The Boston Tangler
Chapter Five: Lightning Strikes
By Roland Merullo
And so it was that the love affair between Louis Robinson, cabdriver, and Luba Neazhidana, computer programmer, raised one of the great existential questions of human life: How does one deal with people who talk too much?
In Allston, on this stormy early August evening, the question had a particular urgency to it, because Louis and Luba were only a staircase and two thresholds away from the consummation of their summer passion when Louis's talkative neighbor Vizelot stopped them on the stoop. Vizelot was listening to the ballgame, too loud, (The Sox were beating the Yankees in the middle innings. Given his present condition, Louis could imagine the torment of veteran fans: caught up in ecstasy of hope and expectation and, at the same time, haunted by past betrayals) and she had that steady, slightly glazed look in her eyes that Louis recognized all too well. Still, it wouldn't do to appear rude.
"Vizelot," he said, "this is my friend Luba. Luba, my neighbor Vizelot." The usual hellos, hi's, how are you's, pleased to meet you's. Watching the two women, though, Louis had the strangest sense that they knew each other already and were only going through a charade for his benefit. As if to divert his suspicions, Vizelot launched a fresh barrage of questions.
"Whoever saw storms like this before we penetrated the ozone?" she began, gesturing at the sky with both arms. "All night it's supposed to go on. Whoever heard of thunderstorms going on all night before we heated things up like this, sent all our emissions up there? Big smokestacks, now, too big. My husband, when he was alive ..."
Trembling, desperate, driven half mad by anticipation and by the sound of the Red Sox struggling on the radio, Louis was engaging in an inward rending of garments and tearing of hair when Luba reached out and put both her hands on Vizelot's soft elbows. "Vizzy," she said, in her slightly accented voice, a voice that seemed to come softly up through the center of the hemisphere, "close your eyes." Vizelot looked at her for a moment, apparently startled by the nickname, then did as Luba asked. "Now sit down in this chair, and here, turn the radio off for just a second. OK, you comfortable?"
"Yes, but I was just starting to tell your Louie ..."
"Now I want you to try with all your powers to picture your husband exactly as he looked on the night you first slept together."
"Our wedding night," Vizelot hastened to say.
"Your wedding night, of course. Picture him exactly as he looked on that night - his face, his body, what clothes he was wearing, cologne, if any. And remember how you felt. I don't want you to just think about it, I want you to feel it, to immerse yourself in it totally, for as long as you possibly can, even if it takes an hour or two hours or more. And then, tomorrow, Louis will have you over for lunch and you can tell him all about it. OK?"
Vizelot was caught up in a silky web of Luba's voice. "OK, sweetheart," was all she said, itself a minor miracle.
"Keep your eyes closed. We're leaving now. Really imagine now."
"OK."
They ran up the stairs. Louis had his key out and was fitting it hurriedly into the lock. "You hypnotized her," he said, leading Luba into his modest and very recently cleaned apartment. "How did you know she likes to be called Vizzy?"
Luba shrugged, smiled, slid a hand down into the back pocket of Louis's Dockers. "Just got lucky, I guess."
Louis took hold of her wonderful shoulders and, kissing her deeply, passionately, fervently, waltzed her through his narrow kitchen, knocking his Mets cap off its hanger and onto the floor in the process.
It should perhaps be noted here, before we follow Louis and Luba into the bedroom, that Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s believe they invented sex. All contrary evidence notwithstanding, they really believe this. After all, the argument goes, who else besides the members of this generation ever talked about sex so openly, wrote about it so overtly, forced it into advertisements for everything from abominable beer to automobiles? Their self-congratulation in this arena knows no bounds. As if the million generations before them existed in a state of historically verifiable frigidity. As if their finest achievement - turning the most mysterious aspect of the great mystery of love into a three-part correspondence course in synchronic gymnastics - entitled them to bragging rights for eternity.
We mention this because both Luba and Louis, although part of the Most Aware, Most Open, and Most Fortunate Generation, were private people when it came to sexual matters. And so, while it would be easy enough here to provide a blow-by-blow description of what they did on that thunderous night, let us honor their privacy. Let us simply say that whatever they did after they fell, entangled, onto Louis's bed, they did in loving fashion, unencumbered by too much comparison, expectation, or self-consciousness. They made love, as the old-fashioned term goes, with the universe's great electrical play going on above and around - and perhaps between - them. They made love.
