After a block Dora slowed almost to a stop, holding on tightly to his arm, his waist.
“We should have taken that ride,” he said.
“I’m fine. I’m glad we didn’t,” she said. “I don’t want to think about you fighting that man. Or anybody else. Look, you’re bleeding.” She reached up and swabbed the corner of his lip with her thumb. But it wasn’t his blood. He had some scrapes and bruises, but they would disappear by morning, along with the aches, just as they always did, with a miraculous, almost furious, speed. As though his own body were mocking him, with its incessant, strange perfection. “Why do you want to get hurt?”
“Who said I wanted to get hurt?”
“Then why fight?”
“Why not?”
“Did your father like to fight, too?”
“That’s a funny question.”
“Is it? Fathers and sons, you know.”
“I don’t know.”
“Legacies, expectations. All that stuff.”
“You’re losing me,” he said, though she in fact wasn’t.
“Oh, just forget it, Hector. Don’t listen to me. I’m a drunk, silly woman.”
“You’re not silly.”
“Don’t be fresh now.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay, then. I’m serious. I want to know. Is it so fun? To be at war all the time?”
“No,” he said, his mind searching a thousand instances, if one. “Not at all.”
“But it just happens.”
“Yeah.”
“Then maybe I ought to stick close to you. Nobody would harm a weak person like me.”
“Not if they had a shred of feeling they wouldn’t. But you’re not weak.”
“I am. You’ll see.” They walked a few more blocks. At a curb she tripped and faltered, and he luckily caught her before she fell. “I think I need some air.”
“We’re outside already,” he said.
“I mean I need to rest,” she answered.
He didn’t know if she meant to sit or lie down (there was no place to do so) and when she teetered he grabbed her and she immediately kissed him, her mouth tasting sappy and fermented with the hard butterscotch candy she’d been sucking to cover the smell of having thrown up. But who was Hector to mind? He was fouled but not sweet and she was no doubt suffering his own ruined flavor as he kissed her in return, embracing her with his full strength, the tender flesh of her waist pushing up between his fingers. The air then truly seemed to go out of her and it was fortunate that his apartment was only a few blocks away. By the time he had the key in the lock she was practically shaking and he lifted her up so that her legs wound around the backs of his thighs and he could feel the sharp but weak dig of her shoe heels.
He carefully walked them through the darkened two-room flat and when he was at the foot of the bed he believed she was out but she began to kiss him with a new force and craving. They fell into the sorry thrift-shop mattress and soon enough she had pulled his T-shirt off and had unbuttoned her own blouse and was atop him, lowering a still-soft nipple into his mouth. It bloomed in a taste of salt and funk and iron. He hefted her other breast and with his free hand he hiked up the willowy crepe skirt and cupped the heat between her legs until she began moving against him in a cadence that marked her breathing. It was terribly stifling in the room all of a sudden and he rose to slide open the glass door onto the weedy uneven patio he shared with a neighbor he’d hardly spoken to. She followed him, dropping her skirt and wilted panties to the floor, the two of them now attracted outside by a cooling breeze, and in the white-green light of the sodium lamps of the apartment’s inner courtyard it appeared as if she might have just ascended from some forsaken underworld, her naked form at once strangely aglow and lifeless. To another man this vision might have been troubling, but to Hector it was an irresistible invitation, and he pressed her up perhaps too hard against the pane of the sliding door. If she gasped with fear it was for but a second, and they stayed there, moving against each other, until it was clear they were too spent to finish, and he carried her already asleep to the bed.
WHEN THE DAWN BROKE Dora was still fast asleep and he left her a note about locking the door behind her, though nothing about whether he would see her tonight. No doubt he would, whether he wished to or not. But he was quite sure he did. He made his way to work through the scatter of the Sunday-morning streets, already caught by a keen urge to turn back and not so gently rouse Dora from her slumber. A surprisingly clean, waxen scent from her wreathed him, a pleasing note in itself but also a contrast to his own aroma, long indiscernible to him but which he was suddenly aware of now in the already bolting warmth of the late-September day, this stubborn rime of lye and bad meat, a consequence of his job, no doubt, though by any measure it was in fact a much deeper insinuation. He wondered if Dora had noticed anything. He was thinking, too, that if he was going to have the regular company of a woman again, maybe it ought to be one like her, even if it meant a more scrupulous regimen of self-hygiene. In a store window he caught a glimpse of himself and paused; he looked murky, watery, either half eroded or half formed. The image aligned with what he had been thinking of himself even before the birthday celebration at the bar, the crux of the matter being that he was a man not yet fixed into his own life.
Jackie Brennan would always say that that was the mark of success, not how large a house a man owned or the model of car he drove but how firmly one was rooted in his family, his neighborhood, his work. Hector had arrived at this point in his life by his own design, and anyone could marvel now at the extent of his feat: he had neither money nor status nor prospects, which was okay by him, even if respectable people might classify him to be a lowlife. But in truth he knew his near-indigence was also easy cover, a way to hide and be freed from responsibility for anything in the least vital or important, which in effect was to be freed from the present, and the foreseeable future, if never quite the past.
For with the bright daylight the past reared up, the name of June its unexpected summons. June, from the war. He almost wished now that Tick had gotten the best of him, put him in the emergency room at Hackensack. He’d have to forget all over again. The last time he’d seen June she was only nineteen years old, this fierce, sharp-cornered girl he’d married for her convenience only, despite how miserable and guilty her presence made him. He brought her over to the States and they had lived together (if not as husband and wife) for five months, until it seemed clear enough she could make her own way, and for what seemed an eternity he’d not heard a word of her, neither of them much caring whether the other was even alive.
He walked faster now, as if he might outpace the visitation. A sweat broke out on his back and chest and he was glad that the good aura of Dora was still clinging to him; he breathed it in, to etherize himself. He was thirsty. He knew there was a pub around the corner, and luckily the owner was just opening up, nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. It was his kind of place (or, more aptly, a place for his kind), and amid the stools still perched upside down on top of the bar he stood and quickly drank three draft beers and by the end of the fourth he felt cooled enough to get going again, his thoughts quelled and lingering once more on Dora.
He should think only of Dora. He was honestly looking forward to seeing her tonight. The last time he was with a woman-a long while now, as it had been cold and wet, March or April-he had encountered that most alarming of troubles and despite the woman’s patience and valiant efforts he had remained as inert as a day-old balloon. He could not be coaxed. It had never happened before but it didn’t surprise him-for some years now he had been sensing a steady depletion in that area, the feeling that what had always seemed his vast reserves of desire were being drawn down at a rate too quick for anything save an eventual exhaustion.