“Who’s your wife?” she said, as if no time had intervened between his asking about her husband and her reply.
“My third wife,” he said. Let her think him a three-time loser. Women liked wild cards.
“Oh?” she said, raising her eyebrows.
He walked over to her. She was standing behind a large teakwood bar with a blue glass top. She picked up a camera and pointed it at him. “Oh no you don’t,” he said, taking it out of her hand. “No souvenirs.” He put it back on top of the bar.
“A chaser of champagne, or beer?” she said.
Beer.
She took a beer out of the refrigerator under the bar. A small bottle of champagne, which she handed him. He undid the wire and took it off. It would make a good muzzle for a box turtle. He dropped it on the bar and turned the little bottle until the cork popped. The glass she held out was shaped like a tulip, and he poured slowly, stopping an inch from the top. Their last anniversary, he and Corky had had champagne. She clinked her glass to his bottle. Both swallowed. A warm rush went through his body and settled in his penis. He was standing behind a bar without any pants on, drinking with a woman whose husband slept in his socks. He took a long, cold drink of beer. It had a metallic taste — the taste that had lingered on his tongue after licking her earrings. She pushed her hair behind her ears, which made her look younger. She was probably fifty. The fan was turning.
She was running her hand through her hair. Pretty, the color she had painted her nails. As though you could dip your hands in fruit and keep the color. She had finished the champagne. He reached for the bottle and poured the rest into her glass. “Take one sip,” she said. The transparent tulip moved toward his lips. He took a sip. The beer had numbed his tongue; he could only taste fizz. The bubbles danced in his body for a while before sinking to prickle inside his penis.
As she sipped, she unfastened the robe with one hand. She had on a low-cut black lace brassiere with a tiny red flower over the front clasp. She finished the champagne. He was getting hard. The fan was turning. What had happened to account for his sudden luck with women? It was as though angels had plotted to please him. The little red flower made him think of impatiens. Hoeing the ground. Digging with the trowel. Setting in little impatiens plants. White, salmon, and red. Last week’s work. His hands were on her hips.
“I do have a bed,” she said.
The bedside clock was ticking. Will had had a toy — a piece of laminated cardboard shaped like an alarm clock with bells on the top. He would spin the hands, making them go round and round. Babies always parted their lips when they played. Wayne had shown Will how to click his tongue. It had taken a long time to teach him. He was glad that he didn’t have to be the one to teach Will to whistle. He could not remember if he had taught Will to click his tongue over the Giddyup Pony book, or to make the sound of the ticking clock. He would be going home to Will and Corky.
Elliott stretched out across the width of the bed, and again he kneeled and looked down at her. For fifty, she was in very good shape. She would have to be fifty, give or take a few years, because of the age of her son. “Did he have that girl with him?” she had asked. He had not even reached them in New York; he had left a message on their machine. Susan had asked why they didn’t join them for a swim. “We’re not lepers,” she had said. Elliott’s son fucked a girl who wore white cowboy boots. In Wayne’s imagination, they had taken on sterling silver tips, cleats, and silver spurs. She kept them on when they fucked. She lay naked on top of a lasso, a Penthouse beauty photographed through a haze filter. Then she sat in a sports car, a Mazda RX-7, in a driveway in Florida. She had called “Honey” with as much of an edge as she would let creep into her voice, considering that she wanted to please the man so he would marry her. She had certainly not been his wife sitting there, in that car, in those boots.
Wayne took Elliott’s smooth feet — even those were smooth! — and brought them to his chest. He ran his hands down the sides of her thighs. He was smiling at her, and she was smiling at him. The bushes were planted on her hillside. There would be pool parties, which he would not be a part of, when she and her guests would drink champagne and notice — vaguely notice — that things were in flower. The day at the pool would probably stay in Will’s mind longer than in the minds of any of the people Elliott entertained. Will would tell Jody. She would ask what he did, and he would tell her that they went swimming at a big pool, and what could she think but that Wayne had friends who had a swimming pool. He looked down. A little wisp of hair blew over Elliott’s forehead, sent aloft by the turning fan. She was rubbing his pubic hair, her thumbs moving up and down the sides of his crotch, her fingertips rising high to stroke the part of his body where the hair ended and his own smoothness began. Impossible to imagine Will in such a position. Will kneeling in front of a woman. Though he would, of course. By that time, would magazines offer the same orchestrated fantasies seen through smoky lenses? Victorian ladies in their bustiers. Cowgirls naked except for white boots, pouting with bee-stung lips, hair spread out on the pillow? Maybe by then space helmets would be erotic, and the hourglass figure, which had been replaced by the anorexic figure, would be something else entirely. Nipples might not be points of fascination, but the clavicle. By the time Will was grown, Jane Fonda might be leading the archangels in aerobics, or using all her muscle strength to leap through the fires of Hell, if she hadn’t been forgiven for what she did in Hanoi.
He had powdered Jody’s buttocks with a big powder puff and then pulled her ass into his stomach and gone inside her, the powder leaving two small moons on his body.
Hanoi. So long ago, it might have been the Civil War.
On the rug, playing with baby Will. Not sure-footed at all. Those hard baby shoes, laced up, that they put them in. Like they’d plunged your tiny feet in rigid ski boots and you were trying to run. No flexibility. No way to run fast enough to win, even though Daddy could only move so fast on his hands and knees. The palms could take it, but not the knees. Trousers helped. Baby knees, going up and down like a carousel horse. Up-down, up-down. Trying to run, but how, with feet in ski boots? Knowing you’re going to be caught. Just knowing it. Squeal and run, work your knees, but you’re as stationary as an animal on a carousel. Big bear will get you, smiling in the disguise of Daddy. Run in circles. You’ll be caught.
He cupped his hands over Elliott’s hipbones and pulled her ass against him, entering her.
What had Jody thought, when she realized that he wasn’t coming back?
Would he be coming back here? To Elliott’s?
He was prepared for Kate to leave. From the first, he knew that she would leave and go back to New Jersey. That allowed him time to prepare. The good thing about fucking other women was that when you left them, or they left you, whatever you had done could be recreated with your next partner, and she would be grateful. Interested. He had powdered Corky’s bottom, improvising a little, years later, by spanking her first. And she had liked it.
What is amniocentesis? flashed into his mind.
Corky was letting him know that she was having a good time with Will. He could see his son growing close to her. She had bought him a little tube that would break the world into bits when you looked through it.
Tick tock.
He fucked Elliott harder this time, three or four hard strokes, slowly withdrawing until only the tip of his penis was inside, moving his fingertips to her nipples, gradually accelerating his thrusts as his grip on her breasts tightened. Tick tock. In out. It seemed silly, child’s play, if you thought about it. Two adults in odd positions. No wonder children were frightened when they looked into a room and saw what they shouldn’t see. Sometimes the people were hurting each other. And if they weren’t then, they might be somewhere down the line. Hurt if the other person refused to do it every day. Or if the person left. Or if you left, and tried to forget the person. Your body would remember.