Afterward, utterly satisfied, body and soul, Louis nevertheless had a bit of trouble drifting off to sleep: the periodic booming of thunderclaps; the spark and flash of lightning; the wondrous warm silken skin of the woman beside him. He thought, at one point, that he heard a series of yelps from somewhere near the front of the house - one of Allston's roving band of mongrels, no doubt, yapping at the storm. A few moments after that, he heard the game again on Vizelot's radio, Castiglione saying something about extra innings. And then, fingers entwined with his beloved's, he fell asleep.
The next day, a warm and humid Sunday, they went out for breakfast at Steve's Kitchen on Harvard Avenue, and the radio there told the story: Strange things had been happening while Luba and Louis were entangled - cell phones rendered inoperable (cp9.5AAAcp10.5 had, not surprisingly, reported a decrease in traffic accidents), beepers out of whack (in a posh western suburb, a group of frustrated teenagers had gone on a small rampage at a soft-serve ice cream stand), call-waiting systems failing to work (some people testified later that they had actually enjoyed talking to only one person at a time). The announcer said that, according to police sources and electronics experts, not all these things could be blamed on lightning strikes from the big storm.
Listening to the news, Louis watched Luba with what was becoming a familiar mix of suspicion and love. She seemed uninterested in the radio - a good sign, perhaps. She was beaming, aglow, radiant. "Last night was so nice, wasn't it?" she said, cutting through her breakfast sausage with fork and knife. "At least compared to anything I've ever known."
Louis's ego, not an especially large creature as male egos go, swelled to twice its size at these words, but its tumescence was short-lived. "Giorgio, my ex, was this perfect Adonis of a man - I never told you - blond, 6 foot 2, stroked the Harvard eight in college, a part-time model for the J.C. Penney underwear catalog right into his early 30s."
Louis felt himself sinking into the seat. He sipped his coffee, nodded, pretended to be curious, intrigued, egotistically uninvolved, just a friend hearing tales of a friend's other life.
"But making love with him was like skating for the Olympic judges. So vigorous and exhausting, so ... so ... all scripted out. Afterward, I kept expecting to look up and see these people by the side of the bed holding up little cards: 6.5 from the German judge, 4.0 from the Italians."
Louis laughed, perhaps a bit too loudly and too long, and for years afterward would be made uneasy by even the most casual mention of the word "vigorous."
Luba had two presentations scheduled for that week, so the soonest they would be able to see each other again was the following Saturday. "In the meantime, until Friday anyway, let's not talk on the phone or anything," she said. "I don't want to take the edge off."
Louis thought this somewhat peculiar, but he agreed. After breakfast, they took a short stroll through Allston, stopped at Moscow International Foods for two loaves of Russian pumpernickel, kissed goodbye on the sidewalk, and parted.
For Louis, Monday and Tuesday were an agony of impatience. So much so that, on Wednesday night, when Lieutenant Bella called him at home and asked if he'd mind coming down to District 4 for "a little chat," he was almost glad for the distraction. Thursday, after work, he washed up at the garage and went to see her.
Bella and Patrolman Small led him into a windowless room where the three of them sat on plain metal chairs near a plain metal table, sipping coffee and running through a list of the Tangler's latest tricks. "cp9.5ATMcp10.5 malfunctions," Bella said, making a fist and bending away one finger at a time, "interruption of music systems, disruption of telephone service - a federal crime."
After she had used up the fingers of both hands, the door swung open, admitting a fellow in jeans and a sportcoat who introduced himself as Detective Dick Hector. Detective Hector stood an inch or two over 5 feet tall and was built wide as a doorway. He was quite bald on top, and one of his ears was cauliflowered. This, Louis noted, with some surprise, was the exact description of a character Max Twice had encountered in Lubyanka Prison, a vision from anyone's worst nightmare. He studied the man, sipped his coffee, waited.
He did not have to wait long. Detective Hector pulled a manila folder out of his briefcase, opened it, and placed three photographs on the table. Louis, Small, and Bella leaned their heads together and found themselves looking at 8-by-10 glossies of Louis kissing Luba in Government Center. "Did you see the flash?" she had said, after that first kiss. Small smiled in a tender way. Bella worked her gum in disapproval - of Louis's kissing style, perhaps, or of kissing in general.
Biting back on his anger, Louis looked up at Detective Hector and said, "Mind if I get copies of these?"
