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- Herausgeber: No Exit Press
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Times are tough for David Miller, a journalist for a second rate financial magazine who hates his boss, is tired of supporting his girlfriend's partying lifestyle, and recently lost his sister to cancer. But things are about to get much worse. When he loses his wallet in a neighborhood bar, he finds himself being blackmailed by junkies, lying to his family and friends, and stumbling into a crime that may cost him his life.
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For John Coles
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Copyright
1
Leaving the interviewwith Robert Lipton, the CEO of Byron Technologies, I wrote the lead to my article in my head:
After Byron Technologies’ dismal first half performance, analysts will search for signs of life in the company’s third quarter earnings report, but the bottom line could be the end of the line for this floundering tech start-up.
Actually, I could’ve gone either way on Byron. While the company had decent quarter-to-quarter revenue growth and showed increasing sales, their cash-burn rate was out of control and they were losing a ton of money. Lipton seemed like a good guy and I would’ve liked to write an article with a positive spin, but Jeff Sherman, the wonderful editor-in-chief ofManhattan Businessmagazine, had a rule—no more than three positive articles in a row. Since my last three articles had been favorable, this one had to be a bashing.
Waiting for the elevator on the twenty-ninth floor of the Seventh Avenue office building, I noticed a woman standing to my right. She was a few years younger than me, maybe thirty-two, with short, stylishly cut red hair and pale, lightly freckled skin. She had a slender, attractive build and was wearing a black designer business suit. Something about her appearance reminded me of my sister, Barbara.
I wasn’t planning on saying anything to the woman, but she caught me staring at her and I smiled instinctively. When she smiled back I said, “Hi, how’s it going?”
“Good,” she said. “Thanks.”
We both looked up at the digital numbers indicating the building’s floors. I continued to look over at her, still thinking about my sister. When we made eye contact again I said, “Long day, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said, blushing.
There was another awkward silence as I noticed that the ring finger on her left hand was bare. When she looked at me again I said, “Do you want to go for a drink?”
I wasn’t usually impulsive, and the question surprised me as much as it did her. She hesitated for a few seconds, sizing me up. I guess I didn’t look like a serial killer, because she said, “Okay. Sure.”
We got on the elevator together and talked some more. Her name was Heather. She was a marketing exec at an ad agency. When I told her I was a reporter forManhattan Businessshe seemed surprisingly interested, asking me a lot of questions about my job. We left the building and headed downtown on Seventh Avenue. It was starting to get dark.
“So where are we going?” Heather asked me.
“There’s this Scottish bar on Forty-fourth,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
We continued talking, mostly about our jobs. Our arms brushed a few times and she didn’t seem to mind. Waiting for a traffic light to change, we stood face-to-face for a few seconds. She had light blue eyes that went well with her hair. I decided she was Irish, or part Irish. I realized she looked nothing like my sister, who had dark, wavy hair and dark eyes like me.
The front of St. Andrews was smoky and noisy. It seemed like an office party was going on, because everyone was in business suits and seemed to know each other. We wove our way to the back and settled onto two available stools at the bar. A bartender wearing a dark-green-and-navy-plaid kilt took our drink order—a pint of Guinness for me, a bottle of Corona for her.
“So where’re you from?” Heather asked.
“Originally, Long Island,” I said. “You?”
“Westchester,” she said.
“Really. What part?”
“Ever heard of Hartsdale?”
“Sure,” I said. “I went to school with a couple guys from around there. You know Mike Goldberg?”
“No.”
“Stu Fox?”
“No.”
“Oh, well.”
The bartender brought our drinks. I gave him fifteen bucks and told him to keep the change.
I sipped my beer, then said, “You know what’s funny? When I first saw you, you reminded me of my sister.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but the thing is you look nothing like her.”
“I guess it’s just one of those things,” she said, smiling. She took a sip of beer, crossing her slender legs, then said, “So does your sister live in the city?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, no. I mean, she used to live in the city. She died fourteen months ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
I sipped my beer, realizing that my palms were sweaty.
“You know what I think?” she said. “I think when people die they stay with the people they loved for eternity.”
“You mean like ghosts?”
“Or spirits. Or just an energy. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as dying.”
“I like that idea,” I said.
We looked into each other’s eyes for a few seconds, then laughed nervously at the same time. I liked Heather and I could tell she liked me too.
