The Gin Palace Page 3

  I looked over at her. I waited a moment before taking a few steps toward her, till I knew I was inside her peripheral vision. I didn’t want to startle her, and waited for some hint that she knew I was there. When I got it——a slight shift in her dream-like focus——I spoke.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s pretty cold out here.” For some reason that seemed the safest thing to say.

  My ears ached sharply, as if they were about to shatter, and my lips felt brittle, like two pieces of glass. Her cheeks were red, her ears purple, her lips trembling. The wind was coming at us from all possible directions. The ocean was on three sides of us, Long Island nothing more now than a stretch of sand running one hundred miles behind us. It offered us no protection at all, from anything. We were on our own.

  “Go,” she said. It was more a plea than a command.

  “I’ve got time. I can wait with you.”

  “My friend’ll be here any minute.”

  “Why don’t you just stand away from the edge? Could you do that for me?”

  “Please just go.”

  I took a step toward her. She didn’t seem to notice. I was just beyond an arm’s length from her.

  “The least you can do is tell me your name. I’m going to have to tell the police something.”

  “The Montauk cops don’t have it out for you, do they? So they won’t give you a hard time, right?”

  “How do you——?”

  “I don’t have any ID on me. I left it all at home. Everything. It’ll probably take a few days for the police to figure out who I am. It’s a few days I hope they don’t forget.”

  “They who?”

  “Did you know Delmore Schwartz lay dead in the morgue for three days before he was identified? Maybe it was more, I don’t know. He was a major American poet and——”

  “I know who he was.”

  “Anyway, he was a major American poet and they thought he was a bum, a derelict. It’s amazing what people get mistaken for. Don’t you think?”

  She looked at me, then away again. I waited, then slipped another step toward her. Her body stiffened. I halted, mid-step.

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t know about you, but those rocks down there, they look pretty nasty. I’ll tell you, the idea of splitting up on one of them isn’t something I’d like to think about too much.”

  “Please don’t. I know what you’re trying to do. Please don’t.”

  “It’s just I used to come here sometimes when I was a kid. I used to love it because it was the end of the line. I don’t know, it captured my imagination or something. Anyway, one day I was down there, climbing on those rocks, and I slipped and took a nasty spill. I nearly cracked my head open. I had a headache for days. Bad. I was ten. It was the start of a pretty unpleasant summer for me. I’ll tell you, I’d hate to imagine what hitting those rocks from a hundred feet above would feel like. I mean, you’ve got to feel it, for a second anyway, for an instant.”

  She said nothing, just stood there regarding the dark horizon. She was looking at it as if she expected something to appear on it. I didn’t have a clue what that something could be. I wondered what I’d be looking for if I was standing where she was.

  “The thing is,” I said, “jumping is tricky, even from this height. I mean, there’s always the chance the fall wouldn’t be fatal, you know. Stranger things have happened. I’d be afraid that I’d land wrong and I’d be laying there all busted up on a rock in the freezing cold, bleeding, in pain, out here with no one around to help. I’d probably end up spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair. That would be my luck.”

  She broke from her dreamy gaze at the horizon then and stole a glance downward, at the rocks and the incoming black tide. I saw tears welling in her eyes.

  I went for the opening, for the weakness, or for what I took as weakness.

  “Look,” I said, “my ears are about to break off. Why don’t you come back to my cab with me, just to warm up. We can wait for your friend there.” I wanted to give her a way out, to know that there was still a way back from this, from where she was.

  But she just shook her head, stiffly. She wasn’t having any of it. “You’ll take me to the hospital,” she said. “They’ll call the police. They’ll have to. And then it’ll all be over for me. They’ll lock me up for good and I’ll never have this chance again.”

  “I promise. No hospital, no police. I just really want to get out of this cold. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

  “It’s not going to work. What you’re doing, it’s not going to work.”

  Below us waves were crashing hard, one on top of the other, but out of sync. It was a dissonant sound, hard to take. I could barely hear her voice over the noise. She winced, and large tears coursed down her cheeks.

  “I can’t live with what I know,” she said. There was frustration in her voice, torment, sorrow. I felt for an instant like an intruder. I fought the compulsion to take a step back, as if I had invaded her privacy. “I can’t live with what I know about myself. I won’t. I can’t. Can you understand that? Can you?” She glanced at me quickly, almost daringly.

  “No,” I lied. I wanted her to make the effort to make me understand. I wanted to keep her talking. The longer she hesitated, the greater the chance that her nerve would slip out from under her. It was my only hope. “No, I can’t understand,” I said. I slid another step toward her. If I lunged from where I was, I could grab hold of her. But I didn’t dare make that kind of move, not yet.

  She was looking back out at the horizon now. I could see the war waging inside her, the conflict of madness over instinct. Then she said it again, quietly, as if it were her mantra. “Love is the world’s excuse for being ugly.”

  “Please step back,” I said. “Just one step. You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “I won’t let it go on. You tell them I said that. I want everyone to know that I stopped it. I stopped it. Me.”

  “Stopped what?”

