Free Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone Page B

be like.
    Brookman himself felt tired enough to sit down in his emblazoned captain’s chair.
Lux in umbras procedet.
    “We never said in so many words that our lives were going to change,” he said, “but we knew. Lives always change. You’re old enough to know that now.”
    “No,” she said. “Not me. I ain’t.”
    “What drove you to carry on like that about abortion?”
    “Whatsa matter,” she asked, “you didn’t like it?”
    “It was all you, my young love. But it’s likely to get you more trouble than you bargained for.”
    “Get you trouble? Get your
wife
trouble.”
    “Sit down, Maud. No, I don’t mean that.” He saw that she was wrapped in an absurd fake fur and she smelled of alcohol.
    “I’m sorry you didn’t like it. Why didn’t you read it? Would you have told me not to publish it? Maybe you would’ve told me not to publish it.”
    “No. I might have had suggestions, I guess. I got worried.”
    “That why you came looking for me last night?”
    “I wanted to be sure you were all right. Grounded. And that you had thought a little about reactions. You were out.”
    “And you had to pick up your wife.”
    “Hey, Maud, you knew about my wife. Did you expect me to leave her at the airport?”
    Maud reacted to his flash of anger. She leaned against the back of the chair that faced his desk.
    “Why didn’t you read it, Stevie? For God’s sake. I was showing off for you.”
    Brookman stood up.
    “Maud. My Maud. I want to be your teacher. I want us to be something in each other’s lives. We cannot be lovers now.”
    “I know what the answer is,” she said. “You’ll be my eternal teacher. I’ll be your eternal student.” She watched him from the corner of her eye, looking venomous and sly.
    “There is no answer to these things.”
    “Oh yeah, there’s an answer. We’ll go to Paris. Want to take me to Paris?”
    “You better sober up, kid.”
    “I’ll become a nun like Jo Carr used to be and I’ll get my father to cut your prick off and we’ll live in France and write cool letters to inspire future generations of assholes. Like me and you, Prof.”
    “I’m a human being, Maud. Same as you. You’re gonna see that someday.”
    “You see how you hurt me, Stevie?”
    “Yes, Maud.”
    She felt dizzy and her mouth was too dry for any more questions or suggestions.
    “I hurt you, Maud,” he said. “But you . . . you knew that—”
    “Don’t say it,” she said.
    Then she went outside to the quad. He sat in his captain’s chair and watched her walk away.
    When Shell got back to their dorm room, the bag she had packed for Maud was gone, and Maud with it.

9
    E DDIE STACK HAD developed an odd skill. He was able to comb his hair—what was left of it—without looking at his own face in the mirror. He kept his gaze above the hairline. Some foreign wit had observed that after forty a man was responsible for his own face. Stack was over forty; in fact he was just over sixty-five, and he desperately did not want any more responsibilities beyond those he bore.
    The face wanted answering for. Young, he had never got enough of it. Don’t think he hadn’t looked in mirrors then. He had the deadpan, dumb mick face that could be transformed within a fractal to the deadliest of satirical grins. And the assumed angry face, the hassled face, the put-upon, uncontainable-rage face that would break his partners up in the middle of a collar. The false smiles and the semi-genuine smiles and the honest smiles that were not entirely unstudied. Not until he had gone into the job had he realized how attractive he was to women. Most women kind of loved all police officers, but Detective Stack was envied in his appeal. There was also, he vaguely knew, a mug of true rage, and that was one he never looked at and yet privately had worn sometimes. His entire life was private now and he knew he must wear it very often.
    Look at the face on him, his mother used to say. Fondly. But the face on him