Nicole cracked her knuckles. “In a minute I’m going to start calling you Douglas instead of Mr. Kerchek.”
“Oh, really?”
Nicole sighed. “Mr. Kerchek, please just listen. I’m going to say some things.”
Douglas collected his thoughts. Outside the door were a married couple on a green couch, drinking brandy, perhaps petting John Stapleton. In the study with him was a headstrong young woman.
“Mr. Kerchek,” said Nicole. “You know that I’m smart. That I can think and read well, like you could when you were nineteen. But I also know what the world is like, Mr. Kerchek.”
Douglas watched Nicole. She’s serious, he thought. She’s deadly serious.
“I know,” said Nicole. “I know how long people go in this city without finding someone to love. I’m young, but I understand loneliness, and how sad it is.” Nicole rubbed her feet. “I know a guy in this building who ties girls up to his bed because he thinks it will cure his loneliness. That’s the kind of sadness I’m talking about.”
“Fine, Nicole. But what does that have to do with us?”
Nicole put her finger to her lips. “Listen. I know I can be irrational, Douglas.”
Douglas caught his breath. He felt something in his spine, fear maybe.
“Like tonight,” said Nicole. “That King Lear business. But here’s something you probably don’t know. I saw you at the Film Forum last week.”
Douglas blushed again.
“They were showing The Gunfighter, with Gregory Peck. It was last Tuesday, the nine o’clock show. I saw it advertised in the paper, and I just knew you’d be there. So I went.”
Douglas tried to remember what he’d worn out that night, what candy he’d brought with him. A flannel shirt? Gummi Bears?
“I sat five rows behind you and watched your silhouette. I saw you admiring the guy who played the bartender. You know, the guy from On the Waterfront.”
Douglas closed his eyes. She’s right, he thought. She’s nineteen, and she’s right.
“Anyway, whether you marry me or not, this is what I want to tell you.” Nicole exhaled. “It’s no good, Douglas.”
Douglas kept his eyes closed. He was listening.
“It’s no good, the way you’re living. All those weights you lift, all those miles you run, all those movies you see. It isn’t right. It’s lonely.”
Douglas looked at her, then. He saw her curves and her temples, but something else, too, something that lived behind her eyes.
“You’re a good teacher and all, but you’re just killing time, Douglas. I can tell.”
Bullshit, thought Douglas. Then he thought, How? How am I killing it?
“I can tell from the books you assign, the ties you wear, everything.” Nicole was not chewing her hair. “You’re ready, Douglas. For the woman, the one you’re supposed to marry.” Nicole shrugged, just a little. “And I think she’s me. I’ve dated some guys, and I know what’s around, and—well, I just know what I want.”
“How?” blurted Douglas. His hands trembled on the snifter, so he put it down. He felt like he might weep, but he refused to. “How . . . are you saying all this?”
“I just am.” Nicole gazed at her teacher.
“Are you in—” Douglas changed phrases. “Do you love me?”
Nicole petted her neck, sipped her brandy. “Look. I’ve got Princeton to go to. And I’ve got that huge heirloom library out there to read. I’m just saying that you should have a woman with you at the movies, and she should be me. I’m ready for her to be me.”
Douglas couldn’t sit still any longer. He stood up and paced, the way he always had in the locker room before a fight. He wanted to shout or punch or be punched. He wanted something reliable, something he knew the feeling of. He stalked over to Nicole, unsure of what to do.
“Easy, Douglas.” Nicole moved back on the daybed.
“No.” Douglas shook his head, kept pacing. “No ‘Easy, Douglas.’ You have to tell me something, here. I’m thirty-one, and I’m—I’m your teacher, for Christ’s sake. I mean—is this—look, answer me, now, Nicole.”
“Okay,” she whispered. “I will.”
“Is this real? I mean, are you . . . in love with me?”
“I’m ready to be,” said Nicole. “And I mean this as a compliment, but I’ve got nothing better to do.”
Douglas stopped pacing. “I’m going crazy,” he said softly. “I’m standing here, solidly, on my own two feet and I’m going crazy.”
Nicole smiled. She took his hand.
