TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE

SECOND EXCERPT

Norman Mailer

Timothy Madden woke from alcoholic oblivion to find blood on the seat of his car... and a severed head, hidden in the woods where he stashed his dope. Was he the murderer? Or was he supposed to take the fall? Was the dead woman Patty Lareine, his runaway wife? Or Jessica, the wealthy blonde from the bar? And how did Acting Police Chief Regency fit in?

Arriving back at my / M house, I started a fire, JL poured a drink, and was just beginning to search for any recollections I could recover of a trip out to Wellfleet two nights ago, carrying two other people in one small Porsche, when there was a thump on the door knocker, or so I would swear, and the door blew open.

I do not know what entered, or whether it left when I bolted the door, but I heard that clapper as a summons, and could have cried out at the inexorable logic of the demand on me. For with all the weight of a decree I could not refuse came the bidding to go back to that wood in Truro.

I held out for as long as I could. I finished my drink and made another, and knew that whether it took an hour or three days, whether I finally went forward sober or became so drunk I could live in flames, I must indeed go out and search the burrow. Nothing could prove worse than to remain here and live through the hours of the night ahead.

I knew. Once before, I had been held in the grip of an imperative larger than myself, and that was the week twenty years ago when I walked each day to the Provincetown Monument with cold oil in my lungs and sick worms in my belly, stared up at the climb, and saw, with a gloom equal to losing all reason itself, that the ascent could be attempted. As high as I could see, handhold by handhold, there were indentations in the mortar and small ledgelike irregularities in the granite blocks. It could be done, and I could do it, and I stared so hard at the base that—can you believe me?—I never contemplated the overhang. All I knew was that I must climb it. If I did not make the attempt, something worse than panic would befall me. Maybe I learned nothing else from those old seizures of terror in the middle of the night when I used to sit bolt upright in bed, but at least I gained (could I term it that?) some small measure of compassion for all who are afflicted by the compulsion to go out and do what is absolutely not to be done, whether it is the seduction of little boys or the rape of adolescent girls, at least I knew the nightmare that blazes beneath the stupefaction of those who never dare to come near to themselves, or disaster will ensue. So in all of that week when I wrestled with this strange will so external to myself, trying to convince this foreign presence that I did not have to climb the Monument, I also learned about the varieties of human insulation. For, to keep from encountering that fiend who dwells in the sweet Kundalini of our spine, so do we take on our booze, our pot, our coke, our nicotine, our tranks and sleeping pills, our habits and our churches, our prejudices and our bigotries, our ideology, our stupidity itself— that most vital of the insulations!—and I encountered nearly all of them in the week before I tried to climb the Monument and conquer the unmanageable in myself. Then, with a brain inflamed by speed, tilted one way by pot and the other by drink, squealing within like an unborn child in terror of suffocation before it finds the light, feeling as murderous as a Samurai, I tackled that wall and found, no matter how absurd the outcome, that I was better afterward, if by no more than the reduction of my terror in sleep.

So it had been worth it. I knew that must be true now. I had to go back and look upon the face of the blonde who was dead. Indeed, I must do it not knowing whether her end came from my hands or belonged to others. Will you ever comprehend me if I say that such knowledge, while crucial to my self-preservation (was I in danger of the law, or of all that was outside the law?) was still not what called me forth so much as the bare impulse to go: that came from the deepest sign I could recognize—the importance of the journey must be estimated by my dread of doing it.

I will spare you those hours while I vacillated in my will. I can only say that it was near to midnight before I had conquered my terror sufficiently to begin the voyage in my mind, and so was ready, in my imagination at least, to leave the house, enter the car, and set out over the reaches of a highway whose wind-whipped leaves were at this hour like an onslaught of spirits. Yet, with each detail of this journey foreseen, composing the trip in my thoughts before it was ever undertaken, I now found at the center of my terror the calm of composition itself. So I was finally armed to set out, and was at the door and ready to step into the real air of the night when the knock resounded again, just as powerfully as a hammer on my tomb.

Some interruptions are too profound to disturb your composure. One’s limbs do not have to shake as one encounters the hangman. I pulled the bolt and drew open the door.

Regency stepped in. For the first moment, seeing the strain upon his face and the bright light of anger in his eyes, I had the idea he was there to arrest me. He stood in the foyer and stared at the furniture in the living room and shook his head from side to side, but for so long that I finally comprehended he was revolving his neck against the grind of his own tension.

“I’m not here for a drink, buddy,” he said at last.

“Well, you can have one.”

“Later. We talk first.” He poked the light of his angry eyes into mine, and then, in surprise—for I do not think he had ever seen me showing such resolve—he looked away. He could not know for what I had just prepared.

“Are you,” I asked, “working on Sunday?”

“You haven’t been down to the West End today, have you?”

I shook my head.

“You don’t know what’s going on?”

“No.”

“Every cop in town was at The Widow’s Walk. Every cop in town.” He looked past me. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

I did. I didn’t. I made some gesture to indicate as much.

He sat down.

“Look, Madden,” he said, “I know you lead a very busy life, but maybe you recollect receiving a phone call this morning from Merwyn Finney.”

“The proprietor of The Widow’s Walk?”

“You eat there all the time but you don’t know his name?”

“Hey,” I said, “don’t break my chops.”

“All right,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down, too?”

“Because I’m ready to go out.”

“Finney called about a car, correct?”

“Is it still there?”

“You told Merwyn Finney,” Alvin Luther now said, “that you couldn’t remember the name of the woman who was with Pangbom.”

“I still can’t. Is it important?”

“Probably not. Unless she’s his wife.”

“I don’t think she was.”

“Well, good. You’re a shrewd judge of people.”

“I’m not smart enough to guess what’s going on now.”

“Oh, I could tell you,” he said, “but I don’t want to slant your opinion.” He looked into my eyes again. “What’s your make on Pangbom?”

“Corporate lawyer. Sharp. On tour with a blonde lady.”

“Anything wrong with him?”

“Just not likable.”

“Why?”

“Cause I wanted to get somewhere with Jessica and he was in the way. ’ ’ I stopped. There was much to be said for Regency as a cop. Pressure came off him and it was constant. Soon, you made a mistake. “Oh,” I said, “that’s her name. It just came to me. Jessica.”

He wrote it down. “Her last name?”

“Still blank. She may never have told me.”

“What was she like?”

“Society lady. Southern California society, I’d say. No real class. Just money.”

“But you liked her?”

“I had the feeling she’d carry on in the closet like a pomy star. ’ ’ I said this to shock him. It succeeded more than I had expected.

“I don’t approve of pomies,” he said. “I don’t go to them. I wouldn’t mind slaughtering five or ten of those pomy stars, though.”

“That’s what I like about law enforcement,” I answered. “Put a killer in uniform and he can’t kill anymore.”

He cocked his head. “Cheap hippie philosophy,” he said.

“You could never stand up to a discussion,” I told him. “Your brain is full of minefields.”

“Maybe so,” he said slyly, and winked. “Let’s move back to Pangbom. Would you say he was unstable?”

“Not particularly. I’m tempted to say not at all.”

“Don’t.”

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

“Don’t?”

“Did he impress you in any way as a swish?”

“He might wash his hands after making love, but, no, I would not call him a swish.”

“Was he in love with Jessica?”

“I’d say he liked her for what she could offer, and was getting a little fatigued. She may have been too much of a woman for him.”

“You don’t think he was in love with her uncontrollably?”

I was about to say, “Not my impression,” when I decided to ask, “What do you mean by ‘uncontrollably’?”

“I’d say it’s loving somebody to the point where you’re not in command of your actions.”

Somewhere in my mind a mean calculation came forth. I said, “Alvin, what are you leading to? Did Pangbom kill her?”

“I don’t know,” said Regency. “Nobody has seen her.”

“Well, where is he?”

“Merwyn Finney called this afternoon and asked if the car could be removed from his lot. But it was legally parked in the first place. So I told him we’d have to put a warning on the windshield. This afternoon I was making a turn around town and I thought I’d take a look. It didn’t add up right to me. Sometimes you see an empty buggy that’s all wrong. So I tried the trunk. It was unlocked. Pangbom was inside.”

“Murdered?”

“Interesting you say that,” said Regency. “No, my friend, he was a suicide.”

“How?”

“He put himself in the trunk and closed it. Then he laid himself under a blanket, stuck a pistol in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. ’ ’

“Let’s have a drink,” I said.

“Yeah.”

His eyes were fixed with fury. “Very strange business,” he said.

I could not help myself. A. L. Regency had his powers. “Are you sure it’s suicide?” I asked, although I could see no advantage to myself in the question.

Worse. Our eyes met clearly with that lack of concealment which is palpable: both people are remembering the same sight. I was seeing blood on the passenger seat of my car.

He kept the silence before he said, “There’s no doubt it’s suicide. The powder marks are all over his mouth and palate. Unless someone drugged him first”—Regency took out his notebook and set down a few words—“only I don’t see how you can ram a gun into someone’s mouth, shoot him, and then rearrange his body without betraying yourself on the blood spill. The dispersal of blood on the floor and side of the trunk is wholly consistent with suicide.” He nodded. “But I don’t,” he said, “have a high opinion of your acumen. You read Pangbom all wrong.”

“I certainly didn’t see him as a suicide.”

“Forget that. He’s a degenerate faggot. Madden, you don’t even have a clue who’s really in the closet.”

Now he looked about the living room as if to count the doors and classify the furniture. Nor was it comfortable to see the place through his eyes. Most of the furniture had been chosen by Patty, and her taste was flouncy and full of Tampa Beach money—that is, white furniture with splashy hues in the cushions and the draperies and the throw mgs, loads of flowers on the fabrics, many barstools in puffy Leatherette, and pink, lemon-lime, orange, and ivory for her boudoir and her drawing room: quite a candy stripe for Provincetown in winter.

Regency studied our furniture. “Degenerate faggot” was still smoking on his lips.

I could not leave it there. “What makes you so certain Pangbom was homosexual?”

“I wouldn’t term it that. I’d call him gay.” How the word offended him. “They ought to spell it ‘Kaposi’s syndrome’!” He drew a letter from his pocket. “Call themselves gay and go around infecting one another systematically. They’re laying in a plague.”

“Well, all right,” I said. “Count your plagues. I’ll count mine.” He was that opinionated it would have given me combative pleasure to argue—nuclear pollution for your side, herpes for mine—but not now.

“Look what’s in this envelope,” he said. “Was Pangbom gay or was he gay? Just read it!”

“Are you certain he wrote it?”

