Centuries of June (35 page)

H
e was so startled by what she whispered in his ear that his cigarette dropped from his lips and into his drink. When he turned his head to get a look at the woman who proposed such a thing, all he saw was cleavage, a pair of red lips, and the fleeting pass of her hand as it disappeared beneath the table and into his lap. He flinched when she touched him and banged the tabletop with his open hand, clattering the dishes and glasses and ashtrays. His three friends all gave him knowing looks, as if they could tell what the woman in the black dress was doing, even if he could not. Her fingers lingered just long enough and then she straightened and smiled at the party. “Here are the matches you dropped,” she said. “Thanks for the light.” She blew smoke in his face, and he was too surprised to say anything but accepted the matchbook, nodding once to the departing woman, and then pretended to turn his attention back to the rumba band and the chanteuse swaying to “El Manisero.”

Bunny waited by the telephone for the call that she knew was coming. It didn’t take long. She had written beneath her phone number to call after ten thirty. The big clock in the kitchen said 10:32. Maybe he didn’t want to appear overanxious, but she knew better.

“Is this Bunny?” the voice over the telephone said.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Phil Ketchum. From the Stork Club. You dropped your matches.”

“How nice of you to call to say you found them.”

“Dropped ’em right in my lap. I’d like to return them to you. How ’bout I drop by on the way home?”

She wrapped the cord around her finger a few times. This was her favorite part. The anticipation. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. I got to get up early in the morning—”

“Oh, I won’t stay long.”

“If you’re going to come clear downtown, you really should stay long.”

“Well, long enough.”

“Mr. Ketchum, behave yourself.” She stood and looked out at the apartment building on the other side of the street. With her free hand, she scratched her bottom, for the flannel pajamas were clinging to her skin. Jerry always kept the place too warm.

“I’d really like to get these matches back to you,” the disembodied voice said.

“Come by tomorrow morning,” she said. “After nine. My husband will be at work.” At that moment, she craned her neck to look down the hallway at their closed bedroom door. She could almost hear him snoring.

On the other end of the phone, the man paused to light a cigarette. “You best get to bed then,” he said. “I’ll be there bright and early, and you’ll need to be well rested.”

She giggled into the receiver. “Phil, you are such a hound.”

He howled, quietly, so that nobody would hear through the glass of the phone booth, and then hung up. Back at the table, Phil Ketchum ordered another scotch and soda and told the boys that he might be coming in late the next morning. They all laughed.

Once or twice a week, Phil and Bunny played a variation of the game at a rendezvous. She would be out with the girls, and he would arrange to bump into her at some nightclub or at the flicks or, once, at
the corner of Seventh and Fifty-third during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Four months had passed, but the game hadn’t lost its glamour or excitement, for she would delight in bringing him to the edge before retreating coyly. Once on the subway, she told Phil that she was wearing nothing under her skirt and managed to maneuver close enough in the packed car to let him discover the truth for himself. Another time at the library, she bit him so hard in the Anthropology section that he actually screamed in surprise and caused a security officer to investigate the trouble. They would meet and flirt seriously, and the next morning he would be hot and bothered, ready to burst.

Twice in the first months of the affair they nearly were found out. Rushing to her on an October morning, when everything was still new and dangerous, Phil bumped into Bunny’s husband in the lobby of their apartment building.

“Phil? Phil Ketchum?”

He had pulled down his hat, but he had no choice but to acknowledge him. “Jerry? As I live and breathe.”

“Why you old dog, I knew it was you the minute I saw you. What’s it been, five, six years? What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“How are you, old man? I had no idea you lived in this part of town.”

Jerry sized him up and then checked his watch. “I haven’t seen you since the wedding. Bunny and I moved down here from Morningside right after. There goes the neighborhood and all that. How are you, you old dog?”

“I’m just here meeting a friend of mine.”

“Who’s that?” Jerry asked. “We know everyone in the building.”

“Friend of mine,” Phil said. “Name of Meyers. Doesn’t actually live here, but comes down for a visit sometimes, if you know what I mean.”

He looked at his watch a second time, and then through the
sidelights on the doorway he checked the traffic on the street. “I’m not following.”

