After the First Death - Lawrence Block [40]
Did people still use them? I wondered. And I checked a variety of cars, looking in the logical places, on the undersides of the fenders, front and back, and felt foolish the first time, and felt like an idiot by the time I was key-hunting on the tenth or twelfth car. But ultimately I found a year-old Plymouth convertible whose owner had responded to the Hide-A-Key sales pitch. He had evidently bought the thing about the same time he had bought the car and had never touched it since. The Hide-A-Key was rusted and grime-covered. But it slid properly open, and the key fit quite neatly into the ignition.
I had not driven in a long time, and did not know the roads. Driving—like swimming, like love—is never forgotten. Routes are, but once out of town I followed the New York markers and got where I was going. There were things I did not want to think about on the way. I played the radio, and between the noise of a rock ’n’ roll station and the unknown route and unfamiliar car, I didn’t have to think about very much of anything.
I left the car somewhere on the West Side and walked back to the hotel. I spent the night not sleeping. I wanted a drink badly. But by the time I had managed to decide to get up and go out and have one, it was four o’clock and the bars were closed. So I stayed where I was, and kept trying to sleep, and kept not making it.
According to my erstwhile sister-in-law, Gwen had had an affair with Doug MacEwan. Linda, certainly, was in no sense constitutionally incapable of falsehood; her only reason for telling the truth instead of a lie would be that the truth was more damaging. In this case, the truth seemed to be that the pal that I loved stole the gal that I loved—and, given the circumstances, my own position seemed perfectly obvious.
Except that things are rarely as simple as they seem. The automatic rage, the sense of having been cruelly used and ignominiously betrayed, just wouldn’t come. Time does more than heal wounds. Time can, in some instances, grow scar tissue in advance and prevent the wound from doing more than scratching the surface.
You see, there were all of those years in the way. The gal that I loved was a gal I loved no more. It had all happened five years ago, five desperately long years ago, and my world in those five years was so much changed that I could not put the betrayal into context. The participants in the drama were my once-wife (who now betrayed me nighdy, or however frequently their schedule permitted, with yet another man, to whom she happened to be lawfully married) and my vestigial best friend, whose world now barely overlapped with mine and with whom I could no longer communicate. I might damn them both for treachery and lechery, but I was so far removed from the realness of it that I was more struck by the fortuitous rhyme of those two sins than by the awesome enormity of the crime.
I believed that it had happened. I knew that it had happened. Viewed from my present vantage point, armed with Linda’s passed-along knowledge, much of Doug’s reticence ever since Sunday night came vividly into focus. And, more to the point, I remembered what Kay had said, albeit hysterically, earlier that evening.
You have to leave us alone, Alex! You have to leave us out of it! It was years ago! It means nothing now, can’t you understand? It’s over and done with, we’ve forgotten all about it—
At the time I had read all of this as meaningless hysteria which defied proper translation. Forgotten all about what? And what was over and done with? Our mutual friendship, I had assumed at the time. But it now seemed clear that Kay had thought I had known of the affair—as she herself had evidently long known of it.
So I believed it. I believed it, and