  She didn’t answer. My question just hung there. She was still looking out at the horizon, still fixed on it, as if waiting for something. Her declaration of intent had bolstered her resolve. I could see it in her body language. I realized that this was exactly what she was waiting for. I watched her as she took a deep breath, as if to brace herself. She was ready now to do what she had come here to do. This was clear. I could see it in her face, in everything about her. It was almost as if part of her was already over that cliff. All she really needed to do was just lean forward and allow her body to catch up with that part of herself. In the end, even with all this warning, even with all that led up to this, it came so quickly, so fucking irrevocably, that I could barely believe it. I hardly had time to react.

  I lunged for her then, just as she leaned forward, her arms hanging, as if useless now, at her sides. Her leaning forward was all it took to set this in motion. She began to fall and I grabbed wildly, almost blindly for her. I clamped hard around the thin bones of her wrist with my left hand. I hung on to her with all I had. She was committed to the fall completely by the time I grabbed her, and she dropped like an anchor, all dead weight, yanking me with her.

  I dived for the hard earth, landing on my stomach on the frozen sand, sprawled perpendicular to the edge of the cliff.

  Chapter Three

  Her fall stopped with the force of a hanged man at the end of a rope. The jolt nearly tore my arm from its socket. I screamed out. I could barely hear myself over the waves below and the blood pounding in my ears. The pain was sharp and sudden. It was as if someone had pressed the blue center of a flame directly to the soft core of my bones.

  I hugged the edge of the cliff and held her wrist. Holding her was as much an act of will as a physical thing. I felt my muscles straining to the point of ripping, the ligaments in my wrist and shoulder on the verge of pulling from bone. The woman screamed from fear, or maybe it was surprise. I couldn’t tell and didn’t care. From where I lay I could see over the edge to the rocks below
. My left shoulder and head were suspended above her, over the edge, the rest of my body the only part of me in touch with ground.

  I ignored the sight below us and looked for her face. It was more a collection of shadows than features. But I could see her well enough to know that she was looking up at me. Whatever courage to leap she had summoned had now been completely replaced by the fear that she would fall. I had no leverage to pull her up. I could only hang on to her, at best stall her fall. Her wrist was too narrow to grip with any authority. In a few seconds it would slip through my hand. I was losing ground, being pulled bit by bit over the edge by her weight. Below, her feet were scrambling, frantically searching the cliff face for footing. But she could find none, and the more she tried, the more she twisted and turned with her panicked effort, the more my grip on her lessened.

  I said to her, “Grab my wrist with your other hand.” I spoke in grunts, as much from pain as the strain and effort. The wind swept my words away the instant I spoke them. “I can’t hold onto you,” I said. “I need you to reach up with your other hand and grab my wrist.”

  She was irrational from fright, lost to base instinct. Her eyes were wild, desperate, burning with fear. I couldn’t look away from them. But she was of no use to me like this. I needed her to focus, needed her to think and act quickly. But she just screamed and screamed and did everything but what I was telling her to do.

  “Grab my wrist!” I shouted. Ground was slipping out from under me, I was getting pulled farther and farther out over the edge. There were only seconds left for her to act, maybe less. “Grab my wrist with your other hand. Now!”

  “I can’t.” Her voice was a faint chirp. The night swallowed it.

  “Listen to me! Just reach up and grab my wrist.”

  “Please don’t let me fall.”

  “Reach up.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do it now!”

  She swung her right arm upward and grasped blindly for my left wrist. Her motion compromised my grip even more, and the instant she grabbed me, I felt the hold I had on her disappear. As quickly as I could I grabbed at her right wrist, forming a trapeze artist’s hold, a solid lock that joined us. I was holding her right arm with my left now, a cross body hold that gave me the leverage I was lacking. I pressed myself up with my free hand and rose from my stomach to my knees and started to pull her up. Her feet continued to scramble, but I leaned to one side, pulling her with my body as I rolled, till the top of her head appeared above the edge of the cliff. Then her face emerged, and I saw that she was grimacing from effort. I spread my knees to widen my base, paused a second to muster everything I had, and then pulled again. She reached over the edge with her left arm, grasping wildly. I snatched her hand with my right, then worked myself into a seated position with my feet planted against the frozen ground, and pulled like a rower. This brought her waist up to the edge. I let go of her left hand and grabbed her by the belt of her coat and pulled. I felt the ground give a little but I didn’t stop. The hard sand under my heels cracked, but I held on to her and pulled till finally she swung her right leg up as if she were mounting a horse. With her leg over the edge, I pulled once more with everything I had till she came all the way over and was once more on solid ground.

  She lay there close to the edge, on her stomach, gasping. I didn’t let go of her arm right away. I don’t think I could have if I’d wanted to. Her hair was mussed, crossing her face, hiding her eyes. Like her, I was out of breath, spent. Sweat covered every part of me. The cold felt all the more brutal because of it. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. Adrenaline was still in my blood. She seemed too exhausted to move, so I let go of her arm and sat there on the frozen sand watching her. In an odd way this felt like an intimate moment to me, one as intimate as I’d known in a long while.

