Over Exposure Part 4

"It's too much, Isaac, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with my friend this way, what, just to weasel her out of her rightful split."

"I made that money. Every nickel."

"It's a marriage, Isaac. Things are supposed to be fifty-fifty."

"Well, it's not completely the money. Not really. It's the principle, you know. All those hours of work. Poof, gone."

"I don't like it."

"Be cool. We can talk about it tomorrow. I'll come over at noon. We'll sort it out. Now you just breathe, find your center."

"You're mocking me again."

"Okay, I'll cut that out. I'll never do that again."

"Yes, you will."

She was watching Kentucky celebrate. Come-from-behind a.s.sholes.

Janet wasn't sobbing anymore. And the bells were going again. f.u.c.king gremlins. f.u.c.king weird-a.s.s voodoo spirits.

Isaac was wearing his pajamas at three in the afternoon. He was in the TV room watching ESPN. He'd jacked up the volume as high as it would go, but the walls were still alive with the sound of bells.

He'd removed all five units. He'd crushed each one of them with a ball peen hammer. Pulverized them to smithereens. But there were still bells. They'd started ringing the night Janet told him she was leaving, that she was moving in with Carla. That it was over between them and he could have the entire nest egg, she didn't give a s.h.i.+t. She was so happy and relieved to get away from him, to be free of his a.s.shole mockery, his s.h.i.+t eating grin that she would have raided her own small savings account to bribe her way out. Or something to that effect. It sounded rehea.r.s.ed. In fact it sounded a lot like Carla's kiss-off lecture the night before. Like maybe they'd compared notes, put their air-heads together and come up with this pathetic termination speech.

That was two weeks ago.

The night she left he took the bells down, but they continued to ring. He pried opened all the other air-conditioning grills but could find no sign of any more. Maybe Carla or Janet had snuck in when he was sleeping and planted their own chiming units in other places around the house. That would be just like them. The s.l.u.ts. The devious b.i.t.c.hes.

He searched the closets, the pantry, the drawers, the cabinets. He searched the dirty clothes hamper, the dish washer, the cus.h.i.+ons of the couch, the bottoms of chairs and tables and desks. He looked in every lampshade. He was thorough. He was methodical. He wasn't a raving lunatic. He went from one room to the next meticulously tearing open every place that chimes or bells or any other ringing device could be concealed. And he found nothing. Nothing at all.

So he drowned out the bells with TV noise, with music, with the radio. None of it worked. Faintly, behind the blare of CNN or ESPN or CNBC, he could hear the sweet tinkle of a bell. A hand chime, a wind chime, a dinner bell, a sleigh bell. Some f.u.c.king bell or another.

Even now as a beer commercial filled the house with its blather, he could hear the bells clinking like silver coins in the pocket. And he could hear a conversation too. Janet and Carla talking. He could hear it inside his head as though he was there in the room, standing beside Carla's queen-sized bed.

Both of them breathing hard. Both of them gasping and giggling and sighing deep.

I didn't know it would be like this.

I always had a feeling about you. I would look at your incredible body, and I had a feeling. You did something to me. I knew this was going to happen. Not like this exactly, but something like this. I knew it.

Are we lesbians now?

I think what we are, Janet, we're broadening our horizons.

I can't get enough of you. I really can't There's plenty of me left.

Now?

Whenever you're ready.

Really, you're still h.o.r.n.y?

Not h.o.r.n.y, no. Hungry, yearning. But for you. h.o.r.n.y's too general. I want what you've got. I want to give you what I have.

Jesus, you're insatiable.

You know what they say, Janet. The best laid women often go astray.

I never thought he was a particularly good lay. Did you?

The s.h.i.+thead was worthless. Nothing like this.

I should be mad at you. f.u.c.king my husband.

Except you're not.

You did me a favor, Carla. You did me a huge favor. Got me out of that h.e.l.l hole.

Of course this was happening in Isaac's head. The two of them mocking him, having fun at his expense. It sounded real to him. It felt real. After all, wasn't all conversation just something in your head?

The bells were ringing louder. And there was something different. A different bell. An old familiar bell he couldn't place.

Isaac turned off the TV and got up from his lounge chair and padded into the living room in search of this new blood-sucking voodoo bell.

Halfway into the room he saw through the front window a UPS truck parked at the curb.

The doorbell rang again.

Ah, yes. He'd forgotten its sweet ding-dong, a comforting sound, so unique, so different than all the other bells.

The UPS guy was wearing his brown short-sleeve sweat stained s.h.i.+rt and his shorts. The day was hot outside. The man was bald and he was in a hurry like he always was.

"I didn't think you were home."

"I'm home, yes."

They were old friends, he and the UPS man. All the online s.h.i.+t he got delivered over the years. You name it, this man in brown brought it to the door. He never said anything to Isaac about all the parcels. He never even suggested anything obliquely. Very professional delivery man.

He handed Isaac the two packages and Isaac put them down on the floor just inside the front door. They were heavy. He wanted to tear open the boxes right away and get to work, but he'd had an idea and turned back to the UPS man.

"Could you do me a favor?" Isaac signed his name to the electronic pad.

"Okay."

"Could you step inside. It'll just take a second?"

"Inside?"

"I'm not going to hit on you or anything."

"I didn't think that."

