Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel (18 page)

“But you’re here,” she says.

“It would appear so, yes.”

“That’s a verbal tic,” she says.

“What’s a verbal tic?”

He doesn’t know what a verbal tic is. But she thinks he’s asking her to clarify exactly which words constitute the verbal tic, whatever it may be.

“Saying ‘It would appear so, yes.’ You said the same thing when I asked if you were alone for the night.”

“Then it must be true,” he says. “I am in fact alone for the night, and I am also in fact here.”

“While your wife is in a motel on the interstate.”

“That’s where I guess she is.”

“What does she look like, your wife?”

“She’s about five-six, and she has brown hair and blue eyes.”

“But you prefer blondes, is that it?”

“I prefer blondes who look like you,” he says.

“Do you have any children?”

“Two.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, fucking around this way.”

“Well,” he says, “so far I’m not doing much fucking around, am I?”

Jennifer laughs. Her laugh is raw and sexy. He hopes this doesn’t turn out to be a false alarm here, because he’s already getting hard in his jeans and he doesn’t want to have to call another cab.

“Would you like a drink?” she asks.

“I think I’ve had enough to drink.”

“I’m going to have another drink,” she says, and crosses the living room to where the drop-leaf front of a wall unit is hanging open. The black silk robe flutters about her like the wings of a butterfly. He wonders if she’s wearing anything under those red silk lounging pajamas. He’s never seen Carol in lounging pajamas. Do women wear anything under lounging pajamas? He sure as hell hopes she doesn’t turn out to be a cock tease.

“Sure?” she says, and turns from the bar to hold up a glass.

“Positive,” he says.

She shrugs, pours vodka for herself into a short fat glass, and screws the cap back onto the bottle. Leaving the glass on the open bar top, she moves to the audio equipment in the wall unit, slides a couple of CDs into the player, and presses a button. A female singer whose voice he can’t recognize begins singing a bluesy number. Jennifer picks up her glass and dances over to him, arms wide, robe fluttering, floating again to where he is still standing across the room. She takes a swallow of her drink, looks at him over the rim of the glass, smiles, and kisses him on the mouth. She pulls away just as he starts getting hungry.

“How do I know you’re not fucking Alice?” she asks.

“Nobody’s fucking Alice,” he says. “Her husband drowned eight months ago. She’s still grieving.”

“Did you try?”

“I knew better,” he says.

“How come you didn’t know better with me?”

“Did your husband drown?”

“I don’t have a husband.”

“Then let’s go to bed,” he says.

“No, let’s dance,” she says, and sips at the drink again, and goes into his arms.

They move about the floor slowly. His hand slides from the small of her back to the swell of her ass under the silk garments. She backs away from him, raises her eyebrows like a virgin, and then moves out of his arms completely to sip at her drink again. Her nipples are puckered under the silk. Jesus, he thinks, please don’t let this be a false alarm.

“What time will your wife be getting down here tomorrow?” she asks.

Back to the wife again.

“Around breakfast time, I’d guess.”

Is she building up to kicking him out of here? Once, in St. Louis, he made the mistake of hitting on a flight attendant staying at the same Holiday Inn he was, but it turned out she was a friend of the flight attendant he’d fucked two weeks earlier. Gave her the same line. Only she
knew
the line already because her friend had told her all about him. So she let him buy her dinner and walk her back to her room, even invited him in for a drink, where he kept giving her the same jive he’d given Gwen—that was the first girl’s name—two weeks earlier. She finally told him he should change his line at least as often as he changed his underwear, and showed him the door. Couldn’t even remember her name now, the bitch, but was this the same thing here? Was Jennifer getting him all hot and bothered only to turn him out into the night?

“Aren’t you afraid she might see your truck where you parked it?”

“She won’t be going near the airport. Anyway, what I do is my business.”

“Oh? Is that right? Have you got some kind of arrangement or something?”

“No, but I’m my own man.”

