Mercy (63 page)

I go to the unmade bed, very much aware of my excitement and what it is doing to my body. The tumbled sheets are cool, the heat of the last body to he here long dissipated. But not the odors. Naked I crawl into the madder blue sheets and smell the woman who lives here. Once again I am like a deity, a blue immortal entering between the sex of this unknowing woman, the folds of her sheets like the folds, the innermost folds, of her sex. I pull the sheets around me, between my legs, under my arms, around my neck and feet, only my head sticking out of her blue vagina with the dark shadows of the surrounding room like the dark pubes of her vulva. I feel bright in my face and secure in my soul, riding between the legs of this woman, inside her, looking out at the world and imagining what we must look like, big she and little I, as though we were a painting by Frida Kahlo.

The sheets quickly grow warm in the muggy night, then hot. When I am thoroughly drenched in perspiration, I come out of the sheets, slick with sweat I come out of a blue birth. I kick at the covers and fling them off, get them away from me, strip them loose at the foot of the bed, and throw them in a corner. Then I lie back on the bare bottom sheet, the only one left, spread out my arms and legs, and he in the center of the bed, alone, feeling the engulfing tickling spreading over every tiny millimeter of me as the perspiration evaporates and leaves me cooled. But I still smell the sheets, which I now have made some part of myself as well as of her, by virtue of the moisture of my recent blue birth.

And I wait.

She has a key, too, and I hear it in the lock of the front door. Though she does not live here she has been here before, and I hold my breath and listen to her step onto the wooden floors. The door closes behind her. I have not turned on any lights nor does she, knowing she mustn’t change anything. Whatever she finds, she accepts. But her steps are slow as she moves through the barely dark, negotiating shadows and faint patches of pale light. Silence as she crosses a rug, and then her footsteps again on the wooden floor through the rooms to the bedroom doorway, where she stops. The light here is bluer, but more telling. I know she sees me on the bed. I begin to breathe again, my mouth closed, sucking the much-wanted air through my nostrils with whooshing gusts I know she can hear because they fill the room.

I hear a tap as she kicks off one of her heels. A double tap as the other falls. I hear the sound of clothes, the soft thup of buttons yanked through their holes, a zip, a snap, the slump of clothing sliding to the floor and the muted pop of elastic against bare flesh.

When I roll over to face her she is close, within arm’s reach, bathed in the madder blue light coming from the window behind my back. She has already begun to work on herself, her legs bowed slightly as though she were playing a cello, her right elbow out away from her body, moving ever so subtly from the action of her hand. Her head is tilted back, her hair hanging long over her shoulder and behind her as her left hand cups the bottom of a lavish breast with an indigo nipple.

When I was a child I used to watch my mother do this, precisely this.

Soon, in the pale light I can see that she is perspiring, that her hand is moving more vigorously, her legs are bowing even more. Hyacinth rivulets are streaming down the sides of her forehead, one, two, down her arched neck, headed toward the indigo nipple of the breast that is rolling free, the one she is not holding. Her legs continue to bow until she is almost on her knees, panting as I had panted after holding my breath, only she is making sounds in her throat as well, hurried, sad sounds that suddenly make me want to cry.

I turn away from her to the madder blue windows and the black palms. I feel them coming, coming, coming from way down inside my heart, crowding up into my chest like a sob, gorging through the narrow channel of my neck, scattering frantically up through the fissures of my face and into my eyes. I lie listening to her, to the quicker, frantic, ululating approach to her climax, and when it happens, when she gasps as though she is being stabbed and stabbed, the tears spring from my eyes in quick streamlets, limpid, profuse ejaculations that run down my face and take me back to my childhood, to my mother slumped against the bed in exhaustion. Then for an instant, for a clean, fleeting instant, I feel exactly as I did then, my emotions a moil of fear and desire and disconsolation…of a longing for something I did not then understand, nor do I understand it even now.

I lie still. Her head is on the bed and a great luxurious sweep of her hair is touching my naked hip.

