A Private Sorcery (18 page)

“Can I help you?” Rena asks.

“Yeah, let me in.” She recognizes the voice—a night voice, whiskey, cigarettes. “Beersden. I'm one of the lawyers here.”

“I talked to you on the phone.”

She can feel him looking her over, appraising the pieces: the tailored slacks from one of her former work suits, the walking shoes, her hair, uncut since she left Muskowitz & Kerrigan, a mop of curls.

“Sorry about that. I realized after I hung up that I'd given you a hard time—the thing about killing the messenger.” Beersden intertwines his long fingers. There's a tightness in her chest. He looks at her throat as she swallows. “So here I am. Spoon-feeding
le Napoléon
a tidbit for his pint-size ego: one night meeting a week, ten to twelve.”

A week later, she sees him standing by the elevator bank. She watches the elevator come and go before realizing that he's waiting for her.

“I brought you something.” He hands her a cassette. “A German woman doing Billie Holiday—a very silky rendition.”

She flushes. Had her Walkman been turned up so high he'd heard the music or had he looked at it sitting on her desk?

Upstairs, he disappears into Hornby's office. Alone in her cubicle, Rena unfolds the notes that accompany the cassette. Among the performers' names, she sees Beersden listed as the pianist for five of the cuts.

At quarter to twelve, she takes her break. She sits in the chair in the ladies' room listening to the German singer, not wanting to see Beersden as he comes out of the conference room. But the next night, when she arrives at the building, he's on the steps, his motorcycle helmet at his side.

“How'd you like the tape?”

“I liked it a lot. You're very good.” Her fingertips are tingling, and she feels separate from herself—perched atop a boa tree looking down at the wildebeests beginning a mating dance. “They have you here two nights in a row?”

“No.” He pauses. “I'm on my way downtown to practice with my band. We have a gig Thursdays through Sundays, and we practice Wednesdays.”

It's simply sexual energy, she tries to reassure herself. You've just forgotten.

“So they think it's because of your family that you're not here nights, but really its because of your music.”

“Even if I weren't also a musician, I wouldn't put in more hours. Lawyering is a job, not a life.”

“Still, you stay incognito?”

“Yes.” He looks her straight in the eyes, a look during which she has the uncomfortable feeling that he knows everything, about Saul, about Ascher, about her lost father. “Just like you.”

She stares at her shoes.

“When do you take your break?”

She can see it already, what will come. I'm not ready for this, she thinks. She counts the months since Saul's arrest on her fingers. Six.

“They give you a break, don't they?”

“At two.”

“I'll take you out to breakfast. Meet me here.”

By one-thirty, the last of the associates has left the office. In the ladies' room, she washes her face, brushes her teeth with the toothbrush she keeps in her cubby. She studies her face in the mirror: her mother's heavy-lidded eyes, the Italianate mouth. Until Ascher, she'd always thought of herself as odd-looking—scrawny with big breasts, pale skin, and unruly hair too dark for a blonde and too light for a brunette. Ascher, though, had found her beautiful. He would push her hair off her forehead and stare at her face. To him, it was all the same, beauty and goodness. What was beautiful must be good, and although she'd later come to see this as a dangerous idea, with Ascher it was a belief that went back to fairy tales, to maidens in gardens and princesses in towers and girls bathing in a sun-dappled stream. He'd seen her face in the flashing lights of the front room at Alil's with the pounding beat of the music coming from the room in back, where men pressed their crotches to the glass cages inside which Sammy and the other girls danced, and he'd been unable to think of anything else until he had her out of there.

With Saul, she has never felt that her face or for that matter any other part of her body particularly moves him. At first, she'd thought it's because they're too similar, eight long, thin limbs, two curly heads, as though the same cast were used to create them both with her breasts and his genitals added on afterwards. Not that Saul has not desired her. But what he desires is to commune with her desire. Once, she'd tried to tell him that if he were less concerned with her, if she didn't feel him
watching her so closely, it would be easier. “Did you ever have sex just to have sex?” she asked. He looked at her curiously. She could feel him trying to understand her question. What she was trying to understand in him. What she was trying to tell him about herself. “The first time. To get rid of the burden of virginity. My brother gave me the girl. She really wanted him, but she was willing to settle for me.”