“Oooo, big macho man,” she says.

“Look,” he says, “if you’re not—”

“Be still,” she says.

“I mean, I’m married, okay? If that—”

“I said be still.”

She moves away from him, glides to the bar, sets her empty glass down in front of the bottles arrayed there, and then lifts the folding top, closing the bar. As she turns back to him, she lets the black silk robe slide from her shoulders. And then she is fiddling with the silken cord at her waist, loosening it, untying it, allowing the pajama bottoms to slide down over her thighs and her knees, bunching at her ankles, stepping out of them in her high heels and taking a stride toward him, the palms of her hands flat on her naked thighs now.

Her pubic hair is black.

“Are you sure you prefer blondes?” she asks, and when he doesn’t answer, she says, “Why don’t you just come on over here and eat me, hmm?”

By midnight, they have
already fucked once and are lying naked on Jennifer’s king-sized bed in a bedroom overlooking a small lagoon in her backyard, getting ready to have another go at it, from the look of things. Rafe feels no guilt whatever; he has done this many times before, with many different women. In fact, he feels exhilarated. She is more spectacularly beautiful than he could have prayed for, lying beside him now with her Miss Clairol Blondest Gold hair spread on the pillow, her legs spread below where her unbleached coal-black hair tufts in crisp anticipation, one hand lying palm up on the pillow above her head, the other hand already stroking his cock again.

The combination of black and blond is somehow very exciting. My head may be fake, it seems to declare, but, baby, what you get down here is the real thing. Moreover, his being able to
witness
the disparity brings a sense of greater intimacy to their nakedness. Here I am, her bush is saying, this is what I’m really like, and you alone are privileged to see it. Me alone, and ten thousand other guys, Rafe thinks, but he’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth or any other open orifice.

What she’s doing now is positioning herself so that she can maneuver the head of his cock against her nether lips. She does this with total disregard for his own needs or desires. It is as if his cock isn’t even attached to him. She uses it like a dildo, pushing the head this way and that until she finds her clitoris and then rubbing herself against it gently at first and then more vigorously and then straddling him completely and sliding herself onto him, wet and open and savage and totally absorbed with pleasuring herself alone. She seats herself firmly and deeply, grabbing her breasts in both hands, working the nipples with thumbs and forefingers, head thrown back, blonde hair above, black below, it is almost like having two women in bed with him.

She keeps him deep inside her, insistently moving her clitoris against his shaft, locked onto his cock, lost in herself, tossing her head, murmuring cunt and fuck and cock and yes and do it and fuck me, and then pulling herself back just on the edge of orgasm, and gliding up to the head of his cock again, almost losing it, capturing it again at the very last moment, and then sliding down deep again, repeating the action, over and over again and again and again, his hands clutching her ass, yes, fuck me, she says, and then screams aloud and hangs above him in agonizing orgasm and flings herself onto him, breasts crushed against his chest, mouth seeking his, tongue lashing, oh jesus, she murmurs, oh jesus.

This is what’s nice about fucking a stranger, Rafe thinks.

She doesn’t bring up
the wife again until half an hour later. They always bring up the wife after they’ve been royally fucked, Rafe thinks. Never miss an opportunity to bring up the wife. It’s like they’re thinking, Well, you son of a bitch, now that you’ve had your way with me, let’s discuss this small matter of the little woman back home. They never put it quite that way, of course, he has never met a woman that stupid. Actually, there’s no woman on earth who will ever say exactly what she means. With women, you’ve always got to decode what they’re saying. If a woman says, “Do you think Hawaii is really as nice as they say it is?” what she really means is “I’ve booked a room for two weeks at the Royal Tahitian.” That is the way women talk. The only time women talk straight is when they’re fucking. But that’s not the woman talking, it’s the cunt. The cunt is saying fuck me, not the woman.

That was half an hour ago.

Now it’s the woman talking.

