She had asked me to come here with her eyes and her song. She knew it was going to be me; I knew she knew it was going to be me; and yet I stood there struck motionless and dumb at the door’s abrupt opening.
Now the vision of her was intensified by another opening: her hands moved to the knot of her silk belt and undid it and the belt fell away and her hands rose to her chest and grasped the edges of the wrap and she spread her arms — opening the kimono — and I had to work hard to bolster my dissolving knees.
Since standing up was a struggle for me at the moment, moving forward was out of the question. She did not seem to mind. She sloughed off the kimono and she was utterly naked, instantly, in the open doorway, and she did not move either, though I’m sure she had more of a choice in the matter than I did, and we stood before each other and it was a tribute to her eyes that they were all I was looking at.
She seemed happy to set the rules, as she had our first time. She lifted a hand and touched my lips with her fingertips. Only they were different rules. “Not a word,” she said. “And forget the last time. Go rough with me. I think you know how.”
This fortified my knees, and I stepped into her cabin and swept her up in my arms and kicked her door shut with my heel. And I did this thing with Selene Bourgani in the War-Zone dark, and though I did it the way I was used to doing it, and though I didn’t even have to make myself assume that the woman beneath me wanted it done this way, and though it was all proceeding just fine as far as the bodies involved were concerned, the damnedest thing started going on.
My mind separated itself, my mind went off somewhere quite a ways away and raised a periscope and watched this vessel sailing by in the dark, watched me doing what I wanted with this woman, whose beautiful eyes I could not see, whose beautiful body was simply something to pound inside, whose beauty and public place in the world I was merely turning into a classy version of all the bodies I’d ever pounded inside, and yet all the while, my lurking mind was wondering what was going on with her. She’d wanted me slow and gentle before her meeting with Brauer. She’d wanted me slow and gentle when we were out in the middle of the North Atlantic, when she was still days and nights away from the place where she was going and from the things she would do there. But tonight she wanted it like this. As our arrival grew nearer, was she feeling guilty about what she was going to do? Was she having me punish her for it? Some women wanted to be punished like this.
And then I was done. My body knew it quite well. But with my mind submerged far away, watching, working on its own questions, I missed the moment.
Selene was gasping, was whimpering, she was saying, “More. Keep going. Please.” My body had enough left to do that. And I did that. But all I was caring about was what, exactly, Selene Bourgani had gotten herself into, and why, and how I could get her out.
Then she said she was all right. She wasn’t. Her body maybe had what it wanted, but I could feel the darkness inside her welling up again and she was not all right. And then we were holding each other close in this outer darkness, on the floor of her parlor in her suite on the Lusitania, and now that my body was done, I was fully there beside her again and we neither of us seemed inclined to move. Not to the bed in the other room. Not even to the overstuffed sofa here in her parlor. We lay on the floor and she put her head on my chest and I drew her close.
After a while she shifted her head to my shoulder and immediately laid her hand where her head had been. Upon my heart, I realized. I knew how to grill possible news sources, even by indirection when I didn’t want to put them completely off me. I figured this might be my only chance with Selene. I said, “Are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
She wasn’t going to say no. But her yes was slow and quiet. “Yes,” she said.
“I think the Germans could do this,” I said.
She was quiet.
“Sink us,” I said.
She still said nothing. I didn’t like the dark. I wanted to read her face. Was it paining her to confront the perfidy of the men she was working for? Was she like them? I wanted to see her eyes.
“What they did in Belgium when they went in,” I said. “In Dinant. Louvain.”
She stirred. Her hand came off my chest. Her head lifted from my shoulder, but only for a moment, returning almost at once. And she said, “The world’s pretty selective in the massacres it cares about.”
She herself applied the word “massacre” to the civilian killings in Belgium. But somehow I heard in her a world-weary justification of the Germans. That’s what I wanted her to talk about. If I was to get more from her at this juncture I needed to start with something like: “Which other massacres do you mean?” It needed to sound like an ignorant challenge. I needed to rile her to get her to say things. But I knew what she was talking about. The Brits in India, for example, killing a million locals by exporting their rice in the midst of famine. The Belgians themselves in the Congo, massacring by amputation over failed rubber quotas. I was holding Selene close and I was still a little in her thrall, and contrary to my reporter’s instincts, I was reluctant to sound stupid and calloused.
So I improvised in another direction. “Have you ever had a German lover?”
This made her head leave my shoulder and stay away. There was just enough spill of light into the room from beneath the door that I could see her turn her body to face me, prop her head on her hand.
“How did you do that?” she said.
“Do what?”
“Go from massacres to my past lovers?”
“A freely associating mind,” I said.
She grunted a little.
“You shouldn’t have asked for it rough,” I said.
She laughed a little.
I said, “You wanted our last time together to be the last. Then this. Before we quit forever again, I want to know where I’ll fit in your memory.”
“He wanted to know that too.”
“Who?”
“The German. What is it with the smarter men? They all seem to want to know about the ones before.”
“The stupid men prefer virgins,” I said. “We’ve got a sense of history.”
She was quiet for a moment, and then she asked, “Was your mother happy in love?”
Selene was freely associating now herself. And she wasn’t hesitant to get personal. I didn’t like the associations squirming to be free in my own head at this question, but at least she made it easier for me to press the only issue I had to work with.
“You’d have to ask her,” I said. “I didn’t keep track.”
I let that sit in her for a moment, and it did, quietly. Then I pressed on. “And your German,” I said. “Were you happy with him?”
She wasn’t saying.
I got to that question too quick. I backed up. “Who was he?”
“A director.”
“Of course,” I said.
She fell silent once more. I waited. She wasn’t talking.
“Which one?” I asked.
She moved abruptly and I couldn’t see how in the dark and I flinched. But her body was suddenly against me again, her head returned to the place on my shoulder where it had been before the talk began. Her hand returned to my heart.
I’d been grasping at straws here. Trying to get her to talk about the Germans. Trying to figure out her connections to them. This seemed just a busted romance. But it was the only card I had to play.
I’m not real smart about women. But I’m smart about reading people, being a pretty good reporter. So after making a certain scale-tipping number of mistakes with women, my reporter skills finally kicked in and taught me a few things. Women, especially ones who have reasons — like jazzing together — to think you’ve got a romantic future, deep down want to talk about their feelings. So for the first time ever while lying around naked with a female, I said, “You want to talk about it?”