Until the Night (23 page)

The smell of food was the first surprise. Delorme had forgotten there was a restaurant.

“Will you be having dinner?” the hostess said. Her smile was friendly, professional, nothing more.

“I think maybe just the bar. But I need the ladies’ room first.”

“Of course. Do you know how the club works?”

“You’d better tell me.”

The hostess explained the etiquette of the different rooms and levels. She had an engaging manner and seemed to really want Delorme, and all her patrons—members, as she called them—to have a good time. The twenty-dollar fee afforded the place its designation as a private club, thus freeing it from certain legal restrictions on sexual behaviour.

The woman’s positive demeanour, the inviting decor should have lessened the sense of walls closing in, but they only made things worse. The pressure wasn’t coming from the place or the hostess, it was inside Delorme. She signed the little scrap of paper that listed the club’s terms and conditions and headed for the ladies’ room.

Now, in the first-floor bar, the music was low and the lighting dim, but there was still nothing sleazy about the place. Five or six couples sat at the tables and the bar, sipping cocktails or glasses of wine. Delorme couldn’t see a single beer mug.

“Kinda surprising how normal it looks,” Heidi said.

“Except there’s no single men.”

“They don’t allow single men. Or I think only one night of the week.”

“Uh-huh.”

They didn’t say anything for a while. Delorme had intended to ask many questions—of the hostess, the bartender, the other staff—but was silenced. The pressure in her chest wasn’t fear. She knew what fear felt like: the sudden certainty that something terrible is about to occur and nothing will be able to undo it. Having that feeling on a regular basis was part of being a cop. But fear had an honesty about it, a directness. There was no certainty here.

Jesus, Delorme thought, I’m not even honest enough to know if I’m working or not. To know why I’m in this place.

“Don’t look,” Heidi said, “but I think the couple near the panther mural is sizing us up.”

“We need another round.” Delorme ordered two more, and when she turned to hand one of them to Heidi, the man from the couple Heidi had pointed out was standing in front of them.

“My wife and I were wondering if you’d like to join us.” He had a shy smile and what Delorme thought of as a Superman curl.

Heidi bit her lip and looked at Delorme.

“I think maybe it’s a little early for us,” Delorme said. “For me, anyway. We just got here.”

“Okay, no pressure. Join us later, if you feel like it.” He looked at Heidi. “Are you Irish?”

“Not tonight.”

The man laughed and went back to his table.

“I don’t even know what I meant.”

“I do,” Delorme said.

“We probably should go sit with them. It’s gotta be more comfortable than just wandering up to the second floor on your own.”

The second floor. The second floor was where people started taking off their clothes. Full nudity acceptable but not required. Partial nudity expected.

“It says on the web page that nobody has to have sex, but that it’s not a good idea to come here if you plan to say no all night.”

“I think they were talking about the third floor.”

“Actually, no. I believe they were talking about the club as a whole.” Heidi’s voice had lost the nervous-little-girl tone. The confirmation of her desirability seemed to have given her a shot of confidence.

“What made you come here, Heidi?”

Heidi looked at her martini. “I’m mad at someone,” she said, and took a sip.

The ladies’ room on the second floor had lockers.

“The only thing I can put in here,” Heidi said, “is my cami. And then what am I gonna do if I go to the third floor—put the rest of my stuff in another locker?”

“Or you could come and get it and take it up there with you.”

“I need another drink.”

The bar was circular, surrounded by a series of alcoves furnished with long, low couches and tables. Couples were making out in several of these, including a man and a woman who were wearing only jeans. The light was dark and flattering, the music an ambiguous throb, as if the building were an engine of some sort.

There were no seats at the bar. Heidi and Delorme had an alcove to themselves.

“You’re hot,” Heidi said. “I bet they hit on you all the time at work.”

“Not really. It’s always the same—the one you want isn’t interested and the ones you can’t stand won’t take no for an answer.”

“God, does that sound familiar.” Heidi raised her glass in a silent toast.

A couple came over from the bar. The woman had perfectly straight blond hair cut in a pageboy. The man looked a little younger, maybe mid-thirties, and more nervous.

“Do you mind if we sit here?”

“Of course,” Heidi said. “Lots of room.”

The woman sat beside Delorme. The man sat on the far side of Heidi.

“My husband,” the woman told Delorme, “thinks he would enjoy seeing me make out with another woman.”

“What a shocking idea,” Delorme said.

“I think what he really means is he wants to do it with more than one woman at a time.”

