Chapter 28
On Tuesday, Robin told Ron that she was going back to Minneapolis after the holiday. She told him on the phone. She didn’t want to see his face when he heard the words, but she saw it in her mind’s eye anyway. She asked him if there was anything special that he wanted to do with her before she left.
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about over Christmas?”
“That’s too soon,” she said. “I won’t be able to afford it.”
Ron blurted, “I don’t want you to go.”
“That’s my home now Ron and besides you have a lot going on here. You have your students and you need to find a place to live. And I think I will be better off out there.”
“What’s so great about Minneapolis?”
“You thought it was beautiful when you were here. Maybe you’ll come back and visit me again.”
Ron felt himself freeze on the other end of the phone. Go back there! She really expected him to go back there? The last time it almost killed him to be there.
She heard the silence on the other end of the line. Then she said in a small voice, “What’s so great about living here?”
“It’s our home.”
“It’s your home.” Now she wondered if she should have told him at all until the last minute. He would spend the next two days sulking about it and be no fun at all. Why couldn’t he just learn to accept things as they were? Why did he always have to try to change everything until it was the way that he wanted it?
They drove into New York City. Ron told her that the school had given them an extra half day off. The rumor was that they wanted to save the money on heat but no one cared. At the end of the day on Tuesday, Irene Emanuel came on the loudspeaker and announced that Father Jones had decided that everyone could use the extra time as a reward for their hard work and so the girls could help their mothers prepare for the holiday feast. They were also reminded that there would be extra masses said on Thursday and that there was no better way of showing thanks and appreciation than to come to God’s house to start the holiday.
The city was alive with traffic and holiday lights and an air of the frenzied festivities. Ron was pleased to see that the backstreet where he was always able to find a place to park was still relatively undiscovered. He side his Chevy neatly into a place and then they walked around the block to her old school.
Before she’d left for Minneapolis, Robin was on scholarship to an acting school. He had picked her up from school the four nights a week that classes were held and they had walked these streets together often and knew all of the cafes.
Ron thought that the West Village was nothing like the East Village. Things seemed cleaner and more expensive. They slid into a booth at a café on West 4th Street. They stared out the window and Robin remembered how much she loved The City and how she would someday come back and live here. Then he began quoting lines from the Leonard Melfi play Birdbath.
It was a play that they had done on stage together. And the lines made her laugh and he was laughing too and then he took her hands and said, “I really don’t want you to go.”
He noticed that she didn’t pull her hands back when she said, “I know.”
He decided to plunge on. “Suppose we got married?”
Now she did pull her hands back. “Ron, we aren’t even lovers anymore and besides, I’m seeing someone.”
Ron face crumpled like a squashed carton. He lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking. The place seemed very hot and noisy. He looked at his reflection in the glass. He stared at the table. He tried to look anywhere but at her. He desperately wanted not to cry. Finally, he asked, “Do you love him?”
She laughed lightheartedly. “I don’t think so.”
Then he got very quiet. All he could see was images of Robin and her faceless, nameless lover. She stood on her toes to kiss him. Her hands hurried his hips as they made love. Her special smiles were all reserved for him. It was for him that she brought home presents. It was to him that she told her secret thoughts. She told him how she counted in colors. She sang Broadway tunes for him. He could see her now. Her voice gentle and high as she sang, “I would die, I would die, I would strangle myself with my tie. If ever you said good-bye, then I’d die.” He remembered when she has sung that for him and now he did wear a tie every day.
Robin quietly kicked herself for the way that she had handled it. Why hadn’t she seen it coming? Why had she told him that she was going back? Why had she ever mentioned Richard?
“Ron, don’t you see how much baggage we have?” she asked quietly.
“I see but I don’t understand why we can’t make it different.”
When he dropped her off, she leaned over and kissed him. It was a long and tender kiss. He felt her arms go around his neck and felt her breasts push against his chest and he tried hard not to over-react and so he didn’t react at all.
“Will you call me tomorrow?” she asked.
