fountain. On a stool she lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, and spread the paper on the imitation marble counter.
The young man behind the counter was wearing a starched white mess jacket and a starched white hat that was cut like a military overseas cap. The hat was cocked at such a precarious angle over one ear that it seemed about to fall off at any moment. His hair was heavy and blond and rather long, brushed around the sides of his head so that it met to form a little ridge, like two waves of water coming together, precisely in the center in the back. The only way a man could brush his hair to achieve such an effect, Kathy thought, would be to stand with his back to one mirror while he looked into another. It would take a lot of time and work to achieve such a precise effect. A lot of vanity.
“A cup of black coffee,” she said.
The young man looked at her and smiled. “Anything else? How about a breakfast roll? Fresh this morning.”
“No, thanks. Just coffee.”
“Doughnut? Hot cake?”
“Please. Just the coffee.”
“Okay, lady. Coffee coming up.”
He put a heavy cup on the counter at the edge of her paper and poured the coffee from a Silex.
“Ten cents, lady.”
“Oh…yes.”
She dug for the dime and slid it across the counter. Drawing the steaming cup over onto the newspaper under her face, she sat with her head bent and let the warm, moist fragrance rise up into her nostrils. It was a good smell, a reviving smell, a smell that prepared her a little better for the ordeal of the paper that waited her attention under the coffee. She drank a little, relishing the scalding descent into her interior, and then pushed the cup aside again, leaving no barrier between her and the symbolic ink, no last excuse for further procrastination.
She examined the paper carefully, her eyes moving column by column across the front page. And there was nothing there. There was a murder, all right, but it was not Angus Brunn’s. Perhaps, she thought, because Angus Brunn, even dead by violence, didn’t merit the prestige of page one. She turned the page, feeling a strange and desperate affinity for the unknown person who might, at this moment, be reading in loneliness and terror and with God knew what futile regret the page one account of his cardinal transgression. She had never before been compelled to feel compassion for a murderer, though she had felt in her life many things good people are not supposed to feel, and she thought, looking for the report of her own crime, that her corruption was now surely complete.
Nothing on page two. Nor three. Turning the pages methodically, examining each page with the same column by column thoroughness, even through finances, sports, and entertainment, she gave up only at the classified section. Then, folding the paper as compactly as possible, she dropped it to the floor and returned to her coffee. What did it mean? That the body of Angus Brunn hadn’t yet been discovered? That it had been discovered and was being kept under wraps by the police for reasons of their own? She doubted that it was the latter. She knew nothing about police procedure, but she doubted that a thing like that would be done in the case of a relatively unknown and unimportant man like Angus Brunn. No, the reasonable assumption was that the body had not been found. Then she began to think, what if it isn’t found for a long time, not until someone is led to it by the nose? She visualized the body, over an extended period, bloating and decomposing and beginning to stink, and she shuddered violently, lifting her cup quickly to take more heat into her stomach.
She sat drinking and smoking, alternating swallows and inhalations. She had a feeling of waiting, of being incapable of doing anything else, as if nothing remained but to let the disastrous effects of grim causes catch up with her. When her cup was empty, she ground out the butt of her cigarette in the saucer and found another dime, which she placed on the counter. The young man with swept-around hair came down to her on the other side.
“More coffee, lady?”
“Yes, please.”
He supplied it and lingered, and she realized with exaggerated resentment that he was about to exercise his charm. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to talk with him. There was something about him that disturbed her even beyond the degree of her usual abnormal reaction which she had long ago come to accept as normal. “Big night?” he said.
She looked at him coldly, quickly. “I beg your pardon.”
He grinned. “All the coffee. No food. I figured you must be trying to work one off.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“No? Okay, if that’s the way you want it. You take my word for it, though, there’s nothing like a good old Seltzer. You like to try one?”
“No, thank you.”
“Don’t be like that, sweetheart. I’ll make it on the house. Don’t be like that.”
“Let me alone. For God’s sake, let me alone.”
His vanity bled in his face, changing it to a dull, ugly red, and his mouth sagged in an expression of angry sullenness. “Sure, lady. Pardon me for living. Pardon me, all to hell.”
He moved off behind the counter, but his words had shattered her defenses against the past. Don’t be like that, he’d said. That silly expression. Someone else had said it to her a long time ago, and its repetition now cued the recollection of an experience she did not want to remember.
Christ! she thought. Kenny Renowski!
And now that she had remembered, it seemed to her that there was even a subtle physical similarity between Kenny and the counterman. Kenny was younger, of course, at the time she remembered him, and his hair was darker, and he wasn’t so tall, and maybe he was a little better looking, though she was a poor judge of that, but there was something common to both of them, and she decided it was the silly arrogance, the nasty little bloated ego that could be heard in the voice and seen in the eyes and in the way the head was carried.
Where was Kenny now, she wondered. In what dull town, working at what dull job, married to what dull, impossible girl? Probably the same old town. Probably doing one of the petty, dreary jobs that seemed to be, for some obscure reason, essential to the existence of people in a town like that. Probably married to one of the girls she used to know when she was there.
Jesus, how she had despised him. Him and all the other strutting, revolting little cocks so proud of their fussy masculinity, just beginning to be conscious of the weight of their genitals between their legs. And the girls had been no better, for that matter. They were just as bad with their secret little yens, their secret little knowledge, their frightened, frantic attempts to give a nauseating spirituality to what was no more than an ache in the groin. Oh, Jesus, what a relief it was to get away from them after each horrible day of school and get back to the beautiful, exciting company of Stella. To return each day from their gray fringe existence to the clean and shining center that was Stella.
But it hadn’t been that bad at first. At first it was actually almost all right, because then, in the early years, it was right and normal for like to prefer like. But then, later, one somehow crossed an intangible demarcation line, and once you were across it, it was no longer normal for like to prefer like, but it became necessary and normal for like to prefer unlike, and what had been normal back on the other side of the line now became abnormal, and if you didn’t make the change at the time it was supposed to be made, you were in a hell of a fix.
