The Deed (38 page)

“I didn’t call her a slut.”

“You suggested she had ulterior motives for sleeping with you,” his friend reminded him. “It’s exactly the same thing as accusing her of banging the football team. Don’t you read your manual?”

“Whatever,” said Jason.

J.D. grinned. He was smoking already, a habit he indulged only while drinking. “I’m telling you,” he said through an enigmatic haze, “if you call a woman insane, or a Communist, she’ll squint and look at you funny. But if you call her a
slut,
she’ll slap you. Why? Because the idea’s not strange to her. It’s one of the two things any woman will believe about herself.” He waited, but Jason didn’t bite. “The other one is that she’s fat.”

“Okay, can we drop this now?” grumbled Jason, amused nonetheless.

And more drinks came, and still more after that, and they sat there checking out the local talent and shooting the shit like lords. And when they got tired of picking at the shrimpiest shrimp at the bottom of the basket, they relocated to an old pinball machine near the front door. J.D. flavored the corner with clovey white smoke, and Jason pounded beers in desperate double time until he began to feel power welling up within him, until he caught the leading edge of a wild euphoria and rose above the thick buzz of the crowd. Slowly he began to dominate the gravity game, coaxing and cajoling the ball from bumper to bumper with divine authority, stoned and invincible.

Outside, the storm, having abated somewhat after the scene at Amanda’s place, had gathered new strength, and spirited gusts banged the flimsy screen door partway open and closed, open and closed, providing intermittent percussion for the analog bells and clanks of the old machine.

The slamming disturbed Jason every time, a recurring unexpected jolt that kept cutting through the welcome numbness. He could have stopped it with two steps and a hand motion, but didn’t dare consciously register the annoyance, for fear of breaking the spell of his buzz. And slowly, the escapist dream of the night started to unravel. He tried to watch J.D.’s ball pinging and knocking around like a legless questing beast, but the notion that his life was at some sort of crossroads, that his full attention was required for an important decision or two, kept freedom at bay.

Bang, went the door, again and again, contributing to his growing feeling of being trapped by everything in his life.

And the more Jason watched the pinball darting from the flippers, and shuttling madly between bumpers, the more it ate away at him, like a time-release capsule of angst. His earlier, heady joy began to drift into restlessness; he found himself second-guessing his own conversation with J.D., and even becoming exasperated by the inability of his friend’s slow drawl to keep up the pace. Slowly but surely, the slap-slamming of the door started to feel like a call to action, as if it were reminding him it was there if needed.

The moment came, finally, when J.D. was in the bathroom and the door slammed again, no louder but more poignant in the lull of activity, and Jason, drunk and determined, left a business card on the machine and staggered out.

Trading the weight of the crowded bar behind him for the clean, open air felt like shedding a skin. The storm pelted him in the face with everything it had as Jason cleared the building’s eaves and turned uptown. It felt fresh and inspiring, and Jason began to run, trailing glassy footprints in the pooling rain.

The memory brought no guilt with it. Jason knew his friend would understand, would in fact take the act as an expression of the closeness of their relationship—they did this crap to each other all the time.

The farther he got into the bottle, the better the tequila tasted. At first it was just medicine to be sneaked past the gag reflex, but as his mind numbed, it became first easier, then almost pleasurable. He smiled at the progression: wine with the lady, then beers with a pal, then the hard stuff, all by himself.

Amanda. It was becoming clear that neither of them would ever quite be able to trust the other. Did she honestly feel betrayed, or was she playing him—maybe testing his loyalty again? Both solutions seemed equally plausible; Occam’s razor had twin blades for extra smoothness. Either she was totally good or totally evil, and there was simply no way of knowing. Making decisions under these conditions seemed an article of faith parallel to believing in a divine being—the answer was all yes or all no, with eternity in the balance.

It was foolishness, this forbidden reaching for the Big Apple. He wondered how much the sperm backup had clouded his reasoning. Why
was
he here, really? Maybe now, with a clearer head, he’d be able to get up the mental scratch to solve the mystery.

This is the first place I ever bought pot,
he recalled with a little thrill of nostalgia. Actually, he’d been more of a bystander, visiting the city as a freshman under the wing of a few upperclassmen. They’d taken a cab to Bryant Park, having heard that was where you went, and had poured out of a taxi, all fearful and suburban, and the con artists had eaten them alive. Twenty dollars apiece for a tiny plastic bag of something just north of pizza topping.

A police car drifted slowly by, hydroplaning at the gutter’s edge, and Jason’s heart did a guilty little flip. He smiled; time was starting to play tricks on him. He decided to head back toward Times Square one last time and catch the subway home.
Maybe that’s why I keep looping in and out of this block,
he realized.
I keep forgetting I’m trying to get the hell out of here.

