but she had never been able to tell the difference with him. Precisely that inability to penetrate his facade had been the seed of their dissolution. “It was okay with us.”
“For a while.”
“Yeah. For a while.” She reached across him to the nightstand and picked up the heavy Orrefors highball glass with the remains of the Mendocino Gray Riesling. “It was so strange running into you at Allison’s party. I’d heard you were seeing some model or actress… or something.”
He shook his head. “Nope. You were my last and greatest love.”
She made a wet, bratting sound. “Bullshit.”
“Mmm. Yeah, it is a bit, ain’t it.”
And they stayed that way, silently, for a while. Once, he touched her naked thigh, feeling the nerve jump under his hand; and once, she reached across to lay her hand on his chest, to feel him breathing. But they didn’t make love again. And after a space of time in which they thought they could hear the dust settling in the room, she said, “Well, I’ve got to get home to feed the cats.”
“You want to stay the night?”
She thought about it a moment. “No thanks, Mike. Maybe another night when I come prepared. You know my thing about putting on the same clothes the next day.” He knew. And smiled.
She crawled out of bed and began getting dressed. He watched her, ivory-lit by the single bed lamp. It never would have worked. But then, he’d known that almost from the first. It never worked well for an extended period. There was no Holy Grail. Yet the search went on, reflexively. It was like eating potato chips.
She came back to the bed, leaned over and kissed him. It was the merest touch of lips, and meant nothing. “Bye. Call me.”
“No doubt about it,” he said; but he wouldn’t.
Then she left. He sat up in bed for a while, thinking that it was odd how people couldn’t leave it alone. Like a scab, they had to pick at it. He’d dated her rather heavily for a month, and they had broken up for no particular reason save that it was finished. And tonight the party, and he was alone, and she was alone, and they had come together for an anticlimax.
A returning. To a place neither had known very well. A devalued neighborhood.
He knew he would never see Martha again.
The bubble of sadness bobbed on the surface for a moment, then burst; the sense of loss flavored the air a moment longer; then he turned off the light, rolled over onto the dried wet spot, and went to sleep.
He was hacking out the progression of interrogatories pursuant to the Blieler brief with one of the other attorneys in the office when his secretary stuck her head into the conference room and said he had a visitor. Rubbing his eyes, he realized they had been at it for three straight hours. He shoved back from the conference table, swept the papers into the folio, and said, “Let’s knock off for lunch.” The other attorney stretched, and musculature crackled. “Okay. Call it four o ‘ clock. I’ve got to go over to the 9000 Building to pick up Barbarossi’s deposition.” He got up and left. Kirxby sighed, simply sitting there, all at once overcome by a nameless malaise. As though something dark and forbidding were slouching towards his personal Bethlehem.
Then he went into his office to meet his visitor.
She turned half-around in the big leather chair and smiled at him. “Jerri!” he said, all surprise and pleasure. His first reaction: surprised pleasure. “My God, it’s been… how long…?”
The smile lifted at one corner: her bemused smile.
“It’s been six months. Seem longer?”
He grinned and shrugged. It had been his choice to break up the affair after two years. For Martha. Who had lasted a month.
“How time flies when you’re enjoying yourself,” she said. She crossed her legs. A summary judgment on his profligacy.
He walked around and sat down behind the desk. “Come on, Jerri, gimme some slack.”
Another returning. First Martha, out of the blue; now Jerri. Emerging from the mauve, perhaps? “What brings you back into my web?” He tried to stare at her levelly, but she was on to that; it made him feel guilty.
“I suppose I could have cobbled up something spectacular along the lines of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against one of my competitors,” she said, “but the truth is just that I felt an urgent need to see you again.”
He opened and closed the top drawer of his desk, to buy a few seconds. Then, carefully avoiding her gaze, he said, “What is this, Jerri? Christ, isn’t there enough crap in the world without detouring to find a fresh supply’!” He said it softly, because he had said I love you to her for two years, excluding the final seven months when he had said fuck off, never realizing they were the same phrase.
But he took her to lunch, and they made a date for dinner, and he took her back to his apartment and they were two or three drinks too impatient to get to the bed and made it on the living room carpet still half-clothed. He cherished silence when making love, even when only screwing, and she remembered and didn’t make a sound. And it was as good or as bad as it had ever been between them for two years minus the last seven months. And when she awoke hours later, there on the living room carpet, with her skirt up around her hips, and Michael lying on his side with his head cradled on his arm, still sleeping, she breathed deeply and slitted her eyes and commanded the hangover to permit her the strength to rise; and she rose, and she covered him with a small rap- robe he had pilfered off an American Airlines flight to Boston; and she went away. Neither loving him nor hating him. Having merely satisfied the urgent compulsion in her to return to him once more, to see him once more, to have his body once more. And there was nothing more to it than that.
The next morning he rolled onto his back, lying there on the floor, kept his eyes closed, and knew he would never see her again. And there was no more to it than that.
Two days later he received a phone call from Anita. He had had two dates with Anita, more than two- and-a-half years earlier, during the week before he had met Jerri and had taken up with her. She said she had been thinking about him. She said she had been weeding out old phone numbers in her book and had come across his, and just wanted to call to see how he was. They made a date for that night and had sex and she left quickly. And he knew he would never see her again.
And the next day at lunch at the Oasis he saw Corinne sitting across the room. He had lived with Corinne for a year, just prior to meeting Anita, just prior to meeting Jerri. Corinne came across the room and kissed him on the back of the neck and said, “You’ve lost weight. You look good enough to eat.” And they got together that night, and one thing and another, and he was, and she did, and then he did, and she stayed the night but left after coffee the next morning. And he knew he would never see her again.
But he began to have an unsettling feeling that something strange was happening to him.
Over the next month, in reverse order of having known them, every female with whom he had had a liaison magically reappeared in his life. Before Corinne, he had had a string of one-nighters and casual weekends with Hannah, Nancy, Robin and Cylvia; Elizabeth, Penny, Margie and Herta; Eileen, Gail, Holly and Kathleen. One by one, in unbroken string, they came back to him like waifs returning to the empty kettle for one last spoonful of gruel. Once, and then gone again, forever.
Leaving behind pinpoint lights of isolated memory. Each one of them an incomplete yet somehow total summation of the woman: Hannah and her need for certain words in the bed; the pressure of Nancy’s legs over his shoulders; Robin and the wet towels; Cylvia who never came, perhaps could
One sharp point of memory. One quick flare of light. Then gone forever and there was no more to it than that.
But by the end of that month, the suspicion had grown into a dread certainty; a certainty that led him inexorably to an inevitable end place that was too horrible to consider. Every time he followed the logical progression to its finale, his mind skittered away… that whimpering, crippled dog.
His fear grew. Each woman returned built the fear higher. Fear coalesced into terror and he fled the city,
