'Maybe. But I don't think so. I think I would have started talking to him, assuming I could work up the nerve, and we'd get into this conversation and gradually I would turn around and the whole subject would be shunted off to the side. And I'd leave it shunted off to the side, you know, because without ever coming out and saying it he'd manage to give me the impression that leaving him wasn't something I was going to be allowed to do. He might not say, 'Look, bitch, you stay where you're at or I'll ruin your face.'
He might not say it, but that's what I'd hear.'
'Did you hear it today?'
'No. That's the point. I didn't.' Her hand fastened on my arm just above the wrist. 'Oh, before I forget,'
she said, and my arm took some of her weight as she got up from the couch. Then she was across the room rummaging in her purse, and then she was back on the couch handing me five hundred-dollar bills, presumably the ones I'd returned to her three days earlier.
She said, 'It seems like there ought to be a bonus.'
'You paid me well enough.'
'But you did such a good job.'
She had one arm draped over the back of the sofa and she was leaning toward me. I looked at her blonde braids coiled around her head and thought of a woman I know, a sculptor with a loft in Tribeca.
She did a head of Medusa with snakes for hair and Kim had the same broad brow and high cheekbones as Jan Keane's piece of sculpture.
The expression was different, though. Jan's Medusa had looked profoundly disappointed. Kim's face was harder to read.
I said, 'Are those contacts?'
'What? Oh, my eyes? That's their natural color. It's kind of weird, isn't it?'
'It's unusual.'
Now I could read her face. It was anticipation that I saw there.
'Beautiful eyes,' I said.
The wide mouth softened into the beginning of a smile. I moved a little toward her and she came at once into my arms, fresh and warm and eager. I kissed her mouth, her throat, her lidded eyes.
Her bedroom was large and flooded with sunlight. The floor was thickly carpeted. The king-size platform bed was unmade, and the black kitten napped on a chintz-covered boudoir chair. Kim drew the curtains, glanced shyly at me, then began to undress.
Ours was a curious passage. Her body was splendid, the stuff of fantasy, and she gave herself with evident abandon. I was surprised by the intensity of my own desire, and yet it was almost wholly physical.
My mind remained oddly detached from her body and from my own. I might have been viewing our performance from a distance.
The resolution provided relief and release and precious little pleasure. I drew away from her and felt as though I was in the midst of an infinite wasteland of sand and dry brush. There was a moment of astonishing sadness. Pain throbbed at the back of my throat and I felt myself close to tears.
Then the feeling passed. I don't know what brought it on or what took it away.
She said, 'Well now,' and smiled, and rolled on her side to face me and put a hand on my arm. 'That was nice, Matt,' she said.
I got dressed, turned down the offer of another cup of coffee. She took my hand at the doorway, thanked me again, and said she'd let me know her address and phone once she got relocated. I told her to feel free to call anytime for any reason. We didn't kiss.
In the elevator I remembered something she'd said. 'It seems like there ought to be a bonus.' Well, that was as good a word for it as any.
I walked all the way back to the hotel. I stopped a few times along the way, once for coffee and a sandwich, once in a church on Madison Avenue where I was going to put fifty dollars into the poor box until I realized I couldn't. Kim had paid me in hundreds and I didn't have enough in smaller bills.
I don't know why I tithe, or how I got in the habit in the first place.
It was one of the things I began doing after I left Anita and the boys and moved into Manhattan. I don't know what the churches do with the money and I'm sure their need for it is no greater than my own, and of late I've tried to break myself of the habit. But whenever some money comes in I find there's a restlessness that comes with it that I cannot shed until I've handed over 10 percent of the sum to one church or another. I suppose it's superstition. I suppose I think that, having started this, I have to keep it up or something terrible will happen.
God knows it doesn't make any sense. Terrible things happen anyway, and will go on happening whether I give all or none of my income to churches.
This particular tithe would have to wait. I sat for a few minutes anyway, grateful for the peace the empty church provided. I let my mind wander for awhile. After I'd been there a few minutes an elderly man seated himself on the other side of the aisle. He closed his eyes and looked to be in deep concentration.
I wondered if he was praying. I wondered what prayer was like, and what people got out of it.
Sometimes, in one church or another, it occurs to me to say a prayer, but I wouldn't know how to go about it.
If there'd been candles to light I would have lit one, but the church was Episcopalian and there weren't.
I went to the meeting that night at St. Paul's but couldn't keep my mind on the qualification. I kept drifting off. During the discussion the kid from the noon meeting told how he'd reached his ninety days, and once again he got a round of applause. The speaker said, 'You know what comes after your ninetieth day?
