Death Wish by Brian Garfield

both played life too carefully. Was he sad now because he had loved her, or because he was guilty that he hadn’t loved her? Nothing left now but a fistful of lost dreams—but then they were dreams that had been lost long ago; her death perhaps was nothing more than a punctuation mark. It had been, most of the time, a good quiet friendship—not what they had dreamed of in the early days, but perhaps the highest possibility either of them was capable of attaining. They did not blame each other for things; yet when he saw friends and acquaintances who adored their husbands or wives, he remembered his envy.
    Now what would he do with himself on the weekends?
    It hadn’t been a Technicolor marriage but she had become a condition of his life. It was important to have someone. He began to understand what his father, who had lived alone a good part of his life, had endured.
    It came again: a shortness of breath, a debilitating rage that flooded all the tissues of his body.
    He disentangled himself clumsily from the twisted sheets and went into the bathroom, switched on the light and stared at himself in the mirror. His ginger hair was getting very thin on top. The freckles that covered his cheeks and hands seemed to have multiplied and intensified to the texture of knockwurst. His eyes were in red pouches; he saw the flabby lines in his face and throat, the beginnings of a sagging pot in his belly that pulled creases into his sides along the ribs. A washed-up, used-up carcass. He walked into the kitchen, moving nothing but his legs; poured a new martini ten-to-one, not bothering with ice, and padded back into the living room. When he sat down he realized it was the first time he had moved naked through the apartment in years. They had both failed to overturn their pristine and modest backgrounds; they always changed clothes in the bedroom, they never walked naked through the living room and kitchen.
    Chills swept him furiously. He took the top magazine off the unread pile beside the couch; opened it at random and read a long paragraph and went back to start it again, realizing he had not paid attention to the meaning of the words. After the second try he gave it up and closed the magazine.
    This wouldn’t do. He had to do something; he had to start making some sort of plans.
    He decided he would call the police in the morning. Maybe they had to be needled.
    He swallowed half the martini and looked around the room with a different glance: trying to picture how it had happened. Where had they done it? On the carpet? Right here on this couch? He tried to visualize it.
    It was hard to form a picture. He had never seen real violence except on television or in the movies. Until this had happened, he had been secretly convinced that a good part of it was fictitious—part of the spurious hearty masculine myths that city men constructed to reassure themselves of their machismo and the toughness of the world they inhabited. Intellectually he knew better but in his private emotions and fantasies he did not really believe, in a personal way, that hoodlums and killers existed. He had lived his entire life in the Sin Capital of the world, except for the two years they had lived within commuting distance of it, yet never with his own eyes had he seen any vice or corruption, or any violence beyond the occasional arbitrary explosion of a motorist or pedestrian so overcome by inarticulate rage that he began to shout at taxi drivers and beat their fenders with fists. He had never seen a bookie, never known a gangster. He knew drugs were pushed in the neighborhood: one block east was Needle Park, and he had seen the faces full of listless ennui which he understood belonged to addicts, but he had never seen drugs change hands, never seen a hypodermic needle outside a doctor’s office. Sometimes he had been frightened by the harsh laughing packs of teenagers who roamed through subway trains and stood in knots on street corners,