“Sees a woman here, I think.”

Like a conspirator, Jerry leaned in close and whispered, “Not Natalie Hoffman?”

Shaking his head, Phil put a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. “You know me, old man, never kiss and tell, and I don’t rat out a pal.”

“Sure, Phil, I understand. Just thought, y’know, she’s the type, a real looker. And her husband’s kind of a schlub. Listen, I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“No harm, no harm.” He frowned disapprovingly.

“I’m late to work,” he said. “But it’s good seeing you, and let’s get together sometime. Me and Bunny would be thrilled to have you and Claire over sometime for dinner or maybe drinks.”

“Sounds great, Jer.”

They shook hands. At the door, Jerry stopped and turned around. “Why don’t you stop in and say hello to Bunny, if you’ve got a minute. She’s up this morning, believe it or not, and she’d love to see you. We’re in 6B.”

“Maybe for a minute, Jer. And we’ll have to make a date for drinks.” He waved good-bye to his old friend, waited in the lobby for another five minutes, and then took the elevator to the sixth floor. They didn’t even make it as far as the bed, for he took her behind the closed door, still in her housecoat.

The second close call happened the week between Christmas and New Year’s. They had arranged to meet at a matinee showing of
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, and there in the dark, in the back of the balcony like a couple of teenagers, they stroked and petted and fumbled beneath the coats on their laps. Coming out of the theater in the late afternoon light, eyes still adjusting to the contrast, they ran into Claire’s
younger sister Kate and her high school friends, on line for the following show.

“Philip!” Kate yelled above the crowd.

He removed his hand from the small of Bunny’s back and made his way across the sidewalk. She followed close behind, certain that she had been seen. In one smooth move, Phil reached down and kissed his sister-in-law on the cheek. “Happy New Year’s, Katie.”

“Imagine running into you here in the middle of the day. Sneaking out of work, are you?”

“You caught me. You won’t tell your sister on me, will you?”

Bunny took the initiative. “Kate Dawson, I would have never recognized you. Look how grown up you are!”

Given the level of enthusiasm, Kate pretended to remember the strange woman.

“I’m your sister’s old friend, Bunny. We went to high school together, Claire and I, and isn’t it a small world, but the one day I sneak out to the movies, who shows up in the same theater but Phil Ketchum. And now you …”

Ducking out of the way, he eased back under his hat. “Small world. Had I known she was in there, we could have sat together and split a popcorn. It’s godawful long, Kate, and kinda violent for a kid.”

The gang of teenagers pressed closer to the conversation, and Katie hastened to defend herself. “I’m not a kid, Phil.”

“She’s all grown up,” Bunny said. “You’re certainly old enough to see a movie about a bridge. Why don’t you be a gentleman and treat your sister-in-law?”

“That’s all right,” Kate said. “We can pay our own way.”

“Tell Claire that Bunny says hello, would you? Nice bumping into you, Phil. Good to see you, Kate.” She raised her hand to hail a cab. “Happy New Year’s.”

Everyone wished everyone the same, Phil walked off whistling “The Colonel Bogey March,” and the crisis was averted.

T
he old man tugged on my sleeve and motioned for me to engage in an aside. I could not take him entirely seriously on account of that ridiculous fez. “I’m having trouble,” he said in a low voice, “knowing who to root for in this one. Bunny is Bunny, of course, but who is the male lead of the drama—the cuckold or the cad?”

I shrugged my shoulders, sloshing my scotch, uncertain as to the significance of his question.

“That is to say, do you remember, do we root for Phil or Jerry here? And what do you make of the gun?”

Glistening atop the medicine cabinet, the gun seemed harmless for the moment, so I shrugged once more, indicating my general ignorance.

“Anton Chekhov asserted that if you put a revolver on the mantel in Act One, it must be fired by Act Three. A principle of dramaturgy that seems eminently sensible.”

The woman in the black dress stared straight at us, hearing his every word, impatient for our interruption to conclude.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the gun,” the old man said.

In one fluid motion, Bunny lifted the hem of her skirt at her right hip and extracted, from a bespoke leather holster strapped just above her stocking, a derringer. Raising her arm in a straight line, she fired a single shot into the ceiling. The small explosion startled everyone in the room and reoriented our attention to the narrator. Bunny continued.

