Toll Call Page 14

  “Yes. If you want. Yes.”

  “You will put them in a small bag. Plastic. White. A kitchen trash bag. And you will leave them somewhere for me. But where? Let me think. It should be convenient, public, busy, so I will not be noticed yet can tell if you and your friends make the mistake of lying in wait for me. Let’s see. I have it. The Transamerica Building. The little park in back. Leave the bag on the bench on the Washington Street side. At precisely five P.M. tomorrow. Just deposit the bag and leave. I’ll take care of it from there. And don’t bother having it watched. I will know if you have done so, and you will pay, and pay dearly, for your mistake. Do you understand your instructions?”

  “Yes.”

  “And be sure they have not been washed. Be sure they still carry your scent. I want to smell your flesh, inhale your musk, feel exactly what you feel. I may even put them on, the panties, I mean. Women’s underwear leaves such a sensual sensation. It’s surprising more men don’t wear them, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh, you’re such a priss. I’m not a pervert, Margaret. A transvestite or any of that. I’m just open to new experience. That’s what all this is about, don’t you agree? Experience? You know you enjoy it as much as I.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Ha. If you must delude yourself you may. Or perhaps you are posturing for Mr. Tanner. Whichever, I don’t mind. There is one last item, Margaret, and then we’re finished for the night. We know you’ve seen a great many men naked, right?”

  “Not many. A few.”

  “Ha. I’d call a dozen many, wouldn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Semantics will not shield you from the truth, my dear. The fact is, you’ve had sex with at least ten men. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And performed fellatio with two.”

  “No, I haven’t …”

  “Remember? We already discussed this. Fellatio, I said. With two men. Right? Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. I know you don’t like it, John, but yes, that’s right. Why do you keep talking about that if it upsets you so much?”

  “I talk about it because I am shocked, and ashamed, and amazed, that you could allow such filth into your life. You tell me you didn’t enjoy it, you tell me you only did it because your partner expected you to and you didn’t want to anger him. You tell me that, but you are lying.”

  “No.”

  “Stop it. Just stop it. It is far too late to change what you are, Margaret. What you have let yourself become. What I need to know tonight is whether you think about them.”

  “What? The men?”

  “No, the organs. Do you dream about penises? Do you find them attractive? When you sit home alone do you get an urge to see one? To fondle one? What do you call them, by the way? Dicks? Pricks? Peckers? What do you call them, Margaret?”

  “Cocks.”

  “What? I couldn’t hear you.”

  “Cocks. I call them cocks.”

  “Very well. Do you get those urges I described? Do you yearn for men’s cocks, Margaret? That’s what I need to know. How do women feel about men’s cocks?”

  Peggy paused for so long I thought she had dropped the phone. “How do you feel about them, John?” she said finally. “Isn’t that what this is all about? How do you feel about yours?”

  “Bitch! Cunt! Never ask me questions. I’ve told you a thousand times. Never ask me what I think again, or you know what will happen to you. You know what I will be forced to do. Don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I’m too upset to continue. See what you’ve done? And we were progressing so nicely. You will pay for this, Margaret. You. Will. Pay. Think of me, Margaret. Think of me! And don’t you dare forget my gift.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Peggy replaced the phone with the sound of a cage locking shut. I was left listening to a persistent, constant buzz that mocked my all-too-fickle heart. Though I was heated to a glow by what I had overheard, I gathered the afghan around my nakedness and went back to the bedroom, uncertain of what to do when I got there.

  Peggy was still in bed, still propped against a pillow, still staring into hostile space. Her face was stricken and subdued, but when she sensed my presence she tried a smile.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She managed a listless shrug. “Pathetic, huh?”

  “Do you want anything? Coffee? A drink?”

  She shook her head, then looked away from the unforgiving abstractions that swarmed around her. “You have such a hateful expression on your face,” she said, so softly I almost escaped her indictment.

  “He pissed me off. I wanted to strangle him. I still do.”

  “No. That may be part of it, but most of it is me. You’re disgusted with me.”

  “No, I’m not. Don’t be silly.”

  Her look was hyper-kind, the look of religious zealots and parents proclaiming affection for their offspring. “Oh, but you are. I told you this would happen. Two hours ago you said you loved me. Do you remember that?”

  “Sure, I do.”

  “And now look at you. You can’t wait to get out of here, can you? You’re trying desperately to think how you can possibly avoid getting back in this bed.”

  “No, I …”

  She bowed her head as though I’d cursed her. “Leave. Just leave.”

  “No. You’re still in danger.”

  “I’d rather be in danger than in contempt.”

  Her implication drove me a further step away from her. I tried to camouflage my retreat with a rearranging of my blanket, but she knew it for what it was. “Please, Peggy. Don’t do this.”

  “Just go, Marsh. Do us both a favor. Maybe someday we can have a big laugh about all of it, about how quickly we went from one extreme to the other, but not tonight. There’s nothing I want to laugh about tonight, Marsh. There really isn’t.”

  She rolled away from me, burrowing beneath the covers, curling as though I was poised to strike her. “I still want to help you, Peggy.”