CHAMBERS STREET
, 2:12
A.M.

Jason awoke, sluggish and disoriented, to the hiss of the opening subway doors. Groping for comprehension, he opened his eyes and stared at the yawning doorway, sitting up with a start as he realized time had elapsed.
Can’t fall asleep,
he told himself.
That’s how nice boys wind up dead in the South Bronx.

Chambers Street,
he read on the post outside, as the doors slowly shushed closed.

A moment later he realized his error; he’d mistakenly hopped the southbound train. “Shit,” he croaked, and tried to rise, then sank back, an error of mechanics. He laughed at his own drunken ineptitude, and the train rolled into motion again, taking him farther south, away from his ever-receding bed. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Down, down, downtown. Jason was still quite loaded, he realized, as his turn in the seat to check out the wall map combined with the train’s acceleration to activate a dizziness that temporarily paralyzed him with nausea. Recovering, he dragged a guiding finger down the red line to the Chambers Street stop. Almost at the southern tip of the island; a few more stops and then the train would head all the way back uptown. Perfect. Sitting down again, he realized for the first time that he had the car to himself, a safety bonus, and he felt his eyes creeping closed again, trying to pull a fast one on him.

He tried to shake off the malaise, but already his body was shutting down nonvital functions.
So many blocks to go…no need to worry…

Looking beside him for inspiration, he found José in the next seat, the squat little bottle only a quarter full now but, having idealized its center of gravity, riding as proudly as if it had paid its own fare.

“Hey, buddy!” he smiled, patting its teeny little head.

A foul reek assaulted Jason’s nostrils, prying open his eyes. Clearly he’d fallen asleep again, because the car was partly filled with people: nose-pierced high-school kids, old rummies, and other night folk straight out of central casting.

How long had he slept? he wondered. There were no clues to be glimpsed out of the windows, no sound above the gentle hum and clack of steel wheels on an infinite rail, the groans of metal twisting around turns. He felt disoriented; he shook his head, but couldn’t clear the cobwebs.

The odor was unbearable. Directly across from his seat, a filthy homeless man sat buried in layers upon layers of shabby rags, slouched back in the seat but with chin on chest, asleep or in some sort of drunken stupor.

Catching a whiff of his own tequila breath, Jason spared a smirk for the irony, but continued staring intently at the slumbering man. What life events had brought this creature to this sad state? Jason had lived his life and arrived on one side of the car; the other had encountered vastly different circumstances, yet had somehow wound up a mirror image, right there across from him. He silently willed the filthy creature to lift its horrible head, so he could glimpse the face.

As if on cue, the man awoke, apparently, and slowly lifted his head with a broad smile, a stewbum’s nothing-to-lose leer. Jason was thunder-struck; his jaw literally unhinged and dropped open.

“Hello, son,” said the bum.

Jason forgot to breathe, choked back an unexpected sob.

“Dad?”

“Don’t use your brain, Jason,” his father warned, leaning forward. A fat lady eating an apple looked over with casual disdain, chewing slowly, her sagging ruby lips framing a slowly pulsing trash compactor. “If you use your brain,” his old man continued in a conspiratorial undertone, “I’m out of here. No choice in the matter.”

“I’m dreaming…?” said Jason, a question.

“Don’t finish that line of thought. Stare directly at the sun and you go blind.”

Jason grinned at the familiar cadence and tenor of his dad’s voice, willed his mind away from any thought that might disrupt this most excellent reverie. He fought to keep awareness itself at bay, content to live by whatever rules would keep this image before him. His father’s old eyes twinkled from deep inside that wrinkled mask; it was a wonderful bit of magic, and Jason had a sudden fear that the vision would collapse under the weight of its own improbability if he didn’t say something, anything.

“Where’s Mom?” he blurted out.

His dad shrugged. “She’s dead,” he replied. “Don’t be absurd.”

Jason smiled, still staring. “You, too, I guess.”

His dad chuckled a little. “Well, I’ve been better.” He fingered a silver-dollar-size hole in his filth-encrusted jeans. “Jesus, look at this getup.”

“I miss you something fierce,” said Jason.

His dad looked troubled, paused for what seemed an eternity before speaking. “On Albert Einstein’s deathbed,” he said, “he started speaking in his native German. Of course, the nurse couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and by the time she could run off and find someone who could translate, the great man was dead. Everyone went a bit nuts that the world’s greatest physicist’s last words were lost to history. But what did they think? That he’d suddenly sorted out superstring theory or invented the microwave? He was probably begging for a fresh bedpan.”