T
he morning after she groped Phil Ketchum at the Stork Club, Bunny waited for his arrival in a state of mild agitation. Her husband had left earlier that morning bundled like an Eskimo against the January cold,
even though it was just under the freezing mark. His precautions she found nearly unbearable; the coat and mittens and stocking cap and scarf were emblematic of the problems inherent in his general character. Jerry was a very sensible man. Got it from his mother, probably, who had babied him through childhood, hovering over his every cough and sniffle. The zealous hen had raised him to be afraid of life. No baseball, you could put an eye out. Wait two hours between eating and a swim, you can’t be too careful. No wonder her son was such a closet nebbish, not like Phil, who did not give a damn about anything and would do anything, try anything she asked of him.

He banged on the door at half past nine, careless of the neighbors, and was upon her the moment she closed the door. Bunny ran into the bedroom and he chased her, tearing off his tie, kicking off his shoes, and leaping beside her on the bed. Breathless, she undid his belt and unzipped his fly, astonished that he was already erect after little more than a kiss from her. He nuzzled her neck, fondled and licked her breasts, and kissed her on the flat of her stomach. In no time, his face was between her legs, the smooth-shaved chin brushing against her thighs, his tongue flickering like a snake’s. She lost herself in such moments, abandoned her mind to the lust that radiated from his mouth and hands. He would do anything she asked, she thought, there is nothing he would not do to please me. His hands slid beneath her bottom and he pulled her whole body toward his mouth, and she grabbed his hair and held him to her, thinking how nice it felt in her hands, soft and thick and not the bald spot like Jerry’s, growing wider day by day while the rest of him seemed hairier, his skin slick and waxy. But Phil, he filled her, and she moaned and pulled him up so that his fat dingus could go in, and she loved him and wished he could be hers.

Later in the rumpled soiled sheets, they rested in a languid stupor. She loved him more, if possible, afterward and took possession of his skin, his arms, the power in his hands. For his part, Phil waited to
begin again, gauging the energy necessary to stir himself to arousal. She knew he was allowing her to work him up.

Bunny spoke across the pillow. “Don’t you ever wish we could be together always?”

He breathed deeply and longed to rise from the bed and float away, right through the ceiling into 7B and on until he bashed through the roof and escaped gravity altogether. “I do,” he told her.

“We can’t go on like this.” She slowly raked her fingernails against the ladder of his ribs. When she hit the right spot, he flinched and rolled away, and then sat up on the edge of the bed. Bunny leaned her head against the arch of his back. In the half-light of the shuttered room, he stumbled and found his Lucky Strikes and lighter. They shared a smoke.

“We’ve been over this a hundred times, Bun.”

The first time was just a drunken whim, a chance meeting at the Carnegie Deli, a momentary opportunity when he saw her home and found her husband out on travel. But Jerry would sooner kill her than divorce her. He had beaten her years earlier, when he suspected that she was carrying on with an actor named O’Leary, and he swore he would never let her go. As for Phil, all of his finances were tied up with Claire’s inheritance, everything in her name. He would be destitute without her money. They had been over and over the options for the past four months.

With a sigh, she slipped out of bed and extinguished the cigarette in an ashtray on her bureau. From his spot on the mattress, he watched her nude form glide through the room, and she could see the lust stitched in his gaze. She moved deliberately through the light seeping between the slats of the blinds, allowing him to watch her, drinking in his pleasure at her nonchalant sensuality. Bunny knew that Claire would never dare parade in the buff in front of Phil. To make the moment linger, she grabbed a brush from the dresser and watched him watch her in the mirror as she fixed her hair. A small laugh jumped from her throat.

“What’s so funny?” He was lying down on his side to get a better look.

“Just a thought.” She dared not face him. “What if they both were out of the picture?”

“Sure, that would solve everything.” His voice oozed sarcasm.

In three quick steps, she was back in bed with him. “You have to take care of Jerry, bump him off. It’s the only way out. He’d never give me a divorce. Once I get ahold of his dough, you take care of Claire, and we live like royals.”