“Well, you’re married eight, nine years, there’s patterns. You stay right in them, no problem. And my wife’s emotional.” Maybe too emotional, he thinks. “If there’s a problem, she’s going to . . . complain.” He almost says whine, to make the point, but decides it’s disloyal.
Robie glances down along her thighs at the glistening hair. He raises his hands to rub her back.
Kathy laughs. “I knew this weird guy believed in UFOs, abductions, all that alien stuff. So put her up on the roof at night. Maybe some green guys will take her away.”
“That’s not . . . very nice.”
“Oh, Robie.” Kathy giggles. “She might like it—sex with green men? Don’t be jealous, now.”
“I think now,” he says, “I’m only jealous of you.”
“You’ll never have any reason to be jealous of me. . . . Hey, remember, I’m the one who should be jealous. I’m still the other woman.”
“No. Not for long. I promise.”
“Thanks, lover.”
“This back-and-forth life is tough on me, you know. I want to be with you.” Robie thinks how simple life would be if Anne got on a plane, and it crashed. . . .
“It was always fate, Robie. We belong together. You think God makes marriages?”
“Maybe.”
“If He does, He made ours.”
“Right.”
“Now let me ask you an important philosophical question. You want to eat me? Or vice versa?”
Chapter
19
• Kathy gets the call from Louise. The one she always half expected. Keith put the pressure on, slapped Louise around some. She told him what he wanted to know.
Alright, deal with it, Kathy tells herself. The hell with Keith. Let’s do it.
She takes a personal day and goes to Hoboken. Visit the sick girl, least she can do. Crazy Keith probably waiting for her. What difference does it make? He knows where she works now. He’ll show up sooner or later.
Outside the PATH station, Kathy finds a cab, tells the driver Louise’s address and that she wants to cruise the street, make sure a certain someone is not around. Driver nods. What’s he care? More money on the meter. Kathy sits in the left corner, checks in her purse for the little cylinder of Mace. She puts it in her right-hand coat pocket, the cap loose.
Louise lives on a block of six-story buildings, sort of rundown residential. No big Harleys in sight. Kathy gets out two blocks away and calls Louise from a pay phone, says she’ll buzz three times, be waiting.
She puts a scarf over her hair, turns up the collar of her coat. Waits for some people going in the same direction.
“Hi,” she says. “I might move in around here. What’s the neighborhood like?”
“Oh, good,” one of the women says. They’re older; one’s probably a grandmother, at least.
Kathy walks close to them, scanning the street, keeping the conversation going until she reaches Louise’s building. “Wait a sec, will you?”
Kathy steps into the vestibule, buzzes Louise. When the door clicks, Kathy waves. “Oh, good, my friend’s home. See ya!”
She’s watchful going up in the elevator to the third floor, and stepping into the hallway. Louise opens the door at the end, calls out, “You’re home.”
Kathy walks in slowly, studying Louise. Three dark bruises on her face, maybe some she can’t see.
Kathy holds her friend’s shoulders. “I’m really sorry.”
Louise shrugs. “I’m okay. I could’ve worked. But who wants all the questions.”
“Well, you did everything you could for me. More. I’ll always be grateful.”
“Alright, alright, let’s not get all serious. I’m watching Oprah, about lesbians who marry gays. Is this an exciting world, or what?”
“It’s an exciting world.”
Louise is wearing jeans and a turtleneck jersey. Very tight. “Hey, you got other injuries?” Kathy gestures at the jersey. “Or are you just trying to show off your tits?”
Louise makes a thin smile. “Still pretty good, huh?”
“You want to answer the question? You want to give a lady a drink?”
“Sorry. Make yourself at home. We’ll get something, then sit over there in the IC unit.”
Louise laughs as she goes to the kitchen, gets two glasses, a bucket of ice, a bottle of gin and a bottle of cranberry juice. “Buffet style,” she says. “The way you like it.”
Kathy takes her coat off, turns the TV off, sits on the living room sofa. A small one-bedroom apartment. Sort of un-decorated-looking, as though Louise just moved in. Kathy thinks she’s been here two years.
