“YOU THINK SOMEONE WAS in your apartment because it seemed tidier?” Detective Tewfik said, as he walked around, surveying the mess. “What is tidier, exactly? And how on earth can you tell? What tipped you off? Is some dust missing?”
It was a pigsty, I won’t kid you, but there was no need to be sarcastic. Since Burke had left, I’d let it go completely, and even in the best of times I’m not much of a housekeeper.
In fact, I am a slob. I admit it. It’s not that I’m a lazy person. I tend to workaholism and when I do clean, I clean compulsively, unable to stop until the place is completely spotless. But housework just seems so insignificant and, as men have always known, there’s always something better to do. I haven’t read Moby Dick yet. I haven’t seen Fellini’s Satyricon. There are dozens of countries in the world about which I know nothing and billions of people I haven’t yet met.
I told Tewfik about the vase but saying it out loud made me realize how stupid it sounded and my voice wavered and lost confidence in the telling. The thing is, I might have righted the vase myself, automatically, without thinking about it. Maybe I was paranoid.
“Did you make this up to get me over here to answer your questions?” he asked, annoyed.
New York homicide detectives are terribly overworked and Manhattan South had a lot on its plate, including a dead stockbroker found in an alley outside a Wall Street strip bar, an artist and his dancer wife dead in an apparent murder-suicide, and a tourist from Gary, Indiana, killed for his wallet in Times Square. Tewfik was understandably a little testy.
“Make it up? That would be dishonest,” I said, in my best Girl Scout voice.
He looked at me, trying to figure out if I was on the level.
“Well,” he said. “We haven’t found the killer in this case so it wouldn’t hurt to be extra security-conscious until we do. Although, you know, there are a lot of burglaries in this neighborhood. There’s no necessary connection to the Griff case.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Wouldn’t you like to live in a place that wouldn’t frighten your mother?” Tewfik went on. “This neighborhood is scary after dark.”
“I know. But I have this theory that a little terror is good for you. Like, fear is the aerobics of the mind,” I said. “Besides, I have never been robbed, knock on wood. And look at the size of this apartment, and the rent I pay.”
“You’re muy macha, I know,” he said.
“My keys,” I said suddenly, thinking out loud. Tewfik looked at me, his heavy, dark eyebrows raised. “I thought I lost my keys yesterday … but maybe someone at work took them.”
This made him pause. “You better take my direct number, just in case,” he said, and wrote it down for me. “And be careful. If you don’t feel safe, go stay with a friend or in a hotel. And if your apartment gets mysteriously cleaner, let me know.”
“Yeah yeah,” I said. “Who do you think hit Griff sixteen or so times with a tire iron—like instrument?”
“It wouldn’t be professional of me to speculate,” he said, smiling now. “Who do you think killed him?”
“Who do you think hired him?”
“Who do you think hired him?”
“You know, officer, sir, lately I’m having a lot of conversations consisting largely of questions with very few answers.”
“It’s an occupational hazard for both of us, isn’t it?” he said, before putting on his hat and coat. Tewfik wore a hat. McGravy wore a hat too. I liked men in hats, it made me think of my childhood.
When Tewfik left, I picked up the phone and started to call Eric, but after three digits I put the phone back in its cradle. It was Saturday and we were supposed to have a date that night at his place, but he hadn’t said at what time. And he hadn’t called me to confirm.
I was going to call him, but then I thought, what if he was just flirting, just kidding around? Will I look like an ass if I call, thinking it’s for real?
Like I said, I was a little rusty on this dating stuff. For years, my radar had been jammed by monogamy and marriage, and now the single signals confused me.
Maybe if I came up with a pretense to call him, I thought, but caught myself. Resorting to feminine wiles, shame on me.
I picked up the phone and dialed.
