The Nicholas Linnear Novels (5 page)

Justine stirred on the other side of the couch, as far from him as if she were in another country, and he smelled her fragrance.

“It’s late,” she said. But it made no sense, was meant, he supposed, to fill a void that was becoming too threatening for her.

But this kind of inner tension was one of the things that most intrigued him about her. Oh yes, she was extraordinarily beautiful in his eyes; if he had passed her on a busy Manhattan street, he would surely have turned his head, even, perhaps, followed her into Bendel’s or Botticelli before he lost her in a swelling crowd; what else does one do with those kinds of fantasy? When one followed them up, one was invariably disappointed. Then she would have been on his mind for an hour or so. But so what? Physical beauty, he had learned quite early, was the arbiter of nothing, could even be a dangerous and bloody thing. More than anything else, he needed a challenge, with women as well as with all the interests in his life. For he felt quite deeply that nothing in life was worth possessing without a struggle—even love; especially love. This too he had learned in Japan, where women were like flowers one had to unfold like origami, with infinite care and deliberateness, finding that, when fully opened, they were filled with exquisite tenderness and devious violence.

Just the creamy splash of the surf now, the record gathering dust on the immobile turntable. There came the cry of a gull, lonely and querulous as if it had somehow lost its way.

He wondered what he had to do; whether he really wanted to do anything. After all, there was fear inside of him, too.

“Have you been with many women?” she asked abruptly. He saw that her arms, as rigid as pillars, were trembling and that she had brought her head up with an effort. She stared at him, daring him to deride her or, perhaps, revile her, comfirming her suspicions of him and, more generally, of men.

“That’s an odd question to ask.”

She turned her head slightly and he saw the warm lamplight define the bridge of her nose, slide down into the hollow beneath one eye, at the crest of her cheek. The crimson motes were like points of burnished brass; the right side of her face was entirely in shadow. “Will you answer it?”

He smiled. “Some that I’ve not cared about. Few that I have.”

And all the while she watched his eyes for any hint that he might be mocking her. She found none.

“What is it you wish to know, Justine?” he said softly. “Are you afraid I won’t tell you?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid that you will.” Her nails plucked at the nubs of cotton as a musician fingers the strings of a harp. “I want to and I don’t want to,” she said after a while.

He was about to say, with a smile, that it wasn’t so serious but he realized that it was; he knew what she was talking about. He came around the end of the sofa, stood by her. “It’s only me, Justine,” he said, “who’s here. There’s only the two of us.”

“I know.” But it was not enough because she had said it like a little girl who did not quite believe what she was saying, wanting only some outside reassurance for an important inner act.

She broke away from this tight orbit, perhaps feeling the increasing magnetism beginning to influence the balance, and went across the room to stand in front of the large window. The outside lights were still on, and beyond the porch and the fluttering pitiful moths the sea broke endlessly onto the shore, the sand now as dark as coal.

“You know, for some reason this view reminds me of San Francisco.”

“When were you there?” he asked, coming around and sitting on one arm of the sofa.

“About two years ago, I guess. I was there for eighteen months, almost.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“I—broke up with someone. Came back here. Returned to the East, the prodigal daughter, into the bosom of her family.” For some reason that struck her as funny, but the laugh seemed to strangle and die in her throat.

“You loved the city.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I did that. Very much.”

“Then why leave it?”

“I—had to.” She lifted her slim hand, then looked at it, surprised that it was in that position. “I was a different person then. Not at all secure.” She clasped her hands in front of her, arms extended downward. “I was so vulnerable. I felt—I guess I felt that I couldn’t stay there by myself. There was a kind of wind sailing through me.” As if it were an afterthought, she said, “It was a stupid situation.
I
was stupid.” She shook her head as if she still could not believe how she had acted.

“I’ve been there twice,” Nicholas said. “San Francisco, I mean. I fell in love with it. It’s size; its whiteness viewed from Mill Valley.” He was watching the thin line of phosphorescence, almost transparent, that marked the rise of the surf and its subsequent fall to earth, coming in, coming in. “I used to go down to the shore just to watch the Pacific and think: Here are these waves rolling in, rolling all the way across the world from Japan.”

