They’d finished having sex, Tacko and DaBlonde, but her husband Louis (you couldn’t call him Lou, she called him Daddy) was still taking pictures with a small silver Canon PowerShot. He’d circle the bed, crouch, loom, even push in between DaBlonde’s open chapped thighs. She’d threaten to trap him there, scissor him, and they’d laugh. Weird shit. Very weird shit, thought Tacko.
Louis was a big guy, obese, and whenever he’d kneel on the bed for another shot, it crunched and sank. He had on a tent-sized black T-shirt and gray Nike sweatpants. He always kept his clothes on. Well, both times so far. “That’s enough pictures, Daddy.” DaBlonde shook a foot at him, making short flicking motions with her toes.
She was at least fifteen years younger than Tacko, who was forty-eight. She might have been still in her late twenties—slight, almost skinny, a pretty face that looked dairy-maid wholesome when she took off her glasses. Just now, though, she’d kept them on through everything, fellatio included.
Louis was nearer Tacko’s age. A friendly, blunt-talking fat cuckold. Tacko didn’t use the word in mockery, merely as description. So the guy enjoyed watching his wife do strangers—so what? Other guys enjoyed tramping out in the dark and bitter cold to shoot at deer. And as far as Tacko could tell, DaBlonde loved the variety. She loved it, Louis loved it, therefore no problem. Weird shit, though. Tacko was in the presence of people the likes of whom he’d never come upon before. They were like TV Martians, human-looking but deeply different underneath. Being with them was exhilarating.
Till now Tacko had been a pretty standard guy, suburban youth in the ’70s, ever-rising, ultimately tiresome career straight out of college. He went to church. Episcopal, till he was thirty-five. All told, he’d had nine sex partners (including DaBlonde), considerably less than the national average for men, which he’d read was thirteen. With his first wife, but certainly not his second, he’d watched porn, but always the tame and corny stuff. Deep Throat. Devil in Miss Jones. He’d never been to an orgy, a strip club, a live sex show, or known any swingers or fetishists, that he was aware of. So yes, hooking up with the Amboys and balling her while the husband filmed it—that was extreme sport for Tacko.
“Really and truly, Daddy, no more pictures. Do you know if there’s still coffee to reheat?”
“Should I look?” Louis tapped the camera’s on/off button and the snouty lens retracted with a tootling whir. It amazed Tacko how agreeable the guy was, like a new boyfriend or a seasoned butler. “Mr. Tacko?” he said. “If there’s coffee, do you want a cup?” Louis only called him Mister. DaBlonde, come to think of it, never called him anything. “Or do you want another glass of wine?”
“Coffee sounds great.”
After Louis went out, Tacko turned on his back, pulled the sheet over him to mid-chest, and folded his hands behind his neck. He could hear it raining, a sleety, hard-ticking persistent March rain. He could also hear muffled sax, drums, and bass surging up from the art gallery below. Some kind of fund-raiser there tonight. Noticing a photograph in a pewter frame on the dresser, Tacko did a stomach crunch to have a better look. When he lay back down, DaBlonde loomed over his face. “What?”
“Just checking out the picture.”
“That’s our wedding.”
“Really?” He looked at it again, Louis in a dark-blue suit, DaBlonde in an Easter-pink cocktail dress. Outdoors on bright green grass, a flowering tree behind them. “How long ago?”
“Last spring.” Tacko watched her remembering, her mouth shifting into a private smile. “We’re still newlyweds. Year in May.”
A year in May, and practically from day one, they’d told Tacko, DaBlonde had been fucking strangers with Daddy’s blessing. Hot Wife/Husband Watches But Doesn’t Join In. That was their lifestyle niche. They’d started playing strictly for thrills, because they wanted to and could, but then Louis and DaBlonde wondered if they might earn some income from it as well. They recorded so many videos and took so many pictures, what were they supposed to do with it all? And frankly, they could use the extra money, what with their two divorces, which they hadn’t gone into in any detail about with Tacko. A website seemed worth a shot.
Louis, who was living on permanent disability (apparently he had twenty things wrong with him), was a seasoned entrepreneur. Before he’d hooked up with DaBlonde (they’d met online, each in a miserable marriage), he’d owned a small chain of video stores in the Petersburg area, and during the dot-com boom a website where he marketed things like patio misters and mosquito lures. He’d run that business out of the family garage in Chesterfield County while holding down a good job assessing and purchasing liability coverage for a residential building contractor. It wasn’t hard for Louis to do the research, stake out their domain, take care of all that technical stuff.
