Prelude to a Scream (3 page)

“I'm sorry I stared at you,” Stanley stammered, as he carefully set the glass back on the bar.

“I'm used to it,” the bartender said.

Stanley's eyes flashed up to the bartender, then quickly to the woman. They were both laughing. Stanley was mortified. When they saw the appalled expression on his face their laughter redoubled. Stanley looked back down at the bar, in rage and amazement. How could they possibly know he wasn't the kind of guy who'd go out to his car and return to shotgun the whole place for such an insult? Or, if he could break the rim of his glass just so, he could gouge the four eyes out of the two of them… But that would waste what remained of the whiskey. Better to finish it first. Revenge is best tasted cold. He set about sending an impulse to his hands, instructing them to quit shaking and raise the glass to his mouth.

A hand with finely boned fingers and unlacquered, long, neatly trimmed nails covered the two of his hands and the glass quivering between them. Stanley twitched like he'd received a kiss from an electric eel.

“Hey, Jack…” she said. “Take it easy.”

“Yeah,” began the bartender. “Relax, buddy.”

“I'll handle this,” she said firmly.

“Sure.” The bartender went away.

“The, the n-name …” His throat constricted his voice. He inhaled and exhaled before he managed to say, “The name is Stanley.” Even to him, his voice sounded as if it were coming through a wall.

“Stanley,” she said gently. Her touch suffused his entire being, depriving it of a quantum of tension as neatly and accurately as if his soul were a guitar string suddenly, with great precision, by her sure hand detuned an entire octave and stroked there, satisfyingly on pitch. He might have explained it, if he'd cared to, by admitting that this was the first time he'd heard a woman utter his Christian name in perhaps a year, or been touched for free in even longer a time. But he didn't care to. He hadn't wanted to explain anything for a long time.

The ring on her middle finger looked fake. It had a small, faceted stone, translucent green set with four tiny diamonds in yellow wire, very fine, very discreet. Still, after a half minute of looking at the finely boned ring finger and its mates, with the two sets of his own blunt digits beneath it, he found in himself the courage to look up and into the eyes of its owner.

Caged radium. A dappled pair of sunlit leaves beneath a darkening canopy. Tracers of uncorrupt light. “Stanley,” she said again.

The sound of his name calcified his rage into a single, tight-lipped, “What.”

“Lighten up, Stanley.”

“Yeah,” said the bartender, from down the bar.

Stanley shot him a glance.

The woman released his hand and pulled a twenty out of her jacket pocket. She showed it to the bartender. “Bring the man another drink.”

“On the house,” said the bartender, reaching for the quart of Bushmills. “It's about time I had a laugh in this morgue.”

She pushed the twenty across the plank. “I'll get the one after that, then. Won't you join us?”

“That's the nicest thing anybody's said to me all day.” The bartender upended a shotglass on the rubber-toothed mat in the gutter beyond the twenty and topped it.

“Here's to jokes at other people's expense,” he said, raising his shot.

“And all other mitigating traumas,” the woman added. She removed the straw from her drink and dropped it on the napkin.

The bartender hesitated, his glass halfway to his mouth. “A big vocabulary makes me paranoid,” he said.

“Let me rephrase.” She raised her Tom Collins.

The bartender waited. Stanley raised his glass, too.

“Whiskey river, take me down,” the woman said.

“And sure but a neater corrective was never issued by the State Department,” the bartender said. He threw back his shot.

Stanley did likewise.

Green Eyes had a healthy swallow of Tom Collins, and pushed the twenty a little further over the bar.

The bartender covered Stanley's ice with whiskey.

“Yours, too, if you like,” she said.

“I like,” said the bartender, who topped his own glass again and raised it. “Yours,” he indicated to Stanley.

His temerity, if not his eloquence, awakened by the whiskey, Stanley turned to Green Eyes and said, raising his glass, “May I remember your name tomorrow morning.”

“Frank,” said the bartender.

Stanley grimaced.

“Vivienne.” She smiled and touched her glass to his. “May you remember it five minutes from now.”

“No problem,” said the bartender, throwing back his shot.

“Any second name?” Stanley asked, emboldened by quip and the knowledge that the bartender's mouth was full.

“Carneval.”

“As in the Brazilian segue from fast to carnality?”

“Sí.”

“Or is it the other way around?”

She smiled. “Take your pick.”

“Spanish?”

“Portuguese and Swedish.”

Stanley was staring again. “Why does that turn me on?”

She stared back. “Which way is on?”

They drank.

The bartender was staring, too. “You can make another Tom Collins, now,” Stanley suggested.

The bartender blinked, as if saddened. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess my chestnuts is burning.”

“Christmas again already,” Stanley said. “Maybe this year they'll do a chestnut beer.”

“You could leave the bottle,” Vivienne suggested. “As a present.”

“You could pay for it,” the bartender replied, “as a matter of fact.”

“I did pay for it,” confirmed Ms. Carneval, indicating the twenty.

“What about the Tom Collins?”

“I'd rather switch than go into shock.”

“Hey,” said the bartender suspiciously. “Something wrong with it?”

“Nope,” she said. “Perfectly good drink for a fairy.”

“You ordered it.”

“I wasn't sure what kind of joint this was.”

“What kind of joint is it?”

“A regular joint. It reflects its clientele.”

“You got something against fairies?”

“Not so long as they buy me drinks.”

“Hey,” said Stanley.

“What about those chestnuts,” she said.

“What, you want some?” the bartender said. He moved down the bar without waiting for an answer.

Vivienne pushed the Tom Collins aside. “And bring me a glass. With ice.”

The bartender returned with the setup and went away with the remains of the Tom Collins and the twenty-dollar bill, leaving behind the half-empty quart of whiskey.