“I checked the handwriting against his address book. He wrote the letter, all right. About a month ago. It’s dated. But he never sent it. I guess he made the mistake of rereading it. That’s enough to put the barrel right in your throat and blow it out.”

“Who was he writing to?”

“Oh, you know faggots. They’re so intimate with each other, they don’t bother with names. Just chat away soul to soul. Maybe at the end they’ll deign to use your name once. That’s so the flower who receives the epistle will know the dirt is in the right pot.” He went off on his whinny.

I read the letter. It was in strong purple-blue ink, a firm round hand:

I’ve just dipped into your volume of verse. I know so little about the fullest appreciation of poetry and classical music, but I know what I like. I like symphonies to rise up from the private parts. I like Sibelius and Schubert and SaintSaens and all the esses, yes, yes, yes. I know I like your poems, because I’m tempted to write you back and make you twitch, bitch. I know you hate my vulgar side, but let us never forget, Lonnie’s a guttersnipe and had to stretch a little to marry his chain-store heiress. Who’s bringing the chains?

I liked your poem “Spent” because it made me feel for you. There you were, tight as a tick, nervous about yourself, as always, locked up so terribly, well, you were serving time, after all, and I was out in Nam patrolling the China seas. Do you know the sunsets there? You speak so beautifully of the rainbow that comes before your eyes after you are “Spent,” but I lived those rainbows. How vividly your lines bring to mind the lush sex-ridden months I spent in Saigon, yes, sweetheart, spent! You write about those heavies surrounding you and tell this reader: “I feel they have fires inside, well-stoked fires glowing through their hide, heating the summer air.” Well, kiddo, that’s not true only for your heavy criminal types. I have had the same thoughts about many a sailor I knew. Many a fire I’ve warmed my hands and face by. You almost cracked up denying yourself what you want, but then, you’re a gentleman. Of sorts. But I sought and I found. I seduced indiscriminately, playing the male slut. I fed like a clown’s pig from the oversize bottle with the long rubber nipple. No crack-ups for Lonnie, thank you. He’s wise enough to get the most out of his queer blood.

How much you missed in those China seas. I remember black-eyed Carmine coming to the Quonset-hut door near Da Nang and calling softly, “Lonnie, baby, come on out!” I remember the tall thin blond lad from Beaumont, Texas, who brought me his letters to his wife. She was leaving him and I had to read the letter, I was his censor, and how he lingered at the edge of Officers’ Country as it grew dark, and I love the way he kept talking about the chicken ranch until I just reached over and fondled him and he spread out and relaxed, and, lovey, he wasn’t about to ask for anything more for his chicken ranch until the next night when he’d prowl about Officers’ Country until it was dark again and I who was hungry could satisfy his hunger. And I remember the lovely lad from Ypsilanti named Thome and the taste of love-impregnated sherry within his lips, those lovely eyes, the quietness of him and the tender, halting poor sixthgrade grammar of the sweet letter he wrote me the day I was leaving the ship, and he came up on the bridge to give it to me.

Or the Signalman from Marion, Illinois, who sent me his first amorous advance in semaphore, not knowing I could keep up with the great speed at which he sent it: “Hey, honey, how about you and me in my boat tonight?” And my answer, “What time, honey?” I can still see the look of surprise on his face. And the glorious scent of him—sweat and Aqua Velva.

How much your poem brings back. Those were the glory days. No legal briefs. No scions of society—don’t take it personally—to suck up to. Just Admirals and grunts. What a pity you’ve never known a Marine. Or a Green Beret. They’re green, sweetie, but don’t fire until you see the pink of their privates! I haven’t had the leisure to think of these things in ages, but now I will. Your poems bring it back. I think of the Chief Hospital Corpsman I met in the Blue Elephant on Saigon Boulevard, and later I remember the room I took him to in some half-gutted hotel and the glorious gushing forth of him until he caught me to drink a little himself because he had to slake the great thirst his pouring out had given him. And how he looked for my name in my hat so he could see me again though I didn’t want that and told him so. Burying my nose in his sack and the frenzied smell of it knocking all sense out of my head all over again.

Yes, they had fires in them that warmed the sensuous air. Legions of great, begging, dripping pricks, angry red as the wattles of a turkey gobbler, lovely, lovely glorious days, while you languished in Reading Gaol, poor Wardley, fighting a nervous collapse because you wouldn’t do what your heart cried out for you to do.

Maybe I better read no more of your fine poems. You see how mean they make me. Never reject a friend as dear as me, or watch out, you’ll lose me forever. But then, you have!!! This time it’s not a boy from the Air Force just in for the weekend, nor am I being oh so discreet with a gay churchman who’s awfully hot to be indiscreet, no, I have the surprise of all time, Wardley. I’m with a blonde creature. Do you think me awfully drunk? I am.

Never fear. This woman looks as feminine as Lana Turner, but maybe she ain’t, not altogether. Maybe she’s had a sex change. Do you believe it? One of our mutual friends saw her with me, and had the crust to say she was so gorgeous she had to be a lie. Has she once been a he? they asked. Well, bad news for all of you, I said, she hasn’t. It’s an honest-to-God real woman, fuck face! That’s what I said to our mutual friend. In fact, it’s the first woman I’ve had since I got to marry my heiress with her dime-store chains. So I know chains. I’ve been in them for years. Let me tell you, Wardley, it’s heaven to be out of them. It’s as carnal with this new woman as it used to be on Saigon Boulevard, pure carnal rut-copulatingfucking-sucking heaven for a faggot— should I say ex-faggot?—like me. What intoxication to cross the great divide. Wardley, I’m a man to this woman. She says there has never been a better. Baby, it has kicked off personal energies you wouldn’t believe. High is high, but I am maniacally high. If someone tried to take my blonde lady away, I would kill.

With all the weight of a decree came the bidding to go back to that wood in Truro

See what I mean? High! But why get you upset? You’ve been down this road, haven’t you, Wardley? Lived with your blonde beauty, too. Well, no hard feelings. Ex-roommates of the heart we may be, but let us remain dear old friends. This is God’s gift to women, your own Lonnie.

P.S. Have you ever seen the commercial for the electric razor named-? I leave the name blank because I daren’t tell you which one. I represent them, after all. But you know which one. Look for it on TV. There’s a twenty-one-year-old boy— Mr. Body!—shaving himself and looking as pleased as concupiscence-in-cream all the while he’s doing it. Know the secret? He told me. He thinks of this electric razor as looking just like a nice fat cock. He thinks of his boyfriend rubbing that fat pretty penis all over his face. The admen are slain by how wonderful this commercial turns out. Oh, well, I’m high on hetero, and have to say good-bye to all that.

P.P.S. I know the twenty-one-year-old well. Believe it or not, he’s the son of my blonde lady. In fact, I’m the boyfriend he’s thinking of. Don’t you think he’s a little jealous now of Mom and me?

P.P.P.S. All this is top-secret ultra-confidential.

I handed the letter back. I think we both made an effort not to look into each other’s eyes, but they met nonetheless. Truth, they caromed off each other like magnets bearing the same pole. Homosexuality was sitting between Regency and me as palpably as the sweat you breathe when violence is next to two people.

“ ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’ ” said Regency. He put the letter back in his breast pocket and breathed heavily. “I’d like to kill those faggots,” he said. “Every last one of them.”

“Have another drink.”

“There is corruption in this letter,” he said, patting his breast, “that leaves a taste no drink is going to wash.”

“I’m not the one to give the speech,” I said, “but have you ever asked yourself whether you should be Chief of Police?”

“Why say that?” he asked. At once, all of him was on guard.

“You ought to know. You’ve been here. In summer, this town has a huge homosexual contingent. As long as the Portuguese desire their money, you will have to accept their habits.”

“It may interest you to know I’m not the Acting Police Chief anymore.”

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

“As of when?”

“As of this afternoon. When I read that letter. Look, I’m just a country boy. Know what I know of Saigon Boulevard? Two whores a night for ten nights, that’s all.”

“Come on.”

“I saw a lot of fine men get killed. I don’t know any Green Berets with pink privates. It’s good Pangbom is dead. I’d have done it myself.”

You could believe him. The air was this side of the gap from lightning.

“Did you resign formally?” I asked.

He put out his hands as if to hold off all questions. “I don’t want to get into it. I was never supposed to become Chief of Police. The Portugee under me is actually running the job.”

“What are you saying? Your title is a cover?”

He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. As he did so, he wagged his head up and down. That was his way of telling me yes. What a hick. He had to be from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. I knew we could have a conversation. Let’s have one soon. Get drunk and talk.”

“All right.”

“I want to serve God,” he said. “What people don’t comprehend is that if you want to serve, you have to grow balls big enough to take on His attributes. That includes the heavy responsibility of exercising vengeance.”

“We’ll talk,” I said.

“Good.” He stood up to leave. “Do you have a clue who this guy Wardley could be?”

“I assume it’s an old lover. Some rich, uptight country squire.”

“I like your acumen. Ha, ha. Ha, ha. Say, I heard that name somewhere. It’s too unusual to forget. Somebody said the name Wardley just in passing. Could it have been your wife?”

“Ask her.”

“When I see her, I will ask her.” He took out his notebook and wrote down an item. “Where,” he said, “do you think this Jessica lady is?”

“Maybe she went back to California.”

“We’re checking that now.”

He put his arm around my shoulder as if to console me for I knew not what, and we walked together through the living room to the door. Given my height, I never have to think of myself as a small man, but he was certainly larger.

Now at the door he turned and said, “I have a regards for you. It’s from my wife.”

“Do I know your wife’s name?”

“It’s Madeleine.”

“Oh,” I said. “Madeleine Falco?”

“The same.”

What is the first maxim of the streets? If you want to die with a slug in your back, fool around with a cop’s wife. What did Regency know of her past?

“Yes,” I said, “once in a while she used to take a drink in a place where I did some bartending. Many years ago. But I do remember her. What a lovely girl she was, what a fine lady.”

“Thank you,” he said. “We have two lovely children.”

“That’s a surprise,” I said. “I didn’t know.. .you have children.” It was a near-miss. I had been about to say, “I didn’t know Madeleine could have children.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, fishing out his wallet, “here’s a picture of us.”

I looked at Regency and at Madeleine: it was certainly my Madeleine, ten years older than the last time I saw

All of this, I soon came to realize, was an exercise to drive my psyche up the high wall of fear her—and with two towheaded boys who looked a little like him and not at all like her.

“Very nice,” I said. “Tell Madeleine hello.”

“Sayonara,” said Regency.

