the letter by the red envelope it came in, he would open it and send them a check for half of what he owed. Otherwise he didn’t open their letters. Losing the phone wasn’t on his mind. What needed to go was the apartment itself – it was the crib of a man who could blow money on Hudson River views. He was no longer that man, but he had renewed when the lease expired, more out of a misplaced sense of optimism than anything else.
He’d had a bad couple of years. Every time he thought he’d hit bottom, that things couldn’t get much worse, life dropped him another notch. A few weeks ago, he would have thought this had to be it – flat broke, deep in debt, working with Gordo, wrestling crazies back into police custody for chump change – that had to be the bottom. But today was a new bottom. He had risked his life for nothing, no reason at all. Tomorrow he’d probably get killed for the same reason.
If he really wanted, he could remember the exact moment when things in his life first started going dark. It was the day Melinda met Elaine.
Melinda kept her pubic hair shaved clean.
Whenever Jonah thought of her, that bald mons was the first thing that leaped to mind. She was a nice little white girl and Jonah often worried that he didn’t deserve her. She worked that body until it was lean and tight and hard. She cut her brown hair in a short bob. She wore Donna Karan for nights out, with white gold from Fortunoff. For casual times, she picked the smallest clothes she could find at Eileen Fisher. Beneath everything, she wore only Victoria’s Secret. When she slept she wore nothing.
She and Jonah looked good together, whether sitting at a table in Carmine’s after taking in a Wednesday evening Broadway show, or cruising home in the Jag with the sunroof open, or wrestling nude on silk sheets later that night. She was fair and small and smelled like money, and he was brown, but not too brown. No, too brown wouldn’t look right, but the kind of brown that came from his mother’s honest blackness and his old man’s rumpled, cigar-chomping whiteness, that was a good soft brown. Jonah thought Melinda liked them together, the look of it. She liked his money, although she had her own, more than he would ever have. She liked that he was strong. Above all, she liked his skin against hers. Yes. She had a taste for brown. It made for three years of damn fine rutting.
But Jonah had a problem. He was not a one-woman man.
It was the Sunday morning just after Thanksgiving. It was rainy and overcast, and they had wasted the weekend and each other in bed. By Jonah’s count, they had fornicated nineteen times since a good-morning romp on the kitchen table the day before.
He lay sprawled on his back in the bed, head resting on the pillows, watching himself in the mirror embedded in the ceiling, and listening to the sound of Melinda taking a shower in his bathroom. After a moment, the water stopped and he waited for her to come out. He felt sexy and pretty damn good about himself. The soreness, the physical emptiness was like a tingling throughout his body. Just seeing his body made him feel pretty good, too. It always did. Other men bought magazines and lotions and uppers and downers because they wanted a body like his. He worked out like they did, but not as hard and not as long. The body was just there for him, better than most of them would ever have. Washboard abdominals without the infomercial gimmicks. Wide round shoulders and a broad chest. And down below the waist… If he was half-black, it was the half that mattered. Little Melinda was fascinated by his size, obsessed with it, maybe addicted to it.
He ran a hand along his chest, played with his nipple ring, and rested his hand on his stomach. He didn’t know why he got that ring. He just did it on impulse one day, walking past all the freak shops on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. It was a small gold hoop like a pirate would wear in his ear.
Melinda came out of the bathroom holding something.
He knew she saw all of him from where she stood. She was already dressed. Dark tights clung to her legs. She wore a blue boiled wool jacket, what he thought of as her fuzzy coat, against the chill of late fall she would face outside.
He figured if he played the next few minutes right, he could get something moving inside her body. If she watched him a few seconds too long, she would take all those clothes off again and they’d go for it one more time before she left for the day. Make it an even twenty.
‘What are these?’ she said.
He caught a note of alarm in her voice. It made him look at what she was holding. The first thing he noticed was a pair of black panties, too large for Melinda. His heart did a lazy belly flop as he responded.
‘Looks like underwear.’
‘I found them in the bathroom drawer,’ she said. Now her voice began to shake and her chin began to tremble. She held the label in the waistband face out so he could get a good long look. ‘They’re La Perla.’
‘OK.’ His mind went dumb, searching for anything, any thought.
She shook her head so hard that her hair bounced back and forth. It returned to almost the same position from which it started. ‘Wrong. Not OK. They weren’t there the last time I went in that drawer. Neither were these.’
She offered her other hand for his inspection. That hand held big trouble. Jonah recognized the items, a tube of KY Jelly and a clear plastic applicator which resembled a toy syringe. They came as a kit and were designed for women who had a hard time maintaining lubrication during sex play, a problem Melinda just didn’t have.
‘Where did these things come from, Jonah?’
There was nowhere to hide. He saw this and he didn’t run from it.
In his mind’s eye, as though it were showing on a giant high-definition liquid-crystal television, Jonah watched his relationship with Melinda collapse and crash apart. It was an awesome thing to behold, like a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island calving away from Antarctica and falling into the ocean.
‘They belong to a woman named Elaine,’ he said. ‘She’s my boss at work.’
Melinda nodded.
She left without another word, but that wasn’t the last he saw of her.
‘I make myself sick,’ she said two weeks later.
She pulled on a thick wool sweater as she readied herself to leave. She checked her look in the full-length mirror. She was satisfied with what she saw. She turned to Jonah. As usual, he lay on the bed watching her dress.
Tonight had been a grudge match.
‘You know that? I make myself sick by coming here again. Already I feel horrible about what I just did. I don’t know what I ever saw in you. I don’t know what you even see in you. On the surface, you seem so arrogant, so self-centered. But what you really are is weak and pathetic.’
‘I’m weak,’ he said. ‘In what way?’
She laughed at him then. ‘In what way aren’t you weak? You’re like a weak little white boy, an accountant maybe, in a nice body. Oh yeah, you have a nice body, not the best, believe me, but nice. But inside, you’re weak and ugly, and when I think of you touching me tonight, it makes me sick.’
‘Come on, Melinda,’ he said. ‘Be honest. It was good, wasn’t it?’
She was dressed, had tousled her hair some, and was ready to go. ‘I need a man, Jonah. I need a real man, not some Oreo cookie, not some pretty boy who never passed a mirror he didn’t like, not some coward.’
She stood by the door, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, she went on without waiting. ‘You’re hiding, Jonah. Big ladies man. Flashes his money around. Smiles his pretty smile. Talks all that sincere bullshit. Gets whatever piece of ass he wants. Right?’
‘Hey. You said it, not me.’
‘But without all that, you’re nothing. I can’t believe I didn’t see through you sooner. You always need a new one, right? A new little piece? Because without it, you’re nothing and you know it. You’re not a man, and you think maybe if you can fuck every woman in sight, that’ll make you seem like a man. You’re so weak. You keep acting this way, you’ll be their slave forever.’
He laughed. ‘Whose slave?’
‘The people who own you.’
‘Nobody owns me.’
She pointed at him. ‘Wrong! They all own you. The job owns you. Your little boss lady owns you. She’s using
