was decadently plush, lips that had been stung by the whole hive of bees held compressed into a solemn pout. They glistened a moist and glossy crimson, some swollen exotic fruit. Her eyes had a feline shape and were of a blue that was clear almost to the point of transparency. Too much mascara only heightened the effect.
“Yes?” the woman—surely only a girl of eighteen or nineteen—asked him at last in a dark, vaguely surly voice.
“I’m sorry…um…I was looking for my landlord…uh, Guy?”
“Guy Hamlin,” the young woman droned.
“Yes. Guy Hamlin.”
“I’m Guy’s daughter, Idelia.”
Griffin smiled. “Do you call your father by his first name?”
Just that lynx-like stare for a moment or two, and then, “Yes.”
The girl—Idelia Hamlin, then— was small, and obviously very slender, lost like some dour, doleful child in her over-sized sweater. Black tights clung to legs almost alarmingly thin, and her bony feet were bare, the red polish on their nails flaking away like old blood. The dim bulb beside the door glowed on her high forehead, and made her pallid, translucent flesh seem almost softly luminous. Normally, Griffin did not care for the starving model look, that heroin chic, the anorexic waif that was the current ideal, as dictated by the media. His interest lay in substantial women, voluptuous, large-breasted, round-bottom-ed. His ex-girlfriend Natalie had been plump as a Renoir nude. This girl was anything but substantial. And yet, those ice-blue eyes, the too-ripe painted lips that seemed to overcompensate for the rest of her, pinned his heart like a struggling, dying moth inside his chest.
He might have disbelieved her about being Guy’s daughter, except that Guy also had uncanny blue eyes—if not of quite so light a shade. Yes, he could see Guy in her unsettling gaze. But otherwise there was no similarity, as Guy was singularly unattractive and a good four hundred pounds, Griffin wagered. Oh yes…Guy. He had come upstairs to see Guy. Griffin realized he’d been mutely staring again.
“I’m Griffin Shores; I live downstairs. Is your father home? I have the rent…and some books to return.” He held them up as proof. “He lent them to me.”
Idelia gazed at the books in his hand, and seemed hesitant, or indecisive as to what to do next. But finally she said, “Why don’t you come in, then.” She held the door wide for him. Before that, she had been blocking it warily with her thin frame.
“Okay, um, thanks.” Griffin slipped past her, lightly brushing against her sweater. Very consciously, he inhaled as he did so, and stole a furtive whiff of her musky perfume.
“What are the books?” Idelia asked as she turned away from the door.
“Oh, about the supernatural, the occult, mostly,” Griffin replied with some degree of embarrassment, as if caught with a stack of pornography. “Your father and I got to talking one day, and he found out I work in a book store and love to read. He’s pretty enthusiastic about these books…he thought I’d find them interesting, too.”
Idelia nodded absently, but said, “I think they’re dangerous.”
“Books?”
“Those books.”
“Oh. Well, ah, so…is Guy here?”
“No. He isn’t. He’s away.”
So why had she let him in, he wondered, when she could have just accepted the books out on the landing? There was something in her spacy manner that suggested drugs, or even a psychological problem, or both—not that it decreased his lust by much. “Um, so when will he be back?”
“Not sure. Not soon.” She shrugged vaguely. “If you don’t feel comfortable leaving the rent with me, you can wait until he returns.”
Griffin didn’t feel comfortable with that, so he changed the subject. “I didn’t know Guy had ever been married.” He didn’t add that his impression had been that Guy was a very lonely—bitterly lonely—man, who had never had a girlfriend in his life, let alone a wife with the kind of genes to produce a creature like this one. Also, he had taken Guy to be only in his mid thirties; he must have sired Idelia when quite young.
“They’re divorced,” Idelia explained. “My mother lives out of town. I’m just visiting here.”
“I see. Then I’ll bet you haven’t been to the store where I work. It’s just down the street—‘Book Plates’? We have a little coffee shop in there. If you’re not busy, maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee and a piece of pie?” His throat clicked as he swallowed a phlegmy glob of nervousness.
