Frayed Read online

  I moved behind the desk and gently led her to an old love seat in the corner. She al owed me to move her along even as she began to snore as she walked.

  I maneuvered her to lie down and she said, “Not now, Monty. I had too much and don’ feel good.”

  “Go to sleep, Candi.”

  “Please don’ make me do it. Not again.”

  “No,” I told her. “Never again.”

  “No, no...”

  What should have been a world of art, glory, and al iance was as ful of the weak, the beaten, and the depressed as anything else. There was probably an even greater percentage of us here than anywhere, brooding and jealous of one another, hateful, spiteful, but somehow stil striving. For who the hel knew what.

  My regrets and failures were beginning to close in around me and I kept waiting for a shot of my old drive to push me back into the game. Maybe the ass-whupping by Gray would do the trick. I felt like I was nearly ready to get back to my novel and make it through the wal that had stopped me dead for so long.

  Monty was at his desk going through a pile of manuscripts. He ran his scams like anybody else, but every now and again he did his job right and sold a book that wound up with al the notice and readers it deserved. He had a sharp eye when he took the time to actual y do line-edits and comment on a novel’s content.

  With him, as with most of the people close to me in my life, I had a stew of feelings that ranged from mild affection to unstoppable loathing. The older I got, the more the rest of the pricks in the world became my brothers.

  I walked into his dingy office and said, “Hel o, Monty.”

  “Aw shit, am I gonna have trouble with you today, Eddie?”

  “That depends on you.”

  “If this is about Gray’s book, then forget it. He said you might show up sniffing around, and he gave me orders not to show you the manuscript.”

  “Since when do you listen to your clients?”

  “Since they start turning in books I can sel .”

  It was a cheap shot but it tagged me pretty good.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but could you do it if the writer wasn’t in the nuthatch?”

  “The daytime talk shows eat this shit up. It reflects their own struggles. Everybody’s crazy and they know it, and they’re afraid of doing something just buggy enough to get their loved ones to commit them to the bin.”

  I wasn’t about to argue.

  He said, “When are you going to write me something like this?”

  “I stil haven’t read it, so I can’t comment.”

  “Oh yes you can. It’s mainstream, muscular, has depth and action, builds plenty of suspense to keep the readers intrigued with the story.”

  Al particular attributes I would have said my own writing exhibited, but there’s nothing like an agent to put you in your place.

  Monty sat back and toyed with his suspenders.

  “How was it up there?”

  “Better than Club Med.”

  “What?”

  “Seriously. He’s having a bal . When he’s not delusional or homicidal, that is.”

  “Wel , so long as he’s having fun. Did you enjoy the cake?”

  That stopped me. A lot of things were stopping me lately. “How did you know about that?”

  “He told me you were going to visit.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “He cal ed me about week ago.” Monty frowned, slid away in his chair. “Jesus, what the hel are you making that face for?”

  I didn’t know what he meant until I felt the pain in my teeth. I was smiling, my teeth champed down, and my breath was coming in tight, near-gasps. “Nothing.”

  “You have a breakthrough on this book of yours yet?”

  “Not quite, but I can feel it coming.”

  “Good, get it to me. I can send you along the same circuit as Gray. You can talk about him.”

  Monty eased even farther back but stopped short, his features contorting with alarm. I had my hands on his suspenders, tugging him forward. My forehead felt very hot and my hackles were freezing, and my heart hammered in my chest and I didn’t want to talk about Gray or writing anymore.

  “Why is Candi so drunk at this time of day?” I hissed.

  “It’s noon. What, that’s too early for you? What’s gotten into you, Eddie?”

  “Tel me.” I hauled him forward inch by inch as the elastic of the suspenders threatened to snap. If they did, he’d slingshot through the office window and fly halfway across Columbus Avenue. “What do you do to her, Monty?”

  “I don’t do anything. I made her what she is.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  “Don’t hit me, Eddie.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Monty. Nah, never, not you.”

