He sat down and asked for wine. "You know, I'm just a little gun shy romantically," he said apologetically. "I don't have the confidence I used to. I don't think I can take my clothes off in front of another person. Not even at the gym, frankly. I've been changing in the toilet stalls. After divorce and all."
"Oh, divorce will do that to you totally," she said reassuringly. She poured him some wine. "It's like a trick. It's like someone puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, 'Stand there.' And so you do. Then boom!" From a drawer in a china hutch, she took out a pipe, loaded it with hashish from a packet of foil, then lit it, inhaling. She gave it to him. "I've never seen a pediatrician smoke hashish before."
"Really?" she said, with some difficulty, her breath still sucked in.
the nipples of her breasts were long, cylindrical, and stiff, so that her chest looked as if two small plungers had flown across the room and suctioned themselves there. His mouth opened hungrily to kiss them.
"Perhaps you would like to take off your shoes," she whispered.
"Oh, no," he said.
There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. "Yoo-hoo?" was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew people but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.
"Where are you?" Ira said in the dark. He decided that in a case such as this he could feel a chaste and sanctifying distance. It wasn't he who was having sex. The condom was having sex and he was just trying to stop it. Zora's candles on the nightstand were heated to clear pools in their tins. They flickered smokily. He tried not to think about how, before she had even lit them and pulled back the bedcovers, he had noticed that they were already melted down to the thickness of buttons, their wicks blackened to a crisp. It was not good to think about the previous burning of the bedroom candles of a woman who had just unzipped your pants. Besides, he was too grateful for those candles — especially with all those little wonder boys in the living room. Perhaps by candlelight his whitening chest hair would not look so white. This was what candles were made for: the sad, sexually shy, out-of-shape, middle-aged him. How had he not understood this in his marriage? Zora herself looked ageless, like a nymph, with her short hair, although once she got his glasses off she became a blur of dim and shifting shapes and might as well have been Dick Cheney or Lon Chaney or the Blob, except that she smelled good and, but for the occasional rough patch, had the satiny skin of a girl.
She let out a long, spent sigh.
"Where did you go?" he asked again anxiously.
"I've been right here, silly," she said, and pinched his hip. She lifted one of her long legs up and down outside the covers. "Did you get off?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Did you get off?"
"Get off?" Someone else had asked him the same question once, when he stopped in the jetway to tie his shoe after debarking from a plane.
"Have an orgasm. With some men it's not always clear."
"Yes, thank you. I mean, it was — to me — very clear."
"You're still wearing your wedding ring," she said.
"It's stuck, I don't know why—"
"Let me get at that thing," she said, and pulled hard on his finger, but the loose skin around his knuckle bunched up and blocked the ring, abrading his hand.
"Ow," he finally said.
"Perhaps later with soap," she said. She lay back and swung her legs up in the air again.
"Do you like to dance?" he asked.
"Sometimes," she said.
"I'll bet you're a wonderful dancer."
"Not really," she said. "But I can always think of things to do."
"That's a nice trait."
"You think so?" and she leaned in and began tickling him.
"I don't think I'm ticklish," he said.
"Oh." She stopped.
"I mean, I probably am a little" he added, "just not a lot."
"I'd like you to meet my son," she said.
"Is he here?"
"Sure. He's under the bed. Bruny?" Oh, these funny ones were funny. "No. He's with his dad this week."
The extended families of divorce. Ira tried not to feel jealous. It was quite possible that he was not mature enough to date a divorced woman. "Tell me about his dad."
"His dad? His dad is another pediatrician, but he was really into English country dancing. Where eventually he met a lass. Alas."
Ira would put that in his book of verse. Alas, a lass. "I don't think anyone should dance in a way that's not just regular dancing," Ira said. "It's not normal. That's just my opinion."
"Well, he left a long time ago. He said he'd made a terrible mistake getting married. He said that he just wasn't capable of intimacy. I know that's true for some people, but I'd never actually heard anyone say it out loud about themselves."
"I know," Ira said. "Even Hitler never said that! I mean, I don't mean to compare your ex to Hitler as a leader. Only as a man."
Zora stroked his arm. "Do you feel ready to meet Bruno? I mean, he didn't care for my last boyfriend at all. That's why we broke up."
"Really?" This silenced him for a moment. "If I left those matters up to my daughter, I'd be dating a beagle."
"I believe children come first." Her voice now had a steely edge.
"Oh, yes, yes, so do I," Ira said quickly. He felt suddenly paralyzed and cold.
She reached into the nightstand drawer, took out a vial, and bit into a pill. "Here, take half," she said. "Otherwise we won't get any sleep at all. Sometimes I snore. Probably you do, too."
"This is so cute," Ira said warmly. "Our taking these pills together."
he staggered through his days, tired and unsure. At the office, he misplaced files. Sometimes he knocked things over by accident — a glass of water or the benefits manual. The buildup to war, too, was taking its toll. He lay in bed at night, the moments before sleep a kind of stark acquaintance with death. What had happened to the world? It was mid-March now, but it still did not look like spring, especially with the plastic sheeting duct-taped to his windows. When he tried to look out, the trees seemed to be pasted onto the waxy dinge of a still wintry sky. He wished that this month shared its name with a less military verb. Why "March"? How about a month named Skip? That could work.
He got a couple of cats from the pound so that Bekka could have some live pet action at his house, too. He and Bekka went to the store and stocked up on litter and cat food.
"Provisions!" Ira exclaimed.
"In case the war comes here, we can eat the cat food," Bekka suggested.
"Cat food, heck. We can eat the cats," Ira said.
"That's disgusting, Dad."
Ira shrugged.
"You see, that's one of the things Mom didn't like about you!" she added.
"Really? She said that?"
"Sort of."
"Mom likes me. She's just very busy."
"Yeah. Whatever."
He got back to the cats. "What should we name them?"
"I don't know." She studied the cats.
Ira hated the precious literary names that people gave pets — characters from opera and Proust. When he first met Marilyn, she had a cat named Portia, but he had insisted on calling it Fang.