“Nothing.”
“Something. Did you have a nightmare?”
“Yes, a strange one with characters out of a poem. I thought I was still in it. Did you ever have one of those, when you wake up and you’re still in it?”
“No, I never have bad dreams. And as your personal therapist I have to tell you that there’s only one sure cure known to medical science.”
“And what would that be, Doctor?”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to lie on top of a naked woman for a certain period of time.”
“No, no, not that!” cried Paz, although he began the therapy immediately. “How long do I have to?” he asked after the necessary slippery adjustments had been accomplished.
“Until the naked woman says to get off,” said Lorna.
Lorna is now floating in the most pleasant phase of post-coital hypnopompic semisleep. She is awake enough to realize that she is not lying in the dreaded wet spot for a change, and not awake enough to start obsessing about the future of her relationship with Jimmy Paz, a nearly perfect combo, promoting cosmic well-being. He is not in bed just now, but that’s all right too. She slips back into dreamland, surfacing only when the sound of clinking crockery and silver intrudes. Paz is entering the room with a tray, upon which is the container of her Krups coffee machine filled with sloshing blackness, assorted jugs, mugs, napery, and utensils. The delightful smell of coffee and fresh baking arises from the tray. Paz places it on the side of the bed. He is naked except for a pair of slight black Hugo Boss underpants.
“What is that?” she says, sliding herself up to a sitting position and pointing.
“It’s a plate of magdalenas,” says Paz, taking one. “You didn’t have rum so I had to use cognac. They’re not bad, though.”
“Oh, well, the hell with it, then. You expect me to eat magdalenas without rum? What kind of girl do you think I am? God, this is beyond delicious.”
“Are you thinking of your great-aunt’s house in Combray yet?” asks Paz.
“Oh, he reads Proust too? Or is that something you picked up from one of the many?”
“From Willa Shaftel, as a matter of fact. We were watching a rerun of a Monty Python, the summarizing Proust contest? And afterward she actually summarized Proust for me during the rest of the weekend.”
“Uh-huh. You know, bringing up previous girlfriends all the time can get old real fast.”
“As can needling me a little every time I say something you figure is beyond the normal range of a dumb cop.”
“Oh, are we having our first fight now?”
“Yes, and now it’s over. Have another magdalena.”
She did and said, “This is well worth seventeen additional hours on the StairMaster. Where did you get them?”
“I made them.” As he pours coffee.
“Wha…youmade them? Inmy kitchen? You carry a madeleine pan around with you?”
“No, I used yours. It was in the back of the closet outside the kitchen. It was still in the box. It must have been a present.”
“It was. From my brother, in whose fantasies I am ever a baker of cookies.”
“Well, I broke it in for you. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I certainly do mind! Neverever break in a madeleine pan in my house again! Christ, this is strong coffee!”
“Weak,” says Paz. “It barely sticks to the spoon.”
Lorna eats another madeleine and falls back against the pillows with a sigh. She feels, to be honest, a faint nausea, but otherwise so good that she decides not to pay any attention to it. “I really wish something interesting would happen to me. Having terrific sex and then being brought breakfast in bed by beautiful naked men morning after morning, I mean, sometimes I want to scream with the tedium of it all.”
“Humor me,” says Paz.
“You’re really gay, right? That’s the catch.”
“I’m afraid so. I have to pretend to love women so the guys down at the police station don’t make fun of me.” They laugh, but in the midst of it Lorna feels the first twinges of real life. The devil speaks into her inner ear: Yeah, this is great, but you know you’ll go out another couple of times, fuck like minks, have fun, conversations, and then he won’t call for a day, three days, a week, and then, desperate to know what’s happening, you’ll call him and leave a half-dozen increasingly irritated messages and then he’ll call and it’ll be, what? As from a stranger.
Paz senses the change. He says, “I’ll clean this up,” and picks up the tray.
“No, leave it,” she says. “I’ll do it.”
Lorna is nearly overwhelmed with the urge to say something nasty and disruptive of this thing that seems to be developing, far too nice for the likes of her. As she fights against it, there is a beeping from Paz’s jacket where it hangs on a chair: the first bars of “Guantanamera.” Thank God, she thinks, something tacky at last.
Paz answers the phone. There is a lot of listening interspersed with gnomic utterances from Paz. Lorna rises, slips into a light robe, takes the tray to the kitchen. It is spotless and smells of coffee and sweet bakings. As she rinses the dishes she feels tears well in her eyes and recalls feeling the same way when she was with him on the beach at Bear Cut. No, she thinks, this is too cruel, my heart won’t take this. As if her body agrees, she feels a bolt of sharp pain through her middle, a kind of pain she does not recall ever having before. Sweat breaks out on her face and back. It passes, and for the first time in a while the old fear returns. Something wrong, something wronginside. Again she suppresses the thought.
She goes back to the bedroom and hears the shower going, so she drops the robe and joins him. After some fooling around with soapy skin surfaces, he sighs and says, “I have to go to work.”
“The phone call.”
“Yeah, my partner. The autopsy on Jack Wilson found a blood alcohol level of point three six.”
“My God, that’s paralytic.”
“Yes, and they also found traces of Nembutal. Plus an empty bottle of cheap vodka in the car. The feds are treating it as an accident, and Broward County is going along. We were lucky to get as much as we did out of them.”
Paz turns the shower off. She senses he is somewhere else already.
They dress in silence, he much faster than she. Paz is in her study, looking at her books and possessions with his consuming policeman’s eye when she emerges from the bedroom in one of her bland suits.
He says, “Listen, are you going to see Emmylou today?”
“Yes, I want to check on her condition. Why?”
“Could you ask her something for me?”
Lorna hestitates. “A police question, you mean.”
“Not really. I just want to know who connected her with David Packer.”
“Jimmy, I really can’t help you in your investigation. It’s unethical.”
“Okay, no problem. You going to find out if she did the cure on what’s-his-name?”
“That’s not very likely, is it?”
He looks at her without answering for a while, then crosses the room and embraces her. “You have any plans for Sunday evening?”
She did not. “We’ll go have dinner at the restaurant. You should meet my mother.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, she’s a charming woman,” says Paz. “Everybody loves Margarita.”
Frank Wilson lived in a condo, a modern eight-story building off Le Jeune in the Gables. When Wilson let them in, Paz could see that he had been crying. His eyes were red and his face seemed to have fallen away from the bone, gone spongy. He kept dabbing at his nose with a wad of tissues. Paz thought it was a strange reaction, but then he’d never lost a sibling, or had one. Wilson collapsed onto a leather couch. He neglected to offer the two detectives seats, but they took them anyway. Both pulled forth notebooks. The tan meshwork drapes on the big picture windows were tightly drawn, and Wilson hadn’t switched on any lights. The room was consequently dim,
