In the Cut Page 2

  I was confused.

  “From the bar,” he said. “My half of the check.”

  He took six dollar bills from his pocket and put them on top of an open notebook on my desk.

  “I tried to find you the other night,” he said. “When you went to the bathroom. Where were you? I waited a long time.”

  “I couldn’t find the bathroom,” I said.

  He stared at me. “Is that all?”

  “All?”

  “All I owe you.”

  I nodded, wanting him to go, turning away from him and putting my hand on the doorknob.

  As I had chosen not to keep hours after class, I felt that it was unfair not to be accessible to my students in some way, especially since they were participants in a special city program for teenagers of what is called low achievement and high intelligence. One or the other of them often trails after me when I walk home. When we reach my stairs, I take out my keys and say, Until next week then. Do you think I should change my major? one of them will ask. To what? I ask. To writing; change it to writing books. Well, I answer slowly, if you’re a writer, you’ll know it. Who would choose to be a writer?

  Perhaps foolishly, I had given them my address and telephone number. It would have been better, I see now, to have arranged to meet in one of the small rooms allowed to lecturers. There would have been boundaries. Restrictions. A clock on the wall. It would have been better than having Cornelius, dressed as a Green Beret, in my living room.

  “I’m almost finished my paper,” he said. “I want to show it to you. It would help and shit.”

  I hesitated.

  “What you working on that’s better?” he asked.

  “I’m writing about language.”

  “Shit. You like that shit?”

  “I do. I like, for example, that you add ‘and shit’ to the end of a sentence.”

  He was embarrassed and I realized that he thought I was making fun of him.

  “You going to write that down? What I say?” he asked.

  “Maybe. I’m interested in what you say. In what all of you say.”

  “Guinea pigs.”

  “No.”

  “You should be paying me.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “This is valuable shit, man.” He sighed and put his hands in his pockets. “I’ll do whatever you want. Chill if you want to chill, go to the store if you want to go to the store.”

  “I have work to do,” I said. “That’s what I want to do.” I could hear horses, police horses going into the park.

  “This is your scenario, man,” he said.

  He brushed against me as he went through the door, his black Ranger boots loud on the wood floor. I closed the door behind him, and locked it, and because the bolt makes a loud sound when it is turned, I knew that he would hear it sliding into its rusted grooves, and I was glad.

  I went to the movies with my friend John Graham. We ate Thai noodles and shrimp at a restaurant on Thompson Street that is decorated to look like a grocery story in Shanghai. Pre-Mao. You can buy the props—bags of rice and Vietnamese fish sauce. He walked me home across the park, the Rasta drug dealers watching in noisy amusement.

  I extended my hand, as always, and he took it and pulled me toward him to kiss me on the cheek, and said, good night, Frannie, and I said, the movie was good and that noodle place isn’t so bad now that the models have moved on, and he agreed.

  I closed the heavy street door behind me, pushing it with my shoulder to make sure that it was locked. I stooped to pick up the piles of Chinese menus that had been pushed under the door, and I saw a small white card sticking out of the corner of my mailbox.

  It said Detective James A. Malloy. New York Police Department. There were two phone numbers in the top right corner.

  Neither of which I thought I would call.

  I used to keep a shopping bag full of the things that had been left on the stoop or pushed into my mailbox until the bag finally ripped at the sides. It had in it, among other things, a demo cassette of an elderly Welsh poet reciting eighteenth-century Cockney rhymes; a nude Barbie doll bound and gagged that my landlord brought upstairs to give to me—it had been on the Greek Revival doorstep all afternoon, he said warily, was it mine?—and a box of condoms, each one engraved or, more accurately, embossed with my name, the letter i dotted with a heart, a gift which I knew was meant for me, which I could not with absolute certainty say about the other gifts, and which I assumed had been left by someone I’d once dated.

  So, needless to say, I threw Detective Malloy’s card away.

  By the time he knocked on my door two days later, I had forgotten about it. It was only when he handed me another card that I realized that the card in my box had, after all, been meant for me.

  “Can I come in a minute?” he asked in a low pleasant voice. “It’s better than talking in the hall.” He looked over his shoulder as if someone were standing there, listening. He held his jacket by the back of the neck. His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow and there were wet half-moons under his arms. I wondered how he had gotten inside the house.

  I was working on my monograph on Portuguese words in Rhode Island slang, but I felt that I couldn’t use that as an excuse. I decided that if he noticed my notebooks, I’d say that I was writing in my diary. A safe girl-thing to be doing. Not that I had anything to hide from Detective Malloy. I just know from experience that trying to explain what it is that I write, what it is that interests me, makes me sound a little foolish, a little ineffective.

  He held out the card until I took it, the card perhaps a way of letting me know that he really was a policeman, not a stockbroker in a paisley tie who spent his lunch hour bothering women. It occurred to me for a moment, being a resident of New York City, to ask to see his badge, but that would have embarrassed me.

  I invited him inside.

  “Nice place,” he said, looking around quickly. “Been here long?”

