The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [78]
“It didn’t bother you?”
He shook his head. “I told her she could bring people here. And that I would bring people here if I wanted.”
“Like Linda. Right. It would bother most fathers.”
“It didn’t bother me.”
“It didn’t upset you that he was black?”
“No,” he said, reaching for her. “Why should it?”
TEN
When Sully heard her car in the driveway he stayed where he was. He sat in his chair in the living room and did not move when her key turned in the lock and she entered the house. She said, “Honey? I’m home,” and he made no response. He sat in his chair and looked at nothing. There was a glass of applejack in his left hand and a cigarette in his right, but he was neither smoking nor drinking. He had poured the drink over an hour ago and had not yet taken a first sip of it. The ashtray beside him was filled with cigarette butts. He would light one and hold it until the heat of it warmed his fingers, then put it out and light another.
She came into the room and dropped down onto his lap, reaching out a hand to touch his ear and rub the back of his neck. “I’m home,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Miss me?”
“You cunt.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to stop telling you about it?”
He couldn’t look at her.
“No.”
“I won’t tell you if you don’t want me to, Sully.”
She settled herself on his lap, her arms around his neck. The smell of her was heady, intoxicating. She waited, silent, and he knew he would tell her to speak and hated himself for it.
He said, “This fucking game we play.”
“You want to stop playing?”
“Shit. I do and I don’t.”
“It’s up to you, baby.”
He put out the cigarette. He raised the glass of applejack, looked at it thoughtfully, put it down untasted on the small mahogany table.
He said, “Who was it?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
Part of the game, part of their ritual, all of it carefully evolved during the past weeks by an elaborate system of trial and error. It was more exciting when he knew. He hated himself more, hated her more, but it was more exciting and that was what seemed to count in the long run.
“Tell me” he said.
“If you’re sure.”
“Tell me.”
She licked her lips. Anticipation glowed in her eyes. This, he knew, was what she lived for. She would go out and enjoy her adventures, but they themselves were spiced by her expectations of returning home to tell him her story. She would come home with her dirty little stories and she would tell him everything in as tantalizing a manner as possible. And then he would take her, and that part of it was what she lived for. What they both lived for.
“I went to the Lambertville House,” she said. “I took a corner booth and just waited for somebody to come in.”
“Who was it?”
“I had quite a wait. There were a lot of men who gave me the eye, but I wanted just the right one.”
“Who was it?”
“Hugh Markarian.”
“Christ.”
“I remembered you pointing him out to me. He comes to the Barge a lot, doesn’t he?”
“Christ.”
“I groped him right there at the table. He was very cool about it. It got to him in a big way but he was very cool about it.”
She went on, giving him the story an inch at a time. The words did not excite him now. That wasn’t how it worked. He would listen all the way through, feeling nothing but a slight sense of nausea, his whole being deadened by the flow of words. That was the pattern they had established. And then, as she neared the end of the story, something would happen within him that he did not begin to understand.
“Talk about cool,” she was saying. “His daughter walked in then, see, and she’s hanging on the arm of a big black nigger.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“And she takes him upstairs. And he tells me she’s free to bring friends home if she wants. Right? And he says why should it bother him if it’s a nigger. Just as cool as ice he said that, but he didn’t know I saw his face when he first caught sight of the nigger. He went white, Sully. He went absolutely white. But just for that instant, and the kid never saw