* * *
*
"CJ!"
She's fairly sure she doesn't want to do this anymore. "Jesus, Toby, I'm coming already." She swaggers across the clubhouse, picking up her clubs on the way. "Let's do this damned thing."
"I'm thrilled by your enthusiasm."
"Shut up," she snipes. "I swear to God, you dragged me out of bed at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning to golf, and you're surprised I'm not doing a cheer about the prospect?"
He shoulders his bag and stalks toward the first tee. "Golf is a noble sport, CJ." He's wearing sky-blue knickers and a green-and-blue plaid golf cap.
She snorts. "Golf is not a sport at all, Toby. You look ridiculous."
"Payne Stewart is dead," he tells her solemnly.
"And if there were such a thing as a merciful God, his fashion sense would have died with him."
At the third tee, she leans on the end of her driver and watches him align himself with some imaginary mark beyond the horizon. Golf with Toby is as predictable as anything else with Toby. For the first four or five holes he will be compulsively, anally, infuriatingly precise. And then, somewhere in the deep rough, or at the shore of a water hazard, he will start shouting and swearing and throwing clubs, and after that the game will become "close enough," and, "call it a 5," and, "why the hell do I continue to subject myself to this?" They only ever play nine holes.
At this point he's still taking three minutes per shot. He finally swings, and the ball goes perfectly straight for nearly a hundred yards -- before hooking wickedly. "Damn it!" he curses as they switch places. CJ scorns the women's tees.
"I don't want to go to prison," she says. The way she says it, it sounds like something she's thought before that she wants to do, but that now she's changed her mind, and he tells her so. "Don't mock me, Toby," she says. She gets a more than respectable drive off and looks quickly to Toby to make sure he appears sufficiently impressed, which he does. "We were party to a massive fraud against the American people."
"We weren't party to, to anything, CJ!" he counters. "We didn't know anything."
"Do you honestly believe that's going to make any kind of difference?"
"Not in the the least."
She points her driver at the fairway. "Then shut up and find your ball. I don't want to go to jail, is all I'm saying." She shudders.
Toby tilts his head. "You speak as though you had personal experience, Claudia."
She tries to shrug nonchalantly, but the way she worries her lower lip with her teeth kills that attempt quickly enough. "I have...friends," she says finally. "I went to Berkeley."
Toby nods sagely. "Picketers and bra-burners."
"Pot growers and draft-dodgers." She pulls her tee out of the ground and brandishes it at him. "You and I, Toby, would not do well in prison."
"They wouldn't -- we wouldn't get twenty years in Sing Sing, CJ. I would not be anyone's bitch." For a moment she stares at him, wide-eyed, then she bursts out laughing. He scowls at her. "CJ--"
"No, no," she gasps, waving him away. "'Cause I could totally see it." Her laughter dies abruptly. "That's not funny."
"It really isn't," he agrees.
"You're my bitch."
He pokes at the weeks with his club-head, searching half-heartedly for his ball. "That I am," he mutters.
"Don't you ever forget it."
"How could I?" He gives the weeds another swipe with the 3-iron. "I can't find it."
"What're you playing?"
"A white MaxFli."
"You and every other player who's ever come through here."
"I think -- it must've gone out around here. I'll take the drop." Hole three. They're starting early.
Toby drops another ball in the fairway and hits it with all the violence he cannot direct at Bruno and Doug. It slices. He sighs and rubs his forehead. "I hate this game."
"And yet you continue to drag me out here year after year. Thank you so much for that."
"You really had friends who went to prison?"
"It was Berkeley. Of course I did."
"Did any of them...where the hell is your ball?"
She waves her 5-iron quite a distance up the fairway. "Up there."
He scans the short rough just off the fairway. "I don't see it."
"That's because it's not in the rough."
CJ says that playing with pink Lady Titleists constitutes an act of defiance against the male hegemony, though she freely admits she has no idea what hegemony would mean, in a golf context. When he spots the small pink dot dead in the center of the fairway, at least fifty yards further than he's driven, Toby narrows his eyes suspiciously at CJ. "You're a ringer."
