“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“We’re not in any shape to drive back to Cherry City.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, for about the fifth time that evening. “You watch.”
We left her car in the lot. I went through an exaggerated pantomime of opening the door of my truck for her, bowing, and helping her into the cab—once again I mentally compared my movements to those of a puppet or marionette—and then I got in and drove us down the Manitou peninsula, first along the winding roads that followed the shoreline, where I took it easy on the curves at first and then grew increasingly, recklessly confident, and then south down the relatively straight county route, where I floored the accelerator and hit ninety.
“Yes!” shouted Kat. “I wish this thing had a sunroof so I could stand up!” As she said it, we were approaching the crest of a steady incline at which point the road gently, but abruptly, veered to the left. We rocketed over the top and sailed through the air for a long free moment. Although it’s impossible that we could have had the time, I would swear that we exchanged a charged look, erotic and unafraid. We landed, jarringly, bottoming out near the right-hand shoulder and the ditch that lay beyond, and with tires shrieking I managed to pull the truck back onto the road without flipping over. I drove the rest of the way down the peninsula more slowly, and by the time I turned onto the east-west highway that connected us to Cherry City I was observing the limit.
SHE HAD A room at the Holiday Inn where I’d stayed when I first arrived in town. It felt odd, familiar in an uncomfortable way, to pull into the parking lot for the first time in months, to recall the ulcerous pang that inhabited my stomach for weeks, the feeling of loss that accompanied my abandonment of everything, the now-whatness of life. I’d really believed that I was coming to Michigan to write a book in relative peace, but when I was standing at the window of that hotel room at night looking down at the harbor lights, or driving deep into Manitou County, late, restless and panicky behind the wheel, I think I must have known that I’d come for nothing.
In the lobby, two of the clerks I’d seen every day during the weeks I stayed there were on duty at the front desk, but if either of them recognized me as we weaved past them toward the elevator, they gave no sign. I didn’t take it personally. After growing up in a town where strangers waved as they passed one another in their cars and then living for years in a city where people you knew pretended to be checking their cell phones when they passed you on the sidewalk, I was perfectly balanced between perfunctory neighborliness and mystifying rudeness. Two teenage girls got off the elevator when the doors opened. They eyed us and, without exchanging a word, began to giggle. I didn’t take that personally either. We rode up amid the sweet smell of cheap perfume and cinnamon gum.
She opened the door to her room and then stood leaning against it, waiting for me to pass.
“You going to come inside or are you just going to stand in the hall like a Bible salesman?”
I came inside and she let the door close behind us. I looked around. A large suitcase sat on the luggage rack. There was a laptop open on the desk, with a cylindrical container of nicotine lozenges and a half-full plastic cup of wine beside it. The wine bottle floated awkwardly in a plastic ice bucket filled with what was now water. On the laptop screen I saw a half-composed e-mail message, evidence of the other life far from here, all the thousands of things that I didn’t know about this woman. Did I really want this all over again? Another history, another pathology? This was the tension few humans could resist, between excitement and uncertainty, the push of one’s resistance to the unknown braided with the undeniable biological imperative. People decided on espresso machines more carefully than they chose lovers.
“That’s a big bag.” I gestured at the suitcase. “Planning on staying awhile?”
“Maybe.”
She reached for my parka and began undoing the snaps, the zipper, various flaps and cords. Despite the bulk of the garment, and the sweater and turtleneck beneath it, the gesture was persuasively seductive. I draped the parka over the back of the desk chair, she moved beside me and poured out a cup of the wine, then handed it to me. The peculiar play of accidental touching. Same as it was at the age of eight. Skin against skin, the foundation of every crude hope since the origin of time.
“Your husband know you’re thinking about staying?”
“God no.”
“But he knows something.” I looked at the bag again, pictured a corresponding set of forlornly depleted bureau drawers, empty hangers swinging on a closet rod back in Chicago. I tried to muster sympathy for him, couldn’t manage it.
“Nothing he didn’t already know.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t there.”
“You left him a note.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“He’ll call later and you’ll tell him.”
“Tell him what? He knows I’m here. He doesn’t have to know what I’m thinking about.”
“Or doing.”
“Or doing.”
“It might be better for him,” I said, “if he did.”
“My marriage doesn’t have anything to do with you,” she said. “So stop worrying about it.”
My moral reservations were winded easily, falling far behind me as I felt myself beginning to get aroused. Kat had sat down at the foot of the bed, and was leaning back to lift her right leg to remove her boot. She repeated the act with the left boot, and then reclined, supporting herself on one elbow as she reached out to take the cup of wine from me. She drank, straightening her back and pushing out her breasts, then looked at me.
“OK?”
“OK.” I gazed at her. “You know, I wasn’t sure we were going to see each other again,” I said. I tried to say it lightly, but my voice shuddered as I spoke.
“You knew we would.”
“Yeah, no, you seemed equivocal.”
“I’m a married woman, birdbrain.”
I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed, lightly. She fell back, giggled.