“Listen,” she said. “I have the prom in a month, which my cousin Fred’s escorting me to, and graduation’s two weeks after that. It’ll be hectic for a bit, but as of the first week of June I’m prepared to become completely infatuated with you.”
Douglas laughed out loud, once, at the practicality in her voice. He thought of his mother, of Chiapas and the Mexicans, of the unbroken chain of essays that he’d corrected for the past six years. There might have been a thousand of those essays. And there might have been a time in history when all people spoke like Nicole Bonner.
“I can commute to Princeton,” explained Nicole, “or else just come back to you on weekends. My family’s a little eccentric, and I am, too, but—well, there it is. What do you think?”
Douglas pulled Nicole to her feet. He felt giddy, vicious. He didn’t know what he felt. Like an animal he set his teeth for one last stand.
“Nicole.” His voice was low, almost mean.
“Yes?”
“I’m—I’m only going to ask you this once more.”
“All right.”
“If you’re kidding about all this, and you tell me tomorrow that you’re kidding, then I’ll—I’ll . . .” Douglas clenched and unclenched his fists.
“I’m not kidding,” said Nicole.
Douglas looked out the window at New York City. He looked back at Nicole.
“You’re sure?”
Nicole reached up, trailed one hand lightly over Douglas’s haircut.
“Domestic short hair,” she whispered.
Douglas took both her hands in his. He was beaming. He felt slightly nauseous. “All right. All right, if you’re serious, then I want you to do something for me.”
Nicole frowned. “No sex till we’re hitched. A kiss, maybe.”
“Be quiet and listen.” Douglas’s voice quavered with pleasure. “I don’t want you to kiss me. I want you to hit me.”
“What?”
Douglas couldn’t keep the grin, the old, triumphant sass, off his face.
“I want you to punch me in the stomach as hard as you can.”
Nicole stepped away. “You’re insane.”
“No.” Douglas took her by the shoulders, squared her off facing him. “Trust me. If you do this, I’ll know that we’re—I’ll just know.”
Nicole laughed, just a little. “You’re a freak.”
“Hit me.”
Nicole angled her head to one side. “You’re serious.”
“Give me your hand.”
Nicole held out her right palm.
“Make a fist. No, like this, with your thumb outside. Good.”
“How do you know how—”
“Shut up and hit me.” Douglas sneered at her. “Come on. Let’s see what you got.”
A wicked joy stole over Nicole’s face. “You better watch it.”
“Hit me.”
“I’ll do it, Douglas,” she warned.
“Go ahead.”
Nicole drew her fist back to her hip. Her eyes checked the door that was hiding her parents. She looked to Douglas as if she would erupt with laughter, or something else, something he couldn’t predict.
“Come on, punk,” Douglas dared her, and that was it. Nicole shot her fist forward and showed him what he, what the both of them, were in for.
* * *
* * *
Serendipity
Leonard Bunce wanted one woman, but he planned to use another. Leonard worke
d in Manhattan, as a lawyer for Spuck and Hardison. The two women were paralegals for the firm. The woman Leonard wanted was Hannah Glorybrook, and the one he planned to use was Alison Shippers.
Alison was five foot three and thirty-five years old. She was plump, busty, and strong in her body, but shy around men. She’d grown up in Maine, and she looked built for lighthouse keeping or work in a cannery. She had an apartment in Gramercy Park, and she wore suits to the office that did not capitalize on her womanhood. On Thursday nights Alison treated herself to sushi, her one urban indulgence, then gave herself a mudpack and watched television. On Saturday nights Alison wept herself to sleep.
Hannah Glorybrook worked two cubicles away from Alison. Hannah was a blond, graceful five foot seven, with sharp cheekbones and a come-hither gap between her two front teeth. She was twenty-six, and an only child. Her mother was dead, her skin was perfect, and her father owned Glorybrook Perfumes and Cosmetics, an expensive, successful line of products sold in New York and Paris. Hannah had the kind of body for which such goods are forged. Whether she had tousled hair or pigtails, whether she wore a gown or a rain slicker, Hannah charmed the streets of Manhattan. She consented to the trap of her good looks and trimmed herself daily in black seductions: berets, dresses, thigh-high stockings, buttoned-up vests. Hannah held a degree in political science from Tufts, and she was rich from her father’s most famous perfume, Serendipity, which she wore daily. She’d worked six months at Spuck and Hardison, where she did her paperwork, then read novels at lunch. At night and on weekends she drank beer and wore sixties-style black-rimmed glasses that made her look savvy and feline.
