“Yes?”
“You didn’t really come to the Zendo because you were interested in Buddhism, did you?”
“I guess I thought that was obvious by now.”
“It is obvious.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I was narrowed to a fine point, thinking only of Frank and Gerard and the places I might have to go to finish my investigation. I’d shuttered myself against Kimmery’s tenderness toward me, even shuttered away my own tenderness toward her. She was an incompetent witness, beyond that a distraction. And I was an investigator who supplied plenty of my own distractions, too many.
“You came to make trouble,” she said.
“I came because of trouble, yes.”
Kimmery rubbed the fur of Shelf’s flank in the wrong direction, aggravating my senses. I put my hand on the cat for the first time, nudged Kimmery’s fingers away from the chaos of up-sticking fur she’d caused, and smoothed the fur back into place.
“Well, I’m glad I met you anyway,” she said.
I made a sound, half dog, half cat, something like “Chaarff.”
Our hands collided in Shelf’s fur, Kimmery’s moving to rough up the area I’d just smoothed into sense, mine preemptively slipping underneath to preserve my work. It took a big indifferent loaf of a cat like Shelf to withstand it; Hen would have been across the room reordering herself with her own tongue by now.
“You’re strange to me,” said Kimmery.
“Don’t feel bad about it,” I said.
“No, but I mean strange in a good way, too.”
“Uh.” She was tugging on my fingers, and I tugged systematically back, so our hands were tangling, squirming, the cat a benign mattress underneath, one vibrating like a cheap hotel’s.
“You can say whatever you want,” Kimmery whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“The words.”
“I don’t really need to when you’re touching my hand like that.”
“I like to.”0em”›iv height=”0em”›
“Touch?” Touch shoulders, touch penguins, touch Kimmery-who didn’t like to touch? Why shouldn’t she? But this vaguest of questions was all I could manage. I wasn’t only strange to her, I was strange to myself at that moment: tugging, lulled, resistant. Conworried.
“Yes,” she said. “You. Here-”
She groped at the wall behind her head and switched off the light. We were still outlined in white, Manhattan’s radiation leaking in from the big room. Then she moved closer: It was a minute after twelve. Somewhere as she fit herself in beside me the cat was jostled loose and wandered ungrudgingly away.
“That’s better,” I said lamely, like I was reading from a script. The distance between us had narrowed, but the distance between me and me was enormous. I blinked in the half-light, looking straight ahead. Now her hand was on my thigh where the cat had been. Mirroring, I let my fingers play lightly at the parallel spot on her leg.
“Yes,” she said.
“I can’t seem to interest you fully in my case,” I said.
“Oh, I’m interested,” she said. “It’s just-It’s hard to talk about things that are important to you. With a new person. Everyone is so strange, don’t you think?”
“I think you’re right.”
“So you have to trust them at first. Because everything makes sense after a while.”
“So that’s what you’re doing with me?”
She nodded, then leaned her head against my shoulder. “But you’re not asking me anything about myself.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, surprised. “I guess-I guess I don’t know where to start.”
“Well, so you see what I mean, then.”
“Yes.”
I didn’t have to turn her face to mine to kiss her. It was already there when I turned. Her lips were small and soft and a little chapped. I’d never before kissed a woman without having had a few drinks. And I’d never kissed a woman who hadn’t had a few herself. While I tasted her Kimmery drew circles on my leg with her finger, and I did the same back.
“You do everything I do,” she whispered into my mouth.
“I don’t really need to,” I said again. “Not if we’re this close.” It was the truth. I was never less ticcish than this: aroused, pressing toward another’s body, moving out of my own. But just as Kimmery had somehow spared me ticcing aloud in conversation, now I felt free to incorporate an element of Tourette’s into our groping, as though she were negotiating a new understanding between my two disgruntled brains.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You need a shave, though.”
We kissed then, so I couldn’t reply, didn’t want to. I felt her press her thumb very gently against the point of my Adam’s apple, a touch I couldn’t exactly return. I stroked her ear and jaw instead, urging her nearer. Then her hand fell lower, and mine too, and at that moment I felt my hand and mind lose their particularity, their pointiness, their countingness, instead become clouds of general awareness, dreamy and yielding with curiosity. My hand felt less a hand than a catcher’s mitt, or Mickey Mouse’s hand, something vast and blunt and soft. I didn’t count her where I touched her. I conducted a general survey, took a tender sampling.
“You’re excited,” she breathed.
“Yes.”
“It’s okay.”
“I know.”
“I just wanted to mention it.”
“Okay, yes.”
She unbuttoned my pants. I fumbled with hers, with a thin sash knotted at her front for a belt. I couldn’t undo it with one hand. We were breathing into one another’s mouths, lips slipping together and apart, noses mashed. I found a way in around the knotted sash, untucked her shirt. I put my finger in her belly button, then found the crisp margin of her pubic hair, threaded it with a finger. She tremored and slid her knee between mine.
“You can touch me there,” she said.
“I am,” I said, wishing for accuracy.
“You’re so excited,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Yes.”
“It’s okay. Oh, Lionel, that’s okay. Don’t stop, it’s okay.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s okay.” Okay, okay: Here was Kimmery’s tic, in evidence at last. I couldn’t begrudge it. I turned my whole hand, gathering her up, surrounding her. She spilled as I held her. Meanwhile she’d found the vent in my boxer shorts. I felt two fingertips contact a part of me through that window, the blind men and the elephant. I wanted and didn’t want her to go on, terribly.
“You’re so excited,” she said again, incantatory.
“Uh.” She jostled me, untangled me from my shorts and my self.
“Wow, God, Lionel you’re sort of huge.”
“And bent,” I said, so she wouldn’t have to say it.
“Is that normal?”
“I guess it’s a little unusual-looking.” I panted, hoping be past this moment.
“More than a little, Lionel.”
“Someone-a woman once told me it was like a beer can.”
“I’ve heard of that,” said Kimmery. “But yours is, I don’t know, like a beer can that’s been crushed, like for recycling.”
So it was for me. In my paltry history I’d never been unveiled without hearing something about it-freak shows within freak shows. Whatever Kimmery thought, it didn’t keep her from freeing me from my boxer shorts and palming me, so that I felt myself aching heavily in her cool grasp. We made a circuit: mouths, knees, hands and what they held. The sensation was okay. I tried to match the rhythm of her hand with mine, failed. Kimmery’s tongue lapped my chin, found my mouth again. I made a whining sound, not a part of any word. Language was destroyed. Bailey, he left town.
“It’s okay to talk,” she whispered.
“Uh.”
“I like, um, I like it when you talk. When you make sounds.”
“Okay.”