“You’re so warm,” she said. “You’re flushed.”
“It’s the wine,” I said. Then I whispered, “I’m sinking a little, Lee.”
“Henry,” she said, wrapping her arms around me. She hugged me tightly, her arms shaking. “You better tell me what’s wrong right now, right now, because I have the feeling I may start bleeding internally.”
“I wish you hadn’t talked to him.”
“I’m glad I did. He cares, you know.”
“I’m not sure that he does,” I said. “But I can’t really blame him. I won’t. This is a business, Lee. Research and reports are fine. But if we don’t generate certain material there’s no operation. The thing doesn’t work. It seizes.”
“What do they want from you?” she asked.
“Something damning.”
She let go of me and stood up. She asked, “Do you have something?”
“No.”
“Then tell Dennis that. Tell Jack. Look, I’m going to the phone. I’m calling Jack right now. I’m going to tell him and then give him a piece of my mind.”
“It won’t matter,” I said. “What Jack says doesn’t matter. It’s Dennis. Are you willing to talk to Dennis? He will say it’s the nature of things that you can always find what you need.”
“Then please quit,” Lelia begged. She was kneeling on the carpet again, stiffly shuffling together the loose photographs.
I explained to her that I couldn’t quit, at least not until the assignment was done. It was bad form to cut loose in the middle, and then also perhaps hazardous; Jack had once told me no one had ever done that before to Dennis Hoagland. Nobody could say what he might try.
She stopped what she was doing. “Then give him what he wants.”
“Someone could get hurt,” I said.
“Why do you care all of a sudden? Why now when we’re just getting things straight?” She swung her arms back and accidently knocked over the rest of her coffee onto the white rug. “Oh shit! Shit!”
“It’s okay, just leave it.”
She tried to mop it with her sleeve but the stain was spreading. Suddenly she looked exhausted, sodden in the face. “As long as you don’t get hurt, I won’t care. I promise, Henry, I promise. I won’t say a word to you. I won’t even think it.”
She got up and left the room and came back with a hand towel from the hall bath. She carefully blotted the dark patch, staring down at the spill. “Am I an official bad person now?”
I took her and we lay down on the carpet. Before I could do anything else to stop myself I told her his name. John Kwang. I could almost see her turning the words inside her head. Of course she knew who he was, that he was Korean. He was appearing on the broadcasts almost nightly because of the boycotts. She didn’t say anything, though, and I could see that she was trying her very best to stay quiet, to think around the notion for a moment instead of steaming right through it. Ten years with me and now she was the one with the ready method. She turned into me, eyes shut. Her breath warm like a priest’s. And now her voice brooking in my ear, in a voice I hardly recognized. “You just say what you want. Please say what you want.”
* * *
No trace of light outside, the night ink, and suddenly the sky raining hard again. The roof chattering. I lay on the small bed in Mitt’s old summertime room. I had left her downstairs with the pictures. I was absently putting clothes in shopping bags, and I felt tired and lay down for a moment.
All over the house things were still in piles. The amount of the work was beginning to overwhelm us. Neither of us was much of an organizer. Picture albums, address books, receipt-keeping, these were the happy tasks of people completely staked to one another, so that they could produce a chit on demand, order and reorder their memories for a future day. We used to enjoy those legions of collectibles, and we were glad for them, their happy messes. Bulging photo albums, corks of wines we’d drunk at restaurants in overcoat pockets. Boxes of mostly useless paper. Trails of frayed odd ribbons and precious bits of gift wrap and other junks of the past. Loose tapes of Mitt.
And if I remember everything now in the form of lists it is that these notions come to me along a floating string of memory, a long and lyric processional that leads me out from the city in which I live, to return me here, back to this place of our ghosts.
I didn’t notice her come in. She curled in beside me. I began stroking her. Her shoulder down her arm to the rise of her hip, with one hand. I was being slow. I wanted to be slow with her. She wasn’t responding to the graze of my fingers but she wasn’t ignoring it, either, and just as I was about to cease my movement and fall back I heard her breathe, once, heavily, through her mouth. She whispered, Easy. Tucking my face into her hair, I kept going, stroking, holding down my rhythm to the slowest ache I could bear. She broke the seam of her legs and scissored one back and hooked my ankle with her instep, pulling my knee between hers. Rub of old jeans. I smelled her soap on the back of her neck. I kissed there, the lightest way I knew. So she wouldn’t jump or freeze. I kissed her again, this time my lips on the pale soft hairs of her neck, and she craned so that the white skin inched up past the cover of her shirt fabric. Bone white, purple white. I felt a heat anyway. Her mouth was open. She was trying to stay herself and I understood. I was doing the same. I was watching my hand stroking and watching my face closing in against her. I pushed myself up on the bed and tugged her to roll and face me and she did. I kissed her neck and the bone between her breasts and I pressed my face maybe too hard against her belly. She pulled me by a beltloop of my trousers and then I slipped my thumbs into two of hers and the bed suddenly seemed too small and fragile and I started to take her with my head up against the angled ceiling painted dead flat white by my father in a long fit of mourning and she said, No, Sweetie, not here, and she swung her legs to the floor and led us out of the room and then down the back stairs to the kitchen.
She asked if it was locked up out there.
I shook my head. We’d never locked the garage. Even my father, who safeguarded his possessions with a military order and zeal, never bothered with it, considering it a colony of junk that was mine. I looked around for something to put on my feet but I didn’t see anything. I started for the front door where I’d left my shoes.
“Just take off your socks,” Lelia said, already undoing her feet in kind.
I did what she said. She slid open the glass door and we walked out gingerly onto the slick deck and down steps to the slate-stone path leading to the garage. It was raining hard enough that we were already wet to the skin by the time we reached the side door to the apartment. I was shivering. When we got upstairs Lelia stripped me of my clothes and then she stripped herself. She walked naked to the far wall and knelt and turned the dial on the baseboard heater. She stood up. I watched the straightness of her as she moved, her long belly, the dark collapse below that. I felt a melancholy before her nakedness. She gripped at my breast and collarbone and tore me down to the carpet.
I had forgotten how to make love to my wife.
Five months, since I had seen her body, maybe eight or nine since I’d really touched her. My low and narrow hips wanted to be lost in her width, the chute of her sternum my sole guide to the one place where we came in the same basic size and shape and flavor: that good piece, the mouth.
We were always oral. We were forever biting, we bit hard, we spit and shined each other, we licked each other, we slobbered, we gorged, we made elaborate meals of ourselves, we made holiday feasts Scotch and Korean, the cold strange meal of tongue, of ankle, of toe, we made a mess. She was given to anything vampiric, went wild for Blacula, Christopher Lee, Lugosi, bats, Venus’s-flytraps, and she said it was the best way, to use your mouth, that this was it, this was the thing that made us human. Not the thumb but the mouth.