As I reached out, I was compelled to tap each of her shoulders twice, gently. She didn’t seem to mind. Then I took hold of the zipper tab, eased it upward. As I did she took her hair in her hands, raised her arms above her head and turned, so that she rolled into my embrace. I kept hold of the tab, halfway up her back. Up close I saw how her eyes and lips looked like something barely rescued from drowning.
“Don’t stop,” she said.
She rested her elbows high on my shoulders and gazed up at my face while I tugged at the zipper. I held my breath.
“You know, when I met Frank I’d never shaved my armpits before. He made me shave.” She spoke the words into my chest, her voice dopey now, absent-sounding. All the anger was gone.
I got the zipper to the nape of her neck and dropped my hands, then took a step back and exhaled. She still held her hair bunched above her head.
“Maybe I’ll grow the hair back. What do you think, Lionel?”
I opened my mouth and what came out, soft but unmistakable, was “Doublebreasts.”
“All breasts are double, Lionel. Didn’t you know that?”
“That was just a tic,” I said awkwardly, lowering my eyes.
“Give me your hands, Lionel.”
I lifted my hands again, and she took them.
“God, they’re big. You have such big hands, Lionel.” Her voice was dreamy and singsong, like a child, or a grownup pretending to be a child. “I mean-the way you move them around so quickly, when you do that thing you do, all that grabbing, touching stuff. What’s that called again?”
“That’s a tic, too, Julia.”
“I always think of your hands as small because they move so fast. But they’re big.”
She moved them to her breasts.
Sexual excitement stills my Tourette’s brain, not by numbing me, dimming the world like Orap or Klonopin, those muffling medications, but instead by setting up a deeper attentiveness in me, a finer vibration, which gathers and encompasses my urgent chaos, enlists it in a greater cause, like a chorus of voices somehow drawing a shriek into harmony. I’m still myself and still in myself, a rare and precious combination. Yes, I like sex very much. I don’t get it very often. When I do, I find I want to slow it down to a crawl, live in that place, get to meet my stilled self, give him a little time to look around. Instead I’m hurried along by the conventional urgencies, by those awkward, alcohol-fueled juxtapositions of persons that have so far provided my few glimpses of arousal’s haven. But oh, if I could have just spent a week or so with my hands on Julia’s breasts, then I could think straight!
Alas, my very first straight thought guided my hands elsewhere. I went and plucked the smoldering cigarette off the dresser, rescuing the finish, and since Julia’s lips were slightly parted I stuck it there, filter end first.
“Double, see?” she said as she drew on the cigarette. She combed her hair with her fingers, then straightened her slip under her dress where I’d held her.
“What’s double?”
“You know, breasts.”
“You shouldn’t make fun of-
“I’m not.”
“Did something-Is there something between you and Tony?”
“I don’t know. Screw Tony. I like you better, Lionel. I just never told you.” She was hurt, erratic, her voice straying wildly, searching for a place to rest.
“I like you, too, Julia. There’s nothing-
“I want you to like me, Lionel.”
“You’re-you’re not saying there could actually be something between us?” I turned and slapped the doorframe six times, feeling my face curdle with shame, regretting the question instantly-wishing, for once, that I’d ticced instead, something obnoxious to obliterate the conversation’s meaning, to smother the words I’d let myself say.
“No,” she said coldly. She set the cigarette, what was left of it, back on the dresser. “You’re too strange, Lionel. Much too strange. I mean, take a look in the mirror.” She resumed crushing her clothes into the suitcase, more than seemed possible, like a magician stuffing a prop for a trick.
I only hoped the gun wouldn’t go off. “Where are you going, Julia?” I said tiredly.
“I’m going to a place of peace, if you must know, Lionel.”
“A-what?”
“That’s my car,” she said. “Would you go and tell them I’ll be out in a minute?”
“Okay, but-
“Have you ever been out of Brooklyn, Lionel?”
Breasts, underarm hair, now Brooklyn-for Julia it was all just a measure of my inexperience. “Sure,” I said. “I was in Manhattan just this afternoon.” I tight=”0em” not to think about what I’d been doing there, or failing to do.
“New York City, Lionel. Have you ever been out of New York City?”
While I considered this question I eyed the cigarette, which had at last begun to singe the dresser top. The blackening paint stood for my defeat here. I couldn’t protect anything, maybe least of all myself.
“Because if you had, you’d know that anywhere else is a place of peace. So that’s where I’m going. Would you please go hold my car for me?”
The car service double-parked in front of the building was Legacy Pool, the furthest upscale of the Brooklyn competitors, with all-black luxury models, tinted windows, cell phones for the customers, and built-in tissue-box holders under the rear window. Julia was running in style. I waved at the driver from the stoop of her building, and he nodded at me and leaned his head back on the rest. I was trying out his neck motions,
“Who’s the car for?”
It was the homicide detective. He’d been waiting, staking us out, slumped to one side of the doorway, huddled in his coat against the chilly November night. I made him right away-with his 10 P.M. Styrofoam cup of coffee, worn tie, ingrown beard, and interrogation eyes, he was unmistakable-but that didn’t mean he had any idea who I was.
“Lady inside,” I said, and tapped him once on the shoulder. “Watch it,” he said, ducking away from my touch.
“Sorry, friend. Can’t help myself.” I turned from him, back into the building.
The elegance of my exit was quickly thwarted, though-Julia was just then galumphing down the stairs with her overstuffed suitcase. I rushed to help her as the door eased slowly shut on its moaning hydraulic hinge. Too slowly: The cop stuck out his foot and held the door open for us.
“Excuse me,” he said with a sly, exhausted authority. “You Julia Minna?”
“I was,” said Julia.
“You were?”
“Yes. Isn’t that funny? I was until just about an hour ago. Lionel, put my bag in the trunk.”
“In a hurry?” the detective asked Julia. I watched the two of them size one another up, as though I weren’t any more a factor than the waiting limo driver.
“Sort of,” said Julia. “Plane to catch.”
“Plane to where?” He crushed his empty Styrofoam cup and tossed it over his shoulder, off the stoop, into the