We finished our beers and ordered another round. Over half an hour went by and the conversation was still lively. I didn’t want to hit on her too hard, but I also didn’t want to give her the idea I wasn’t interested. So at an appropriate time, after she said something funny and I laughed, I casually rested my right hand on her left leg. Right away I knew I’d blown it. She immediately crossed her legs, rotated away from me on her bar stool, and checked her watch. I tried to make more conversation, pretend nothing had happened, but she stopped talking. A few minutes later she said she had forgotten that her cousin was coming over to her apartment tonight and she had to meet her. I tried to talk her into staying, but she thanked me for the drinks and left the bar quickly.
Finishing my second pint alone, I felt like a moron. A nice girl like Heather probably dated guys ten times before sleeping with them, and I had started pawing at her like a horny teenager. If I’d just played it cool, maybe asked for her number or suggested meeting for lunch sometime, maybe it could have led to something.
I ordered another pint, feeling like even more of a jerk.
I had a deadline at twop.m.tomorrow for my article, but I wasn’t ready to leave the bar. As I was nursing my third Guinness, the drunk-looking guy with long, stringy brown hair who had sat on Heather’s vacated bar stool stuck out his big sweaty hand and said, “Eddie. Eddie Lomack.”
Normally I hated when drunks talked to me at bars, and I would have ignored Eddie, but my own good drunk feeling was starting to set in, so I had more patience than usual.
“David,” I said, without shaking his hand.
“David,” he said. “That’s a good name. Simple, anyway. Don’t gotta spell it out for people a lot.”
“That’s true,” I said, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.
“People don’t ask me to spell my name either,” Eddie slurred. “I just say my name’s Eddie and that’s good enough for them.” He laughed. “So what happened with that girl you were talkin’ to?”
“Girl?”
“The hot little redhead who was just here.”
“There was a hot little redhead here?”
“Come on, I saw you walk in together; then she got up and left. What the hell happened?”
“Oh,her,” I said. “She was late for an appointment.”
Eddie gave me a long, drunken stare, his eyes looking like they weren’t firm in their sockets, and then he said, “Late for an appointment, my ass. She ran out on you, didn’t she?”
“Let’s just say there was no love connection,” I said.
Eddie laughed, more than necessary. I shifted my stool away from him to avoid being hit by saliva, and then I looked at my half-full pint, deciding I’d leave as soon as it was gone.
“Who needs her?” Eddie said when he was through laughing. “You can do better than that, my man. Hey, you wanna see a picture of my girlfriend?”
Eddie leaned back, wobbling so much he almost fell off the stool. After he steadied himself, he reached into his pocket and took out his wallet. He opened it to a picture of a naked blond centerfold.
“Pretty good-lookin’, huh?” he said. Then he said, “Oh, and here’s my other girlfriend.”
He opened his wallet to a picture of another naked blonde.
I smiled and took another gulp of my beer; then I put the glass down on the bar, deciding that I’d had enough. I reached into my right pocket to leave a tip for the bartender when I realized my wallet was gone. I felt my other pockets, but the wallet wasn’t there either. I checked all my pockets again, then looked around on the floor near my bar stool.
“What’s wrong?” Eddie asked.
“I can’t find my wallet,” I said.
Eddie started looking around too as I stood up, feeling my pockets again. Then the realization set in that I had been pickpocketed. I suddenly felt hot all over and I became even more frantic.
One of the Scottish bartenders came over and asked me what was wrong.
“Somebody stole my wallet,” I said.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m sure!” I shouted.
Now other people nearby were looking over, and a couple of college-age guys started searching on the floor. Eddie was still looking around too, and then it hit me what had happened.
“Give me my wallet back,” I said to Eddie.
He gave me a drunken stare, then said, “The fuck you talkin’ about?”
“Come on, I know you took it,” I said, “or you were working with somebody who took it.” I looked around, but there was no one suspicious-looking nearby. I turned back to Eddie and said, “Give me my fucking wallet back.”
A big surly-looking guy with a blond crew cut and bulging muscles squeezed into a tight black T-shirt came over. I figured he was the bouncer. “There a problem here?” he said.
“Yeah, there’s a fuckin’ problem here,” I said. “This guy stole my wallet.”
“I didn’t steal nobody’s wallet,” Eddie said.