I would, and do, go to great lengths to recapture that brief, precise emotion from my childhood. Great lengths, and my abiding fear is that someday I will not be able to reproduce it just exactly as I remember it. Indeed, it is becoming more difficult to do with passing time, and this has caused me hours upon hours of anxiety. Why is this threatening to elude me? What would my life be like without it? Thinking of it panics me. I have tried to re-create the emotions of that moment by simply casting my mind back to those childish years when the emotion itself was born. A few times I have actually done it. But more and more it requires a woman, young as my mother had been young, her breasts as ample as her breasts had been, her flesh as smooth and taut as hers had been when she first invited me to share. It has required this. And the aftermath. It works now only when I know in the lower substrates of my mind that the aftermath is coming, though I do not think of it or anticipate it consciously. The aftermath is my gift to her. Bittersweet. And I think she would understand it. I know she would. For she is the one who taught me what I know, and made me what I am. She was the one who blurred the borders between love and lust, who stole my childhood, and taught me while I was still too young to know, the meaning of betrayal.

The woman has recovered her strength now, and I feel her moving against the bed, getting up and going to the bag that I have brought and set down beside the bedroom door. I hear her open it, her hands moving among the things that I keep. I know what she is doing and a warm liquid begins to flow inside me, spreading out through all my limbs until I vibrate. I keep my eyes on the black palms.

When I feel the bed moving I know she is climbing onto the bare sheet, the bed sinking here and there under the weight of her knees, shifting as she positions herself, knees on either side of me. And then I look around. She is a tall girl, long-limbed, high-hipped, and breasty. I love her breasts, which in the madder blue light, I can see are still streaked with perspiration. Her stomach is drawn flat with excitement, and she is smoothing back her hair, which has become wildly tousled. Dangling from her raised arms I can see the ropes she has tied to her wrists, and I know that others are around her ankles as well, though I cannot see them because they are doubled back behind her, alongside my own legs.

She is magnificent, and I can feel the ache beginning within my own groin, the ache that will take us beyond anything she has ever experienced. I rise up and embrace her body, my arms around her buttocks as I pull her vulva to me and feel its wiry lubricity against the depression in my throat, smell the singular fragrance of her sweat. I take my tongue from the top of her pubes, up the center of her stomach to the depression that is her navel. I encircle it with my lips and begin to nurse, feeling her stomach against my face, feeling her fingers thread themselves into my hair.

Of the things I am about to do to her she has no intimation, though she thinks she knows why she is here and what is going to happen. It will be a rare thing. For her, a singular event. For me it will be yet another sequel, the price for reliving that haunting passion from my childhood, the price for keeping it alive though it has caused me more anguish in my life than if I had been possessed by devils.

50

B
y the time they had made their way through the crowded hallway, down the elevator, and across the lobby and out to the front of the administration building where Palma had double-parked, it was a quarter past ten o’clock. Palma pulled out onto Houston Street and pushed the department car under Memorial Drive and quickly up onto the Gulf Freeway. They were already circling south of downtown and Palma was easing over to the right to pick up the Southwest Freeway before either of them spoke.

“Tired?” Palma asked.

“Yeah, that too,” Grant said, looking out the window toward the twin clusters of skyscrapers that distinguished Green-way Plaza and the Post Oak district from downtown.

“In the mood for any particular kind of food?” Palma asked.

“No, you decide. I’ll eat whatever you want.”

“Then I’m going home,” Palma said. “How do sandwiches strike you?”

“Oh, sure, that’d be perfect.” He was surprised, looking around at her. “But wouldn’t you rather not go to the trouble? A diner’s fine with me.”

“If it’s all the same to you,” she said, “I’d really rather go home. At my place, we don’t have to keep our shoes on.”

It wasn’t until she was unlocking the front door with Sander Grant standing beside her that Palma had a moment’s apprehension. All of Grant’s talk about what you could tell about a person from their surroundings, from what they kept on their bookshelves and in their closets, in their refrigerators and in their medicine cabinets. She had the sudden feeling that she was giving everything away, giving Grant the advantage from the moment they walked through the door. The advantage to what? To hell with it, she thought, and pushed the door open.

