Urge to Kill

“It’s illegal in this state for two comics to be that way with each other,” Mitzi said.

“Is he prepared to be your love slave, like I am?”

“You’re more a love jester, Jackie.”

She was immediately sorry she’d said it. He turned away to hide the pain on his face.

When he turned back, he was smiling.

She bit her lower lip. “That was a horseshit remark. I didn’t mean it, Jackie, honest.”

“Sure you didn’t.”

“Will a blow job make it up?”

“I get the point,” he said, “you say things you don’t mean. Just be careful, Mitz.”

“Of what?”

“Banana peels, that kinda thing.” He gave her a wave and turned his back on her.

“Hey! Hey, Jackie! Don’t go away mad!”

Even that had come out wrong. Just go away hung in the air. Two comics. Maybe it was a good law.

Jackie probably hadn’t heard her anyway. He was deep into the crowd that was massing toward the street doors. She could just make out his dark head of hair with its bald spot, then he was gone. Hurt and gone, like so many people in her life.

Why am I always hurting people, or getting hurt?

Feeling paper-edge high, Mitzi continued her way to the stage steps and the office. She knew she’d deeply cut Jackie, maybe her only true friend and one of the last people in the universe she was willing to hurt, and she vowed she’d make it up to him. She wouldn’t apologize—that would only remind him of what she’d so thoughtlessly said and embarrass him some more. What was needed here was a kind of indirect apology, giving away a piece of herself without it being obvious. Mitzi was good at that. She’d been doing it since she was a little girl.

Ten minutes later, her check in her purse, she met Rob outside in front of the club, beneath the lighted marquee. Nobody looks that good in all that bright light coming from overhead, she thought. Not even me. She clutched his arm, turning her head slightly away from him and the sickly light, as she led him out farther down the sidewalk.

They walked a few blocks to a small, dimly lighted sports bar they frequented. There were booths toward the back, where serious drinkers and lovers sat, leaving the front booths to the sports nuts who sat hypnotized by taped ball games while raising the alcohol level of their blood.

“You seem kind of down,” Rob said, when they were settled in with their drinks. She had an apple martini, he a scotch on the rocks.

Mitzi told him what had happened with Jackie.

“I feel kind of sorry for him, too,” Rob said. Then he smiled. “But I don’t blame him for being jealous.”

They sat for a few minutes in silence, sipping their drinks. There was cheering from the front of the bar.

“Home-run volume,” Rob said.

“Maybe,” Mitzi said. “I don’t know how they can get so into it. Both the Mets and Yankees games have been over for hours. They already know who won.”

“They like to pretend, like everybody else.”

“What are you, running for political office?”

He gave her his hooded-eyes smile, melting her down. The bastard was into her even deeper than he knew, making her vulnerable. Vulnerability was something she loathed. “Mitzi, Mitzi…always the tough front.”

She shrugged. “I’m just pretending, like everyone else.”

“You should cheer up, sweet. You’ve got a birthday coming up next week.”

“How’d you know that?”

Does he know how old I’m going to be? Twenty-five. Holy Christ! How’d that happen? Twenty-five already, and at a place like Say What? She didn’t even have top billing

“You must’ve mentioned it,” he said.

“Not me.”

“Somebody else, then. Or maybe it was on your Web site.”

“There is nothing true on my Web site.”

He laughed. “I know that’s your photo.”

“It’s my mother when she was my age.”

“Can’t you ever be serious, Mitzi?”

“Only when I’m being funny.”

“We should celebrate your birthday.”

“Day of mourning,” Mitzi said. “Don’t even think of buying me a present, Rob, really.”

“No whoop-de-do?”

“Not even whoop.”

He studied her over the rim of his glass. She couldn’t read his eyes, so dark in the dim lounge, but with pinpoints of light or something else in their centers.

“Okay,” he said. “But maybe I’ll bring you flowers.”

“That could work,” she said.

54

Lavern Neeson sat in what had become her usual place, holding the shotgun from the closet loosely aimed at her sleeping husband.

The shotgun was exerting more and more of a spell on Lavern. She and Hobbs had argued again this evening about what for most couples would be nothing. They’d disagreed over who’d said what about some insignificant subject, and Hobbs, as usual, took the argument from the specific to the general. He accused Lavern of constantly saying things and then swearing she’d never uttered the words.