Brake-O. Cars were parked under a lopsided shed out back and there was a man's abandoned shoe in one of the empty slots. She stood naked in the room by the edge of the window. Then she walked to the long mirror and edged her hip against the surface of the glass, feeling some small coiled chill of body and object. She looked all right. All the exercise, the diet, the diet, the exercise. All the butt repetition, the toilsome boredom she endured in the name of keeping fit. She was not the twisted perfect woman she used to be but she still kept fit. Fuck you, keep fit. She stood squared up to the glass. Nothing she could do about the needle nose but otherwise not bad. She never looked at herself so closely at home. It was easier to see herself out here, inside strange walls. She let her nipples touch the glass and when she backed away she saw they'd left a moist-ness, a pair of pressed kisses like winter breath.
When Brian arrived she was wearing a robe she'd found in the closet.
'I shouldn't be here,' he said.
'Neither should I. This is the point, isn't it?'
He sat on the edge of the bed taking off his shoes, a little like the class crybaby undressing for gym.
'Whose place is this?'
'My assistant's.'
'Are you serious?'
'Why not? We need a safe place,' she said.
'But your secretary?'
'My assistant. And it's better than a hotel.'
'I shouldn't be here.'
He walked around the room barefoot, unbuttoning his shirt. He had clown feet, long and bunioned, and he didn't loosen his tie until he'd pulled his shirt out of his trousers.
'Is she young?'
'How do you know it's a woman?'
'Seriously. Young?'
'Yes,' she said.
He walked around touching things, looking at photographs and matchbooks.
'Good-looking?'
'
'She can't afford better?'
'We're underbudgeted.'
'It's a roomette.'
'Small but intense,' Marian said.
She was standing against the wall, arms folded, and he stepped into her. She freed her hands and worked at his pants. She liked having sex with Brian because she could handle him, turn him, get him to match her mood, rouse him easily or make him talk, talk-acid candid shameful stuff, bitter-funny.
'I think he knows,' she said.
'What?'
'I think he knows.'
'He doesn't know.'
'I think he knows.'
She had her hands in his pants and a smile on her face. He moved the robe off half her body, smeared it- rubbed it against her shoulder and breast before he got it off her, almost off her, pulling her arm through the hole and letting the garment drag.
They eased onto the bed. She tried to get clear of the rest of the robe but he wouldn't let her. He wanted a woman in half a robe. The phone rang and they stopped to listen. Every time a phone rang in a borrowed apartment they stopped and thought about the thing they were doing and maybe at some level about the life of the person whose apartment they were using. It made them feel the wrong kind of guilty trespass, she thought. The bed. The mystery of the other person's life and medicine cabinet and bed. It was the one thing she didn't like about this, one among others, and she couldn't have sex to a ringing phone.
She felt around for her handbag, which was on a chair at the side of the bed. The ringing stopped. Brian got off the bed and finished undressing.
'You trust her to keep quiet?'
'She keeps quiet about everything else.'
'This isn't everything else.'
Marian found her cigarettes and lit one up and he handed her an ashtray.
'I thought you stopped.'
'I'm down to five a day.'
'I thought you were wearing the patch.'
'I'm not,' she said.
He stretched out next to her, on his side. The ringing phone had brought them prematurely to a lazy state of small caresses and mellow bends of conversation and streams of smoke.
He said, 'This job of yours. Real or fake?'
'I work with structural engineers, urban designers. I fight with citi-zens' groups all the time. But I get things done, pretty much.'
'I had lunch in a mechanical mist the other day In some mall somewhere.'
'We don't do malls. We do parkways.'
'What do you do to a parkway?'
'Make it livable, bearable. Tell little stories. Sculpture on the road dividers. Piers that are shaped like animals.'
'What's your secretary's name?' he said.
She tipped a length of ash onto his pubic hair.
'Long hours, single-minded devotion. Stuck in that Japanese thing,' he said. 'Death from overwork.'
'Disappear in the company and die. Only I don't do it to disappear. I do it to be visible and audible. And I'm not sure what you mean by real or fake.'
He picked the ashes out of his crotch and blew them off the tips of his fingers.
'Most jobs are fake,' he said.
They'd been late starters and had never developed a reliable pace. Only three or four apartments in all this time and they'd used each apartment only once or twice. She'd learned not to notice her disappointment. This was an aspect of being twistedly perfect. But Brian's reluctance was fairly maddening. She had to arrange the apartments, make the assurances, calibrate the timing and then wonder if he'd show. They talk about demon lovers. She had a demon husband. Her lover was a loose-jointed guy with a freckled forehead and nappy hair. But this was the dare she had to take, a way into some essential streak of self, some possibility that felt otherwise sandy and scanted and unturned. These times were hers, however brief and infrequent. And he was enormously easy to be with and growing dear to her. She liked to tease and scare him but did not want to think about giving him up.
'Blow smoke my way,' he said. 'I want all the aromas. Tobacco, bedsheets, women.'
She was herself with Brian, whatever that meant. She knew what it meant. Less enveloped in someone else's figuration, his self-conscious shaping of a life.
'And don't let me forget, I have a meeting at three,' he said.
'I'm a little put off by the fact that you haven't, you know,' sort of dangling the words, 'fallen in love with me, Brian.'
'You're my age, you're my height. I fall in love with small brisk women I see from a distance.'
'And they have to be young.'
'They have to be young. You and I, we're buddies. And I'm too guilty to fall in love with you. I'm very guilty. I'm guilty as shit.'
'Then why are you doing it?'
'Because you want it so much,' he said.
