The pain is so enormous that he bucks in the chair. The other man reaches out, unhurried, to prevent it from tipping over.
“Steady,” he says.
The seated man can barely hear. His teeth are clenched, his eyes clamped shut. He feels the block lifted off his lap, hears it thrown back into the room. Something else lands on his leg, but it weighs next to nothing and he doesn’t care about it or anything else. His leg feels as if someone is hammering a huge rusty nail up along the bone, again and again and again.
It is ten minutes before he has control of himself and opens his eyes. Hunter is no longer in the room. How he left, the man in the chair has no idea. He also has no clue how he is now going to prevent the idea of thirst—and increasingly, its reality—from moving front and center of his every thought. He knows he ought to look down at his leg but believes it unlikely that will achieve much except make him feel worse.
Nonetheless he does so—and what he sees drives, for a moment, all thoughts of thirst from his mind. The thing Hunter dropped on his lap is a woman’s robe.
The man in the chair recognizes it. It belongs to a woman called Lynn Napier, the one he spent the evening with the night before.
A voice floats up from the level below.
“Who else?” it asks.
There is the sound of footsteps receding, and then silence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Is this from you?”
“What?”
“This.” I turned from the counter toward the kitchen table, where Steph was swiftly eating breakfast while absorbing local nonnews from the small flat-screen in the corner. She put her head on one side, causing still-wet hair to slide across her face. When she clocked the jacket of the book I was holding she gave a snort.
“That would be a supersized no.” She laughed. “With a side of ‘Dream on, my friend.’ ”
I looked back at the book, which I’d found propped outside our front door, in corrugated packaging, when I got back from the gym. It was large and heavy and apparently retailed for eighty bucks. It was published by a European house I recognized as purveyors of lavish coffee-table tomes, and featured a retrospective of the work of a photographer I’d never heard of.
A quick flick through confirmed that, as the cover implied, said snapper was all about honoring the timeless beauty of the female form, in fetishized states of undress. An immaculate airline stewardess bending over a meal cart, skirt hitched up to reveal tattered, cheap underwear. A secretary dutifully typing at an old Underwood, unaware of how very close her besuited boss—seen only from the waist down, complete with self-evident bulge—was standing behind her. A female doctor, adrift in a lamp-lit ward in the dead of the night—the patients asleep in their beds—wearing only high heels, garters, stockings, and a stethoscope, gazing with apparent melancholy at a clipboard she held in one hand.
“Really?”
“Really,” she said.
“This isn’t some guy who’s going to have an exposition here or something?”
“Exhibition, not exposition, dear,” Steph said around a mouthful of high-spec granola. “And no. Sarasota has come a long way, but it ain’t New York. Or even Tallahassee. The art-porn market still falls outside what local folks will countenance in a public gallery.”
I frowned down at the Amazon delivery note. “Well, that’s weird.”
“Does it say it’s a gift?”
“No. It was bought on my account.”
“Hon,” Steph said, “it’s okay.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you ordered this, I don’t mind.”
I stared at her. “Why would I even open the package in front of you if I had something to hide?”
She shrugged. “You’re cruising around the site, see the book, accidentally click BUY IT NOW instead of ADD TO BASKET. Forget all about it and then bang, here it is. And in front of the wife. Whoops. No biggie.”
I spoke slowly. “I did not order this book.”
“So send it back,” she said, grabbing her car keys. “I got to go, hon. Big day of prep for the Maxwinn Saunders powwow tomorrow.”
“Steph, listen. I didn’t buy this.”
“I believe you,” she said with a wink, and then she was gone.
First thing I did when I got to work was to e-mail Amazon, briskly requesting the procedure for returning a book sent in error. I’d already checked the shipping notification e-mail I’d received the day before. Paying more attention when it came in wouldn’t have achieved much—by then the book had already been on its way. It was Steph’s response that was nettling me most. It wasn’t as if the book was hard-core. Two seconds with a search engine would have flooded my screen with pictures that would have made Henrik Myerson (creator of the images in the book stowed in the trunk of my car) blanch. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that the book’s arrival had made me look like the kind of person who wanted to own this kind of thing. I have dedicated a lot of time and effort to assuming control of my personal brand. I’m not going to stand for random misinformation muddying the waters.
That was the first point, anyhow. The second was a broader one. I grew up in Pennsylvania. My mother’s sister lived in South Carolina, and from time to time the family would migrate down to spend a week. Aunt Lynn was a recovering hippie and big on producing her own food. This included a series of impressive chili plants that grew along a fence in the backyard. The fruits of these were fascinating to me. There’s something so ripe and eye-catching about a chili when it’s ready to pick, a plumpness that bellows “eat me” to the untrained eye. My parents had firmly instructed me not to do any such thing, and I was in general a well-behaved kid.
Imagine their surprise, therefore, at coming out into the yard one afternoon to discover that the eight-year-old child they’d left peaceably playing was now in paroxysms of agony, unable even to come indoors, apparently caused by having eaten one of these chilies.
They were comforting, and supportive, and fed me ice cream to dull the burn, all the time managing to refrain from saying they’d told me so. I said I hadn’t eaten a chili, and they didn’t explicitly call me on it, but smiled when they thought I wasn’t looking. But the thing is . . .
I hadn’t eaten a damned chili.
All I’d done—and this hadn’t been explicitly disallowed, and children need explicit instruction because they are not good at expanding from the specific to the general—was to reach up and touch one of the swollen, bright red chilies. I’d marveled at how hard it was, how powerful and fecund, then turned my back on the forbidden fruit and got on with something else. I’d evidently also accidentally brushed those same fingers across my lips, however, bringing the freakish power of a Scotch Bonnet to bear upon skin that still thought of American mustard as wantonly aggressive.
The pain eventually subsided. What did not fade was the sense of injustice—the injustice wrought by someone being kind and forgiving over a sin that had not been committed. Steph shrugging off the book’s arrival this morning felt the same way—and the worst of it was that there was no way back. I could go home at the end of the day clutching proof that I’d returned the book, and she could interpret this as me going out of my way to maintain the pretense of not having ordered it in the first place. Even if she eventually believed me, the instant in which she’d thought otherwise remained alive in time.
I was still fulminating over this when there was a ping to indicate I’d received an e-mail. It was the Amazon help desk, with guidelines for returning a book if you had ordered it in error.