“Hi, you’ve reached 1-900-CONFESS,” his answering machine said. “After the beep, please leave your name, number, the date and time you called, and a salacious tale of personal misconduct. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
“It’s Robin, it’s Saturday noon,” I said, thinking to myself, if he calls me back, I’ll cancel the date, I’m not ready. “Today I took the Lord’s name in vain, I had impure thoughts about George Stephanopoulos and …”
The machine clicked off. Eric came on.
“Robin?” he said. “Sorry, I’ve been screening my calls this morning. Greg keeps calling from Grand Rapids.”
“What’s he doing in Grand Rapids?”
“A trade show, meeting sponsors, the usual PR stuff he loves so much. Calling me and annoying me. So. You miss me?”
“No.” My voice sounded strange to me, soft, sexy, roughened. No, I said, in a way a woman usually says yes, trailing the vowel to a fade-out. I hadn’t been speaking this way consciously and was only then aware that this was a different voice for me, that I only used it with Eric.
“Are we still on for tonight?” he asked. “You’re not calling to cancel, are you?”
“No. I was calling to see if I should bring anything.”
“Just your sweet self. Eight o’clock all right? I’ll meet your cab downstairs.”
“Okay.”
“Come unarmed,” he said, before giving me his address.
It was okay, I told myself. It was just a get-together. As long as I didn’t kiss him, I was safe. I had control over this.
Still, when I went to the corner bodega to get milk and newspapers, I hesitated for a moment at the sight of the little condom boxes hanging on hooks behind the counter and considered buying some, just to be safe. I passed on them in the end. Nothing was going to happen. I mean, it was a first date, sort of.
Although a new disaster took the front page (“WATER PIPE EXPLODES AT CAFÉ MARFELES. ELOISE MARFELES BLAMES UNION ‘GOONS’”), the tabloids were full of Jackson’s theory that someone was trying to destroy ANN through its reporters. Various possible villains, ultra-right-wing “watchdog” groups on jihad against the “liberal media,” media competitors, and vague political cabals were suggested. Paul Mangecet’s name was mentioned, as he was believed to control some of the stock, but he vigorously denied any sinister intentions.
There was just one problem with all this: Why would anyone trying to destroy ANN bother with me? Go to all that trouble and expense? I mean, I was not a major player at ANN and I had very little credibility left. Why pick on me?
Some of the details of Griff’s death were reported too, and there was also a boxed story at the bottom of the page, a sidebar on Griff, which detailed his alleged “history” with attractive women, using quotes from First Avenue bartenders. First Avenue, once the place fashionable singles bed-hopped, was now where the recklessly unhip went searching for meaningless sex. It said something about Griff that he was so well known in anachronistic singles bars.
The bartenders said he flashed a lot of money around and sometimes used pseudonyms and “cover stories” with the women he picked up, telling them variously that he was a cop, a magazine reporter, an art forger, and—get this clunker—Elite modeling agency boss John Casablancas.
He regularly employed “escorts,” preferring redheads, according to one “escort agency insider.” “But only real redheads, which are hard to come by,” the insider added. Well, I thought, at least I’ve never had to pay for sex. Let me rephrase that. At least I’ve never had to pay money for sex.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Griff had made surreptitious films of several attractive young women who lived in his building, using concealed cameras in their bathrooms to film some of their most intimate moments. Man, this guy made Jerry Spurdle look like Germaine Greer.
I put down the papers and, although it was only the early afternoon, I started getting ready for the evening, taking a long, hot shower.
It had been years since I’d dated a man other than Burke. The last time was shortly before we got engaged, when we agreed to see other people while we evaluated our relationship. Well, really we agreed that he would see other people. He was the one pushing for it but he didn’t expect me to do it too.
It’s that old double-standard bullshit. He gets to go off to the Crusades, wenching all the way, while I stay home watching the rust grow on my chastity belt.
I didn’t.