“Why did you leave?” she asked. “What made you come here?”

He took a deep breath. “That’s difficult to sum up in words. I suppose it was an aggregate of many things, a slow accretion.

“My father, you know, he wanted to come to America. He loved Japan. Fought for it, always. He might have come here himself but—it wasn’t his karma, I suppose. It was something he regretted.” The spume was like silver lace far away—out there on the bosom of the sea. “If there is a part of him within me, then he’s here now and that makes me feel all right.”

“Do you really believe that? Life after—”

He smiled. “Oh yes. Oh no. I cannot tell you truthfully. East meets West inside me like swirling currents and there is a kind of tug of war. But about my father, my mother. They are with me, yes.”

“It seems so odd—”

“Only because we are here, standing on a porch in West Bay Bridge. If we were in Asia …” He shrugged as if this explanation were sufficient. “And, too, I came here to prove to myself that I could be a Westerner as well as an Easterner. I majored in mass communications at college, launched into the atom age. Advertising seemed a logical choice once I came here and I was lucky enough to find someone who was willing to take a chance on me as a raw trainee.” He laughed. “It turned out I was a natural.”

She turned her body sideways to the surf, facing him fully. She came and stood next to him. Her long hair swirled, a link; they had not touched. “Do you want me?” she whispered like the tide. “Do you want to make love to me?”

“Yes,” he said, watching her eyes, their expanded pupils darkening the green to black. He felt a tightening in his stomach, no longer quite certain of his own ghosts, feeling a filament of fear, a feather brushing the base of his spine. “Do you want to make love to me?”

She said nothing; he felt the nearness of her hand rather than saw it, mesmerized by her eyes, the glowing motes like magnets. He felt its heat, then the tips of her fingers touched the skin of his biceps, curled around the muscles there, firmly but without squeezing, and it seemed to him that the simple gesture communicated so much that it was as if she had never done it before; that it had never been done to him before in just that way. And that first contact was so electrically tender that he felt the muscles of his thighs trembling, a sighing in his heart begin.

He wrapped her slowly in his arms and he was quite certain she cried out, a tiny burst of erotic emotion, “Oh!,” the abandoned ardor of the music, just before his lips covered hers. Immediately her mouth opened under his and he felt the length of her body pressing against his, building heat at the fulcrums of breasts, belly and the juncture of her thighs.

How hot she seemed as his lips caressed her long neck, tracing the rounded edge of her collarbone. His hands pulled at her shirt. Her lips were at his ear, her tongue circling, circling like that last hungry gull above the night-dark beach, and she whispered, “Not here. Not here. Please—”

Lifting her arms and the shirt came off; his fingers stroked her spine, the deep long indentation. She shivered and moaned as he licked under her arms, moving slowly to her full breasts, the nipples already hard and puckered.

Her long fingers unfastening the snap of his jeans, her nail clicking together as his open lips covered the upper slopes of her breasts, spiraling inward. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.” And brought him out of the jeans, already half-erect, stroking him softly to full hardness as he sucked her nipples.

He felt the fear give a last flutter, like a tired sigh, before it evaporated utterly. They sank lower and lower, twisting and trembling with anticipation as the remainder of their clothes came off. Her hands moved to push down the pair of thin silk panties but he stopped her, picking her up from the carpet, one hand under her buttocks, the other at the small of her back, lifted her half onto the sofa, moving between her spread thighs, bending, his opened lips finding their soft inner sides, moving slowly upward, toward the high silk-covered mount. Her fingers were white as they gripped the front edge of the sofa’s pillow; his tongue touched the moist silk and she moaned again, her back arching.

