Do you have any brains left,” she asked into his ear, “or shall we continue?”
“No, I think you got the last neuron,” said Paz. “And let me say that was quite a performance. Don’t they have fucking in Iowa?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Willa Shaftel disdainfully. “All I do is read and write. No, I tell a lie. Writers are horny creatures, and I have dabbled, but one has always the sense that they’re collecting material, and that your every spasm is going to wind up in some novel.”
“As mine did in yours, I couldn’t help noticing.”
“Oh, yeah, but that wasn’t serious. It was just to make a shitload of money so I could escape from the poet’s poverty ghetto.” A long sigh. “My God, I haven’t been trulynailed like that in a coon’s age.” She stretched luxuriously and picked several of his chest hairs from her exiguous breasts.
“My pleasure,” he said. “Anyway, you did good writing. I liked that line about the herds. ‘There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.’ “
” ‘Through them the belled herds travel at will. Long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.’ Yes. Did you actually read the whole book?”
“Yes, but the words don’t stick in my mind the way they do when you say them. It’s because I’m still in touch with the primitive oral tradition.”
“As you so amply demonstrated this evening,” she said. “Is this paradisical or what?” she asked the world. “He’s not a wuss, packs a rod, and likes my poetry. A ten.” She laughed and hoisted herself up on an elbow to look at him more closely. He had a more sober expression on his face than she was used to seeing there.
“Something the matter?” she asked.
“No.” Meaning yes. “I was just thinking about something you said once. You were going on about how great I was, like you just did, one of your complimentary litanies…”
“Complimentary litanies is good.”
“Yeah, all about how I was polite but not a sensitive New Age man, buy a girl champagne, show her a good time, a great lay, albeit with a penis of only moderate size, and then you said there was a forty-foot-wide state highway sign over me that read DON’T GET SERIOUS, or something like that.”
“Yes, DANGER! HEARTBREAK AHEAD. I remember. It was the night of one of the murders, when I went out to the crime scene and got you in trouble.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I was thinking that I should take down the sign.”
“Really.”
“Yes, and you remember something else you said around back then, about Afro-Cuban-Jewish babies. When you were leaving for Iowa?”
“Ye-es?” Cautiously.
“Well, we should have some.”
Her mouth dropped momentarily and then she laughed. “Jimmy Paz, are youproposing to me?”
He swallowed. Most of the blood seemed to be gone from his forebrain. “In a manner of speaking. The fact is that for, what is it now, fourteen months, you’ve been my only, I guess you could say, girlfriend. I think about you a lot, and not just lustful stuff…anticipation. And I’ve been thinking, okay, if not now, when?” He paused to check out her face. Paz was a professional judge of facial expressions, but he couldn’t quite read hers now. Her eyes were wide, bright, and sharply focused, and there was a faint rosy blush on her cheeks. Romantic fascination? Or horrified traffic-accident fascination? He added, “I mean I didn’t get a ring or anything. I wanted to sound you out first.”
“That was wise,” she said. “But then prudence has always struck me as one of your virtues.” She groaned softly and wriggled half-upright, so that she was leaning against the headboard. “Gosh, I’m a little stunned. I had no idea. I mean, I thought we were great fuck-buddies and all, and now this. But it’s not justtime, is it? Not just, ‘But at my back I always hear…’ “
” ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.’ No, not completely. I changed, more than I thought I had, since that summer, you know, with the killings. I used to?I mean this can’t come as a surprise to you?have multiple girlfriends.”
“Yes, I recall, having been of their number.”
“Right. Three, four, five at any one time, up front about it and all, no sneaking, and either it was right for them or not, but I played it pretty straight, and I don’t think anyone got hurt. Fun and games for healthy young adults, right? But since…what happened and all that, I don’t know. I tried to, like, get back on the circuit, but nothing doing. I couldn’t…I mean fun and fucking and fun…I started to feel like a jerk, like one of those assholes out on the Beach, forty-eight, on their second peel job, with the Tom Jones shirt and the gold chains. That’s not me. So what is? And like I just said, the more I started thinking about that, the more I started thinking about you.”
“And why me particularly, from out of the thousands? Now’s the time for any litany of compliments you may have prepared.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I like you. We’re funny together. You got your own life, you wouldn’t be hanging on me to make you feel like a real person. Some of the people I work with have wives like that.” He paused and added, “My mom likes you.”
“Oh,there’s a selling point!”
“Laugh if you want, but Margarita is a great judge of people. Plus you’re notlike her.”
“No, I’m not. Continue…”
“You’re smart as shit. You tell me poetry out of your head. I love your hair. And your skin. And your mouth. You have the hottest mouth in the world. And, finally, I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that we are sexually compatible.”
“Mm. Of course, it’s easy to be sexually compatible when there’s nothing else on the table.” Ten seconds later, without warning, she expelled a loud sob and then began to cry woefully.
Paz sat up in bed and held her while she trembled and dripped tears and snot down his chest. “What’s wrong? What’d I say?” he kept saying, but for once she couldn’t find the words.
A little later, when she had gone to the bathroom and washed her face and dressed in the hotel’s white terry cloth robe, she sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “Well, that was unexpected. I’m sorry.”
“No problem. Let me guess. You like me, but not enough to marry me, and you didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I’m assuming now it wasn’t tears of happiness and we’re going to rent the hall.”
“No and no. No hall. And no, it’s not about you at all. Oh, how to explain this so it doesn’t sound like total lunacy? Come on, Shaftel, use your vaunted word power! It’s like this: I don’t have a heart. No, that’s wrong, I have, but not one like you have. Not like regular people.”
“Like the tin woodman?”
“Almost. The part that in normal people is occupied by living in a couple, loving, having children, making a home, is consumed by what I do. I fall in love, I have affairs. Hell, I’m in love withyou, if it comes to that. You’re my absolutely favorite man in the world right now. But it doesn’tmean anything, Jimmy. Because I’m never going tobe any different than I am now. All the growth and change is going to be in connection with the poetry and not within a couple. It’s a little like being a nun, the kind that gets bleeding palms. And, you know, I’m on my super very best behavior when I’m with you. You haven’t seen it working, when it’s really voracious, when I stop washing and combing my hair and talking to people, and I eat cold chili out of a can. I’m talking weeks here. I’d kill a baby, I really think I would, just leave it in a car or in the bath and forget about it, like you read about.”
“What, that’s a rule, poets don’t have kids?”
“Few do, and the ones they have are generally sad ones. It’s probably not as bad for males. They can havewives. You’re not a wife. Shit, I don’t know, maybe it’s the ghost of Sylvia Plath. Or Virginia Woolf…”
Paz stared at her. Virginia Woof? Fuck Virginia Woolfe! She wasrejecting him? Fucking blowing him off? Smash her face. Smash her, break her nose, knock out her teeth, this fucking fat, white bitch this fuckinggusano maggot was rejectinghim? Stick his gun up her fuckingcunt…
“Jimeeeee!” A high wail, a shriek.
Somehow Willa had slid off the bed and was now cringing in the corner of the room, on the other side of the night table. Her face, normally pale, was skim milk blue, except for heavy red marks around her neck and her eyes were rimmed with tears.
“What!” he cried. “What’s wrong?”