  My muscles were locked so tight that I was trembling.

  “You scared for her?” He swatted at my hands but couldn’t break my hold, and was stil too nervous to get angry or struggle much. “You sound like you love her, Eddie. That it, you want her now?”

  “You should never laugh at someone else’s loves or fears, Monty. Everybody’s got a weird love or strange fear. Don’t you know that?”

  I said it as if I knew something dark and disturbing about him. His eyes swirled and he swal owed thickly.

  I released him and walked out, took the stairs down leaping them four at a time. Uncertain why I was moving so fast, or why I should stop short when I opened the front door back onto the street.

  The rain pummeled my face.

  Jazrael hovered behind me, just out of sight. The ghost of a dead angel. I could feel the flames rising from her wings, the weight of my own darkness behind me.

  8

  WORDS LEFT BEHIND IN ALL

  THE HIGH CORNERS,

  THE FUCKIN’ NEW LAMP

  I wanted to beat the shit out of somebody.

  Even though my ribs stil hurt, the bitter need was there, steadily edging deeper into the back of my head, making my fists tighten. Gray had stirred the anger in me again.

  I thought how much I’d like a crack at him now, but I didn’t want to drive the hour back upstate and deal with the guests, the staff, the security, and the suicides. So I decided on the next best thing.

  I walked across town and took the 6 down to the East Vil age. Whenever I shut my eyes I saw blurred sentences printed on a page, but no matter how hard I tried to focus I couldn’t make the words clear up. I kept wondering if it was the next part of the story I couldn’t quite get down, or if my subconscious was tel ing me to go home and dust my apartment. In any case, I realized I shouldn’t be heading downtown on the 6 to visit with Emily.

  She stil occupied the third-story walk-up we had lived in during our marriage. It was a fair-sized apartment for New York, with two bedrooms and two smal alcoves with brightly sunlit window seats. Emily loved curling up in one while she pored over her fashion books and jotted down ideas for designs. Half of our bedroom doubled as a workstation for her fabrics, sewing machines, and draft board.

  I’d work in the guest bedroom and surround myself with novels, posters, rubber skeletons, action figures, comics, il ustrations, toy robots, stone idols and gargoyles, and about another ton and a half of clutter that I hoped would inspire me while I sat around clunking my skul against the desk.

  Four years ago my ex-wife Emily hadn’t quite been ex yet. We were having our problems and spending too many nights caught up in terse, vague arguments that were more childish than anything. The slightest matter could become a major brawl. A misplaced book, a forgotten phone cal , a skipped kiss goodnight. We had somehow both become hypersensitive in the extreme, as if we were walking around a roomful of razors, nicking ourselves from every angle, and neither could do right by the other.

  She met Mark Kutchman at a museum, a fucking museum in Manhattan on a spring day when novelists are smacking their heads against wal s trying to rattle loose their stories and pretty boys are frolicking in museums with other men’s wives.

&nb
sp; As our troubles continued, Emily spent more and more time out of the house. She claimed I didn’t notice, but I did. I simply trusted her to be out at the places where she said she was going. Visiting with friends, relaxing in the park, clothes shopping. And technical y she was doing al that, it just happened to be with another guy she was fal ing in love with.

  We had plenty of altercations, some passionate and some with a crushing, disdainful pressure of boredom. Stil , I was hopeful—I am nothing if not hopeful—and thought our life together would stabilize once we’d made it across the rough patches. Or that we’d accept the situation and continue with our routine and the force of our inertia would keep us comfortably rooted together. I’m a hel of a big believer in inertia.

  The last time I had seen him he’d kicked the crap out of me in an upscale restaurant not far from here.

