sadistic wrestling holds thrown in. The one time Winsome had blown up he'd yelled, 'You are turning our marriage into a trampoline act,' which Mafia thought was a pretty good line. It appeared in her next novel, spoken by Schwartz; a weak, Jewish psychopath who was the major villain.
All her characters fell into this disturbingly predictable racial alignment. The sympathetic - those godlike, inexhaustible sex athletes she used for heroes and heroines (and heroin? he wondered) were all tall, strong, white though often robustly tanned (all over), Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and/or Scandinavian. Comic relief and villainy were invariably the lot of Negroes, Jews and South European immigrants. Winsome, being originally from North Carolina, resented her urban or Yankee way of hating Nigras. During their courtship he'd admired her vast repertoire of Negro jokes. Only after the marriage did he discover a truth horrible as the fact she wore falsies: she was in nearly total ignorance about the Southern feeling toward Negroes. She used 'nigger' as a term of hatred, not apparently being capable herself of anything more demanding than sledgehammer emotions. Winsome was too upset to tell her it was not a matter of love, hate, like or not like so much, as an inheritance you lived with. He'd let it slide, like everything else.
If she believed in Heroic Love, which is nothing really but a frequency, then obviously Winsome wasn't on the man end of half of what she was looking for. In five years of marriage all he knew was that both of them were whole selves, hardly fusing at all, with no more emotional osmosis than leakage of seed through the solid membranes of contraceptive or diaphragm that were sure to be there protecting them.
Now Winsome had been brought up on the white Protestant sentiments of magazines like The Family Circle. One of the frequent laws he encountered there was the one about how children sanctify a marriage. Mafia at one time had been daft to have kids. There may have been some intention of mothering a string of super-children, founding a new race, who knew. Winsome had apparently met her specifications, both genetic and eugenic. Sly, however, she waited, and the whole contraceptive rigmarole was gone through in the first year of Heroic Love. Things meanwhile having started to fall apart, Mafia became, naturally, more and more uncertain of how good a choice Winsome had been after all. Why she'd hung on this long, Winsome didn't know. Literary reputation, maybe. Maybe she was holding off divorce till her public-relations sense told her go. He had a fair suspicion she'd describe him in court as near impotence as the limits of plausibility allowed. The Daily News and maybe even Confidential magazine would tell America he was a eunuch.
The only grounds for divorce in New York state is adultery. Roony, dreaming mildly of beating Mafia to the punch, had begun to look with more than routine interest, at Paola Maijstral, Rachel's roommate. Pretty and sensitive; and unhappy, he'd heard, with her husband Pappy Hod, BM3, USN, from whom she was separated. But did that mean she'd think any better of Winsome?
Charisma was in the shower, splashing around. Was he wearing the green blanket in there? Winsome had the impression he lived in it.
'Hey,' called Mafia from the writing desk. 'How do you spell Prometheus, anybody.' Winsome was about to say it started off like prophylactic, when the phone rang. Winsome hopped down off the espresso machine and padded over to it. Let her publishers think she was illiterate.
'Roony, have you seen my roommate. The young one.' He had not.
'Or Stencil.'
'Stencil has not been here all week,' Winsome said. 'He is out tracking down leads, he says. All quite mysterious and Dashiell Hammettlike.'
Rachel sounded upset: her breathing, something. 'Would they be together?' Winsome spread his hands and shrugged, keeping the phone tucked between neck and shoulder. 'Because she didn't come home last night.'
'No telling what Stencil is doing,' said Winsome, 'but I will ask Charisma.'
Charisma was standing in the bathroom, wrapped in the blanket, observing his teeth in the mirror. 'Eigenvalue,' he mumbled. 'I could do a better root canal job. What is my buddy Winsome paying you for, anyway.'
'Where is Stencil,' said Winsome.
'He sent a note yesterday, by a vagrant in an old campaign hat, circa 1898. Something about he would be in the sewers, tracing down a lead, indefinitely.'
'Don't slouch,' Winsome's wife said as he chugged back to the phone emitting puffs of string smoke. 'Stand up straight.'
'Ei-gen-value!' moaned Charisma. The bathroom had a delayed echo.
'The what,' Rachel said.
'None of us,' Winsome told her, 'have ever inquired into his business. If he wants to grouse around the sewer system, why let him. I doubt Paola is with him.'
'Paola,' Rachel said, 'is a very sick girl.' She hung up, angry but not at Winsome, and turned to see Esther sneaky-Peteing out the door wearing Rachel's white leather raincoat.
'You could have asked me,' Rachel said. The girl was always swiping things and then getting all kittenish when she was caught.
'Where are you going at this hour,' Rachel wanted to know.
'Oh, out.' Vaguely. If she had any guts, Rachel thought, she would say: who the hell are you, I have to account to you for where I go? And Rachel would answer: I am who you owe a thousand-odd bucks to, is who. And Esther’d get all hysterical and say: If that's the way it is, I'm leaving, I will go into prostitution or something and send you your money in the mail. And Rachel would watch her stomp out and then, just as she was at the door, deliver the exit line. You'll go broke, you'll have to pay them. Go and be damned. The door would slam, high heels clatter away down the hall, a hiss-thump of elevator doors and hoorah: no more Esther. And next day she would read in the paper where Esther Harvitz, 22, honors graduate of CCNY, had taken a Brody off some bridge, overpass or high building. And Rachel would be so shocked she wouldn't even be able to cry.
'Was that me?' out loud. Esther had left. 'So,' she continued in a Viennese dialect, 'this is what we call repressed hostility. You secretly want to kill your roommate. Or something.'
Somebody was banging on the door. She opened it to Fu and a Neanderthal wearing the uniform of a 3rd class boatswain's mate in the U. S. Navy.