"Yes."
"You are a ringer."
"Yes, Toby. By day I corral the White House Press Corps; by night I wear spiked saddle-shoes and battle evil with the women of the LPGA. Did any of them what?"
"What?" He shakes his head.
"My friends. The ones who went to prison. Did any of them what?"
"Oh." He almost looks abashed. "Did any of them say anything about it?"
"They said the maid service was a bit lax, but that the five-star restaurant more than made up for it. What do you think they said, Toby -- it was prison."
"I want to have sex," he says suddenly.
She rests her seven-iron across her shoulders and hooks her wrists over the shaft. "That would be new and unexpected, coming from you," she says dryly.
"Now. I mean, here."
"In the middle of the fairway?"
"Obviously, I mean, not here, but...there must be, I don't know, sheds, or something."
"Sheds." She quirks up an eyebrow. "You think there are sheds."
"To store, you know, things. Lawn mowers and, and those poles with nets for when your ball goes in the water."
There are no sheds. There is only a ball-washer, a red box-like contraption on a thick metal pole, and she desperately wants just to lay down on the ground if they're really going to do this, but Toby doesn't want to get his knickers grass-stained. So he presses her against the ball-washer, and of course the sex is terrible, because who can have good sex with a metal box in the small of their back and another foursome teeing off just two holes behind them? But it seems important to Toby, so CJ digs her fingernails into his shirt and steadies herself as best she can against the box, and she doesn't wrap her legs around him like she normally does because they'd both fall over, and she doesn't move her hips to meet his or she'd slide down the pole.
Her eyes are trained on the grass, which she tries to free-associate to "green," or, "roots," or even, "lawn mower," rather than to "weed," "illegal," or "raid." The vertical stripes of the plaid in Toby's hat are thicker than the horizontal, and she tries not to think that they look like prison bars.
He drives into her desperately, furiously, and she has something that is not so much an orgasm as a seizing up, a panicked freeze. She tries not to think about whose bitch she'd be.
After he comes with a depressed grunt, he stares over his shoulder while he catches his breath and spots his ball, back in the weeds. And things are adjusted and zipped and realigned, and they pick up their clubs and move on. "We didn't do anything wrong," he says quietly.
She shrugs. "Maybe you didn't."
He looks at her and decides to pretend he's misheard her. "Yeah. Maybe I didn't."
CJ saunters toward her ball and wishes a round of golf could be four holes, wishes she hadn't just had sex with Toby in the middle of a golf course. She doesn't want to do this anymore.
***
*
Natalie finds her at sunset. But if she squints just right, she can almost convince herself it's sunrise.
"Dana." Just like that, the way she says it, apologetic -- pitying, maybe. It makes Dana feel stale. It makes her feel like yesterday's bread, and she hates Natalie for trying to be kind.
"I hate this time of day."
"You love this time of day."
"I love this time of day."
"Dana--"
She is being left again.
It never snowed in Texas.
In Texas Natalie held her hands, and they made a mutual decision. It would be too hard, they said. Their positions would be too important. Dana, perhaps, was too in love with Casey, not in a way that would ever lead to anything, but in a way that would fuck up everything else. And the fact that Natalie understood that distinction better than Dana did was no small part of the reason they ended it, and Dana understood that, and she almost believed that it had all been for the best.
She certainly hadn't felt like she had just been the masking tape that was holding things together until the glue showed up.
"We need to talk, Dana."
"Jeremy seems nice."
Earlier today, the glue arrived.
Natalie has the grace to blush as she sits on the arm of Dana's couch. "He is. I think he'll do a great job."
"Though he did fall over."
"He apologized."
"To the door."
Natalie giggles. Dana used to make Natalie giggle. The first time, in Texas. She has stopped giggling since they came to New York. She considers it undignified. Dana won't bother telling her that she is a small, cute woman, and that giggling could be considered as much a part of her as her hair or the bounce in her step when she's looking forward to whatever she's walking toward. Nothing Natalie does can be considered undignified, any more than it can be considered un-cute, but Dana's never bothered saying that. In about a second and a half, it will cease to be her place to say.