  I’d walked in spoiling for a fight and was surprised as hel when he’d turned out to be a lot more brutal than I was. I would’ve thought my wife leaving me for another man would’ve given me an edge, a dark energy found only in the most difficult but righteous times. Instead, the muscular even-minded guy had taken me apart in front of about fifty witnesses who al told the cops the truth. He’d attempted to discuss matters like a gentleman and I’d gone after him, a maniac who’d wound up with half a plate of chicken cordon bleu and a vinaigrette salad on my head.

  He shamed me even more by not pressing charges.

  Now I stormed through the street door of the building as a young couple I didn’t recognize walked out. They looked back in fear as if realizing they’d made a mistake letting me in without my buzzing anybody in the building. But New Yorkers are busy, and they don’t have time to stop and try to correct every personal blunder or lapse in reason.

  I clomped up the stairs, seething, wincing without knowing why, glowering with my eyes scrunched so tightly I could barely see. I banged on the door to my old apartment. It didn’t rattle in its frame anymore.

  He’d fixed that.

  Emily answered, wearing her reading glasses and with her hair tied back loosely, in sweats and a T-shirt.

  Looking beautiful but engrossed. Perhaps even a touch harried, planning her next show.

  She seemed almost unreal to me, as if I could pass my hand through her.

  My agitated mood made the edges of my vision burn with a bright nimbus. She said, “Eddie, what are you doing here?”

  “Hel o.” My voice, even with only speaking a single word, betrayed my intension. She was fast. She tried to slam the door in my face but I slid inside before she could shut me out. The door was heavy. Resistant and slow to open and close. He hadn’t fixed that.

  One point for me. You had to keep score even in your stupidest, most insignificant games. You had to win at something, even if you had to make the contest up yourself. Sometimes the only way to win was to not tel everybody else that they were playing your dumb-ass game too.

  “Jesus, Eddie, why are you here? What are you doing now?” Emily kept her voice hushed, which meant Kutchman was home. In my home. I began to smile. I couldn’t feel it, but I knew I was doing it.

  “What are you into now?” she asked, and pressed her hands to my chest. Once it was a sign of desire, the way she moved against my body. She kept pushing at me, hoping to get me back out the door before Kutchman saw who it was. I should be yel ing for him, but that just wasn’t how this should go down.

  No. I was moving back into the past, step by step. I had owned this apartment once, and it remembered me.

  My stories had been taken from out of the air, composed from the dust in these corners. The paint flecks and the sunlight, the age and the energy from these wal s. And I’d left plenty of my own vision and substance behind. I could feel it throbbing al around me, and I opened myself to it and cal ed it back into my marrow again.

  “Cal him,” I told her.

  “No, please.”

  “I just want to see him.”

  Her hands tightened into fists and she dug her nails into my flesh. Again, it was once a show of lust. I began to become aroused. I stared at her lips and thought, what was the worst thing that could happen if I tried to kiss her?

  Her nails began to rake down. “You don’t even love me anymore,” she said. “I’m not even sure you ever did. You don’t want me. You’re just searching for yourself.”

  “Cal him.”

  But there was no need. Kutchman was already emerging at the end of the hal , stepping out from what had once been my office and was his own now.

  Kutchman was an architect who stil did plenty of construction work on the sites. He was the kind of man who took pride in every element of his life. From his work to his clothes to his appearance. He merged his creative interests with his physical ones, and was highly effective at them al . Handsome, with an air of dignity about him, even a gentleness amongst al his prowess and capability.

  I hated every fucking molecule of him.

  “What’s this?” he asked calmly. He took one look in my eyes and a slick little grin uncoiled across his face. “Are you back for more trouble?”

  “Sure,” I told him.

  Sick as it might’ve been, it was good to have someone like this in your life. A rival you could detest for no other reason than he had won the woman you’d lost. A woman you perhaps no longer even wanted and never truly had. In another life we could’ve been sparring partners in the ring who could cal each other up and train together, try to murder each other in the ring and then go out for a beer afterwards. There were normal ways to do the things we needed to do in this warped fashion.

  “Leave this place,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Don’t force me to cal the police.”