He began to lick at her through the thin barrier of the silk and her hands flew to his head, stroking his ears, her wide opened mouth making small involuntary cries as the tension built inside her rapidly. Then he moved aside the sopping silk and buried his face against her. Her nails grazed his back as her long legs jerked convulsively upward. Her ankles locked against his spine. He moved slightly upward to her core, sucked it into his mouth. Her loins rolled upward in powerful thrusts as she cried out, his tongue and lips constantly moving until he felt her shuddering against him, heard her scream, the tenseness dissolving out of her, and wetly, heatedly, she drew him up toward her, her fingers seeking him, her lips wildly on his, wanting him in her now, at this precise moment, more than she wanted anything else, to continue the exquisite heat she felt, to give him pleasure as he had given her.

Her sex felt like a furnace as she guided him into her. She rammed her belly against him as he buried himself to the hilt; they both groaned with the sensation. She surrounded him with her arms, languorously twisting her upper torso so that her lush breasts rubbed back and forth across his chest. She moaned with the intense stimulation to her hard nipples. She licked at his neck as he used his hands on her, all over, increasing her pleasure, riding high within her, and at the end, when she found the tension almost unbearable, when the sweat and the saliva ran down her arms and between her breasts, pooling in her navel, when his frictioning against her was so intense that it took on a kind of third dimension, she used her inner muscles once, twice, heard him gasp, felt herself balancing on the brink, the thudding of their hearts heavy in her inner ear, whispering to him, “Come, darling, come—ohhh!” gasped out as she felt his probing finger, slick with their mingled juices, at the opening of her anus and lost all control, filled with fire all the way up to her throat.

Dr. Vincent Ito stirred the hot chrysanthemum tea steaming in the handleless ceramic cup. Disturbed, several dark bits of crushed leaf swirled upward from the bottom, circling the surface. They reminded him of floaters. They were coming, he knew, had been for a month or so. Those bodies, once people who had leaped or, unconscious, had, perhaps, been pushed into the East River or the Hudson during the long winter months. Consigned to the deep, they had been preserved by the chill at the bottom, undisturbed by the sluggish currents until the beginning of the summer when the water heated up. At thirty to thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, bacteria would begin to breed, causing putrefaction and gases that would, eventually, bring the body to the surface, and the floater, months after it had gone in, would be brought to him at the Medical Examiner’s building.

That certainly did not bother him. Since he was an associate medical examiner, it was merely part of Vincent’s life. An important part, he had admitted to himself long ago. The morgue, in the building’s basement, with its steel-jacketed doors stacked one atop the other marked by their neat, typewritten cards, the scrubbed gray tile floor, the great scale upon which the corpses were weighed, was where he lived most of his days. There was nothing ghoulish about it, passing the brown and white bodies laid out on the shining gurneys, bloodless, the great T-shaped incisions across the chest from shoulder to shoulder and down across the abdomen, the epidermis thick like leather, the faces as peaceful as if they slept the sleep of the innocent. It had no effect on him. The interest and, yes, the excitement of forensic medicine was, for him, the intricate puzzle of death. Not so much what it was but rather what had caused it. He was a detective whose work among the dead had, many times, aided the living.

Vincent stared out the window as he slowly sipped his tea. Darkness still spread itself before the coming dawn: 4:25. He was always up this early.

He stared out at the city, the lighted empty streets of Manhattan. Far away he heard the grinding of a garbage truck making its lentitudinous way along Tenth Street. Then closer by, a police car siren cut abruptly in, shattering the quietude. But it too, after a time, was gone, evaporating into the darkness. Nothing remained in the night but his thoughts, twisting upon themselves.

He felt trapped. My karma must have been very bad in my last life, he told himself. Japan seemed as inaccesible as if it were in another time. It no longer seemed possible for him ever to find it again, at least the Japan he had left twelve years ago. For him there was no more Japan; it was but a withered flower—calling him still like a siren of the sea.

Nicholas awoke just before dawn. For just a moment, he was quite convinced that he was in his old house on the outskirts of Tokyo, the Zen garden, the oblique shadows on the wall by his head made by the stand of tall rustling bamboo. He heard a cuckoo’s brief call, the rush of the morning’s traffic into the city, muffled, funneled and yet magnified by the distance and the peculiar acoustics of the topography.

He turned his head, still half asleep, saw a female form asleep beside him. Yukio. She had come back after all, he thought. He had known she would. But now to actually have her here beside him—