The Deed (37 page)

Honeycomb’s big: yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not small: no, no, no.

A moment later, parts perfectly machined by nature came together and the rest of the world fell away. The fit, the rhythm, where their smoothly straining faces ended up in relation to one another—everything was perfect. Amanda wrapped her legs around him and they rode the experience together, as if it were a physical thing between them.

And then, and then…

Her delicious moaning was building in intensity; the moment was approaching. Suddenly realizing the imminent danger, he whispered, “Amanda, we can’t…I don’t have…”

“Yes we can,” she purred. “It’s okay.”

The angel on his right shoulder wanted details, but the devil on his left launched his pitchfork and hit the whiny thing right at the base of its skull. The steady pulse of their horizontal dance transitioned into a berserker frenzy; they left their bodies and swam for the light more or less at the same time, and fell back down to earth entwined together, hair slick with sweat, hearts thundering, with real thunder clapping on and off outside the door like celestial aftershocks.

“Holy shit,” said Jason a few moments later, when the power of speech returned.

“Mmmm,” was all she could muster.

“Wow,” he reiterated. “We—”

“I know.”

“It was like a…”

“But then it…”

“That was really…something,” he finished, feeling delirious and stupid.

“Exactly,” she said, and they both laughed.

“I lost her,” said Vinnie, out of breath and dripping with the rain, clambering inside the car. He squeezed the door shut against the downpour. “Whoever she is, she’s good.”

“She’s back in the apartment, you numb fuck,” said Freddie. “She came back five minutes after you left.” Lightning flashed.

Vinnie looked bewildered. “I watched her drive away.”

“Well, she’s here,” said Freddie, profoundly irritated, reclining in the passenger seat. “Nice work, Sherlock. Just take the first watch; wake me up if you see either one of ’em. Don’t take your eyes off that door or it’s your ass.”

A moment of silence, then, “Can’t we get some doughnuts or something?”

Freddie ignored him, closing his eyes and folding his arms in front of his chest, a position that naturally placed one hand an inch from his shoulder holster.

Vinnie rubbed his black eye, still swollen, and turned and stared longingly out through his rain-drizzled window at the apartment entrance, the standard-issue iron-girded concrete stairway spilling straight down from big oak doors.

“People gotta eat,” he mumbled, not quite loud enough to be heard.

Jason and Amanda lay side by side on their backs, bodies cooling under a single sheet, his right foot thrown possessively over her left to maintain the link.

“You probably want a couple of cigarettes,” he said.

She shook her head. “No, don’t get up. Don’t go anywhere.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he reassured her, and gave her ear a little bite. For a while they lay quietly, listening to the rain on the porch, smelling the breeze.

“You never did explain that bit with the cigarettes,” he reminded her. “Breaking one in half every time you smoke. That’s about trying to quit, right?”

“Nope,” she said. “Good guess, though.”

Jason waited, but she remained silent. He rolled toward her. “You’re really not going to tell me?”

“Maybe someday,” she said playfully.

“That’s cold.”

“It has to do with my last boyfriend—my only boyfriend, if we’re going to be brutally honest here. I needed to get some control back in my life.”

He watched the ceiling for a few moments as a sideways gust scattered a sheet of spray across the bedroom window like a drum roll. “I don’t get it.”

“It’s not important.”

“You’ve really had only one boyfriend?”

“That’s right,” she replied. “Why, how many have you had?”

He gently brushed a wisp of hair away from her forehead and turned to look out the window with a sigh. “I’ve never had a boyfriend,” he said wistfully.

“Hardy, har har.”

He cast his mind back. “Well, it’s been a long time, that’s for sure. I went through a big one-night-stand phase after my parents died. Nobody serious since then.”

Amanda didn’t reply, and he felt compelled to continue; her serene silences had an odd way of driving him to dig deeper. “When I look back now,” he confessed carefully, “everything I’ve done seems designed to sort of freeze things, kind of—keep everything just the way it was when they died.”

Still she held her silence, and he considered his words; this was new ground for him. “I don’t mean not moving the stuff out of their closets. I mean…committing myself to anything. Seriously, I can’t even hold down a hobby; I just lose the fascination with whatever it is after a couple of months and try something else.” He paused, rolled toward her again, demanding a response.

She frowned. “Not very encouraging for me, is it?”

He nodded soberly; no point in denial. “Well, at least I’m talking about it,” he replied. “
That’s
new.”

She returned his little display of affection, running a fingertip across his forehead. “It means a lot to me,” she said.

At a loss for words, he kissed her again, and she responded passionately. His heart was soaring; it felt as if they’d been together for ages.

They made out like crazed teenagers for a luxurious fifteen or twenty minutes, punctuated with occasional bits of conversation. He was in existential heaven, marooned on this strange island of an apartment with Amanda, his past happily dissolving behind him, the future bright, if still out of focus. Past experience made him leery of rocking the boat unnecessarily, but one thing bothered him enough to override his weak internal-warning system.

