pulled his arm over her shoulder, then leaned into him. “And I know what you need.”
“Eve-”
Sweat filmed his face, cold at the temples as she pressed back against him, leaving no doubt about where she wanted him.
“Are you sure?”
She turned and looked back at him, her eyes filled with dark knowledge, her lips curved in a serene smile. “I’m totally relaxed. Do it.”
He shut his eyes and obeyed.
It was dusk when he swung the Land Cruiser out of the narrow drive and onto Wall Street. As he crossed to the next block, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw her black Lexus nose out of the drive, then pull into the street. He looked at his cell phone and thought of calling home, but decided against it. Rose would be gone by now. Lily and Annelise would be in the kitchen, talking about homework, wondering where Daddy was. Daddy was wondering the same thing.
His arms and legs felt shaky, as though he couldn’t trust them. Memories of his last hour with Eve flashed through his mind like flares in the darkness, blanking out his thoughts. She came back to him in pieces, like quick cuts in a film. The nape of her neck, beaded with pearls of sweat. Her hip, already bruised in the pattern of his fingertips. And the sounds…her mouth at his ear, whispering, urging, taunting, begging. Nonsense words. Profanity. Prayers. But always she returned to the same three words: a pleading command, a mantra, the soundtrack to her remarkable movement, her controlled abandon.
“Eve,” he’d grunted.
She shook her head and splayed her fingers against the wall to brace herself against him. “
“Eve…”
“No! Say my name!
“I did.”
He shook his head, unable to vocalize anything, though the word she wanted so desperately was swelling in his mouth like a balloon, bursting to be freed with all its transformative power.
He never did.
Chapter 9
He saw Eve every day for the next two weeks. In the beginning he tried to resist, but it was pointless. The awareness that she was within a few miles of him yet not with him made it impossible to concentrate on the smallest things. His work did not suffer, because he did not work. When forced to be in his office, he stared out the window at the river or riffled through the portfolio he kept in the locked desk drawer.
Then his cell phone would chirp. He developed a Pavlovian reaction to the sound. Out of silence it came, and before the first chirp ended, his heartbeat had accelerated, his respiration had gone shallow, his self-awareness had tripled in intensity. Then Eve would speak, her voice a clipped command.
“I’m gone,” he’d reply, already standing with his keys in his hand. Eve always called from pay phones, and she always managed to be waiting for him when he arrived at their assignation.
In the beginning they used Bienville. Waters had suggested that they meet in various empty houses, as though Eve were showing him properties for sale, but she rightly argued that this would create more problems than it would solve. If she toured him around town in a sham of house-shopping, word would quickly get back to Lily that her husband was looking at antebellum homes, and she would wonder why, since they already owned one that she had no intention of selling. Moreover, few other properties had the advantages of Bienville. Though situated in the middle of town, the mansion was totally isolated by its elevation and its verdant gardens. The only risk of being seen came when either of them turned into the narrow gravel drive that led off of Wall Street. From that moment until they drove out again-usually hours later-they were safe from the prying eyes of passersby.
Waters came to know the mansion in a way he did not know his own, the way the child of a house knows its secret spaces and idiosyncrasies. They made love in every room, not by design but by serendipity. Exploring the house between sessions, they would find a cozy nook they hadn’t noticed before, or a bathroom countertop set at just the right height, and a different sort of exploration would begin. Sometimes they would look down at the street from the half-moon window on the third floor, watching the people passing below, oblivious to the naked lovers above. Their hands would intertwine, they would kiss, and the rest followed as naturally as flowers opening to the sun.
These were moments of searing purity to Waters, existential epiphanies that made irrelevant all that had come before and all that might come after. But this purity had nothing to do with morality, or even with light. There was more darkness in the house than light. Darkness within Eve, and also within himself. That darkness was the shadow of Mallory Candler, who haunted the empty mansion with them during these lost hours. When they made love, Mallory was always there, watching from beside the bed or from over Eve’s shoulder. The whole experience was a kind of shared madness, but Waters had lived without passion for so long that he would deny almost any insanity to drink of it. Before long, he found a way to think about it that he could live with. It was like dating an insatiable schizophrenic; the conversations could be eerie, but the sex was explosive.
It was in her sexuality that Eve most resembled Mallory. For just as Eve and Waters avoided dwelling on the underlying truth of their situation-riding the wave of passion without looking beneath the dark water that carried them forward-Mallory too had used sex as an escape. Even before the “black wings” that she later named broke loose in her head, Mallory fled into the sanctuary of physical ecstasy, struggling to drive back an amorphous threat that Waters felt but could not see. With Mallory, directness was the thing. Foreplay was exactly that, and she was not much interested in play. Sex was penetration; all else was secondary. Even now, he could see her near- mindless stare as she bucked and strained toward her peak, her renowned beauty shed like a husk as some primal thing took her over, the way a woman in childbirth is hijacked by larger forces, primordial compulsions that drive her through pain that a conscious body could not otherwise endure.
After Mallory’s deepest drives had been sated to some degree, she could spend hours exploring, caressing, and kissing-but all that was lagniappe. What had stuck in his mind was her aggressiveness. She was usually ready for him before they were alone, and she could not get her clothes off fast enough. Sometimes she didn’t bother to remove them; she wore skirts so that she could simply climb astride him in the car, or lift her leg in a fortuitous hallway or bathroom and take him into her standing up. She dared him to take her in crowded places, where discovery would have instantly shattered the perfect image grafted onto her by the town and then the state. She brought inanimate objects into their coupling, things Waters would never have thought of as sexual, and which frightened him for her when he did. The perversity of her needs-and her ruthless directness in seeking to satisfy them-kept him in a state of continuous arousal. He went through his days with a woman whom young and old alike admired and adored, whom many Mississippians thought of in the way they thought of the models for Ivory Snow, all the while knowing that her true nature was such that no one in their insular world could have imagined or believed it.
All this Eve Sumner resurrected in the empty mansion on Wall Street. Rather than analyze her behavior, Waters shut his mind and embraced it, reveling in her unrestrained eroticism. Eve gave orders; he obeyed them. He abased himself before her. He worshiped at the pagan altar of her sex. Only one heresy did he cling to in the shadows of this hidden world. When she demanded that he call her “Mallory,” that he give voice and thus legitimacy
