What followed after that didn’t figure in any category of possibility I understood. Because, when the pain had dulled enough to let me draw breath again, I found that my head was cradled against Rachel’s genuflected knees. I heard sharp words exchanged between her and her date: he telling her in effect that she must choose between him and me. “What cornball script are you reading from?” she barked back at him, after which he flung a parting oath and was apparently gone.
Then, before a dozen onlookers who probably assumed I’d gotten what I deserved, she offered an apology. “I’m sorry,” she said, releasing an essence like vanilla roses. The bar had grown silent but for the jukebox playing a rock anthem by Iron Butterfly. “He’s a bit of a hothead sometimes,” she explained.
Despite my acute discomfort, I felt jealous: I wanted to be the hothead. At the same time, humiliation notwithstanding, I was enjoying the humid warmth of her thighs through the thin fabric of her dress. The blood that pulsed so percussively in my temples throbbed as well in remoter parts. I opened wide the eye that wasn’t already beginning to swell shut and asked her, God help me, if she’d ever been mounted by a troll. The cushion of her thighs was abruptly removed from under me as she got hastily to her feet, leaving my head to bounce on the sticky hardwood floor. Seeing that I was still prostrate, however, she relented, and with a charity that surpassed understanding leaned over to drag me upright and back to my feet.
With the drama ended, the bar’s clientele had retired to their tables, while Rachel and I remained facing each other awkwardly in the center of the room. When she released my sleeve, I began to teeter perhaps more than my actual dizziness warranted, so that she grabbed me again to keep me from keeling over. Then, having steadied me, she let go and wiped her palm on her dress as a prelude — no doubt — to washing her hands of me entirely. I started to teeter again. Out of the corner of my good eye I caught sight of Lamar, whose shit-eating smirk I interpreted as a kind of benediction.
“Could you maybe help me across the street?” I asked her, having as I saw it nothing to lose.
“What are you, blind?”
“I live across the street.”
“Nobody lives around here.”
I made a face to suggest that it wasn’t exactly living.
With a put-upon sigh, she fastened an arm round my shoulder and escorted me out of the bar and over the road; then having come that far, she assisted me the rest of the way up the steep flight of stairs to my apartment. My brain was pounding like a tom-tom, my ribs bruised if not broken, but the rubber legs were pure theater. At the top of the stairs I pushed open the unlocked door with a knee.
“Welcome to Xanadu,” I said contritely.
What hit you first on entering the apartment was an odor of gamy clothing so keen it stung the retina. When your eyes grew accustomed to their watering, you could make out the few items of furniture I’d salvaged from sidewalks and dustbins in the vicinity. In fact, the garbage strike had provided me with some odd late additions: a cardboard wardrobe, a slashed bucket seat. For all the radiator’s Gatling-gun clamor, the place remained chilly. There was an unshaded bulb hanging from the concave ceiling, a fleabag mattress on the floor near the windows, and the tumulus of books in the middle of the room. They looked, the books, like a pyre awaiting the burning of a heretic.
Rachel dumped me unceremoniously on the mattress. I fully expected her to disregard my unsubtle groaning and depart, but instead she began to pick her way toward the kitchen. The shush of her stockinged calves brushing against one other was the rhythmic respiration of an angel. She returned with a dirty sock full of ice cubes that might have resided in that ancient refrigerator since the Pleistocene age. She offered me the sock (whose stiffness she may have detected) like you’d dangle a dead mouse by the tail.
“Hold this over your eye.”
I sat on the mattress with my back against the windowsill, amazed at having lured a mortal woman into my digs. Affected though I was, I felt a little like her guilty captor, and as her captor it was my reluctant obligation, now that her duty was done, to let her go. Still she lingered in her tweed coat buttoned to the throat, observing the mound of books like an obstacle she had to climb over to reach the door. She nudged them with the toe of her boot as if stirring embers.
“Is it just a coincidence that so many of these authors killed themselves?” she wanted to know.
I smiled my idea of a dangerous smile. “I like your accent,” I said. “Where are you from?”
Her expression was the perfect mixture of curiosity and disdain. “Are you trying to make conversation?”
Something in her tone of voice opened a tiny porthole of lucidity in my brain, through which I spied my little life in all its squalor. Then the porthole slammed shut and I smiled again, albeit sheepishly.
“I have to go,” she announced abruptly though she continued to study the pile. Then she stooped to pick up a book, the book. “This one looks like somebody’s bound dissertation.”
“Don’t touch it!” I blurted, starting up from the mattress but constrained by my aching ribs.
She dropped it like a live coal.
“It’s a cursed book,” I alleged.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s … I stole it from the library of a satanist.”
With absolute confidence she assured me, “No you didn’t.”
“He was rumored to perform human sacrifice,” I added. She rolled her eyes and I promptly changed the subject. “So, what do you do?”
Rachel peered at me as if trying to decide what species I belonged to, then shook her head in perplexity. “You’re some piece of work,” she concluded matter-of-factly. Then just as flatly she told me, “I grew up in Larchmont, New York. I came to Memphis on a grant from the Mid-South Folklore Center to research the roots of the Southern Jewish community. Dennis is my fiancé, sort of, and I only stayed with you because I was mad at him. So why am I still standing here in this pesh”—for she’d had some wine this evening—“pesthole?”
Ignoring her question, I submitted, “I’m a Jew,” though the fact had not occurred to me for some time.
“Oh well,” she said, her voice dripping irony, “that makes all the difference.” There was a moment when her eyes narrowed like Lauren Bacall’s, her mind gnawing a thought. Then she seemed to have reached some kind of decision, because she unbuttoned her overcoat, allowing it to drop onto the floor among the empty medicine vials. She began to walk toward me as far as the edge of the mattress upon which she knelt, raising a small cloud of dust. Unclasping a barrette, she shook out her hair so that it spilled like India ink over her forehead and shoulders. She had almost no waist at all. “So you’d like to defile me?” she teased, alluding, I guessed, to my unfortunate pickup line from the bar.
I tried to swallow but it seemed that my Adam’s apple was caught in my windpipe. Watching me, her large eyes grew even wider.
“You’re scared of girls, aren’t you!” she declared, obviously delighted. She shoved me backward onto the mattress, paying no attention to my injuries. “Ouch!” I cried as, laughing, she wrested the soggy sock from my hand and twirled it coquettishly before tossing it over a shoulder. Asterisks of light from the unshaded bulb played in her glossy hair. When she lifted the hem of her dress to straddle me, I saw how the mauve stockings stopped at the top of her tender, goosefleshed thighs. There was a rustling, a fumbling, my heart pumping warm molasses in place of blood. All of creation seemed to have gathered in my pants, which had been shoved to my ankles. Then a mournful cry escaped my lips as my excitement ranneth over.