Meanwhile, Leonard Bunce was a bitter bachelor. He was forty-three. In high school he’d collected trophies in quiz-bowl contests. He aced college, won a Rhodes scholarship, and was now one of Spuck and Hardison’s premier trial lawyers. Leonard’s bitterness, however, didn’t rise from intellectual condescension. It stemmed from a giant birthmark on his right temple. This birthmark was a red, raised splash of skin that made it seem as if Leonard’s brains were exploding out of his skull and leaking down into his right eye. Leonard hated his birthmark, and the women and friendships he was sure it had cost him, the privileges and challenges it afforded him. It nauseated Leonard to stare into a juror’s eyes and see sympathy for his client building or dying as a result of his own visage. It sickened Leonard to believe that Hannah Glorybrook, the bombshell on the fourth floor, would never lavish her ecstasies upon him because of a physical branding he couldn’t control. Whether the world, and women in particular, deserved Leonard’s suspicions or not didn’t change Leonard’s demeanor. He curled his lip at beauty and truth, always wanting to conquer and wield them, never confident that he could.
Every evening, hands deep in his pockets, Leonard stalked the streets of midtown, craving half the women that passed him. He lusted after young mothers with wholesome hips, college girls in miniskirts, skinny models on billboards. At night, alone in his apartment, with his fists clenched, Leonard watched films with Ann-Margret, Raquel Welch, and Katharine Ross. It seemed to Leonard that God had created women for men to squeeze and spend money on, and that if only a man could be well paid and free of blemish, the graces of women were his to hunt and gather. The woman Leonard most wanted to squeeze, the one whose graces he most wanted to tap, was Hannah Glorybrook. However, out of livid conviction in his shortcomings and a basic desire to get laid, the woman whose desk Leonard approached was Alison Shippers.
“Ms. Shippers,” said Leonard, “have you finished the Kowalski brief?”
Alison looked up. She had a round face with obvious features, like a man-in-the-moon caricature. Also, she wore a white blouse with a gold pin on the bust. The pin was a heart on a stick.
“Almost, Mr. Bunce.”
Leonard checked his eyes east and west, scanning for eavesdroppers.
“Ms. Shippers,” said Leonard, “will you join me for dinner tonight?”
Alison blushed. “Why, Mr. Bunce . . .”
She’s got a pent-up, New England libido, thought Leonard. She’ll fuck me like a sex-starved rabbit.
“Duranigan’s at nine o’clock,” he said. Two cubicles away he could see Hannah Glorybrook’s neck and shoulders. Peeking out from under Hannah’s dress was an indigo bra strap.
At promptly nine that evening Alison and Leonard dined at Duranigan’s Restaurant on Madison Avenue. Alison wore perfume that smelled of berries and a tasteful white dress that came to her calves. She smiled meekly through her lobster cocktail and osso buco, while Leonard eyed her sturdy biceps.
“You played sports in college?” he guessed. “Rowed crew, maybe?”
“You must be psychic, Mr. Bunce.”
By eleven-thirty that night Leonard had Alison alone in her apartment, where he filled her with wine and asked her questions. By twelve-thirty Leonard had his face in Alison’s thighs.
“Why, Mr. Bunce,” breathed Alison. She wondered if she’d done particularly good work on the Kowalski brief.
Leonard kept himself wedged where he was, flicking his tongue out at Alison like a serpent. He glared up at her torso, her pink brassiere. When he satisfied a woman this way, no talking was necessary. Alison couldn’t witness his birthmark, and he, unable to see her face, could pretend she was a slender, conquered Barbarella.
At work the next day Alison made eyes at Leonard. She brought him coffee and touched his wrist.
“I’ll make you dinner tonight,” she whispered.
Gullible cow, thought Leonard.