"I want to talk to him," she says abruptly.
Natalie blinks. "Excuse me?"
"Jeremy. Is he still here?"
"I wouldn't think so."
"No. I wouldn't, either." She licks her lip and looks over her city. The sun is lower, the shadows longer, but still, if she squints a little more, she can pretend the sun is coming back. "He answered the question about the Knicks well."
"Yeah."
"That thing, at the end? About Spike Lee. That was funny."
"Yeah. So, see, it's not just football. He knows plenty of sports plenty well."
"Yeah."
"I'd like to start him as soon as--"
"Did you say 'plenty' twice in that sentence?"
Natalie leans aganst the back of the couch. "I don't know. I might have."
"That's some reckless disregard for the English language, Nat." She smooths the leaves of a plant in the windowsill.
Natalie's eyes may darken a shade or two. "Casey's the writer, not me."
"We do produce a television show. Which has to be written." She waves her hand around, not sure what she wants the gesture to mean. "And -- what the hell does Casey have to do with it? Casey has nothing to do with it."
"Casey has plenty to do with you, and so, by extension, with anyone you're interacting with."
The second time it began, when Dana and Natalie discovered they were like two ends of a slinky, or like two characters in a cheesy cable melodrama, that they just couldn't stay apart despite their almost rabid efforts to do so, Dana spent more time than she ever would have imagined necessary convincing Natalie that she did not have feelings for Casey. Eventually, despite them both knowing what a blatant lie it was, Natalie said she believed Dana, and maybe she did. Maybe she made herself believe it because believing it was easier than continuing to fight it out. Maybe she allowed herself to believe because she so desperately missed the feeling of Dana's hips under her hands, had missed the half-sheepish, half-glazed look that always came to Dana's face just before she suggested sex, and swallowing the official line about Casey was easier than living without Dana.
"I bet Isaac's still here."
Natalie scowls. "I bet he is, too."
"We could go visit him."
"We're not talking about Isaac, Dana."
"See what he thought of Jeremy."
"Dana, this isn't about Isaac."
"Except for the part where this is Isaac's show."
"Can we, maybe, have a conversation that's just between us? Just Dana and Natalie, without involving Casey, or Lisa, or Isaac--"
"Or Jeremy."
Once, they were in Minnesota interviewing the Vixens, during that one season that women's professional football was a thing that was, and they found the carousel in Como Park. It was only twenty-five cents per ride, and it was mid-October, already cold in Saint Paul, and they were two of only about a dozen people there, so they kept going around and around until Dana ran out of quarters. Natalie laughed the entire time -- giggled, really, and it hadn't sounded undignified; it had sounded free and alive and just the way Natalie should be laughing.
"We knew something like this would happen eventually."
"Did we? I didn't."
"If it hadn't been me, it would've been you."
Dana shrugs. "The thing is, Natalie, I don't think it would've."
"It would've been you and Casey."
Dana is so tired of talking about Casey, so tired of everyone assuming she's in love with Casey -- and not in the way she really is in love with Casey, the way where you don't ever do anything about it, just pine from afar -- but really and truly in love with him, and intending to do something about it someday soon. She's this close to telling everyone who ever mentions Casey to her again -- everyone between now and the day she dies -- that she has always come in fifth in Casey's life, behind Charlie, and Danny, and the show, and Lisa, and that although she might act like a flake sometimes, she's not about to get involved with a man who's going to put her fifth; but she is, after all, in love with Casey in that way of hers that no one understands, and these are not the kinds of things you say about men you're in love with.
"It really wouldn't have, but that's not what we're talking about."
Natalie folds her hands in her lap and stares at them. "No. We're not." Dana leans against the window ledge and waits. "The thing is, lately you and I have been..."
"Yes."
"And so I think that maybe it's time we..."
"Possibly."
Natalie sighs. "God, I can't even get a sentence finished over here."
"You don't have to."
Natalie looks profoundly grateful, and stands to go.
"Except that, you know what?" Dana says suddenly. "You have to. I want you to say it."
