The Monkey Rope

by Stephen Lewis

  She rose from her chair, smoothed down her shorts, and adjusted the tank top over her breasts. She smiled warmly, and her teeth still glistened as moistly white as they had done so many years ago.

  “How ya doin’, gimpy?”

  In spite of himself, he broke into a laugh that began as a pucker on his lips and then drew the tension from his taut stomach until it exploded through his mouth.

  Lois joined him for a moment, and then she pressed her fingers against his lips. She glanced over his shoulder at the doorman.

  “Shh!” she murmured. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk.”

  Seymour reached over and grabbed her arm, surprised at the firmness of her biceps. He held it for a moment, and then he saw the faint, but unmistakable traces. She pulled her arm away and held it against her side.

  “Yes,” she said. “But no more, not for a long time.”

  “Look,” he said quietly, “I’d like to help you if I can.”

  * * * *

  It was not until some time later, as they sat across from each other in O’Neill’s, that he realized how her sudden appearance, dressed like the hooker she probably was, and the tracks on her arm, coming right after his conversation with Brown, had made him realize that he no more belonged working for Mrs. Kaiser, with her dead husband and greedy new shiksa wife, than she belonged sitting in the lobby of a building that housed firms such as his own, whose business it was to help those who already had so much hold onto what they had, even in death. More than any threat from Brown, she brought him back to himself. They shared a kinship that he would never have acknowledged to the senior partner.

  O’Neill’s was a place of dark, scarred wood, and intimate conversations floating in the dusk of its interior. Even bright sunlight had to force its way through the thick, greenish gray glass and pierce the dusty and smoke-laden air so that the high-backed booths with their dark red leather cushions blended into shadows and smiles flashed like brief sparks from hidden faces. It was a place frequented by men who came to soften the hard edges of a day over a quiet drink, and occasionally to meet their lovers before catching the late train home to their wives and families. Seymour’s blood would stir when one of these women, usually in her twenties and stylishly dressed, would slip into a booth next to a man who had been drinking alone, and when she threw her arm around the man’s neck, Seymour’s loneliness would turn to a palpable hurt. Birnhauser, who came only to drink, had introduced Seymour to O’Neill’s, and soon, Seymour knew, he would arrive and take his usual stool at the end of the bar.

  Sitting across from Lois made Seymour feel more comfortable than he had ever been in the tavern. Although he knew the other men were absorbed with their own companions, he sensed eyes caressing Lois as he steered her to a booth in the rear corner. Seymour imagined that Lois had been meeting him like this each evening, but that tonight they would find a hotel where he could wash away the dust of his arid days. He ordered drinks for them, Bloody Marys, and she smiled.

  “I haven’t had one of those in years,” she said.

  “You used to like them.”

  “I used to like many things.” Her voice quivered, and she ground out her cigarette with considerable force. She searched his eyes.

  “Seymour, I hope I’m not going to cause you to do something you’ll be sorry for. I know I’ve caused you pain in the past, and I want you to know I wouldn’t have come to you now, if I could have helped it. But we, that is, I didn’t know where else to turn.”

  He heard, but ignored, the switch. He didn’t care, at least at that moment, why she had sought him out. He wanted to tell her that he had never been able to rid his mind of her image, that there was a wildness in her that both fascinated and repelled him. He wanted to explain these paradoxical feelings to her and watch her eyes catch and magnify the light of the candle on their table, but he felt struck dumb.

  “Look,” he forced himself to say after a while, “I’ll try to explain it to you. You’ve got nothing to blame yourself for. Then or now. In fact, seeing you has helped me make a decision. I’m thinking of leaving the corporate tomb, although I really don’t have anything better lined up right now.” He paused, “And there’s my father in the hospital.”

  She reached across the table and grasped his hand.

  “Woa, counselor, you’re going too fast. We have a lot of ground to cover from when we used to drink these on the couch, listening for the click of my mother’s key in the lock.” She lifted her drink, blood red in the candlelight. “From then until now.”

  From the moment he had realized who she was, he had felt suddenly liberated, and now, as the vodka made his mind spin, he forced his shoe off underneath the table, leaned back, and brought his foot up between her thighs. She shifted her weight on her chair until the blunt end of his shortened foot pressed hard against her warmth. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them her face relaxed into a comfortable glow. Seymour began to speak, but she reached across the table and brushed her fingers across his lips.

  “Let me just remember for a minute,” she said. She held his eyes with hers and tightened her thighs. Then she clasped his foot with both hands before pushing it away from her.

  She lit a cigarette as though to confirm that they would deal with the present.

  “Tell me about your father.”

  Seymour shrugged.

  “A stroke. He’s getting better. Slowly.”

  She held his hand, and then ran her fingers up to his neck, her touch warm and gentle. She seemed lost in thought.

  “And you? What have you been doing all these years except messing up your career?”

  He smiled.

  “Messing up a marriage.”

  She lifted her eyebrows.

  “Anyone I know?”

  “I don’t think so. I found somebody from the other side of town. Anyway, she’s in California now. With our son.” He spoke the words easily, but the hurt and anger rose anyway. “It’s been two and a half years. I don’t really know what the kid looks like anymore.”