  “But I don’t want your help. I don’t need the condemnation that comes with it.”

  “The guy is nuts. You can’t tell what he’ll do next. He probably doesn’t even know himself.”

  “I know what he’ll do,” Peggy said from beneath the blanket. “He’ll call and call, night after night. And I’ll talk to him the way I did tonight, about whatever it is he wants me to talk about, and it won’t be so bad, after a while. It won’t be bad at all.”

  “He’ll destroy you, Peggy. He’ll chip away at your self-esteem until it’s gone.”

  Peggy’s laugh was a hopeless croak. “Self-esteem. What a quaint expression. Good night, Marsh. I can handle it from now on. I should never have gotten you involved.”

  “I want to be involved. Remember?”

  “But now you don’t.”

  The statement contained enough truth to make me veer from the subject. “You go back to sleep. I’ll sleep on the couch. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

  “No. Please get out of here, before I have hysterics.”

  “It’s three in the morning, Peggy. This isn’t the time to be making decisions.”

  “I can’t stand that look on your face, Marsh Tanner. I can’t stand what you’re accusing me of being. Because I’m not that. I’m really not. And I never have been, no matter what you think.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Peggy. It’s not your fault this creep’s obsessed with you.”

  Her smile stretched wearily across her face, the journey spartan and unproductive. “Oh, Marsh. What I’ve always admired about you most was your honesty. Well, be honest with yourself now. Face up to what you really think about all this. Just please don’t do it while you’re still here in my apartment. Go home, Marsh. Just go home.”

  The covers heaved and twisted atop Peggy’s muffled sobs. I stared at them until they had been immobile for several seconds, then went into the bathroom, put on my cloth
es, grabbed my shaving kit, and went out into the night.

  Neither of us delayed my departure. As I crossed the street to get to my car a gray Ford almost ran me down. The driver looked at me savagely, as though he was Peggy’s surrogate and I was a menace to him as well. I returned his epithet, then drove home at the pace of a snail.

  My apartment was as cold as my reflection in Peggy’s eyes, and was commandeered by the memory of my ignoble reaction to the spider’s latest bite. Peggy had been right, I had been revolted by her telephone conversation, by what she’d told the spider, by how little resistance she’d offered to his demands, by the throb of intimacy that occasionally passed between them. The fact was both humbling and alarming—humbling because it made me less of a man than I envisioned, alarming because the long-term consequence of my behavior was Peggy’s permanent exit from my life.

  I tried to wash away the night with my usual method—a glass of Scotch and a deep sleep. Neither of them worked the way they were supposed to, so at five A.M. I got dressed again, stumbled down to my car, and drove east across the bay, over the Oakland hills, down the San Ramon Valley, through the Diablo Range and into the Central Valley.

  I guess it’s a psychic imprint from my rural youth that makes me do it, but whenever life turns particularly odious, whenever I need to escape my surroundings or the heavy baggage of my self, I head for the wide-open spaces. Amazingly, there still are some to be found, even in California.

  As soon as I could I left the interstate and meandered to Modesto, where I stopped for an early lunch at a Mexican place that came close to serving the real thing, which meant the food was hot enough to burn away everything short of the incipient scalding of my palate. At one o’clock I called my office. There was no answer so I left a message for Peggy on the machine, reminding her how the speaker system worked, where the on-off button was, and who would come to her rescue in the event she needed saving. At the end of the message I apologized for everything I could think of to apologize for. It seemed a craven response to the evening’s events, but it was all I was capable of at the moment.

  After hanging up I headed farther east, cracking the window to invite the brisk dry wind to chasten me with an hour-long slap to the face. The agricultural miracles being staged around me gradually lulled me into a charmed amazement, and I drove all the way to Sonora before I decided I could turn back, that enough of the past few days lay like litter along the highway to let me live a little longer with what I had become, in both Peggy’s eyes and my own.

  The return trip offered fewer diversions, and as I drove through Tracy my mind began to rattle across my cobbled history with women. I’ve thought about it for years, and I’m still not sure why sooner or later it’s always gone wrong. I’ve had scores of relationships, of varying degrees of intimacy. One of them reached a formal engagement before it self-destructed, and a couple of others included serious speculations on the advisability of matrimony. But something always happened. The breakup was not always my doing by any means, at least not overtly, and the precipitant was often something trivial—a dispute over the merit of a movie, a broken date, a drink too many, a remark too thoughtless or too frank. But regardless of who or what initiated the break, deep down I was always relieved. Except maybe once.

  In my younger years I used to feel that the women in my life were too different from me—active instead of sedentary, talkative instead of thoughtful, gregarious instead of private. But now the problem has become the opposite. Rather than my antithesis the women I know are far too much my like—independent, comfortable, penurious, wary of being hurt or, worse, of looking foolish, far too firmly convinced of life’s imperfectibility to believe it will confer anything more robust than a semitolerable existence, an existence that is most efficiently managed as a sole proprietor rather than in a partnership, no matter how modern the terms of the agreement. From this perspective, bachelorhood was not only what I wanted, it was near nirvana.

