She told Truitt about Moretti’s languid, luxurious ways, his velvet furniture and his silk dressing gown. She told of his piano playing. She told him about the dark apartment, the rooms that revealed such exotic elegance, such assurance of taste.
She asked if Truitt was sure, if he was certain that he wanted his uncertain son under the same roof. She knew there were parts of the past you had to let go of, certain lands that were irredeemably lost, sorrowfully lost, but, finally, lost forever. She wrote that she would wait for his answer before proceeding.
He responded that he wanted nothing else. He wanted his son; that was his only wish. She should do whatever was necessary. She should go to his rooms. She should dog him in the street. She should give him money, whatever he asked for.
Catherine herself was only a means to that end. He didn’t say it but she knew; it had been clear since he first told her she was to go to Saint Louis. She was both the lure and the instrument to accomplish Truitt’s deep desire. Foolish as it was.
She would always know, now, that Truitt was a sentimental fool, that he would never imagine Catherine’s own desires, confronted with such a ravishment.
There. At least she had covered herself. At least there would be no question of her conduct. Malloy and Fisk, even if they followed her, would have nothing to report.
She was always and forever delighted and amazed at her own cleverness. There was no scheme she couldn’t see through. There was no outcome she couldn’t shape to her will. By making Truitt her accomplice, she made herself the heroine of her own deceptions, and she felt a freedom and a voraciousness she hadn’t felt before. She had at first been unsure of her footing with Truitt. Now she knew she had him.
She walked through the streets at dusk, her karakul coat pulled tight around her throat, a veil hiding her face. She checked to make sure she wasn’t being followed, although now it hardly mattered. She walked past the brownstones, turned into the street of dingy clapboard houses, and stood in front of his red house.
He would be getting dressed. He would be warm from the bath, and his clothes would be laid out on the bed. He would hear the knock on the door and hastily put away the opium pipe, the syringe, whatever his instruments of stupor and imagination and music, never far from his hand. He would hear the knock, and he would be ready for her. He would know who it was before he opened the door.
She knocked. He opened. He stared at her for a long moment, and then his tongue was in her mouth, as slick and salty as an oyster. He pulled her inside, kicked the door shut, and kissed her with a ferocity that was familiar to her.
He put his finger beneath her coat, just under the collar of her dress, and touched the beating vein of her throat. She tore at his clothes, already loose and unbuttoned, desperate to touch the smooth white skin of his chest, of his tight slim stomach, silky against her hand. His skin felt brand-new, as though it had never been touched.
All the while he was kissing her, crushing her lips, his tongue in her mouth, against her teeth, and her tongue in his mouth, gliding over his, feeling the roof of his mouth, tasting the dissipations of the night before, the champagne and cigars and the stale breath, tasting him, and her mind went blank, her skin turned to fire, and she was lost, lost again, lost in the brightness of who and what he was, the terror of his soul. Nothing mattered. There was no time. There was no heat or cold or past or future. There was only this, her hand against his skin, her finger in his navel, her hand beneath the waist of his pants, his finger on her pulsing vein.
Her blood was water. Her eyes were blind. She was not Catherine. She was not anybody. Nobody knew where she was. Nobody would ever know where she had been. She stood in the kingdom of touch, and it was an ecstasy to her.
They made love as if someone were watching. Uncovered, sensitive to their own movements, their own caresses, as though it were being done for other eyes, a demonstration of the effortless ways of creating the pleasures of the body. She was on his bed, her clothes in ruins on the floor, and he was naked too, she lying sideways on the bed, her bones gone, he moving above and on and at her, his tongue expertly bringing her to climax so fast and so deeply that she went on rolling with warmth and pleasure as he entered her and brought himself to coming, letting out a cry as he did so, his only sound. It was his own masculinity he was making love to, which drove him as he rode inside her, rapture at his own skill, his own pleasures, the tenderness, the savagery, ripping through her as though for the first time.
He made love to her until her lips were swollen from kissing, her skin covered with marks, her insides aching and raw. She was complete. Whole again.
“Truitt,” she said in a voice she hardly recognized.
She had known so many men. She couldn’t remember their faces. Moretti had known so many women. Their names were on the tip of his tongue, she knew. It hardly mattered that she was here, that she was the one, and none of that mattered.
Making love to him was not like food. It was not nourishment. It was like fire, and when she came, she came down in ashes.
Afterward she dozed, wholly unguarded. She floated in the warm waters of a foreign sea, not knowing her own name, caring about nothing, remembering nothing.
“My little darling.” His voice was far away, a wind that came to her from the rain forest. “My bird. My chocolate.”
She laughed softly. She nestled into him, feeling every point at which his skin touched her skin. She would never love anybody else the way she loved him, so lost, so bewildered, so helpless. Her defenses, practiced and perfected, were of no use to her now. Her mind, her speech would do her no good. She was all sensation, and hunger for more sensation.
“My music. Speak to me.”
She opened her eyes. She was in the French bedroom she knew so well, tented in sky blue silk, hung with a French chandelier, in the arms of the one lover who rode her dreams, who defined for her all she knew of love. How shabby, she thought. How sad.
“Yes. What? What?”
He looked at her with his eyes so mixed with sadness and selfishness.
“Why isn’t he dead?” His voice was like ice on her skin, and his eyes stared at her nakedness. She covered herself with a shawl, carelessly thrown on the bed, her beautiful black embroidered shawl left behind when she went to the north, when she changed herself for Ralph Truitt.
“He can’t be. There wasn’t… when would I have done it? How? What do you want?”
“You know what I want. You know what we agreed. I want it all. I want to share it with you.”
“And you’ll have it.” She sat up. “How was I to know he would ask for you? How was any of this in the plan? That he would ever find you? And even then, he can’t die right away, you know that. It has to go on. It has to be timed. Slow. He has to get sick, and then weak, and then he has to die, and he will, but he can’t now.”
He put her hand on his sex and held it there. She felt it move beneath her hand, now soft, pliant as a fish, rising and falling like breath. “Swear.”
“I promise you.”
He got up, grabbed a towel and began to clean himself off. There was a wet pool in the bed where he had been. He never came inside her. He was terrified of children.
He began to pick up his clothes and throw them in a corner, taking from an armoire other, equally perfect things. “As though a promise from a whore makes any difference. I have to go to work now.”
She wept. He had never called her a whore before this hour, and the abrupt cruelty of it was sharp and terrible. She had sworn she wouldn’t let him see her cry, no one had, but she could not help herself. She could not stop.
“What do you want?”
“I want him dead. I want his money. I want him dead, and I don’t want to see his face. I want to hear what his face looks like when he’s dying, but I don’t want to see it. I want his stomach to turn to ice. I want his teeth to rot in his face. I want to live in my mother’s house and have exquisite things. You know what I want.”