The site went hot six months ago. The original version was amateurish and skimpy, offering only a few dozen nude-slash-action pictures of DaBlonde and a handful of short clips. Over time it got better, easier to navigate, and grew to include thousands of photographs and more than eighty videos. About two thousand subscribers signed up, guys like Tacko paying $23.95 per month with automatic credit card renewal. Subscribers from all over the country, she’d proudly told him. Europe, Japan, Australia, Brazil, even the Middle East. “Arabs and blond women,” Louis said once, meaningfully clenching his jaw, and let it go at that.
Tacko had never intended to contact DaBlonde, even though as a member of her site he was encouraged to. But ten days ago—the same day that Dave Sandlin of the Eury Agency telephoned out of the blue and asked Tacko to fax over his resume—he’d impulsively written her an e-mail. Saying how much he enjoyed her newest video, adding that he’d been in the same bar dozens of times, the bar where she’d picked up that stringy Jamaican guy with the white teeth. It was the Tobacco Company, wasn’t it?
She’d e-mailed him back, using emoticons and u for you, which Tacko loathed. Would he like to meet? Tacko didn’t reply. Fantasy was okay, but actually doing something? Very damn unlikely. DaBlonde persisted. She wrote Tacko again, and included two cell numbers. When he didn’t call, she wrote a third time: they would be at Siné Irish Pub in Shockoe Slip on Wednesday evening at 8:30. It would be so great if he joined them.
By ten past 8 last Wednesday, Tacko still hadn’t made up his mind.
He’d been so nervous when they met that his lips kept sticking to his front teeth. He just nodded and smiled, sipped his beer, and let DaBlonde and Louis do most of the talking. This was their dog-and-pony show. Not that either of them had dressed to impress. Louis, in need of a beard trim and a haircut (his full beard was salt-and-pepper; the hair on his large head gray, thin, and wind-blown), had come to the pub wearing khaki pants and a plum-colored knit shirt stretched over his big stomach like a drumhead. He hadn’t worn a coat. Twenty degrees out and no coat. Louis was about five-eight, but his bulk made his presence overpowering; he took up so much room! They’d stood, all three of them, talking at the bar for more than an hour. Tacko wondered if they stayed there because the tables and booths were too confining for the guy.
DaBlonde introduced herself as “Ann-dray-ah but spelt like Andrea,” and Tacko thought she looked dowdy, a little drippy, in person. At any rate, in clothes. Charcoal slacks and a pale gray blouse, black vest hand-decorated with colored glass beads. A dobby four-button jacket. She’d dressed like a third-grade teacher out for a drink—a non-alcoholic margarita—on a Friday afternoon, even though it was a weeknight, and she drank a White Russian, then a second. This is what they liked to do, she said. She looked Tacko straight in the eye. He smiled back. There was their marriage, she said, and then there was this. She gave a happy shrug. This was just a hobby they shared.
But it was a business too, said Louis. Tacko would have to sign a consent form. They would try not to show his face in videos. Louis was careful about that. However, if Tacko were recognized, they could not be held accountable.
He had to think it over. What would happen if he were recognized? What could? Tacko wasn’t married, and his friends and professional acquaintances were universally unlikely to surf into DaBlonde’s “hot wife” site, although you could never know anything for certain. His parents were deceased, so was his brother, he didn’t plan on running for public office, and he’d been laid off from his job, so he couldn’t be fired.
Fuck it, he signed the waiver.
“That your real name?” said Louis Amboy.
Tacko blushed. Had he done something wrong? Was he supposed to make one up? “But nobody calls me Vincent,” he said. “Vin sometimes, but not so much. Never Vinnie. Usually either Tack or just Tacko.” Shut up.
DaBlonde had put her hand on his leg, right thigh, underneath the bar ledge. She moved it back to his crotch. At that moment her cell phone started playing Van Morrison’s “Have I Told You Lately?” and she withdrew the hand to root though her bag. “Excuse me.” She turned away and answered, frowning.
“Look, I’m in a restaurant. Because I am, that’s why.” She planted an elbow on the bar and slumped in dejection. “Nice. Classy. And I’m supposed to listen to this crap? Scott. I’m not listening to you. No, Scott, you may not speak to my husband, either. Because that’s who he is, Scott. And now I’m going to hang up. Same to you, asshole.” She listened a few more seconds, then snapped her phone closed. Flipped it back open and turned it off. Then she raised an eyebrow significantly at Louis. “That was Scott.”
