A minute passed, maybe two, and the kiss grew less cautious, more passionate; less deliberate, more a thing unto itself. It waxed and waned as though in obedience to some force that was slipping from our control. I took in all the different aspects of her mouth, each shifting through my consciousness like images illuminated by a strobe light: her tongue; her lips; her teeth; her tongue again; the delicious feel of the whole, this new threshold to so much of whoever she was.
She took my lower lip between her teeth and lips and held it there for a moment, then released it and gradually eased away. We looked at each other. She smiled.
“I like the way you taste,” she said.
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Must be the Laphroaig.”
She made a sound of agreement that was something like a purr. “That’s part of it. The other part is you.”
I smiled at her. “The exotic taste of the Orient?”
She laughed. “Just you.”
We made love on the bed. There was some jocular debate in the midst of the proceedings about who should be on top, debate that we resolved by recourse to each of the alternatives in question, along with several others. Her body was as luscious and beautiful as that glimpse in Belghazi’s suite had promised, and she moved with an unaffected experience and enthusiasm that made me think of the confidence I had first seen in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental.
We used a condom, something I assumed was one of several practical items she would typically keep in her purse. It was smart. In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I’m rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I’ve survived, I must be immune to sexually transmitted diseases. Stupid, I know. More likely, fate will indulge its taste for irony by killing me with AIDS or some other unpleasant alternative.
We lay on our sides afterward, facing each other, heads propped languorously on folded pillows. She reached over and traced my lips with a fingertip.
“You’re smiling,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow. “What did you think, I was going to frown?”
She laughed. Her words, her attitude, it all felt authentic enough. But she was a pro. If she was letting her hair down, I had to assume it was tactical, a means to an end. And I still couldn’t be sure about her motives, about what she might have tried back at the Mandarin Oriental. A shame, to have that knowledge lying on the bed coldly between us, but there it was.
I asked her, “How did you get involved in your work?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes I ask myself the same thing.”
“Tell me.”
“I answered an ad in the newspaper, same as you.”
I waited. There was no sense saying more. If she didn’t want to talk about it, she wouldn’t.
We were quiet again. Then she said, “I was a skinny kid, but when I was fourteen, my body started to develop. Boys, men, started looking at me. I didn’t know why they were looking, exactly, but I liked it. I liked that I had something they wanted. I could tell it gave me a kind of power.”
“You must have driven them crazy,” I said, remembering what it was like to be that age, testosterone-poisoned and single-minded as a heat-seeking missile.
She nodded. “But I wasn’t interested in boys my age. I don’t know why; they just seemed so young. My fantasies were always about older men.”
She pulled herself a little higher on the pillow. “When I was sixteen, a friend of my father’s from the army moved to our city because of a job opportunity. He stayed with us for a couple months while he looked for an apartment and got settled. His name… I’ll call him Dov. He was forty, a war hero, dark and handsome and with the softest, most beautiful eyes. Every time I looked at him I would get a strange feeling inside and have to look away. He was always proper with me, but sometimes I would catch him looking at me the way men did, although it seemed that he was trying not to.
“When I realized he was looking at me that way, it was… exciting. Here was this man, this war hero, handsome and intelligent and so much older and more sophisticated than I was, and still I had this power over him. I started… experimenting with the power. Testing it, in a way, to try to figure out what it was. I would laugh at something he said and hold his eyes a moment too long. Or brush against him when I walked past. I didn’t intend for it to lead anywhere; I didn’t even know that it could lead somewhere with a man like Dov, or where that place might be.
“One day, when he was home and my parents were out, I put on what I thought of as my sexiest outfit-a white bikini top and matching sarong. I knocked on his door. My heart was beating hard, the way it always did when I was near him or even thought of him. I heard him say, ‘Come in,’ so I did. He was sitting at the small desk in his room, and when he saw me he stood up, then flushed and looked away. My heart started beating harder. I told him I was going to walk down to the beach-we lived near the ocean-and asked him if he wanted to go for a swim. He didn’t say anything-he just looked at me for a second, then away again. I realized I could hear his breathing. I was so young at the time, I didn’t even know what that might mean, but it excited me. And I felt awkward because he hadn’t answered me. I didn’t know what to say, so I fanned my face a little and said, ‘It’s so hot in here!’ which it suddenly was. He still didn’t say anything, he just looked at me with the oddest expression-smiling, but almost a little sick, too, as though he was in pain and trying to be brave about it-and I saw that his hands were trembling. It made me nervous that he wasn’t answering me, so, just trying to think of something to say, I said, ‘It’s okay if you don’t want to swim,’ and I realized my voice was as shaky as his hands.
“His lips moved, but no words came out. Then he reached out and touched one of my cheeks with the back of his fingers. I was surprised and took a quick step away. He pulled his hand back and told me quickly he was sorry. I didn’t know what he meant by that or why I had stepped back; all I knew right then was that I wanted him to touch me, wanted it more than anything, and without another thought I took his hands in mine and said, ‘No, no, it’s okay!’ Then he looked at me with his beautiful, dark eyes, took my face in his hands, and kissed me. It was my first real kiss and I felt like I would faint from the pleasure of it. I could hear myself moaning into his mouth and he was moaning, too. And you know what? When he put his hands on my body, just my hips and my breasts, I came. That was another first for me-I didn’t even know what was happening, I couldn’t breathe, there was this explosion of pleasure and then I was sagging against him and crying. He held me and stroked my hair and told me over and over that he was sorry, and I couldn’t speak so I just kept shaking my head and crying because it was so wonderful, he was so wonderful.”
I smiled, wanting to believe that the story was true, that she was showing me something more of the person behind what she had called the “poseur.” Maybe she was. Even if it was a pseudonym, Dov was an Israeli name. From what I could tell of the timelines, Israel’s Six Day War might have been the conflict in which he had distinguished himself. Her city by the sea? Tel Aviv? Eilat?
Or maybe it was a story she had told so many times and for so many reasons that she’d come to believe it herself. Maybe it was part of a campaign to get me to develop an attachment, to warp my objectivity, cloud my judgment.
But I could remind myself of all those unwelcome possibilities later. I didn’t see the point of dwelling on them now.
“Did he make love to you?” I asked.
“No. Not that time. Although he could have. He could have done anything with me.”