Now I could not begin to go to the Truro woods. I could not bring myself up to such concentration all over again. At this hour, I could not. My mind was yawing like a wind in the hills. I did not know whether to think about Lonnie Pangbom, Wardley, Jessica, or Madeleine. Then sorrow came down on me. I had all the sorrow of thinking of a woman I had loved, and the love was gone, and it should never have been lost.

I brooded upon Madeleine. Perhaps an hour later I went to the top floor and in my study unlocked a file drawer. There, out of a pile of old manuscript, I found the pages I was looking for and read them again. They were written almost twelve years ago—was I twentyseven when I did them?—and done very much in the style of the cocky young man I tried to be then, but that was all right. If you are no longer one man, only a collection of fragments, each with its own manner, the act of looking back on writing done when one was full of identity (even phony identity) can put you together for a little while, and did while I was rereading these pages. As soon, however, as I concluded, I was bathed in an old woe. For I had made the mistake of showing the manuscript to Madeleine years ago, and it helped to break us up:

The best description of a pussy I ever came across was in a short piece by John Updike called “One’s Neighbor’s Wife”:

Each hair is precious and individual, serving a distinct role in the array: blond to invisibility where the thigh and abdomen join, dark to opacity where the tender labia ask protection, hearty and ruddy as a forester’s beard beneath the swell of belly, dark and sparse as the whiskers of a Machiavel where the perineum sneaks backward to the anus. My pussy alters by the time of day and according to the mesh of underpants. It has its satellites: the whimsical line of hairs that ascend to my navel and into my tan, the kisses of fur on the inside of my thighs, the lambent fuzz that ornaments the cleavage of my fundament. Amber, ebony, auburn, bay, chestnut, cinnamon, hazel, fawn, snuff, henna, bronze, platinum, peach, ash, flame, and field mouse: these are but a few of the colors my pussy is.

It is a beautiful description of a forest, and makes you ponder the mysteries of scale. Somebody once wrote that Cezanne shifted our perception of magnitude until a white towel on a table was like the blueshadowed snows in the ravines of a mountain and the treatment of a patch of skin became a desert valley. An interesting idea. I always saw more in Cezanne after that, just as I realized I had never looked at a pussy properly until I read Updike. For that alone, John would be one of my favorite writers.

They say Updike used to be a painter, and you can see it in his style. Nobody studies surfaces so closely as he does, and he uses adjectives with more discrimination than anybody who’s writing in the English language today. Hemingway said not to use them, and Hemingway was right. The adjective is the author’s opinion of what’s going on, no more. If I write “A strong man came into the room,” that only means he is strong in relation to me. Unless I’ve established myself for the reader, I might be the only fellow in the bar who is impressed by the guy who just came in. It is better to say: “A man entered. He was holding a walking stick, and for some reason he now broke it in two like a twig.” Of course, this takes more time to narrate. So adjectives bring on quick tell-you-how-to-live writing. Advertising thrives on it. “A superefficient, silent, sensuous five-speed shift.” Put twenty adjectives before the noun and no one will know you are describing a turd. The adjectives are the cruise.

Therefore, let me underline it. Updike is one of the few writers who can enhance his work with adjectives rather than abuse it. He has a rare talent. Yet he irks me. Even his description of a pussy. It could as easily be a tree. (The velveteen of moss in the ingathered crotch of my limbs, the investiture of algae on the terraces of my bark, etc.) Just once I would like to have him guide me through the inside of a cunt.

Right now, for instance, my mind is pondering the difference between Updike’s description of a pussy and a real cunt, that is, the one I am thinking of at this instant. It belongs to Madeleine Falco, and since she is sitting next to me I need only reach over with my right hand to feel the objective correlative on my fingertips. Still, I would rather remain in the simpler state of a writer in reverie. Being nothing if not competitive—as which unheralded writer is not?—I am trying to put the manifest of her cunt into well-chosen words, and so implant a small standard of prose on the great beachhead of literature. Therefore, I will not dwell on her pussy hair. It is black, so black against the cemetery white of her skin that my bowels and balls resound against one another like cymbals whenever her bush is displayed. But then, she loves to display it. She has a little pink mouth within the larger one (like Governor Nelson Rockefeller) and it is a true flower that pants in the dew of her heats. When aroused, however, Madeleine’s cunt seems to grow right out of her buttocks, and this little mouth always remains pink no matter how wide she spreads her thighs, whereas the outer meat of her vagina—the larger mouth—reveals a sullen grease-works, and the perineum (which we boys out on Long Island used to call the Taint—’tain’t vagina, ’tain’t anus, ho, ho) is a gleaming plantation. You don’t know whether to eat her, devour her, revere her, or root about. I used to whisper, “Don’t move, don’t move, I’ll kill you, I’m about to come.” How her cooze would pullulate in reply.

Whenever I was inside of Madeleine, the other girl she usually was, the dear brunette on my arm that I walked with down the street, ceased to exist. Her belly and her womb became all of her—all that fatty, saponaceous, sebaceous, unctional, unguinous quiver of lubricious worldly delights. Let me not claim I can do without adjectives when it comes to meditating on cunt. Fucking her, I would be afloat with all the belly dancers and darkhaired harlots of the world—their lust, their greed, their purchase on the swarthier ambitions of the cosmos, all now in me. God knows through which designs of Karma was my come pulled by her belly. Her cunt was more real to me than her face.

After she read this much, Madeleine said, “How could you write such things about me?” and wept in a way I could not bear.

“It’s only writing,” I said. “It’s not what I feel about you. I’m not a good enough writer to say what I really feel.” I hated her, however, for making me disavow my writing. But then, we were in trouble in any event. She read those pages just a week before we decided to get into a wife-swapping sort of halforgy (I know no quicker way to describe it) that I talked Madeleine into attending with me, and the use of the word attend must come from my Exeter French, since we had to drive all the way from New York to North Carolina to get there, and didn’t know the people. All we had was an ad in Screw magazine with a post-office box for an address:

Young but mature white couple, male a gynecologist, are seeking fun weekend. No water sports, golden showers, S&M, or B&D. Send photograph and SASE. You must be married.

I answered the letter without telling Madeleine, and sent a photo of us nicely dressed and standing on the street. Their Polaroid came back. They were in bathing suits. The man was tall and halfbald, with a long sad nose, knobby knees, a small potbelly, and a sallow look.

Madeleine said, on looking at the picture, “He must have the longest prick in Christendom.”

“Why do you say that?”

“There’s no other explanation for him.”

The wife was young and wearing a flouncy bathing suit. She looked saucy. Something about her spoke to me right out of the photograph. On an impulse I said, “Let’s visit.”

Madeleine nodded. She had large dark eyes that were luminous and full of tragic knowledge—her family were not without rank in the Mafia and had put a few curses on her head when she left home (which was Queens) for Manhattan. She wore those wounds of departure like a velvet cloak. She had gravity, and to counterbalance it I would go through great pains to make her laugh, even trying to walk on my hands around our furnished room. A moment of merriment from her gave a bouquet to my mood that could last for hours. That was why I had fallen in love. She had a tender marrow within her depths that I found with no other woman.

But we were too close. She began to pall on me. How harsh and Irish I must have come to seem. After we’d been together for two years, we were in the season when one marries or one parts. We talked about dating other people. I cheated on her from time to time, and she had all the night for choosing to do the same to me since I worked the bar four times a week from five to five and much love can be made in twelve hours.

Therefore, when she nodded her agreement to the trip down South, I needed no more confirmation to proceed. One of her gifts was to be able to convey it all by one wry humorous dip of her head. “Now tell me the bad news,” she said.

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

So we went to North Carolina. We assured each other that we would probably not like the other couple, and get out fast. Then we could enjoy an extra night or two on the drive back. “We’ll stop in Chincoteague,” I said to her, “we’ll try to sneak up on a Chincoteague pony,” and explained how they were the last wild horses, just about, east of the Mississippi.

“Chincoteague,” she said. “I would like that.” She had a rich husky voice whose timbre would resonate in my chest, and she let me rock on every syllable in “Chincoteague.” Thereby we laid salve on each other against the incision we had just made on the nature of our future flesh. And went.

That was where I first encountered Patty Lareine. (It was long before she met Wardley.) She turned out to be the wife of Big Stoop (as she called him) and Big Stoop turned out to be (1) possessor of a truly long dick and (2) a liar, for he was not the most successful gynecologist in the country, but a chiropractor. He was also a prodigious lover of pussy. Could you conceive of how deep he dived into Madeleine’s treasure chest?

In the adjoining bedroom (for he was hygienic about these wife-swapping sports—no threesies or foursies!) Patty Erleen—who had not yet renamed herself Patty Lareine—and I began our own weekend. I may yet bring myself to describe it, but for now suffice it to say that I thought of her on the ride back to New York, and Madeleine and I never stopped off in Chincoteague. Nor was I smoking in those days. So I had gone through some quick rises and free-falls of the ego, passing through two days and a night of mate switching (Big Stoop never knew that Madeleine and I were not married, although, truth to tell, for the damage it did, we were) and never a cigarette for the moments I felt impaled—that is the word for listening to my woman give voice to pleasure (and how Madeleine could moan) while another man was in her. No male ego is the same after hearing the same ongoing female cry of pleasure given to a strange, new (very long) dick. “It is better to be a masochist than a faggot,” I said to myself more than once during those two days, but then, I spent hours that had their own glory for me, since the chiropractor’s wife, formerly his nurse, this Patty Erleen, had a body as pneumatic as a nineteen-year-old model in Playboy standing unbelievably before you in life, and we had one hot highschool push-on romance, that is, I kept pushing her to put her mouth into places she swore she had never put it before, which kept us in each other’s pits, we had such hooks for each other, so mean and intimate and nasty and super-pleasureful (as Californians say) for being nasty. God, Patty Erleen was nice, you could fuck her till you died. Even now, twelve years later, I was close to that first night again, and did not want to be, as if to think well of Patty would betray Madeleine once more.

Instead, I suffered the memory of the long return of Madeleine Falco and myself to New York. It was a very long return. We quarreled, and Madeleine shrieked at me (which was most out of character for her) when I went too fast around a few turns, and finally—I blame it on trying to go cold turkey without cigarettes—I lost the car on an unexpectedly sharp turn. It was a big boat of a Dodge, or a Buick or a Mercury—who can remember? They all acted like sponge rubber on a hard curve, and we squeaked and squeegeed over a hundred yards of hard-top before we slammed into a tree.

My body felt equal to the car. Part was crunched, part was stretched, and a fearful racket like a trailing muffler knocked inside my ears. Without, a silence. One of those country silences when the unrest of insects vibrates through the fields.

