Via Dolorosa (33 page)

When Nick returned to the table, he found the pinot
gris
almost gone. Isabella and Emma were laughing again, as if nothing had ever happened. Maybe nothing had. Was this all a dream? In unison, both women looked up at him and followed him with their eyes as he entered and sat across from them. In the brief time he’d been in the bathroom, he could see that the alcohol had lifted Emma to a different place; she looked flushed and only half there, while trying at the same time to be overtly alert to her surroundings. Her eyes continued to alternate between too wide to squinty.

“You don’t want to sit on this side of the table with us, Nicholas?” Isabella asked. “Do you not like us anymore? Or are you just sitting there to protect us in case those horrible beasts come back?”

“Man is a horrible beast,” Emma said.

Isabella cheered the comment. “Your wife is such a smart woman, Nicholas. Do you love her?”

He felt his eyes alternate between the two.

“Yes,” Isabella said. “Don’t answer that. I have a gun in my car outside, Nicholas. It’s in the compartment under the dashboard.”

“That’s nice,” he said.

“I don’t know what kind it is, as I’m not too familiar with guns, but I know that it shoots, and I would think that would be enough to know about a gun.”

“Jesus…”

“Would you like me to get it for you? Then you can go out into the street and shoot those three men. Boom-boom-boom. We can even swim to their boat and wait for them to come aboard, if you’d like. We can shoot them right on their boat then dump their bodies into the sound. No one will be the wiser.”

“We ordered another bottle,” Emma said. It was as though she hadn’t heard a word Isabella had just said.

“Of course, after time,” Isabella went on, “we’d probably begin to distrust each other, too. Murder, inherently, is not a group effort. And that can be very dangerous. I wouldn’t want to keep looking over my shoulder at you, Nicholas.”

“You’re crazy,” he told her.

The absinthe came. It was in a dark, narrow, suspicious bottle without labels. The proprietor brought it over to the table personally. From a tray he removed a slotted spoon, a small carafe of water, three rocks glasses, and a porcelain bowl filled with sugar cubes, and set these items down on the table beside the bottle of absinthe. The proprietor was an abbreviated, tar-faced black man with a bad complexion and eyelids swollen with
chalazia
. When he spoke to Isabella, he referred to her by her first name.

“Gracias, hombre
dulce
,”
Isabella said.

“De nada, mi Isabella,”
said the proprietor—and vanished.

Isabella poured the shots. The drink came out cloudy and tinted green beneath the dim lights of the bistro.

Nick looked at Emma from across the table. There was a tumult in his gut. She looked youthful and eager sitting across from him, her face refreshed and open. Again, he was reminded of the way she’d spun the Impala on the Pennsylvania dirt road, kicking up dust while veiled in the stink of exhaust. How she had laughed.

“What?” she said to him now, catching his stare.

“Nothing. Just looking.”

“I can see that, yes.”

“That’s all,” he said. He could tell she was already very drunk.

The slightest lift of her small shoulders. “It’s a free country, last I heard,” she said. “Look all you want.”

By the bar, the
zydeco
band concluded one number then struck up another on its heels.

“It is traditional to drink absinthe with water and sugar. It is traditional that way,” Isabella explained. “The water dilutes the alcohol. It is strong alcohol. It will hit you like a wave, and it will drag you under and not let go. It never lets go. The water makes the alcohol
muy
estúpido
—
makes it very stupid. And the sugar makes the oils less bitter. We can drink it short—it is called short, drinking it short—with the water and the sugar, if you like, or we can be
las
personas
valientes
and drink it neat, without water or sugar.”

“Las personas
valientes
,”
Emma volunteered. “Whatever that means.”

“It means ‘the brave persons,’ which is who we will be if we take it neat.”

“Take it neat,” said Emma.

“Here and here and here,” Isabella said. She lifted her drink.
“
Vivas
!”

“
Sí
, mi
amante
,”
Emma said in her poor Spanish.

The two women drank the shots while Nick looked on. Emma grimaced, pulled a face, and her eyes immediately clouded as she set the rocks glass back down on the table. An abrupt flush of blood blossomed beneath the surface of her cheeks.

“
Bebe
,
Nicholas,” Isabella told Nick. “Drink, drink.”

“Nick won’t drink it,” Emma said. “It’s illegal.”

“It is bought and paid for from the bar,” Isabella said.

“I mean he won’t drink it because it’s absinthe.”

“It is good, strong absinthe,” Isabella said.

“He won’t drink it,” Emma went on. Her eyes were locked on him now. Something inside her had turned over. There was a predacious air about her. “We can sit here for an eternity but he won’t drink it. Will you, Nick?”

“My Nicholas,” Isabella sang.

“He is a very noble man, didn’t you know?” Emma said. “Did you see how he stood up to those men? Very noble. Aren’t you, Nick? Isn’t that right? You are quite the noble gentleman.”