  “Not so long,” I said. He was big. Tall. I could smell his cologne. It was strong and sweet, a little musk in it, a little drug-store, which usually gives me a headache. “Six months,” I said. “I used to live on Seventy-first Street. Do you know that people once said they lived in a street, not on it? I lived in Seventy-first Street.”

  He smiled, and I realized something that he already knew. I was nervous.

  He laid his jacket over the back of the sofa and sat in one of the steel garden chairs. The chair swings low to the ground when there is weight on it, and he looked startled when it dipped close to the floor for a moment. He reminded me of a ballplayer past his prime, the old muscles still twitching, just not so fast anymore. I couldn’t imagine him chasing anyone down the street. But then detectives probably didn’t do that.

  “I’m doing a canvass in your neighborhood,” he said.

  He looked at the jade hairpins on the table. “There was a woman murdered on the sixteenth,” he said. “That would be Tuesday the sixteenth. Last Tuesday sometime between midnight and two in the morning. Me and my partner are questioning people in the neighborhood. Her body—” He paused. “A part of her body, to be exact, was found across the street in the park here. I wanted to talk to you in case you saw or heard anything unusual. Saw anybody.” He had a faint accent. He pronounced “saw” as if it had an r at the end of it. He lengthened his vowels, stretching the second vowel so that “exact” sounded like exaaact.

  “There are hundreds of people in the street at night,” I said. “All night long.”

  He nodded. “We came by the other day,” he said, “me and my partner, but you must of been out.”

  He looked at the jade hairpins again, each a different shape. They had belonged to a Chinese maid in my grandmother’s house in San Francisco, whom I think of tenderly as the only person, as far as I know, that my mother ever loved. When I was a child, I’d thought the pins must have belonged to a queen. Later, when I saw the kind of hairpins used by rich Chinese women, the pins covered with knobs of coral that looked like raw meat, carved with inscriptions beseeching male children and long life, they were not as beautiful as the pale jade sticks.

  “What are they?” he asked, picking them up and holding them in his outstretched hand.

  “Guess. No one has ever guessed correctly.”

  “No one?”

  He was interested in this game, I could tell.

  “Utensils,” he said. “Utensils of some kind.”

  “In a way,” I said. I wondered if he had a gun.

  “They’re old,” he said. “Jade. Are they for a female?”

  “No questions allowed,” I said.

  He was suddenly bored. “Tell me,” he said.

  I shook my head, and I realized that he’d been trying to work up the interest to flirt with me. His eyes were the kind of blue that would change with the light, or the color of his shirt. They were, at the moment, opaque.

  “No,” I said.

  He sighed in dismissal and stood up, the chair swaying beneath him. “My ex-wife collects dolls,” he said. He put the hairpins back on the table, lining them up absentmindedly, and I suddenly wondered if he was neat. I imagined that he, too, had a collection of dolls. Lined up neatly.

  “Did you see or hear anything, by the way?” he asked. “The night of the sixteenth, morning of the seventeenth? You never answered me.”

  He picked up his jacket and took a pen and a small stenographer’s pad from the inside pocket. He flipped the pad open with one hand. He saw me looking at the pen. It was a maroon Mont Blanc ballpoint. He held it out to me.

  “Fake,” he said. “It’s a cop thing.” He winked.

  “No, I didn’t see or hear anything unusual,” I said. “I sleep with the windows open.”

  “Do you?” he asked, looking up from the pad. “All the way open?”

  “Who was killed?” I asked. “Not my landlord, I know.” I was surprised by my flippancy. I was still nervous. But now I knew why.

  “An actress. Twenty-six years old. She worked part-time in a after-hours gambling club. She was last seen in a bar around the corner. A cop bar, as a matter of fact.”

  “A cop bar?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s the Sixth Precinct bar. A lot of detectives go there.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry that she was killed.”

  He nodded.

  “How was she killed?”

  “Her throat was cut.” He paused. “And then she was disarticulated.”

  What a good word, I thought. Disarticulated.

  He slid the notebook back into his pocket and took two cuff links from another pocket and turned down the sleeves of his shirt, and I remembered that it was masculine gestures that aroused me.

  He looked at me as he pushed one of the cuff links through the hole. “You remind me of someone,” he said.

  I was disappointed in him. “I’m not surprised. I have that kind of face.”

  That kind of ass, I thought.

  “You’ll let me know if you remember anything? My office number is on the card. Call anytime.”

  He walked to the door. I opened it for him.

  His trousers were a little tight. Thin black socks. Black shoes, lace-up. Needed a shine. A small tattoo inside his wrist. The three of spades. But no redhead between his legs.

  I dreamed about him that night.

  It was near morning, really. There was faint light behind the wooden shutters. It was that time when I am finally able to sleep the sweetest, the deepest. My skin feels smooth against the sheets and I wonder why it takes until dawn to feel so smooth. It is the same leg, the same sheet, as it was eight hours earlier.

  I pushed aside my pillows and turned onto my stomach. My feet hung off the end of the bed, my toes hooked over the edge. The way I do. And through my cotton nightgown, I put two fingers of my right hand on my clitoris and thought of him. Standing in a room, coming toward me, watching me undress. (It must always be through a nightgown or a pair of underpants. I’ve wondered if this is because of the greater friction. Surely that must be part of it, but there is something more, perhaps the thrill that first came to me as a small girl, pressing my fingers against myself, the cloth interceding between my fingers and my vagina, interceding between shame and pleasure. Perhaps I was afraid that I would die were there not a piece of cloth, something intervening, to prevent me from falling irrevocably into a trance of self-delighting.)