In truth, what Saul wants is her mind. To think with her. To watch her think. To see her spirit. Perhaps that's it. He's seen her spirit as beautiful. Her face, her body, have been largely irrelevant. It's very noble. If it isn't very exciting, whose problem is that?

She takes the elevator downstairs, passes the guard and walks out into the August night. The air is hot and moist like the inside of a mouth. Beersden is standing in front of his motorcycle with an extra helmet under his arm.

“Here,” he says. He places the helmet on her head and buckles the strap under her chin. He looks at her sleeveless dress and then takes off his denim jacket. “Wear this. It's cooler when you ride.” She puts on the jacket. She can smell him in the denim. He climbs on the bike and she gets on behind. She holds on to two fistfuls of his T-shirt.

At Eighteenth Street, he turns west. He stops in front of one of the retro diners that now dot the city: Hopper with cappuccino machines. She's relieved that he knows not to bring her to a bar or a dark, smoky place. Inside, there are hanging lights and emerald green booths. He orders a hamburger and a beer. She feels too nervous to eat, her stomach hard and heavy as if she'd swallowed a river rock; afraid of exposing this, she orders iced tea and a turkey club.

When the sandwich comes, it's a many-layered thing with red-flagged toothpicks holding the stacks together. Bacon peeks out from one section, slices of turkey and avocado from another. She picks up a piece and tries to bite but can't get her mouth around it.

He pulls her plate toward him and takes the stacks apart, reconfiguring them into smaller sandwiches. “When you have kids, you spend half your time in restaurants fixing the food.”

“How old are your children?”

“Four. Identical twins.” He opens his wallet: two little girls crouched back to back on a shaggy green rug, two blond heads bent over two identical baby dolls.

“Is your wife home full time with them?”

“She's a freelance writer. Now that they're in school, she actually has some time to work.”

“And she doesn't mind your going out to breakfast or lunch or whatever you call this with other women?”

He looks down at his burger. The muscles in his face seem to collapse and she sees that she has hurt him. Half an hour alone and already she has hurt him.

She puts down the mini sandwich he's made for her. “I'm sorry. That was crude of me.”

“It's warranted.” He closes his eyes and presses his fingertips against the lids. She sees that she's had him all wrong—a rebel without a cause, an artist who lives by his feelings, something out of late-night television. Something that has nothing to do with him.

“I've never done this before.” He jerks sideways so his legs are freed from the booth. She can see the outline of his thighs under his jeans. “I love my wife. I love my children. I don't know why I'm here.”

S
ATURDAY NIGHT, HE CALLS
her from a phone booth on West End Avenue. It's three in the morning and she's undressed, reading in bed. “I'm on the way home from my gig. Can you give a guy a cup of coffee?”

“I don't drink coffee.”

“A beer?”

“No beer.”

“Can I slurp from your sink?”

“You're driving from the Village to Brooklyn through the Upper West Side?”

“I'll explain when I get there. What's your address?”

She gives it to him and he hangs up quickly, as though if he lingers one of them will change their minds. She puts on shorts and a T-shirt,
runs damp fingers through her hair. Outside, she hears a motorcycle turn the corner and stop in front. The night doorman buzzes. “A Mr. Beersden here to see you.”

She had not thought about this part. About the doorman as witness. About Santiago next door.

She opens the door before the bell rings. He's carrying his helmet. He looks first at her solemn expression and then over her shoulder at the long hall lined with her black-and-white city photographs, at the vase filled with calla lilies on her coffee table, at the doorway to her bedroom and the lights from across the river shining beyond. He sighs as if something is now confirmed. He pauses for a second to look in her eyes, to be certain of her consent before kissing her, and she feels startled by her own response: her muscles tightening, her inner sensations gone liquid. She leads him back to her room, onto the bed with the sheets still warm from her body. She peels off his leather vest and he moves on top of her, his belt pressing into her stomach. He pushes her hair back from her eyes. “Now I can see you,” he whispers. He kisses her again, and again she is startled because for so long what she had felt with men was revulsion, every mouth her stepfather's reeking of halitosis and beer, so that only now does she see that what she had thought of as desire with Ascher and then with Saul was simply the absence of revulsion: that this, this craving of her own mouth for his, this way that her hands work to get off his jeans and T-shirt, this arching of her hips into his, is something else.