“I gathered. And?”
“You heard me. I wouldn’t listen.” She looked testy, then didn’t. She widened her eyes, doing mock-waif, and smiled at Tacko. “Scott’s my ex-and-I-couldn’t-be-happier-about-it-husband. And I’m especially happy that he lives in Greensboro. He makes cheap furniture. And empty threats.” After a shrug, DaBlonde leaned forward and kissed Tacko on the mouth, with tongue.
“Well,” said Louis, recovering abruptly (he’d paled at Scott’s name) and paying for his and DaBlonde’s drinks with a twenty, “shall we continue this somewhere else?”
They’d gone to the Omni since they could walk to it from the pub, Louis explaining to Tacko on the way how it was standard practice for the single guy to pay for the room. Tacko thought, Standard practice. In the Amboys’ world it was standard practice for the single guy to pay for the room. In the Amboys’ world, and in Tacko’s world now too.
He’d felt a knot of fear when they arrived at their room and he unlocked the door with a magnetized card. (What if they robbed him? Tied him up and tortured him? What if—?) Then it was gone. DaBlonde threw off her clothes like it was nothing. White cotton underpants, white undershirt with spaghetti straps, no bra. Tacko was delighted by her smooth skin, her small breasts, impressed by her intensity. The more DaBlonde carried on, and the louder she got, the more Louis enjoyed it. That was demonstrably evident. All told, they were at the hotel for about an hour and a half.
Afterwards, Tacko felt conscience pangs. He’d wondered if he would, and he did. He felt like some kind of crazy amoral heathen, and as big a pervert as Louis Amboy. Well, maybe not quite as big.
He was surprised when the Amboys e-mailed him and suggested another get-together. He’d been flattered too by the follow-up invitation, but uncertain how to respond. He’d met them just to say (to himself) that he’d done it, to actually do something outrageous for a change. But what was the point of seeing them again? Sure, that. But did he really want any more of the Amboys? No. Yes. No.
Eventually, he decided to see them again, and then to his further surprise (and slight discomfort) they’d invited him to their condo on Decatur Street, just south of the Mayo Bridge. Tacko knew their pay site well, and all of the videos and pictures there had been shot in hotel rooms or in public or semi-public places, never their home. Till now they’d not so much as hinted at where in the city they lived. For all Tacko knew they actually lived somewhere else and just played in Richmond. No, it turned out they lived on Decatur and Third.
A few of the red-brick early-twentieth-century buildings in the old Manchester district still operated as factories (Alcoa had a plant, there were a couple of box companies), but most were either derelict or had been gutted and refurbished into work space for artists, art galleries, or luxury condos. Where the Amboys lived had once been the United States Cardboard Company and still bore the name chiseled above the entrance door.
They owned one of the few residential units that had been sold in the building. Two or three cooperative galleries, a banquet hall, a café, and about fifty artists’ studios comprised the ground level. Louis and DaBlonde lived on the third floor, a wide-open industrial space, exposed brick, timber columns and trusses, everything else chrome or glass or bleached canvas, Ultrasuede or black leather. The place was furnished, Tacko thought coming in earlier tonight, like a full-page design collection ad in the New York Times Magazine—except for all of the computers.
There were desktops and laptops, Macs and IBM PCs, and monitors either shining a dead blue light or playing explicit videos Tacko recognized from the pay site. DaBlonde with the Sports Bar Guy, the Sharp-Dressed Man, the Man in the Woods, the Cowboy Trucker. In the restroom at Chesterfield Towne Centre, on a farm, on a different farm, behind the Ashland Wal-Mart, at the Virginia State Fair. All of the monitors had the sound turned off. Even so, it was disorienting, porn everywhere you looked, and the actual woman, the “hot wife” herself, standing right there, dressed in herringbone slacks and a white fuzzy sweater, urging Tacko to sit down, then sliding onto the sectional beside him.
They drank red wine (Louis poured) and smoked half a joint (Louis rolled, Louis lighted, Louis declined to partake, same as he’d passed on drinking wine). DaBlonde pulled up her sweater and exposed her breasts, then slotted her tongue at Tacko while Louis talked geekishly about a new camcorder he’d bought that took higher quality videos. They required more time to load, he said, but it was worth it.