“Cut it out,” he said.

“No. Listen—it isn’t a bad thing, to be so noble. I wouldn’t think so, anyway. But I wouldn’t know.” She shook her head and, thankfully, turned her gaze on Isabella. “I wouldn’t know,” she said again. “How could I know? I couldn’t be so noble. Such a thing is beyond me.”

“You are noble, Nicholas?” Isabella asked him innocently enough. “I never knew it…”

“I’m not going to play any games,” he said.

“No games,” Emma said. “What games?”

“What games?” echoed Isabella.

“You see,” Emma went on, her eyes back on her husband, “once Nick and I were married, after he’d come back from the war, I was keeping a secret from him. I didn’t want to keep it, and it hurt me to keep it, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I could feel it building and building inside me like a volcano, and I knew I wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t noble enough, to keep it inside. So then a few days ago, I told him my secret. Finally. I told him all about my lousy, dirty secret. It hurt me even more to tell him because I knew I was hurting him by telling it, but I couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. Is that selfish? It was killing me on the inside, burning up through me like a fire in the center of a house, and I had to tell it. A volcano. I had to tell it. Maybe I am weak that way and maybe I am selfish. Maybe it should have been my cross to carry for the rest of my life. But whatever the case, I am certainly not noble. Not for the telling of the secret, and certainly not for the secret itself.”

“Stop it, Emma.”

“Stop what? This is just talk, Nicky, just talk.” She laughed. “Stupid drunken talk.”

“Well I don’t like it.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know. You don’t like it and you never want to talk about it. You prefer the pregnant, ugly silence, don’t you? We’ll just stay as we are, right here and right now and for all eternity, while everything falls apart around us both. Isn’t that the plan, the new plan?”

“All that poetry has made you too goddamn dramatic.”

“What is the secret?” Isabella asked.

“That I’d loved someone else,” Emma said. “Not in my heart, though, but in my bed. That while my Nicky was fighting in Iraq, I’d received a letter telling me his entire squad had been killed. I was told he had been killed, too.”

“Emma,” he said.

“I had been shattered and he, a friend, had been there, in that moment of weakness. He was just someone there and nothing more. How I cried and cried over that letter! Have you ever smelled a letter wet with tears? It has its own smell.” A vague smile threatened her lips, the corner of her lips, but she did not give in. Her eyes were daggers on him now. “I loved him and he was dead. He would not be coming home. I would never see him again.”

“You died, Nicholas?” Isabella said. “That is so sad. Poor sad dead noble Nicholas.”

“I died that night, too, Nick,” Emma said.

“You’re both goddamn drunk.”

“Be drunk, too,” said Isabella, and slid the remaining shot in front of him.

“Nick has a secret, too,” Emma said. “Don’t you, Nick? You didn’t know it, but I can tell, even if you don’t say it. Just like me, he’s had a secret since he’s returned from the war. I guess the war is good for making secrets. But he hasn’t told his secret yet. Maybe he is nobler than me. You see? Maybe I had to tell my secret because I am weak and I couldn’t keep it in. But Nick has kept his. Good boy, that Nick. He is of high moral fiber and he has kept his secret.” Her eyes stayed on him the whole time. “You’ve kept your secret, Nick. You’re incredibly noble. You are not a weak coward like me.”

“I want to stop talking about this right now,” he said.

“You aren’t talking about any of it,” she said back. “I’m doing all the talking, all the talking, all the talking.”

“Then I want you to stop.”

“I’m drunk. You can’t make me and I’m drunk.”

“That’s for damn sure…”

Isabella leaned over the table. “What is your secret, Nicholas?”

“I have no secrets.”

“So noble,” Emma whispered. Her tone suggested she spoke to herself now and no one else. “How can I live with such a noble man? How can I live with such a noble man after I screwed someone else when I thought he was dead?”

“Stop it!” he demanded. The table jumped as he threw a fist upon it.

Emma pushed her head back on her neck, laughed. “You don’t like my language?” she taunted. “You don’t like it?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Yes, right—because you are so noble,” she lamented. “You are the noblest man in the world, Nicholas
D’Nofrio
, and I am the slut who is your wife.”

“Enough,” he said, and stood from his chair.

“Noble. And I’ll say whatever the hell I want. ‘Fuck’ and ‘shit’ and ‘piss’ and ‘goddamn’ and ‘hell’ and ‘bastard’ and ‘balls-balls-balls.’ You like that, Nicky? Does it make you sorry you married such a foul-mouthed whore?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I am sorry.”

“It was a mistake. I felt so lost and needed someone else there. I thought you were dead. And I died with you that night. When I did, Nick, I died with you.”

There was nothing he could say; he could not look at her.

“Would it have been better for me to have loved him in my heart instead of just in my bed? Would it have been better for you that way?”

He said, “You can’t control how you feel. You only control what you do.”