After they mix up some red gin, Kathy says, “So what, really, is the damage?”
“Just what you see.” Louise is in the big easy chair, legs folded beneath her. Her light brown hair combed out almost straight. No makeup. She makes Kathy think sexy librarian. “And he grabbed my arms real hard. They’re blue. Shook me a lot. I think he likes that.”
“Makes your tits jump.”
“He said that.”
Kathy waits. “And?”
“Well, he was real dramatic. Scared me more than he hurt me.”
“That’s Keith. Guy ought to go to Hollywood. Get paid for acting all the time.”
Louise laughs.
“I notice you’re not all that angry, Louise. You’re nuts, you know, if you even think about this guy for one second.”
“I know. I know.” She glances around vaguely. “Look, the main thing is you. He said he’ll be seeing you.” Louise watches for her reaction.
Kathy sighs wearily. “It doesn’t matter, Louise. It just doesn’t matter.”
“Nothing’s left? No sparks?”
“Nothing. Everything he stands for, I’ve moved past it. You like Keith. You take him.”
“Maybe I would . . . but he likes you.”
“He doesn’t like me. He wants me.”
“Well, that’s a compliment, isn’t it?”
“Oh, sure. Louise, he wants me on the back of his Harley. Prize pussy. Jerking him off on the New Jersey Turnpike while we’re doing eighty.”
“Damn. Thinks big, doesn’t he?”
They both laugh together, almost like old times.
“Louise, I think you like this shit.” She gestures at the bruises. “Is life so boring?”
Louise shrugs.
“Puts a glow in your cheeks, does it?”
“Leave my ass out of this.” She laughs, uncomfortably. “Anybody ever knock you around?”
“Yeah, my father. To put it politely. You know what I mean?”
“Oh, Kathy . . . I don’t think I understood.”
“Remember when he died? You were more upset than I was.”
“Oh, that’s terrible. I’m sorry.”
“Well, it’s something you put behind you, and you try to move on. Keith, I guess, was a lot like Dad, now that I think about it. See, I’ve got to move on, get away from all that.”
“Ohhh.” Louise looks sad a moment. “So how is all . . . you know, your plans?”
“Good. Fine. Everything’s on schedule.”
“You got him?”
“He proposed, I’ll say that much.”
“Oh, congratulations.” She holds up her glass.
“Thanks. Let’s wait until you get the invite.”
Louise looks skeptical. “Wait, is proposing the same as leaving his wife?”
“He’s married almost nine years, Louise. How fast can a man jump? Being fair about it?”
“You tell him about Keith?”
“You kidding?”
Kathy stares at her friend. She’s holding herself in an oddly sensual way. Her voice gets quiet when she talks about Keith.
“Louise. I think you want the guy . . . or maybe you already did.”
Louise looks away.
“Louise, sweetie. I don’t care. It’s your funeral. Just get something straight. The guy would fuck a doughnut.”
“You can be rough, you know th
at?
“You don’t listen, you know that?”
“So . . . who does?”
They sit in silence for a while. A quiet, sort of timeless feeling in the room. Kathy thinks it could be a room anywhere in America. Anytime when it’s light out. Louise squirms on the sofa, says, “So what’re you thinking about?”
“What a loser Keith is. . . . The shit I did when I was twenty. It’d turn your stomach.”
“Maybe not mine.”
“Alright! Nurses!” Kathy laughs. “Guys always saying you’re hornier than normal.”
“We see a lot of bad stuff.”
“You see a lot of bodies.”
“We see people sick and dying. Anything healthy, well, we appreciate it. Maybe more than most people.”
“Great. Well, Keith isn’t healthy.”
“Are we fighting? I don’t have a problem with Keith. You do.”
“What?”
“Forgetting you ever knew him. Meanwhile, he’s going to be around.”
“Really, I do not have a problem. Nada. I see him on my door, I’ll have him arrested.”
“For what?”