Once they’d moved into the bedroom, the sex was better than last time. Not so bing-bang-bing or as impersonal. They were learning each other’s moves, adding finesse. Tacko forgot about Louis and his camera, except for whenever the husband asked DaBlonde how she liked it so far and urged Tacko to come wherever he wanted, externally, internally, whatever struck his fancy. Unlike last week, Tacko wasn’t impelled by a flight reflex immediately afterwards.
“Tell me something,” DaBlonde was saying now. “You a cheater? You can tell me, I don’t care.”
“Cheater?”
“Married.”
“Jeez, no. I’ve been divorced since ninety…seven.”
Louis stuck his head into the bedroom. “There wasn’t enough to heat so I put on a fresh pot.” Then he was gone again.
DaBlonde flung herself upright as if suddenly and willfully were the only ways she could ever force herself to move again. She laughed when she almost bounced Tacko off the mattress, then swung her legs around, grabbed her Chinese robe (black and red with a firecracker dragon on the back) from a chair, put it on, and cinched it. “Do you want to take a shower first?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“No, you go ahead.”
But Tacko felt like dawdling. “Do … do a lot of guys you meet say they’re not married?”
“You’re kidding, right? Because I’m not even sure I believe you’re not.” She laughed and came back and sat down on the bed. “You’re all a bunch of genetic liars.”
“Harsh.”
“Except Louis. Otherwise you’re all cheaters, if you ask me. Not that I give a damn.”
“I’m really divorced.”
“I believe you. No, seriously. I was kidding.” DaBlonde’s expression changed again, her long face looking placid, her gray eyes vacant. “But most men are cheaters. You know they are. And worse. Like my ex? Was just convinced that I screwed around, and I never did, not once in seven years. But meanwhile Scott’s out knocking off new stuff every other weekend. And—and carrying on with my best girlfriend, maid of honor at our wedding.” The corners of her eyes crinkled and her smile returned. “Louis is probably hovering out there right now, hoping we’re having sex again, and here we are having a regular conversation.”
Tacko thought, A regular conversation? That’s maybe not how he would’ve described it, but they were having … something. Something Tacko was okay with. That he was here for, present for. He was good with all of it. It was just—he still had a hard time convincing himself he could do something like this, weird shit like this, and get away with it. He’d probably get AIDS. Or maybe Louis was right that second dropping a diamond-shaped purple roofie into his cup of coffee, he’d end up with a ball-gag in his mouth and dangling from a ceiling beam. Jesus. Had he lost his mind? Had he lost his mind since he’d lost his job? He wondered.
For almost nineteen years he’d worked at Greene and Scivally Advertising, the last eleven as a group creative director. Then: new management, and out he went. Week before Thanksgiving. One day he’s brainstorming a new campaign for a national brand, the next he’s emptying his desk with a security cop standing by in case he goes berserk. But Tacko wasn’t the excitable type.
It was scary carrying away his carton of personal items, but also a secret relief. He’d been in career burnout a long time, he just hadn’t let on. In recent years, movies and novels and TV series about characters who found the courage and/or the foolhardiness to abandon stifling lives had held great appeal for Tacko.
The first two months he didn’t do much. Got out to the gym more regularly, subscribed to Netflix and caught up on the third season of Lost, scheduled and kept doctor and dentist appointments before his company health insurance lapsed, and worked on his screenplay, the one based on a botched kidnapping that happened in the early 1990s. But the story got trite as he was writing it, not basing it closely on the real case at all, and he gave it up again. He knew he wouldn’t go back to it.
During this period Tacko wasn’t dating, by choice. He’d had an on again/off again friends-with-benefits thing with a married secretary who used to work with him and now worked for the Virginia Bar Association. But when they didn’t get in touch over the Christmas holidays, Tacko wondered if maybe this time the off-again was permanent. Upon consideration he discovered that possibility not even slightly painful. Thinking about Connie Agnew and how insignificant she had become in his life was the first inkling Tacko had that he might have left more behind recently than his job.
People he knew well, whom Tacko considered friends, called and left messages. Tack, a bunch of guys are getting together for poker tonight, we’d love to see you. Vincent, my man, you at all interested in seeing a movie? Tack? I sent you an e-mail about Robin’s birthday party. Call me. Vin? Nikki and I were saying how we haven’t heard from you. Vincent? Tack? Tacko? He didn’t get back to most people. It just wasn’t anything he cared to do. After a while there weren’t many calls. Tacko had no problem with that.