“He’s lying,” I said.
Eddie started taking things out of his pockets—his keys, change, crumpled up bills, his own wallet.
“See?” Eddie said. “Where do you think I got his wallet, up my ass?”
“Why do you think he took your wallet?” the bouncer said to me.
“Maybe he didn’t take it, but someone else did,” I said, “somebody he was working with. He was distracting me while his friend took my wallet.”
“I wasn’t distracting nobody,” Eddie said. “I was just sitting here, minding my own, then he starts screaming I took his wallet.”
“Did you see him with a friend in the bar?” the bouncer asked me.
“No, I didn’t see him,” I said, “but that’s what happened. Can’t you call the cops or something?”
Eddie stood up off his bar stool.
“Hey, enough’a this shit, all right?” he said. “I didn’t take your fuckin’ wallet.”
“Yes you did,” I said.
“You callin’ me a fuckin’ liar?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck you, asshole.”
I pushed Eddie, not hard, but hard enough to knock him back a few steps. But he was so drunk—or faking drunk—that he fell backward, knocking over the bar stool and spilling his beer onto the woman to his right. The woman’s boyfriend started shouting at Eddie, and the bouncer grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowd toward the front of the bar.
“What the hell’re you doing?” I said. “Let go of me.”
He didn’t let go until we were outside.
“The guy took my wallet,” I said, “I’m telling you.”
“I don’t give a shit about your wallet,” the bouncer said. “There’s no fightin’ in the bar. Now get the hell outta here ’fore I call the cops!”
The bouncer went back inside. A couple of seconds later Eddie came out. He looked at me, then headed away toward Sixth Avenue.
“Please,” I said, walking next to him, “I don’t want to fight with you, okay, and I don’t want to call the cops either—I just want my wallet back. You can keep the money, all right? I just want my credit cards and ID and everything else.”
Eddie stopped and turned to face me.
“For the last fuckin’ time, I don’t have your fuckin’ wallet,” he said, spraying spit in my face with eachFsound, “so just leave me the fuck alone.”
Watching Eddie walk away, I tried to decide what to do. I could call the cops on my cell phone, but by the time they came Eddie would be gone. Besides, from the position he’d been sitting, Eddie couldn’t have taken the wallet himself—his partner had to have taken it, and by now his partner was probably long gone.
Then there was the chance that I was wrong about Eddie altogether—that he’d had nothing to do with it.
I decided that calling the cops would be a waste of time. I’d spend the whole night filling out forms for nothing, because they wouldn’t make any effort to catch a pickpocket. I walked to the corner and checked the garbage can, figuring that the thief might have taken the cash and dumped everything else nearby. My wallet wasn’t in the top layer of garbage in any of the garbage cans around the intersection of Forty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. I walked around the block, checking other garbage cans, finding nothing. Finally, I decided it was hopeless. The pickpocket could have dumped my wallet down a sewer, or anywhere.
I only had forty-five cents on me, so I couldn’t take a bus or the subway. Walking home along Seventh Avenue, I took out my cell phone and got the numbers for my bank and credit card companies, and then I started closing my accounts.
2
During the half-hour-or-sowalk to my apartment on West Eighty-first Street, I froze my bank account and closed my credit card accounts, relieved to find out that nothing had been charged on any of my cards. I’d heard horror stories about identity theft, so later I’d have to call the credit bureaus and report that my wallet had been stolen. Then, tomorrow, I’d try to replace my more minor cards—Blockbuster, United Health Care, the New York Public Library, Duane Reade Dollar Rewards Club—and deal with the headache of replacing my Social Security card and driver’s license.
As usual, when I entered my apartment hip-hop music was blasting and the living room reeked of pot. I was slightly surprised, because Rebecca had said she was going to be out for the night.
“I’m home!” I called down the hallway, toward the bedroom, but I doubted she could hear me over the pulsing music.
I went into the narrow kitchen. There had been a six pack of Amstel in the fridge this morning, but now there was just an empty carton.
“Sorry, yo, we got thirsty.”
I looked over and saw Ray, one of Rebecca’s dancing friends, standing there, smiling by the entrance to the kitchen. Ray was a clean-cut Latino guy and he was dressed in tight pants and a tight, ribbed, Ricky Martin-style T-shirt, showing off his lean, ripped body. Rebecca claimed Ray was gay, but I hoped she was lying. If she left me for Ray or somebody else it would’ve solved a lot of problems.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I probably shouldn’t drink any more tonight anyway.”