“So tell me,” Jennifer says, “is Atlanta a nice place to live?”

Meaning, “So tell me about this goddamn wife of yours in Atlanta.”

“It’s okay, I guess,” he says.

“Did you ever live anyplace else?”

He almost tells her he spent a year and four months in Reidsville, Georgia, at the correctional facility there.

Instead, he says, “Born and raised there.”

“Your wife, too?”

Here it comes, he thinks.

“No, she’s originally from Peekskill. That’s upstate New York.”

“So how’d she end up in Atlanta?”

Meaning “So how did you meet this fucking wife of yours?”

“She was going to college in Athens. University of Georgia. That’s about sixty miles northeast of Atlanta.”

“So what’d you do? Meet at a prom or something?”

“No, my sister was going to school there, too.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

She nods. She is sitting beside him on the bed, cross-legged, still naked. Her lips are only a trifle pursed. She is thinking this over. About to get pissed off that she went to bed with a married man. And enjoyed it. All of this is beginning to eat at her.

“You are so beautiful,” he says.

Rescue operation.

“Mmm,” she says, and nods again, and pulls a little face.

He is about to get kicked out of here in the middle of the night unless he says something very smart very soon. He knows she won’t believe him if he tells her he doesn’t love his wife, which isn’t true, anyway, or at least he doesn’t think it’s true. He has been to bed with a lot of different women since he met Carol, but never once has he ever stopped loving her, he supposes, although he has to admit that never once has he ever felt like this in bed with another woman. Just lying here beside Jennifer, he is beginning to get hard again. And this is without touching her again or anything, this is just remembering what happened half an hour ago, thirty-five minutes ago. He wonders if he should call her attention to the fact that he is getting hard again, give a wink in the direction of old Willie there, who has a mind of his own, and who certainly isn’t thinking about Carol in a motel someplace on I-495.

“Let me tell you something,” he says.

“Sure, tell me something,” she says.

Meaning, “But make it fast because you’re going to be out of here in ten minutes flat.”

“The minute I saw you…”

She is already rolling her eyes in disbelief.

“…I knew you were going to mean more to me than any woman I’d ever met in my life.”

Meaning what? he wonders.

She seems to be wondering the same thing. A moment ago she was turned slightly away from him, sitting there like a doubting Indian maiden with a black bush but incongruous blue eyes and blonde hair, legs crossed at the ankles, head erect and staring straight ahead, hands palm up in her lap, but now she turns her head to him and looks him directly in the eyes, wanting to know—though not asking—what he means by what he just said. Is this some bullshit line he gives to small-town girls all over the south and southwest? What exactly does he mean when he says she will mean more to him than any other woman he’s ever met, or words to that effect?

“That’s why I called you,” he says. “I couldn’t let you just walk out of my life,” he says. “I had to see you again, Jennifer. And as it turns out, I was right, wasn’t I?” he asks rhetorically. “I have never in my life felt this way with another woman.”

Meaning exactly
what
? her eyes are still asking.

“I mean
about
someone,” he says. “I’ve never felt this way
about
another woman,” he says. “The way I feel about
you,
” he says.

“And how exactly is it that you feel?” she asks.

She almost sounds prim. Almost sounds like a schoolteacher. He wonders if she’s a schoolteacher. He realizes that he knows hardly anything at all about her, and here he is telling her he’s never felt this way about another woman, whereas even he himself doesn’t know what the hell that means. But she’s waiting for an answer.

He is tempted merely to nod at old Willie down there, who is now standing erect after merely hearing Rafe’s feeble attempt at describing how he feels, present the evidence of a rock-hard cock to the court not forty minutes after he and Jennifer fucked for the second time, I mean what does
that
have to say about how a man feels about a woman, huh, Jennifer?

“Does anyone call you Jenny?” he asks, and places the tip of his forefinger on one rounded knee.

“No,” she says, and brushes his hand aside.

