In the shadow of truth, p.47
In the Shadow of Truth, page 47
Jenny knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and she certainly didn’t blame Kathryn for her anger. The woman didn’t look her way again as she took her place at the microphone and the bandleader passed on the instructions to the band. It was apparent a message was going to be sent via the next song, and Jenny figured that as long as it wasn’t “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” she could handle it.
The tune was “Just One of Those Things,” and it appeared to be an apology from Kathryn, like the scene with Marcella couldn’t be helped. It bolstered Jenny’s theory about the assignment angle, and while it would take some doing to swallow the idea of Kathryn being assigned to Marcella, at least their relationship hadn’t been a lie, and it was certainly preferable to the devastation of her initial impression.
As the song went on, however, it seemed less like an apology and more like notice that their relationship was the one that had run its course and, according to the gist of the lyrics, good riddance.
Jenny’s chest tightened again. The air was getting thick, and she despised the song for being so cheerful as it delivered Kathryn’s killing blow. The audience was added to her hit list, as they applauded the tune at its finish and became unwitting accomplices in the pain caused by the end of her relationship and her life as she had known it for the past eleven months.
Kathryn came to the edge of the stage, an intimidating figure as she towered over her and looked down from the top step.
Jenny gathered her nerve, unsure she really wanted to have the impending conversation, but pressed on. “I need to talk to you.”
“I imagine you do,” Kathryn said coolly.
Jenny didn’t say anything, confused by her attitude, which conveyed a great deal more than just anger.
Kathryn crossed her arms, waiting.
Jenny looked around, uncomfortable at the public setting, and grew irritated that Kathryn insisted on turning the screw.
“Can we go somewhere a little more private, please?” She looked briefly toward the stairs leading to the dressing room.
Kathryn exhaled in irritation and looked at her wristwatch. She got the attention of the bandleader and flashed five fingers twice. He nodded.
Ten minutes. Jenny frowned as Kathryn stepped from the stage and brushed past her, heading for the stairs. All they had shared, all the promises made, and it would all come down to ten final minutes.
She almost didn’t bother. Kathryn’s demeanor told her all she needed to know, but she dutifully followed her up the stairs, already regretting that she’d come back.
Kathryn entered her dressing room, waited for Jenny to pass by, and slammed the door behind her.
“Private enough? Talk.”
Jenny felt ten again, trying to explain how the dog wound up shaved bare to his haunches and painted blue.
“You’re angry.”
Kathryn snorted a contemptuous laugh and pushed by. “Let’s hear it for Jenny for being so perceptive, but I’m sure you came here to do more than state the obvious.” She turned and crossed her arms.
Jenny would go for the apology first. Kathryn sure wasn’t acting like someone who had been caught having an affair.
“I once made a promise to you.” Jenny sat on the end of the bed, feeling as small as she appeared in the shadow of Kathryn’s anger. “That whatever happened, I would remember how much you loved me at that particular moment, and I would never forget. No matter what.”
She watched Kathryn’s face for any hint of recognition or absolution. There was none.
“I didn’t forget that promise, but I did misplace it briefly.”
Kathryn may as well have been a marble statue, for all the help she was giving her. Surely, she could understand the shock of the situation.
“Kat,” Jenny pleaded in a more familiar tone. “I knew you had an assignment, and I knew it might turn sexual, but I never, in a million years, expected it to be Marcella! You can understand why I went insane, can’t you?”
Kathryn broke off her acerbic gaze and seemed to relax as she moved slowly to the comfortable chair beside her vanity and sat down. She smiled a disconcerting smile as she reached for a cigarette pack beside the cold cream jar and removed one as she spoke.
“Marcy wasn’t an assignment, Jenny, just a good lay.”