“Youout partying?” Ray said, his eyes glassy from the pot he’d smoked. “Say it ain’t so.”
“I just had a couple beers,” I said.
“Still,” Ray said. “We should call Eyewitness News down here to do a story. David Miller gets fucked up—details at eleven.”
I was used to being the butt of jokes for Ray and Rebecca’s other friends; because I held a steady job and didn’t drink a lot or do drugs they treated me like I was Mr. Rogers.
As Ray laughed, I took out a carton of orange juice from the fridge and gulped some from the spout.
“Seriously,” Ray said, “sorry about the beer, yo, but we needed to get a buzz on for tonight. But don’t worry ’bout it—next time I come by I’ll bring you another sixer.”
Whenever Ray came over he drank my beer or ate food from the fridge and always promised to replace it, but never did. At this point it was like a running joke.
I was still guzzling orange juice when Rebecca sashayed into the kitchen. She was twenty-four, and there was no doubt she was hot. She had wavy brown hair that went halfway down her back, a fit, slender body, and small, doll-like features. Whenever people asked her what she did for a living she always answered, “I’m a modern dancer,” which used to impress me, until I saw her dance. A few weeks after we met, I went to a showcase that she and her friends were putting on at a space they rented out downtown, and I was surprised by how awkward and ungraceful she was. After that night, it became painful to hear her talk about her dancing, taking it so seriously, when I knew she was deluding herself. She blew off most of her dance classes and auditions, sleeping through the alarm clock, or just not bothering to show up. The only dancing she did on a regular basis was when she went out to clubs and partied with her friends four or five nights a week.
“I thought I heard your voice,” she said. “What up, yo?”
Rebecca was originally from Duncanville, Texas, then she lived in L.A. for several years before moving to New York. She had a faint Texas accent and spoke in Southern Californian, slash Manhattan, slash twenty-something “upspeak,” making the ends of most of her sentences sound like questions. She also used a lot of pseudo hip-hop slang, which most of the time sounded forced and stupid—a white girl from down south trying too hard to fit in in the big city. I used to think her style of speaking was cute; now, like a lot of other things about her, it just annoyed the hell out of me.
But, I had to admit, she looked especially hot tonight in skintight jeans, a pink halter top, and matching pink sandals. I had never seen the sandals before and I realized why my Visa card had a $124 charge on it from a purchase made this afternoon at Wheels of London, a shoe store on Eighth Street.
She came over and kissed me on the lips, slipping her studded-tongue into my mouth for a second or two. She tasted like a bong hit.
Then she pulled back and said, “How was your day, cutie?”
“All right,” I said.
“The business writer was out lettin’ his hair down tonight,” Ray said.
Rebecca looked at me with an intrigued smile. “Are youdrunk?”
“No, I just had a couple beers with the CEO I was interviewing.”
“Oh, how did that go?”
“It went okay,” I said. “I mean, I think I got all the information I need for my article.”
“Good, I’msohappy for you,” she said.
“So what’s this about a party tonight?” I asked.
“Oh, it was kind of a last-minute thing. Rachel told me about it this afternoon. Her manager’s friend is this, like, famous clothing designer or something? Anyway, he’s having this big party at this new club in Soho tonight—it should be slammin’. Wanna come?”
I knew she didn’t really want me to go—if she did I wouldn’t have had to basically invite myself—but I wouldn’t’ve gone if she begged me. When Rebecca and I first met and I was excited about dating her, I used to go out clubbing and barhopping with her and her friends all the time. It was fun the first couple of times—dressing up like an MTV groupie in FUBU jerseys, Snoop Dogg jeans, and other clothes Rebecca bought for me. But after a while I started feeling ridiculous—the old guy in his mid-thirties out with a bunch of kids in their early twenties—and Rebecca started going out without me.
“I’d love to,” I said, “but I have a deadline for tomorrow afternoon.”
“Blow it off,” Rebecca said, acting disappointed.
“Sorry, can’t,” I said.
“Well, I’m gonna miss you.” She kissed me again, making out with me for a few seconds. When she broke away she said to Ray, “Ready to go, cuz?”
