She stood up and I watched her leave the room. As soon as she was gone, regret settled in my chest like an iron bar. When she returned and handed me a maroon towel to wipe myself, my body felt heavier than I could remember, like a tank that had run out of gas.
In Lucille's bathroom, I washed my penis with soap. As I dried myself with another maroon towel, I could feel a rift forming between myself and the present moment, as if I had already left the apartment. Only minutes before, my need for Lucille had been furious and real. I had acted on that need, and had taken pleasure from it, but already the sex was becoming remote, like an apparition of itself. When I pulled up my pants, I remembered Jack quoting the artist Norman Bluhm: "All men are prisoners of their peckers." The words rose in my mind as I stood there eyeing Lucille's night creams and an ice-blue streak of toothpaste that had hardened onto her sink.
After staying in the bathroom too long, I returned to Lucille, who was sitting in her partly unbuttoned dress on the sofa. Seeing her made me want to apologize, but I knew that it would have been tactless—the admission of a mistake. I sat down beside her, took her hand and began several sentences in my mind: I love Erica. I don't know what came over me ... Lucille, this was not... I think we should talk about... I canceled every hackneyed phrase and instead said nothing.
Lucille turned to me. "Leo." She spoke slowly, enunciating every word. "I will not tell anybody." Her eyes measured mine, and after she spoke those words, her mouth tightened. At first I felt relieved, although I hadn't come so far in my thoughts as to suspect that she might tell other people about the tryst. A second later, I wondered why she had mentioned this before anything else—that she wouldn't tell. Why had 'anybody' popped up as a character in this drama between us? I had been wondering how I might extricate myself from the entanglement without hurting her feelings. All at once I sensed that she had raced ahead of me, that she didn't want more of me at all. She had wanted this time, and this time only.
I said it then: "I love Erica very much. She is more dear to me than anything in the world. I was rash ..." I stopped. Lucille was smiling at me again, more broadly than before, and it wasn't a smile of satisfaction or sympathy. She looked embarrassed. Her face had turned red. "I'm sorry," I stuttered, the apology running out from me in spite of myself. I stood up. "Can I get you something?" I asked. "A glass of water? I could make coffee." I was filling the air with speech, rattling on to block out her blush.
"No, Leo," she said. She reached for my hand and examined it, turning the palm toward her. "You have long fingers," she said, "and a rectangular palm. In a book I saw once, it said that hands like yours belong to psychics."
"In my case," I said, "I'm afraid the book was wrong."
She nodded. "Good night, Leo."
"Good night." I leaned forward and kissed her cheek. As I did it, I made a great effort to check my awkwardness. And then, although I wanted to run from the apartment, I lingered, overcome by a feeling that the business between us was unfinished. I looked down at the floor and noticed a toy at my feet. I recognized the black-and-red object, because Matt had several of them. The toy, called a Transformer, could be changed from a vehicle into a robotic creature with more or less human form. The thing was in a half-and-half state—part thing, part man. On a sudden impulse, I picked it up. For some reason, I couldn't leave it untouched. I flipped one side of it downward to finish the change. It became all robot—two arms, two legs, a head, and a torso. I could feel Lucille watching me. "An ugly toy," she said.
I nodded and lay the Transformer on the table. We said good night again and I left.
When I crawled into bed beside Erica, she woke up for a few seconds. "Was Lucille okay?" she said. I told her yes. Then I said she had wanted to talk, and I had stayed with her for a while. Erica rolled over and went back to sleep. Her shoulder and arm lay over the covers and I stared at the thin strap of her nightgown in the obscure light of the room. Erica would never suspect my betrayal, and her trust sickened me. Had she been a woman who doubted my loyalty, I would have felt less guilt. In the morning, I repeated the lie to Erica without flinching. I lied so well that the night before appeared to harden into what should have happened, rather than what had happened. "I will not tell anybody." Lucille's promise was our bond, one that would help erase the reality of my having had sex with her. As I sat with Erica and Matt at the table that Sunday morning, a basket filled with bagels in front of me, I listened to Matt talking about Ling. Ling had left the grocery next door for another job. "I'll probably never ever see Ling again," he said, and while he continued to talk I remembered Lucille's teeth on my neck and saw her pale brown pubic hair against her white skin. Lucille had not wanted an affair; I felt quite sure of that. But she had wanted something from me. I say something, because whatever it was, it had merely taken the form of sex. The more I thought about it, the more troubling it became, because I began to suspect that the something was connected to Bill.
I didn't see Lucille for months after that. Either I missed her comings and goings in our building or she rarely came for Mark anymore, because she had made new arrangements with Bill. But only a few weeks after I had sex with her, I asked Bill about Lucille's illness, the one he had mentioned to me years before.
His direct answer turned my years of reticence into folly. "She tried to commit suicide," he said. "I found her in her dorm room with her wrists cut, bleeding all over the floor." Bill paused and closed his eyes for a moment "She was sitting on the floor holding her arms out in front of her, watching herself bleed very calmly. I grabbed her, wrapped her wrists in towels, and started yelling for help. Afterward the doctors said the cuts weren't very deep, that she probably hadn't meant to kill herself. Years later, she told me that she had liked watching the blood." Bill paused. "She said a strange thing about it. She said, 'It had authenticity.' She was in a hospital for a while, and then she lived with her parents. They wouldn't let me see her. They thought I was a bad influence. You see, when she did it, she knew I wasn't far away. She knew I would come looking for her. I think her parents thought that with me around, she might do it again." Bill grimaced for an instant and shook his head. "I still feel bad about it," he said.