“Why would I write him a note?” she said, returning to the subject. I put my hands on her thighs. “Or is it because I’m a journalist you figured I’d want to, what? Document it?” I straightened my fingers so that the heels of my hands and my thumbs were pressing against her thighs and then moved them slowly up and in. “Or because you’re a writer? Write a note, explain everything.” I put my fingertips on the thin band of flesh that had appeared between the waist of her jeans and the hem of her blouse, moved them up and under the blouse, felt smooth skin and the ridged swell of her rib cage. “It’s like when someone commits suicide. They always ask did he leave a note.” I moved my hands back out from under her blouse and placed them on either side of her torso, put one knee on the bed between her thighs, and leaned over her to kiss her. She grabbed me by the hair and pulled me toward her. For a few minutes it was all tumble and sprawl, friction of clothes against skin, seams twisting the wrong way and digging in, gasps and moans. It was different than it had been in the car—that had been tender and tentative. Here it was clear that a decision had been reached, that all second thoughts would be afterthoughts. I reared back and pulled off my sweater and turtleneck, then helped her remove the blouse. Beneath it she wore a red brassiere, and she sat up to unhook it. I pushed her back down. I wanted to sustain the intermediary stage, half exalted flesh, half responsible grown-ups ready to swing ourselves into business casual and head off to more upright pleasures. But my taste for the intermediary waned as quickly as my initial hesitancy. Her torso was warm and sleek, with uncanny musculature, not worked-out but toned and responsive under the stretched buttery surface. I reached for her waist and undid her jeans, worked them off, slipping, for comic effect, off the edge of the bed onto the carpeted floor and bringing the pants with me. She raised herself on her elbows, an amused smirk on her face. She wore a red satin thong, something I might have found corny in the abstract but here, now, it
was the thing I had been put on earth to witness, these sculpted thighs and this plump crotch made salient by the grace note of these panties, the few wiry black pubic hairs spiking above their waistband, the stomach that sprang back from the touch like a freshly baked cake. I bent and undid my shoes, kicked them off, then removed my pants, revealing the dumb familiar sight of my erection holding the fabric at the front of my boxers aloft like a tent pole. Her face had lost the smirk and become candid with anticipation; the playground face that wants, risks, takes, loses; forgets risk and loss to want again. She took my dick and pulled me toward her.
WE STOOD UNDER the shower, bunched up at one corner of the tub as the pulsating spray of the massaging head buffeted us. I had my hands on her shoulders and was kissing her, but I was spent, a deep, satisfied exhaustion that required only the burrow of kind words and sleep. Or so I thought. Kat reached down and grabbed the bar of hotel soap from the dish, removed the paper wrapper from it.
“Ugh,” she said, her voice reverberant in the close tiled space, “I hate this stuff. When you’re close enough to get below the fake patchouli and herbal scent, it always smells like you could clean an oven with it.”
She worked the bar in her hands, building up a lather, then began washing my dick, shampooing my pubic hair with the tips of the fingers of her right hand, almond eyes studying my face, her black hair slick and beaten down by the water. She put the soap back in the dish and began kneading me gently with both hands. I looked down, saw mostly her impossible body, its curves and angles, the prominence of the veins stretching from her pubis to her hip, ghostly and slightly green under the dark skin, but with weight, weight and texture. She had very prominent veins, I saw now, veins across her upper torso, her throat, encircling her forearms like old wisteria vines, massing on the backs of her hands. Flaw or miracle, who knew. I ran my hands from her shoulders down to her backside, hefted both cheeks slightly and then let them drop. She stepped to one side to allow the spray from the showerhead to rinse me off, and when it had, I removed the thing from the mount and adjusted it so that fat pulses of water rushed from the nozzle, felt the throb of the thing in my hand, lowered it to her crotch and pointed it at her clitoris, watching the flow of water against gravity, pooling bubbling in her dark pubic hair, then falling against the enameled metal of the tub floor, a solid concentrated drumming keeping time against the ostinato of liquid whining through pipe. Kat put her head back against the tiles, eyes closed, breathing through her mouth, and I put my mouth next to hers, we breathed each other in and out for a minute, the shared taste and smell and sound as powerful an intimacy as any, and I hung the showerhead up again, half-crouched before her, and pushed into her.
It was too late when we had finished and stumbled from the bathroom’s steam-bath fog to the bed. The same fifty or hundred words appeared on the screen of the laptop, though it seemed as if I’d first glimpsed them days or weeks before, in a context I no longer recognized.
“Maybe,” I said—and even as I was summoning the words I realized that I’d said the very same thing to Susannah when things had seemed simple and clear, when the state of ignorance in which we’d willfully placed our spouses still seemed a kindness and not a form of contempt—“Maybe,” I said, “we could carve out a space for ourselves, just the two of us, where nobody else can come.” But it’s never that simple.
Kat just said, “Let’s not go overboard here.”
We were done talking for the night. Kat lay with her eyes closed, and we contented ourselves with distracted, Tourettic touching. Soon she was breathing slowly and deeply; her face relaxed into the unselfconscious composure of sleep, while I considered the emotional siege of a first encounter. Here we go again, is what I thought.