I put myself on the arm of every interesting man in New York who’d be seen with me in public, and back then there were a few, believe me. This went on for about a month, and then, suddenly, Burke was at the door with a bouquet of roses, saying he figured we might as well get married. I’d had fun dating around but he gave me that Correspondent’s Squint and it took me just fourteen seconds to bargain away my freedom. Okay, I said, let’s get married.
What sorry sequence of events had brought me to that disastrous pass, and how could I disrupt the sequence this time around? I wasn’t sure I could trust myself around a cute guy in my weakened, vulnerable state.
As I was dressing, I set out two underwear sets. On one side of the bed was the creamiest, slinkiest fuck-me lingerie on the island of Manhattan, lingerie that felt so good on my skin it qualified as foreplay.
On the other side was what I jokingly referred to, when Burke and I were still together, as my anti-adultery underwear, big old ugly granny underpants with goofy flowers on them, underwear no man could see me in without laughing. I knew I wouldn’t commit adultery while wearing this underwear because I wouldn’t be caught dead in this underwear and, as I was still married in the eyes of the law at least, I hoped it could prevent adultery one more time.
My choices suddenly appeared very concrete. There was the dangerous underwear and the safe underwear. Which would I wear that night?
I chose the granny underpants and wore them around for five minutes before deciding they just didn’t feel right, opting for the slinky stuff over which I wore a sweater and jeans. Another spray of L’Heure Bleue on my pulse points and a final sweep through my hair with a natural-bristle brush and I was ready to go.
There is Murphy’s Law and there are Robin’s Amendments. Number one: The guy with the biggest tub of popcorn and noisiest eating habits will always sit directly behind me in a movie theater (or else a hearing-impaired foreign national with his translator, so that every line of on-screen dialogue is repeated in loud German). Number two: The amount a man adores me is roughly equal to the number of his faults. Number three: When I’m already running late, something will inevitably happen to make me even later.
Something like, say, Mrs. Ramirez. When the elevator doors opened on the first floor, there she stood with Señor.
“You!” she shouted, coming at me. I tried to press the Door Close button but it was too late, she had her cane in the doors, forcing them open again. The old lady, the dog, and the leash effectively blocked my exit.
“You whore!” she said, raising her cane. I put my hand up and grabbed it before it hit me.
“Mrs. Ramirez, you’re mistaken in the head again,” I sang sweetly.
“You had a transvestite orgy in your apartment last night. Don’t deny it! It woke me up and then I couldn’t get back to sleep.”
“I did not have a transvestite orgy,” I said, knowing it was useless to try to reason with Mrs. Ramirez.
“Don’t yell at me!” she shouted.
Apparently, she hadn’t taken my advice about turning down her hearing aid, because I was talking quietly.
“I saw one of the transvestites,” she said. “The man in the blond wig dressed up like a woman.”
Mrs. Ramirez thought all my friends were transvestites or hookers. She thought I was a transvestite and a hooker. A week before, she’d been raving about “Negro prostitutes” working out of my place. Her eyes weren’t so good either.
“That probably was a woman, Mrs. Ramirez. Probably coming to visit someone else in the building.”
“Don’t lie to me!” she shrieked. “I’m eighty years old. You think I don’t know the difference between a man and a woman? What kinda fool you take me for?”
I considered this. “An old fool?” I guessed.
“The police are on to you, missy. And the newspapers too!”
Her cries of “Whore” and “Sodomite” followed me as I pushed past her, and rang in my ears as I left the building.
Some people have luck with cabs; I am not one of them. Claire can hail a cab at any time of day, in any kind of weather, in any neighborhood in New York. The cabs come looking for her. They pick up her scent and zoom in on her from all directions like hounds. But me—I always have to work to get a cab, and tonight was no different. My apartment building is in a “marginal” neighborhood and not too many taxis cruise the area. My best bet was Fourteenth Street, four blocks away.