Madeleine was in worse shape. She never told me, but I learned that her womb was injured. And, indeed, there was a frightful scar on her belly when she came out of the hospital.

We lasted for another year, cutting ourselves away from each other over the months that followed. We got into cocaine. It filled the rift. Then the habit froze, and the rock of our relation was cracked by the habit, and the rift was larger. It was after we broke up that I got busted for selling cocaine.

Now I sat in my study in my home in Provincetown sipping my bourbon neat. Could it be that these pains of the past in conjunction with a little bourbon were proving a sedative for three days of shocks and starts and turns and absolute dislocations of all I understood? Sitting in that armchair, I began to feel sleep coming on like a blessing. The murmur of what was gone rose over me, an infusion, and the colors of the past grew deeper than the present. Was sleep the entrance to a cave?

In the next instant I was plucked back from sleep. What could I do when even my simplest metaphor saw an entrance to a cave? That was not calculated to keep one’s mind away from the burrow in the Truro woods.

All the same, I kept sipping at the bourbon, and a few resources returned. Was I beginning to digest the impact of Mr. Pangbom’s suicide? For now it seemed not improbable that Pangbom could be the maniac who did it. Certainly the letter might be seen as the anticipation of a crime. “If someone tried to take my blonde lady away, I would kill.” But whom? The new lover or the lady?

This, which offered a working premise, became, when added to the bourbon, the sedative I needed, and I fell at last into a deep sleep, as bruised about as if I were still playing wide receiver for that Exeter team which could not throw a pass, and went down to such a depth that the voices of Hell Town were not even with me when I awakened. Instead, I came back to a clear recollection that three nights ago—yes, for certain!—Jessica and Lonnie and I had stepped out of The Widow’s Walk at about the same time, they from the Dining Room, I from the Lounge, and there, in the parking lot, had resumed— much against Pangbom’s will and much to her taste—our conversation, and Jessica and I laughed so much and so quickly that it was soon decided we must go to my house for a nightcap.

Then began a discussion about the car. Did we go in two or one? Jessica was for two cars, Lonnie in his rented sedan and she and I in my Porsche, but he could read ahead and had no desire to be sent packing, so he solved it all by getting into the passenger seat of my car, whereupon she was obliged to fit herself in and all around him, and managed to do this only by laying her legs across my lap, so that I could shift gears only by maneuvering my hand in and around her knees and under her thighs, but then, it was only two miles and a little to my house, and once there we talked for a long time about property values in Provincetown and why Patty’s and my old ramble was worth so much when it consisted only of two saltboxes and two sheds and a tower we had built ourselves for my third-floor study, but frontage, I told them, was the factor. We had one hundred feet of bay frontage, and the length of our house ran parallel to the shore, rare in our town. “Yes,” said Jessica, “that’s wonderful,” and I swear her knees parted a little further.

Now, I cannot say whether this was a recollection or a dream, for if it had all the clarity of the real event, the logic seemed to belong to that theater of sleep where only those impossible actions take place which are too incisive for the day. What I now recalled is that as we sat in my living room and drank I began to sense the sachet in each of Lonnie’s moves. The deeper he got into drink, the less the Bar Association seemed able to shore up his masculine frontage, and I woke up in my chair on this, the third morning after they disappeared, ready to swear on the stand that the other night, looking at her and at him in my living room, I developed a prodigious erection (one of those few we remember with excessive pride) and so peremptory was my understanding of this kind of bonus that I made a point of undoing my fly right into the warp and woof of a long, rich—I must say it—pregnant silence. Yes, I took it out and held it up for them, like a six-year-old or a happy lunatic, and said, “Which of you gets first licks?”—a cataclysmic remark, since the evening rather than my phallus could certainly have been blown, but if this memory is true, she got up from where she was sitting, knelt by me, put her blonde head in my lap and her red mouth on my cock, and Lonnie gave vent to a sound that was half joy and half agony pure.

Then, it seems, we were all in my Porsche again, and on a crazy trip to Wellfleet. Once, I stopped the car in the woods and made love to her on the front fender, yes, because on this morning, awakening in the third-floor-study chair, recalling it all, I could still feel the grasp of the walls of her vagina on my monster of an erection. How I had to fuck her! Down with Patty Lareine! It was as if Jessica and I had been designed in some heavenly shop, part for part, our privates were inseparable, and where was Lonnie but watching! He was crying, if I remember, and I never felt more of a brute. His misery was as good as blood to my erectile tissue. That was the state of my affections near to four weeks after being deserted by my wife.

Then all three of us were talking again in the car. He said he had to be alone with the woman, he had to talk to her—would I let them talk? In the name of decency, would I let them talk?

“Yes,” I said, and then—no, I could not remember stopping in the Truro woods to show them my marijuana patch, but we must have—yes, now I could not see how I would have failed to do that.

What had happened after? Had I left her alone with him? How little my balance on awakening this morning was for love, and how much for self-interest! I was now hoping I had left her with him, and that it was her head—so much for my fealty to great pussy on marijuana— yes, it was her head I wished to find in the burrow. For, if she was there—and now I was convinced it had to be Jessica—why, then I could find other clues. If he had killed her in some motel room and brought her body—or was it only her head?—back to my patch, there ought to be tire marks still on the side of the sandy road. I could drive by his car, wherever it was now impounded, and check the tires, yes, I was thinking like a sleuth at last; and all of this, as I soon came to realize, was an exercise to drive my psyche up the high wall of fear until I felt strong enough, yes, psyched up enough once more to make a trip a second time in my mind in order to make it a first time in reality. So, waking up in the chair at eight in the morning, refreshed with all the carnal stimulations of Jessica, I converted the high hard adrenaline of each lustful thought into the will to lift myself out of my morass. And it took all of that day, all of the morning and afternoon. Even though I did not wish to return in the dark, I was obliged to. For long hours that day my will was silent, and I sat in my chair or I walked on the beach at low tide, and suffered as much as if I had to climb our Monument again. By evening, however, I had gotten myself back once more to the place I was when Regency knocked on my door almost twenty-four hours ago, and so I got into my Porsche, yes, once again, thinking even that Pangbom might, after disposing of Jessica, have come by my car and painted the front seat with the last of her blood—how would I ever prove that?— and drove out to the woods, parked, went up the trail, and with my heart pounding like a battering ram on a cathedral door and the perspiration coming off my face like founts of eternal water, I drew in the mist of the night air in Truro, removed the rock, reached in with my arm, and came out with nothing at all. I cannot tell you how I searched that burrow. I could have burned a hole in the earth with my flashlight, but when the footlocker was removed, all else was out. There was nothing there. The head was gone. Just the footlocker with its jars of marijuana remained. I fled those woods before the spirits now gathering could surround me.

Count the cavities in your teeth by the obsessions that send you back to drink

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

By the time I reached the highway, however, my panic was gone. If many a night of drinking had on many a bad morning brought me close to committing myself (so little could I remember of what I had done) it now seemed to me that since the evening at The Widow’s Walk I had not—despite my agitation—been cut off again from my memory. If this was true, then I did not remove that blonde head from the burrow. Someone else was involved with the deed. It was even likely that the murder had not been my act.

Of course, how could I swear that I had stayed in bed each night? On the other hand, no one had ever accused me of walking in my sleep. Like the rustle along the beach that comes with the turning of the tide (if you have ears to hear it) so did a kind of confidence begin to return to me, a belief, if you could so call it, that I had not lost the last of my luck—just the sort of recovered faith that gets a man back to the crap tables.

In my case it was the bravado to believe I could return home, stay reasonably sober, and fall asleep. Indeed I did, which impressed me in the morning as a species of small wonder. Be it said, I had gone to bed with a purpose. It was to debate, in the deepest regions of sleep, whether I should try to see Madeleine or not. The readiness with which I took to my bed, and the force with which I slept, were testimony to that purpose.

By morning there was no question. On this, the twenty-eighth day after Patty’s departure, I would go to see Madeleine. All else could wait. I had breakfast and cleaned the dog’s dish, noting that his fear of me had now been replaced by a huge reserve. He had kept his distance this week. Yet, before I would allow myself to ponder the withdrawal of his friendship and thereby risk my mood, I picked up the Cape Cod book and found Alvin Luther Regency’s number in the Town of Barnstable.

It was nine o’clock, a good time to call. Regency had probably driven the fifty miles to Provincetown already or, failing that, was on the road.

Nor was I wrong. It was Madeleine on the line. I knew she was alone.

“Hello,” she said. Yes, she was alone. Her voice was clear. When another person was in the room with her, she always betrayed distraction.

I waited, as if to prepare the occasion. Then I said, “I hear you send regards.”

“Tim.”

“Yes, it’s Tim.”

“The man of my life,” she said. It was with an edge of mockery I had not heard for a long time. She could just as easily have said, “Aren’t you the fellow in the short chapter?” Yes, her voice had echoes.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, “but I don’t remember sending you regards.”

“I have it on good authority you did.”

“Yes, it’s Tim,” she said, “oh, my God!” as if now, the second time around, it was reaching her. Yes, Tim— on the phone—after all these years. “No, baby,” she said, “I didn’t send you regards.”

“You’re married, I hear.”

“Yes.”

We had a silence. There was a moment when I could feel the impulse mount in her to hang up, and perspiration started on my neck. All hope for the day would be smashed if she put the receiver down, yet my instinct was not to speak.

“Where are you living?” she asked at last.

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Hey, friend,” she said, “is this Twenty Questions? I don’t know.”

“Please, lady, don’t be harsh.”

“Fuck off. I’m sitting here putting my head together”—that meant I had interrupted her first toke of the morning—“and you ring up like you’re the fellow from yesterday.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “you don’t know that I’m living in Provincetown?”

“I don’t know anybody there. And from what I hear, I’m not sure that I want to.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Every time the clock chimes, your husband busts another one of your old dealer friends. ”

“How about that?” she said. “Isn’t it awful?”

“How could you marry fuzz?”

“Do you have another dime? Try calling collect.” She hung up.

I got into my car.

Madeleine looked me over. “Being kept doesn’t agree with you.”

I had to see her. It was one thing to blow on the embers of an old romance; it was another to feel the promise of an answer. I had at that moment an insight into the root of obsession itself. No wonder we cannot bear questions whose answers are not available. They sit in the brain like the great holes that were dug for the foundations of buildings that never went up. Everything wet, rotten, and dead collects in them. Count the cavities in your teeth by the obsessions that send you back to drink. No question, therefore. I had to see her.