She lit the cigarette and exhaled to the ceiling as Jenny stared on in confusion. Who was this woman? The attitude, the smoking— Jenny’s mind was working overtime, trying to make sense of it all. She came to the conclusion that the cigarette was a sign. After the incident at the center and the damage to her lungs, Kathryn would never take up the habit again, of that she was sure. Only one explanation made sense. Jenny took out a small notepad from her purse, scribbled a note, and then handed the pad to Kathryn.
First, I’m really sorry! it said, underlined twice, and then, Can we talk safely? Are we being watched or listened to?
A slow grin formed on Kathryn’s lips as she read it, and Jenny’s heart lifted. Kathryn’s odd behavior was an act. Just as she thought.
Hope quickly turned to despair, as the grin became a chuckle and then an outright laugh when Kathryn shook her head and handed back the notepad.
“You’ve seen too many movies, Jenny.”
Jenny stared at her, searching those eyes she knew so well. She was devastated to find not just a stranger there but no one. She stared into the glassy blue infinity of a glacier, devoid of life and just as hostile.
She refused to believe it. She knew this woman, perhaps better than the woman knew herself. She was capable of many things, but after what they had shared, this coldhearted betrayal was not one of them.
“You’re lying to me.”
Kathryn shook her head with a smirk and settled into her chair and her condescending attitude as she took another drag of her cigarette and exhaled it with her bottom line.
“I’m sure this is difficult for you, Jenny, but please don’t make a fool of yourself. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end, and for that I am truly sorry, but there’s no point in going on about it now.”
Jenny couldn’t believe she was reducing their love to a roadmap of planned acts—the chase, the conquest, the merciful end. The ugly truth was threatening to swallow her whole again, and she could only flail helplessly as it swelled within her.
“And how was it supposed to end, Kat?”
Kathryn raised her brow as she flicked the ash from her cigarette into the ashtray on the vanity. Her ensuing shrug was just as casual and infuriating as her answer.
“You’d get assigned somewhere, I’d get assigned somewhere, we’d go our separate ways, drift apart, no one gets hurt.”
“No one gets hurt?” Jenny said incredulously.
Kathryn leaned forward. “Look, Jenny, I think you’re a swell gal … honestly, I do. You were there for me when I needed a friend, and the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you …”
“Too fucking late!”
“Obviously.”
It was clear to Jenny from Kathryn’s attitude that the fling with Satan wasn’t new. “How long has this been going on with Marcella?”
Kathryn took an impatient drag on her cigarette and looked at her wristwatch before answering. “Does it really matter?”
Volatile emotions were pressing on fragile nerves, and it was all Jenny could do to speak in even tones without unleashing her temper that was fueled by pain and a desperate urge to hang on to the truth as she knew it.
“It matters to me!”
Kathryn stood. “Look, I haven’t time for this, and it won’t help to—”
Jenny was on her feet and in Kathryn’s face in an instant, demanding an answer.
“How long?”
Kathryn stared at her with those cold, unflinching eyes.
“On and off since we first met in the grocery store.”
“Bullshit! You’re not that fucking good.”
“No, but I am that good at fucking, and, apparently, that’s enough to make some people believe anything, especially when they’re desperate enough or naïve enough to believe in things like love and forever.”
Jenny was speechless for a moment. The woman was throwing everything of value back in her face, making a mockery of their life, their love. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true.
“You believed in those things.”
Kathryn laughed and took her seat again. “Did I?”
She said it with a smirk, made it a challenge—what do you know, and how can you be so sure?
Jenny was no longer sure. Nothing made sense, least of all the woman before her. It was as if she was seeing her for the first time, rose glasses crushed at her feet. What once was exquisite had become an aberration.
Kathryn’s face was suddenly too angular, her lips too thin, and her eyes so unnaturally blue, as to be made by the devil himself as a tool to trap and hypnotize. A modern day Eve with her apple.
“I don’t know who you are.”
In a blink, Kathryn was serious, her gaze almost menacing as she leaned forward. “You’re right, Jenny, you don’t know who I am. You never have. The best thing for you to do is to walk out of this room and never look back.” She sat back and took a slow drag on her cigarette and then released her poison into the air with a maddening smirk. “But you won’t.”
