Koko

the guy. The bouncer got a knife in one lung for his troubles, and by this time our hero is making a speech about how the sinners of the world have degraded him long enough, and now he’s going to set things straight. Starting with Forty-second Street.”

Conor Linklater and young Grace had wandered up to listen to the detective’s story. Young Grace had entwined Conor’s hand into her own.

“You’ve got one punctured bouncer, one man bleeding to death, two people with less serious stab wounds, and the whole theater is going nuts.”

Murphy was an entertainer, and he enjoyed the spotlight. His eyebrows arched, his eyes gleamed.

“Anyhow, this guy finally creates so much commotion that he has to run out into the lobby. Somebody called us by then, and four patrolmen jumped him by the popcorn counter. We take him to the station and get statements from a dozen witnesses. The funny thing is, as soon as we get our guy into the station he is perfectly calm. He says he didn’t want to cause so much trouble. Things have been bothering him lately, and they just got too much for him. He hopes he will not be kept too long because he has important things to do for the Lord. After we book him and tell him that he will have to stay with us for a while, he says, oh yeah, I guess you ought to know that I killed that man Pumo last week, upstairs in a loft over a restaurant in Grand Street.”

Conor looked down and shook his head; Harry Beevers pursed his lips and blinked.

“The man can describe the loft perfectly, but there are a couple of points we’re not satisfied on. So after the line-up there are some things I’d like to go over with the three of you.”

After Murphy left them, Judy walked in from the dining room. “Have you spoken to that detective? Everybody’s saying that they caught the man who killed Tina.”

“It looks like they did,” Michael said. He told her about being asked to appear at the line-up.

4

All Sunday the Pooles behaved toward each other with a conscious courtesy that would have suggested to an onlooker that they were comparative, slightly unfriendly, strangers in a neutral setting. It was the first full day they had spent together since Michael’s return from Bangkok, and the surface of their life together felt eggshell-thin. Michael saw that Judy wished to “put the past behind them,” which for the two of them meant to live exactly as they had for the four years since their son’s death. If he could forgive her affair—forgive it by wrapping it in layers of silence—she would make it not have happened.

Judy brought a cup of coffee and the Sunday Times to the bedside. Feeling oddly more dutiful than she, Michael drank the coffee and leafed through the magazine section while Judy sat beside him and talked brightly about what had happened in her school over the last few weeks. This is an ordinary life, she was saying; this is how we live. Don’t you remember this? Isn’t it good?

Together they limped through the day. They ate brunch at the General Washington Inn: Bloody Marys and pickled okra and blackened red snapper, for it was “Cajun Festival.” They took a long walk through the neighborhood past brown winter lawns dotted with FOR SALE signs and new houses rising like fantasies of glass and chrome on lots rutted with tire tracks. The walk ended at a long duck pond in the middle of little Thurlow Park. Mallards paddled sedately in pairs, each green-headed male insistently driving off the other males who approached his mate. Michael sat on the bench beside the pond and for a moment wished he was back in Singapore.

“What was it like, having sex again after all that time?” he asked.

“Dangerous,” she said.

That was a better answer than he had expected.

After a little while, she said, “Michael, this place is where we belong.”

“I don’t know where I belong,” he said.

She told him he was feeling sorry for himself: behind these words was the assumption that their life was fixed, unavoidable; their life was life.

To Michael the entire day seemed to be happening to someone else. Actors must feel this way, he thought, and only then realized that all day he had been acting the part of a husband.

He went to bed early, leaving Judy watching “Masterpiece Theatre” in apparent contentment. He undressed, put on his pajamas, and began brushing his teeth while he read Newgate Callendar’s reviews in the book section of the Times.

Judy amazed him by easing around the bathroom door and twinkling at his reflection in the mirror. Also amazing was that she was wearing a pink satin nightie and clearly intended to go to bed before the end of “Masterpiece Theatre.” “Surprise!” she said.

The person whose role he was acting said, “Hi.”

“Mind if I join you?” Judy plucked her own toothbrush from the rack and nudged him an inch to the side. She ran water over the brush, squeezed on a fat curl of toothpaste, and raised the brush to her mouth. Before she inserted it, just as he was swishing water in his mouth, she asked his face in the mirror, “You’re surprised, aren’t you?”

Then he got it: she was acting too. That was deeply comforting. Any reality in a scene like this would have made him lose his mind with pain and fear.

When he edged around her and left the bathroom, she waved with her free hand. “Bye.”

Michael walked to his side of the bed on someone else’s feet, switched on the bedside lamp with someone else’s fingers, and pushed his stranger’s legs down into the stranger’s bed. Then he picked up The Ambassadors and was disproportionately relieved to discover that it was really himself and not the person he was pretending to be who was reading it.

The Ambassadors was about about a man named Strether who had been sent to Paris to fetch back a young man suspected of dissipation. Strether soon found that Chad Newsome, the boy, had been enhanced instead of corrupted by the experience of Paris, and was not at all sure that he ought to go back. Strether himself put off his own return for weeks, discovering newer, subtler, better flavors and refinements of manners and feeling—he was alive and at home in himself, and he did not want to go home either.

As soon as Michael began reading, he realized that he felt he had a lot in common with Strether. They too had gone out to find a corrupt man and had found him a different, better man than they had expected. Poole wondered if Strether was ever going to bite the bullet and go home. This was a very interesting question.

Judy slid into her side of the bed and advanced nearer to him than was usual.

“This is a great book,” he said. The statement was nearly not acting, but it was acting.

“You’re certainly engrossed in it.”

He put down the book just to make sure that Judy was still acting and he saw instantly that she was.

“I think you’re mistaking me for Tom Brokaw,” he said.

“I don’t want to lose you, Michael.” She was acting her head off, but she was serious about it. “Put down the book.”

He placed the book on the bedside table and let Judy come into his arms. She kissed him. He play-acted kissing her. Judy slipped her hand past the waistband of his pajamas and fondled him.

“Are you really doing this?”

“Michael,” she said. In a second she had tossed the pink nightie aside.

He kissed her back with real play-actor’s fervor. For an instant his penis stirred as she rubbed and squeezed it, but his penis could not act, and it did no more.

Her arms tightened around him and she hoisted herself up onto his body. The humor in all this play-acting melted away, and all that was left was the sorrow. Judy squirmed on top of him for a time, frantically kissing his face and his neck.

Judy lapped at him with her tongue and pushed her breasts into his face. He had forgotten how Judy’s nipples felt in his mouth, round and sly. For an instant filled with danger and violence he remembered how her breasts had swelled early in her pregnancy, and his cock stiffened in her hand. But she shifted, and he felt how her real emotions turned her body to steel and balsa wood, and his cock went back to sleep. Judy labored over him for a long time, and then she gave up and merely hugged him. Her arms were trembling.

“You hated doing that,” he said. “Let’s tell the truth. You detested it.”

She uttered a low, feral sound, like a thick fold of silk being ripped in half, hoisted herself up onto her knees and struck him very hard in the middle of his chest. Her face was distorted by passion and her eyes were wild, glowing with hatred and disgust. Then she scrambled off the bed and her solid little body flashed through the room.