Natalie turns. "I think you know what I'm saying, Dana." And there it is again, that way Natalie says her name. The apology and the pity. "I think it's time we ended this." She looks older suddenly. She looks like a grown-up. Like someone who wouldn't ever giggle.
"Again," Dana says, but she doesn't think Natalie hears her. So she nods once, not because she agrees, but because Natalie looks like she's waiting for a response of some sort. Dana turns back to the window. "If you squint just right, you could almost believe it's sunrise."
Natalie stands on tip-toes to see out the window. "Except that the sun is sinking, and it's darker now than it was a minute ago."
Dana turns just her head to look at Natalie. "Well, thank you for backing me up on this, Natalie."
She shrugs. "I'm just saying."
Dana taps her fingernails on the window pane. She likes the sound; sharp and businesslike.
"Jeremy will do a good job. He was just nervous today," Natalie says softly, and leaves the office.
In Minnesota, oddly enough, all those times they went around, Natalie had stayed on the same horse. Dana had chosen a different one every time.
She still feels like the same loaf of bread, getting more stale by the minute. The shadows are so long now that there's no way to pretend the sun is coming up.
*
Sometime in the night, Tyburn wakes up drenched in sweat and unable to remember his nightmare, but he has no trouble guessing what it had been about. He practically falls out of bed and stumbles to the door, going around to the side of the building and leaning heavily against the wall while he retches dryly for at least five minutes and hopes for an oblivion that will not come.
"Albert."
He folds his arms across his stomach and squeezes his eyes shut. "I didn't mean to wake you," he says, sounding even more wretched than he feels.
Instead of answering, Valentine wraps his arms around Albert's shoulders. Albert shivers despite the heat. Even in the middle of the night, Nairobi is hot, but Albert can't stop shaking. Maybe he has a fever again. Maybe the Laibon cursed him again while he wasn't paying attention. "You were having a nightmare."
Valentine couldn't have made a more obvious statement, no matter how hard he tried. Of course Albert was having a nightmare. He is always having nightmares, and whether he is awake or asleep doesn't seem to make a damned bit of difference. To be sure, the images are stronger when he closes his eyes, but even when they're open he can see the faces, and the faces keep getting jumbled up in his mind. "I killed him."
"Van der Vuurst?" Valentine scoffs. "Albert, how many times must we do this?"
"Hutchings."
Valentine's hands go lax at Albert's shoulders. If he could see the officer's eyes, Tyburn knows, at this moment they would be bright and wary, like a bear or a fox sniffing out what could easily be a trap. Hutchings is not a name that has been spoken aloud since Albert left London, but Valentine's read the report. "The situations--"
"The situations are...no, they are not the same," he concedes. "But, the circumstances--"
"You do your job. You do it damned well. And sometimes, yes, doing your job means that people end up dead. But, Albert--"
"If I hadn't brought him in--"
"Which one?" Valentine is standing now, pacing in short, jerking strides, never more than two steps away, and then back. Two away, two back. It should be comical. "If you hadn't brought in Hutchings, 11-year-old boys in London would still be getting murdered. And if you hadn't brought in Van der Vuurst, Elihu Mwange would have hanged for a murder that was never committed in the first place."
If Albert closes his eyes, the images are clearer. Hutchings's face blends with Van der Vuurst's; Hilde's flat, dead eyes as she raises the gun to her father transforms seamlessly into his own as he pulls the trigger on Hutchings. On Valentine's next pass, Tyburn catches his hand and concentrates on that, the pressure, the heat of Valentine's flesh. It is not enough to dispel the visions.
Tyburn raises his head and looks around. This is his home now. The bedroom window that opens on the jail; the daily wars with Commissioner Burkitt; Emma Fitzgerald a constant, nagging dilemma at the back of his consciousness. And yet the mistakes of London are what continue to plague him. All of the boys Hutchings killed that Albert couldn't save -- and the one he had, at the cost of Hutchings's life and his own career. His life, too, in a way, although there are few enough people in England who mourn the exile of Albert Tyburn. He thinks of Sarah, wherever she's gone -- to America, maybe, or perhaps to Australia with that queer little bookkeeper she'd taken up with last he saw her. No, that can't be right; that was years ago.And why in God's name is he thinking of it now?
