Jake & Mimi (29 page)

Thirty-seven years ago, on a warm March afternoon, I sat in the last row of the eighth-grade classroom at West Side Catholic.
The scent of spring came through the open window behind me, mingling with the fresh shavings of the pencil I was sharpening
onto the floor. I looked up at the sound of the door, expecting to see the stern face of our Latin teacher, Father Keegan.
Instead, I saw the beautiful substitute.

The nun’s habit she wore could not contain her radiance. No, the strict black cloth only set off the pale blue of her eyes,
the warm color in her cheeks, the ivory of her neck beneath the high collar. And most of all, the quiet, stunning swell of
her bosom. Sister Grace spent the hour administering an exam, her soft footsteps filling my senses as she walked slowly down
the ordered rows of desks, from the blackboard to the windows and back again. I wondered how the boys around me could concentrate
on their tests. Each time she neared, I grew flushed and dizzy, the black text of my exam swimming on the page in front of
me. She would reach me, turn, and then start back the other way, and I would lean low over my paper and breathe in. She smelled
of rainwater and salvation.

That night in bed I gave into the fever for the first time. The priests on Sunday, the Fathers at school had been clear: when
boys felt the fever coming on, they were to clasp their hands and pray. I had always done so, but not that night. Nor the
next. Nor the next. Even now I remember the intensity of those first visions, and their innocence. I imagined her by a waterfall,
her back to me. Lowering her habit inch by inch. It took her a full week to reveal her neck, another to bare her shoulders,
a third to uncover her smooth back. I awoke each morning filled with shame, but each night I returned to her. I would go only
so far, I told myself. So far and no further.

When she appeared in class again, I drank in every delicate detail. The white of her fingertips as she pressed a piece of
chalk to the board; the curving outline of her legs as she moved. And as before, the swell of her bosom beneath the saintly
black cloth. My nighttime visions grew bolder. Soon she had stepped clear of the habit and walked naked into the calm blue
water. I wouldn’t allow her to turn toward me. Not until I saw her again.

I waited desperately for her to return to our class, but April passed without her presence. And then May. And then early June,
and the final week of classes. I thought I had lost her, but when I took my report card home to my father and he saw that
my Latin scores had fallen below ninety, he grew angry and called me into his study. My punishment, he said, would be to endure
a summer tutor. Which of my teachers should he approach?

She came each Saturday afternoon, and for one hour we sat across from each other at the mahogany table in our living room.

“
Malus
,” she would say.

“Male, malum, mali
,” I would answer, struggling to keep my eyes on her hands.

“Amor.”

“Amorem, amoris, amori
.”

Our lessons were from two to three, and when they finished, my mother would take me to the reading room at the Alcott Hotel,
where I would read the international papers to her as she sipped a double martini. As soon as we returned home, I would excuse
myself to my room, soak a washcloth in hot water, and lie down on my bed, the cloth over my eyes.

My visions grew ever bolder. Sister Grace naked in the water, turned toward me now. Her face, then her neck, then her shoulders
rising into view. I pressed the warm cloth hard to my eyes, torn between her purity and my unspeakable desire, keeping her
breasts below the waterline, yes, but allowing my free hand to drift down and do the devil’s work. Afterward I would rush
to the sink and scrub my hands with coarse soap, then kneel on the cold tiles and pray.

All through the summer this continued, until the last Saturday in August. The day of our final lesson.

At the end of it, Sister Grace put her hands on my shoulders. “You’ve been a fine student,” she said, her mesmerizing swell
just inches away from me. “I hope to see you in the fall.”

My mother and I walked to the Alcott, as usual, but we found the front doors barred and the worried concierge on the sidewalk.
A waiter had been felled by tuberculosis, he explained. The hotel would reopen on Monday.

And so we returned home.

As my mother removed her gloves in the foyer, I walked ahead of her down the hallway. A few feet from my father’s study I
stopped still, not comprehending the sounds that came through the door. I looked back at my mother. For just an instant she
stood with her head tilted, as if she might be listening to a bird. “Go to your room,” she said quietly. I didn’t move. She
walked toward me, her eyes no longer on mine but on the closed door of the study. In those eyes, already, were the first glints
of madness. “Yes,” she said as she reached me, and then again, dreamily, “yes, you had better stay.”

She opened the door and I saw the black habit strewn over the back of my father’s armchair. I heard his gasping roar and,
much softer, her startled cries. And across the room I saw the end of everything. My father’s strong forearm in the small
of her back. Her delicate fingers, curled and gripping. Her blue eyes, wide in shock. And her breasts, the breasts that had
haunted me, that I hadn’t dared to imagine, pressed hard into the desktop.

•     •     •

I open my eyes. The white plaster of the windowsill is stained with sweat, and chipped where my fingers have dug into it.
I relax them and close my eyes again. I stand still in the quiet apartment. For several minutes I stand, until the visions
subside and the storm inside me passes. When I open my eyes again, my mind is clear. Clear of the images of thirty-seven years
ago, and clear of all doubt. All weakness.

I cross the living room to the far wall and walk slowly along it, running my hand across the cassettes that fill the mounted
oak case. Cassettes that rise from just short of the floor to eye level and stretch to the window. A full year of Miss Lessing’s
evenings and mornings. These past few days I have listened obsessively. Pulled tapes at random and listened, as if somewhere
among them I might find the moment when I lost her. Instead, I found treasures.

October 14. Miss Lessing in the kitchen, listening to the classical music station as she prepares dinner. “Minuet,” she says,
and then a few minutes later: “Finale.” Teaching herself to recognize the separate movements in an orchestral piece. The next
day I sent her the Kreisler that is now her favorite.

