Gossip by Christopher Bram

Author:Christopher Bram [Bram, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2456-2
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-04-19T22:13:00+00:00

16

THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN the end of it, but Friday was my day off; I had too much time to think. I woke up worried about Nancy, as if after a bad dream. I remembered Bill’s call, knew it hadn’t been a dream, but all thought and emotion gathered around Nancy.

I waited until ten and phoned her office. The receptionist said she was out for the day.

“Out sick? Did she call this morning or yesterday?” If she called this morning, then she should be all right.

“All I can say is that Ms. Wenceslas won’t be in.”

I phoned her machine again and ordered her to pick up. “You have me worried. If you don’t call me back, I have no choice but to come down there and see if you’re all right.”

I grew more certain that something awful was happening. Poets are the antennas of the race, and I was a poet only to myself, but even neurotics can pick up danger signals inaudible to others. Waiting for a call, able to do nothing except sit and wait, my fear spun tales. Kathleen had ordered Nancy to clear her desk. She wandered the city in a daze. She’d drunk herself unconscious at home. Or she lay sober yet catatonic in bed, with no thought in her head except hatred for the man she had once considered her best friend. When I didn’t deliver on my threat to come see her, she would write me off forever.

My slow, corrosive panic did not subside until that afternoon, when I was already on the train to Washington.

Only then, trapped in a crowded passenger car racing through New Jersey, committed to the long trip south, did I calm down enough to recognize the neurotic foolishness of my fears. What had I gotten myself so worked up about? Even at the best of times, Nancy didn’t return calls. What did I hope to prove to myself with this gratuitous mission of mercy? I almost got off in Trenton to catch a train back to New York, but decided to finish this and let Nancy see that I cared about her so much I could behave like a lunatic.

My concern had been so genuine that I’d brought nothing to read. Relaxing into my foolishness, I could only watch the scenery, look at other passengers and give in to the erotic woolgathering of train travel. Six weeks ago, I had ridden this same route to Baltimore with simple expectations of sex and a nervous hope of love. Even today the sweep of fields and bridges had the three-dimensional depth of bodies in a bed.

No, I told myself. I was not going to see Bill. Not in Washington. Not next week in New York. Never. If this journey had an unconscious demon, it was a bad conscience, not vestigial lust for an old mistake.

I came up in Dupont Circle shortly after six, in twilit clouds of flowering trees. I felt like a vagrant arriving at Nancy’s building without luggage. The doorman said Ms.

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