Thanks to a brutal wind-chill factor the streets were pretty deserted and between me and Fourteenth Street lay a long stretch of dubious real estate. My own street was a nosy and neighborly sort of street for New York. I felt relatively safe there. But the streets around it were less residential and less friendly. There was a whole stretch of buildings that could have been Berlin during the blitz—burned-out shells with blackened windows and doors boarded over with cheap plywood; shops covered with corrugated steel bearing the bright, ugly spray-paint graffiti of the local youth gangs. KILL THE SKINHEADS! screamed a choice bit of blood red graffiti, to which the skinheads responded, DIE NIGGER-SPICS! signing it with a swastika. Over both of them, in yellow paint, someone had written PEACE.
I finally hailed a decrepit cab. It began to rain.
When my taxi pulled up, Eric was waiting outside his building, huddling under an umbrella, his free hand jammed into the front pocket of his jeans. He looked thin and a little tired, which just heightened my desire. A girlfriend and I discussed this once, how a touch of pathos, a hint of haggard, makes a man more attractive to a woman. When courting hesitant females, the males of other species cinch the biological deal by puffing up their brightly colored plumage. All our men have to do is not shave for a day and stint themselves on sleep.
When the cab stopped, Eric came forward and reached into the driver’s window to pay him, over my objections. I got out and he held his umbrella over me, wrapping his other arm lightly around my waist. We walked this way, touching under his umbrella, into his building and his apartment.
The apartment was warm and masculine, but not in an overpowering way. It wasn’t neat but it wasn’t messy either. A floor-to-ceiling entertainment center dominated the wall across from me and the two adjoining walls were lined with books.
He reads, I thought, with some surprise.
While Eric poured drinks in the kitchen, I scanned the titles, from Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti to a book of critical essays by Northrop Frye to Stephen King. I hate to admit this, but I checked the spines and the pages of some of the books to see if they were largely ornamental or if he had actually cracked them and read them. He had. He’d even underlined passages and made funny notes in the margins.
Eric came in with a glass of seltzer for me and a beer for him, which he put down on the coffee table in front of the sofa. He came up behind me as I looked at a cluster of family photographs.
I could feel him standing there. I could smell him, that great clean man smell. I was holding a small, framed photograph of a little boy in black martial-arts garb of some kind.
“My nephew, Patrick,” he said. “He’s into ninja. Only seven, but smart. Last time I talked to him, he told me ninja is—these are his words—‘the art of escape, essentially defensive, not aggressive.’ Invisibility is apparently a big part of it. Smart kid, huh?”
“The art of escape,” I repeated.
He went back into the kitchen.
“Are these your parents wearing the fishing hats?” I asked, picking up a picture of an older couple with their arms around each other.
“Yeah. Alf and Irma,” he said.
“What are your parents like?” I was nervous and when I’m nervous I tend to turn social situations into interviews, which are easier to control.
He came and stood in the doorway, holding a handful of mushrooms. He was cooking dinner, I realized.
He cooks.
“Mom’s a rock-of-Gibraltar type—kind of a martyr sometimes. Six kids—I was the second youngest—four boys and two girls. Seven, if you count my dad. Mom always did,” he said. “You’re not allergic to anything, are you?”
“No.”
“Any foods you don’t like?”
“Blue cheese and anything that comes from a goat.”
“Great,” he said.
“What is your dad like?” I persisted.
“My dad,” he said. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah.” I followed him into the kitchen and watched while he sliced mushrooms.
“There’s this one story that … well, my dad drove a cab for a while, here in New York, and one day he came home with this enormous box. He’d bought it off a customer, he said, for twenty-five dollars, which was a lot of money in our household. My mother, when she was mad, didn’t frown or yell, she just went blank. She looked at him like that, and he said, ‘Wait until you see what’s in here. Just wait until you see.’”
“What was in it?”
“Well, Dad wouldn’t let us see right away. He liked to build up the suspense. It was dinnertime, so we all sat down for dinner, for about an hour, while the box sat in the living room, unopened. After dinner, we all had to watch Cronkite, silently. By this time, we were bursting with curiosity.”