“Anything the man’s got on his mind is illegal.”
They laugh together again.
“Hell, I’ll Mace him. I’d shoot him if I could. It’d be selfdefense, wouldn’t it? You ought to think along the same lines.”
“I don’t think I could hurt him.”
“Oh, Louise.”
“I am a nurse.”
Kathy pours some more gin, shaking her head. The bullshit people tell themselves. She’s all beat up. Waiting for the next time. What can you do? The only reason Keith talked to her was to get to me. That and maybe getting laid. Kind of sad, but what can you do?
• • •
In the train under the Hudson, going back to Manhattan, Kathy tries to put Louise out of her mind. A lot of heart. A great heart. But look what she’s doing with it. And Keith. Put him out of my mind, too. The hell with him, really. Louise still doesn’t believe me. I tell her ten times, and she still thinks I’m in love with the guy, because she is. . . .
Kathy thinks back, again, over all the times she’s seen Robie. She thinks about the office, the lobby of the building, the streets nearby. Did anyone ever see them together? Did they ever even nod hello to a passing acquaintance, either of them?
Maybe at the very beginning. When they were just chatting. Wouldn’t mean anything to anybody. Newspaper people are very friendly. A lot of them drink together. Lots of laughs. Me and Robie chatting, a few feet apart, nobody would look once.
Never once went to my place.
Interesting, she thinks, how careful I was. Not even sure why. Probably some TV program about asshole divorce lawyers. Why give them ammunition?
Thing is, nobody’s ever seen us together. That might be important, the way Robie’s talking now, maybe doing something extreme. . . . Didn’t think the guy had it in him.
Clever, really. Nobody in the whole world knows about us. Robie and me, working it out, private business, the way it should be.
Kathy gets out at 34th Street, in a good mood. She thinks about going by the office. Then realizes she’s probably not entirely sober. Got to be real careful.
She laughs. I see Robie in this mood, I’ll scare the hell out of him, for sure. Get him to fuck me in an elevator or something. Whoa, girl. Let’s just go shopping.
Chapter
20
• Anne goes down the steps into the basement. A delicious tenseness in her whole body. Things you aren’t supposed to do . . . why are they so much fun? Well, no, she thinks, not fun exactly. She’s nervous, scared. She can feel the beat of her heart. But she wants to do this; she’s sharply aware of enjoying it, in a way. It’s not just the hope that she might learn something. It’s the knowledge—there’s a voice in her head saying this—that she’s doing something she shouldn’t do.
But then you do it anyway, she thinks. You just do it. And there’s this odd, sickly pleasure. The way orchids are. They’re just too pretty, and they smell evil. . . . Oh well, all my people were Puritans, what can you expect?
She glances at her watch. 6:34. Robert called to say he’d be a little late, he thought he’d be on the 7:07. How many times is that now? She should have been counting, keeping a record. But that was never their style. One of them was always late, or changing things in a minor way. What difference does a half hour make? Or even an hour? Still, she’s sure that it’s happening more now. Or New York’s more chaotic than last year, and editors work more. . . .
I have to start listening more closely to his excuses, she thinks. Never mind. I’m safe now. Coming down here. . . .
It’s an almost empty basement, used only for storage. Twenty big cardboard boxes are stacked along one wall. There are piles of magazines and old clothes. They talked about putting a ping-pong table down here, or a pool table. There was always the sense that they’d have children and then the whims of the children would decide what filled this useless space.
The man who installed the recorder looked around and said, “Well, it’s getting warmer. Nobody wants a blanket now.” He put the device on two magazines, under a half dozen folded blankets. “You don’t have flooding, do you?”
She said, “No, never.”
Anne stands with her arms folded, staring at the stack of blankets. The odd thing is that she can access the device by telephone, from anywhere. But she worries she’ll push the wrong buttons, erase something. No, that’s so little of the truth it’s a lie. She likes coming down here to this musty place. She likes touching the expensive little piece of hardware and listening to what it contains.