How quickly I took myself through the landscape. It was the day for me. Just outside Provincetown, a wan November sun gave a pale light to the dunes, and they looked like the hills of heaven. The wind blew sand until the ridges were obscured by an angelic haze of light, and on the other side of the highway, toward the bay, all the little white cabins for summer tourists were lined up as neatly as kennels in a pedigreed-dog compound. Now, with their windows boarded, they had a mute, somewhat injured look, but then, the trees were bare as well and bore a hue as weathered as the hide of animals going through a long winter in a land without forage.

I took my chances and drove at a rate that would have put me in jail if a State Trooper had caught my vehicle on radar. Yet I did not make such fine time, after all, since it occurred to me in the middle of this high speed that Barnstable was a town small enough to notice a man in a Porsche asking directions to Regency’s house, and I did not want a neighbor inquiring of Alvin Luther this evening who the friend might be who parked his sports car three hundred yards away from the door. In this part of the Cape, the winter people, mean and quick-sighted as birds, orderly as clerks, write down license numbers when they don’t recognize your car. They anticipate interlopers. So I parked in Hyannis and rented an anonymous dun-colored blubber boat, a Galaxy—or was it a Cutlass? I think a Cutlass—it didn’t matter. I was hyper enough to joke about the ubiquity of our American auto with the young air-head behind the Hertz counter. She must have thought I was on LSD. She certainly took a time checking my credit card and made me wait through one of those ten-minute ready-to-slay delay warps before she put down the phone and gave the card back. That gave me the opportunity to brood a bit over my financial condition. Patty Lareine had emptied our checking account when she left, and had cut off my Visa, my MasterCard, and my American Express cards, all of which I discovered in the first week. But husbands of my ilk have resources even wives like Patty Lareine cannot eradicate entirely, and so my old Diners Club card, which I would renew but never use, had been overlooked by her. Now its viability was keeping me in food, drink, gas, this rented car, and—well, it was near to a month—sooner or later Patty Lareine was going to get a few bills from the outpost. Then, after she cut me off, lack of money might become my preoccupation. I didn’t care. I would sell off the furniture. Money was the game other people played that I tried to avoid by having just enough not to play it. No one ever trusts a man who makes such a claim, but—do you know?—I believe myself.

All this is making an excursion from the point, except that the nearer I came to Barnstable, the more my mind was afraid to contemplate what I would do if Madeleine did not let me in. Such uneasiness was, however, soon replaced by the need to concentrate on getting there. That was no automatic deed in these parts. The environs of Barnstable had in the last decade become little more than freshly paved roads and newly erected developments slashed through the flat scrub pine that covered most of the land here. Even old-timers had often not heard of new streets two miles from where they lived. So I took the precaution of stopping at a real-estate office in Hyannis, where they had a large up-to-date map of the county, and finally located Alvin Luther’s little lane. As I had suspected, it looked by the map to be not more than a hundred yards long, one of six similar and parallel mini-streets, all depending from a trunk road like six teats on a sow or, would it be kinder to say, like the six cylinders of an in-line engine designed for the kind of car I was now driving. Dependably, the short road to his house ended in a nipple the size of an asphalt turnaround. On that dead-end circle were set out five identical highly modified Cape Cod-type wooden houses, each with a planted pine tree on the lawn, a set of plastic rain gutters, asbestos shingles, differently painted mailbox, trash-can bins, tricycles on the grass—I parked just short of the circle.

It would certainly attract attention to be seen walking fifty needless steps to her door. I could hardly go up, ring her bell, and later make it back to my car without being observed. Yet it would be worse to leave the car in front of another house and in consequence agitate the owner. What a loneliness hung over this enclave in the sorry scrub-pine woods! I thought of old Indian graves that once must have sat on these low brush-filled lands. Of course, Madeleine would accept a situation whose gloom matched her own worst moods— from that she could rise. But to live in a house like Patty’s, where one could plummet below the cheerfulness of the colors—well, not much, for Madeleine, could be worse.

I pressed the doorbell.

It wasn’t until I heard her step that I dared to be certain she was in. She began to tremble as soon as she saw me. The intensity of her disturbance went through me as clearly as if she had spoken. She was delighted, she was furious, but she was not startled. She had put her makeup on, and thereby I knew (for usually she did not do anything to her face until evening) that she was expecting a visitor. Doubtless, it was me.

I received no great greeting, however. “You’re a clod,” she said. “I’d expect you to do something like this.”

“Madeleine, if you didn’t want me to come, you should not have hung up.”

“I called you back. There was no answer.”

“You discovered my name in the book?”

“I discovered her name.” She looked me over. “Being kept doesn’t agree with you,” she told me at the end of this examination.

Madeleine had worked as a hostess for years in a good New York bar and restaurant, and she did not like to have her poise nicked. Her trembling had most certainly stopped, but her voice was not where she would have placed it.

“Let me lay the facts of life on you,” she said. “You can stay in my house about five minutes before the neighbors will start phoning each other to find out who you are.” She glanced out the window. “Did you walk here?”

“My car is down the road.”

“Brilliant. I think you better go right away. You’re just asking directions, right?”

“Who are your neighbors that they inspire such respect?”

“There’s a State Trooper’s family to the left, and a retired couple to the right, Mr. and Mrs. Snoop.”

“I thought maybe they were old friends from the Mafia.”

“Well, Madden,” she said, “ten years have gone by, but you still show no class.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Let’s find a hotel room in Boston,” she said. It was her good way of telling me to go peddle a few papers.

“I’m still in love with you,” I said.

She began to cry. “You’re such a bad guy,” she said. “You really are rotten.”

I wanted to embrace her. I wanted, if the truth be told, to go right back to bed with her, but it was not the hour. That much I had learned in ten years.

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

Her hand made a little gesture. “Come on in,’’ she said.

The living room went with the house. It had a cathedral ceiling, factory-prepared paneling, a rug of some synthetic material, and a lot of furniture that must have come from the shopping mall in Hyannis. There was nothing of herself. No surprise. She paid great attention to her body, her clothing, her makeup, her voice, and the expressions on her heartshaped face. She could register with the subtlest turn of her fine mouth every shade of the sardonic, the contemptuous, the mysterious, the tender, and the cognizant that she might need to express. She was her own work of brunette art. She presented herself as such. But her surroundings were another matter. When I first met Madeleine she was living in an apartment totally drab. That was cool. I had a queen who was independent of her habitat. I can tell you that was one good reason I tired of her over a couple of years. An Italian queen was no easier to live with than a Jewish princess.

Now I said, “Alvin bought all this?”

“Is that your name for him? Alvin?”

“What do you call him?”

“Maybe I call him the winner,” she said.

“It was the winner who told me that you send regards.”

She was hardly quick enough to conceal the news. “I never spoke your name to him,” she said.

I was thinking that could be true. When I knew her, she never talked about anyone before me.

“Well,” I said, “how did your husband find out I knew you?”

“Keep trying. You’ll come up with the answer.”

“You think Patty Lareine told him?”

Madeleine shrugged.

“How do you know,” I asked, “that Patty Lareine knows him?”

“Oh, he told me how he met the two of you. Sometimes he tells me a lot. We’re lonesome here.”

“Then you knew I was in Provincetown.”

“I managed to forget it.”

“Why are you lonesome?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You have two sons to take care of. That must keep you hopping.”

“What are you talking about?”

My instinct was sound. I did not think children lived in this house. “Your husband,” I said, “showed me a photograph of you with two little boys.”

“They’re his brother’s children. I don’t have any. You know I can’t.”

“Why would he lie to me?”

“He’s a liar,’’ Madeleine said. “What’s the big news? Most cops are.”

“You sound as if you don’t like him.”

“He’s a cruel, overbearing son of a bitch.”

“I see.”

“But I like him.”

“Oh.”

She began to laugh. Then she began to cry. “Excuse me,” she said, and stepped into the bathroom that was off the entrance hall. I studied the living room some more. There were no prints or paintings, but on one wall hung about thirty framed photographs of Regency in various uniforms. Green Beret, State Trooper, others I did not recognize. He was shaking hands in some of them with political officials and men who looked like bureaucrats, and there were two fellows that I would have cast for high F.B.I. men. Sometimes Regency was receiving athletic or memorial cups, and sometimes he was giving them away. In the center was one large framed glossy of Madeleine in a velvet gown with deep cleavage. She looked beautiful.

On the facing wall was a gun rack. I do not know enough to say how fine a collection it might be, but there were three shotguns and ten rifles. To one side was a glass case with a steel-mesh front, and within was a pistol rack with two six-shot revolvers and three fat handguns that looked like Magnums to me.

When she still did not come out, I took a quick trip upstairs and passed through the master bedroom and the guest bedroom. There was more shopping-mall furniture. It was all neat. The beds were made. That was not quintessentially characteristic of Madeleine.

In the comer of the mirror was tucked a piece of paper. On it was written:

Revenge is a dish which people of taste eat cold.

—old Italian saying It was in her handwriting.

I moved downstairs just before she came out again.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked.

She nodded. She sat in one of the armchairs. I put myself in the other.

“Hello, Tim,” she said.

I didn’t know whether to trust her. How much I needed to talk I was just beginning to realize, but if Madeleine did not prove to be the best person to whom to unburden myself, she would almost certainly be the worst.

I said, “Madeleine, I’m still in love with you.”

“Next case,” she said.

“Why did you marry Regency?”

It was wrong to use his last name. She stiffened as if I had touched her on the marriage itself, but I was already weary of speaking of him as the winner.

“It’s your fault,” she said. “After all, you didn’t have to introduce me to Big Stoop.”

Nor did she have to finish the thought. I knew the words she was inclined to say, and held back. However, she could not hold herself. Her voice came forth in a poor imitation of Patty Lareine. She was too angry. The mimicry was strained. “Yessir,” said Madeleine, “ever since Big Stoop, I’ve had a taste for good old boys with mammoth dicks.”

“You serving any drinks?” I asked.

“It’s time for you to go. I can still pass you off as an insurance salesman.”

“Say, you are afraid of Regency.”

She was not hard to manipulate when all was said. Her pride had to remain intact. She now said, “It’s you he’ll be irritated at.”

I said nothing. I was trying to calculate the size of his anger. “Do you think he’d be bad?”

“Buster, he’s in another league.”

“What does that mean?”

“He can be bad.”

“I’d hate to watch him cut my head off.”

Now she looked startled. “Did he tell you about that?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Vietnam?”

I nodded.

“Well,” she said, “any man who can behead a Vietcong with one stroke of a machete is doubtless to be reckoned with.” She was not horrified altogether by such an act. Not altogether. I was remembering the depth of the sense of vengeance in Madeleine. Once or twice a friend had insulted her over what I deemed a small matter. She never forgave it. Yes, an execution in Vietnam could stir up much in her.