27
IT was a little after ten a.m. by the clock radio on the nightstand, and I lay in bed, watching idly as Kat dressed. I felt vaguely jealous as she dipped into her enormous suitcase to pull out a clean pair of rust-and-maroon-striped corduroys and a beige cashmere sweater—not merely envious of her fresh clothes (mine had spent the night in a tangled heap on the floor), but jealous of the million subtle puzzle pieces, the life in and out of the suitcase, all the magpie accretions women gathered and kept, and where were you supposed to begin asking how to put it all together? Why did people like me who couldn’t be bothered to learn another language, who would never study flower arranging or avidly reconstruct historic chess games, who would never dream of mastering hang gliding or woodworking, persist in taking on the monumental and disappointing task of trying to decipher other people? And to start, always, with the crudest parts of the puzzle: Who else has seen you take those cords off and put them on? Did you ever leave one of those earrings behind in someone’s bed? What does your husband say when he comes? Attraction and its discontents. A trade-off, I thought, admiring the curve of Kat’s ass in clean white panties. She turned and caught me looking. “Do you want to meet a friend of mine today?”
“Sure. But.” I pointed at the clock. “Story time.”
“If you insist.”
“You’re the one doing the piece on him.”
She pulled on her corduroys, which fit as if they’d been tailored particularly for her, and sat down beside me on the bed. “You never did tell me your news about him, by the way.”
“I never got the chance.”
“Sue me. So?”
“No big deal,” I said. “I talked to him the other day. He confirmed some of the stuff I told you about him.”
“He did, OK. So?”
“He asked where you were.”
“Me? That’s weird.”
“He noticed you. You’re kind of noticeable. Plus,” I added, “he’s convinced you’re an Indian.” A peculiar look crossed her face. “What?”
She shook her head. “He’s right. So what?”
“So nothing, I guess,” I said. Actually, I was astonished.
“Am I supposed to wear a star, or something?” She shook her head again, pushed her hair out of her face. We were silent for a long moment. “Wait a minute, why’s he asking you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. He saw us together, I guess. Anyway, I told him you were interested in him.”
“Geezum, like I need some Indian on my butt.”
“No,” I said. “I told him you were a journalist and that you might want to write about him.”
“Alexander. You didn’t. Shoot.” She got up and rapidly began to pack things into her purse.
“What?” I said. “It came up.”
“Get dressed if you’re coming.”
WE SAT SIDE by side at one of the big tables. I needed coffee; the cup I’d bought at Gagliardi’s I had surrendered to the librarian who had wordlessly glanced at the sign beside her forbidding food and drinks and then extended her hand for the contraband, eyes still averted as if it was a practiced gesture.
It was ten past eleven, and Salteau hadn’t appeared. I couldn’t remember Salteau ever having been late before. The kids were beginning to get unruly, the unfolding awareness of Salteau’s absence apparently freeing them from the unspoken contract that ordinarily bound them to their good behavior. Adults who had settled into chairs or sat cross-legged on the floor suddenly had to vault themselves back into their roles as umpires and police. One kid pushed another off the bear. Throw pillows that had been piled neatly on the floor in a reading nook began flying. Whatever force held the library together as an idea, as a set of conventions, was coming apart simply because Salteau had failed to show up.
Finally one of the librarians entered the room and began clapping her hands loudly until she’d gotten everyone’s attention.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “John apparently has been seriously delayed. He hasn’t contacted us and we haven’t been able to reach him. I’m afraid that at this time we’re going to have to cancel today’s event. We’re very sorry for any—”
Apology accepted. The adults who hadn’t already bailed on the chaos withdrew with their kids. I hear
d the librarian mutter, “They think every place is a darn Chuck E. Cheese, now.” She began gathering up the scattered books, straightening and pushing in chairs.
“Damn,” Kat said. “I think you scared him off.”
“Scared? How?”
“I’ll explain later on.”
“Why not now?”
“Just, no. Let me call my friend Becky and see if she can meet us today.” She got up abruptly and headed toward the exit.
I sat for a minute pondering Kat’s evident annoyance with me, then went to the men’s room and took a long look in the mirror. I’d thought I was content, but I considered changing my mind when I saw myself: I looked dissolute and angry, like a prairie spree killer after his apprehension; hair askew, gray stubble glinting like metal filings, eyes dull but glaring. I washed my face to see if I could wash the impression away, and then attempted a smile, which only accentuated the look of derangement. When I returned to the lobby, Kat was entering the building, tucking her phone into her purse.
“Well?”
“She asked if she could call me back.” She frowned. “This is turning out to be the weirdest morning. She says that someone called and told her that she’d won a plasma-screen HDTV. Some radio station promotion. She’s got to stay home and wait for it to be delivered.”
We were conversing in a normal tone of voice, and the librarian who’d confiscated my coffee was glaring at us. Kat took me by the elbow and led me out of the building.
“What did you mean about me scaring him off?”
“Not everybody wants to talk to reporters. As you yourself pointed out at great length.”
The Fugitives Page 22