  “I see, baby,” she said, her eyes half closed, and her voice quiet. “Some other tune, we can go over all that. I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Aren’t you curious,” she asked after a awhile, “about my name?”

  His face darkened. He had not wanted to discover that secret just yet.

  “It’s not, I suppose, because you thought I would recognize that name, and not your own.”

  She shook her head.

  “And you’re not the one in trouble. Am I right?”

  She stared down at the table, twirled the cubes in her drink, and nodded.

  “Bingo!” he exclaimed. “Do I get a prize?”

  “You don’t have to get nasty. Look, I’m sorry, but Junior needs help, and he asked me to find you. That’s what this whole charade is about.”

  “I knew it,” he said slowly. “I knew sooner or later this would happen, at least in some shape or form. And it shouldn’t surprise me that you are the messenger. I had let myself hope, you know...”

  “Yes, I do know. And that part is also true. Please believe me.”

  He shook his head. “And are you also now his wife?” She flashed a smile, and her tone became playful again.

  “We’re not that formal about these things. You should have guessed that as well.” The day had become overcast, and the gloom darkened inside the bar. But Seymour felt closer to her, as though they had been shut away from the world. She searched his eyes and seemed to find a different question.

  “Don’t you want to know about Rosalie?” she asked with a suddenly bright smile. “Now that you’re a free man. Maybe you should get back together with her, get yourself a good Italian girl, from the old neighborhood.”

  He started to rise to the bait, but caught himself.

  “I didn’t even know that you would have any idea about her, and besides I haven’t thought about her in years.”

  She reached across the table to touch
his cheek. “I don’t think that is entirely true.”

  “Maybe not,” he admitted.

  He settled back further in the booth. In the quiet of the place, with just the murmur of subdued conversation, and the occasional clink of glasses, he had fooled himself into thinking that she could be his for a little while without suffering the shadow of Junior and the past, but thinking about Rosalie forced him to remember the images of that time: the pure companion of his youth and the siren, neither of whom he had possessed, nor could—both inaccessible in their abstraction, and he unable to dispel either ikon.

  Lois took out a cigarette and searched for a match. She fished a crumpled book out of the pocket of her shorts, and lifted the cover.

  “I guess it’s going to be that kind of day,” she said, showing Seymour the empty book. He picked up the candle and reached across the table.

  “Thanks. Why didn’t I think of that? I guess that’s why you’re the lawyer.” She inhaled deeply.

  Seymour pulled a full book of matches from his pocket, and handed it to her. “I could have given you these. But I liked the candle idea. Saw it in a movie once.”

  “Just like you. I’m sure you spend too much damned time in movies, alone. Am I right?”

  He nodded.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Rosalie, she’s a librarian, now, after going to school at night and working as a waitress in a diner in Sheepshead Bay. You should look her up.”

  “That’s not what I want to hear,” Seymour snapped.

  “Why she became a librarian, you mean? I couldn’t tell you. Maybe she never recovered from the way you broke her heart.” Her smile now was evil. “Or the college she went to. You know she dropped out after the first year, but she never lived at home again.”

  “No, none of that. I knew some of the story anyway.” He lit a cigarette for himself with the candle. “What I mean is, that while I’m sitting here with you, I don’t want to be talking about Junior. Or his sister. Anyway, when did you start playing matchmaker?”

  He was unprepared for the violent burst of laughter that exploded from her.

  “Matchmaker! Me! That’s a good one! I’ll have to tell him about that one. He’ll get a good laugh. And his sister and you no less.”

  The late afternoon crowd began to arrive, their clothes soaked from a brief thunderstorm that now provided a background to their conversation. Seymour saw Birnhauser stroll in, shake himself off, and settle into his seat. Wordlessly, the bartender slid a glass in front of him. Lois followed Seymour’s eyes, and her face hardened.

  “I think it’s stopped raining, and I should be getting you home.” She leaned across the table and exhaled a warm ring of smoke. Seymour felt her hand run up his thigh. He covered her fingers for a moment, pressing them into his flesh.

  “I want to spend the night with you,” he said.

  She smiled, “Maybe you will.” She drew back. “But first there is Junior.”

  Lois waited outside the booth while he dialed. He heard the phone ring six or seven times before his mother picked it up.

  “Mom, I won’t be able to make it tonight. Something has come up.” He began to turn his back to Lois, but she motioned that she would be waiting outside. On the other end of the phone line, his mother’s voice was plaintive. He half listened to the litany of accusations and then told her he would see her next week when his father would be home from the hospital.

  He found Lois waiting in a cab parked by the curb outside the bar.

  “Everything alright?” she asked.

  “Sure, just fine.”

  “Did you send them my regards?”

  He didn’t respond, and she looked hurt.

  “I was serious,” she insisted.

  He took her measure. “Maybe next time,” he said.

