Dangerous Women (39 page)

Well, the hell with that. She’d already groped my crotch in the car, and that ought to be enough to break the ice. I reached for her and kissed her, and I got one hand on her ass and drew her in close.

I could have peeled those jeans off of her, could have ripped that fine silk blouse. I had the impulse.

More, I wanted to do some damage. Soften her up with a fist in her belly, see what a liver shot would do to her.

Fact: I have thoughts like that. They’ll come to me, and when they do I always get a quick flash of my mother’s face. Just the quickest flash, like the flash of green you’ll sometimes get when you watch the sun go down over water. It’s gone almost before it registers, and afterward you can’t quite swear that you really saw it.

Like that.

I was gentle with her. Well, gentle enough. She didn’t pick me out of the crowd because she wanted tender words and butterfly kisses. I gave her what I sensed she wanted, but I didn’t take her any further than she wanted to go. It wasn’t hard to find her rhythm, wasn’t hard to build her up and hold her back and then let it all happen for her, staying with her all the way, coaxing the last little quiver out of the sweet machinery of her body.

Nothing to it, really. I’d been taught young. I knew what to do and how to do it.

“I knew it would be good.”

I was lying there, eyes closed. I don’t know what I’d been thinking about. Sometimes my mind just wanders, goes off by itself somewhere and thinks its own thoughts, and then a car backfires or something changes the energy in the room, and I’m back where I was, and whatever I was thinking about is gone without a trace.

Must be like that for everybody, I suppose. Can’t be that I’m that special, me and my private thoughts.

This time it was her voice, bringing the present back as sure as a thunderclap. I rolled over and saw she was half sitting in the bed beside me. She’d taken the pillow from under her ass and had it supporting her head and shoulders.

She had the air of a woman smoking a cigarette, but she wasn’t a smoker and there weren’t any cigarettes around. But it was like that, the cigarette afterward, whether or not there was a cigarette in the picture.

“All I wanted,” she said, “was to come in here and close a door and shut the world out, and then make everything in the world go away.”

“Did it work?”

“Like magic,” she said. “You didn’t come.”

“No.”

“Was there something—”

“Sometimes I hold back.”

“Oh.”

“It makes the second time better. More intense.”

“I can see how it would. But doesn’t it take remarkable control?”

I hadn’t been trying to hold back. I’d been trying to throw her a fuck she wouldn’t quickly forget, that’s all. But I didn’t need to tell her all that.

“We’ll be able to have a second time, won’t we? You don’t have to leave?”

“I’ll be here all night,” she said. “We can even have breakfast in the morning, if you’d like.”

“I thought you might have to get home to your husband.”

Her hands moved, and the fingers of her right hand fastened on the base of her ring finger, assuring themselves there was no ring there.

“Not the ring,” I said. “The mark of the ring. A depression in the skin, because you must have taken it off just before you came into the roadhouse. And the thin white line, showing where the sun don’t shine.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” she said.

She paused so that I could say something, but why help her out? I waited, and she said, “You’re not married.”

“No.”

“Have you ever been?”

“Same answer.”

She held her hand up, palm out, as if to examine her ring. I guess she was studying the mark where it had been.

She said, “I thought I’d get married right after high school. Where I grew up, if you were pretty, that’s what happened. Or if you weren’t pretty, but if somebody got you pregnant anyway.”

“You were pretty.”

She nodded. Why pretend she didn’t know it? “But I wasn’t pregnant, and this girlfriend got this idea, let’s get out of this town, let’s go to Chicago and see what happens. So just like that I packed a bag and we went, and it took her three weeks to get homesick and go right back.”

“But not you.”

“No, I liked Chicago. Or I thought I did. What I liked was the person I got to be in Chicago, not because it was Chicago but because it wasn’t home.”

“So you stayed.”

“Until I went someplace else. Another city. And I had jobs, and I had boyfriends, and I spent some time between boyfriends, and it was all fine. And I thought, well, some women have husbands and children, and some don’t, and it looks like I’ll be one of the ones who don’t.”

