“And he adored you.”
“Madly.”
“I always wondered. Where did you meet him?”
“In an elevator. He struck up a conversation, offered to buy me a drink. This was after you started pulling away. I was feeling vulnerable. I let him buy me a manhattan. He had nice hands.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“And he wore a Rolex.”
“There it is, the secret of my undoing. A Rolex.”
“It was a very nice watch,” she said.
“And you didn’t give me a chance after that.”
“I did, don’t you remember? I told you about him, and you turned away.”
“You told me there was someone else. I was supposed to take you out dancing?”
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t going to fight for you.”
“And right there was the problem. I could tell that all you wanted was a way out. So I gave it to you.”
“You don’t know how much it hurt.”
“Yes I do,” she said.
Granted, her display of bitterness didn’t include the brilliant image of the three of us hoisting a pitcher of piss, but it was plenty tough and plenty accurate, and it hurt like only the truth of things can hurt.
So of course we met for drinks.
We met at a hotel bar, something intimate and classy. At this point the enterprise takes on an air of inevitability. Over drinks we each blamed ourselves for what happened. It was my fault. No my fault. No really, my fault. Okay, your fault. Shared laughter. All part of the dance. And the next part too. So really, no really, how are you?
Not so good, either one of us.
Her marriage had died, become a farce. Her husband had shady business dealings and a mistress with blond hair and skinny legs, and she didn’t really care. When I met Julia, she had been an art student, pulling espressos at the local coffee shop. Now she didn’t know what she would do with the rest of her life. But she needed a change, she said. She was ready to change everything.
And me? My relationships since her had been frank disasters. I was in the same apartment as when she knew me. My legal practice was limping along. When we were engaged I had two partners, both had deserted me, and now I was practicing alone.
“As in love as in law,” I said in that fancy hotel bar.
“Things haven’t quite worked out the way we had hoped,” she said.
“No, not really.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“So am I. But more and more I find that life is nothing but regrets.”
“That is so sad.”
“It is.”
“But I know what you mean.”
“And I guess you’re just one more on the list.”
We parted with a hug and a shrug, a wan good-bye and good luck. As if the purpose of the whole thing was to lance the boils of bitterness that had grown like goiters on our necks so we could both, separately, go forward with our lives. But that wasn’t the purpose, was it? And even as I stepped out of that bar, I knew that wasn’t it. Because about some regrets in this world there is nothing you can do, but this was not one of them.
She called.
It was late on a Sunday night. I had been lying on my pleather couch, my shoes off, my head resting on my hands, remembering the way her lips would part ever so slightly in the middle of sex.
And she called. On my cell phone.
“Victor,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“I’ve been thinking of you.”
“Where are you?”
“Victor?”
“Because wherever you are, I’m coming.”
“I’m parked outside your building,” she said.
And this is the thing about falling into bed with your old lover: it is the best of both worlds. It is new, spanking fresh, spontaneous in the way it only is the first time with someone who has your blood and your soul at fever pitch. But it is also old and familiar, as comfortable as your favorite pair of jeans. The steps, the sounds, the scents, as familiar as hearth and home.
I missed you. I think about you all the time. I’m sorry. Kissing you feels so right. I think I’m ready now, finally, yes. If it wasn’t for your husband. Forget about him. It could be perfect. Maybe. We need him out of our lives. He already is, I’ve already moved on. What got into us? I don’t know. I’ve been in a fever about you for days, for weeks. Are we really going to try again? We can make it work this time, I know we can.
And the words are sincere, absolutely, as sincere as any words can be accompanied as they are with tossed socks and bra hooks coming unloose.
Her shoulder, her neck, the soft underside of her breast, so new and so familiar. The brush of her fingers across my tattoo, the smoothness of her thigh, the taste of her tongue, the delirium that leads to the sweetest step in the sweetest of dances. Because it’s not happening just in the present, it’s happening in the past and the future, too, and all three are suddenly pure and full of promise. The unzip, the pull down, the kiss of the calf, still taut and lovely, the bite, the laughter, the sigh, teeth clacking, hands gripping, an ecstasy over the horizon so distant and so close it leads to a burning-
And then, smack in the middle, after commitment but before consummation, the knock at the door, a knock so loud the walls shake.
3
The car was still there, Sims and Hanratty were still there.
“They came,” I said to her as I stared out the window, “to tell me that your husband was murdered.”
I didn’t turn around when I said it. Whatever registered on that lovely face, a reaction of staggering shock or something else, something more frightening, I didn’t yet want to see it. It was my legal training kicking in, I suppose. The sad truth about lawyers is that we are fantasists, we make up stories in our heads, stories we can weave for judge and jury, but we don’t want to know the reality. And what fantasy could ever be larger than lost love recklessly reclaimed?
“What did you say?”
“Your husband was murdered, Julia.”
“Where? How? Victor?”
“At the house,” I said. “Shot through the head.”
“Victor, stop it.”
“Not long before you showed up here,” I said.
“Stop it. Just stop it. Please.”
There was a quiet for a moment, and then a whispered “Oh, my God,” as if she had just put together the meaning of my words, followed by the sound of something falling, collapsing, a long, dangling rope dropping to the ground.
I supposed she would expect me to rush over and help her through it. I supposed she would expect me to act like a human being. But instead I stared out at the cops sitting in the car in front of my apartment building and I thought over a few things. Like how Julia had come back into my life just a few weeks before her husband was murdered. Like how it seemed almost too wrong to be a coincidence. It might all have been a slapstick twist of fate, sure, and every piano that falls out of a fifth-floor window has to land on some sap’s head, but if it wasn’t pure happenstance, then I was already in serious trouble.
I took another look at the cops in the car, then I pushed myself away from the window and walked over to her.
She was lying quietly on the floor, hands over her face, towels strewn about her naked body. Her jaw was shaking, her breasts were rising with each shallow breath. I stared at her for a moment and wondered what I was seeing. A devastated woman who had just lost her beloved husband? No, surely not that, or why would I be seeing her at all? A cold-blooded killer trying to use me as an alibi or, worse, a fall guy? At first take it added up just like that. But she was so lovely I couldn’t stop myself from hoping that she was something in between, and that hope itself was enough to allay for a moment the brutal doubts that had bound tight my emotions.
I bent down, put one arm behind her neck, snaked the other arm beneath her legs, lifted. She was lighter than a woman her size had any right to be. I smelled the shampoo in her hair and felt the silky heat of her skin as I carried her to the couch. I placed her gently on the cushions so she was sitting up. From the bedroom I fetched her a blanket, with which I covered her modestly. From the kitchen I fetched her a beer, which I placed into her hand. She sipped from the bottle once and then ignored it while her dazed eyes darted to and fro. I sat close and petted her still-wet hair.