She invited him to make himself at home, and offered to take his suit coat and hang it up, but Grant just shook his head as he pulled it off and draped it over the back of one of the dining room chairs.

“There’s a guest room and bath through there,” Palma said, motioning past the stairs as she laid her purse on the dining room table.

“Yeah, I’d like to wash up,” Grant nodded. “Thanks.”

Palma just about had everything pulled out of the refrigerator when Grant came back into the kitchen, rolling up his sleeves.

“What can I do?”

“That’s okay,” Palma said. “Just pour yourself whatever you want to drink. There’s some wine and beer in the refrigerator, and some iced tea, I think.”

“What about you?” he asked.

“Wine is fine,” she said. “Glasses are up there.”

Grant got the glasses out of the cabinet and poured one for each of them and set one beside her on the tile counter. Then he leaned against the cabinets and watched her slice the roast beef and smoked ham, and lay out a platter of green onions and olives and cheeses and celery and tomatoes and sliced boiled eggs. Grant started nibbling. Neither of them spoke, which didn’t seem odd to her at all, but comfortable. She was in no mood to chat, and if he didn’t have anything to say she didn’t want to be worn out any more than she already was by trying to exchange niceties. But Grant didn’t say anything, just stood there watching her, taking an olive or pickle, drinking and thinking. She would have liked to know what he was thinking, though, without having to bother to pull it out of him.

“After being married,” he said without preamble, “how do you like living alone?”

Jesus, she thought. She tilted her head and laughed a little. “I wasn’t married that long.”

“Well, you’d gotten used to it, though, hadn’t you?”

“Yeah, I had,” she conceded, finishing slicing the bread. “Here it is. Help yourself.”

They started making their sandwiches.

“I don’t have much of a frame of reference,” he said, spreading Dijon mustard on his bread. “A good number of the men I work with are divorced. Sometimes you hear people talk about their divorces, how tough it was or how they’ve remained good friends with their ex-wives. It’s hard to imagine, to put myself in their place.”

“It’s hard to imagine even when it’s happened to you,” Palma said, sipping her wine, this time watching him. He made his sandwich with the preoccupied air of a man who had made a lot of them and didn’t need to give his full attention to what he was doing. When he finished he took one of the knives and cut the sandwich diagonally.

“You’ve gotten used to it, though, living alone?”

“You get used to anything,” she said, and the second she said it she knew that Grant hadn’t found that to be the case. But he nodded and stepped around her for the bottle of Soave and refilled their glasses. They took their plates and glasses and the bottle into the living room, where they set them on the small table in front of the sofa. Palma kicked off her shoes.

He grinned and sat on the edge of the sofa and untied his shoes too, and slipped them off. Then he pulled out his shirttail and the two of them sat on the floor, Palma leaning back against the front of an armchair and Grant leaning back against the sofa, their legs stretched out in front of them, almost toe-to-toe. Grant sipped his wine and looked at Palma again. Then he smiled.

“I appreciate this,” he said.

They ate for a few minutes in silence and Palma noticed that even though Grant’s mind quickly wandered, he truly seemed to be enjoying himself. She was glad she had guessed that he would have wanted to do this sort of thing. She knew he traveled a lot, doing exactly what he was doing here, a job that in itself must be something of a burden, a chain of ghosts. And she knew that motels and hotels, at least the kind you often had to stay in on government budgets, could be excruciatingly depressing. She was glad she had read this much correctly, that he seemed to be at ease. She was glad that he had stood at the cabinet and nibbled off the plate, and that he had pulled out his shirttail. All of those little things she had noted while pretending not to, all of them as welcome and comforting to her as the memory of an Eden that never was. “Yeees-ter-days, yeees-ter-days, days I knew as happy, sweet, sequestered days.” For all her man troubles, Billie Holliday knew what men should have been, even if they never were.

“Maybe men and women handle this sort of thing differently,” he said, and when she looked around he was already looking at her. She didn’t catch his meaning, and he saw it in her face.