I let her talk but didn’t listen too closely. She met this man, he wanted to marry her, she thought it was her last chance, she knew it was a mistake, she went ahead and did it anyway. It was her story, but hardly hers alone. I’d heard it often enough before.

Sometimes I suppose it was true. Maybe it was true this time, far as that goes.

Maybe not.

When I got tired of hearing her I put a hand on her belly and stroked her. Her sudden intake of breath showed she wasn’t expecting it. I ran my hand down, and her legs parted in anticipation, and I put my hand on her and fingered her. Just that, just lay beside her and worked her with my fingers. She’d closed her eyes, and I watched her face while my fingers did what they did.

“Oh! Oh!
Oh!
”

I got hard doing this, but didn’t feel the need to do anything about it. After she came I just lay where I was. I closed my eyes and got soft again and lay there listening to all the silence in the room.

My father moved away when I was still in diapers. At least, that was what I was told. I don’t remember him, and I’m not convinced he was there. Somebody got her pregnant, it wasn’t the Holy Ghost, but did he ever know it? Did she even know his last name?

So I was raised by a single mother, though I don’t recall hearing the term back then. Early on she brought men home, and then she stopped doing that. She might come home smelling of where she’d been and what she’d been doing, but she’d come home alone.

Then she stopped that, too, and spent her evenings in front of the TV.

One night we were watching some program, I forget what, and she said, “You’re old enough now. I suppose you touch yourself.”

I knew what she meant. What I didn’t know was how to respond.

She said, “Don’t be ashamed. Everybody does it, it’s part of growing up. Let me see it.” And, when confusion paralyzed me, “Take off your pajama bottoms and show me your dick.”

I didn’t want to. I did want to. I was embarrassed, I was excited, I was …

“It’s getting bigger,” she said. “You’ll be a man soon. Show me how you touch yourself. Look how it grows! This is better than television. What do you think about when you touch it?”

Did I say anything? I don’t believe I did.

“Titties?” She opened her robe. “You sucked on them when you were a baby. Do you remember?”

Wanting to look away. Wanting to stop touching myself.

“I’ll tell you a secret. Touching your dick is nice, but it’s nicer when someone else touches it for you. See? You can touch my titties while I do this for you. Doesn’t that feel good? Doesn’t it?”

I shot all over her hand. Thought she’d be angry. She put her hand to her face, licked it clean. Smiled at me.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Claudia, my blonde. I’d wondered, without much caring, just how natural that blondness might be. Still an open question, because the hair on her head was the only hair she had.

Had to wonder what my mother would have made of that. Shaving her legs was her concession to femininity, and one she accepted grudgingly.

Got so she’d have me do it. Come out of the bath, all warm from the tub, and I’d spread lather and wield the safety razor. I’d be growing whiskers in a couple of years, she told me. Might as well get in some practice for a lifetime of shaving.

I asked Claudia what she didn’t know.

“I just wanted an adventure,” she said.

“Shut the world out. Keep it on the other side of that door.”

“But you’ve got a power,” she said. “The same thing that drew me to you, pulled me right across the room to where you were standing—it scares me.”

“Why’s that?”

She closed her eyes, chose her words carefully. “What happens here stays here. Isn’t that how it works?”

“Like Las Vegas?”

She opened her eyes, looked into mine. “I’ve done this sort of thing before,” she said.

“I’m shocked.”

“Not as often as you might think, but now and then.”

“When the moon’s full?”

“And left it behind me when I drove away. Like a massage, like a spa treatment.”

“Then home to hubby.”

“How was it hurting him? He never knew. And I was a better wife to him for having an outlet.”

Taking her time getting to it. It was like watching a baseball pitcher going through an elaborate windup. Kind of interesting when you already knew what kind of curveball to expect.

“But this feels like more than that, doesn’t it?”

She gave me a long look, like she wanted to say yes but was reluctant to speak the words.

Oh, she was good.

“You’ve thought of leaving him.”

“Of course. But I have … oh, how to say this? He gives me a very comfortable life.”

“That generally means money.”

“His parents were wealthy,” she said, “and he was an only child, and they’re gone, and it’s all come to him.”

