Lights Out

“How’s the coffee?” she said, sitting down on the other side of the table. It was small, about the size of a cafe table for two.

“Good.”

She added three spoonsful of sugar to her own cup and stirred with her red-tipped finger. “This is great,” she said. “I’m glad you came. Really. Having you here is almost like, having him. Isn’t that weird?”

Eddie nodded.

“How is he?”

“Doing all right.”

“But what’s he doing, what’s he thinking, what’re his plans?”

“He wants to get into politics.”

Tiffany started laughing. Eddie laughed too. He stopped when he got the feeling that she had spent some time behind bars herself.

“He’s afraid, with you gone,” Tiffany said.

“Why?”

“You protected him.”

“I didn’t.”

“Just you being there protected him.”

Eddie was silent.

Tiffany twisted in her chair, reached across to the counter for a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” she said.

“No, thanks.”

“Fifteen years in the pen and you don’t smoke?”

“Trying to quit.”

She lit up, exhaled a blue cloud. The smell reached Eddie.

“Maybe I will after all,” he said.

She regarded him without surprise. “Help yourself.”

He lit up too. Big mistake: he knew that right away, but it went so well with the coffee.

“Habits are hard to break,” she said. “I sure as hell hope Prof can break some of his.”

“Like what?” Eddie didn’t want to seem nosy, but he was curious: he’d lived with Prof for a long time. He and Tiffany had Prof in common. He started to feel a little more comfortable in the dark and tiny apartment.

Tiffany took a deep drag, blew smoke through her nose this time. “Like doing stupid things,” she replied.

“You mean the documents and stuff?”

She squinted at him. “I mean getting caught. The documents and stuff are his job. How he supports us in the standard of living to which we’ve become accustomed.” She stabbed her cigarette, still mostly unsmoked, into her coffee, still mostly undrunk. It hissed. Eddie couldn’t imagine Tiffany in the reindeer sweater at all.

“He’s afraid without you,” she said, “but he was afraid of you, too.”

“Prof?”

“He thinks you’re crazy-reading books all the time and killing people.”

Eddie felt his face grow hot.

She gave him that narrow-eyed gaze again. “You don’t look crazy to me.”

Eddie recalled his image in the polished brass of the elevator and realized he probably did look a little crazy. “I’m coming out of it,” he said. “I’ve been in a crazy place for fifteen years.”

“That’s not the record,” she said.

Eddie laughed, tried a joke of his own. “What’s your personal best?”

Tiffany glared at him and didn’t reply. She picked up the cardboard tube, lying on the table. “Let’s see what this is.”

She picked the plastic cap off one end, slipped her fingers inside, and withdrew a sheet of scrolled paper, about two feet long. She unrolled it on the table. He felt her go still.

It was a charcoal drawing of a nude woman. She was gazing right into the eyes of the viewer and was unmistakably Tiffany. She was sitting in a kitchen chair, very like the one she sat in now, legs slightly spread and pinching one of her nipples between forefinger and thumb. The drawing seemed professional to Eddie, even artistic. Prof’s inscription wasn’t in the same class: “To Tiff, from her dirty old man.”

Eddie looked up from the drawing to find Tiffany watching him. Their eyes met. She licked her lips. “He’ll always be an idiot.”

“Is he an idiot?”

“Don’t you think so?” In the silence that followed, Eddie and Tiffany didn’t take their eyes off each other. “Don’t you think so?” she repeated, and opened her robe, just enough to expose one breast. She took the nipple between her red-pointed finger and thumb and pinched, harder than in the drawing, much harder. At the same time she stretched her bare foot underneath that little cafe table and ran it under Eddie’s khaki pants, up his leg.

“Come on, killer.”

Tiffany rose, took him by the hand, led him into the bedroom. Eddie hadn’t been with a woman in a long time, not since Mandy. The sex he had with her seemed so sweetly innocent now, compared to what was about to happen. It was going to happen. He couldn’t stop it. The sight of Tiffany’s breast, in life in color and on paper in black and white, the pinched erect nipple, the red fingernails, the knowledge that the cardboard tube he’d been carrying had had this power the whole time, like an amulet in a story or something: all that, combined with fifteen years of loneliness, the different kinds of loneliness, but especially the loneliness of a man for a woman, added up to much more than he could resist.

He went into the bedroom. She helped him strip off the clothes the state had given him. She looked him over.

“He’s right to be afraid of you,” she said. Even that couldn’t stop him.

Outside: Day 3 13

Eddie awoke in complete darkness. The phone was ringing.

“Tiffany?” he said.