She likes, she realizes, the rising anxiety in her chest. The totally alert sense that each second is important, that every sound is something she must pay attention to. The sounds on the machine. The sounds that could come suddenly from upstairs. It’s a very long shot that Robert would say he’s going to be late, then come early. Still, she knows she is vulnerable.
Anne tries to remember something in her life that combines danger and anxiety and sin, the way this does. She has to go way back. Nothing she did as an adult seems to qualify. There’s nothing in college or B school. She thinks about all that hot, clumsy making out when she was a teenager growing up in Ohio. But how sinful is that? Everybody’s telling you to do it. All she can think of, really, is when she first masturbated, when she was fourteen, fifteen, somewhere in there.
Yes, she remembers the time with a putter. An uncle—her favorite uncle—played golf and he left the clubs in the front hall. She sat in an old chair and played with his putter. She remembers twirling it. The adults were in a room close by. She could hear their voices; that was a big part of it, the fear of discovery. She remembers how she sat there on that hot summer day, in some loose shorts, and fondled—really, that’s what it was—the putter. And then she got the idea of sliding the handle along her thigh, inside the shorts, until the blunt end of the putter touched her underwear. And very carefully she pushed it against her vagina, feeling exquisitely evil, then up higher to her clitoris. She remembers how she leaned forward, covering what she was doing. Still, the putter was sticking out way past her knee. Anybody would have suspected something. She moved it just a little, steady flicks of her wrist. God, she can still remember the turmoil in her thighs, her pelvis, right up past her stomach to her pounding heart. Every few seconds she had to monitor the voices, make sure nobody was moving around. She got wetter and wetter, until she was sure there would be a stain on the chair’s upholstery. But she didn’t want to stop, she remembers this clearly, she wanted to keep going, going and going, forever. Her body tightened just like a string on her Gibson guitar, everything seeming more shrill and high pitched. Dear God, it was wonderful. The room started to become hazy and brighter. There were probably minutes when the whole family could have been watching, and she wouldn’t have known. Maybe they did; and they were always too polite or embarrassed to mention it. Maybe
, she realizes, you secretly hope for some horrible exposure, a scandal that proves how truly evil the whole thing is, and how evil you are. But what she remembers for sure is how she struggled with every nerve to make sure nobody did see her. How she stayed with it, cunning and furtive and watchful, and jabbed that putter against herself until a wave of prickly heat seemed to rise through her body. She remembers gasping but trying not to, almost little hiccups. And when the wave passed, she could suddenly smell herself, she was so wet and sticky, which seemed to her the perfect finishing evil touch. She put the putter back and ran to her room. When she was changing her clothes, she realized that her uncle might later smell the putter. The very part he would be holding. Her favorite uncle! She wetted a cloth and raced back to wipe off the putter. The voices still droning in the nearby room. Then she went back to her room again, threw herself on her bed, and thought something like, Gosh, that’s so horrible, thanks, God.
Anne is smiling at the details still so clear in her memory. She realizes with a start that she’s pressing her thumb against the front of her skirt. Not much, just a subtle accompaniment.
Going to the dogs, she thinks. Robert comes home now, I may attack him. Well, that could be awkward if he’s been . . .
She looks at her watch. 6:51. Damn.
She goes back to the steps, listens upstairs. “Robert!” What if he came in while she was daydreaming? “Robert?”
When there’s no answer she goes quickly to the blankets, squats down next to the recorder. She plays the voices at a very low volume, just listening for Robert talking to a woman, fast forwarding through anything else, through her own conversations. Listening also to any sounds from upstairs. The whole time keenly aware of the almost sexual pleasure she’s getting from all this.
It takes ten minutes to check the last three days of calls. Nothing. Still nothing. And yet she’s more sure, just on instinct, that Robert is pulling back from her, drifting somehow, spinning into another orbit.
The bastard, she thinks, resetting the machine, concealing it again.
I really need him now. I wish he would throw me on the living room floor and make love to me. But what if . . . ? I could pull him into the shower, wash him off, like it’s a game.
Too Easy Page 8