• Robie lies on his back, flopping his penis side to side. He stares across the room at Kathy’s lean, well-proportioned body, the black bush she says she trims.
She’s by the dresser, pouring champagne. She glances back, sees what Robie is doing to his penis. “Hey,” she says, “stop that.” She tosses her shoulders. “That’s my job.”
She comes back with the glasses of champagne, some croissants and Swiss milk chocolate. “All the things you love to eat,” she says, sitting on the bed by his hip, her knees spread apart. Robie glances between her legs.
“Go ahead,” she says. “I want you to memorize me. No matter what you’re doing, you’ll see my pussy in your mind.”
“It’s about that bad.”
“Bad, hell. That’s great.” She leans way over and sloppy-kisses him. “You couldn’t say anything sweeter to this girl. Except maybe, ‘I do.’ ” She dribbles some champagne on his almost hairless chest, leans over again to lick it off him.
Robie’s face tenses. “You know I’m not happy about it.”
“Lover! Don’t worry. Things are going fine. We’re getting married. I want it. You want it. It’ll happen.”
Robie sees his wife’s expression, in the kitchen, when he tried to mention the word divorce. Damn it. He thinks about the letter he’s been carrying around all week—it just never seems to be the right moment.
“It’s just so clear to me,” he says, “no matter how I handle this, there’s going to be trouble. Maybe she goes ballistic, starts yelling, calling a lawyer, ordering me out. I don’t know. . . .”
“Robie.” Kathy’s voice is a little impatient. “She’s your wife. You know best how to talk to her. It just seems to me you have to do it in a firm, decisive way. Then she sees it’s more or less settled. A done deal.”
Kathy plays with his penis, curls her fingers through the brown hair there. With her other hand she’s holding a glass of champagne up close to her face, sipping now and then.
Robie watches her with fascination. She always seems completely given over to him and sex. As if all she can think of is getting him hard again and stuck in one opening or another. Then she surprised him a week back, telling him, “It doesn’t make any difference if you get hard, Robie. Nice but not the main thing. You don’t want to do anything, I’ll lie here and look at your face and jerk off all by myself. I love looking at your face.”
He thinks about her devotion, and regrets again that he disappointed her. He disappointed himself. He gets pissed every time he thinks about it. Damn Anne. He hates the thought that Kathy might think, well, that he’s not in love enough, or not strong enough.
“Come down here and kiss me,” he says.
When their faces are inches apart, he says, “I do love you. And I like you. And I lust after you. All three, probably more than any other time, any other woman.”
“Probably?” Kathy laughs. “Who’s the bitch? I’ll kill her.”
“No,” Robie says earnestly, “you’re in a class by yourself.”
“Oh, I think I’ll jerk me off right now. You mind?”
Robie stares.
“Only kidding, lover. I just wanted you to know you got the juices flowing. Thanks, big precious.” She laughs in a girlish way. “I think I’ll sit on your chest. So you can see how hot you make me.”
The things she says! Robie feels his penis stiffen. She doesn’t notice, swinging one knee over him, settling her weight on him, smiling down between her swinging breasts. “Now,” she says, “tell me what you’re thinking about. . . . Is it the economic condition of the country? . . . No? Is it the riots in Brooklyn? . . . No? By the way, what you’re feeling . . .”
“What?”
“It’s a special medical condition. It’s called VFS. Vaginal fire syndrome.”
She sort of smiles at him, waiting for Mr. Literal to catch up, join the party.
Robie finally laughs. “Oh. Haha. Yeah.”
He thinks about Anne’s expression, that time in the kitchen. He wonders why he assumed that of all the things she could do, she’d react just the way he wanted. Go, Robert, you’re free to do as you please. Of course she’ll make problems, maybe big problems. How can he chance it? Damn you, Anne! Be reasonable. Get out of the way.
Kathy studies him. “You’re with me. You don’t think about her. That’s an order.” She reaches behind herself to squeeze his penis, wake him up. “Oh,” she’s says, “it’s alive. Well, half alive. That’s still an order.”
“The thing you have to remember about her,” Robie says, looking away, wanting somehow to explain himself, “is that she spends her days telling big corporations how to save big bucks. Maybe they think of her as a tough cookie. She doesn’t usually bring that side of her home. Wait . . . don’t do that.” He holds Kathy’s arms. “One more minute. All I can tell you is that there was an instant when I saw it.” He fumbles on, trying to find something good in his failure. “Maybe a couple instants. Thing is, this might be a blessing. I mean, once the cat’s out of the bag, hell, I lose control. I think. Now we can look the terrain over. Move in just the right way. You know, while we still have the element of surprise.”
Kathy listens for some sense in all this, not sure there is any. “Look, lover. The best thing for everybody is she disappears off the face of the planet. But that’s not going to happen. So what are you going to do? You think of the story that will upset her the least. I’m repeating myself, right? But I’m a woman. This is what I’d want to hear, if you have to hear this kind of shit. It’s not her. You still love her. But you’ve grown in a different direction. You need time and space. It happens a thousand times a day, you know.”
Kathy draws her knees up, rests her chin on them. Staring almost straight down at him. Robie nods that he understands.
“You’re sure she doesn’t know, right?” Kathy asks.
“No, I know her. She’d ask me straight out. Or she’d be pissed all the time.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Well, you’re married eight, nine years, there’s patterns. You stay right in them, no problem. And my wife’s emotional.” Maybe too emotional, he thinks. “If there’s a problem, she’s going to . . . complain.” He almost says whine, to make the point, but decides it’s disloyal.
Robie glances down along her thighs at the glistening hair. He raises his hands to rub her back.
Kathy laughs. “I knew this weird guy believed in UFOs, abductions, all that alien stuff. So put her up on the roof at night. Maybe some green guys will take her away.”
“That’s not . . . very nice.”
“Oh, Robie.” Kathy giggles. “She might like it—sex with green men? Don’t be jealous, now.”
“I think now,” he says, “I’m only jealous of you.”
“You’ll never have any reason to be jealous of me. . . . Hey, remember, I’m the one who should be jealous. I’m still the other woman.”
“No. Not for long. I promise.”
“Thanks, lover.”
“This back-and-forth life is tough on me, you know. I want to be with you.” Robie thinks how simple life would be if Anne got on a plane, and it crashed. . . .
“It was always fate, Robie. We belong together. You think God makes marriages?”
“Maybe.”
“If He does, He made ours.”
“Right.”
“Now let me ask you an important philosophical question. You want to eat me? Or vice versa?”