“You are on the pill, right?” he said warily, in a lull. “Please tell me I didn’t misread that signal back there.”

“Yes, my little worrywart.” She smiled warmly.

At this Jason relaxed a little. “Cool. So just out of curiosity, what turned the corner for you tonight?”

A frown. “The corner?”

“Why did you finally succumb to my many and obvious charms?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, simultaneously shaking her head and shrugging in a complex, exasperated little move. “I guess I just felt ready. Is that so strange?”

Jason shook his head. “No, it’s
fantastic,
obviously. It’s just that…well, you’ve been sending pretty clear signals that you’re not interested in me for a week, and now here we are. It’s just funny how it’s all working out at once—the pieces starting to come together on the deed, you coming around…what’s the matter?”

He’d felt, rather than seen, her posture stiffen; her eyes locked on his with an almost audible click. In a heartbeat, the dreamy postcoital stupor was gone; he’d misstepped somehow.

“I’m just wondering what you’re implying, exactly.” she said curtly.

“Nothing,” he offered lamely; the mood was slipping away fast. “I’m not implying anything. I’m just—”

Amanda sat up abruptly, setting up a defensive position, and he had no choice but to mirror the motion. “Well, if you’re afraid to put it into words, I will,” she offered helpfully. “You think I’m sleeping with you just to make sure you’ll stay with me, now that there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.”

“That is ridiculous,” he said, and meant it. “Weren’t you here when there was all this mind-blowing sex going on? Weren’t we
connecting?
” Confusion and despair wrestled for his soul; he wanted badly to brush this aside, or at least distract her—
Hey, look out the window—isn’t that the Goodyear blimp?
But he had zero skills for extricating himself from this sort of thing; in fact, his argumentative nature nearly always found a way to make things worse.

“But the thought’s occurred to you,” she pressed. “That I’d have sex with you to make sure you stayed interested—to reaffirm our partnership.”

Of course it had—but was honesty the best policy here? Suddenly there were mines all around him; he couldn’t even backtrack without blowing off toes. And that moment’s hesitation damned him; Amanda rolled her eyes and leaned back on her hands.

“I cannot
friggin’
believe this,” she said, leaving her mouth hanging half open.

“Yes, okay, I’ve
thought
of it,” he confessed, aggressive now, starting to care more about truth than consequences. “I look at everything from every possible angle. That’s who I am. But it doesn’t mean I
believe
it.”

“So just how long have you been sitting there wondering whether or not I would fuck you just to make sure you stayed in the game?”

“Amanda, whoa! That’s
not
what I—”

“That’s why you asked about the birth control, isn’t it? Were you worried I might want to produce a little descendant of my own?”

It was all unraveling now, but there was no way he was letting her get away with this one. “Amanda, you are completely off the deep end here,” he affirmed. “You’re being paranoid and”—there was no way to soften it—“ridiculous.”

“Oh, my God,” she wailed, falling backward onto the futon from her seated position. “I’m actually doing it again. You’re just like every guy I’ve ever met.”

“I absolutely am not. Amanda—”

“No, Jason. I just want to ask you the same question you asked me. Why do
you
think I had sex with you tonight?”

He paused, weary and dejected, the adrenaline starting to wear off. “I don’t know, Amanda. You’ve been treating me like…like I’m gay or something, for a week, and only after I sort of ‘prove my loyalty to the quest’…”

Her shove, when it came, took him wholly by surprise; he rolled all the way off the futon and onto the floor with a tiny thump. “Amanda, what the—?”

“Just get the hell out,” she ordered, livid and raving, eyes brimming with hot tears. “Go!”

The storm continued to pour out its dazzling fury, sandblasting the sidewalks in a shower of glassy sparks. Rain pounded the already raging gutter streams, glittered brightly in the steam of reflected headlights that discreetly hazed the gaudy lights of Broadway. Great rolling booms echoed up and down the avenues and ricocheted across the short blocks of Midtown, where skyscraper walls bound the streets into sonic canyons. White lightning, in jagged freeze-frame, split the heavens again and again, just a half step ahead of its thunder now, backlighting the deluge in momentary splendor. The rain seemed relentless and infinite, incapable of slackening, as if the city were caught in the tidal embrace of a jealous moon bent on scouring away all Times Square’s ancient sins in one terrific night.

A few bedraggled passersby still scampered across the streets, heads bent into the gale, or hustled between points of cheap shelter along the sidewalks, pulling themselves uptown or downtown awning by awning. The city traffic pulsed slowly in and out with the dumb cycle of impervious streetlights. Maimed umbrellas littered the slick, ghost-town streets in wretched skeletal heaps, a cold trail of yuppie spoor.

