awkward little jerks.
Someone near the bus terminus began shouting. Bremen did not look over his shoulder. Taking his time, he stepped closer, hefted the three-foot length of board still in his hand, and swung it like a golf club, the swing ending in the big man’s open mouth. Teeth caught the last of the sunlight as they arced out over the street.
The big man spat, sat up, raised his forearms to his face.
“This is for Bonnie,” said Bremen, or tried to say through his clenched jaws, and then he swung down, very hard, smashing the end of the board into the man’s crotch.
The big man screamed. Someone down the walking mall screamed.
Bremen stepped forward and smashed the board into the man’s head again, splintering the wood a final time. The big man began to topple forward; Bremen stepped back and kicked him, once, very hard, imagining his groin as a football held at a perfect angle for a field goal.
Somewhere close by on Larimer Street a siren wailed and fell back into silence. Bremen stepped back, let the last shard of splintered wood fall from his grubby hands, looked once at the whimpering man on the sidewalk, and turned and ran.
There were shouts and the sound of at least two people running after him.
Raincoat flying, beard flapping, eyes so wide that they appeared to be blank, white eggs set in a dirt-browned face, Bremen ran for the shadows of the railroad overpass.
EYES
Gail and Jeremy want a child.
At first, during the year or so that is their extended honeymoon, it is assumed that a child will come along soon enough, so Gail takes precautions against an unwanted pregnancy—first the Pill, then a diaphragm when health worries arise. Eighteen months after their wedding they agree to discontinue the diaphragm and to let nature take its course.
For another eight months or so there are no worries. Their lovemaking is frequent and still passionate and the making of a baby is secondary in their thoughts. Then Gail begins to worry. They did marry somewhat late … Jeremy was twenty-seven and Gail twenty-five … but her doctor assures her that she has ten years of prime reproductive time ahead of her. But three years after the wedding, a week after Jeremy’s thirtieth birthday— celebrated by having friends from the college come over for a day of softball—Gail suggests that they both see specialists.
At first Jeremy is surprised. She has shielded her concern from him as well as she could conceal anything; which is to say, he had known it was there but had underestimated the strength of it. Now, lying in bed together on a summer night, the moonlight streaming between the lace curtains, both of them listening to the insects and night-bird sounds out behind the barn during the pauses in their conversation, they decide that it is time to check things out.
First Jeremy goes through the slightly embarrassing ritual of providing semen for a sperm count. The doctor’s office is in Philadelphia and is part of a modern complex with a discreet sign on the service elevator: GENETIC COUNSELING SERVICES. At least ten doctors work out of the complex, trying to help infertile couples realize their dream of parenthood. The reality of it all is sobering to both Gail and Jeremy, but they laugh together when Jeremy has to go to the rest room to provide his “specimen.”
Jeremy sends the visual: copies of
In the small room where she is waiting for her doctor, Gail begins giggling.
Irritated, Jeremy does not answer. He finds the conversation distracting. He turns the pages.
Gail undoes the last button on her blouse and folds it carefully over the back of the chair. She gestures toward a hospital gown laid out on the examining table.
Gail Bremen is a small woman, only five feet two inches tall in her stocking feet, but her body is classically proportioned, strong, and sensual in the extreme. She smiles into the mirror at Jeremy and he thinks, not for the first time, that her smile is a large part of that sensuality. The only woman’s smile that he has seen that is similar in such an engaging, provocative, but overall wholesome way is that of the gymnast Mary Lou Retton. Gail’s smile has the same irrepressible involvement of jaws and lips and perfect teeth; it is an invitation to some small mischief that communicates directly to the observer.
Gail senses his thoughts and quits smiling, feigning a frown and squinting at him.
She flashes the grin again and slips out of her black skirt and slip, setting both on the chair. In her simple bra and underpants Gail seems both vulnerable and infinitely alluring. She reaches to unfasten her bra with that unself- conscious feminine grace that never fails to stir Jeremy. The slight hunching of her shoulders brings her breasts closer together as the fabric over them goes slack and slides away. Gail sets the bra on the chair and peels off the white pants.
Jeremy is still watching. He is touched in an almost religious way at how attractive his wife is. Her hair is dark and short, parted so that it falls across her high forehead in a soft curve. Her eyebrows are thick and dark— Annette Funicello eyebrows, she once had ruefully called them—but they add a dramatic highlight to her hazel eyes. An artist who had drawn her portrait with pastels some years before on a summer outing to Monhegan Island had said to Jeremy, who was watching: “I’ve read about eyes being luminous, but I always thought that was a bullshit word. Until now. Sir, your lady has luminous eyes.”
Gail’s facial features somehow manage to be both fine and strong: finely chiseled cheekbones, strong nose, fine laugh lines around those luminous eyes, a strong chin, and a fine complexion that shows the slightest hint of sun or embarrassment. She shows no embarrassment now, although there is a hint of red high on her cheekbones as she tosses her underpants onto the chair and stands a second before the mirror.
Jeremy Bremen has never been overly attracted by female breasts. Perhaps it was the ease with which he had eavesdropped on girls’ thoughts during his adolescence, perhaps it is his penchant to look at the entire