“Sure,” said Ron and then she was gone. He drove down towards Rahway and when he passed the house he saw that all the lights were on and that there were cars in the driveway. He slowed down but he didn’t stop. He drove back up the parkway to his apartment and when he walked in the door the phone was ringing. It was Zoe.
Ron loved many things about Zoe but right now chief among them was that she never asked where he had been. He was there now and that was all that she seemed to care about.
“I can’t wait till Friday,” said Zoe. “I miss sleeping with you and drawing you and doing the things that we do.”
“It’s good that you’re getting to see your sisters and your parents. How are things going up there?”
“Heidi really wants to meet you. She says that you sound neato.”
“Neato,” repeated Ron. “Well, tell Heidi that’s the very first time that I have been told that I am neato. And what has your older sister had to say?”
“She just says to have fun with you and to be careful to not let you break my heart. But I don’t care. You can break my heart if you need to break it.”
All at once Ron felt tender and guilty. She was so incredibly vulnerable. She deserved at least some modicum of loyalty.
“On Saturday, can we go and pick out a stone?”
“Sure,” said Ron. “Should we be stoned to pick out a stone?”
He waited for Zoe to laugh but she answered seriously. “I think it would help if we were. We would caress the surfaces with more sensitivity and feel if there were interior cracks or faults.”
Ron smiled. Maybe this was the girl for him. Then she solidified the feeling saying softly, “I’ve been so horny. I’m wet all the time. I can’t believe how much I have missed sleeping with you.”
After the call, Ron looked through his albums. They had salvaged much more from his burnt out shell of an apartment than he thought would have been possible, and Zoe had brought down her stereo. He put an old Dylan album on the turntable and grinned to himself as he placed the needle in just the right spot. Dylan intoned, “If you’re travelling in the North Country fair, where the winds hit heavy on the borderline. Remember me to the one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine.”
Immediately tears sprang to his eyes. He needed to smoke a joint. He always needed more than one and so he rolled his customary 3 joints and lay back and listened to the songs roll over him. Then he shifted to Jackson Browne’s first album and dropped the needle at the start of Jamaica. He lay his head back and thought, there they were in a nutshell. Robin the girl from the north county, and Zoe the beautiful Captain’s daughter from Jamaica.
The taste of the pot was fine. He felt it swirl into him with a welcoming haze and the soft glow of the interior light that illuminated his brain when he was high. But then “My Opening Farewell” found its way into his mind and he saw Robin standing in front of that open window. He wondered if it would be easier if he was the one who was going and not the one who had been left behind.
When he slept that night he had one of his two recurring dreams. He could almost feel himself groan in his sleep when the dream started. It was by far the one that scared him the most. In the other dream, he was waiting in a car and then he was shot and in a hospital bed while people gathered around him. He was not in pain in the dream but he could not move and then he felt himself getting better and stronger and would find himself in the car again waiting to be shot. That was the easier dream, but this one scared him so completely.
He was in the basement of his mother’s house. And he was digging up the concrete floor. He was digging up a body that he had buried there. The body was wrapped in plastic and he could not see who it was but the fear that rushed through him caused his heart to race and made him break out into a sweat in his sleep. He could not remember killing someone. But there was this body and he was sure that he had put it there and now he was trying to get it out before someone discovered it. He pounded on the concrete and felt it crack and then break into huge chunks. He swung the sledge hammer down hard and watched sparks and dust and small shards of stone break off. And then he could see the plastic and the sight woke him up.
He sat up shaking in the darkness. He could never really kill anyone, could he? The answer did not come from inside of him. Was the silence an indictment? Had he really done it and repressed it? Would he be found out as the murderer that he was and thrown into some dank hole and be forgotten? Had he really ended a life? No, he tried to scream to himself. He could not have done that, he would never do that.
Why would he bury the body there? Right in front of the washing machine and the dryer. How had he repaved the floor? George would surely have noticed. He would have been caught a long time ago if it had really happened. But he kept dreaming it and the dreams came at the most unexpected of times. A body wrapped in heavy plastic beneath a concrete floor in his mother’s basement and he was responsible for it being there. He was the only one who knew that it was there. Ron tried to tell himself that he read too much Edgar Allen Poe.