“I gather that you’re miserable with Patty Lareine,” Madeleine now said.

“Yes.”

“She left you a month ago?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want her back?”

“I’m afraid of what I’d do.”

“Well, you chose her.” There was a decanter of bourbon on the sideboard, and she now picked it up and came back with two glasses, pouring each of us a half-inch of liquor without water, and no ice. That was a ritual from the past. “Our morning medicine,” we used to call it. As before, so again—she shuddered as she sipped it.

“How the hell could you pick her over me?” was what Madeleine wanted to say. I could hear the words more clearly than if she had uttered them.

That was one question she would never ask aloud, and I.was grateful. What could I have replied? Would I have said, “Call it a question of Comparative Fellatio, dear heart. You, Madeleine, used to take a cock into your mouth with a sob or a sweet groan, as if hell were impending over this. It was as beautiful as die Middle Ages. And Patty Lareine was a cheerleader and ready to gobble you up. Albeit with innate skill. It came down to whether you wished your lady to be demure or insatiable. I chose Patty Lareine. She was as insatiable as good old America, and I wanted my country on my cock.”

Of course, my long-lost medieval lady had now developed a taste for men who could behead you with a blow.

The greatest virtue of living with Madeleine had been the way we could sit in a room together hearing each other’s thoughts so clearly that we seemed to be drawing them from the same well. So she as much as heard my last, unsaid speech. I knew that by the mean twist of her mouth. When she looked at me again, Madeleine was full of hatred.

“I didn’t tell Al about you,” she said.

“Is that what you call him?” I said to hold her off. “Al?”

“Shut up,” she said. “I didn’t tell him about you, because there was no need for it. He burned you right out of me. Regency is a stud.”

No woman had ever flayed me with that word so well before. Patty Lareine could not have come close. “Yes,” said Madeleine, “you and me loved each other, but when Mr. Regency and I began our little courtship, he would fuck five times a night, and the fifth was as good as the first. On the best day you’ll ever have, you’ll never come near Mr. Five. That’s what I call him, you dolt.”

Against every intent of my will, there were tears in my eyes from the pain this speech gave me. It was equal to suffering while sand is cleaned out of a wound. Yet, at that moment, I fell in love with her all over again. Her words would show me where I put my feet for the rest of my life. It also stirred a pride I thought was dead. For I took a vow that, one night before I was done, I would obliterate her admiration for Mr. Five.

Before I left, however, our conversation took another turn. We sat in silence for a time, and then it was longer than that. Maybe it was half an hour later that the tears began to come out of her eyes and wash away the mascara. After a while she had to wipe her face.

I'm still in love with you.” “Next case,” she said.

“Tim, I want you to go,” she said.

“All right. I’ll be back.”

“Call first.”

“Okay.”

She walked me to the door. Then she stopped and said, “There’s one thing more I ought to tell you.” She nodded to herself. “But if I do,” she went on, “you’ll want to stay and talk.”

“I promise not to.”

“No, you’ll break your word.” She said, “Wait. Wait here,” and she went to a shopping-mall replica of a Colonial kneehole desk in the living room, where she wrote a few words on a note, sealed it, and came back.

“This promise you can keep,” she said. “I want you to hold this note until you’re better than halfway home. Then, open it. Think about it. Don’t ring me to talk about it. I’m telling you what I know. Don’t ask how I know.”

“That’s six promises,” I said.

“Mr. Six,” she said, and came close and gave her mouth to me. It was one of the most remarkable kisses I have ever had, and yet there was little passion in it. All the tenderness of her heart, however, and all her pall of rage both passed into me, and I confess that I was stunned by the combination, as if a good boxer had just caught me with a startling left hook and a stultifying right, which is not the way to describe a kiss and gives none of the balm it also offered my heart, but I say this to emphasize how rubbery were my legs on the walk past the neighbors down the road to my car.

I kept the six promises and didn’t open her note until long after I turned in the blubber wagon at Hyannis and got back into my Porsche and drove all the way to Eastham. There I stopped on the highway to peruse her message, and it took three seconds. I didn’t phone her, I just read the note again. It said: “My husband is having an affair with your wife. Let’s not talk about it unless you’re prepared to kill them.”

Well, I started up my Porsche again, but it will come as small surprise that I was not able to concentrate on the road, and, coming to a sign for the Marconi Beach Site of the National Park Service, I turned off Route 6 and drove out to the bluffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I left my wheels in the space allotted by the Park Service and walked off to sit on the top of a low dune, passing sand through my hands while I meditated on the Pilgrims and wondered if it might be out in the seas right here that they turned north to sail up the tip of the Cape and around to Provincetown. What better place than this promontory for Marconi to send his early wireless messages across the ocean’s space? My mind, however, on pondering such large concepts, grew empty, and I sighed, and thought of other wireless messages, between Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth and Essex, the Czarina and Rasputin, and, in our own most reduced and modest way, Madeleine and myself. I sat at the top of this low bluff and passed sand back and forth in my hands and tried to estimate my situation now that I had seen Madeleine. Did it all come down to Alvin Luther Regency?

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

It occurred to me that I could just about use a rifle and had hardly any competence with my pistol. For that matter, I had not had a fistfight in five years. With drinking and, of late, my smoking, I must have a liver large enough for two. Yet, at the thought of facing Regency, I also felt some of the old blood come back. I did not start as a fighter, and I did not seem to have ended as one, but the years in the middle when I tended bar taught me a few tactics, which knowledge I had doubled in the slammer—I was a compendium of dirty tricks—and then, finally, it didn’t matter. I had gotten so evil in my last few street fights that they always had to pull me off. Something of my father’s blood had passed on to me, and I seemed to have bought his code. Tough guys don’t dance.

Tough guys don’t dance. On that curious proposition my memory, like a boat coming around a buoy into harbor, returned to my adolescence, and I could feel myself dwelling again in the year I turned sixteen and went into the Golden Gloves. That was far away from where I now found myself with Madeleine’s note. Or was it not so far? After all, it was in the Golden Gloves that I tried for the first time to hurt someone seriously, and sitting here, on the beach at South Wellfleet, I started to smile. For I was able to see myself in the way I used to, and at sixteen I always pictured myself as tough. I had, after all, the toughest father on the block. While I knew, even then, that I would never be his equal, still I told myself that I was enough like him to make my high-school football varsity by my sophomore year. That was a feat! And I remember how that winter, once football was over, I used to feel a mean and proud hostility toward the world which I could hardly control. (It was the year of my parents’ divorce.) I started to go to a boxing gym near my father’s bar. It was inevitable. Being Dougy Madden’s son, I had to sign up for the Golden Gloves.

A Jewish boy I knew at Exeter told me that the year before he turned thirteen was the worst in his life. He spent it getting ready for his Bar Mitzvah, and never knew if on a given night he could fall asleep or would be wide-awake reciting the speech he had to give next winter in the synagogue to two hundred friends of his family.

That wasn’t as bad, I suggested to him, as your first night in the Gloves. “For one thing,” I said, “you walk in half-naked, and nobody has prepared you for that. Five hundred people are there. Some of them don’t like you. They’re for the other guy. They’re very critical when they stare at you. Then you see your opponent. He looks like dynamite.”

“What made you do it?” my friend asked.

I told him the truth. “I wanted to make my father happy.”

For a boy with such a good purpose, I had, all the same, a nervous stomach in the dressing room. (I was sharing it with fifteen other fighters.) They, like me, were to be in the blue comer. On the other side of a partition was a dressing room with fifteen contenders from the red comer. Every ten minutes or so, one of us on each side would go out to the auditorium and another would come back. There is nothing like the danger of humiliation to build fast alliances. We didn’t know one another, but we kept wishing each guy luck. Devoutly. Every ten minutes, as I say, one kid would go out and, soon after, the previous kid would return. He would be ecstatic if he won and in misery if he lost, but at least it was over. One kid was carried in, and they sent for an ambulance. He had been knocked out by a black puncher with a big rep. In that minute I considered forfeiting my match. Only the thought of my father sitting in the first row kept me from speaking up. “Okay, Dad,” I said to myself, “my death is for you.”

It came down to whether you wished your lady to be demure or insatiable

Once the fight started, I discovered that boxing, like other cultures, takes years to acquire, and immediately I lost the little culture I had. I was so scared I never stopped throwing punches. My opponent, who was fat and black, was just as frightened and never stopped, either. At the bell, neither of us could move. My heart felt ready to explode. By the second round, we could not do a thing. We stood still, we glowered, we used our heads to block punches because we were too tired to duck—it cost less to get hit than to move. We must have looked like longshoremen too drunk to fight. Both of us were bleeding from the nose and I could smell his blood. I learned on this night that blood has a scent as intimate as body odor. It was a horrendous round. When I got to my comer, I felt equal to an overraced engine whose parts were ready to seize.

“You got to do better, or we don’t win,” said the trainer. He was a friend of my father’s.

When I could catch my voice, I said as formally as I could—you would have thought I was already in prep school— “If you want to terminate die fight, I will abide by that.”

The look in his eye, however, told me he would repeat my remark for the rest of his life.

“Kid, just go beat the shit out of him,” my trainer said.

The bell rang. He gave me my mouthpiece and a shove toward the center of the ring.

Now I fought with desperation. I had to eat the entrails of my remark. My father was shouting so loudly, I even thought I was going to win. Boom! I ran into a bomb. The side of my head could just as well have stopped the full swing of a baseball bat. I suppose that I careened around the ring, because I only saw the other boxer in jump cuts. I was in one place, then I was in the next place.

New adrenaline must have been shaken loose by the punch. My legs were shocked full of life. I began to circle and to jab. I ran and I ducked and I jabbed (which is what I should have done from the beginning). At last I could recognize the given: My opponent knew less about boxing than me! Just as I was measuring him for a hook (since I had now discovered that he lowered his right each time I feinted with my left to the belly) why, the bell rang. Fight was over. They lifted his hand.

Afterward, when the well-wishers were gone and I was sitting alone with my father in a coffee shop, a second wave of pain just commencing, Big Mac muttered, “You should have won.”

“I thought I did. Everybody says I did.”

“That’s friends.” He shook his head. “You lost it in the last round.”

No, now that it was over and I had lost, I thought I had won. “Everybody said it was beautiful the way I took that punch and kept moving.”

“Friends.” He said it in so lugubrious a voice that you would have thought it was friends, not drink, that was the bane of the Irish.

