He knew it was Judy. He didn’t turn around when she stepped into the enclosure. She asked, “Are you all right?”
“I just met your husband.”
“Oh. So he actually showed up, huh? What did you think?”
Fear of embarrassment overrode psychic distress, and his stomach settled down. He moved away from the puke and sat on the ground beside the Dumpster. The cement felt nice and cool, and he fought the impulse to lie down on it. He cradled his head in his hands and felt the sweat beading his temples. “He didn’t seem so bad.”
She laughed ruefully. “Don’t be fooled. Normally he’s a royal pain in the ass. He’s just in a good mood because he got laid last night.”
Zach felt his stomach lurch again. “Thanks for telling me that. Really, that’s the vision I needed to keep going just now.”
“I’m sorry.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I was trying to find you so I could apologize.”
“You found me.”
“I see. I think my husband makes you sick to your stomach. That’s okay. He has the same effect on me.”
Zach managed a small laugh.
She squatted down beside him. “I’m very sorry about what I said,” she told him quietly. “It was stupid of me. Are you angry?”
“I don’t know.” He felt weary, not angry, but he knew he might feel angry again later.
“Tell me what it will take to make it up to you.”
He looked into her eyes, struggling for clarity, but only felt dizzy. He pulled his knees up against his stomach and wrapped his arms around them.
“I don’t want you to be angry,” she whispered. “I care about you. I love being with you. And you can move on, but everything is at stake for me. My career, my marriage, everything. You know that.”
She waited for him to respond. He maintained eye contact, but said nothing.
She unbuttoned her blouse halfway and pulled it open. Her bra, black and lacy, stood out against her pale skin. Beneath her collarbones, like tattoos, lay the twin arches of bruises shaped by his fingertips. He thought back to their two trysts the previous week, the state of his mind and body: still ragged out by illness, constrained by the clock, afraid he wouldn’t finish in time—and angry. As desire bloomed in him, so rose his anger at her; he couldn’t differentiate the two, and hadn’t cared enough to try. But had he really used enough force to
“If Russ saw these,” she told him, “I would be screwed. And not by you.”
“It was an accident.”
“I’m not blaming you. I’m saying, this is how much I don’t want to mess things up with you. I can live with this. You could do this to me every single day and I’d just hide it and hide it and hide it.”
He dropped his head to rest between his knees.
“Tell me what it will take to make it up to you,” she repeated.
He stared down at the gritty concrete. All he wanted to do was take a few deep breaths and Zen out and forget about all the shitty complications that kept creeping into his life. He didn’t even want to ditch Judy, because then he’d have the ditching of Judy to deal with on top of everything else. He just wanted to take a mental break from all of it—not only Judy but also school and Fairen and his homesickness for New Hampshire.
He looked up at Judy and, in the nicest possible voice, asked, “Can I have a blow job?”
She smiled. “Of course you can. Come with me. I think I left some extra cookies in my kitchen.”
“What I want the American people to know, what I want the Congress to know, is that I am profoundly sorry for all I have done wrong in words and deeds.”
The rising volume of the television caught my attention as I took a tray of cookies from the oven. I turned off the heat, then walked into the den, where Zach sat on the sofa with the remote in his hand. A white-haired and pallid-looking Bill Clinton stared back at him from the screen, speaking from the Rose Garden. It didn’t sound like a Rose Garden sort of speech.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“They impeached him.”
“What? No.”
Zach gestured to the TV. “This is from yesterday. CNN’s running it again because they just approved another item of impeachment or something.”
I frowned. “I don’t think that means he’s impeached quite yet. But it doesn’t sound good.” I listened for another minute and asked, “Did you know about this?”
“Sort of. My dad said something last night.”
“This is what I get for going out of town,” I murmured. With a subtle shift of my gaze, I peered down at Zach. He seemed to be trying to watch intently, but his eyelids drooped as though he were fighting sleep. His gray shirt was bunched onto his stomach, his belt notched tightly but his fly still undone.
The voice from the television filled the silence between us.
I looked at Zach again and asked, “What do you think about all this?”
