Mortal Fear

“Was she involved with other men during these years?”

“She dated. But it never worked out. I don’t think she ever meant for it to. When Drewe didn’t put out after a few dates, the guys usually went elsewhere.”

“But you weren’t holding to a similar code of abstinence.”

“Didn’t even try. It was the classic dilemma. She wanted total commitment from me before giving up what she held precious. I wanted what she held precious as proof of her love.”

“Smart woman.”

“Okay, okay. Cut ahead a few years, to when my last band self-destructed. Where do you think I ran to lick my wounds when that happened?”

“New Orleans.”

“Naturally. Drewe was entering her final year of residency at Tulane. My career was in flames. It was start over or get out for good. What do you think happened?”

“She started sleeping with you.”

“You’ve heard all this before, I guess.”

“Not quite in this way. But I’m starting to feel as though I know your wife.” Lenz allows himself a smile. “I like her.”

“I asked Drewe to marry me, but she said we had a year before real life started. She said we should use that time to make sure we were sure. What she really meant was, I had a year to make sure I was sure.”

I reach down to the drink caddy and take a long swig of Tab. “I did a repeat of what I’d done after high school. Packed up my clothes, twenty grand I’d saved from gigging, and headed north to Chicago. I was going to relearn everything I ever forgot about the markets and earn our stake for the future. I took a tiny apartment near the Board of Trade. A bed and a TV. No guitar. Books stacked waist-high everywhere, even in the bathroom. Drewe and I had planned to see each other as often as possible, but we only managed it twice. The timing was too tough. But we talked on the phone constantly.”

I feel a last flush of anxiety, but I force myself to go on. “And then it happened.”

“Erin appeared magically in Chicago.”

“Standing in my hallway in the dead of winter without even a coat. She was flying cross-country with some actor, had a layover in Chicago, and she just walked off the plane.”

“As beautiful as ever?”

“More so. White linen blouse buttoned to the throat, black jeans, plain silver earrings, sandals on her tanned feet.

“You slept with her that night?”

“No. We just talked. I lent her a ski jacket and gloves and took her out to dinner. We took a cab up and down Michigan Avenue, rode the elevator to the top of the Hancock like a couple of tourists. I was lonelier than I knew. I found myself holding Erin’s hand as she looked out over Lake Michigan. The intimacy of it was… I don’t know. Thirty seconds of connectedness in a winter when my only connections had been with greedy assholes and numbers. She didn’t look at me while we held hands, but she squeezed hard before she let go and walked back to the elevator.”

I stop talking for a moment and watch the constellations of headlights around us, racing toward us, overtaking us from behind. “You want details, or just the Jack Webb version?”

“Oh, details, please. But for the details, Mourning Becomes Electra would be no different than the Oresteia.”

I grope for the allusions, but all I come up with is an absurd image of Jack Nicholson trying to get Diane Keaton to sleep with him in Reds. “We talked some more at the apartment. Sitting on the floor and drinking coffee laced with bourbon to keep warm. We talked about Erin’s time in New York, her getting clean, my giving up music. She seemed surprised Drewe and I had only seen each other twice. She had no grasp of the demands of medical school. When she fell asleep, I tucked her in my bed, then slept in an easy chair I’d bought thirdhand from another tenant.

“The next morning I forced myself out of the chair, brushed my teeth, and got in the shower. I felt like hell. I turned the water as hot as I could stand it. Then I felt a quick draft of cold air. The bathroom door had opened and closed. I heard Erin say, ‘I couldn’t wait.’

“I pulled the shower curtain away from the wall and saw her sitting stark naked on the commode with her elbows on her knees and her chin propped on her hands. She shooed me away with one hand when she realized I was watching. I let go of the curtain and started washing my hair.

“A few seconds later she stepped into the shower. I’d seen her naked once before, in high school, skinny- dipping, and her body looked no older than that in Chicago. Her skin was much darker than mine, her hair almost black. Long and thick falling over those shoulders, and the same… you know. Lots of it. She looked up and smiled, then hugged me and laid her cheek against my chest, as if she meant to go back to sleep standing there in the spray. I didn’t hug her back, but I wanted to. I’m sure it all sounds calculated now, but then it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Unavoidable.”

Lenz makes no comment.

“She was so casual about it. Like walking in to pee as if I wasn’t there. Like we’d been married for years. She just didn’t worry about things like that. Propriety. That affected me. Seeing her on the commode like that affected me. Weird maybe, but it’s the truth. And she… she just wasn’t like other women. She kissed my nipples before she ever kissed my mouth. She seemed to sense it had been a long time since I’d had a woman, long enough that any serious lovemaking would have to wait until she’d gotten that first release out of the way. She used her mouth for that, and her hands. She knew before I did where I was, you know? And when I started to finish, she didn’t pull away. She just…” I trail off, unable to find words to communicate the experience.

“Afterward, she stood up and hugged me again. She didn’t speak, but I saw she somehow knew her sister didn’t complete that act in the way she just had. I thought of Drewe then, but she seemed removed from all this, wholly apart from it. It was as though Erin and I were meeting in some place where Drewe didn’t exist. The way it might be if Erin found herself in grand rounds at the hospital with Drewe. In that environment, Erin simply would not exist. The analogy isn’t perfect. Drewe certainly has a sexual identity of her own, but-”

“I understand.”

“You want me to skip ahead?”

“It’s you or the radio,” Lenz says in a strangely thick voice. “Just keep going. From the shower.”

A bleak image from Fahrenheit 451 suddenly passes behind my eyes: I see myself driving through its wooded film location, a living book spouting my soft-core text for Lenz’s strange pleasure.

“Look, I can’t explain what made Erin so unique. What I said before about exploration, crossing thresholds… even that fails with her. I doubt there’s any erotic space she’s never been. Except maybe pure love. But her sexual presence, her magnetism… Jesus. Bottomless eyes, scalloped collarbones, small dark- nippled breasts that made a mockery of all the surgically enhanced architecture I saw every day at the Board of Trade. I think she realized I was being overcome by her beauty for the first time, and she was determined to give me access to all of it. She must have seen a lot of men get lost in her like that, but I could tell this meant more to her.”

“For more reasons than you could imagine, Cole.”

“The first time we made love in the bed, she came about ten seconds before I did. Then she cradled my face in her hands and-I still remember what she said.”

Lenz turns to me, his eyes tiny points of light. “I love you?”

“No. She said, ‘It’s so easy, isn’t it?’ And then she smiled when I emptied into her. A Mona Lisa smile. No other way to describe it. Like she knew all the secrets of creation.”

“How long did she stay in Chicago?”

“Four days. We hardly left the apartment. The most she ever wore was one of my shirts. She watched movies without comment, unless laughter or tears is comment. Once we saw an eyeliner commercial that had used her eyes. I never once looked up to find her watching me. Yet when I caught myself staring at her, she would turn to me with a half smile that told me she knew I was watching. It was like living with a wild creature. She never once put on a spot of makeup. She seemed to stay perpetually wet. I mean she never got-”