Stanley poured her a drink.

“What are you doing in this joint?” he asked, setting aside the bottle.

“Same as you, I'd guess. Having a drink where they don't know me.” She picked up her glass, touched it to his on the bar, and had a dainty sip.

Stanley suddenly became shy again. He'd neglected to realize that the bartender's contribution to the social equation had made things easier for him.

“They don't know me any place.”

“Yeah? So start fresh. What's your name?”

“Stanley. I told you.”

“No. Your last name.”

“Ahearn. Stanley Clarke Ahearn.”

“Why, that's the gentlest, most solid name I ever heard,” she said earnestly. “It sounds like a building standing all alone against a record number of snowflakes falling on Minneapolis at two o'clock in the morning a week after New Year's Eve.”

Stanley was so amazed by this remark that the smile it elicited from him hung between a grimace and a smirk.

“Plus or minus a little pollution,” he managed to mumble.

“They'll get it cleaned up,” she said. “They have to. Ever read Jonathan Schell's
Fate of the Earth?
”

“Oh, Christ,” said Stanley. “She's going to do the eco-dozens on me. Let's get this over with: No, I haven't read it. And I'm not going to read it. For the last three years I've done little beyond watch
Star Trek
reruns and drink this particular brand of whiskey and drive a delivery truck for a grocery wholesaler in Chinatown. I live alone and I like it that way. I have no friends. My only ecological requirement is that there always be a large bottle of aspirin in the glove compartment.”

“So demanding,” she said. “So forward-thinking.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I can't talk about
Star Trek
,”
she said. “I get vertigo in space, televised or not.”

“Maybe it's morning sickness.”

She shot him a fierce glance. “Mind your own fucking business.”

Stanley's jaw dropped a little.

“Sorry.”

She took a sip of whiskey larger than her previous one.

“Don't mention it.”

He sipped his whiskey, racking his brain for the conversational tag immediately preceding the subject of
morning sickness.

Suddenly compliant, his mind sent
televised space
scrolling across the foreground of his perception, like the sign above Times Square, big enough to read without glasses.

“I probably would get it, too,” Stanley ventured charily. “Vertigo in televised space, I mean. I've seen them all, every episode, and I can't remember a single damned one of them. Except for one time they have to go to Altair, see, and —.”

“So let's change the subject.”

“Well,” he began again. “I hear they're translating the King James Bible into Klingon.”

She straightened up, looked toward the back bar, then at him, then away again.

He smiled wanly. “So let's change the subject.”

In fact he remembered dozens of
Star Trek
episodes. The enormity of the lie squatted on the bar between them like a ruptured Tribble, enforcing an additional silence. Vivienne toyed with her drink without tasting it.

Stanley became uneasy. “So much for our first date,” he said at last.

“Hey, no pressure from me,” Vivienne said. “You want to look at your little round face in that little hexagonal pool of whiskey all night, help yourself.”

“The trouble is, it's a habit,” Stanley admitted morosely. “Habits are hard to break.”

“Especially for a lousy reason,” she added acidly.

Stanley nodded. “Especially for a lousy reason.”

She smiled, just a little.

“Is this becoming self-flagellant?”

“Pan-flagellant,” she said. Her tone hinted that she already knew all she needed to know about such habits.

“Married?” Stanley said abruptly.

“Not so's you'd notice.”

“Divorced?”

“That too. You?”

“Never married.”

“Really? How old are you?”

“Forty-seven.”

“How'd you miss the banana boat to bliss?”

“It left without me.”

“Either you're whining, or you're better off.”

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

Caged radium. He hadn't shaved. “Yeah?” he said. Turning away he tipped a little whiskey over his lower lip, staring over the glass held by both his hands.

“Yes,” she said. She ran a fingernail around the rim of her own glass. “It's an institution designed to eat you alive, husband, house, kids and all. It turns your mind into a La Brea tar baby. It turns your heart into a suppurating retaining wall. It turns your soul into a firefly in a jar. It turns… It turns…” Her voice stopped. After a moment she added, “I guess you could call me biased.”

Stanley shrugged. “First off, I wouldn't have to live with a husband. I'd have to live with a wife.”

“That's a good point. We girls got that strike against us. Right out of the box. As it were.”

“Second… I never took the chance.”

“Stop whining. You're better off.”

“Or maybe I should say…”

She finished it for him. “The chance never took you.”

He shook his head. “I never took the chance.”

“Like I said—.”

“I'm better off?”

To Stanley, who thought he must by now be somewhat drunk, the repartee sounded like the same old ping-pong.
Pock:
Husband this.
Pock-pock
… What wife?
Pock
… Had your chance.
Pock-pock
… You call that a chance?
Pock
… Anything beats waiting on tables.
Pock-pock-pock:
Except getting beat yourself.
Pock
… That's the truth.
Pock-pock-pock
… I was lucky to get out with all my teeth.
Pock
… That rough?
Pock-pock
…
All I ever did was darn his socks and wait for him to decide he had time to fuck me. What? You heard what I said. The guy must have been crazy. Drunk, mostly. He ignored you? Like an empty mailbox on a dirt road to nowhere. How existential. Nothing to shoot at, even. He never, ahm, he never made love to you. No, and he never fucked me, either. I find that very hard to believe—. So fuck me. Fucked you? Fuck me. Fuck you? Me. Here? Why not? What, in the toilet? That's right: why not? Can't I finish my drink first? You see? Fuck me, stupid. Why? Why not? I'm shy. So am I. Shy but desperate. Besides, I-I don't have a condom. What about—you don't even know me. I feel like I know you. A thousand years, right? That time on the Nile you poured wine into the pasta instead of olive oil? We were oxen together, with a common yoke. I don't know you, either. What's to know?
Pock
.…