“So am I,” I said.
“After Cronkite, Dad said, ‘Mother, you know that wall-to-wall carpeting you wanted?’ Well, my mother’s face lit up a little, but only a little, because she had been with my father a long time and she knew better.
“‘Ta da!’ my father said, and he opened the box.” Eric stopped talking but continued chopping, smiling to himself.
“Well? What was inside?”
“Hundreds of broadloom samples, ten-inch squares, in dozens of colors and textures, samples from the season before. Got ’em from a carpet salesman who took his cab. Anyway, my mother’s face dropped because she had always dreamed of a soft blue carpet and Dad knew it. Dad always seemed to be raising her hopes, and then he’d deliver on ’em in a way that completely … confounded her expectations. She was let down a lot.”
“That’s too bad. What happened to the carpet squares?”
“Mom and us kids, we spent two weekends sewing the whole mess together, a white shag next to a nappy orange square next to a shaved blue patch. Dad got a cheap carpet and Mom got a conversation piece, an excuse to tell the story about Dad and his carpet of many colors to every person who walked through the door. She scorned that carpet; but when Dad could afford to get her a nice one, she kept the old carpet, put it in the bedroom. She said she was kind of getting used to it.”
He put the knife down on the cutting board and looked straight ahead.
“My dad died last year.…”
“Oh. I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, and after he died, Mom moved into a retirement community and she had that old carpet rolled up and shipped to her new place. Isn’t that romantic?”
I wanted to have his baby.
“It’s … beautiful,” I said.
“Yeah, ain’t it though.” He scooped up the mushrooms with the knife and the palm of his hand and dropped them into a wooden bowl into which he sprinkled olive oil, wine vinegar, and a bunch of spices. I liked watching him.
“I’m not really much of a cook. I make a few things over and over again, but I make those few well,” he said. “In our house, everyone had to help out with everything.”
“I don’t cook,” I said. To me, a meal is something eaten standing up more often than not. For example, breakfast is eating dry frosted mini-wheats straight from the box and washing them down with periodic gulps of skim milk straight from the carton.
“I know,” he said, and grinned. “And you’re a rotten housekeeper.”
“How do you know that?”
“You have a reputation, Robin.”
“A bad one?”
“Well, an interesting one,” he said. “So tell me about your family.”
“My mom lives with my aunt in my hometown. All my mom’s sisters are there. My dad died.”
“When?”
“When I was ten.”
“Wow. How did he die?”
“Well, you know how you can’t get a traffic light at a bad intersection until somebody dies?”
“Yeah.”
“My dad was the guy who died. My father was a real safety nut, you know? He was always warning of the hidden menace in things, and looking for ways to thwart it. Anyway, he was one of the organizers of a petition drive to get a light at this intersection in the middle of town. It was a really bad one, a blind corner with the streets crossing at funny angles and a lot of thick bushes on one side.”
“What happened?”
“Well, that day he was taking measurements of the street dimensions for the committee’s report, and a truck barreled around the corner and killed him. There’s a little plaque there with my dad’s name on it, near the traffic light.”
“That’s terrible. You were pretty young,” he said.
He took a cut mushroom from the board and put it up to my mouth. I ate it. His fingers touched the tip of my tongue.
“Yeah, you know, life’s a bitch,” I said. “I used to imagine my dad was in those traffic lights. Oh God, does that sound crazy?”
“Not really.…”
“I didn’t believe my father was reincarnated as a traffic light, or anything. It’s a metaphor for a kind of …”
“Benign authority,” he said.
“Exactly!”
“Something telling you stop, go, caution.”
“Yeah. So—how did your dad die?”
“Um, massive coronary,” he said, almost apologetically. “In the bathtub. He smoked, ate, and drank himself to death. Slowly. He was sixty-nine.”
“I’m so sorry.”
There was an awkward moment. We had divulged too much. Or I had, at least. Eric, actually, seemed unbothered, but I felt like I had made a tactical error.