Jenny noticed the routine with the cigarette was the same as the night they met: the tilt of her head, the squint on the purposeful inhale, and then the eventual exhale. It cut through her anger that first night and aroused her in spite of herself, but tonight it was repulsive, the mechanics of a disgusting habit by a woman who no longer merited the perverse fascination of the past.
“The hell I won’t,” Jenny said. As she turned to walk out the door, she was caught by Kathryn’s laughter, felling her like a well-placed whip around her neck. It was more than she could take. She faced her torturer. “Stop laughing at me!”
Tears were coming, and she struggled to keep them at bay, because Kathryn Hammond would get no such satisfaction from her. Why was she doing this? If she didn’t love her, then just leave. Why go through the motions of a relationship? Was it really worth it to just cruelly taunt her in the end? No, something was very wrong.
Kathryn was doing her best to drive her away, and she knew all the right buttons to push. Jenny’s heart was telling her everything about the situation was a lie, but her head and her insecurities were telling her I told you so.
She tried to fight it. It’s what she wants, she told herself. Don’t give in to it.
Every time she convinced herself it wasn’t over, gave herself permission to hope, the relief was overwhelming. She became desperate for it all to be some misguided plot, and she wasn’t above begging.
“Kat, please, if this is some kind of crazy guilt thing with you, or some OSS scheme to keep me out of harm’s way, just tell me, please. I’ll do whatever you ask, I’ll go away … whatever I have to do. Just, please, tell me we weren’t a lie.”
Kathryn was silent, with no hint of empathy in her indifferent stare.
Jenny felt her last semblance of hope burn out and drift away like the smoke from an extinguished candlewick. “You told me you loved me.”
“Nothing comes for free, Jenny. I gave you what you wanted, and I got what I wanted in return. It’s what I do.”
Jenny couldn’t help herself. She had to know. “And what did you want?”
“The chance to live the life everyone raves about. They call it love, and people spend their entire lives trying to find it … that one person who fills your world and makes you whole.”
“You found that person. You found stability for the first time in your life, and you’re throwing it all away.”
Kathryn chuckled. “Stability is another word for boring, Jenny, and that’s not for me.”
“Our life was anything but boring, Kat.”
“Oh, yes, evenings by the firelight, reading, playing cards, listening to the radio, recounting the minutia of each day, like anyone really cares. Like I said, it’s not for me.”
Jenny was defeated. Her questions were a reflex, like a twitching corpse with no knowledge of its actions and no care for the results.
“Why did you stay?”
For some reason, Kathryn found the question amusing, and she grinned.
“You’re the best sex I’ve had in years. Seemed like a small price to pay.”
Jenny died more and more, as every aspect she loved about their relationship was unmercifully torn down and degraded, until it felt cheap and pathetic—until she felt cheap and pathetic. Kathryn kept hurling her daggers, uncaring.
“I should have left long ago,” she went on, “but I could have my cake and eat it too, so why not?”
How much cruelty was she expected to bear? Fury found its way back to her, and Jenny refused to be kicked anymore. “How many others were there?”
“None of your business,” was Kathryn’s flippant reply.
Jenny had enough.
“You disgust me!”
Kathryn responded with another laugh, which sealed it for Jenny. She wasn’t the woman she knew and loved. How could it all have fallen apart so quickly, and how could she have been so wrong? The tears finally fell.
“I used to think you were so beautiful. Now, I can honestly say you are the ugliest person I’ve ever met.”
Kathryn smiled. “Now you’re getting to know me.”
“Fuck you, Kathryn!”
“Jenny,” Kathryn said with a consoling tone as she got up, “don’t cry. I don’t want you to go like this.” She moved closer. “The others are just sex. And Marcy … well, she’s like a circus sideshow of sex. You know what I’m talking about. I don’t want you to be upset.”