Hannah Glorybrook strolled by, wearing high heels and a plaid Scottish miniskirt.
Leonard smiled thinly at Alison. He could still smell her awful berry odor.
“Dinner it is,” he said.
It went on for a month. Leonard spent his days trying to approach Hannah Glorybrook, to find some pretext to speak to her. But whenever he got close to her cubicle, Hannah made some unconscious feminine adjustment—smoothing the lap of her dress, tucking her hair behind her ear—and Leonard’s heart seized up, and he touched his birthmark and walked away. After such moments Leonard tried every means possible to expend the energies that Hannah stirred in him. He crucified his opponents in court, then waged war on the body of Alison Shippers.
On a warm Thursday night in August, Leonard Bunce was at Cherrywood’s Lounge on Forty-second Street, taking the night off from Alison’s meat loafs and thick ankles. Cherrywood’s was a cozy bar that featured fine Scotches and live storytellers. It was the kind of dimly lighted establishment, Leonard thought, where a man could drink alone and have his place.
Leonard ordered Glenfiddich over ice, and sat in a booth, his birthmark toward the wall. He was well into his second Scotch when a smell reached his nose that had no trace of berries. Leonard looked up.
“Well, well, well,” said Hannah Glorybrook. “Lenny Bunce.”
Leonard’s face creased with pleasure. Holding a pint of Guinness and a cigarette, Hannah stood in a black shift that slit up one side all the way to her waist. She had her blond hair collected in a wispy beehive, and she wore cat-rimmed black glasses that Leonard had never seen on her. Strangely and, to Leonard, thrillingly, Hannah was barefoot and free of jewelry or makeup. Best of all, she was alone.
Hannah dragged on her cigarette, exhaled. “Hello, Hannah,” she prompted him. “Good evening, Ms. Glorybrook.”
Leonard stood with a fluster, banging his knee on the table. “I’m sorry. Ow. I’m sorry, hello.”
Hannah slid into the booth across from him. Leonard sat back down. His right hand instinctively faked a scratch on his forehead to cover his birthmark.
“I don’t really go by Lenny,” he said.
Hannah held Leonard’s glass to the light. “Scotch,” said Hannah. “Yuck.” She drank from her pint.
Leonard glanced around. Several men at the bar had looked up from their whiskey and were watching Hannah. Also glaring at her were two wives, three girlfriends, and the six single women who were lounging near
the billiards table. These women had come from viewing Broadway plays and musicals, and they were adorned with pearls, diamonds, lipstick, and, to the last woman, heels.
“I’m surprised you got into this place,” said Leonard.
Hannah blew smoke out the gap in her teeth. “I’m twenty-six,” she said.
“You’re barefoot,” said Leonard.
“Yep.”
“Are you meeting someone here?”
“Would you prefer that I were?”
Leonard blushed and, once again, scratched a phantom itch.
“I’ll bet you’re meeting someone, Lenny,” smiled Hannah. “I’ll bet you’re meeting a sexy little trollop. A tramp.”
Leonard imagined Alison facedown in a gutter.
“A hussy,” said Hannah. “A harlot.”
“You use a lot of big words,” said Leonard.
“Only till a man vanquishes me. Then I’m docile. Pliable. Reticent.”
Leonard turned even more crimson.
Hannah held up her empty glass. “I need a pint.”
Leonard hurried to the bar, ordered a Guinness and another Glenfiddich. In his mind he reviewed his day at light speed, searching for whatever deed he might have done to earn this company. When he returned, Hannah was lighting a fresh cigarette.
She’s staying, rejoiced Leonard. Even through the smoke he could smell the scent Hannah wore. It smelled finely of liquor, or a midnight breeze.
Hannah jutted her chin around. “These women are staring me down. They don’t like how I’m dressed. They think I’m all about sex. They’re jealous.”
“Well, do you always walk around downtown without shoes?”
Hannah drank her stout. “Lenny, let’s talk about something besides my feet.”
“All right.” Leonard thought madly of topics. He thought of the Certs breath mint he’d crunched down on the way into Cherrywood’s.
“Do you believe in God?” asked Hannah.
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