Seduction’s suction, he thought. He wanted action. He wanted tearing, room-defiling. He broke her hold and regrasped her. My way, he thought. He wanted the pillows on the sofa at lewd angles, the pictures askew, rape-happened furniture and the stains of love. “Awghrrh,” he roared, and pushed the girl back, shoving up her dress, up to his elbows in it, getting a fugitive image of someone rolling someone else in a blanket to put out a fire. He fumbled around inside the blue fool suit.
“Aren’t you going to take your clothes off?”
“A tough guy like me?”
“That’s cute,” she said.
Feldman rampant, roaring, amuck. Tumbling the world, rising, falling. He pummeled. He tummeled and tunneled. Aroused, he browsed and caroused and roamed and caromed. He smashed and crashed. “THAT WASN’T BAD AT ALL,” he cried in climax. It was a lyric scream.
“Shh,” she said. “Shh, shh.”
“That wasn’t bad at all,” he chopped out. He started to cough and laugh at the same time.
“You’ll bring the others,” she said.
“You are the others,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said, as if she knew what he was talking about.
“Say, give me a cigarette. Wow, I’m some tough guy. Wow. Wow. Look at me, I’m gulping like a kiddie. My heart says, ‘Gosh.’ Everything goes on. This goes on too. What a place, what a world! My heart says, ‘Golly.’”
“Shh,” she said. “Shh. Shh.”
Feldman got off her, but she made no effort to move. He had done some job on her. Through the girdle. She lay, hobbled by her dropped, ripped pants, like a fallen sack-racer. Her stockings were collapsed at her knees. Straps and buttons, clasps and wires loose on her thighs made an opened package of her legs. He stared at her thighs. They were red. They fascinated him. He took his time, bent forward and touched one. He pinched it hard, drawing no white marks. The redness goes all the way through, he thought, swallowing. It excited him. She might have been some ur-colleen, some boggy, seaside lady in black linen, shawled, a keener at shipwrecks and storms. A coffinside wailer. The real Catholic hot stuff. “Look at that,” he whispered. “How about that!”
“Pull my dress down.”
“Psst, Leo, what’s going on out there?” It was his homunculus.
“It’s terrific,” Feldman said. “It’s fabulous.”
“Pull my dress down. What is this?”
“No,” he said, “please. Wait a minute.”
“I will like hell,” she said. She sat up, tugged at her underwear and pulled her stockings taut. It was the old story. Disarray inspired him, and as she adjusted her clothing Feldman felt his energy drain off. “I think I’ve been taken,” he said quietly. “I’m over a barrel in some new way.” He sighed.
“You’ve been taken?” Mona said.
“What I don’t understand are the elaborate processes. The technicalities of your justice. Why do you have to have me dead to rights?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“All right,” he said. It was true. He didn’t understand the trouble they went to. Why didn’t they fake their photographs, rig their lie detectors? What difference did it make?
Mona finished dressing and turned to face him, sitting on a leg, flexing her big knee toward him like an enormous muscle. He recollected her red thighs. There was something terrifying about them, something powerful and secret like those biological myths about the angled cunts of Asians and erogenous palms of Negresses. There were rumors about the tough, horned nipples of Russian girls and the queer asses of squaws. Were these things true? They must be. Everything goes on. The forms of life were infinite — look at himself, his homunculus, old Short Ribs — as were the forms of death. You were nuts not to acknowledge power, whatever its source. Mona smiled at him. She must love me, he thought, she must. Otherwise — a flick of those red thighs, and he would have been done for, sent flying. He prayed silently to the red thighs, while one spur of his imagination conjured speculatively the thighs of his schicksa mom. Were they red too? Nah, he thought. She’d be alive today.
One of Mona’s earrings had fallen on the carpet, and he picked it up. It was for a pierced ear; you could have hung drapes on its hook. “Here,” he said.
“Hey, thanks. I didn’t feel it fall out.”
“Listen,” he said, “can I put it back?”
“What’s that?”
“May I put it back?”
“Go ahead.” She shook her head, and her hair swung. Feldman, failure in forests and catcher of poison ivy who never knew the planets or found the North Star and couldn’t remember which were the months with thirty days, gingerly held red-thighed Mona’s milky ear lobe. He bent his neck to see the hole, and then on impulse, arranging carefully his lips and tongue, precisely as a musician’s mouth at a flute, he blew through the aperture.
“Don’t fool around,” she said.
Feldman, who had already made several connections with the universe in the last half-hour, leaned back gratefully. He handed the girl her earring. “I might hurt you,” he said.
“Not a chance. The skin’s tough in there. I can’t feel a thing.”
He took back the earring and threaded it through her ear, deliberately clumsy. He felt marvelous. How many points, he wondered, for that sweet basket?
“We’ve been in here too long,” she said. “What about the others?”
But he had forgotten the others. He was interested now in what he might do with Mona. He saw himself at her controls: combing her hair, going through her purse for lint; then if she’d let him — always remembering the power of those red thighs, those tough pierced lobes — putting her toes in his mouth, her nipples in his ears, sitting in her lap and exploring her teeth with his fingers. “What about the others?” she repeated. “Is this smart?” It was hard to reconcile her anxiety with her red thighs, but then, he thought, he didn’t know what kind of thighs the others had. Maybe theirs canceled hers, bleached them in blood’s bright pecking order. Or maybe he was right the first time: she had done a job on him, and time was up. He stood reluctantly, nervous again, and said that maybe it would be better if they weren’t seen going out together.
“It’s too late to think about that,” she said.
“Why?”
“Don’t you know where we are? This is the warden’s bedroom.”
“It’s not,” Feldman said. “It can’t be. It doesn’t even look like a bedroom.”
“The couch is a hideaway. The wing chair’s a bidet.”
“Oh,” Feldman said. And the sofa pillows are sprinkled with Spanish fly, he thought. And the lamp is a camera. And the coffee table is a plainclothesman. Everything goes on, he thought. Why do you let everything go on? he prayed.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s face the music.” She tried to take his hand, but he wouldn’t let her have it. At the door she passed through first, and he followed sheepishly.
They were all gone; the room was empty. Mona went to the sideboard and made herself a sandwich. Feldman stood beside her as she spread mustard on a roll. “Where is everybody?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, her mouth full. “Gone home, I guess. Tomorrow’s a working day.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he said.
“Are the jails closed?”
“Well, what do we do now?” he asked.
“How do you mean? Have a sandwich.”
“They’re all gone.”
“Well, I know that. They’re all gone. They’re a bunch of party poopers. Have a sandwich.”
“I don’t want a sandwich,” Feldman said. “Listen, how do I get back to jail?”