10
Rosemary's flesh, her overample thighs, the contact chill of her body were the preoccupations of his detachment from common bonds. Once her clothes were off, she rarely spoke. He gripped and bit at her, leaving spit everywhere. Her breath was milky. She was uninterested in all but the most commonplace sex. Suitable, he thought. Perfectly acceptable. Why not? She clutched the back of his neck. Her flesh obsessed him, color and touch, bland odors coming off it. She might almost have been a drugged child. He wanted to scratch at her flesh, to leave teeth marks, pink ridges, alternately lapping and clawing away. It was hardly the mood of squandered afternoons. He wanted to put his mouth inside hers; roar.
'It's that I'm all through with that. I'm out. Let it all come down. Don't you think everybody, nearly, feels that way about their work, where they work all those years? It's insane, besides. The whole thing is. Besides, why not?”
She never let him undress her. She would go into the bathroom, emerging ten minutes later, slightly ill at ease although not about her nakedness, he felt, but about the way she walked when barefoot, a somehow downhill step, heavy-tending. She showed little sign or whatever measures or desire his own body might have been expected to arouse in her.
'There may be some people you can meet.”
'Of course, I know.”
'I was wondering,' she said. 'The car?”
'Sure, I remember, clearly.”
'That picks me up from work sometimes.”
'Absolutely, who else but them?”
'If you want to.”
'Why not, certainly, what am I here for?”
Her thighs distorted the line of her body. A plodder's thighs, surprisingly. Hard to spot in someone who wears a dress but reassuring in that it confounded the set of his expectations. He pressed onto her constantly, all his body, ravenous for flesh, his hands mixing and working her into a mass of mild discoloration. She never approached orgasm. He accepted this not as a deficiency he might correct (as people often interpret the matter), using patience and skill, the bed mechanic's experience; nor as a deeper exhaustion, a failure of the spirit. It was simply part of their dynamics, the condition of being together, and he had no intention of altering the elements of the spell or even of wishing them otherwise. One kind of sex or another was not the question. The triteness that pervaded their meetings supplied what he wanted of eroticism and made 'one' or 'the other' a question of recondite semantics. He gripped her fiercely. There was never any point at which he guided himself past a certain stage or prepared to approach a culmination. It was too disorganized, the moments of intensity only loosely foreseen. He would climax unexpectedly, barely aware, feeling both criminal and naive.
one is padding to the bathroom, he thought. Holding her breasts she admires her body in the full-length mirror. She is rosy with fulfillment. Two waiting-maids enter to prepare her perfumed bath. On the bed of carved walnut, he thought, her lover reclines against a mound of silk pillows, recalling how she'd groaned with pleasure.
TWO
1
She turned the car into a dead-end street. It was Sunday and very still, midafternoon. Lyle looked out the side window, dreamily, his arm hanging out over the door, a surfer returning from a day at the beach. The woman parked, turned off the ignition and sat there. Lyle waited. Only one sidewalk was paved. The house was gray frame, two-storied, fronted by shrubs and a single tree. She made a small noise, routine irritation, as she attempted to bend herself out of the car. She looked back in at Lyle, who hadn't yet reached for the door.
'I forgot the Cheerios,' she said. 'This will precipitate a small crisis in the morning. Is that right-'precipitate'?”
'I think so,' he said. 'Maybe not quite.”
She reached in for the groceries.
'Do I come in now?' he said. 'Or wait out here.”
'Oh, I think come in. By all means now. I think it's clearly the thing.”
He heard piano music coming from the back of the house, a record player apparently, upper floor. The woman, reacting to the sound, turned on the radio. She gestured to Lyle and he sat in a deep chair with enormous laminated arms. The woman, Marina Vilar, stood behind the table the radio was on, reaching over the top of the radio to turn the station selector. Through the window behind her Lyle could see part of a bridge, either the Whitestone or the Throgs Neck. He knew they weren't far from the Nassau County line but couldn't recall which was the easternmost bridge. The woman found what she wanted, a rapid-fire disk jockey, and turned up the volume, grimly satisfied, her look directed toward the top of the stairs.
Marina was squat, close to shapeless, dressed in what might have been thrift-shop clothing. Her face had precise lines, however, strongly boned, a trace of the socialist painter's peasant woman, broad arcs and shadows. Her hair was parted in the middle and combed back over the ears. She had eyes that concentrated intently and would not easily surrender their assertiveness. She believed in one thing, he felt, to the exclusion of everything else. Although he didn't know what this thing was as yet, he was certain she'd imbued it with a particular kind of purity, a savage light.
'You didn't meet my brother, unfortunately. Only Rosemary, is that right? My brother did the rockets at Tempelhof. He planned it to the last detail.”
'I don't know if I recall.”
'They hit the wrong plane. They hit the DC-9. They were totally stupid. One plans something to the closest degree of precision. What happens?”
'They go and hit the wrong plane,' he said.
The place was full of blond furniture, secondhand, the kind of thing found in rec rooms or settlement houses. Everything had a chemical veneer. Marina put the groceries away and made some phone calls, not bothering to reduce the volume on the radio. During the third such call, J. Kinnear came down the stairs, moving quickly, feet wide apart, taking the last few steps with a rhythmic little canter. Five nine or ten, Lyle thought, identifying yet another suspect for some detective lieutenant. Checked shirt, brown pants, brown loafers, older than he appeared to be at very first glance.
'Hi, I'm J. Delighted. You want to turn, is that it?”
He smiled, shaking Lyle's hand, half winking, and sat on a stack of phone books, hunched forward, clutching his knees. His manner suggested they were fellow believers whose paths had diverged only through the force of horrid circumstance. Furthermore he was eager to hear the whole story. There was humor in the way Kinnear assembled this sense of flattering intimacy. He was at a distance from it but certainly not in a way intended to deceive. His hands were at his ankles now, absently scratching. Marina turned off the radio and made another phone call. The room hummed as the two men waited for her to speak before resuming their own conversation. Kinnear had a gaze that never quite penetrated. If there was such a thing as being stared at evasively, Lyle felt he was experiencing just that. Rusty brown hair. Remnants of widespread freckling. Creases about the eyes and mouth.
'A man from the floor itself.”
'The floor of floors.”
'Delighted, delighted.”
'What happens now?”
Kinnear laughed. He said he'd been making trips to and from the Coast. He said things were getting interesting.
