“Hank, Jesus!” Zefira wailed. “You old. . Jesus.”
He blinked, focussed. Apparently he’d been staring at the button of her jeans as he spoke. When he raised his eyes to her face, Pinnerz found a look so uncomplicated that at first he couldn’t think of what it meant.
“I can’t believe you,” she said. “I can’t believe... Look, tell me. How far are you going to take this?”
His forearms were back on his knees. He turned his hands as if trying to catch the last breath out of a restroom dryer.
“You know years and years from how, Hank, it’s not going to matter how hard you tried to hang on. All that trouble yesterday, all the times I had to sneak around, it’s not going to matter. And even what I got into with you, back at the beginning of the summer… I mean, I admit it was a wrong move. I made a wrong move, Hank. But you weren’t married or anything. You were just, this very impressive older man who’d given me this wonderful opportunity.”
Deep sigh. Pinnerz watched her flick one big toe with the other.
“But Hank, how long are you going to think that gives you some kind of hold on me? Last night, you threw such a fit, I admit you had me bulldozed for a while. You had me talking to the walls in here today. But finally I realized that years and years from now all that’s going to matter to me is, this was the summer when I met Tripp. Jesus, I hope so. I hope…” She cleared her throat. Then, louder: “So Hank, tell me. When can I go see him without sneaking around? When do we all stop acting like I’m some kind of slave?”
Pinnerz couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even think what was practical, or begin trying to reckon her background against his. He knew only that if he so much as looked at Zefira, he’d have to deal with the same uncomplicated hatred he’d seen in her face a minute before, and seen last night in his son’s as well. Lying, scheming bastard, he’d shouted at Tripp then. All summer long you never cared what I was after, lying bastard kid. Hard words that now emerged again to ache in his neck like mutant teeth. Between that new bony catch in his breathing and what this girl had asked, it was all Pinnerz could do just to manage a ghostly gesture with one hand. A signal that he wanted more time.
Thirty Spot, Fifteen Back on Either Side
She had appealed to Grissom unusually, that woman. Even now, twenty-five years further on, he wished he could find a way to tell his wife just what the experience with that woman had meant to him. His wife Syl, Grissom believed honestly, had been a part of it. Because when he had first laid eyes on that woman, on that whore all dolled up in the nightclubby fashions of the mid-Fifties, she had appealed to him…unusually. She’d appealed to him as a kind of perverted lens through which he could see both himself and his wife more clearly, more specially. Syl, he wished he could tell his wife now, you were up in that room with us. And surely, after thirty years married to Grissom, Syl would understand a rising young executive’s one-night layover with a pickup in another hotel. But during this month just past, the story had got out of Grissom’s control. It had got out into the Chicago papers before he could find the words to explain it to his wife.
And Grissom knew also he wasn’t your standard executive geek, high-powered and homeless. He’d been through all that crap already. He’d started out in consulting, one of the real ballbuster firms. But shortly after his experience with the whore, he’d switched to a job where it wasn’t the Sharks vs. the Shits all the time. He’d gone to a place near Batavia, in the jet-aircraft line. In those days — Grissom wasn’t then thirty-five — he’d told people in his circle he switched because the cross-country running around a man had to do in consulting took too much time from his wife and kids. And his wife and kids had been, in fact, part of Grissom’s reasoning. Grissom’s father had always said, in his heavy-tongued immigrant accent, work eats the legs but the family feeds the soul. Then surely, after all that and more, Grissom felt comfortable with himself. He was pushing sixty by now.
But the whore and her people, no denying, had thrown him badly. It hadn’t been just the woman herself. The bottom line was, just when Grissom’s career had been getting started, he’d been forced to step down to a position that cost him a minimum of $12,500 in salary and benefits alone over the first two years. The exact figures were important. He’d gone over them carefully with his lawyer.
The woman herself, well. When he had seen her alone in that hotel bar, the young Grissom had felt only the old and simple deepdown tug. He didn’t try to fight it. The woman fit his imaginings. When she lifted the veil they wore in those days, by the flame of his lighter Grissom saw icy, dark features, the fineboned quality he’d always pictured on European women. And that bar where they met was of course nowhere near his brown home in Lake Forest, nor even near Chicago. This had all happened on his very first extended executive-level trek. Even when he and the woman were discussing money, him showing off his pre-credit-card wallet as hefty as the wrought-iron elevator they rode in, even that came out sounding to Grissom like avant-garde poetry fresh in from the Continent — or wherever, in the suddenly very wide world, they got avant-garde poetry from.
Grissom of course drank. A good Scotch firmly in hand could practically launch a career by itself, in those days, and the place he worked for was a world-class ballbuster. Afterwards (no surprise, considering) Grissom went on the wagon.
And she next did something strange. Yes, something as strange by its own lights as anything that followed. The woman actually let him have what he’d gone up there for. Together they got the juices going and took turns leering at each other from top or bottom. She let young Grissom have his satisfaction even though it was she who’d mixed the drinks — even though, in other words, she must have slipped him the stuff right away. She must have slipped him the stuff before he’d so much as got his shoes off. And naturally Grissom had belted down as many shots of courage as an empty stomach would allow. Moreover he did remember, odd detail, that the drink had left a coating of silt on the ice He remembered, because after the last swallow he’d held the glass up to one eye in order to watch her undress. He’d felt very lightheaded already. That nightelubby suit she wore, like Peter Gunn’s girlfriend’s, had seemed to blur with the fineness of her skin, which was sometimes indistinguishable from the ghostly ice. Yet the woman did strip, in silence. Soon enough she stood unusually naked, a glistening silt-creature he’d tuned in from a world of icebergs and runny, elongated stars. And then, still silent, she held out her hands to him.
He’d been looking for an adventure, sure. That much Syl could have understood. She could have appreciated her husband’s yen for a night’s adventure maybe twenty-five minutes after the fact, let alone twenty-five years. Sure. But also young Grissom had wanted…so many times, especially during this month just past, he’d tried to put this idea into words…he’d wanted to come by means of this experience to a more complete, more substantial idea of himself as an individual. Grissom alone, he’d wanted to see. Grissom as a separately defined person, as an intensely, separately defined person, something as unique and identifiable as a planet in a pale sky. That too was what he’d wanted from this woman. And given all the facts about what had happened, certainly in time he could have put the idea into words. He could have gentled the lonesome wanderer he was trying to define, and so in time he could have shared the whole experience with Syl.