In a few minutes, the man came out of the house. Now he was trying to appear casual. Wayne looked at the man walking toward him, his hands in his pockets. What kind of man was he that he’d leave his girlfriend in the car in the heat? His high forehead gleamed in the sunlight.
“Well,” the man said, shaking his head as if he had very much amused himself with his folly. “That’ll teach me not to reconfirm my plans with my mother, I guess.”
“Hey, stay and have a swim,” Wayne said. “Water’s great.”
“Honey!” the woman in the car called.
“No. Sorry to interrupt you. I guess we’ll be pushing on.”
I could have fucked your mother if I’d wanted to, Wayne thought. You unhappy to see me and my friends in the pool? What if I had fucked her?
The man bent to shake Wayne’s hand. Wayne was damned if he’d rise a second time. The man had wanted to know what he was doing there? He’d told him. He wanted to check? He checked. Furthermore, even if the pool wasn’t his by right, at least he was swimming there because the lady of the house was smitten with him. He could make the beast with two backs with the lady of the house as soon as she got home. Maybe on the floor of the Florida room, on the cold tile, with that ceiling fan going around and around. The room he had stood in as she wrote a check, asking: “Do you get tired of flowers? When you see so many, do you — does a person — get tired of flowers?”
The next time he saw her he would take her up on her offer of something “more substantial” when he finished work. Send Zeke back in the truck. Have his own car, then fuck her, fuck her for her pretty eyes and her high forehead and because she wanted him to, and now because she had a son who wouldn’t like that.
Corky and Susan were talking louder. The man was almost back in his car. See? Wayne thought. You get those big-buck guys, they leave you sitting in the sun like you were a piece of tumbleweed on the desert. You think rich people have good family lives? Her husband’s always in New York, and she wants to fuck the guy who’s planting bushes on the hillside, and her own son didn’t know she was in another city when he stopped by. You think that was his wife in the car? A wife with white boots who calls him honey?
Will wanted to know who the man in the flashy car was.
“Nobody important,” Wayne said, and tried to mean it.
“He should of stayed and gone swimming. We’re not lepers or anything,” Susan said, combing her black hair.
Wayne jumped into the pool and kicked water high in the air, wetting Corky and Susan at the side of the pool, making Susan yelp and Corky run for cover. He meant to bring back the spirit of fun. The man and his girlfriend had driven away. Let them have their sports car and let him have his keys to Mama’s house. Mine by right, Wayne had started to think again.
Will was giggling, sitting on top of Zeke’s shoulders. Watching them through the geyser of water he kicked up, Wayne was happy that Will was having a good time. In his heart, he always trusted that he could amuse him. If his friend was the temporary stand-in, so be it. Wayne stopped kicking and swam to where his feet could touch bottom. Then he peed, luxuriating in the scalding rush of urine around his legs, staring at the fixed point of Zeke standing in shallow water with Will balanced atop his shoulders. If it were his house and he had the keys, he could have gone inside to pee. As it was, the only thing to do was jump in the pool and do it in the water. A little urine wouldn’t hurt anyone, diluted by all the chlorine. And — like everyone who pees in a pool — he was convinced that he wasn’t the only one. Like everyone else, for the umpteenth time in his life, Wayne was just going with the flow.
NINETEEN
It did happen on the floor of the Florida room, after Wayne had two shots of Chivas on the rocks, drunk out of crystal glasses that acted as prisms as the day drew toward evening, throwing marbly bits of light on the wide white columns separating the sliding glass doors. A quilt had been pulled from the sofa. She was more drunk than he and informed him the quilt was versatile. That her husband liked things that were versatile. Her son, she said, was simply wrong about the date.
Elliott had had surgery. There was a scar low on her belly, on the right side. As she lay back, her earrings clattered on the tile floor: long silver-and-agate earrings. She told him what agate was. He was licking the stones, and she said, “Does the agate feel cold on your tongue?”
He didn’t ask where she got a name like Elliott. People who had money often named baby girls for their uncles, deceased. Or they gave babies an important surname they didn’t want lost when a woman took her husband’s name — they put it first, like a person with a sweet tooth who eats the dessert before the meal. As a baby, did they call her Ellie?
Jody was going to name the first, he was going to name the second, but there was no second.
Elliott said: “My husband likes me to wear freshwater pearls. Pearls are different colors, you know — not just white. They can be silver-gray. Many different colors. But the way a pearl feels — it isn’t hard, like a diamond. Some irritation causes pearls to form. Something deep inside that couldn’t be gotten rid of. He thinks of that, I know, when he tells me to wear pearls.”
“What does your husband do?” Wayne said, kneeling between her legs.
“Arbitrage,” she said. “He wears socks that come up to his knees. He sleeps in them, the way Mormons sleep in their undergarments.”
The ceiling fan.
“He pushes them down around his ankles when he’s in bed, but he keeps them on. He gets up at six o’clock. He has his back worked on by an acupuncturist. Little porcupine quills. He relaxes with a Magic Slate: making squiggles on a Magic Slate, then pulling up the top sheet, sloooowly, like someone removing a bandage with a lot of adhesive. Sometimes he gets up at five-thirty in the morning. All his socks are black.”
Wayne was not used to making love to women who talked. Her legs were the smoothest he had ever felt. There was not even hair on her thighs. He rubbed his hands down her legs, feeling the muscles under her slick, soft skin. She lived in Florida, but she was not tan. He leaned toward one nipple, licking around the areola, his eyes closed. A few tiny hairs surprised him, like seaweed when you were swimming. Her legs were hugging him tightly. He was not yet inside her, but his penis was hard, horizontal over her belly as he kissed between her breasts. Little kisses. Baby-step kisses. One two three. It took five little kisses to get from the left breast to the right. Her fingers gently touched the head of his penis.
“Amber takes a high polish,” she said. “It’s vegetable resin.”
“You’re teaching me things?” he said, inserting the tip of his penis. Pearls would be shot inside her. He pushed another inch deeper. She was smiling pleasantly, as if she had run into someone on the street whom she knew. When she came, she winced and looked unhappy, as if the person on the street had quite unexpectedly stepped on her foot.
He had his shirt on. As she rolled away, she tugged the material. His pants and his undershorts were on the wicker chair. He opened his mouth to breathe. She went into the bathroom and came back wearing a pale blue robe. The sash dangled down the front. A stain had seeped through, high up, over her thigh.