“Outside?” Idelia glanced rather suddenly at one of the windows in this front room, a parlor. Ancient, water-stained paper of a dark color covered the tenement apartment’s walls, and all the curtains were drawn, all the shades pulled. “No—thank you.”
Griffin felt like he’d totally humiliated himself, as usual. He called the look women gave him when he asked them out “the tarantula”. As if, instead of asking them out, he had extended his open palm with a tarantula on it. He had gotten along with Guy, evasive as Guy was (this was the first time Griffin had actually been inside his apartment), not only because they shared a passion for books, but because they were both unlucky bachelors. Well, he had had Natalie, and Guy had had his wife, so there was always hope for the future…and Griffin felt he was at least more attractive than Guy, though that wasn’t saying much.
“Well, I’ve got to start my shift in a half hour, anyway, so I guess I should be going. You ought to drop in some time, though—I mean, just to look at the books. It’s a nice little place.”
Idelia said nothing in reply; just stared at him, as if to hypnotize him. He was hypnotizing himself, he thought, and he’d better break off; he was starting to feel light-headed just being in her aura of subtle perfume and glowing flesh.
And then, she took two steps to cross the space between them, to float toward him like a somnambulist, and her arms drifted up to him, the sleeves of the bulky sweater sliding back to reveal the thinness of her arms, and her hands alighted on either side of his face, her touch so soft it was like smoke, but cold smoke. A question half rose in Griffin but before he could give it sound, her face too floated toward him, and she pulled his face down and pressed that luxuriant mouth against his.
He put his hands on her arms, as if to push this stranger away, but her tongue slipped into his mouth, cool and anxious, and he found his arms sliding around her instead, to press her whole body to him. He could almost have wrapped his arms around her twice; he was accustomed to Natalie’s broad back, her warm cushions of flesh. This bird-like body with its sharp points of bone and its insubstantial lightness was alien to him. But that alienness of her body and of her actions increasingly stimulated him. He pushed his own tongue into her mouth in turn, and grew aroused, grew desperate to enter her down there as well…
Her hands had moved from his face down to his waist and now slid under his own sweater and the shirt beneath to the bare skin. She began to bunch the material in her hands as if to pull it off him, over his head, and this caused him to open his eyes in surprised desire.
Her eyes were open, too, perhaps had been open all along, and right there in front of his own—so blue, so intense, so very hungry that they frightened him. But it wasn’t just her hunger that suddenly disturbed him. Again, he had been reminded of Guy’s eyes. It was as if Guy had changed form so as to seduce him, but had just now dropped his defenses to reveal himself lurking beneath the mask. It was, Griffin thought later that night when mulling over these events, a ridiculous idea. Had Guy lost three hundred pounds in the two weeks since Griffin had last seen him, and had a sex change operation to boot? But the girl was, of course, a part of Guy, being his daughter—a physical extension of him.
She must be insane. Why would she try to seduce him, a stranger? He was hardly irresistible, he was the first to admit. He thought himself as bland and colorless as a ghost. So why this frantic passion? Yes, she had to be disturbed, and however beautiful she was, that knowledge began to repulse Griffin, and he stepped backwards away from her.
But she clung to the bottom of his sweater, walked forward with him. “Look at me,” she breathed. “Look at me. Want me. Want me to be here…”
Increasingly unnerved, Griffin had to actually take hold of her bony wrists and extricate himself as gently as he could. He gave a very nervous chuckle, embarrassed and horrified for the both of them. “I’m sorry, Miss Hamlin, but I have to go to work now. I’m sorry.” He turned quickly to the door, let himself out into the hall, at any moment expecting the woman to pounce upon him to drag him back…
But she didn’t, and when safely through the threshold, Griffin threw a look back at her. She remained standing where she had been, her eyes on him but seemingly having lost their focus. Huge empty eyes, eyes of a