The bowl went into the fridge to marinate, and Eric wiped his hands on his apron before taking it off and hanging it on a hook.
I loved the way he dressed, a navy blue corduroy shirt over faded jeans. He had a great physique, like he worked out, but not too much. He didn’t have that bowling-balls-in-pantyhose look of muscle men or anything like that.
Did he have a hairy body, I wondered? His arms weren’t very hairy, but just above his open collar there was a nice hint of dark hair on his chest. Too hairy didn’t turn me on, but some strategically located body hair would be nice. Burke was almost hairless.
“Have a seat and I’ll plug in the Fritz tape,” he said, but then the phone rang.
He took it in the bedroom. The door was open and I could see him sitting on his bed, a four-poster. I sat down on an overstuffed sectional sofa, which sank comfortably as I nestled in. It was warm in Eric’s apartment, a nice contrast to the icy rain outside, and I was feeling very good and very pretty.
When he came out, he said, “Sorry, that was Greg, about some show plans for next week. The guy never stops. Never. He wants me to watch Greg Browner Weekend.”
“He has a weekend show now?”
“It’s highlights from his live shows the previous week. We repackage the stuff and sell it to a new advertiser. Do you mind watching? He thinks he wants to change the lighting. He thinks it’s making him look old.”
“Age is making him look old,” I said.
“I know, but I don’t say stuff like that to my boss, Robin, unlike you. I like my gig.”
He flicked on the television and sat down on the sofa next to me, just six enticing inches between us.
“I don’t know how you work for Browner,” I said. “Are you a saint?”
He smiled. “No. I’m just not a news moonie, like some of you. For me, it’s a great job. Technically, I work for Greg’s production company—I don’t actually work for ANN anymore—and I make twice what I made when I worked on Ambush. I give him that youthful edge he’s missing. I do what Greg tells me to do, and if I have a better idea I tell him and he turns thumbs up or thumbs down. I don’t sweat it, and every two weeks I get big bucks, relatively speaking. I have money for my real life.”
“What is your real life?”
He thought about it and said, “It’s an endless search for true love. How about yours?”
I gritted my teeth and, through sheer force of will, sucked a blush back from my skin. “I don’t really believe in love,” I said. “I think my life is an endless search for the guilty party.”
He didn’t laugh. Instead, he looked like he found this … interesting.
The show was starting so he turned up the volume. We watched a montage of Greg shots—chatting with guests, laughing at Eddie Murphy, earnestly quizzing Richard Nixon, leaning on Elton John’s piano, singing along. Over this was the Browner theme music, friendly but newsy, like a Stephen Foster song played on typewriter keys. The announcer read off the list of guests, three always and always in this order: celebrity, politician (there to tell America something we don’t already know about them), and a “regular guy” to whom something irregular had recently happened. At the bottom of the screen, a super told weekend viewers the show was taped and not to call.
Greg, looking handsome for an older man with kind of a blond, Robert Mitchum thing going, conversed with the famous guest and then opened up the phones to his millions of viewers, many of whom had his toll-free number programmed into their phones. They loved Greg and he had good demographics, if not the numbers Larry King had—yet. Ironically, Greg skewed very well with college-educated women. On the air, he was very appealing, I’ll give him that, but that was his TV persona. A TV persona is kind of like a whalebone corset. When you take it off, everything goes flying.
“First-time caller, Greg,” a male voice drawled. “Want to say I love your show and I wish you’d run for office.”
“Thanks a lot, Chicago, but I’ve already got a job I love. Did you have a question for Cher?”
“Think he’ll ever run for office?” I asked.
“Never,” Eric said, snorting. “Look, he likes a few of those callers every show asking him to run, because he likes to be flattered, but he loves television. He has more influence with his talk show than he would have as president.”
“Not quite.”