“After you, baby,” Ray said, smiling widely as he put his arm around her waist.
As Rebecca was leaving the kitchen, I said, “By the way, your credit cards won’t work tonight.”
Rebecca stopped and turned around, suddenly panicked. “Why not?”
“I got pickpocketed.”
“You did?” she said, sounding more concerned about her credit cards than the fact that I had been robbed.
“Yeah, it must’ve happened in an elevator or something,” I said. “I thought I felt something, but when I realized what had happened it was too late—my wallet was gone.”
“That sucks,” Rebecca said, still probably thinking about her credit cards. “Did you call the police?”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Just to report it?”
“They won’t do anything.”
“You sure?”
“He’s right,” Ray said. “The police won’t do shit about a wallet.”
“So why won’tmycredit cards work?” she asked.
“Well, I had to close the accounts, didn’t I?” I said.
“I guess that was smart,” she said. “You think you can, like, lend me some money tonight?”
Lend, I thought. That was a good one.
“The only money I have is in the dresser in the bedroom,” I said. “I can’t get any more until I open my bank accounts tomorrow.”
Rebecca pouted. I wanted to say, “Too bad,” but I guess if I had the ability to turn her down I wouldn’t have let her have access to my money and credit cards in the first place.
“How much do you need?” I asked weakly.
“How much do you have?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty bucks.”
“That’sit?”
“Sorry.”
It felt good to put my foot down with Rebecca for once, but of course in this case it helped that I had no choice.
“Hey, I know,” Rebecca said, brightening. “You keep your Discover card in the top drawer of your dresser? So that card must still work, right?”
I’d forgotten about the Discover card. I rarely used it, but Rebecca had one in her name too.
“Yeah, it works,” I said.
“Slammin’!” Rebecca said. She started out of the kitchen with Ray, then turned back to me and said, “Hey, you sure you don’t want to come out with us?”
“Next time,” I said.
“I shouldn’t be hometoolate,” Rebecca said. “Two or three. I have my cell if you need me.”
“You meanmycell,” I said.
“What?” she asked, confused.
“Have a great time,” I said, smiling.
When Rebecca and Ray were gone I scavenged the fridge, eating some leftover burrito from the other night and a yogurt, and then I went to the alcove in the living room and booted up my computer. The Windows wallpaper came on—a picture of my sister Barbara and me, taken at Syracuse. She was a senior and I was a sophomore and we were in front of my dorm—me in jeans and an Orangemen basketball jersey and her in a Lands’ End sweater, a knapsack over one shoulder. She looked good in the picture, but it didn’t really do her justice. She had pale skin, but the picture made it ruddier, especially around her cheeks, and she must’ve been having a bad hair day, because her hair looked much frizzier than it really was. I tried to remember who had taken the picture—maybe Aunt Helen or a friend of Barbara’s—then I became distracted by the scent of Glow by J. Lo that Rebecca had left in her wake.
I opened a file in Word and worked on my article for a while, but I couldn’t concentrate, thinking about the last time I saw Barbara, at Sloan-Kettering.
“You can’t even look at me anymore,” she said. “I disgust you.”
She looked so awful—half-bald from the chemo, her skin ghostly gray. It was hard to believe the tumor in her brain had been discovered only three weeks earlier.
“What’re you talking about?” I said. “That’s crazy.”
“See? You can’t even look at me right now.”
I turned toward her, realizing she was crying.
“Come on, stop it,” I said, getting up to find her a tissue.
“Get the hell out of here!” she screamed. “Just go!”
“Calm down, I didn’t mean—”
“I hate you, you son of a bitch! Just get the fuck out of here!”
I started working again, writing a line I’d insert somewhere in the story about how Byron Technologies would likely have to seek equity financing later in the year, but I couldn’t focus, remembering the awful, hollow sounds the shovelfuls of dirt made against Barbara’s coffin. I had been in shock during the entire funeral, unable to cry or show any emotion, and for weeks afterward I remained in a zombielike state, unwilling to accept the fact that she was dead. I stopped showing up for my job as a technology reporter at theWall Street Journal, without giving any explanation. Eventually, the paper’s personnel department informed me that I had been terminated, but I didn’t care. I spent most of my time in bed, lying on the couch, or wandering the streets, confronted by memories of Barbara wherever I went. Just standing on a street corner would remind me of a time we had been on that corner, and I’d remember snippets of conversations we’d had, things we’d laughed about, and the memories would be so vivid that the idea that she was dead, that I couldn’t call her up on my cell phone or drop by her place to hang out, would seem incomprehensible.
