Dark Rivers of the Heart

“Compassion,” she whispered.

“Compassion. If you try to understand other people, to feel their pain, to really know the anguish of their lives, to love them in spite of their faults, you’re overcome by such pity, such intense pity, it’s intolerable. It must be relieved. So you tap into the immeasurable, inexhaustible power of compassion. You act to relieve suffering, to ease the world a hairsbreadth closer to perfection.”

“Compassion,” she whispered again, as if she had never heard the word before, or as if he had shown her a definition of it that she had never previously appreciated.

Roy could not look away from her mouth as she repeated the word twice again. Her lips were divine. He couldn’t imagine why he had thought that Melissa Wicklun’s lips were perfect, for Eve’s lips made Melissa’s seem less attractive than those of a leprous toad. These were lips beside which the ripest plum would look as withered as a prune, beside which the sweetest strawberry would look sour.

Playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, he continued her first lesson in moral refinement: “When you’re motivated solely by compassion, when no personal gain is involved, then any act is moral, utterly moral, and you owe no explanations to anyone, ever. Acting from compassion, you’re freed forever from doubt, and that is a power like no other.”

“Any act,” she said, so overcome by the concept that she could barely find enough breath to speak.

“Any,” he assured her.

She licked her lips.

Oh, God, her tongue was so delicate, glistened so intriguingly, slipped so sensuously across her lips, was so perfectly tapered that a faint sigh of ecstasy escaped him before he was quite aware of it.

Perfect lips. Perfect tongue. If only her chin had not been tragically fleshy. Others might think it was the chin of a goddess, but Roy was cursed with a greater sensitivity to imperfection than were other men. He was acutely aware of the smidgin of excess fat that lent her chin a barely perceptible puffy look. He would just have to focus on her lips, on her tongue, and not allow his gaze to drift down from there.

“How many have you done?” she asked.

“Done? Oh. You mean, like back at the restaurant.”

“Yes. How many?”

“Well, I don’t count them. That would seem…I don’t know…it would seem prideful. I don’t want praise. No. My satisfaction is just in doing what I know is right. It’s a very private satisfaction.”

“How many?” she persisted. “A rough estimate.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Over the years…a couple of hundred, a few hundred, something like that.”

She closed her eyes and shivered. “When you do them…just before you do them and they look in your eyes, are they afraid?”

“Yes, but I wish they weren’t. I wish they could see that I know their anguish, that I’m acting from compassion, that it’s going to be quick and painless.”

With her own eyes closed, half swooning, she said, “They look into your eyes, and they see the power you have over them, the power of a storm, and they’re afraid.”

He released her right hand and pointed his forefinger at the flat section of bone immediately above the root of her perfect nose. It was a nose that made all the other fine noses seem as unformed as the “nose” on a coconut shell. Slowly, he moved his finger toward her face as he said, “You. Have. The. Most. Exquisite. Glabella. I. Have. Ever. Seen.”

With the last word, he touched his finger to her glabella, the flat portion of the front skull bone between her unimpeachable left superciliary arch and her unfortunately bony right superciliary arch, directly above her nose.

Although her eyes were closed, Eve didn’t flinch with surprise at his touch. She seemed to have developed such a closeness to him, so quickly, that she was aware of his every intention and slightest movement without the aid of vision — and without relying on any of the other five senses, for that matter.

He took his finger off her glabella. “Do you believe in fate?”

“Yes.”

“We are fate.”

She opened her eyes and said, “Let’s go back to my place.”

On the trip to her house, she broke traffic laws by the score. Roy didn’t approve, but he withheld his criticism.

She lived in a small two-story house in a recently completed tract. It was nearly identical to the other houses on the street.

Roy had expected glamour. Disappointed, he reminded himself that Eve, though stunning, was but another woefully underpaid bureaucrat.

As they waited in the Honda, in the driveway, for the automatic garage door to finish lifting out of the way, he said, “How did a woman like you wind up working in the agency?”

“I wanted the job, and my father had the influence to make it happen,” she said, driving into the garage.

“Who’s your father?”

“He’s a rotten sonofabitch,” she said. “I hate him. Let’s not go into all that, Roy, please. Don’t ruin the mood.”

The last thing that he wanted to do was ruin the mood.

Out of the car, at the door between the garage and the house, as Eve fumbled in her purse for keys, she was suddenly nervous and clumsy. She turned to him, leaned close. “Oh, God, I can’t stop thinking about it, how you did them, how you just walked up and did them. Such power in the way you did it.”

She was virtually smouldering with desire. He could feel the heat rolling off her, driving the February chill out of the garage.

“You have so much to teach me,” she said.

A turning point in their relationship had arrived. Roy needed to explain one more thing about himself. He’d been delaying bringing it up, for fear she would not understand this one quirk as easily as she had absorbed and accepted what he’d had to say about the power of compassion. But he could delay no longer.

As Eve returned her attention to her purse and at last extracted the ring of keys from it, Roy said, “I want to see you undressed.”

“Yes, darling, yes,” she said, and the keys clinked noisily as she searched for the right one on the ring.

He said, “I want to see you entirely nude.”

“Entirely, yes, all for you.”

“I have to know how much of the rest of you is as perfect as the perfect parts that I can already see.”

“You’re so sweet,” she said, hastily inserting the correct key into the dead-bolt lock.

“From the soles of your feet to the curve of your spine, to the backs of your ears, to the pores in the skin of your scalp. I want to see every inch of you, nothing hidden, nothing at all.”

Throwing open the unlocked door, rushing inside, switching on a kitchen light, she said, “Oh, you are too much, you are so strong. Every crevice, darling, every inch and fold and crevice.”

As she dropped her purse and keys on the kitchen table and began to strip out of her coat, he followed her inside and said, “But that doesn’t mean I want to undress or…or anything.”

That stopped her. She blinked at him.

He said, “I want to see. And touch you, but not much of that. Just a little touching, when something looks perfect, to feel if the skin is as smooth and silky as it appears, to test the resilience, to feel if the muscle tension is as wonderful as it looks. You don’t have to touch me at all.” He hurried on, afraid that he was losing her. “I want to make love to you, to the perfect parts of you, make passionate love with my eyes, with a few quick touches, perhaps, but with nothing else. I don’t want to spoil it by doing…what other people do. Don’t want to debase it. Don’t need that sort of thing.”

She stared at him so long that he almost turned and fled.

Suddenly Eve squealed shrilly, and Roy took a step back, more than half afraid of her. Offended and humiliated, she might fling herself at him and claw his face, tear at his eyes.

Then, to his astonishment, he realized that she was laughing, though not cruelly, not laughing at him. She