At the end of December his brother died suddenly, but he didn’t fly out to Salt Lake City for the funeral. They’d been estranged. Their personalities, their politics, their dad’s will. His brother, though. Jesus Christ. Heart attack. And he was younger than Tacko by four years! His brother Kenny’s death shut Tacko down for weeks, well into the new year. Except for paying bills online, he mostly slept and moped around the house. He watched four seasons in a row of The Wire. Grew a beard and shaved it off.
He’d received a good severance package, and had significant savings, even some excellent technology stocks, so money wasn’t an issue. The rest of his fucking life was. But even deep into January his future remained a subject Tacko felt he couldn’t deal with yet. If something great, some fabulous new direction, didn’t happen or present itself by the first of February, he’d look for another job in advertising. First of February. February the first. He marked it on his calendar.
Often Tacko woke in the night and lay awake for hours. He couldn’t turn his brain off. One night, but just the one, he pondered ways a reasonable man might realistically kill himself, but otherwise he just thought about how much he didn’t want to resume his former life. Is that what it was already? His former life? What he wanted, what Tacko most needed, was something different, a fresh possibility, even the merest glimpse of one.
For a about a week he considered writing a novel, one set in the cutthroat world of advertising. He actually outlined one on the computer. But when he read over what he’d done, it sounded like every other story ever written about an ad agency, so he deleted it and looked at Internet porn instead.
Honestly, Tacko could not recall how the habit started—from boredom and curiosity, probably. But he’d also recognized just how infrequently (hardly ever) he thought about women these endless unemployed days and nights at home, and so it was possible he was using the stuff as proof he hadn’t lost interest in sex. Porn gradually became a daily routine, and one of his favorite pay sites (by the middle of February, he’d subscribed to six) was DaBlonde’s. Not only because she was located in his hometown, although it surely played a major part. (Finding her site had been a sheer accident, serendipity, link to link to link to link …) No, what he liked best about her? The woman seemed utterly reckless. Fucking men in stairwells, hallways, at highway rest stops. Behind the Museum of the Confederacy. That took guts. Her site biography (which Tacko figured was probably all bullshit, but he chose to disregard his cynicism) stated that she’d been raised in a strict household and had never even kissed a boy before she was twenty-one. And look at her now!
“You seemed like you were going to say something.”
“No,” said Tacko. “Just thinking.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do,” said DaBlonde.
“Who came up with your name?”
“It’s what my ex used to call me, but that’s not what you were thinking. He’d call me that when he called me a slut. So what were you really thinking?”
“All right. I was just wondering—you and Louis met online? At a chat room?”
“Yeah…? I was in North Carolina and Louis was living here. Well, out in the county. So?”
“I was just wondering. Was there, like, one day, one particular day, when the two of you just said that’s it, enough, and then packed your stuff and walked away and—got together?”
“I guess. But it’s not exactly an original story. It happens all the time.”
“Well, maybe.”
“It does. People walk away, Tacko. And the world doesn’t end. You can do whatever you always wanted and nobody can stop you. Is that what you’re asking me?”
“Yeah. No. I’m not sure.” He was babbling now because he realized this was the first time she’d called him by any name, and she’d chosen his last name, the least familiar, even the coldest, of the possibilities. His heart sank a little.
DaBlonde got up. “Go take your shower.”
“Yeah, sure.” Tacko rolled out of bed and started collecting his clothes from the floor (shirt, briefs, jeans, one sock, Clarks boots, second sock) while DaBlonde fingered apart two thin blinds and looked out the window. That side of the condo faced a gutted brass foundry covered by construction company signage.
“It’s still raining,” she commented. “Listen to that.”
“It’s supposed to stay like this till midnight,” said Tacko, just to say something.
He picked up the Amboys’ framed wedding picture. They were both laughing with their toothy mouths open. He set it down and thought he might not shower after all, just get dressed and go home. But since he was already standing naked at the bathroom doorway, he went in and turned on the faucet in the tub. This was so weird. The whole thing. Being here. Taking a shower now. Using their shampoo, their liquid soap, their scrubby.
As soon as he turns off the water, Tacko hears voices raised in an argument. The Amboys quarreling? But no, the man’s voice isn’t Louis’s. Tacko can’t make out what he and DaBlonde—it’s definitely DaBlonde’s voice—are hollering about. Then he hears the guy shout either “disgusting” or “disgust me” and feels a spurt of jangling dread. He starts to put his clothes back on without drying himself.