“Pretty close. On his show, he’s in control of his image. He gets to be the voice of reason between warring extremes. Nobody can run for office anymore without checking in with him and Larry King, and Greg is the wave of the future because he’s younger than Larry and he’s better looking. Jackson gives him autonomy. Women viewers write him erudite love letters. People admire him. If he went into politics, all that would be over.”
Eric was smart. Why did I think he was a bimbo?
“I see your point. But people think Greg might do it—run, I mean. Doesn’t he risk a backlash if he doesn’t run? Like Ross Perot when he pulled out of the presidential race?”
“Nah,” Eric said. “He’s more like Will Rogers than Ross Perot, on the air at least. If he refuses to run, it just endears him more to his viewers. If he actually ran, all that would be over.”
“Do you think Greg was being blackmailed too?”
“Greg says no.”
“Do you believe him?”
“It’s not my job to believe him or not, just to implement his managerial edicts,” he said tersely and looked back at the television.
He was a little sensitive about working for Greg. I didn’t press him.
“Yeah, it’s time for the diffusion filter,” Eric said, referring to Greg’s lighting complaint. “Lighting isn’t good enough anymore. We need to blur his edges a bit too.”
“You aren’t serious? That’s so dishonest.”
“This isn’t news, this is talk, and things are looser in the talk format. Solange uses a diffusion filter too,” he said. “It’s human nature to want to appear better than we really are. You wear makeup. All you on-air people wear a ton of it on the air just to look ‘natural’ and not washed out on video. So why sweat it?”
“Oh, it gives me a chance to get self-righteous,” I said.
“You’re cute when you’re self-righteous,” he said. It was such a corny thing to say that it caught me off guard. He caught me off guard a lot. That worried me.
We watched the rest of Greg’s weekend show and talked some more about our families, a subject Eric kept bringing up. I was an only child. Eric came from this big Long Island family, and he had twelve nieces and nephews. Once a month they all got together at his brother’s house in Long Beach to argue, insult each other, and eat grotesque amounts of food.
He made it sound very appealing. I bet other women eat this stuff up, I thought. A bachelor could do very well with this kind of family values rap. I, however, was impervious.
After declining my offer to help, he went back into the kitchen, and we continued our conversation between the two rooms. I knew what was going on. I’d heard the old wives’ tale, that a guy who cooks dinner for a woman gets laid that night.
“Here we go,” he said, putting place mats, silverware, and wineglasses on the coffee table. He went back to the kitchen and returned with condiments and wine, red, which he poured for both of us, leaving the bottle on the table. On his third trip, he came back with two steaming plates, filet mignon covered in marinated mushrooms, shoestring french fries, and glazed carrots.
Thank God, he’s a meat eater, I thought. I have a soft spot for men who are meat eaters. There’s just something about a carnivore.
“It looks wonderful,” I said.
“Thanks.” He sat back down next to me, a little closer this time. “I thought after everything you’ve been through lately, you could use a home-cooked meal.”
Well bless you, I thought, crossing my legs and bouncing my foot slightly.
We watched Fritz the Cat and drank some wine and I started to think it might not be such a bad idea if Eric seduced me. God knows he was attractive, and he had a powerful, primal sexuality. So what if he was just casting a role for his memoirs? So what if I would just be the Older Married Woman who follows the Danish Exchange Student? Maybe he could be the Younger Stud in my life story, who comes between the Philandering First Husband and The Kids in the Hall.
Normally, I’m not quite this brazen and desperate, but I hadn’t had sex in months, and I hadn’t had good sex in about a year. My husband, on the other hand, was presumably having lots of good sex with his younger paramour, and all my friends and foes knew about it.
After Eric cleared away the plates, he made coffee, which he served with a basket of anisette biscotti. His grandmother’s recipe.
“The News-Journal described you as ‘kind of a loner’ today,” he said, smiling.
“Well, in the last six months I haven’t been out much.” I didn’t want to go into it. “Thanks again for that police report. Sixteen to twenty whacks with a blunt metal object, huh? What a way to go.”
