“Got the plans of this house out of Popular Mechanics. Want to buy it? If you don’t, my idiot son will get it. It’d cost you less than a million. You could write a great book here.”
Steadman said, “Is that your story?”
“Of course not,” Cubbage said. “Listen, you shouldn’t pay a blind bit of notice to what people say. There’s no connection between anything you’ve done and this damn president.”
“Who said there was?”
“I don’t know, it’s going around,” the man said carelessly. He seemed to be stirring his hand in a cardboard box of oddments, because he made a clattering, the scrape of loose paper and the clink of trifles. Then came four clear notes of a banjo. “This is a little thing called ‘Sleepy Time Gal.’ ” He began strumming, but his plucking slowed and stopped as he began to sob miserably. “It’s my wife,” he said. He snuffled snot and tears. “Cancer took her. Forty-two years we were married. You can’t replace someone like that.”
“I’m very sorry,” Steadman said.
“Do you know what true love is?”
In a voice like stone Steadman said, “No.”
“Go ahead”—and he plucked the banjo again, a twangling note—“make me an offer on the house.”
“I can’t stay here any longer,” Steadman said.
“What about my story?”
“I’m late for an appointment.”
“Don’t you realize I saved you back there, from those people?”
“What people?”
“The ones following you. Looked like they wanted to pester you. And that man?”
“What man?”
“Dogging your heels.”
“Can you describe him? What did he look like?”
“How am I supposed to know what he looked like?” Cubbage was on his feet. “You’re the writer — you describe him.”
In a mood of resentment Cubbage fumbled and bullied Steadman down the stairs and into the car. Because of all the one-way streets, he took him by the back route down to the taxi stand at the ferry landing.
“That’s the thanks I get,” Cubbage said.
“I’ll call you,” Steadman said, to pacify him.
By the time he got home he could tell from the descent of cool air and the dropping of the wind that night had fallen. He also suspected from the way Ava spoke to him that she was not alone. Something dense, like a thickness of cloth, blotted the echo of Ava’s voice in the room.
She said, “I was beginning to think you’d taken up residence somewhere else.”
The choice of words, too — the sort of facetious and brittle formality a person used when someone else, someone who mattered, was listening.
Steadman was too rattled to banter with her, and he was acutely aware from the pulse of the stranger’s breathing that this other person was watching closely.
“What about that doctor who was going to examine me?”
“All in good time.” Another stagy and supercilious phrase, meant to be overheard. “Now, how about a drink?”
It was all like theater, all the obvious talk, but he was lost here. He said, “Okay,” and felt for his armchair. Sitting, drinking, he was weighted with a sense of captivity. Ava had put the glass of wine into his hand. She lingered beside him.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Her growly affection was unambiguous: she wanted sex. Yet he had hardly recovered from the old man’s weeping and bullying and the crazy interlude in his house, which was like an abduction. Do you know what true love is? and Dogging your heels— what was that all about? He was ruefuclass="underline" a blind man was everyone’s victim.
“I had an insane afternoon,” he said. “I did as you suggested. I went into town. I almost fell down about fifty times. I think I was being followed. Some crazy old bastard was after me.”
“Come over here,” Ava said. “You need to relax.”
She helped him to his feet. She led him onto the carpet and had him crouch and lie down. She put a pillow under his head.
As he lay, letting her fumble with his belt buckle, she radiated warmth, hovering over him. He tried to imagine her propped on one arm, leaning to tug his jeans off. But apart from a vague picture of her warm presence, he got nowhere and was conscious only of his naked legs stretched out. Even when she touched him, using her fingers and then her mouth to arouse him, he felt unfocused and unprepared.
“I’m sorry.”
He struggled to fantasize, yet his sense of being trapped, a reminder of the afternoon, crowded and distracted him. A hardening spark in his flesh gave him hope, but was more light than heat. He wanted to be overwhelmed, and he knew that was what Ava wanted. He lay on his back as though adrift, and she worked on him, squealing, her mouth filled with his flesh. When he was harder she mounted him. She rode him with furious impatience, and he was like a woman again, wincing beneath her thrusts.
“Now, yes, that’s what I want,” she said.
From the directness and practicality of her tone he knew she was not talking to him. A moment later he was nudged, something pressing his ear, and then his head was gripped and a mass of moist flesh settled against his face, warm soft skin at his ears, his nose and mouth brushed by the lips of a dripping vulva.
As Ava rode him, the other woman’s body rose and fell against his face, as if in the saddle of a cantering horse. Each time she lifted herself, releasing his ears, he could hear her squeals — and the sighs of Ava’s rapture, too, as she steadied the woman and kissed her. It was not the fierce kissing he had known, but a gentle chafing of soft lips and the pressure of fondling hands.
Her version of pleasure was so single-minded she made him feel more like her prisoner than her lover. Ava had taken charge again, but hers was not the tentative and maternal breastfeeding embrace of the night before. It was a piling on, aggressive and deliberate, an act in which he was a passive supine detail, something for the women to sit on and ride while they hugged and kissed. Lying there, he understood that he was an aspect of Ava’s fantasy, but not the object of it, not the center of her attention. There was no rapture for him, no tenderness, and now, as he was pummeled, hardly any arousal.
The nameless person, the silent woman, was smearing his face, stifling him as he gasped for breath. He was pinned to the floor, the weight of the two bodies on him, his cock feeling twisted and raw from being ridden, his whole head burning from the hot clamp of the bare legs. They went on, like delirious children assaulting a giant. And he was rubbed and smacked, the heat of that wet rag of flesh like being slapped in the face with raw meat.
In the women’s concentration on each other he was denied his orgasm, though they enjoyed a moment of frenzy together, yelping in triumph, sounding girlish. They didn’t seem to notice him then, but when they were done, laughing softly, shivering into each other’s arms, they gathered him up and helped him to bed.
“I hope we didn’t hurt him,” the woman said as they left the room.
There was so much he didn’t know. He lay there feeling bruised. All this time and he hardly knew anything.
For the following few days Ava worked odd hours again. Steadman brooded on his humiliation. The next time she was on the day shift and they had dinner together at home, he tried to broach the subject. He did not know where to begin. Never mind the visiting woman; who had Ava become, and what did she want?
“Shouldn’t we be talking about that”—he fished for the right word—“that encounter?”
“That was my encounter, not yours,” she said, sure of herself. “So there’s nothing to talk about. I just want you to know it’s not retributive.”
But he thought “retributive” was exactly what it was — retribution for the months and months of making his book, for the years of living his life, for his choosing the drug. And the retaliation was her way of showing him that she now knew what he had known all along, that sex was a different route, a different destination, for each person. Approaching that land of desire, one person saw a mountain and another a valley, a foreign landscape and culture, a confusion of language and costume. So that in any act of sex one person was at home feeling all the gusto and satisfaction of security, and the other was trespassing.