do in yours. And both of us a little weird about our autonomy.'
'Without endorsing the us,' I said, 'let me suggest a suitable reward for being so integrated.'
'I do not want to go to Fenway Park and watch the Red Sox do anything.'
Susan said.
'I had in mind exotic sexual congress,' I said.
'With the Red Sox?'
'After last year, I think they're too clumsy,' I said. 'I was thinking that you deserve me, Foots Spenser.'
'Yes,' Susan said, 'God help me, I'm afraid that's just what I deserve.'
'So,' I said, 'shall we finish dinner, go back to your place, and make love?'
'Certainly,' Susan said.
'With or without sweater?' I said.
There was a long, silent moment while Susan looked at me, straight on.
Her great dark eyes wide, her face wearing an odd expression that might have been a smile. Then she did something I've never seen her do.
Something, perhaps, that no one had ever seen her do.
She blushed. . It was hot in the cell. And the jail was loud, full of angry obscene shouts. He had never been in jail before. There was no light in the cell. He could see the bright lights in the hall that made long shadows. The smell was bad too. Urine, shit, steam pipes, body odor, cigarettes, fear. There was no one in the cell with him. This was an angry, frightened male world, dark and fetid and woman less Already they knew. Prisoners yelled at him when he came in. The blacks looked at him every step he took past them. He cried, lying on the bare mattress, his face in his arms. No one cared. No one. He was entirely alone. His aloneness ached in him, deep into his stomach and up his throat and along the backs of his arms. He felt weak and tiny. No one.
Nobody. No one… He remembered lying in his mother's bed… the last thing, the thing he hadn't told the shrink. His mother's body, naked, smelling a little like cooking, touching him. Her hand pressing, touching, the smell of white wine, his mother's sounds, voiceless, wordless sounds as she forced him against her. Into her. He sat up on the bed and took off his shirt. He knotted one sleeve around his neck and stood and walked to the cell door and put one foot on a crossbar and stepped up, holding himself by a forearm looped through the bars. He fumbled the other sleeve up through the bars and tied it to a crosspiece with his free hand, guided by the hand hooked through the bars. He snugged the sleeve tight so there was maybe a foot of play and turned, holding himself with both hands.
'I never told,' he said. He heard the voice in the empty cell and heard it echo in the person less dark. 'I never told, Momma,' he said, and freed his feet from the crosspiece and let go with his hands…
