He cupped a hand under her ass, lifted her and brought her forward, slipped himself inside her. Engulfed in her warmth, he let out a long, relieved breath.
“Bury it,” she said.
There was nothing better than this.
They moved slowly. They moved for a long time. The rhythm and squall of the Feelies was just right. Donna threw her head back, pushed her pelvis out. Sweat flew off her hair. Karras squeezed her breast. She put her hand over his and made him squeeze it harder.
“Go,” she said.
“You go,” said Karras.
The sounds she made got him closer. It started in his thighs. He bit down on his lip.
He heard that chiming sound and opened his eyes. He saw Donna’s hand coming back with a fistful of ice as she reached beneath him.
“What the—”
“No,” said Donna. “Now you go.”
She jammed the ice cubes through his asshole and into his rectum. Karras thrashed, the veins defined on his neck. He came convulsively as Donna laughed from far away.
“Damn,” said Karras minutes later. “What the hell was that?”
“Something I picked up somewhere.”
“I thought I was the teacher,” said Karras.
“You were,” said Donna. “But not anymore.”
Marcus Clay stood out on R Street, his hands buried in his pockets, watching Dimitri Karras through the living-room window that faced out from the third floor of the Trauma Arms. Karras was doing some weird kind of dance. Clay could hear Irish-sounding music all the way down on the street.
Fuckin’ Dimitri, man. Thirty-seven years old and up there raising all kinds of hell with that black-haired girl. Probably coked up out of his head, too.
Clay wanted to go to bed. But he figured there was no way he could sleep in there, not while Karras was on that kind of roll. He got back into his car.
Clay thought of going to a bar that had a television, watching the late Kentucky-Davidson game, but he had already had a beer tonight, and one was pretty much his limit. He drove uptown.
He knew where he was going. He went up through Rock Creek Park. He got off near Arkansas Avenue, and then he was on the edge of Mount Pleasant, on Brown, the street where he owned his house. He parked the car a few houses down.
He walked over to a Chevy owned by a good guy named Pepe, a hardworking Puerto Rican he’d been knowing for the last fifteen years. He leaned against the car, looked up at his own house, to the second-story window on the right, the room where Marcus Jr. had slept since he’d been born.
Clay could see Elaine’s silhouette in there, Elaine sitting in the rocker, patiently looking at a book — reading a book aloud, Clay knew — as Marcus Jr. jumped up and down on the bed.
He could see Marcus Jr.’s nappy head rising in the frame of the window and falling out of the frame as he jumped. Marcus had a big head and nicely formed features for a boy. You could already see the muscles defined in his shoulders and arms. Dark skin — he got that coloring from Elaine. And deep brown eyes. He was going to be a big man, Marcus reckoned, and a handsome one, too.
Elaine, reading that Donald Crews book aloud, one about the kids going back to the country, playing around the train tracks and all that. Reading it while Marcus Jr. jumped around, listening while he jumped because he loved that book, but having too much energy to lie still. By now Clay would have lost his patience, told his little boy to sit his butt down.
Elaine was better with the boy, there wasn’t any doubt about that. But a boy needed a father around to make him whole.
It was a lot of little things that had driven Clay and Elaine apart: the fact that they led two separate lives, that they barely made time to talk, that their conversations centered around money when they did talk, that they had become more like housemates than lovers and friends. Stepping around each other, not meeting eyes, always on the way to something else. Details and obstacles, clouding the memory of how it had been when they’d first met. All those little things that weaken a marriage over time. But it was one big thing that had torn them apart.
That girl Clay had met at the Foxtrappe that night, she’d shown him more attention in the hour she knew him than Elaine had shown him in six months. That’s how he explained it to Elaine, anyway, after one of those he said/she-said friends of hers had called Elaine and told her she’d seen Clay and this girl leaving the club and going out to his car. The truth was, this young girl, she looked good, and Clay just had to find out, could he still if he wanted to? He’d had four beers, way more than he ever drank, and he supposed his judgment was off, too. Never should have gone out to the Peugeot — that damn car, it always had brought him bad luck — and never should have put fire to that fat joint of Lumbo she rolled while she was smiling and showing him all those perfect teeth. Shouldn’t have kissed her when she leaned into him, either, or slipped his hand in her dress and brushed it across that big red titty of hers, but there it was. He’d denied it to Elaine, of course, which had only made the whole thing worse. He never had been able to look her straight in the eye and tell a lie.
The hardest part was what he’d learned. Maybe it was self-righteous of him — okay, it was self-righteous — but Clay had always thought that he was better than all that. Turned out, you put something fine as that girl in front of him, he wasn’t any different than most men he knew. The thing that hurt was he had never imagined himself to be that weak.
Okay, he’d made a lot of mistakes. He’d make an effort to be a better husband if only she’d let him try. As for strange women, never again. One thing that had come out of this: He knew now how deeply he loved Elaine. And God, he loved his son.
The light went out in the window. Elaine would try to quiet Marcus Jr. down now, get him up in that rocking chair, hold him in her arms. It was tough on her, big as Marcus Jr. was, but this always got him down to sleep.
If Clay were in there now he’d offer to help. He’d tell his wife, It’s all right, go on downstairs, baby, I’ll do this part tonight. He’d sit there in that rocker, hug his boy tight, make him feel loved. Smell his hair.
But he wasn’t in there. He was out here, standing on the street.
Dimitri had always warned him, when he’d seen a certain look in Marcus’s eye, You don’t even want to be thinkin’ about messing with any strange. You don’t want to end up standing outside your own house, like some kind of heartbroke spy, looking with puppy-dog eyes at your own wife and kid, separated by brick and glass you paid for yourself.
And now that’s exactly where he was. Funny how it was that Dimitri, king of the players, ended up being the one to give him that kind of advice.
Not like Dimitri would ever change in that way himself; just look how he was carrying on with that girl up in the Arms. As for Clay, he had no business living in that apartment down on R Street. He had love for his friend, but Clay was all the way past that bachelor thing. He didn’t want any part of that world anymore.
Clay turned and walked back to his car. He hit the ignition, rubbed his hands together against the chill as he looked back up through his boy’s window.
Clay belonged with his wife and son, behind the walls of that warm house.
Saturday
March 15, 1986
Eleven
Dimitri Karras had a seat on the edge of his bed. The furnace heat of the sun came through his bedroom window, causing him to lower his head. Hundreds of other cokers across the city were sleeping off their Friday night grams and wouldn’t get out of bed until noon or one o’clock. But Karras worked retail, and Saturday happened to be the biggest day of the week. He thought of his mother, always giving him advice, urging him to be a professional. He could see her raised eyebrow, the flip of her hand punctuating her words. “Go to law school, Dimi mou, you’ll work gentleman’s hours. No weekends, nothin’ like that.” And then he thought, I haven’t been out to see my mother for some time.