with gentle pats. “Happy birthday, dear Dad …” Only one voice on the
Dad,
Jordana’s, and a moment later, she and her boyfriend Clark entered the kitchen, holding hands.
“Oh my God,” Jordana said, shaking her head so her long, dark blond hair fanned out prettily. Clark, his shirt open at the collar to afford a view of a triangle of hair of the sort found on black poodles, put his arm around her. She was gazing at the table and chairs and not at her parents. “What happened?”
“There was something slippery on the floor,” said Chrissie, “and Daddy got up for a second and—” Somehow she got out a giggle and in her squealiest voice went on: “—he started to slip and I ran over to catch him and—”
“We kind of knocked over the chair and then Mom landed on the table and most of the stuff went flying off.”
“Well,” Jordana said, “I’m glad everybody’s okay. Because here—” She rooted inside her pocketbook which, to Bob, looked like a tan leather laundry bag. He swallowed. His throat hurt. “—is your birthday gift. From both of us.”
Together, they handed him a wrapped gift … a book. People always got him books. He tore off the paper and, sure enough, it was that new book about the lives of ordinary Afghans in Kandahar province. He’d read half the review and decided that was more than enough, but now he’d have to read it and enthuse. His head hurt and he wanted to vomit. “Do you know, I’ve been dying to read this. The review was terrific. Thank you. Great gift.”
“And we have one other gift for you.” He glanced at Chrissie for a second. She was rubbing her fingers gently over her throat. She looked him straight in the eye and he turned back to his daughter. “Actually, this is a gift for both of you. I guess you can call it a gift.”
“I hope you’ll call it a gift,” Clark added. As always, Bob had to strain to hear what he was saying. Nobody else seemed to have that problem, but Clark spoke in some decibel range that was beyond Bob’s ability to decipher clearly. “It’s a gift to me.”
“We’re engaged!” Jordana announced.
Chrissie squealed with joy and ran over to embrace them. Now he had to go and kiss Jordana and offer Clark a manly handshake. Maybe grasp his shoulder too as they shook. That would show warmth, but kept Bob from actually having to give him a hug.
“This is the happiest news ever!” Chrissie declared.
As he took the three steps to them, he noticed the rest of the steak had bled all over the tile. Well, if you like gorillas, Clark was all right, and he was certifiably smart. Harvard undergrad and law school, yet egalitarian enough to get engaged to a girl from Swarthmore and NYU Law School.
The happiest news ever. Except now Bob could not kill his wife in cold blood, or indeed in any other fashion. They had a wedding to plan. Then James would be graduating. Then—who knew?—grandchildren. There was so much the Geissendorfers had to look forward to.
G
EOFFREY
B
ARTHOLOMEW
has tended bar at McSorley’s Old Ale House in Manhattan since 1972, when East 7th Street still resembled the setting of a noir novel. Upon publication, his 2001 volume
The McSorley Poems
became the best-selling poetry title at St. Mark’s Bookshop in Manhattan, and it still enjoys robust sales from behind the bar at McSorley’s. He is currently working on a memoir and a second volume of McSorley’s poems.
L
AWRENCE
B
LOCK
was born in Buffalo, New York, and first came to Manhattan with his father. In a whirlwind weekend they stayed at the Commodore Hotel, saw
Where’s Charlie?
on Broadway, went up to the top of the Empire State Building, and rode the Third Avenue El down to the Bowery. The year was 1948, and the future author, ten years old at the time, never got over it. He returned eight years later, and has lived in the borough ever since, but for brief sojourns in Ohio, Florida, and Brooklyn. The editor of
Manhattan Noir
and winner of many writing awards, he is nevertheless thrilled to share space in an anthology with Edith Wharton, Irwin Shaw, Stephen Crane, and Damon Runyon. His mother would be so proud …