That’s a shot. Fuck.
Somebody just fired a gun, out there. Beyond the bathroom door, beyond the bedroom, out there in the loft.
And that’s a second shot.
He’s fully dressed now, but paralyzed, unable to decide whether to move—to investigate, to implicate himself—or to stay put.
He opens the door a crack and Louis Amboy’s hysterical voice carries in.
“Scott, please. Scott, please. Please, Scott.”
He makes cheap furniture. And empty threats.
“Scott, please, for God’s sake!”
Why isn’t DaBlonde saying anything?
It’s still raining hard and downstairs the band is still playing. Tacko quietly closes the door and locks it.
Three more shots in a burst. Silence, and then another shot. Then silence.
The first slap against the bathroom door is percussive enough to shake it; the second is the merest scratching tap.
Now a spot of dark red glistens in the narrow gap between the bottom of the door and the saddle. The spot widens, liquefies—blood. In its flow, carried along, comes an inch-and-a-half-wide sodden strip of black silk.
A tie end from DaBlonde’s Chinese robe.
Straddling the pool of blood, one foot planted on either side, Tacko unlocks the door, eases it toward him, and her huddled body insistently pushes it open the rest of the way. He glances down for only a moment, but long enough to register DaBlonde’s fixed eyes. His head goes groggy, and he wills it clear, staring through the bedroom and out into the living area, seeing part of the black-and-white sectional and a row of blue screen monitors on a molded glass table.
The only sound now is the rain lashing at the building, the windows, the roof. The band has finally taken a break.
Now Tacko is standing at the bedroom door, now he’s creeping out into the loft, and now crouching beside Louis Amboy sprawled on the floor, a bullet hole at the base of his skull. Blood runs down the back of his neck into his collar. Tacko’s mind fills with strobing light and he bolts for the front door.
“Hey!”
It’s a young guy, thirtyish, full head of brown hair, filthy tan barn jacket, short barrel revolver clutched in a fist streaked with mahogany wood stain. He steps out of the kitchen, or glides from behind a bank of computer monitors (sound on, DaBlonde groaning), or just leans forward in a flexible mesh chair, and says, “You’re disgusting.” Or maybe, “You disgust me.” And squeezes the trigger. A hundred times, like it’s a fucking machine gun.
“Hey! Tacko!” DaBlonde: tapping on the shower glass. “You want to leave me some hot water?” She pulled open the door, shed her robe, and stepped into the spray, smiling as she nudged Tacko from under it. “Can I have the shampoo?” He plucked it from the caddy, Elizabeth Arden, and handed it to her. “You can stay. We can share.”
But he was already out. “No,” he said, “I’m done.”
Louis Amboy was conveying a French press and three ceramic mugs on a service tray from the kitchen to the coffee table when Tacko came out of the bedroom fully dressed and grabbed his leather coat from the sectional.
“You’re not leaving, I hope.”
“I should.”
Louis carefully set down the tray. He cocked his head. “Well, if you have to.”
“This was fantastic.”
“Tell me something, Mr. Tacko. Would you be interested in making it a regular thing?”
“Sure. I guess. I don’t know.”
“Ah,” said Louis, seeming abashed. “Can I loan you an umbrella?”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Well then. Good night.”
“You too.” Tacko would’ve had to walk all the way around the mammoth sofa to shake hands, so he just waved to Louis. But it wasn’t like he wouldn’t shake hands. It wasn’t like that. Even so, riding the elevator down, he felt like a real shit, then had an abrupt impulse to push the button again and go on back up, saying he’d changed his mind, he’d wait out the rain and have that cup of coffee now, if they didn’t mind. Because you can do anything you want and nobody can stop you—wasn’t it true?
He’d have to think about that some more.
“Vincent!”
Tacko flinched. He’d flipped up his collar, hunched a little, and stepped outside into the gusting rain, but hadn’t gone three steps across the sidewalk before someone hailed him. Shit.
It was Dave Sandlin, a VP at the Eury Agency, wearing a tux and smoking a cigarette in a doorway not ten feet down the block from the Amboys’ street entrance. Tacko felt he had to go over. Had to? Had to.
“How you doin’, boy? Haven’t seen much of you lately.” Sandlin transferred his cigarette to his left hand and they shook. “Keeping busy?”