  One Sunday morning in boarding school I found my roommate lying on her back on the tile floor of the shower stall. Her legs, covered with black and blue bruises from hockey, were splayed on either side of the spigots, the water cascading between her slack muscular thighs. I couldn’t imagine what she was doing. I thought that she had slipped on the wet tiles. She remains to this day the only woman I’ve ever known who spoke freely of her own masturbation. She urged me to try it. I didn’t have the courage to tell her that I had found my own way. Women will talk about anything—sexual jealousy, dishonor, the lovely advantages of eating pussy or sucking cock, the disadvantages of eating pussy or sucking cock—but they will not tell you about fucking themselves.

  So there was Detective Malloy, watching me take off my clothes.

  My clitoris swelled under my fingers. My breath grew short. My legs stiffened. Inside, I rose and rose, sometimes stopping short, but not without pleasure even in the prolongment. It is not the same as when a man’s fingers are there and I do not know if he will have the skill or the patience or the interest to see it through, the not-knowing causing my body to overreach, to strain too hard. I am confident when it is my hand. Sometimes I am greedy, and I get a terrible cramp in my calf and I have to leap up and limp around the room until it goes away.

  Malloy was happy to wait.

  This morning when I left the house, walking to the subway at Astor Place, I noticed two men sitting in a dull gray car. I noticed it because the color of the car was without shine, as if it had been sanded, and I noticed it because there is no street parking during the day on Washington Square.

  Before I had time to think about this, not even realizing yet that it warranted thinking about, there was the rough grating sound of the bottom of a car door scraping against cement, and a voice said, “Oh, Miss.”

  He stood with one black shoe on the curb, his arm resting on the open door. Another man sat in the driver’s seat.

  “Hi, how you doing? Could we talk to you a minute?”

  He leaned forward and opened the door to the back seat.

  “I’m supposed to get in?” I asked.

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” he said in a low voice. “Unless you want to talk in the street. I never think it’s a good idea to put your business in the street, you know what I’m saying? But it’s up to you.” His hand fell away from the door handle, as if he thought less of me for my hesitation.

  My business in the street? I thought. What is he talking about?

  I got into the car.

  “My eyes aren’t very good,” I said as he closed my door with two hands and eased himself back into the front seat. “Someday I’m going to get into the wrong car.”

  “That wouldn’t be smart,” he said, watching a white boy buy dope from one of the Jamaicans. “This is my partner, Detective Rodriguez,” he said.

  Detective Rodriguez turned to look at me. “Hi, how you doing?” Another big handsome man. Black hair, black eyes. Big head. White shirt. Silver tie. A black jacket on a hook in the back next to me. This is someone who has spent some time at Club Broadway, I thought, and not at the six o’clock beginners’ merengue class.

  “Hello, Detective Rodriguez. How do you do?”

  The radio was on, a regular radio, not a police radio, and that interested me. Marvin Gaye, turned low, not a police dispatcher. I had read that detectives sometimes ate raw garlic before questioning a witness, so this didn’t seem too bad. I sat forward and crossed my arms on the back of the front seat, between the two of them. Malloy looked at me for a moment when I suddenly appeared at his shoulder, then turned away to roll down his window.

  “We wanted to ask you some questions,” said Rodriguez. “One of your neighbors heard screams in MacDougal Alley the night in question.” He leaned forward to wipe the inside of the windshield.

  “The night in question,” I said. “There are screams almost every night in MacDougal Alley.”

  Detective Rodriguez looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You a teacher?”

  I nodded.

  “You run those prints?” Malloy suddenly asked him.

  “What’s an isthmus?” Rodriguez said, still watching me in the mirror.

  “Isthmus be my lucky day. You ran the prints. And?”

  “And nothing.”

  “Jesus,” Malloy said under his breath.

  “We just wanted to double-check with you,” Rodriguez said, turning so that I could see his face and he could see mine. “In case there was something you forgot. You know, sometimes things come back.”

  I did stop to think, just to be polite, lowering my eyes to appear to concentrate better, and I noticed that Detective Rodriguez wore a holster at his waist. It was brown leather, and the island of Puerto Rico was painted on it in green and red. That in itself was enough to get my attention, as well as my admiration, but what really interested me was that in the holster was a yellow plastic water pistol.

  “To tell you the truth,” Rodriguez said, “the reason Detective Malloy and I thought you might be able to help is that a Mr.”—he looked down at a piece of paper lying on the seat between them—“Lothar Wilker, an employee in a bar called the Red—”

  “—Turtle,” said Malloy.

  “—Turtle, says you were there the evening of the sixteenth. The night in question.”

  Malloy turned to look at me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was there with one of my students. I was there for a very short time, and came home.”

  “What’s his name?” Malloy asked.

  “Whose name? My student?”

  “Yeah, your student.”