“Hi.”
“Well?”
“I’m at your place. I let myself in.”
“My place? Don’t move, I’ll be right there.”
It was rush hour, and Karp had to put a body check on a distinguished elderly member of the bar to get a cab.
The door was open. Karp rushed through the apartment to the bedroom.
She was standing at the foot of the bed in a long-sleeved tan summer dress. She was completely transformed. Her ordeal had stripped the softness from her, and the planes of her face showed clear, through the taut skin. The right side of her face was discolored in patches and covered with a quilting of fine white scars. A black patch covered her right eye. Her hair was cropped short, and some peculiarity of the wounding had created a white blaze through her black hair from the forehead to the crown.
The cover girl was utterly lost. Instead, she had a face out of archaic imagination, like something painted on terra-cotta on an Aegean island or cut into bronze at Mykonos, for a hero’s grave.
As Karp stood there, his heart pierced and full at once, staring, her mouth, which was perfectly still, hardened into a grim line, and her one eye flashed defiance like a hawk’s eye, out of her hawk face. Her hands were clenched at her hips, in her old way, and Karp saw that her left hand was clad in a tight black kid glove.
Karp slowly raised both hands above his head. “Don’t shoot,” he said weakly. “I give up.”
Then he went toward her and picked her up, placed her on the bed, and pinned her beneath him. And he kissed her face, starting with the scarred part, and then her mouth, for a long time. He kissed every scar and the bad eye and the good eye.
Marlene started to cry. She cried so hard she couldn’t breathe on her back. She wriggled out from under him and went into the bathroom to sob great, whooping, wracking sobs for nearly ten minutes, while Karp stood outside and said her name, and she said, “Just a second, just a second.”
She came out, and said, “Whoosh! OK, that’s over. Christ, I think my patch shrank.” She walked over and examined herself in the long mirror on the bedroom door. Karp came and stood behind her. She saw his reflection looming over her own, and suddenly she giggled.
“What?” he asked.
“Belmar. I just thought of Belmar, for no reason.”
“What’s Belmar?”
“It’s a resort town on the Jersey shore. It’s part of the ethnic Riviera-we used to go there when I was a kid. They had this severed head, it was an attraction on the Boardwalk that would tell your fortune. Anyway, there were all these blue-collar bungalow resorts, little hotels, too. Italians around us, Russians to the north, Polish, Irish.
“I just had the image of you and me walking up the Boardwalk in Belmar.”
“Do they allow Jews?”
“Only with a responsible adult. Karp, let’s go sometime. Jesus, I haven’t been there since Christ was a corporal. We’d blow their pants off-Pirate Jenny and the Giant Jewboy. They’d be strolling the sand in their Jockeys.”
“It’s a deal. However, right now this minute …”
She turned toward him. “What do you think of glass eyes? Tacky, right?” She still had tears in her voice.
“No, I think a glass eye can be tasteful,” said Karp conversationally, close to tears himself. He said, “Champ, I want you so much, I’m nauseous.”
She held her hands out, palms up. “Well,” she said, “here I am.”