“Not really.” Tacko glanced past Sandlin into the gallery, saw the musicians picking up their instruments again, the drummer sliding behind his kit, an all-white, dressed-up crowd drinking and talking, and large abstract paintings, black the dominant color, hanging on the walls. “Just enjoying life.”
“Fuck’s that mean?” Sandlin laughed but looked skeptical. “I thought I’d hear back from you.”
Tacko, who’d been standing in the rain like an idiot, finally stepped under the overhang. “I’ve had a few personal projects I’ve been taking care of.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t want to stay out of sight too long, Vinnie. People forget you. Look.” Sandlin tossed away his cigarette and pulled out his wallet, extracted an embossed card. “Give me your hand.”
“What?”
“Put out your hand.” He placed the card in Tacko’s right palm, then tapped it. “Fax me your damn resume. What’s today, Friday? I want it on Monday. All right? Okay?”
Looking at the card, looking at Sandlin, looking at the people, many of whom he recognized, dancing now in the gallery, Tacko felt disgusted. You disgust me. You’re disgusting. “Thanks,” he said. “Monday. Promise.” Pocketing Sandlin’s card, he put out his hand again. “Well, let me run.”
“What the hell’re you doing down here anyway?”
“Visiting friends.”
“Fax me.”
Tacko dashed across Decatur Street and walked along the chain-link fence to the parking lot entrance. When he’d arrived there were only about a dozen vehicles, now there must have been close to a hundred, most of them Beemers, Lexuses, and SUVs, and he couldn’t immediately remember where he’d left his. Rain drilled on a diagonal through the vapor lights. As he peered up and down the lanes, then jogged to a red Cooper he thought was his but wasn’t, Tacko noticed a man sitting in a parked Saturn that was at least ten years old and badly dinged. The interior dome light was on. The man was rummaging through a leather satchel on his lap, but glanced up at Tacko. He looked about twenty-five, had stringy long dark hair and a soul patch. Tacko nodded. The man did not.
By the time Tacko found his car, he was drenched and his shoes and socks were infused. He got in and just sat there dripping. Then he glanced up and there were DaBlonde and Louis Amboy gliding up and down in front of their wall of windows, DaBlonde in that Chinese robe, her hair in a blue towel turban. The pair of them moving forward and sideways and back, box stepping.
They were dancing. Her tiny, him huge, they were dancing, waltzing—not gracefully, shamblingly, but still. Still, they were waltzing alone in their little weird-shit world.
Tacko turned the car on, and the heat, then just sat there watching.
He had his cell phone, he could call them, invite himself back. Nothing to stop him, if that’s what he wanted to do. He took it from his coat pocket and Dave Sandlin’s business card came out with it. He glanced at the card—exquisite printing—and then opened his window and tossed it out.
They were still waltzing up there, and Tacko started scrolling through his stored numbers—Abbott, Bill; Adler, Ed; Agnew, Connie, Alman, Foster & Meeks; Amboy, Louis & Andrea. Thirty-two on Tacko’s speed dial. He hesitated, then was startled by a car door slamming nearby.
The guy from the Saturn stood alongside of it now in the downpour staring at the Amboys’ brightly lit condo, staring up at them as they danced their mechanical waltz. Then he strode toward the open fence gate, satchel swinging in his hand. He crossed the street, passing a few people departing the fund-raiser under voluminous black umbrellas. He walked directly to the building’s corner entrance. Tacko glanced back up at the Amboys’ windows, but they were no longer in view.
When he looked back down, his eyes tracking past where it was chiseled United States Cardboard Company, the young man with the satchel had opened the door and was going inside. Had they buzzed him up? Had they invited over another “friend”? Or thought Tacko had come back?
He turned off the car, opened his door, and got out. Stood in the rain for perhaps a minute, but still didn’t see anyone in the windows.
Dave Sandlin, he noticed, had gone back into the gallery.
A middle-aged couple hurried by under umbrellas, squealing with laughter as they hit puddles.
Tacko started to get back into his car, but changed his mind and jogged up the line to the Saturn.
North Carolina plates.
And now when he looked back up, the Amboys’ condo was dark, except for an ambient blue wash that came off the computer monitors.
On his way back to his Cooper, he stooped and picked up Dave Sandlin’s card. Then he got in, tossed the card on the other seat, restarted the engine, and drove home.
Did he even have a fucking resume to send?