“So do you do this a lot?” she asks out of the blue.
“Eat Thai food? Every now and then.”
“Sure,” she says, and picks up the long-stemmed glass and sips at the wine again, a faint amber glow reflecting from the glass to touch her chin. She looks more catlike tonight than she did on the stage of the Winter Garden, the reddish-blond hair swept back from her face and caught with a ribbon that matches her eyes, the green looking deeper than it had before, the eyes burning with an intense inner glow, the yellow flecks complementing the bright umber gloss of her fingernails and the earth colors of her gossamer costume. She is wearing sandals. Her toenails are painted in the same subtle brownish-yellow color. She puts down her glass and says, “Which means you fool around, right?”
“No,” he said.
“Then why the Thai evasion?”
“Good title,” he says. “The Thai Evasion.”
“There it is again,” she says.
“No, I do not fool around.”
“I don’t care except that I’m not eager to catch some dread disease. You don’t have any dread disease, do you?”
“No.”
“Like AIDS, for example?”
“I do not have AIDS.”
“Ron had herpes. I didn’t catch it because I was very careful. But we didn’t use any protection last week...”
“You and Ron?”
“Sure, me and Ron. Why do you do that?”
“I don’t know. Why do I?”
“You’re the shrink, you tell me.”
“I guess I’m a little embarrassed by this conversation.”
“You shouldn’t be. I know too many people in the business who died of AIDS.”
“Does Ron have AIDS?”
“No, just herpes. We both tested HIV negative in Detroit.”
“You were that serious about each other, huh?”
“That was eight months ago.”
“But you were serious enough to...”
“I guess we were serious. But that was eight months ago, I just told you.”
“Yes.”
“And this is now.”
“Yes.”
“So if either you or your wife fool around...”
“We don’t fool around.”
“Then why the Thai Evasion? Which is a very good title, you’re right, but it’s still ducking the question. If you haven’t done this a lot, have you done it a little?”
He looks across the table at her.
“Thank you, I have my answer,” she says.
“No, you haven’t. But I don’t feel like discussing it in a room this size, where everyone...”
“My apartment isn’t much bigger,” she says. “But let’s go, you’re right. If I don’t kiss you soon, I’ll die.”
Her air conditioner is going full blast, but the sheets beneath them are wet from their earlier passionate thrashing on what has turned into another sodden summer night. The apartment is on the third floor of a doorman building, and he can hear the traffic moving below on First Avenue, horns honking in this city where noise pollution is illegal, but who cares, ambulances shrieking in this city where murder is as inevitable as sunset, but who cares? Who cares, he wonders, that we ourselves are murderers of a sort in this bedroom with its drawn blinds and its noisy air conditioner, who cares that we are together nullifying and rendering void a sacred covenant, while Helen — sworn second party to the same pact — sleeps peacefully in Menemsha?
Let it come down, he thinks.
First Murderer. Macbeth.
He has done something like this... well, not really like this... only once before in all the time he’s been married, just that once in Boston... well, not anything like this, in fact nothing at all like this. In fact, he cannot recall ever having been this excited by any woman he’s ever known, not Helen, not any of the girls he’d known before he met Helen...
“Do I really excite you?”
“You know you do.”
“I want to excite you. Is that her name? Helen?”
“My wife, yes. Helen.”
Saying her name in this room. Saying it aloud where he has just made love to a passionate woman not his wife, whose arms are still around him.
“My mother almost named me Helen,” she says.
“You’re joking.”
“No, no. Helen was my grandmother’s name. She almost named me after her. Does your wife excite you the way I do? Does Helen excite you this way? Say.”
“No.”
Murderers, he thinks. We are both murderers here.
“Did this woman you met in Boston...?”
“No, certainly not her. No one. Ever.”
“That’s because I love you,” she says. “More than any woman you’ve ever known.”
“No, you don’t love me,” he says.
She can’t love me, he thinks.
“Wanna bet?” she asks, and kisses him again.
There’s just this beautiful girl whose tongue is in my mouth, I don’t know who she is, her kisses are driving me crazy.
She breaks away breathlessly. They are lying on her bed, naked, and whereas they’d made love not ten minutes ago, he feels again the faint stirrings of renewed desire as she gently lifts her mouth from his, their lips clinging for an instant, stickily, the taste of his own semen on her lips, parting. She looks deep into his eyes, her face inches from his, and says, “Tell me all about your woman in Boston. What were you doing in Boston?”
“There was a convention up there. Of psychiatrists. The American Psychiatric Association.”
“Was she a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.”
“Oh God, another shrink!”
“Yeah.”
“Was she beautiful?”
“Not very.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know, this was seven years ago.”
“Well, you must know how old you were.”
“I guess I turned thirty-nine that July.”
“Midlife Crisis,” she says at once.
“Maybe.”
“Fear of Forty,” she says.
“Maybe.”
“Incidentally, I have a great title for Erica Jong’s next book.”
“Tell me.”
“Sex at Sixty. How old was she?”
“Who, Erica?”
“Sure, Erica. Your bimbo in Boston.”
“She wasn’t a bimbo. She was just this lonely woman...”
“This shrink, you mean. God, she wasn’t Jacqueline Hicks, was she?”
“No, no.”
“You almost gave me a heart attack. If she’d turned out to be Jacqueline... well, it couldn’t have been her because you said she wasn’t beautiful. I think Jacqueline is very beautiful, don’t you?”
“I never noticed.”
“Is that the truth?”
“That’s the truth.”
“I love Jacqueline. I was really crazy when I started going to her, you know. She really helped me a lot. I’m glad it wasn’t her you fucked in Boston.”