Jason stared straight up into a curious infinity of falling droplets, white with reflected light, starbursting in perfect symmetry around the vertical axis. Then he tore his gaze away, so as not to fall; he was running as fast as his heaving lungs and the tequila bottle cradled in one drenched arm would allow.

A headlong race up Broadway, splashing amphibiously through flooded low spots, cackling at the anarchy of it all. He was soaked and exuberant and drunk as an ox, and though his leg hurt as if the thighbone itself had popped out through the flesh to say hi, he no longer remembered or cared where he’d logged the injury. As if on cue, he tripped awkwardly over a curb located exactly where you’d expect a curb to be and fell heavily, skidding on the wet concrete.

His hair an unwrung mop drizzling icy rivers into his ears and eyes, wet clothes plastered to his freezing body, Jason rose and took inventory: The bottle was fine. He staggered forward a step or two, found his rhythm, and began running again. The downpour was more than welcome, if only for its ability to drown out so much else; he drank it in with cartoonishly outstretched arms.
Sweet, sweet water: the universal solvent.
He wanted to wallow in this pickling process, this self-preservation, and to that end he clutched the Cuervo, already half its weight. And the night so very young…

The current window of lucidity had opened with a crystal moment a half hour earlier, four blocks south, at 38th Street. Jason had heard the strange, undeniable peal of a bell singing out from high atop the Herald Square war monument, a bright, unexpected bit of whimsy instantly demolished by a startling crack of thunder. It was then that he first realized he was running, and adjusted his flight so as to head at least in the general direction of home, in case the next waking blackout came.

It had been a long time, a year or more, since Jason had drunk alone, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever been quite
this
wasted. He tried to force his brain to remember the right way to end it: aspirin and water, bucket by the nightstand, a spread-eagle sleeping pose to pin the diabolically spinning bed. And the morning after: pain, nausea, and that odd disassociated hangover guilt.

But God, it felt good the night before. Already the passion and the frenzy of the past week—Amanda’s bitchy self-righteousness, the humiliation, all of it, the sheer waste of freaking
time
his life seemed intent on devolving into—was slipping into delirious, who-gives-a-fuck oblivion. All that remained of him now was this urge to erase himself, to let this truly remarkable once-in-a-century rain scrub him from the face of the planet.

Jason’s perilously thudding heart hauled in the reins at last at 42nd and Broadway, Times Square proper. Thoroughly winded, he collapsed against a streetlamp and took in the visuals, marveling that he had managed to end up here, at the very heart and groin of the city, as if drawn by cultural gravitational attraction.

He recalled catching a cab away from Amanda’s place, out of the female-friendly Upper East Side and into the welcoming sunset of the Wild Wild Upper West. Remembered ringing up friends in unsuccessful bids for companionship, then coercing J.D. at last, the easy mark, into some cocktails. Ditching him mercilessly when they’d both become too drunk for anything but more drinking.

All this running, though, was a mystery. Toward something or from? He couldn’t remember. It seemed important to know, a puny polar dilemma any three-year-old in similar straits could solve. Yet memory failed him.

“It is to laugh,” he panted thickly, and he did laugh, long and hard, sincerely. Life was simple again, finally.

His eyes were drawn upward to One Times Square’s slowly revolving neon news ticker.
ESCAPED FEDERAL PRISONERS STILL ON THE LOOSE
,
SAYS FBI
…
SIXERS UPEND KNICKS,
79–68…
U.S. MINT TO PLAN NEW QUARTER
…

Then lightning blazed once more over Sodom, seeming fainter here when viewed through the jungle of neon, and Jason took another swig of firewater, swaggering invincibly across the street, through the unrelenting torrent.

He found a surviving porn movie house and stepped under its welcome awning, reveling to find himself in a dry cube surrounded by a showery curtain. He looked around at the signage in the dim light. The old playhouse was currently featuring
Scamlet, Titties Andronica,
and—a nightcap—
The Shaming of the True.
An intellectual spot, then, perfect for a quick picnic. Angry droplets pinged impotently on the metallic rooflet as Jason shook his hair dry and treated himself to another pull-grimace-shiver from the tequila. He sat down by the wall, ass landing harder than expected.

His mind went back to a night during his first week of college, when he’d gotten so spectacularly wasted that he’d passed out on a sheetless laundry-day mattress and not regained consciousness until noon the following day, awash in a stew of his own vomit. The rude awakening had terrified and fascinated him.
That
close to death, he remembered, pinching an invisible marble. He’d walked out of his room invigorated, a conquering hero.

“Fuck
you!
” he shouted aloud to the mostly empty street.

Amanda’s freak-out, the stress of the last week…it had all fermented, ounce by ounce, block by block, into a shimmering rage.