June 2. Miss Lessing in the living room, listening to National Public Radio. A commentator mentions that Michelangelo was
seventy when he began work on St. Peter’s Cathedral. “Wow,” she says softly, and then I read her thoughts. The remark would
put her in mind of the elderly. She would think of her father. I waited, and she walked to the kitchen and phoned him.

May 10. I take the cassette from its slot and turn it in my hands. I hold it to the light, as if I might see into it. May
10. The first time I heard her with her fiancé.

Her sounds were beautifully simple and quiet. The sounds of a woman who turns to sex for the deeper communion it offers. What
thrilled me most in listening was to hear the… catch in her soft cries, the restraint. Even in love she
withheld
.

I replace the cassette in its slot and walk along the wall to the last row. I kneel down and take from near the floor the
final cassette in my collection. April 16. I recorded it three nights ago, from my car. I take the tape out of its case, walk
to the stereo, and slide it into the tape player. I hit
PLAY
and listen again to its final seconds.

“We could set rules.”

“No rules.”

“Limits.”

“No. Room twenty. The last one. The door won’t be locked.”

I walk to the window again and look down at the street below. A line of drivers in their parked cars wait for the six o’clock
chimes that will make them legal. Across the street the gilded awnings sparkle in the fading light.

At thirteen I was sent to a military school in Virginia. One hundred and forty-seven boys in my class, and I was the weakest.
When I had been there a month, my father wrote to say that he had put my mother in an institution. “It is what she needs,”
he wrote. “Pray for her.”

From the speakers behind me, above the low hiss of the tape, come the sounds of the river. The rustle of the wind on the waves.
Jake Teller must have walked away without waiting for her to answer. I close my eyes again.

It is their struggle that excites her. The stripping of their defenses, one by one.

I turn and look at the long wall of tapes. There are more than a thousand of them. Tomorrow I will box them all up and put
them away, just as I did with the others. But the collection is not yet complete. I have one more cassette to make.

Four hours from now Miss Lessing is due at the Century Motel. An Øre lies beneath the bed in room twenty. Another beneath
the front desk.

I walk to the stereo and turn it off. The apartment is quiet again.

Tonight I will give her one final chance to refuse him. Fate is character. Character, fate. Four hours from now Miss Lessing
will choose hers.

And I will listen.

I
wear low heels, and a trace of Maige Noire.

The same pink dress and my cobalt sweater. It is five minutes to ten o’clock, and I sit on a wooden bench outside the ice
room of the Century Motel. A few feet from the door of room twenty.

It is the last motel room, as he said. Past it is only the ice room, and then a chain-link fence at the end of the motel property.
I look at the door, blue and bare. Almost the way I imagined it. Lying in bed last night, and tonight as I dressed, and in
the taxi on the way over, I pictured the door and nothing else. As if I might walk to it and then turn and walk away.

The night air is cool and soothing. From this bench I can see across the parking lot into the window of the motel office.
An old man sits at the front desk, reading by the light of a lamp. Every few minutes he turns the page.

I look down at my watch. 9:58. I close my eyes and rub my hands over the knees of my dress.

I called my mother thirty minutes ago. Just before I left the apartment. I thought she would be in bed, reading, but she was
in the garden. “What’s wrong?” were her first words. I was fine, I told her. I just needed to talk.

She saw my wedding dress today. She was downtown, passing by the shop, and couldn’t resist. It was ravishing. The final alterations
were done, the beads — seven thousand of them — sewn on by hand. “You’ll cry when you see it,” she said.

I open my eyes. 10:03. I stand and walk to the door of room twenty. I try the handle, and it turns easily. I pause. I look
back, past the parking lot and the office, out to the lights of Tenth Avenue. Up into the dark city sky.

One night, in a lifetime, without rules. Without limits.

I open the door, step inside, and lean back against it. And I stare, transfixed.

In front of me is everything I didn’t let myself imagine. The white silk ties on the posts. The black blindfold on the pillow.
A cassette player on the nightstand. A lamp clipped to the headboard. The curtains by the lone window are drawn tight, and
the heat is on high. I stand a full minute with my back to the hard door.

I walk slowly to the bed and sit down on the edge. Just as I did three weeks ago, at the Roosevelt Hotel. Was it only three
weeks ago?

He takes everything from you, Mimi. Everything
.

The two white silks at the head of the bed are tied low on the posts and lie across the red covers. They end in graceful,
knotted loops that wait patiently for my wrists. The loops are impossibly far apart. At the foot of the bed, the other two
ties hang straight down from the posts. He won’t use those until he’s ready. I reach out and touch the white silk, careful
not to disturb the knot. It is so soft. I close my eyes, trembling. This room has been waiting for me my whole life. The soft
ties, the blindfold, the heat. Waiting. I only had to come to them.

I slip off my shoes, walk to the chair by the window, and place them beneath it, with my purse. I hang my sweater over the
straight back of the chair. I look to the door, then undo the buttons on my dress and slip out of it. I fold it carefully
and lay it on the chair. I place my watch on top.

I’m down to bra and lace, grateful now for the heat. I walk to the bed again. I look down at the careful arrangements, at
the desk lamp pointed down the center of the bed, the delicate knots in the looped ties. I sit down. I take the black blindfold
from the pillow and slip it on, its smooth felt soft on my forehead. I pull it close to my eyes but leave it just above them.
I lie down on my back on the covers.

I reach up with my right wrist and slip it through the loop of silk. I turn my body, reach up with my left hand, and pull
on the loose end of the tie encircling my right wrist. I watch the knot constrict, watch the silk close around my wrist, feel
its thrilling bite. I pull it tight, then turn onto my back again and press my legs together.