I never felt more argumentative with my father. There is no surliness like sitting around, half-dislodged in every vale of your mind, torso, and limbs, your organs hot and full of lead, your heart loaded with consternation that maybe you did lose the fight your friends say was stolen from you. So I said out of my own puffed mouth, and I probably never sounded cockier to him,

“My mistake was that I didn’t dance. I should have come out fast at the bell and struck him. I should have gone: Stick! Stick! Slide,” I said, moving my hands, “and circled away. Then back with the jab, dance out of range, circle and dance, stick him! Stick him!” I nodded at this fine war plan. “When he was ready, I could have dropped the bum.”

My father’s face was without expression. “Do you remember Frank Costello?” he asked.

“Top of the mob,” I said with admiration.

“One night Frank Costello was sitting in a nightclub with his blonde, a nice broad, and at the table he’s also got Rocky Marciano, Tony Canzoneri, and Two Ton Tony Galento. It’s a guinea party,” my father said. “The orchestra is playing. So Frank says to Galento, ‘Hey, Two Ton, I want you to dance with Gloria.’ That makes Galento nervous. Who wants to dance with the big man’s girl? What if she likes him? ‘Hey, Mr. Costello,’ says Two Ton Tony, ‘you know I’m no dancer.’ ‘Put down your beer,’ says Frank, ‘and get out there and move. You’ll be very good.’ So Two Ton Tony gets up and trots Gloria around the floor at arm’s length, and when he comes back, Costello tells the same thing to Canzoneri, and he has to take Gloria out. Then it’s Rocky’s turn. Marciano believes he’s big enough in his own right to call Costello by his first name, so he says, ‘Mr. Frank, we heavyweights are not much on a ballroom floor.’ ‘Go do some footwork,’ says Costello. While Rocky is out there, Gloria takes the occasion to whisper in his ear, ‘Champ, do me a favor. See if you can get Uncle Frank to do a step with me.’

“Well, when the number is over, Rocky leads her back. He’s feeling better and the others got their nerve up, too. They start to rib the big man, very careful, you understand, just a little tasteful chaffing. ‘Hey, Mr. Costello,’ they say, ‘Mr. C., come on, why don’t you give your lady a dance?’

“ ‘Will you?’ Gloria asks. ‘Please!’

“ ‘It’s your turn, Mr. Frank,’ they say.

“Costello,” my father told me, “shakes his head. ‘Tough guys,’ he says, ‘don’t dance.’ ”

Now, my father had about five such remarks and he never dropped them on you until he did. Through my adolescence it used to be: “Tough guys don’t dance.”

At sixteen, a half-Mick from Long Island, I did not know about Zen masters and their koans, but if I had I would have said the remark was a koan, since I didn’t understand it, yet it stayed with me, and the older I became, the more meaning it offered, until now, sitting on a beach at South Wellfleet, looking out at the surf that came to me at the end of the three-thousand-mile ride of the waves, I thought again of the wonders of erosion that Patty Lareine had worked on my character. The wells of self-pity rose predictably, and I thought it was time to stop thinking of my koan unless I could bring a new thought to the circle.

Surely my father had meant something finer than that you held your ground when there was trouble, something finer that doubtless he could not or would not express, but it was there, his code. It could be no less than a vow. Did I miss some elusive principle on which his philosophy must crystallize?

It was then that I saw a man approaching on the beach. The closer he came, the nearer I came to recognizing him, and with that, many of my preoccupations with myself began to fade.

He was a tall man but not menacing in appearance. In truth, he was plump, and soon in danger of looking like a pear, for at any weight he would have had a potbelly and not much in the way of shoulders. Moreover, his gait as he walked on the sand was comic. He was well dressed, in a three-piece pinstriped charcoal-gray flannel suit, with a white collar on a striped shirt, a club tie, a small red handkerchief in his breast pocket, and a camel-hair coat folded on his arm. To avoid scuffing his brown loafers he was carrying them in his hand, and so marching in Argyle socks over the cold November sand. That gave him the prancing, skittery foot of a show horse stepping over wet cobblestones.

“How are you, Tim?” the man now said to me.

“Wardley!” I was twice stupefied.

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

Once, because he had put on so much weight—he was slim when I saw him last, in divorce court—and again, that we should meet on this beach at South Wellfleet I had not visited in five years.

Wardley leaned over and stuck out his hand in the general direction of where I was sitting.

“Tim,” he said, “you were a perfect son of a bitch in the way you acted, but I want you to know, I don’t sit on bad feelings. Life, as one’s friends constantly admonish, is too short for that.”

I shook his hand. If he was willing, I did not see how I could refuse. After all, his wife had run across me dead broke in a bar in Tampa—it was the first time she had seen me in close to five years—had given me a job as their chauffeur, had taken me to her bed under his nose, thereby resuming the romantic possibilities we had begun on our night in North Carolina, and had then motivated me to the point where I certainly tried to think up a fail-safe method to kill him. That failing to spark, I certainly did testify against him in the divorce trial, taking the stand to swear—and some of it happened to be true—that he had solicited me to testify against her for a very good sum. I added that he had proposed I take Patty Lareine to a house in Key West that he was prepared to raid with a detective and a photographer. That was not wholly true. He had merely mused aloud over such a possibility. I also said that he had asked me to seduce her with the aim of becoming a witness for him, and that was successful perjury. It is possible my testimony did as much for Patty Lareine as her lawyer with his video coaching. Wardley’s legal guns certainly treated me like a star witness and did their best to paint me as an ex-con and a beach bum. They were as nasty as you would expect, but how could I keep any kind of good conscience about my role? Through all of that gig as a chauffeur in his home, Wardley had treated me as an Exeter classmate down on his luck. It had been no way to treat him back.

“Yes,” he said, “I was hurt for a little while, but Meeks always said to me, ‘Wardley, extirpate self-pity. It’s one emotion this family can’t afford.’ I hope they’re dipping Meeks now in the worst pits, but that’s neither here nor there. One must take one’s advice where one can find it.”

He had the damnedest voice. I will come to describe it in a moment, but for now, his face was over me. Like many ungainly people he had a habit, when speaking to someone who was seated, of leaning forward from the waist and putting his mug into the airspace around your own, so that you were always uneasy you’d receive the dew of his patrician spit. With the sun on his face he looked, particularly at this short distance, like a dollop of oatmeal. He would have been oafish in appearance if he weren’t so neat, for his thin dark hair was straight and his features, left to themselves, were lumpy, lacking in strength, and sullen, but the eyes were startling. They were luminous, and had the curious gift of goggling into a blaze at a passing remark as if the Devil had just rammed a thumb up Wardley’s track.

So his eyes did their best to own you, staring into your face as if you were the first soul he had ever found remotely like his own.

Then there was his voice. Whatever Wardley lacked in any other way was made up for by his diphthongs. A snob would turn to cream before those diphthongs.

If I have taken a while to describe my old classmate, it is because I was still in shock. I had long been a believer in the reach of coincidence; indeed, I went so far as to think one must always expect it when extraordinary or evil events occur—a bizarre but forceful notion I hope yet to explain. That Wardley, however, should choose to appear on this beach now—well, I would have been happier at first with a rational explanation.

“It’s incredible that you’re here,” I said despite myself.

He nodded. “I have absolute faith in chance meetings. If I had a saint, her name would be Serendipity.”

“You seem glad to see me.”

He considered this, his eyes intent on mine. “Do you know,” he said, “everything considered, I think I am.”

“Wardley, you have a good nature. Please sit down.”

He complied, which was a relief. Now I did not have to look constantly into his eyes. His thigh, however, resting against mine, was a large soft amiable physical object. The truth is that if one had a vocation in that direction, one could have grabbed him, etc. His flesh had the kind of nubile passivity that begged to be abused. In prison, I remembered now, they used to call him the Duke of Windsor. I used to hear cons say of Wardley, “Oh, the Duke of Windsor. He’s got an asshole as big as a bucket.”

“You don’t look well,” Wardley now murmured.

I let this pass, and took my turn to ask, “How long have you been in these parts?” I could have meant this Marconi Beach, South Wellfleet, the Cape, New England, or, for that matter, all of New York and Philadelphia too, but he just waved his hand. “Let’s talk,” he said, “about vital matters.”

“That’s easier.”

“Easier, Mac, you’re right. I’ve always said—in fact, I used to say it to Patty Lareine—‘Tim has an instinctive gift for good manners. Just like you, he tells it as it is. But he puts the best face on the matter.’ I was trying to smuggle a clue, of course, into her obdurate head. How I tried to give her a notion of how to behave.” He laughed. It was with the great pleasure exhibited by people who have spent their lives laughing aloud when they are by themselves, and so, if there was much loneliness in it, there was also extraordinary individuality, as if he didn’t care how much was revealed of the most god-awful sinks and traps in his plumbing. The liberty of being absolutely himself was worth the rest.

When he had finished this laugh and I had begun to wonder what was amusing him so, he said, “Since you, me, and Patty have been down this road before, let me make it brief. What would you think of doing her in?”

He said it with a gleam, as if proposing the theft of the Koh-i-noor diamond.

“Total?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t take long to get to the point.”

“That’s the other piece of advice I received from my father. He told me, ‘The more important the matter, the quicker you must broach it. Otherwise, the importance itself will weigh on you. Then you’ll never get it proposed.’ ”

“Maybe your father was right.’’

“Of course.’’

He was obviously leaving the option to pursue this suggestion entirely to me.

“I’m inclined to ask,’’ I said. “How much?”

“How much do you want?”

“Patty Lareine used to promise me the moon,” I said. “ ‘Just get rid of that awful faggot,’ she’d say, ‘and you’ll have half of all I’ll be worth.’ ” I said this to be as rude to him as I could. His compliment about my good manners had irritated me. It was so blatant in its stroking. So I said this to see if his wounds had dried. I’m not so certain they had. He blinked rapidly, as though to keep a few emotional paces in front of any loose tears, and said, “Well, I wonder if she now has equally agreeable things to say about you.”

I began to laugh. I had to. I had always assumed that, when we were done, Patty Lareine would be kinder to me than she had been to Wardley, but that might be a large supposition.

“Are you in her will?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Do you hate her enough to do the job?”

“Five times over.”

I said it without pause. Talking on the beach gave a great freedom to say anything. But then the number came back. Had I uttered a true sentiment, or was it merely a repetition of the noxious idea that Madeleine Falco Regency’s husband ejaculated five times a night inside that temple I had once adored? Like a boxer, I only seemed to ache hours after the ugly exchanges had taken place.

“I’ve heard,” Wardley said, “that Patty treated you badly.”

“Well,” I said, “you could use the word.”

