her wine against a thigh.
“I’d like to be quicker, smarter,” she admits, “I don’t really understand a lot of the stories I cover,” she says.
I sip at the Coors she has brought me. There is a sad, sweet quality about her that is touching. I feel heat rising as if someone had lit a boiler under me. Women want so badly to be taken seriously and listened to it is almost embarrassing. I have promised myself that I will not get involved quickly with the next woman, but I hear myself lying, “You’re a lot brighter than you give yourself credit for. I’ve watched you too many times cover difficult stories not to believe that.”
She pats her lovely hair self-consciously and gives me a hopeful smile.
“Are you serious?”
As I gulp at my beer, trying to cool down, I look at the pictures on the opposite wall. Humphrey Bogart, Sally Fields.
She is living in la-la land. Please don’t do this to this woman, I tell myself. She doesn’t want to go to bed on the first date, but she will if I handle her right.
“You’re your own worst critic,” I say, putting my beer on the cheap coffee table in front of the couch. All her money must go into clothes, I think. This place is just short of a dump.
“They wouldn’t have hired you if they weren’t certain you could do the job.”
She puts the wineglass to her lips and finds it empty. I pour her some more from the beaded, sweaty bottle in front of us. Over the years I’ve found that it doesn’t matter if you look like an orangutan-all you really have to do is listen.
From her bedside table she reaches over and pulls open a drawer. I watch her right breast swing free as she strains to reach a brown envelope. I’ve had better sex the first time but not with anyone less inhibited. The alcohol must have loosened her up, because, until the last hour she has been almost ploddingly serious. The bottle she brought into the bedroom is almost empty. I am expecting marijuana, but instead she pulls from the packet a handful of pictures. Incredibly, they are of her naked in various poses.
She looks at me through the harsh glare of the lamp and says in a slurred voice, “I had these made when I was twenty. What do you think?”
She looks incredible-slim hips and small but attractive breasts which appear larger because of the way she is bending toward the camera. My immediate reaction is embarrassment, not arousal. I am too recently spent for that. Why is she showing me these? I look slowly through them. Was she trying out for Playboy or what? I have a slight headache from the six pack of beer I have drunk and rub my head. I say truthfully, “They’re stunning.”
She nods, her right hand stroking my back, the other holding the pictures up for her to see in the light.
“I think they’re good, too,” she says, her voice sodden with the liquor.
Finally, I understand why she has shown me these pictures. She is almost pathetically insecure. Somehow, she considers the photographs are proof of her value. I say, “No matter what happens, you ‘ll have proof what a knockout body you have.”
She tosses the pictures onto the table instead of putting them back into their envelope. She smiles and rests her head on my chest.
“How’d you know that?” she says.
“My body works a lot better than my mind.”
I stroke her hair, noticing that Rainey was right. This close I can see her makeup.
“The old mind body problem,” I say. I am a little drunk myself.
She reaches down and peels off my condom and holds it up for us to inspect. Waving it over my head like a pennant, she says, “Wanna hear a joke?”
Fearful that she is going to spill my jism onto my head, I lean back but say quickly, “Yeah.”
She pulls the condom down and rests it on her pubis. “You know what the rubber said to the diaphragm?”
I pat her right thigh.
“Naw, what did it say?”
She turns her head and smiles crookedly at me.
“Was it good for you, too?”
I begin to laugh and find I can’t stop, shaking the bed and her body in the process. The truth of the joke has struck some nerve I can’t begin to understand about my own life. I guess the joke works because our protection against each other has become the most important element in the equation.
At some level we have become merely matchmakers for our own technology. I glance across the room, noticing again that the largest picture she has in her bedroom is a picture of herself. It is enormous, an eleven by fourteen, probably a promo by her employer. Kim Keogh, the latest and prettiest member of the Channel 11 news team. I wonder but do not have the courage to ask if she has had her name changed.
She reaches across me and casually tosses, like a worn-out sock, the swollen condom into the wicker wastepaper basket beside her bed and says sourly, “It wasn’t that funny.”
For some reason she thinks I am laughing at her. I roll her off my chest and cradle her in my arm.
“It was a good joke.”
She snuggles against my chest, “I like you,” she says, “You understand me, you know?”
So I will not have to answer, I kiss her hair, which is damp from her exertions. In three minutes she is sound asleep, snoring gently against my shoulder. For all her nude pictures, aggressive lovemaking, and vanity, the always kind and pleasant Kim Keogh who appears on TV is the dominant personality. Alcohol and a sympathetic ear have uncovered a wilder side, but before she got halfway through the bottle of Chablis, Kim moved me with her own unpublicized work as a volunteer tutor for the last two years to black girls who live in Needle Park. A nice woman, I think, sleepily, nicer than she’ll sound if I ever tell someone about the pictures….
Remembering Kim’s joke and my extreme reaction to it, for some reason I think of Amy and wonder if she had an abortion. I should call but realize I’m not anxious to be confronted by either of the choices available to her. What would I do if Kim becomes pregnant and wants to have a baby? I yawn so loudly Kim stirs beside me. Somehow, I don’t think either Sarah or Rainey would be pleased….
I awake feeling pain in my rectum and notice a growing need to defecate. I turn my head and check the luminous red dial on her clock. It is just after three. I have been asleep only an hour. Kim has turned over toward the wall, and I slide carefully out of the bed, trying to remember the location of her bathroom. After opening a closet door, I find it and sit on the commode hoping a good shit will take away the pain. Though I strain like a man who has been constipated for weeks, nothing doing. It feels like someone is going into my bowels with a corkscrew, and I break into a sweat as I stand up and look into Kim’s bathroom mirror.
“Gideon,” Kim calls through the door.
“Are you okay?”
I come into the room almost dancing with pain. She turns on the light, and I would feel embarrassed were I not hurting so much.
“Something’s wrong,” I admit and explain my symptoms as if she were a physician making a house call.
Perhaps sobered somewhat by what she is being forced to witness, she pulls the sheet over her breasts.
“Has this happened before?”
I would be less alarmed if the corkscrew feeling were in my stomach. Food poisoning would be bad enough, but I might live. There is no mistaking the location however. I begin to put on my clothes as fast as I can. If I am going to die, I don’t want to do it like this. I can see Sarah’s face as they tell her, “Your dad’s ass started hurting, and then drunk and naked as a jaybird he fell over dead on top of a pile of nude pictures of some TV reporter he had known only a few hours.” I catch my big toe on a belt loop and fall sideways on the bed. She scoots backward as if I were now trying to rape her.
“No,” I say, looking sideways at Kim as I slide up my pants.
“Please tell me if you do,” I beg.
“Do you have AIDS or some disease?”
Kim bursts into tears.