  * * * *

  Sitting beside her in the back seat, Seymour tried to clear away the curtain that the vodka and scotch had draped over his mind. He leaned back and watched the sun dip toward the blackening waters of the East River beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The solid yet graceful pillars were bathed in the red sunset, glowing an unreal pink against the gray sky. The cab crawled along, one in an antlike procession. He didn’t know exactly where they were going, and he didn’t care, for the moment. He would find out soon enough, and in the meantime, he was content to sit with her in silence. He noticed, though, that she became increasingly nervous, puffing deeply on her cigarette, as the cab began to work its way down Flatbush Avenue.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I haven’t told you everything.”

  “I know. Don’t. Let me find out one step at a time.”

  She smiled a little too quickly, drew his head to her, and kissed his lips. Her tongue jumped into his mouth, and he pulled her into his arms. She moved against him so that her breasts were cushioned against his chest.

  He cupped her breast softly with his palm, partly to savor the anticipation, and partly because he feared that the moment would be spoiled, that they were only figures in a long suppressed dream which would vanish with the first sudden and conscious movement. He did not know if he desired the actuality, but he ached pleasantly, and so he stroked the underside of her breast with just the tips of his fingers. She murmured deep in her throat and pushed herself against his hand.

  Her movement forced him to realize the present, and he felt himself begin to harden. He abandoned the dream against the thrust of her tongue and the touch of her hand between his thighs. She pulled her mouth away from his lips and drew her tongue over his neck and, moistly, behind his ear.

  “I want you tonight,” he said.

  “And what I want,” she whispered, “is to get you so hard you ache, and then when you are good and ready, let you pick a hole, and come inside me, somewhere, anywhere, but inside me.”

  He caught his breath and leaned against her, dimly aware of the lurch of the cab and the labored groan of its engine as it accelerated from a light. In a rush, he was with her again on the couch in her parent’s apartment, performing her cruel ritual, baring the stump of his foot for her pleasure, but he did not care, he would gladly have offered himself again, right there on the cracked seat of the cab as the evening fell around them, and the driver lit a cigarette and stared straight ahead at the shimmering pattern of red lights.

  She pulled back after a while as though she had read his thoughts.

  “Don’t let me do this to you. I’m professional now, anyway. You know that.”

  The words ripped through his desire, through his memory of those long afternoons, and through his rising excitement. He moved away from her.

  “I’m sorry.” She sighed. “That seems to be all I can ever say to you. But I really do love you, a little, after all, and in my own way. I just wanted to tell you, so you would know. I don’t want to use you. It’s enough that I’m bringing you to Junior. More than enough.”

  The name merged the past with the present, and he withdrew to his side of the cab. He lit a cigarette and stared out the window at the line of cars approaching on the other side of the bridge. But his mind refused to be deterred and it raced back twenty years to a street in Brooklyn, the street before the house in which his family rented the second floor from the Constantinos. It was the night of July Fourth, and the black sky above the towering maples was encrimsoned and ablaze with exploding rockets and roman candles. He felt again the squeeze of Rosalie’s fingers on his arm as they stood alone in the shadows, but he pulled himself free and joined the tight circle of his friends around Junior, who tossed innocent ladyfingers at their feet in a game of chicken. He saw now in the glare of the oncoming headlights the fire in Junior’s eyes and his thick hand reaching into his pocket to emerge holding the fat cherry bomb, the long fingers lighting another match, but the eyes never leaving his. Then the rounded shape rolling lazily toward his feet, and too late Junior’s body hurled against his in a brutal and futile shove, as the explosion reverberated even now in the quiet cab where only the click of the
meter and the wheeze of the driver disturbed the silence. But there was no pain, just the torn canvas of his sneaker and the bright red blood and the shards of bone and flesh.

  He felt Lois’ body press against his. She leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “Maybe we should just forget the whole thing,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  He turned to her. “Is that what you want?” She shook her head.

  “What I said about tonight, I meant it, if you still want me.”

  He fought the push of his blood, and did not answer.

  * * * *

  They rode in silence for almost an hour. The cabbie, whose hacking breaths rose in counterpoint to the steady ticking of the meter, glanced at them in his oversized rear-view mirror and then lit another cigarette.

  Seymour’s mind darted back and forth between the woman leaning against him like a sweetheart and the memory of her as the seductress of his youth. He made himself remember the time he had decided to buy her love, how he had been inspired by her comment one afternoon, as she circled his flesh with her warm fingers, that she had seen a pearl ring in the window of a jewelry store, and that, as she had brought her lips closer to him and whispered, the color of the pearl was just like the color of his come. He had found the ring the next day, and for some reason he had never understood, he told Junior he wanted to get it for her. He tried to erase the next scene that forced its way into his mind, but he heard again Junior’s taunt that if he were a man he would just get it. His own foolish retort echoed in his memory, and then he remembered the shattering of glass, the alarm, and the sirens, and the moment of aching clarity when Junior had stared down at his foot and snarled, “Now, we’re gonna be even, you bastard.” And the last image of Junior hurling himself at the running policemen while he fled down an alley, pausing only to toss the ring into a garbage can.

  He turned to her, and she lifted her heavy lidded eyes to him.

  “Do you know why Junior got sent away the first time?” he asked.

  Her eyes showed interest, but she shrugged.

  “Just that he got caught breaking into a store.”