I remembered one Saturday afternoon, taking one of my usual long, aimless walks through Central Park. The park had as many memories as the streets, but it was a beautiful, early spring day and I needed to get on with my life. I walked to the East Side, then back through the winding paths of the Ramble, exiting onto the wooden footbridge. I’d taken a picture of Barbara on the bridge once. Holding the camera vertically, I’d knelt, shooting up at Barbara, who was posing like a fashion model with a hand on one hip and her windblown hair pushed over to one side, her image perfectly framed by the midtown skyscrapers in the distance. I continued along the path adjacent to the West Drive, and stopped for a moment past the boat landing, where people were lounging on the grass, listening to a scruffy guy playing old folk songs on an acoustic guitar. During “Moon Shadow,” I remembered how Barbara had a few old, scratched-up Cat Stevens albums that I’d donated to a thrift shop with most of her other things. The memories were getting too painful, and I was about to leave when I spotted a girl on a blanket on the lawn.
The girl was wearing denim cutoffs and a red bikini top, her head tilted to the left slightly, toward the sun. She looked young, in her early twenties, and the way she was lounging, looking so relaxed and content, reminded me of all the afternoons Barbara and I had spent in the park.
I was going to walk away when the woman looked at me and smiled widely and waved. I thought it was cute—the way she seemed so spontaneous and comfortable with herself, like a child almost. I smiled, realizing it was probably the first time I’d smiled in days, or even weeks. I also realized that I needed someone else in my life, that I couldn’t take being alone anymore.
Without giving it any more thought, I approached the girl, figuring I’d say,Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? I knew it was a lame opening, but it had worked for me several times before, and besides, I wasn’t the type of guy who could think of great, spontaneous pickup lines.
But, as it turned out, I didn’t have to use any line, because the girl spoke to me first.
“Hi, I’m Rebecca.”
She smiled again, and I noticed the silver stud glistening on her tongue. I’d never understood why people pierced their tongues, or any other parts of their bodies other than their earlobes, but I had to admit there was something sexy about it. She also had wide, eager eyes and a friendly smile. I stared at her for a few seconds before I said, “Oh, I’m David,” and we started talking. The conversation wasn’t exactly riveting—we discussed how great the weather had been so far this spring, and how pretty the lake was—but I could tell she liked me. Then the scruffy guy finished “Moon Shadow” and started “Stairway to Heaven.”
“Nobody can play it like Jimmy Page,” I said.
“Who?” she asked.
Okay, so there was a generation gap, but there was something intriguing about her, and at least I wasn’t thinking about Barbara.
After a few minutes, she invited me to join her on her blanket. I happily accepted, and I tried my best to keep the conversation going. Every guy has a repertoire of a few stories that he uses in an attempt to woo women, and I was no exception. I told her about the trip Barbara and I had taken to Europe one summer during college, the time a frying pan started an oil fire in my kitchen and I barely got out of my apartment alive, about the boating accident that had killed my parents when I was five, and then I went on my usual rant about how crowded Central Park was getting and how Riverside Park was much hipper. After I was through with my monologue, my mouth dry from talking so much, she told me all about the trauma of her parents’ divorce and how she’d moved to California the summer after high school graduation. After living in L.A. for several years, trying to make it as a modern dancer, she moved to New York, and she was currently living on a friend’s couch in Brooklyn. Although, as I spoke, she said “wow” and “awesome” at appropriate times, I knew she was barely paying attention. I wasn’t offended, though, because I wasn’t really listening to her either. I guess we were at that awkward, beginning stage of a relationship when you’re too concerned with trying to impress the other person to really care about anything else.
I walked her out of the park, to the subway on Seventy-ninth, and asked her for her phone number. She wrote her number in eyeliner on my forearm, which I thought was cute and sexy. The next night we went out to dinner at the Cajun in Chelsea. Afterward, we went out to a club called Aria, which she obviously frequented, because all of the bouncers and bartenders called her “Becky.” We danced for a couple of hours, then went back to my place and had sex. She liked to take control in bed, getting on top and pinning me down hard, and I was also really turned on by the big dragonfly tattoo just above her ass.