He's thinking it because, while Nairobi has become his physical home, his body still thinks of London. It's some kind of residual flesh-memory, the body thinking things that have long since ceased to be -- pains in arms and legs amputated years before, keeping to one's own side of the bed despite lovers who deserted in your long-forgotten youth. And so Albert's body continues to believe in England, and even Valentine is not enough to alter that.
And the patterns are repeating. Albert knows he is trapped in this life, doomed to kill time and again, to rewrite the law into something he likes better. No wonder Burkitt hates him.
Valentine's eyes are narrow as he comes around to stand in front of Albert, looking down at him. "You're feeling sorry for yourself again, aren't you? You're blaming yourself for what's happened."
Tyburn stands, stalks around a little. "Of course I blame myself. Who would you blame?"
"Maximillian Van der Vuurst and Samuel Hutchings. None other. Men who thought they were beyond the law simply because they had more money than everyone else combined--" That gets a small smile out of Tyburn. "--men who thought they were not committing crimes, because those they acted against were young, or poor, or dark of skin. Men who -- I could continue all night like this, Albert, but in about thirty seconds, Karinde is going to come around the side of that building, and I wouldn't think this is an image you want him to see. Could we go back inside, perhaps?"
Tyburn wishes paranoia were a pattern he could kill and bury. He wishes he were the kind of man who could say, "To hell with propriety; this is my life and this is how I live it." He wishes he could dance with Valentine at any number of mind-numbingly dull functions Burkitt forces him to attend, rather than having to hang all night on the arm of Emma Fitzgerald, whom he loves like a sister, but who loves him in the wrong way entirely, and who has therefore become a liability, a complication, a rock in the bottom of his shoe that refuses to shake loose.
He wishes to God that the entire situation would stop reminding him so much of Sarah, because he was torn from her by his own arrogance and stupidity, and the thought of losing Valentine in the same manner cuts a thousand tiny slashes in his heart.
When they slip back into Albert's room, he has a vision of the rest of his night, and it involves Valentine excorciating him for taking things so personally, and the last thing Albert can handle right now is anything that makes him feel bad about feeling bad about himself. He's tired -- weary of body; exhausted of spirit. He has seen two good men and one wicked one die today, and he has heard a tale so fiendish it has stabbed him to the core, when he had believed nothing could surprise him any longer.
Perhaps he will revise the "Copper's ABCs," and perhaps he will call his new B "be numb."
So now he stares at Valentine across the small space of his room and realizes that the man is about to begin a lecture which will undoubtedly end with Albert making a promise to stop blaming himself for things, making a promise he has no intention of keeping, making a promise he has no idea how to keep, and there simply isn't enough strength in his entire body to deal with that tonight, so he reaches across the small space of his room and draws Valentine to him, sucking the lecture out of him, drawing it into his own body. This is the far preferable way to learn it.
And Valentine laughs, because he knows what Albert is doing, and right at this moment he doesn't feel inclined to stop him. "You're avoiding the issue," he pants when they pull apart, but his heart isn't in the scolding, and when Albert leans down for another kiss, Valentine doesn't try to stop him, to resume his admonitions.
Tyburn has conflated Van der Vuurst with Hutchings and Hilde with himself, but his mind has never once merged Sarah with Valentine, and there is something to that. Or rather, there is nothing to that, but Tyburn has made in into something, because it's the only thing he has to hang onto, the only part of this story that isn't the same as it was before. Here in this place that might never be home, there is Valentine, and Valentine can become his home, the reality that his flesh will remember.
Albert will continue to blame himself, and he will continue tricking Valentine into forgetting to yell at him about that, and although the cycle keeps repeating itself, and although, because of his unswerving adherence to what he considers to be right and wrong, good men and bad keep dying -- and don't they all, eventually? -- perhaps he can force little changes. The wheel will slip forward just an inch, instead of merely turning in its ancient groove.
One day he will close his eyes and see only darkness.
END