  After a moment she rolled onto her back and stared up at the turbulent sky. Her coat was open now. She had a sweater on underneath, bone-white and densely knit, expensive. I watched her torso heave as she breathed, watched her chest rise and fall. It moved in sync with my own breathing. My heart was still pounding, flexing against my ribs. After looking up at the moving sky for a while she let her head roll to the side and looked over at me. There were tears in her eyes now. I didn’t say anything, just looked at her and listened to the wind howling and the ocean coming in against the rocks below.

  “You should have let me go,” she said. Her voice sounded small and faraway. There was so much open space around us——the sky above, the shore below, the Atlantic Ocean beyond that. We were just specks on the dark end of the world. “You should have let me do it while I had the nerve.”

  “It’s cold,” I told her. It was all I could think to say. “We better get back to my cab.”

  “And then what?”

  “I have to take you somewhere.”

  “You promised you wouldn’t.”

  “That was before.”

  “I really don’t want to go to the hospital. And I know you don’t want to take me to the cops. I know that about you.”

  I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. A moment passed. Neither of us moved.

  “Maybe you’d be interested in a compromise,” she said finally.

  “I can’t pretend you didn’t do what you just did.”

  “You won’t have to. My doctor lives in town. You could take me to him. I’d rather keep this private if I could. That kind of thing matters to me. You can understand that, right? About keeping things private.”

  I had no desire to cause her to suffer more than she already was. Taking her to her doctor, getting rid of her in that way, seemed like a good idea. I had my own problems to deal with, my own suffering. I couldn’t help her with her troubles any more than she could help me with mine.

  A door had opened in front of me, a way out of this mess I had gotten myself into. I’d have been a fool not to take advantage of it. I was starving and tired and I didn’t need this. But more than that, this disturbed woman I didn’t know obviously knew some things about me, knew about my trouble with the police, and that made me uneasy. I began to feel a little unsafe in her presence, as if maybe, somehow, someone somewhere was setting me up. It was a thought that lingered in the back of my mind like a shadow.

  “Where does your doctor live?” I said.

  “Southampton. On Lee Avenue. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yeah.” The sweat on her face shimmered, and her damp hair was starting to freeze. I couldn’t feel my feet. “C’mon, we should get where it’s warm.”

  I took her hand and towed her to her feet. She leaned against me, and we started down the long sandy path from the lighthouse back to my cab. All I thought about as we went was how good it was going to feel to get out of this wind. My ears now felt like they were made of glass and ready to shatter. When we reached the parking lot, instead of opening the back door, I led her around to the driver’s door and had her climb in through it and slide across the seat. I’d left the engine running for the heat and didn’t want her doing something stupid like trying to take off on me before I could get in. She was docile now, looking and acting like someone exhausted, someone beyond it, even; someone who had to will herself to move. But this could have easily been an act, and I wasn’t in the mood for any more stunts.

  I got in quickly and closed the door, then reached around to the back seat and grabbed the wool army surplus blanket I kept there for emergencies. For now all the heat collected inside my cab did was make the cold we carried in with us seem more severe. I unfolded the blanket and placed it around her shoulders. She looked at me as I covered her up, watching my face closely. Neither of us said anything. Her lips had begun to turn blue. My hands were numb, the bones of my fingers aching. I fumbled with the blanket, and when I was done with it, I faced forward and shifted into gear. A soft jolt went through the drive shaft below and I gripped the wheel. The warmth was reaching me now, beginning to move into me, but my hands were still shaking violently. I watched them for a moment,
then shifted back into Park and sat there and looked straight ahead through the windshield.

  Whether it was the cold that remained in me or the adrenaline that lingered in my blood, or a combination of the two, every part of me was trembling pathetically, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I’d need steadier hands to drive, it was that bad.

  My passenger was still watching me. I could see her from the corner of my eye, could feel her. She offered to share the blanket with me, but I told her no. It was only big enough for one person. After a moment I looked at her. Her eyes were still hidden behind her long bangs. Her chin was buried in her dark scarf. Frozen hair was still matted to her face. The little of her that was visible to me was being lit by the faint glow of the dashboard lights, and looking at her wasn’t something I could do for very long. What I could see of her face was a little too much like the reflection that looked back at me from my bathroom mirror most nights. The troubles inside her were maybe a bit too similar to those at work inside me.

  I glanced down at my hands. They were still shaking, but we couldn’t just sit here. I was thinking of trying to will them still when she spoke.

  “It’s weird,” she said. “You being the one to pick me up, I mean. I guess I just didn’t think about it, that it might have been you they’d send. I didn’t even think that when I called for a cab. It’s … weird, don’t you think?”

  I said nothing. I didn’t look at her. I glanced through the windshield at the empty night beyond. I wasn’t all that interested in why she thought it was weird that I had picked her up. I wasn’t interested in much but getting home. It was beginning to seem as if maybe she was baiting me, trying to get me to ask her something so she could tell me her tale of woe. I couldn’t think of any other reason for what she was saying. I didn’t really want to hear it, so I just sat there getting slowly warmer, and didn’t reply.

  She watched me for a while longer, then said, “You seem like a decent enough guy. I didn’t know it till now. I only knew what I’d been told about you, the things I’d heard. I didn’t know.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry.”