Hector went from fire hydrant to fire. He slammed a palm down on the table. "Do you have any idea what has been going on in this city over the past few weeks?"
"A vast left-wing conspiracy?" Louis suggested.
"Exactly. Do you know how much money these little socialist pranks have cost the taxpayers?"
"A lot?"
"Do you know how many hundreds of thousands of people have been inconvenienced, how much productivity has been lost, how much damage has been done to consumer confidence and the business profile of this city?"
Louis shook his head.
"Do you even care?"
"Sure I care. I just have nothing to do with it, that's all."
Detective Hector jabbed a finger at the photographs. "Nothing to do with it?" he shouted.
"It depends on exactly how you define do," Louis thought, but he managed to say, instead: "I'm dating a woman. It's a free country."
Hector was pacing back and forth by the table now, blood in the face. "This is the woman you took to Fenway Park on the day the big screen went blank, is it not?"
"Yes."
"And then you end up going out with her on dates. Can you explain that?"
"We met again in Harvard Square."
"Ah," Hector said. Lieutenant Bella was scribbling notes on a pad. "Harvard Square. Of course."
"I took her to Lynn."
"Lynn," the detective repeated, apparently for Bella's benefit.
"We had a meal in the North End."
"The North End, naturally. It all fits."
"And the other night we had dinner in Allston."
"The Fenway, Harvard Square, Lynn, the North End, Allston! And you say there's nothing suspicious?"
"There's no quid pro quo," Louis said. It was a phrase he'd heard President Bush use during the Iran-Contra affair, and then President Clinton's lawyers during Monica. He wasn't sure exactly what it meant, but he thought it might be Latin for "No real money was made here."
"What would you say if I told you your new sweetheart might be part of a conspiracy of computer specialists, '60s revolutionaries, immigrants, and common thugs, a group whose goal it is to ruin the city of Boston's reputation as a place of progress?"
"I'd say it was impossible."
"Impossible or unlikely?"
Louis could almost hear his ex-wife Alicia's shouts in his ears. Disloyal, a betrayer, scared to death of anyone in authority. He swallowed, he said: "Impossible."
"Nothing she has said or done leads you to have any suspicions whatsoever ..."
"Zero," Louis lied.
Detective Hector nodded, his lips twisted in a sarcastic way. "You yourself are a suspect. You know that, I'm sure. Your friends at the cab company are cooperating, your neighbors. We are in touch with your ex-wife."
At this news, Louis raised the coffee cup to his mouth and emptied it, gave the drug a few seconds to reach his brain, glanced at Small, at Bella, looked straight up into Detective Hector's eyes, and said, "cp9.5K.M.R.I.A.cp10.5"
Bella was scribbling madly on her notepad. Hector had stopped pacing and seemed suddenly triumphant. From off to the side, Small said, in a relieved voice: "The initials of your terrorist organization, yes?"
"No." Louis stood and walked right past Hector to the door, turned there, and looked back at them. He was a college grad, as Max Twice kept reminding him. BA in English literature from Boston University. Not so useless after all. "It's James Joyce," he said. "Ulysses."
"And it means?" Detective Hector pressed.
Louis took hold of the handle, pulled the door open, and looked back at them over his shoulder. Pacino in the Brooklyn restaurant about to do away with the evil police captain; Marciano answering the call of the bell, all bloody in the twelfth; Eruzione at Lake Placid, beating the Russians. Cool as could be, he said: "Kiss My Royal Irish Ass."
So this was the new Louis Robinson then, unflappable, defiant, loyal as the day was long. A sort of a mixed blessing, it seemed to him, walking out of the station with his heart hammering. He was sweating, hungry, floating aimlessly, block after block. Finding himself on Mass. Ave., not far from where he'd made his illegal left turn years ago, he did something he had not done since just before the sixth game of the 1986 World Series: He bought a cigar. He carried the cigar down to the Mother Church and sat on a bench at the fountain there, smoking it. After a few minutes, someone sat down on his left, and after another little while, Louis glanced up and saw the Irwin Corey lookalike he'd driven to Lynn a few weeks earlier. The crazy professor was wearing his tuxedo and sneakers again, staring straight ahead. "Good work," he said in a nutty whisper. "We won't forget you."
|
Click here for past issues of the Globe Magazine, dating back to June 22, 1997