“Jenny,” he says, “I feel as if—”

“Don’t call me Jenny,” she says. “My name is Jennifer.”

“I’m sorry, Jennifer,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, and nods.

“What do you want me to say?” he asks.

“You’re the one doing the talking.”

“I’m married,” he says, “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t expect to meet you, I didn’t expect to fall in love with you, I’m sorry all to hell, but these things—”

“You
what
?” she says.

He blinks at her. What was it he just said?

She seems to notice his cock. At last. She glances at it slyly, but does not reach to touch it.

“Say it again,” she says.

“I’ve never felt this way before in my life,” he says.

“That’s not what you said.”

“What did I say?”

“You said you didn’t expect to fall in love with me.”

“That’s true, I didn’t.”

“Say it again.”

“I didn’t expect to fall in love with you.”

“
Are
you in love with me?”

“I think I’m in love with you, yes.”

“Think?” she says, and seizes his cock.

“I’m in love with you, yes,” he says.

“Say it.”

“I love you.”

“Say ‘I love you, Jennifer.’”

“I love you, Jennifer.”

“Say it again.”

“I love you, Jennifer.”

“Again.”

“I love you, Jennifer. I—”

“What about your wife?”

“Fuck her,” he says.

“Fuck me instead,” she says, and rolls onto him.

Afterward, he begins to
learn a little bit about her. She’s been divorced for a year and a half, she tells him, used to be married to a lawyer who still practices in Sarasota. Was married for three years before she discovered he was playing around with this redhead in his office, another lawyer, who wore minis shorter than Ally McBeal ever did.

“Which is one of the reasons I didn’t want to start up with you,” she says.

“Because I’m a redhead?” he asks, which he isn’t. “Or because I wear minis?”

“Because you’re a married man who plays around,” she says.

“All married men play around.”

“You’d better not ever cheat on
me,
” she says.

“We’re not married,” he says.

“But you love me, right?” she says.

“It would appear so, yes.”

“There’s that tic again.”

“I love you, yes,” he says.

He’s beginning to believe it himself.

She tells him that she’s been working in a jewelry boutique out on Willard, which is how she happens to know Ronnie’s Lounge, but that she’s been thinking of maybe starting her own business, if she can get her wonderful ex to make his damn alimony payments when he’s supposed to…

“I’m supposed to get a thousand dollars a month, but he’s always late with his check,” she says.

“Yeah,” Rafe says.

He’s thinking the one thing he doesn’t need in his life is paying alimony to an ex-wife, no matter how much you love another woman,
if
in fact you do love her, now that Willie has shrunken back into his shell again. She does indeed have a splendid rack, though, and a lovely ass, and he can’t get over the blonde hair and black bush, which he still thinks is entirely trusting of her to expose herself that way. He is beginning to think he’s never been quite this intimate with another woman in his life, which is perhaps what he meant when he said he’d never felt this way about another woman, which maybe is being in love, after all. He is beginning to get a little confused.

“Did you ever go to bed with Alice?” she asks out of the blue.

This is now three o’clock in the morning. Around three in the morning, they all ask you out of the blue to start cataloging all the women you’ve ever slept with. He’s almost forgotten this about women. You have to know this about women if you ever hope to survive. He’s glad he’s remembering it now. Before it’s too late. Too late for what? he wonders. And feels confused again.

“No, hey,” he says, “what kind of a bounder do you take me for?”

“Bounder, huh?” she says, and giggles.

It pleases him that he can make a beautiful woman like this one giggle. Not that Carol isn’t beautiful. It’s just that she doesn’t giggle much, anymore. Well, two growing boys, who would giggle anymore?

“A bounder and a rounder, too,” he says, pressing his luck, and damn if she doesn’t giggle again. “But I would never hit on my own sister-in-law.”

“Then what was your truck doing parked outside her house?” she asks.

“I told you. I stopped by to see her. I do that all the time. She’s my sister-in-law!”