I moved into the woman’s apartment, staking it out from within. The woman was pretty in a lush, overblown way. She drank enough wine to stay permanently unfocused, smoked Newport Lights one after another, played solitaire by the hour, and never turned off the television set in the five days I spent in her apartment.
I would sit in a chair all day, reading a book or watching the TV if she happened to have it tuned to something I could stand. I used the phone a lot to keep from going crazy. Around midnight Eddie Rankin would come over. He’s an occasional employee of the Reliable agency, a big towhead with quick reflexes and an appetite for violence. I figured the boyfriend was most likely to come around at night, and Ed-die would be good if it got physical. He and I would tell lies for an hour or two, until I got drowsy enough to nap on the couch. At five he would wake me and I’d pay him a hundred dollars and send him home. I don’t think I could have stood it for more than a week, but the boyfriend showed up on the fifth night. It was around two-thirty. The kid was asleep in her bedroom. The woman had passed out in her chair in front of the TV, as she did every night. The set was still on, and Eddie was watching it while I was dozing lightly. I heard a key in the lock, and Is sitting up and throwing my legs over the side of the couch when the door burst open and the boyfriend came in, wild-eyed and roaring.
I never had to move. Eddie was on him before he got two steps in the door. He hit him with a hard left just below the rib cage, and he must have found the liver because it took the poor son of a bitch completely out of the play. He fell as if he’d been gutshot, and caught Eddie’s knee in his face on the way down.
We could have called the cops and she could have pressed charges, assuming she would wake up enough to follow through with it. But he would have made bail, people like that always make bail, and he probably would have come over and killed her. He might have done that this time if we hadn’t been there; I frisked him while he was lying there moaning, and took a seven-inch folding knife off him.
The idea was to keep him from coming back. “Maybe he fell off the roof,” Eddie said, dragging the clown over to the window as he talked. “He strikes me as the kind of guy, he walks on roofs a lot, he tends to fall off.”
But of course we didn’t throw him off the roof, or out the window. What we did do was a pretty good job of beating the crap out of him. Eddie did it, actually—kicking him in the groin, in the ribs, stepping down hard on his hands. I’d have had to have been in a rage to do any of that, and once the situation itself was under control, so were my emotions. Eddie, on the other hand, was never far from rage, and could turn it on at will, with no provocation whatsoever.
If pressed, I could probably guess what kind of childhood he had.
When he’d had enough we got the boyfriend on his feet and out the door. In the stairwell I took hold of him by the front of his shirt and told him I never wanted to see him again. “If you ever come around here again,” I said, “I’ll break your arms and your legs, and I’ll put your eyes out, and I’ll cut your dick off and make you eat it.”
We got out of there and rode in Eddie’s car to a diner he liked. “I was gonna have knockwurst,” he said, “until you said that shit about making him eat his dick. You want to tell me something? How come the fucker had a key?”
“I guess she didn’t change the lock.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Well, it costs. She’s not rolling in dough, as you may have guessed from a look around the place.”
“Hey, she had money to pay us,” he said. “You gave me, what, hundred a night for five nights, plus the extra yard for tonight”—I’d given him a bonus for combat duty—“is what, six bills? And how much are you getting, if you don’t mind me asking?”
I admitted I wasn’t getting paid, and told him when he pressed that his wages had come out of my pocket. He asked if she was family. I said no, and he frowned and asked if I was sleeping with her.
I said, “Jesus, Eddie.”
“Well, shit,” he said. “I mean, what are you, the March of fucking Dimes?”
“Lawyers call it ‘pro bono,’ ” I said. “Once in a while I do one for free. She’s a friend of a friend and she’s got no money and you can’t let a shitbag like that walk all over somebody that way.”
“He was a shitbag, all right.”
“So it was easier to help her out than explain why I couldn’t,” I said. “That’s all. I don’t make a habit of it.”
“Shit, I should hope not,” he said. And later, when we were on our way out, he said, “One more time, Matt. You sure you’re not poking her?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said. “And what difference does it make?”
“Well, I was thinking I might try my luck,” he said. “But not if I’d be stepping on your toes.”
“My toes’ll be in another part of town,” I said. “But are you serious?”
“Why not?”
“Well . . .”
“Look,” he said, “I know she’s a pig. But she’s built nice, and she’s got those sleepy eyes. Hey, I’m not talking love af-fair. I’d like to do her once, that’s all.”
“Be my guest.”
“Those eyes an’ that mouth. She looks like you could get her to do anything, you know what I mean?”
I was silent for a moment. Then I said, “Just don’t touch the kid.”
“Hey,” he said. “What am I, an animal? Don’t answer that.”
“I won’t.”
“I may be an animal,” he said, “but there’s a limit.”
It wasn’t long after that that I celebrated my anniversary. Another sober year, a day at a time.
An accepted article of AA folk wisdom holds that we tend to experience a lot of anxiety around the anniversary of our last drink, and I suppose it’s generally true. I’d be hard put to say how I felt this time around, and it seemed to me that I had more things to blame it on than my anniversary.
We celebrated the occasion. I qualified at an open meeting at a senior center on Ninth Avenue, and Elaine attended and got to hear me tell my story, and not for the first time. After-ward we went out for dinner with Jim and Beverly Faber.
“You’ll see,” Jim said. “It sneaks up on you. One of these days you’ll wake up and realize you’ve got Long-Term So-briety.”
“I’ll probably have serenity, too,” I said.