  Yet I still resisted, and for the past eight years my resistance found its focus in my secretary. Peggy suggested a more traditionally elegant possibility, an enduring association that was mutually mature, respectful, admiring. For almost a decade she had been the template for the woman who would, if I could only find her, be a mate for life despite the prattle of the diehard pessimists and the recently divorced. How then to explain the fact that twelve hours earlier my ideal woman and I had recoiled at the first sign of frailty in the other, at the first hint that the other was not precisely and completely what we imagined them to be. Despite our past and our ideals, we seemed to have surrendered our history without a fight.

  As I waited at the Bay Bridge tollbooth, I wondered whether Peggy and I would ever see each other again on anything approaching our former terms. By the time I was across the bridge I knew that I needed the answer to be yes, and that I was willing to do almost anything to see that it was.

  When I hit the city it was almost five. I assumed Peggy would be home, and hoped that Ruthie would be with her. Then I remembered the spider’s demand of the night before—that Peggy deliver him a gift of her unmentionables. Irate once again, I almost turned for home and left their little gesture to play itself out without me. But the more I wrestled with the exchange, the more I realized that the circumstance offered the chance that in his haste to recover the silks he coveted the spider would expose himself to capture. I made a quick decision to act instead of brood, and ducked off the Embarcadero Freeway at Clay, drove to my usual lot, left the car behind, and set out on foot for the Transamerica Building.

  The evening flood had already begun, the sidewalk gorged with office workers exhibiting their first flair of the day. I shouldered my way among them, till I could view the tiny redwood park where the spider would retrieve his spoils. There were several people sitting among the trees and fountains and blue-and-orange assemblages, but none seemed conceivably my nemesis. Indeed, all of those on the Washington Street side of the park were women, and thus more likely targets than accomplices.

  Trying to anticipate the event, I took two turns around the block, but the result was not encouraging. There were too many entrances and exits to be confident of trapping him or of remaining undetected. Defeated, I crossed Washington and headed toward my office. But halfway up the stairs a second thought occurred to me, and I retreated to Washington Street, turned my back to the pyramid, and looked north.

  My hunch had been correct—someone standing on the roof of the second building south from mine could easily see everything that transpired in the little park where Peggy was to leave three tokens of her ensnarement. I went back to the parking lot, fumbled in the trunk of my car until I found my binoculars, then hurried to the office again.

  Peggy was sitting at her desk, a plastic bag placed precisely in front of her as though it were only lunchtime and that were only her lunch. She nodded at me as I entered, and I said hello. Our eyes sought anything but other eyes.

  I sat in the waiting chair and crossed my legs. “Are you going to leave it for him?” I asked, gesturing at the shiny sack.

  She nodded, her face as devoid of expression as I had ever seen it.

  I looked at my watch. “How soon are you leaving?”

  “Right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Aren’t you going to try to talk me out of it?”

  “Would it do any good?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I’m going home afterward.”

  “Fine.”

  “Nothing happened today that you need to know about.”

  “Good.”

  “I got your message on the machine.”

  “Good.”

  “It doesn’t change anything.”

  “I suppose not.”

  She looked at her watch. “Well, I’m going.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to come over tonight?”

  “Definitely not.�
��

  “Okay. Well, have fun.”

  “There’s nothing fun about this, you bastard.”

  Peggy snatched the bag off the desk and hurried out of the office. I waited till her footsteps had descended out of earshot, then went through the door and walked the other way, toward the exit at the very end of the hall, the one next to Arthur Constable’s office.

  As I passed Constable’s door I glanced inside. Constable and Richard were standing behind Richard’s desk, deep in an animated discussion. From the look of it, Richard had done something wrong. The crowd of sculptured people made the chastising a public spectacle.

  I was about to go on my way when Constable looked up. When he recognized me he smiled and waved. I waved back. When he noticed the binoculars he frowned and mouthed in mime, asking whether there was a problem. I shook my head and went on my way.

  I shoved open the heavy fire door and ran up the steps to the roof. It was windy, the breeze racing in to cool us off and bed us down. I walked to the edge of the building, my feet crunching into the graveled roofing that the sun had made as soft as fudge, and jumped from my building to the next, and then to the next one after that. When I got to the end of the block I looked down onto Washington Street and across to the park.

  The view wasn’t as good as I’d hoped—part of a tree cut off a corner of the park, and the distance made the faces on the rushing pedestrians miniature and virtually indistinguishable. I rubbed my eyes, checked various vantage points for the one offering the best perspective, and settled down to wait.

  Peggy appeared in the next moment, her bag clutched tightly in her fist. She proceeded into the park without hesitation, went directly to a vacant bench, placed the plastic bag on the nearest corner, and turned and left, walking directly toward me for several steps before heading up Columbus toward her bus stop. Even from a distance I could see her look of brash defiance, a rebellion I deserved in common with the spider. I muttered a self-directed curse and sat down on a crate, staring at what passed for a public park, the cheap binoculars bifurcating the world into interlocking circles and pressing the people into oddly shaped mutations.