Over the next couple of weeks, I didn’t obsess about Barbara as much, and I was able to live a normal, functional life again. I couldn’t get my job back at theJournal,so I started applying for other jobs, and tried to do some freelance work on the side. Rebecca and I went out sometimes, but most nights she just came over to my place, usually late in the evening or early in the morning, to have sex. Most of my past girlfriends had been conservative in bed, so it was refreshing to be with Rebecca, who loved to bite me and talk dirty. Once in a while, she tied me up to the bedposts and spanked me.
After we’d been seeing each other for about a month, the friend whose couch Rebecca had been crashing on lost her lease, leaving Rebecca with no place to live. Figuring that she and I were practically living together anyway, I suggested she move her things over to my place until she found another apartment. I made it clear to her that I couldn’t see us getting seriously involved, and she agreed that we were “just having fun.” As long as we both had the same minimal expectations, I figured I had nothing to worry about.
When we’d met, Rebecca was working part-time at a coffee bar in Soho. She got fired from her job after showing up late three mornings in a row—each time, she’d been wasted or had a hangover and slept through the alarm clock—so I started lending her money while she tried to find something else. We kept a tab of how much she owed me, but it was only a few hundred dollars, and I didn’t really care if she paid me back.
One night, after Rebecca and I had been living together for a few weeks or so, I took her out with me to a party at my friend Keith’s, a guy I knew from Syracuse. Keith and my other friends acted weird all night, and I figured they were just jealous because Rebecca was much better looking than their dates. About a week later, after work one night, I went to Ruby Foo’s on Broadway to meet Keith and Mike, another friend, for dinner. When I approached the table I was surprised to see Keith and Mike seated with several of my friends, some with their wives and girlfriends. It was June and my birthday was in October, so I knew this wasn’t a surprise party.
I joined them at the table and said, smiling, “Hey, what’s going on?”
Everyone was friendly, but no one would explain why they were all there.
“Come on, what’s this all about?” I asked.
People looked at each other, then turned to Keith for leadership. Keith stared at me for a few seconds, then said, “We’re worried about you, man.”
“Worried about what?” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“We don’t think Rebecca’s right for you,” he said.
I didn’t know what to do, so I smiled. Everybody else remained very serious.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said. “Why isn’t she right for me?”
“We think she’s dangerous,” Keith said.
I laughed. Rebecca was ditzy, shallow, a little on the wild side, but dangerous?
“Dangerous?” I said.
I looked at my friend Joe, who’d brought his wife, Sharon. Then I turned toward Phil, with his girlfriend, Jane, and looked over at Tom, and Stu, and Mark, and Rob, but no one would crack a smile.
“So what is this,” I said, “some kind of intervention?”
“We’re doing it for your own good, my brother,” Phil said.
Since Phil had gotten a job in the marketing department at Jive Records he had started calling everybody “my brother.”
“Look, I’m sorry if you guys didn’t hit it off with Rebecca,” I said, “but I really don’t think it’s any of your business.”
“She’s psycho,” Joe said.
“Psycho?” I said. “How is she psycho?”
“Didn’t you hear what she said to me the other night?” Sharon said.
I remembered how at the party Rebecca had had a few too many and had argued with Sharon, calling her “a dumb, ugly bitch.”
“So her drinking gets a little out of hand sometimes,” I said.
“She said she wanted to slit my throat,” Sharon said.
“She didn’t mean it,” I said. “Come on, you guys have never gotten drunk?”
I was looking in particular at Tom, infamous for drinking sixteen bottles of Rolling Rock one night freshman year.
“I saw her doing coke in the bathroom,” Keith said.
“So what’s a little coke?” I said. “Come on, Keith, man. I remember in college, you used to make runs into the city all the time for coke and ’shrooms.”
“That was the eighties,” Keith said, as if that explained everything.
“We’re doing this for your own good,” Mike said. “We think the girl’s got some serious problems and you’re gonna get hurt.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“You’re hiding from yourself emotionally,” Jane said.
Phil and Jane had been going out for about six months, and I barely knew her. She was going for her Ph.D. in psychology at the New School, so of course she thought she had all the answers.
“Oh, am I?” I said.