Women have an awesome, spellbinding magic, he conceded, one of the truly great motive forces on the planet.
Look at what this one girl, dimly glimpsed, has made me think and do and become in the course of a week,
he reminded himself.
I quit my fucking job, for starters.
Not because he thought he’d inherit New York, but because he wanted to set up camp in her pants.

What a house of cards.

Jason took another slug of tequila and dug deeper. Was he being honest with himself? Fact is, he really
had
thought he might inherit New York. Seemed like there was a possibility, anyway. She’d sidled right through his defenses, brought him to the brink of buying her whole curious tale. Why had he allowed himself to believe his life would be anything but ordinary? That she’d converted his cynicism so quickly was amazing. Almost made you want to take a hacksaw to your balls so you could fucking think straight.

“Am I insane?” he asked aloud, and the sound of his own gravelly voice amid a percussive chorus of raindrops seemed to shift the question disturbingly away from the rhetorical.

The thunder roared, low and long, but the imperfect echo of the overhang gave it a cheap, hollow ring—it was not the wrath of the plague-raising, temple-toppling god of Moses, but that of an impotent post-Biblical God, a drooling, retarded God armed with a handful of crappy parlor tricks, growing ever more irrelevant with each passing year.

From his perch, Jason could still see the news ticker through the rain, a more oblique angle now.
NATHAN HALE GRAVESITE DISTURBED BY TEEN VANDALS
…”

The New Year’s Eve ball drops from the top of this building,
he remembered. Near midnight on any December 31, this area would be wall-to-wall drunken revelers, literally tens of
thousands
of them, from all over the globe, massing around the square like lemmings. Every year,
on
the year; a farsighted, slow-moving race of aliens could set their cosmic watch by it. Times Square was one of the few places on earth where you could actually look a fair distance into the future or past and accurately predict the scene.

It was something like being in an early prototype for a time machine. And while he still wasn’t sure how or why he had come here, Jason recalled, suddenly, that he’d just been swigging tequila and wandering in and out of Times Square all night, returning to the mecca of sensory lust whenever he strayed too far into its dark and dirty backstreets. For all its showiness, this was in fact a dangerous neighborhood, Disney or no Disney, but he didn’t care. He was waiting for something—anything, really—to happen.

BRYANT PARK
, 1:00
A.M.

He stood spread-eagled against a twelve-foot chain-link fence, fingers hooked through the links as if preparing to be frisked and cuffed, eyes staring upward and blinking into the rain. Bryant Park was sealed off for renovations, as it had been for many months; but here had once stood the Croton Reservoir, a fortress of water that had also held, if his and Amanda’s reasoning was correct, his deed, and the fact that he’d run across it in his drunken wanderings had to be significant. Didn’t it?

He wondered what was to stop him, apart from the nausea of course, from scaling this fence. Nobody could possibly be watching. Could he in fact wander around inside, root around in piles of unearthed dirt and rock, see if the renovation had
just happened
to unearth some crusty ancient chest?

But he knew, looking up, that he didn’t have the strength left for the fence. Even if he did somehow scrabble his way to the top, he reasoned, he’d probably snag his crotch on the way over and get stuck, dangling there by his bleeding nuts until the rescue crew could overcome their hilarity long enough to bring him down.

He tried to superimpose the mental picture he’d copied from Amanda’s book onto the empty park block. The Croton Reservoir had been a square stone monolith, only a story high and slanting gently inward and upward on all sides, like the base of an eventual pyramid, containing all the water for the city. At the other end of the block, the part facing 5th Avenue, they’d later built the New York Public Library, and he knew the library had miles and miles of stacks underground that extended all across Bryant Park, under his very feet. Any chance the foundations of the reservoir had been incorporated into the library’s underground walls?

But no,
he reminded himself,
this is foolishness; the deed’s moved on from here, if it ever was here.
His brain was too muddled to work properly; he threw in the towel with another long pull from the tequila bottle. It was starting to feel distinctly foolish, this drinking and wandering around in the rain, but he held on to the bottle, just the same.

Jason continued west on 40th Street and was just rounding the corner to head up 6th Avenue when the nausea that had been shadowing him all night overtook him at last. Immediately on his right he saw a cute little stone atrium inset into the wall, as if set there by God himself for just this dark purpose, and he leaned gratefully over it, freely donating the contents of his stomach.
Whatever else happens tonight,
he promised himself, wiping his lip,
no more of this running shit.
He looked at the disgraceful mulligatawny he’d left behind, already thinning in the ceaseless downpour, and let his eyes glaze out of focus.

“Well, whatever else happens,” J.D. had drawled, “at least you nailed her. No one can ever take that away.”

“I don’t get it,” said Jason, dipping a shrimp, a half beer hovering expectantly in the other hand. “Why do you always have to watch what you say? I mean, isn’t that the point, to try to find a girl you don’t have to be on your guard with?”

J.D. shrugged. “Well, you
did
call her a slut. Women don’t take that shit lightly.”