“No, no,” the man said. “I don’t necessarily have to be involved.”

Heidi leaned into Delorme, a little too hard, her cold nose hitting Delorme’s neck before she righted herself. She cupped a hand to Delorme’s ear and whispered, “He’s pretty cute, doncha think?”

“I think,” Delorme said, “I’m going to save it for the third floor. Assuming I get up the nerve.”

“My name’s Janey, and this is Ron. We’ve never been up there,” the woman said. She had a wide forehead and authoritative cheekbones, the sort of face you might cast in a movie as a senator or a judge. Not a Janey. “Maybe we could venture up there together—assuming, as you say, we get up the nerve.”

When Delorme placed her foot on the bottom step of the stairs to the third floor, she had the sensation of something collapsing inside her. But she forced one foot in front of the other, following the woman, who was following the man.

“I’m staying behind you,” Heidi said, “to make sure you don’t chicken out.”

In the ladies’ room, with the locker door open before her, the collapsing sensation was replaced by something else. Delorme slipped out of her dress and hung it up, and it was as if a flock of birds had been released inside her chest.

“Are you sure you’re okay with it?” Heidi was saying to the woman. “Won’t it bother you to see your husband with someone else?”

“I think I can handle it.”

“They’re not married,” Delorme said.

The woman laughed. “Guess it shows, huh?”

“Really?” Heidi tottered a little, pulling a shoe off. “Sometimes I’m so dumb I amaze myself.”

“You gonna keep the underwear on?” the woman said to Delorme. “I think we’re allowed to.”

The third floor was designed for sex and nothing else. There were no chairs. All the surfaces were meant for lying down, not for sitting. The colour scheme was devoted entirely to the red end of the spectrum, the darkness relieved by sconces turned low.

Delorme thought she had thrown her numbness switch upon ascending to this floor, but the sight of a naked couple engaged in slow, quiet but unmistakable sex shorted that particular circuit. A hot blush, invisible in this place, spread upward from her rib cage. Her face burned with it and a fine sweat broke out across her shoulders.

Other men and women were arranged on the floor around the couple. None of the men wore clothes. Two of the women had tops on, the rest wore microscopic panties.

“Why don’t we sit over there?” Heidi pointed to the far side, where there was a gap in the circle.

The fluttering in Delorme’s stomach was not going to settle down. She had never even glimpsed a couple having sex before, let alone watched one. Thanks to the tastes of more than one boyfriend, she had seen porn movies. She had found them exciting in parts, though those parts depicted things she did not necessarily want to engage in herself, no matter what ideas the boyfriends might have had.

“Do they know each other?” she heard someone ask.

“Just met,” came the hushed reply.

The couple were in their early thirties, and they went at it with a kind of solemn devotion, aware of their audience but focused on each other. They were lying on their sides now, facing each other. A woman in the outer circle reached out and caressed the man’s back. If he made any response, Delorme didn’t hear it.

Delorme was surprised at how unsexy it was. Perhaps this was due to the complete absence of fantasy. These were real people, and Delorme found their realness constricting in a way that fantasy was not. She found herself looking at the floor in an effort to avoid eye contact. She could feel the pulses in her wrists and ankles. How strange that, while seeing the couple engaged in sex was not wildly arousing, the
fact
that they were doing it was. The
fact
that this attractive young woman was opening her legs to someone she had just met. That this well-built young man, probably with
a responsible job and a good income, possibly a good father and kind to animals, was willing to share the sight of his erect member in action with a group of naked strangers. It was not what they were doing but the
fact
they were doing it that was rearranging the tumblers in some heretofore unseen lock on Delorme’s self-knowledge.

A cool hand touched her upper back.

“Okay?”

Delorme looked back over her shoulder. Janey was looking at her, eyebrows raised. Behind her, Heidi had fastened her mouth to Ron’s, her bra already abandoned.

Bruce Turcotte stopped his snowmobile and sat for a few minutes just looking up at the magnificent fire tower before him. Middle of the bush, and here you have this perfect structure—not beautiful, but completely suited to its purpose, and built with an economy and integrity that spoke to the engineer in him. He had made his preliminary inspection a few days before and had been looking forward to the return trip.

Turcotte had been employed by the Ministry of Natural Resources for over twenty years, and in that time he had suffered his share of lousy assignments. He’d nearly frozen to death in James Bay one year, all but perished of boredom carrying out projects near communities so small they hardly deserved a name, and been driven half mad by blackflies more often than he cared to remember.