“You haven’t fully dealt with your emotions about your sister’s death,” she continued. “You’re only in this relationship with Rebecca because it’s a convenient place to hide. You’re very vulnerable right now, and you’re probably not even aware of what you’re doing.”
“You don’t even know me,” I said. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“Chill, my brother,” Phil said.
“I appreciate your concern,” I said to everyone, “but I think you’re all a bunch of assholes.”
I stormed out of the restaurant. The next day, Keith left a message for me at work, apologizing for organizing the intervention, but reminding me that it was for my own good. I didn’t bother returning the call.
Over the next couple of months, I fell out of touch with most of my friends, but I stayed with Rebecca. Freelancing wasn’t working out, and supporting Rebecca was seriously depleting my bank account, so when I was offered a job atManhattan Businessfor roughly half of what I’d been making at theJournal, I had no choice but to take it. Rebecca went about her routine—shopping during the day and going out with her friends at night, and I went about mine—working during the day and into the early evening, and hanging out in my apartment the rest of the time, or occasionally going to a movie alone. Once in a while, Rebecca and I went out to dinner together or hung out in the living room, watching TV, but otherwise the only times we saw each other were when we were having sex. Our romps became even wilder and more adventurous. Sometimes she left me tied up to the bedposts for hours while she went out shopping, and I often wound up with cuts and bruises.
Occasionally, after one of our early-morning sessions, Rebecca got very intense and melodramatic, telling me about how traumatic it was for her when her father left her mother—just packing up one day and leaving without any warning—and how she’d always been terrified of men abandoning her. Whenever Rebecca talked like this I couldn’t help feeling trapped. I knew that Rebecca and I had no future together, and I began to dread the inevitable day when I would tell her it was over.
Then, one night in bed, Rebecca started nibbling on my ear playfully and asked me if I could see the two of us getting married someday. Of course the answer was definitely no, but, caught off guard, I changed the subject. The next day, she didn’t mention marriage again, but I decided that things were starting to get a little too serious and it was time to call it quits.
When I came home from work, I told her there was something important we needed to discuss.
“What?” she asked.
In gym shorts and a sports bra, doing crunches on the living room floor, she looked especially hot. As usual, rap was blasting on the stereo.
When I turned down the throbbing music she said, “Hey, that was my boy Jay-Z.”
“Last night,” I said, trying to avoid eye contact, “you said something about us getting married.”
“Idid?” she said, acting surprised.
“Yeah, you did,” I said.
“That’s so funny, I was probably half-asleep.” She held up her head and chest off the floor, her face turning pink as she tightened her abs for several seconds, and then she relaxed.
“What I’m trying to say,” I said, “is at this point in my life I don’t think I’m really ready to—”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t mean it,” she said.
“You didn’t?”
“Of course not. Why would I want to be somebody’s wife?” She made the idea sound ridiculous.
“Oh,” I said, “because last night you—”
“You shouldn’t believe everything I tell you,” she said.
We continued to live together and nothing really changed. She went out to hip-hop clubs and bars at least a few nights a week and we hardly spent any time together. She made more passing comments about marriage—usually when she was drunk or on whatever drug was fashionable that week, but sometimes she was completely sober. Whenever I confronted her about it she always claimed that she didn’t remember saying it or that she didn’t really mean it.
Then, one night, I overheard Rebecca in the living room bragging to her friend Monique about how I was “a little puppy dog,” and how well she had trained me. She said she could get me to do anything, even paint her toenails, and she predicted that by next year we’d be engaged with a joint bank account and her name on the lease.
I felt like an idiot for letting Rebecca use me and take advantage of me for all of these months. When Monique left, I marched into the living room, prepared to tell Rebecca to move the hell out. But when I was about to speak, I imagined what it would be like if she left—I’d be alone again, wandering the streets.
Rebecca asked me what was wrong and I said, “Nothing. Coming to bed soon?” And a few days later I was ordering her credit cards in her name.
* * *
I typed the first sentence of my Byron Technologies article and continued outlining the rest of it. In the opening, I’d describe Robert Lipton, the CEO, as “desperate” and describe how he had “irresponsibly deceived investors by pursuing an unrealistic business plan.” Then I’d go on about how the company had been rapidly losing market share and was likely to file for Chapter Eleven by year’s end.
