I said.
“Shut up.”
“Boy, are you always this grouchy?” I asked.
He ignored me.
“I mean, my head hurts too, but you don’t see me complaining or being abusive to people who are just trying to help.”
I heard his pillow being moved.
“Would you like me to hold that over your face for a few minutes, to help put an end to your misery?” I asked.
There was a long sigh, ending in something like a growl, so I decided to be quiet. I was awake now, however, and although my head was still pounding I longed to be able to turn on the light or the television as a diversion. My phone battery was long dead so that offered no entertainment. But I did have a notebook and pen so I decided to do the old-fashioned thing and write by hand.
I tried to quietly slip by the foot of my companion’s bed and enter the bathroom, but he was just as awake as me.
“Where you going?” he said, sitting upright in the bed.
“Bathroom,” I said. “Is that okay with you, or do you want to come, too?”
“It’s tempting, but I’ll pass. Just don’t try anything.”
I closed the door and turned on the light. What did he think I was going to try? An escape in this attractive johnnie? Or to rig up an explosive device that would be a diversion while I strangled him with the television cord? That was all I needed to get my creative juices flowing, and I looked around to find a place to sit and write. Unfortunately, there was no cover on the toilet, so that limited my options. I spread a towel on the floor and attempted to sit with my back against the door and all my privates somewhat covered by the thin cotton nightgown. The expressions “Yikes” and “Yeesh” came to mind.
My crude drawing of the knife had been ripped out of the notebook, hopefully by Dad or Phil, so I started writing on the next page. I began with a synopsis of what I knew about the people who were around Neville, starting with his partner, Kenneth.
Kenneth had been a darling of the art scene when Neville met him, and theirs was a romance that was something of a fairy tale, in a manner of speaking. Many people thought it was a fairy tale, how the washed out old poet came back to life when he met the young painter, his next book of love poems earning the Pulitzer Prize and the announcement of their commitment ceremony breaking the barrier for gay couples in the New York Times. It was a heady time for Neville, and his workshops were revitalized along with his career and his social standing.
I knew about this only by reading along with the rest of America in the pages of New York Magazine and Time Out, because I was nowhere near the epicenter when things started to crack. Apparently, happiness takes work in unions of all kinds, something Neville knew from his previous disastrous marriage and liaisons, but Kenneth had yet to discover. The sudden decline of interest in his art—which his agent kindly ascribed to the crisis in the stock market, naturally—coupled with the daily grind of living with an older and, let’s face it, less attractive man, coalesced into a full-blown depression and slide back into nasty habits of the past. Neville checked Kenneth into a facility, cleaned him up, and they returned from a month-long retreat to a private spa in Europe the proud parents of an adopted daughter.
That’s around the time when I came in. Things were still a little shaky in the marriage and Kenneth was pretty unstable on his own two feet, so adding a baby to the mix was pretty crazy, but I guess if you had money, connections, and access to a private plane, anything was possible. So, the solution to Kenneth’s depression and their marital problems was going to be Amantha. God help us all.
My list now had some interesting entries. Drugs, from where? Private plane, owned by whom? Travel to Europe? How many times, with whom? What kind of art did Kenneth produce? Who bought it? Where did they get all their money? The more I wrote, the more questions I had.
How much money did a person make writing poetry? Even with a Pulitzer, did people really buy poetry books? Yes, Neville had his writing groups, but how much money could he be earning from them? Certainly not enough to pay for all that rehab, plus the month at the spa in Europe, plus the private plane. And the private adoption of Amantha. Did they buy that little girl? I shuddered. This whole thing was beginning to give me the creeps.
Moving on: Who else was in the group? There was Joseph, Neville’s right-hand man. A long-time colleague from back in their “salad days,” as they called them. They’d been to Vietnam together, come back and gotten jobs together at some place in midtown, writing copy for advertising. The end of the “Mad Men” era, I suppose. I couldn’t picture either one of them in that milieu, wearing skinny ties and shiny black shoes, writing jingles for soda pop and then going home in the evening to their wives, whom they avoided talking to and having sex with. Smoking all day until their fingers were stained yellow. Hair greased back so they still felt hip and young, even though it was killing them to be working for “the man,” selling junk food and sitting in a crappy 8 x 8 office all day long. Joseph now wrote violent stories about taking ears off gooks, while Neville changed diapers and wrote about loving cock. I put a star next to his name.
Leslie, a relative newcomer to the group, was another frustrated Neville groupie. Her unrequited love of the poet manifested itself in weekly offerings of baked goods, erotica, and Neville’s oblivious exploitation of the poor woman. I knew that Leslie had spent hours babysitting for Amantha at the drop of a hat, and I had witnessed firsthand how she ran to get the baby whenever Kenneth was out. How many times had I watched her dandle Amantha on her lap over the past year, only to have Kenneth swoop in and snatch her away? While Leslie was no friend of mine—I’d laughed aloud when she produced a knitted bonnet for the baby that I genuinely thought was a potholder or one of those things you use to scrape ice from car windows—I knew that she’d never harm a hair on Neville’s head. Now, if Kenneth was dead, I would definitely put her in my top ten. But unless Neville did something horrid like tell Leslie to stay away from Amantha, I couldn’t see her stabbing him with a knife.
Javi, the sullen Serbian novelist, was an enigma to me. He could be a nice guy, I was certain, but I had no evidence of either the niceness or, to be quite frank, the gayness. This was a very sexually amorphous group, I suddenly realized. Only Paxton was definitively straight, in the sense that he was married with a couple of kids and a wife that he talked about all the time. Wow, what a boring guy to be in a writing group. He must be a killer!
The door jerked against my back, and then I felt someone pounding on it.
“Miss, are you all right? Miss? Oh my God, should I call for help?”
I squirmed to the side, opened the door a crack, and peeked out.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Have you fallen? Can you move?” a young woman asked. “I’ll get some help.”
“No,” I shouted. “Stop right there. I haven’t fallen. I can get up. Just wait a minute. I’m just sitting here, quietly, trying not to wake my neighbor in the bed there.”
“Too late,” Friday said. “I’m awake now. Thanks.”
I opened the door. The little nurse was clutching her chest.
“Are you okay? I’m sorry I scared you,” I said. I helped her get to the chair.
“I couldn’t find you in the bed, and then I couldn’t open the door, and I saw