Kathryn’s tone, the humiliation of being made the fool, and the memory of Marcella’s insatiable quest for bizarre sex in the most inappropriate places, all clawed at her broken heart, until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to get out of there, and this time her body would have no problem following orders.
As she reached for the door, Kathryn was quickly there, blocking her way with her hands on her shoulders. “Come on, Jenny, don’t be angry. We were friends, weren’t we? The others were just sex. You know that doesn’t mean anything to me. If you say what we had was love, then okay, maybe it’s worth taking another look.”
Kathryn’s long fingers were in her hair, like dead tree branches scratching the gray winter sky, and then they were cupping her face. It made Jenny’s skin crawl, as the sociopath made a blatant attempt to worm her way back into her bed. Jenny tried to shrink away, but Kathryn bent her head and kissed her. It was the full-on sensual kiss that always made her knees weak and her heart soar.
Jenny shoved her away and spit the foul taste of cigarettes onto the floor. “Don’t touch me! You’re sick, and you disgust me.”
“So you said. Worth a try though, don’t you think? For love?”
It was the last time she would be mocked by this despicable creature. It was finally Jenny’s turn for a perfectly executed departure. She brushed past the pathetic whore, and before slamming the door in her face, she did her one last favor, for old times’ sake.
“Your things will be on the roadside until tomorrow morning. That’s garbage day. If you come by when I’m home, I’ll have you arrested for trespassing.”
Jenny found herself knocking on Smitty’s apartment door. It was sometime after midnight, but she had long since lost track of the time. She had spent the entire evening relieving her home of everything Kathryn brought into it, including some things of her own that would forever be linked to the woman and their relationship.
She’d gone through every possible emotion—anger, sorrow, self-pity, hate, even love—and she rode each one until they’d all had their say and left her battered and worn. She couldn’t bear to stay at home, and she couldn’t stand to be by herself any longer, a prisoner of her thoughts and memories. She’d been sentenced to solitary confinement and was drawn to the only crack in her cell, like a weed trapped beneath a sidewalk, clamoring for the light of the sun. She cringed at how pathetic it was that at that particular moment, her only friend, her only chance for escape, was Smitty, a man who merely tolerated her.
He answered the door wearing only his pants, which he held up with one hand while planting the other on the doorjamb, in an attempt to block the view into his room.
“Hi ya, kid, what brings you down here?”
Jenny had a moment of panic when she looked past his shoulder and saw a tall, dark-haired woman by the bed securing her hose at the thigh. She immediately thought it was Kathryn, and visions of a murderous crime of passion flashed in her mind. Smitty knew she saw the woman and reluctantly removed his hand from the doorjamb and scrubbed his chin, momentarily chagrined.
The tall woman sauntered to the door and held out her hand. Smitty reached into his pocket and counted out some money, almost losing his pants in the process.
“Thanks, angel puss.” She stroked his cheek. “Same time next week?”
“I’ll let you know.”
The prostitute looked Jenny up and down like she was the reason his answer wasn’t the usual yes, and she smiled. “I’ll be waiting.”
Smitty watched her ass as she walked away, and now Jenny was the one who was momentarily embarrassed.
“Sorry, Smitty.”
He shrugged it off.
“What’s wrong?”
“I caught Kathryn screwing my ex-girlfriend.”
Smitty blinked once, then simply said, “Ouch.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
He stepped aside. “Come on in.”
His apartment was a small, poorly lit one-room affair, with the bed taking up most of the space. It was disorganized and cluttered, and thanks to the previous visitor, smelled of sex, booze, and cigarettes.
“You look a little rough,” Smitty said. “You want a drink?”
Jenny declined and started slowly pacing around the room. If she started drinking now, she might not find a reason to stop.
“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” she began, as Smitty fastened his pants and then grabbed an undershirt. “Apparently, it’s been going on for some time, but you probably knew that.”