“It must have been bloody,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, thinking aloud. “Yeah, it must have been, which means … the killer would have been covered with blood afterwards. He, or she, couldn’t have gone back to the party without changing clothes. That means it was probably someone with a room at the Marfeles that night, someone who could kill Griff and then go change clothes.”
“Yeah, or someone who could hide his bloody clothes under a costume,” he said, but without my enthusiasm for the topic. “Murder’s kind of a hobby of yours, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you so interested in it?”
“The usual reason, I guess. We are most fascinated by what we most fear, right? For instance, Claire, who is flawlessly gorgeous, is fascinated by disfiguring diseases, especially if they are mosquito-borne and capable of being transported to this country in tires or produce,” I said. “She can go on for hours about biting flies that lay their eggs in your bloodstream, eggs that hatch into these long, slender worms that come out of your eyes. Or that disease that makes men’s testicles so large they have to carry them around in a wheelbarrow.”
“I get the picture,” he said, pained.
By this time, I noticed that we were sitting just an inch apart. Had I unconsciously inched closer to him, him to me, or had we inched closer together, drawn simultaneously by forces of mutual attraction?
At this rate of geographic progress, actual penetration was only hours away. I was in no hurry. I had nowhere else to go and the wine and the stories had lulled me into complacency. I felt at that moment like I could stay where I was forever and whatever happened happened.
I looked up and he was staring at me, into my eyes. I smiled and stared back, just as intensely. At first it was silliness, a staring contest. We had to hold back laughter.
But then it got serious.
Eric has these blue eyes, not just blue, but cold, otherworldly blue eyes. Have you ever been on a glacier? I was once, and when you look down a crevasse, you see this pale, foggy blue ice, deeply buried, prehistoric ice, holding old secrets.
That blue.
It was almost painful to stare into his eyes for too long, and yet I couldn’t have looked away if I tried because there was a commensurate pleasure. So I kept staring, watching different emotions flicker below the surface of his eyes. Suddenly, I wanted to run for my life. Instead, I blinked, slowly and deliberately.
He leaned over and kissed me. Or did I lean forward and kiss him? Or both? I don’t remember now.
I just remember a kiss and then a jolt of the most tremendous fear I’ve ever experienced. I bolted upright and sprang to my feet.
“I have a lot of work to do on this sperm series,” I said. “And I have this murder on my mind so …” I looked around. I don’t know why. Looking for an escape hatch, I suppose.
He grabbed my hand, tried to nudge me back to the sofa. “What are you afraid of?” he said.
“Oh God. Nothing personal, but you have a reputation as a terrible playboy, and I’ve been warned away from terrible playboys by my culture and my womenfolk and, come to think of it, my own experience.”
Yeah. I looked around me with some surprise, asking myself, Where am I? How did I get here? In what hormonally induced stupor did I wander into this trap?
“Robin,” he said, in a tender voice I’d never heard him use before. It touched me so deeply—a sudden, rapier thrust of tenderness—that my immediate reaction was pleasure, followed by an icy gust of fear.
“I am not a playboy. Do you want references? Call up some of my ex-girlfriends. Investigate me,” he said. “Or trust me. What will it be?”
I opened my mouth but said nothing.
“Wait—don’t answer now. You’re upset. You’ve had a bad week,” he whispered. “Think about it. Sleep on it tonight and call me tomorrow.”
Why was I afraid of him?
Later, alone in my bed, windows and doors locked and heavy bits of furniture barricading them, I read over my file of stories on sperm, fertility, and artificial insemination and thought I found the answer in a paragraph Claire had highlighted from the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on reproduction:
Although fertilization in the higher terrestrial forms involves contact during copulation, it has been suggested that all of the higher animals may have a strong aversion to bodily contact. This aversion is no doubt an antipredator mechanism: Close bodily contact signifies being caught.