“You look whipped. I don’t believe you could perform the deed.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“I don’t want to be.”

“Why don’t you commit it?” I asked.

“Tim, you’ll never believe me.”

“Tell me anyway. Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”

“That’s a good remark.”

“It’s not mine. It’s Leon Trotsky’s.”

“Oh. It’s worthy of Ronald Firbank.”

“Where is Patty Lareine now?” I asked.

“She’s around. You can count on that. ’ ’

“How do you know?”

“She and I are vying for the same piece of property.”

“Are you trying to slay her or defeat her in a business deal?”

“Whichever comes first,” he said with a droll flash of the whites of his eyes. Could he be trying to emulate William F. Buckley, Jr.?

“But you would rather see her dead?” I persisted.

“Not by my own hand.”

“Why not?”

“You simply won’t believe me. I want her to look into the eyes of her killer and have it all wrong. I don’t want her to see me as the last thing in her life and say, ‘Oh, well, it’s Wardley going in for payback.’ That’s too easy. It’ll give her peace. She’ll know who to haunt as soon as she gets her stuff together in the next place. And I’m not hard to find. Believe me, I prefer her to die in a state of profound confusion. ‘How could Tim have done it?’ she’ll ask herself. ‘Did I underestimate him?’ ”

“You’re marvelous.”

“Well,” he said, “I knew you wouldn’t comprehend me. But you hardly can, considering the gap in our backgrounds.”

He had turned around sufficiently so that his eyes were looking into mine again. On top of it all, his breath was not too fragrant.

“But if you scotch her in the realestate deal,” I said, “she’ll know it’s you paying her back.”

“Yes, she will. I want that. I want my living enemies to see my expression. I desire them to know on every breath they take that, yes, yes, it’s Wardley who did this to them. Death is different. Send them out in confusion, I say.”

I would have been less inclined to take him seriously if, in prison, he had not had a man killed who was threatening him. I was present when he bought the killer’s services, and he had not sounded all that different from now. Convicts would laugh at him, but not to his face.

“Tell me about the real-estate deal,” I said.

“Since your wife and I have an eye on the same place, I’m not certain I should tell you. One never knows when Patty Lareine will come back and wrap her arms around you.”

“Yes,” I said, “I could be vulnerable,” and wondered how Patty would reek of Acting Police Chief Regency.

“I shouldn’t tell you.” He paused; then he said, “On impulse, however, I will.”

I had to look now into those abominably large, searching eyes. “I don’t want to roil your feelings, Tim, but I’m not certain you truly understood Patty Lareine. She pretends that she couldn’t care less what the world thinks of her, but I will tell you that she’s really the stuff from which the world’s flagships are made. It’s just that she’s too proud to work her way up the daily rungs. So she pretends no interest.”

I was thinking of the first gathering to which I had taken Patty Lareine when we came to Provincetown five years ago. Some friends of mine brought their wineskins out to the dunes for a party, and the women contributed tea cakes and Acapulco Gold, Jamaica Prime, and even a few Thai sticks. We had a moon blast. Patty had actually been nervous before it began—I was to learn that she was always nervous before a party, which might have been hard to comprehend, considering how good she was at giving them, but then, Dylan Thomas, they say, used to throw up just before going out to give an unforgettable poetry reading. So had Patty taken them for a great ride on this first party and, before the end, even bent over to play a bugle between her legs. Yes, she had been the life of that party and many another.

All the same, I knew what he meant. She gave so much for so little. Often I felt the wistful note of a good artist’s painting ashtrays to make Christmas gifts. So I did not ignore what he said; indeed, I considered whether he could be right. Her unrest at living in Provincetown had become considerable of late.

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

“The secret to Patty Lareine,” Wardley said, “is that she sees herself as a sinner. Hopelessly lost. No return. What can a girl do next?”

“Drink herself to death.”

“Only if she’s a fool. I would say the practical answer for Patty Lareine is to build great works to the Devil.”

His wait was portentous, as if to allow endless space for this to sink in. “I’ve kept my eye on her,” he said. “There is little she has done in the last five years I haven’t heard about.”

“You have friends in town?”

He made a gesture with his hands.

Of course he did. With half the winter population on welfare, he would not have to pay a great deal for information.

“I’ve kept in touch,” he said, “with real-estate agents. Haunted the tip of the Cape in my own way. Provincetown impresses me. It’s the most attractive fishing village on the Eastern Seaboard, and if not for the Portuguese, bless them, it would have been ruined long ago.”

“Are you saying Patty Lareine wants to get info real estate?”

“Not at all. She wants to pull off a coup. She has her eye on a fabulous house on a hill in the West End.”

“I think I know the place you mean.”

“Of course you do. Don’t I know that! Those people you had drinks with at The Widow’s Walk were my surrogates. They were planning to step into the agent’s office next day to get that house you were already kind enough to put me in.” He whistled. “Provincetown is haunted. I’m convinced of it. How else could you come up with my name while speaking to them?”

“It is remarkable.”

“It is directly spooky.”

I nodded. My scalp felt alert. Did Patty Lareine tune the orchestra in Hell Town? While blowing her bugle at the moon?

“Do you realize,” said Wardley, “that poor Lonnie Pangbom got up the same night in the middle of dinner with his blonde lalapalooza, and phoned me? He was half-convinced I was doubledealing. How, he asked, could he keep a low profile as the purchaser when my name was being bruited about?”

“Well, chalk one up,” I said.

“That always happens with master plans,” said Wardley. “The better the plan, the more you may count on something unforeseen getting in to bend the works. Someday, I’ll tell you the real story of how Jack Kennedy got killed. It was supposed to be a miss! What a set of accidents! The C.I.A. didn’t know anus from appetite that day.”

“You want to buy the estate in order to keep Patty Lareine from getting it?”

“Exactly.”

“What would you do with it?”

“I would take great pleasure in hiring a caretaker to watch over its empty glories. Calculated to put dry rot into every one of Patty Lareine’s apertures.”

“But what better can she do, if she gets it?”

He held up a white plump hand. “This is just my speculation.”

“Yes.”

“Newport is Newport, and you can leave it where it is. Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket have become no better than real estate. The Hamptons are a disaster! Le Frak City is more attractive on Sunday.”

“Provincetown is jammed worse than any of them.”

“Yes, in summer it’s hopeless, but then, so are all the other spots on the Eastern Seaboard. The point is, Provincetown has natural beauty. The others are nature’s culls. And for fall, winter, and spring, nothing is superior to little old P-town. I suspect that Patty Lareine wants to start a chic hotel right there on that estate. Done properly, it could, in a few years, have more cachet than anything around. In the off-season, once in, it could sweep all before it. That’s how Patty is thinking, I reckon. And, with proper assistants, she would make a fabulous hotelier. Tim, whether I’m right or wrong, I know this: She’s got her heart set on the place.” He sighed. “Now that Lonnie’s packed it in and the blonde has disappeared, I’ve got to find a representative in a hurry or go speak for myself. That will kick the price way up.”

I began to laugh. “You’ve convinced me,” I said. “You’d rather screw Patty on a piece of real estate than kill her. ’ ’

“You bet.” He made his point of laughing with me. I didn’t know what to believe. His story sounded wrong.

We watched the waves for a while.

“I adored Patty Lareine,” he said. “I don’t want to bring out the crying towel, but for a little while, she made me feel like a man. I always say that if you’re A.C./D.C., it’s nice to have power in both lines.”

I smiled.

“Well, it was no laughing matter. All my life, I would remind you, I’ve been trying to regain property rights to my rectum.”

“Given up?”

“I’m the only one who would care what the answer is by now.”

“Back in my chauffeuring days, Patty Lareine used to harangue me how we had tp off you, Wardley. She would say that there would be no peace until you were dead. That if we didn’t kill you, you would certainly kill us. She said she’d known some evil types in her day, but you were the most vindictive. You had, she said, so much time to plot and scheme.”

“Did you believe her?”

“No, not really. I kept thinking of the day we got kicked out of school together. ’ ’

“Is that why you didn’t try to terminate me? I always wondered. Because, you know, I didn’t suspect a thing. I always trusted you.”

“Wardley, you have to see my situation. I was broke. I had a police record and couldn’t work any good places as a bartender, and the wealthiest woman I ever knew acted as if she was mad about me, and promised me all the drugs and booze and toys that money could buy. I did get pretty serious about how I was going to total you. Psyched myself up. But I couldn’t get that heavy shit to flush. Know why?”

“Of course not. I’m asking.”

“Because, Wardley, I kept thinking of the time you got your moxie together and inched out along a third-floor ledge to get into your father’s room. That story moved me. You were one wimp who got his nerve up. Finally, I had to call it off. You can choose not to believe me.”

He laughed, and then he laughed again. The sound of his humor as it cawed through his bends brought a flight of sea gulls near, much as if he were the lead bird crying out, “Here’s food, here’s food!”

(continued on page 110)

TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE

(continued from page 90)

“That’s marvelous,” he said. “Patty Lareine’s plans gone kerflooie because you didn’t have the heart to kill the little boy on the ledge. Well, I’ve enjoyed this talk and am delighted that as old classmates we are finally getting to know one another. Let me fill you in on what a liar I used to be. I never inched out along that ledge. I made up the tale. Everybody has to have a war story in prison, so that became mine. I wanted people to recognize that I was too desperate to fool around with. But the truth is that I gained entry to my father’s private library by way of the butler—who was also the photographer, remember? He just took out his key and let me in. And all for no more than the promise that I would unbutton his fly—old-fashioned buttons for the butler, not zippers!—and go gooey-gooey down there. Which I did. I always pay my debts. Paris is well worth a Mass!”

With that he stood up, lifted his shoes on high as if he were the Statue of Liberty, and started off. When he was ten feet away, he turned around and said, “Who knows when Patty Lareine may pop in on you? If you get the impulse, off her. Her head, since we have to put a figure on it, is worth two million and change.” Then he lowered the arm that was carrying the shoes and pranced off on stiff cold feet.

He was not out of earshot before I told myself that if I could find the blonde head that had now disappeared, that very blonde head which probably belonged to Jessica Pond, it might, by now, be sufficiently decomposed to be successfully presented as the remains of Patty Lareine. I might be the lucky inheritor of a high-powered scam. Tricky as hell, but worth two million.

Then I told myself: Anyone who is capable of thinking this way is capable of homicide.

Then I told myself: Thought is cheap. The best guide to my innocence is that the idea of such a scam hardly stirs me.

I waited until Meeks Wardley Hilby III was a distance down the beach before I went back to my Porsche, and left Marconi Beach for the drive to Provincetown.