  “I won’t.”

  He sighed at that—I could charge him for lessons—

  and behind me Emily let out a sharp whine of frustration. I appreciated my position in the room, standing between the two of them now, remembering my stories. I glanced at the window frames, the floorboards, some of the furniture that had been here before. I could feel my inspiration finding me again, the themes that comprised my fiction and my life. The wine rack made me think of my father, the flower vases of my mother. The living room reminded of my bul shit sessions with Gray while we discussed events and trivia and sports and a thousand scattered topics which al somehow found their way into my words.

  I had gone even more crazy in this home, and that was saying something.

  Kutchman stood poised. He shoved the coffee table out of the way so we’d have some room. I walked in and almost felt like shaking his hand, the way two cultured, intel igent men wil before they try to maim one another.

  With a moan Emily stepped up behind me, her breath on the back of my neck, and the skewer of my desire stabbed through my guts again and twisted, as I recal ed the murmurs of love she’d once whispered in my ear.

  “Don’t hurt him too badly,” she told him.

  Kutchman shook his head. “I’l try not to, but he looks drunk.”

  “I don’t smel liquor,” she said.

  “Perhaps vodka.”

  “He used to hate it.”

  “Perhaps no longer.”

  “Don’t let him break the new lamp.”

  “I won’t. Maybe he’s had a psychotic break.”

  “It’s this thing with Gray, it’s driven them both to the edge.”

  “More likely over it.”

  “So it seems.”

  “He does appear demented.”

  “I knew he needed serious professional help.”

  I stamped my feet like a furious child and shouted,

  “Stop talking about me like I’m not even here!

  Kutchman, put ‘em up!”

  “‘Put ‘em up,’ Eddie?” He couldn’t believe it, and his smile got larger. “Is that what you said?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. Put ‘em up!”

  He put ‘em up and I slid forward.

  Kutchman was thick and carved, but
moved like a bantamweight. Despite the composed exterior and attitude of cultivation, he could pul up hel when he wanted it. I’d seen that the last time. Nobody learned to brawl like that without reaching into his own wel of wrath and disappointment.

  Now I let it build in him. I eased around him and boxed the way Gray had taught me. Blocking and ducking instead of trying to pummel. Thinking about what would irritate him the most, rather than hurt him. I wove and slapped his cheeks, showing him I could trifle with him. That I didn’t have to be demented when it counted man to man.

  My ribs flared with pain but that didn’t slow me. As we moved about the living room, with Emily watching, shaking her head at me, I caught more of my symbols, plots, motifs, and issues.

  The deaths of my life that wound up on the page.

  My fears and hurts, the subtle torments of everyday existence. My love and sins, Emily’s flesh, her hair across my lips. The sweet smel of sex and salvation, and redemption, however brief.

  I didn’t live here but my work stil did. This place was imbued in the writing, and the writing was imbedded in the plaster. I cal ed my strength back to me.

  Kutchman was sweating and panting. I was only half in the moment. He kept throwing roundhouses and clever jabs, but I slipped away and continued slapping him in the face. I started plowing into his gut. His eyes reddened and he came at me with a war cry. I kept knocking his rib cage and felt more and more satisfied every time he let out a bitter grunt. It was a good sound. Now I knew why Gray always went for them.

  With a heave, Kutchman sort of threw himself at me, his jaw slack and his bottom lip hanging. His cheeks were a bright red like a child who’d just come inside from building an army of snowmen. He couldn’t hold his arms up any longer. Emily sobbed against the wal . Crying for him.

  I blocked his weakening punches and shoved him onto the floor. I wasn’t done with him yet. I stepped into the kitchen and Emily wailed, “What are you doing? What are you doing now?”

  “Continuing with my psychotic break,” I said. “By the way, nice fuckin’ lamp.”

  I got to the kitchen drawer, yanked it open and grabbed a steak knife. Kutchman froze and his eyes widened for the first time with genuine fear.