She feels embarrassed by her own activity, as though she is the man and he the woman, but her body and her breath have a mind of their own, her movements toward him matched by his so that he grows ever more intent on her, and for a moment she fears she will dissolve in sorrow as she sees that she has never understood bodies or sex and that it is only by chance, the chance of Hornby's temper tantrum, that this has come to pass. Together, their skins feel satiny, without temperature, neither warm nor cool, and she thinks, how could I not have known this before, that a man and a woman can pull one another into each other.

Afterwards, he lies propped on pillows watching the night river, the
lights of the boats moving like constellations at the horizon, while she fetches iced glasses of juice. She sits cross-legged at the foot of the bed in one of Saul's undershirts, only he doesn't know yet about Saul. He sweeps an arm around at her Florentine sheets and the Persian rug that had come from Saul's grandparents' house and the set of perfume bottles she'd inherited from Rebecca, neither of them wearing perfume but both enchanted by the glass, and the Victorian fainting couch Saul had purchased in anticipation of one day becoming an analyst. “These are not a secretary's digs,” he says, reaching out a hand to stroke her ankle.

She tells him about Muskowitz & Kerrigan and about the merger with Cassen & Silvano, about quitting in June, about taking the job at the law firm as a holding position while she thinks through what to do next. He finishes his juice and moves toward her, his mouth tasting of fermented fruit, and she inhales his breath and lets him draw her up to the pillows and then down on the sheets where he puts his hands under her buttocks and lifts her legs up around his waist and whispers, “You haven't told me a thing, I'll have to discover it all for myself,” and her hands move down his back and her pelvis up to meet his and again she thinks, how can it be that only now, at thirty-four, I am learning that my body can want like this?

She thinks about the two men she has loved, and how with each there'd been this great wall in their sexual life. Ascher had overpowered her with his obsession for her, his passion leaving no room for her own timid wishes to emerge. At eighteen, starved for love as she'd been, it had been impossible to untangle what she felt for him from what she felt about being so loved. With Saul, there was the relief of his lightness: the lightness of his slender torso atop her, the lightness of his desire, the corpus a vestigial inconvenience, a leftover from animal ancestry, sex, at base, an epiphenomenon. Their sexual encounters had struck her as almost technical exercises, like Hannon piano scales, Saul's vast concentration brought to bear on catalyzing her responsiveness. Patiently, he persisted, both of them declaring his efforts a success, so that only now does she see what a limited success it had been.

Beersden curls around her, his hands cupped over her breasts. He talks, whispering in her ear. He tells her how he's never so much as flirted with another woman in eight years of marriage to Sherry. Not while she was pregnant and blew up like a balloon. Not while he struggled with his terrible resentment that with the news of twins, it was clear that Sherry would not be able to go back to full-time work anytime soon, a fact that had prompted the two sets of parents (her father a prominent lawyer, his father a banker) to come together to devise the plan of his going to law school. It was Sherry who wept at his having to give up living in music. She kissed each of his fingers. She looked with horror at her huge belly, inside of which two little mouths were already making sucking motions. Comforting her, he lied that it would be an adjustment, not a change. He regaled her with stories of musicians who were doctors by day. Painters who taught elementary school. And, in fact, it had worked out. Yes, for the first two years of law school, while the girls were babies and the household a circus of diapers and bottles and pacifiers and toys and laundry, he was unable to play music with other people. But, even then, he put fingers to keys every day. He rocked bouncy seats with his left foot while he played Chopin mazurkas, Debussy nocturnes, Scarlatti sonatas, gave bottles while listening to Artur Rubinstein, to McCoy Tyner, to the tapes of African bands the percussion player from his old group sent in the mail. Day and night, the apartment was bathed in music, which the girls called alternatively
mukey
and
mucus
and
pano
and
sinning
as they made their first attempts at speech.