The Best of Lucius Shepard (72 page)

The
Blue Lady fills with the late crowd. Among them a couple of older middle-age
who hold hands and kiss across their table; three young guys in Knicks gear;
two black men attired gangsta-style accompanying an overweight blonde in a dyed
fur wrap and a sequined cocktail dress (Roman damns them with a glare and makes
them wait for service.) Pineo and Mazurek are silently, soddenly drunk,
isolated from their surround, but the life of the bar seems to glide around
Bobby and Alicia, the juke box rocks with old Santana, Kinks, and Springsteen.
Alicia’s more relaxed than Bobby’s ever seen her. She’s kicked off her right
shoe again, shed her jacket, and though she nurses her drink, she seems to
become increasingly intoxicated, as if disclosing her past were having the
effect of a three-martini buzz.

“I
don’t think all men are assholes,” she says. “But New York men...maybe.”

“You’ve
dated them all, huh?” he asks.

“Most
of the acceptable ones, I have.”

“What
qualifies as acceptable in your eyes?”

Perhaps
he stresses “in your eyes” a bit much, makes the question too personal, because
her smile fades and she gives him a startled look. After the last strains of
“Glory Days” fade, during the comparative quiet between songs, she lays a hand
on his cheek, studies him, and says, less a question than a self-assurance,
“You wouldn’t treat me like that, would you?” And then, before Bobby can think
how he should respond, taken aback by what appears an invitation to step things
up, she adds, “It’s too bad,” and withdraws her hand.

“Why?”
he asks. “I mean I kinda figured we weren’t going to hook up, and I’m not
arguing. I’m just curious why you felt that way.”

“I
don’t know. Last night I wanted to. I guess I didn’t want to enough.”

“It’s
pretty unrealistic.” He grins. “Given the difference in our ages.”

“Bastard!”
She throws a mock punch. “Actually, I found the idea of a younger man
intriguing.”

“Yeah,
well. I’m not all that.”

“Nobody’s
‘all that,’ not until they’re with somebody who thinks they are.” She pretends
to check him out. “You might clean up pretty nice.”

“Excuse
me,” says a voice behind them. “Can I solicit an opinion?”

A
good-looking guy in his thirties wearing a suit and a loosened tie. his face an
exotic sharp-cheekboned mixture of African and Asian heritage. He’s very drunk,
weaving a little.

“My
girlfriend...okay?” He glances back and forth between them. I was supposed to
meet her down...”

“No
offense, but we’re having a conversation here,” Bobby says.

The
guy holds his hands up as if to show he means no harm and offers apology, but
then launches into a convoluted story about how he and his girlfriend missed
connections and then had an argument over the phone and he started drinking and
now he’s broke, fucked up, puzzled by everything. It sounds like the prelude to
a hustle, especially when the guy asks for a cigarette, but when they tell him
they don’t smoke, he does not—as might be expected—ask for money, but looks at
Bobby and says, “The way they treat us, man! What are we? Chopped liver?”

“Maybe
so,” says Bobby.

At
this the guy takes a step back and bugs his eyes. “You got any rye?” he says.
“I could use some rye.”

“Seriously,”
Bobby says to him, gesturing at Alicia. “We need to finish our talk.”

“Hey,”
the guy says. “Thanks for listening.”

Alone
again, the thread of the conversation broken, they sit for a long moment
without saying anything, then start to speak at the same time.

“You
first,” says Bobby.

“I
was just thinking....” She trails off. “Never mind. It’s not that important.”

He
knows she was on the verge of suggesting that they should get together, but
that once again the urge did not rise to the level of immediacy. Or maybe
there’s something else, an indefinable barrier separating them, something neither
one of them has tumbled to. He thinks this must be the case, because given her
history, and his own, it’s apparent neither of them has been discriminating in
the past. But she’s right, he decides—whatever’s happening between them is
simply not that important, and thus it’s not that important to understand.

She
smiles, an emblem of apology, and stares down into her drink. “Free Falling” by
Tom Petty is playing on the box, and some people behind them begin wailing
along with it, nearly drowning out the vocal.

“I
brought something for you,” Bobby says.

An
uneasy look. “From your work?”

“Yeah,
but this isn’t the same....”

“I
told you I didn’t want to see that kind of thing.”

“They’re
not just souvenirs,” he says. “If I seem messed up to you... and I’m sure I do.
I feel
messed up, anyway. But if I seem messed up, the things I take
from the pit, they’re kind of an explanation for....” He runs a hand through
his hair, frustrated by his inability to speak what’s on his mind. “I don’t
know why I want you to see this. I guess I’m hoping it’ll help you understand
something.”

“About
what?” she says, leery.

“About
me...or where I work. Or something. I haven’t been able to nail that down,
y’know. But I do want you to see it.”

Alicia’s
eyes slide away from him; she fits her gaze to the mirror behind the bar, its
too-perfect reflection of romance, sorrow, and drunken fun. “If that’s what you
want.”

Bobby
touches the half-shoe in his jacket pocket. The silk is cool to his fingers. He
imagines that he can feel its blueness. “It’s not a great thing to look at. I’m
not trying to freak you out, though. I think—”

She
snaps at him. “Just show it to me!”