“I guess the Ford’s a rental.”

“The Ford? Oh, the car I’m driving. Yes, I picked it up at the airport. Why would you—oh, because I probably have a nicer car than that. Is that what you meant?”

“Something like that.”

“We have several cars. There’s a Lexus that I usually drive, and he bought me a vintage sports car as a present. An Aston Martin.”

“Very nice.”

“I suppose. I enjoyed driving it at first: the power, the responsiveness. Now I rarely take it out of the garage. It’s an expensive toy. As am I.”

“His toy. Does he take you out and play with you much?”

She didn’t say anything.

I put my hand where she didn’t have any hair. Not stroking her, just resting it there. Staking a claim.

I said, “If you divorced him—”

“I signed one of those things.”

“A prenup.”

“Yes.”

“You’d probably get to keep the toys.”

“Maybe.”

“But the lush life would be over.”

A nod.

“I suppose he’s a lot older than you.”

“Just a few years. He seems older, he’s one of those men who act older than their years, but he’s not that old.”

“How’s his health?”

“It’s good. He doesn’t exercise, he’s substantially overweight, but he gets excellent reports at his annual physical.”

“Still, anybody can stroke out or have a heart attack. Or a drunk driver runs a red light, hits him broadside.”

“I don’t even like to talk about something like that.”

“Because it’s almost like wishing for it.”

“Yes.”

“Still,” I said, “it’d be convenient, wouldn’t it?”

It wasn’t like that with my mother. A stroke, a heart attack, a drunk driver. There one day and gone the next.

Not like that at all.

Two, three years after she showed me how much nicer it was to have someone else touch me. Two, three years when I went to school in the morning and came straight home in the afternoon and closed the door on the whole world.

She showed me all the things she knew. Plus things she’d heard or read about but never done.

And told me how to be with girls. “Like it’s a sport and I’m your coach,” she said. What to say, how to act, and how to get them to do things, or let me do things.

Then I’d come home and tell her about it. In bed, acting it out, fooling around.

Two, three years. And she started losing weight, and lost color in her face, and I must have noticed but it was day by day, and I was never conscious of it. And then I came home one day and she wasn’t there, but there was a note, she’d be home soon. And an hour later she came in and I saw something in her face and I knew, but I didn’t know what until she told me.

Ovarian cancer, and it had spread all through her, and they couldn’t do anything. Nothing that would work.

Because of where it started, she wondered if it was punishment. For what we did.

“Except that’s crap and I know it’s crap. I was brought up believing in God, but I grew out of it, and I never raised you that way. And even if there was a God, he wouldn’t work it that way. And what’s wrong with what we did? Did it hurt anybody?”

And a little later, “All they can give me is chemo and all it’ll do is hurt like fury and make my hair fall out and maybe stretch my life a few months longer. My sweet baby boy, I don’t want you remembering a jaundiced old lady dying by inches and going crazy with the pain. I don’t want to hang around that long, and you have to help me get out.”

School. I didn’t play sports, I didn’t join clubs, I didn’t have friends. But I knew who sold drugs; everybody knew that much. Anything you wanted, and what I wanted was downs, and that was easy.

She wanted to take them when I left for school, so that I’d be gone when it happened, but I talked her out of that. She took them at night, and I lay beside her and held her hand while sleep took her. And I stayed there, so I could tell when her breathing stopped, but I couldn’t stay awake, I fell asleep myself, and when I woke up around dawn she was gone.

I straightened the house, went into my room and made the bed look as though it had been slept in. Went to school and kept myself from thinking about anything. Went home and, turning my key in the lock I had this flash, expecting her to be walking around when I opened the door.

Yeah, right. I found her where I’d left her, and I called the doctor, said I’d left in the morning without wanting to disturb her. He could tell it was pills, I could tell he could tell, but he wanted to spare me, said it was her heart giving out suddenly, said it happened a lot in cases like hers.

If she was alive, if she’d never gotten sick, I’d still be living there. With the two of us in that house, and the whole rest of the world locked out of it.