"I just want to get your opinion on something."

"My opinion."

Isaac held the door wide open.

"One second, that's all."

The UPS man stepped into the house. For years he'd been stopping at Isaac's house several times a week, but this was the first time he'd ever been across the threshold. When he was inside, Isaac waved at the ceiling, at the walls, at the air filling the room.

"Do you hear anything?"

The UPS man stared at Isaac and tilted his head like a dog decoding a new command.

"Like what?"

The bells were ringing throughout the house. Twenty bells, thirty. A symphony of bells. A tabernacle choir of bells. A horde and great mult.i.tude of bells. Church bells, the bells on a tricycle's handlebars, the ice cream man's bell, gla.s.s wind chimes, the Salvation Army's Christmas bells, the gong and jangle, plink, c.h.i.n.kle, dong and peal of bells. The house was ringing, the walls were throbbing with bells.

"I hear your refrigerator going on," the UPS man said. "Is that what you mean?"

Isaac forced himself to go slow. He forced himself to stay disciplined. Using the hand sledge and chisel he'd ordered from an online hardware store, following the blue-lined quadrants he'd laid out against the white plaster, he was working his way around the living room, cracking open the walls, breaking through the drywall, tearing out the insulation, section by section, scooping out the dust and debris with the garden trowel.

Moving down the front wall until he'd peeled it open, then working down the west wall in the same methodical fas.h.i.+on.

No bells yet. No hidden chiming units. But he knew they were there. Ones he had planted himself and forgotten, or ones that Carla and Janet had secreted into some cavity within the wall to sabotage his peace of mind, to destroy his bulwark against the chaos beyond his castle walls. He knew this with the same certainty that he knew what was happening at Carla's South Beach condo.

All of it rang in his ears, their voices, their heaving sighs, their quick tightly spiraling cries, their o.r.g.a.s.mic bellows and yawps and sobs. The creak of her bedsprings, the thud of the headboard against that lavender wall, the s.h.i.+mmy and teeter of Carla's dwarf collection, those little ceramic men and women who stood guard on a shelf of her bookcase, watching it all, watching Isaac's two women have at it. His lover and his wife joined in unholy union.

And Ray was there. f.u.c.king psycho-babbler, Ray was getting undressed. Skinning out of his professional clothes, his stylish slacks and s.h.i.+rt falling to the floor, his Calvin Klein fancy a.s.s underwear. Until there he was, Ray, the unshrinking shrink standing naked and at attention beside the bed watching the two of them satisfy each other the way only women can satisfy another woman. And Ray waited until he was asked. Which Janet finally did.

What are you waiting for, Ray? An engraved invitation?

Everyone chuckled. Carla snuggled into the embrace of her damp lover, Isaac's soon to be ex-wife, and the two of them opened their free arms to Ray.

Permission to come aboard? Ray said.

Granted, Janet said.

Double granted, said Carla. Come anywhere you like.

Where do I start? I've never done anything like this before.

Neither have we, Carla said. Ain't it great?

It's like being reborn, starting fresh, the slate is clean, and this is a whole new me, Janet said.

Follow that thought, Ray said. Follow that thought.

I'd like to get pregnant again, Janet said. There, I've said it.

Whoa, said Carla. Where'd that come from? Pregnant?

I'd like to, Ray. Is that bad? Is that wrong?

No, it's not wrong, Ray said. Nothing you do is wrong. You're perfect just as you are, Don't doubt yourself. And I think you're very brave, very open.

Oh, man, said Carla. Oh, man. Do I get to be the daddy?

Oh, yes, G.o.dd.a.m.n Ray was there, taking Isaac's seat at the table, satiating himself with those two she-demons. Spreading his psycho-babbling seed. The man was going to father Isaac's son. All this going on while Isaac worked his way around the house, inch by scrupulous inch, painstaking, utterly focused on the plaster before him, digging beneath the hard crust to root out those bells, exorcise those jingly, gonging, twinkling, h.e.l.lish voodoo chimes.

THE CATCH.

"Two hundred bucks? You're kidding, right?"

"A hundred now, the rest when it's done."

"You can't be serious."

"You're asking me to charge more?"

"I always heard it was like five thousand or something."

"Yeah? Where'd you hear that?"

"The movies, I guess. Somewhere."

Mason took a second to appraise the guya"shoulders pulled back, trim waist, the look of command. Wearing a dark blue corporate suit, oxblood cordovans polished to a deep gleam. Gray hair clipped in a military style. Ice blue eyes clicking here and there, but a little pouchy underneath them like he wasn't getting his full eight hours. Fifty-nine, sixty years old. Stock broker, he said. Probably pulled down half a million a year. Manicured and ma.s.saged with a leased Porsche and slinky girlfriends, a third his age. An apartment with a ten mile ocean view, decorated with furniture too chrome and weird-angled to sit in. To this guy two hundred bucks was tip money for a valet parker.

"Some get five thousand, some get more," Mason said. "The rip-off artists. The hotshots. How hard it is to pull a trigger? Two hundred dollars. I been getting that for forty years. It's my rate."

"But the chances you take. Prison, the death penalty. I don't know, it just sounds cut-rate."

"Think of me as the generic alternative. Same drug, lower price."

"Weird," the guy said. "Very weird."