He
sets the shoe beside her glass and for a second or two it’s like she doesn’t
notice it. Then she makes a sound in her throat. A single note, the human
equivalent of an ice cube
plinking
in a glass, bright and clear, and
puts a hand out as if to touch it. But she doesn’t touch it, not at first, just
leaves her hand hovering above the shoe. He can’t read her face, except for the
fact that she’s fixated on the thing. Her fingers trail along the scorched
margin of the silk, tracing the ragged line. “Oh, my god!” she says, all but
the glottal sound buried beneath a sudden surge in the music. Her hand closes
around the shoe, her head droops. It looks as if she’s in a trance, channeling
a feeling or some trace of memory. Her eyes glisten, and she’s so still, Bobby
wonders if what he’s done has injured her, if she was unstable and now he’s
pushed her over the edge. A minute passes, and she hasn’t moved. The juke box
falls silent, the chatter and laughter of the other patrons rise around them.

“Alicia?”

She
shakes her head, signaling either that she’s been robbed of the power to speak,
or is not interested in communicating.

“Are
you okay?” he asks.

She
says something he can’t hear, but he’s able to read her lips and knows the word
“god” was again involved. A tear escapes the corner of her eye, runs down her cheek,
and clings to her upper lip. It may be that the half-shoe impressed her, as it
has him, as being the perfect symbol, the absolute explanation of what they
have lost and what has survived, and this, its graphic potency, is what has
distressed her.

The
jukebox kicks in again, an old Stan Getz tune, and Bobby hears Pineo’s voice
bleating in argument, cursing bitterly; but he doesn’t look to see what’s
wrong. He’s captivated by Alicia’s face. Whatever pain or loss she’s feeling,
it has concentrated her meager portion of beauty and suffering, she’s shining,
the female hound of Wall Street thing she does with her cosmetics radiated out
of existence by a porcelain
Song of Bernadette
saintliness, the clean
lines of her neck and jaw suddenly pure and Periclean. It’s such a startling
transformation, he’s not sure it’s really happening. Drink’s to blame, or
there’s some other problem with his eyes. Life, according to his experience,
doesn’t provide this type of quintessential change. Thin, half-grown cats do not
of an instant gleam and grow sleek in their exotic simplicity like tiny gray
tigers. Small, tidy Cape Cod cottages do not because of any shift in weather,
no matter how glorious the light, glow resplendent and ornate like minor
Asiatic temples. Yet Alicia’s golden change is manifest. She’s beautiful. Even
the red membranous corners of her eyes, irritated by tears and city grit, seem
decorative, part of a subtle design, and when she turns to him, the entire new
delicacy of her features flowing toward him with the uncanny force of a visage
materializing from a beam of light, he feels imperiled by her nearness,
uncertain of her purpose. What can she now want of him? As she pulls his face
close to hers, lips parting, eyelids half-lowering, he is afraid a kiss may
kill him, either overpower him, a wave washing away a tiny scuttler on the
sand, or that the taste of her, a fraction of warm saliva resembling a speck of
crystal with a flavor of sweet acid, will react with his own common spittle to
synthesize a compound microweight of poison, a perfect solution to the
predicament of his mortality. But then another transformation, one almost as
drastic, and as her mouth finds his, he sees the young woman, vulnerable and
soft, giving and wanting, the childlike need and openness of her.

The
kiss lasts not long, but long enough to have a history, a progression from
contact to immersion, exploration to a mingling of tongues and gushing breath,
yet once their intimacy is completely achieved, the temperature dialed high, she
breaks from it and puts her mouth to his ear and whispers fiercely,
tremulously, “Thank you.... Thank you so much!” Then she’s standing, gathering
her purse, her briefcase, a regretful smile, and says, “I have to go.”

“Wait!”
He catches at her, but she fends him off.

“I’m
sorry,” she says. “But I have to.. .right now. I’m sorry.”

And
she goes, walking smartly toward the door, leaving him with no certainty of
conclusion, with his half-grown erection and his instantly catalogued memory of
the kiss surfacing to be examined and weighed, its tenderness and fragility to
be considered, its sexual intensity to be marked upon a scale, its meaning
surmised, and by the time he’s made these judgments, waking to the truth that
she has truly, unequivocally gone and deciding to run after her, she’s out the
door. By the time he reaches the door, shouldering it open, she’s twenty-five,
thirty feet down the sidewalk, stepping quickly between the parked cars and the
storefronts, passing a shadowed doorway, and he’s about to call out her name
when she moves into the light spilling from a coffee shop window and he notices
that her shoes are blue. Pale blue with a silky sheen, and of a shape that
appears identical to that of the half-shoe left on the bar. If, indeed, it was
left there. He can’t remember now. Did she take it? The question has a strange,
frightful value, born of a frightful suspicion that he cannot quite reject, and
for a moment he’s torn between the impulse to go after her and a desire to turn
back into the bar and look for the shoe. That, in the end, is what’s important.
To discover if she took the shoe, and if she did, then to fathom the act, to
decipher it. Was it done because she thought it a gift, or because she wanted
it so badly, maybe to satisfy some freaky neurotic demand, that she felt she
had to more-or-less steal it, get him confused with a kiss and bolt before he
realized it was missing? Or—and this is the notion that’s threatening to
possess him—was the shoe hers to begin with? Feeling foolish, yet not persuaded
he’s a fool, he watches her step off the curb at the next corner and cross the
street, dwindling and dwindling, becoming indistinct from other pedestrians. A
stream of traffic blocks off his view. Still toying with the idea of chasing
after her, he stands there for half a minute or so, wondering if he has
misinterpreted everything about her. A cold wind coils like a scarf about his
neck, and the wet pavement begins soaking into his sock through the hole in his
right boot. He squints at the poorly defined distance beyond the cross-street,
denies a last twinge of impulse, then yanks open the door of the Blue Lady. A
gust of talk and music seems to whirl past him from within, like the ghost of a
party leaving the scene, and he goes on inside, even though he knows in his
heart that the shoe is gone.