“I don’t mind doing something,” I said, putting an arm around her. “It gives me a sense of participation.”
“No,” she said, now working on my shirt buttons. “I want it to last.”
“I can cooperate along those lines, too. We’ve got forty minutes or so.”
She started unfastening my belt. “That’s how long it’s got to last. Forty minutes.”
“Why?”
“Because it keeps me from thinking. I don’t want to think. Not until it really starts.”
All of my clothes were off now and we lay on the bed, our arms around each other. I started to say something, to pay her some compliment probably, maybe about how pretty she was, but she shook her head and said, “Don’t talk. I don’t want to talk. I just want to do everything as though it were the last time ever. For both of us.”
She was able to pretend that better than I. There was something frantic about her tongue and hands. Her tongue went exploring, darting into every opening and crevice that she could find. Her nails raked my buttocks and my back again and I had to bite my lip to keep from yelling. But to bite my lip I had to close my mouth and she didn’t like that. She wanted it open so that my tongue could be where she thought it should be.
It went like that for what seemed to me a long time although I didn’t keep track. And then I was inside her and she began to make small little moans as she writhed and clamped at me and crosshatched my back with her fingernails. “Now hurt me,” she said, almost choking on the words, “I want you to hurt me bad.” So I hurt her, but not bad, even though she’d wanted me to, and I felt the spasms start in her belly, once, twice, three times, and I quit worrying about her and started delighting in myself and then it started to be over and then it was and we lay there breathing hard and listening to Wiedstein throw up in the bathroom.
“Jesus,” I said, turned over, and started fumbling through my clothes for a cigarette.
“He always does that,” she said. “I always do this. This is better.”
“Who’s your usual partner?” I said, offering her a cigarette.
“It depends on where I am. Sometimes it’s just me.”
“That’s not much fun.”
“It depends on your imagination. Don’t worry, you’re not cutting out either Wiedstein or Procane.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
The bathroom door opened and Wiedstein stood there, looking a little pale. I’m not sure that he noticed we were naked. I don’t think he cared. He was sponging off his face with a wet cloth.
“You’d better get ready,” he said.
“Are you okay now?” Janet Whistler said, propping herself up on one elbow.
“I think it’s over. I thought my goddamned appendix was coming up.”
“What time is it?” she said.
He looked at his watch. I thought about covering myself with something, but decided that if it wasn’t bothering them, it shouldn’t bother me. “Eight-ten,” he said, turned, and closed the door behind him.
Janet Whistler turned toward me and stretched. “God, I feel better.”
“Why don’t you go in the bathroom and see if you can find something to put on my back,” I said. “I think I’m bleeding all over the counterpane.”
“Turn over.”
I turned over and she said. “How’d you ever do that?” I think she really didn’t know.
I sighed. “It’s something like stigmata except that I get it on my back every time I screw.”
“You mean I did that?”
“Didn’t anyone ever complain before?”
“No. Never. Really they didn’t.”
“Am I bleeding?”
“Not really. They’re just scratches, but I’ll put something on them.”
“Don’t bother,” I said, swinging my legs over the bed and reaching for my shirt.
“Did I do that before?” she asked. “I mean when we were up at your place?”
“Yes.”
“I never did it to anyone else. Honestly.”
“Maybe they were too polite to complain.”
“They weren’t that polite. Nobody is.”
“Forget it.”
“I think I know why I do it.”
“Why?”
“It’s like I told you before. You’re such a good fuck. But you know what you can do next time?”
“What?”
“You can buy me some gloves.”
Mrs. Williams fetched our coats from the hall closet and we shrugged into them in the living room and then stood around, a little awkwardly, like guests at a party that has lasted too long.
Procane turned to Mrs. Williams and said, “The car will be by for you at ten.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll be back in New York some time tomorrow.”
“In time for lunch or dinner?”
“Dinner, I think.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you for coming down, Mrs. Williams, and for the fine dinner.”
“You welcome, Mr. Procane.”
He turned to us then and said, “We can go out through the back.”
We followed him through the dining room, a pantry, and the kitchen that had one of those large, commercial stoves that can cook for four or forty. There was also a big freezer, an outsized refrigerator, and two automatic dishwashers.
“They entertain a lot,” Procane said, apparently referring to the absent owners of the house. He opened a door that led outside and we went down a flight of wooden steps from a small porch into a back yard. Procane had switched on an outside light and I could see that the term back yard wasn’t quite grand enough for the small, carefully laid out informal garden that had cost somebody a great deal of money and even more time. It was too dark to recognize the shrubs and bushes, and I’m not sure that I could have anyhow, but some of them were cozily wrapped up in burlap against the winter frost. There were five or six tall shade trees, nearly bare now, and curving in and out of the shrubs and the trees was a walk of white gravel that sparkled in the artificial light.
We followed the walk until we came to a brick garage. Procane used a key to unlock a door and we went inside. He turned on another light and it revealed two three- or four-year-old Chevrolet Impalas. One was black and the other was green. There was still space enough in the garage for a third car, a big one such as a Cadillac or an Imperial. There was even enough space for the long workbench that ran along one side of the garage and which had enough tools to put a shade-tree mechanic in business.
Procane moved over, inserted another key in a wall lock of some kind, pushed a button, and the garage’s overhead door rose smoothly. “We’ll take the green one, Mr. St. Ives,” he said and motioned for me to get in. He went around to the driver’s side. Wiedstein and Janet Whistler got in the black car, Wiedstein at the wheel.
Procane waited until Wiedstein backed out of the garage and started up the alley. Then he started our engine and we followed, turning left and then right on N Street and then left on Wisconsin Avenue and right again on M Street, which, along with Wisconsin, is one of the two main drags through Georgetown.
Wiedstein stayed in the left lane. He signaled for a left turn just before we got to Key Bridge, but had to wait for a red light. We waited, just behind him.
“What’s it going to be,” I said, “Maryland or Virginia?”
“Virginia,” Procane said. “Do you have a preference?”
“No.”
“Have you been in Virginia before?”
“I stopped at Bull Run once.”
“Was it interesting?”
“Sort of.”
The light turned green and we crossed the Potomac over the bridge that was named after the composer of our national anthem who, I’ve always suspected, had a tin ear. At the Virginia side of Key Bridge we turned right and about half a mile later edged on to the George Washington Memorial Parkway.