I TOLD HER MOST OF IT. I didn’t tell her about the little Greek in Paris. I figured she might know the man or his family, and anyway it was Freddy Tarkoff’s private business with me. But I told her about the big Spade on Chicago’s South Side. The one who killed my partner, and that I went down into the South Side after, myself. The police were looking for him and couldn’t find him. I found him because I had close friends on the South Side. I told her there was one moment when I probably could have saved his life. For about thirty seconds during our discussions he’d been about ready to give it up and turn himself over, if I’d asked him. I didn’t ask him. Instead, I let him think he’d fooled me into trusting him. I did it deliberately. So he went on sweet-mouthing me, with his slippery mean eyes. Until he thought he could get the drop on me, like he had my partner. When he went for the gun he had hidden in the back of his belt, I was all ready and waiting. The luridly described “FLAMING GUN BATTLE” of the headlines was only three shots really, one from his gun that went past my chest as I turned sideways, and two from mine.
“Probably I wouldn’t have done it that way, today,” I said. “I was younger then, and I was angry. Today I’d probably take him in. And six months later he would be back out on the Street, terrorizing and extorting other black people, and bragging about how he fooled us whiteys. If he ever went to jail at all.”
“I don’t understand you,” Chantal said crisply, from the bed. “I would have killed him without any compunction. He killed your friend, didn’t he? And tricked him?”
“He was black.”
“Why does that make any difference?”
“It shouldn’t. I kind of liked him,” I said. “And he probably had had a hard life. Liking him was about comparable to liking a rattlesnake you found by the road.”
In the bed, she shrugged.
“And you were a local hero for a while because of this adventure?”
“About three months. But I milked it for a lot longer. I could have milked it even longer, and gotten a lot more out of it, if I’d wanted to stay in Chicago.”
“I don’t understand you Americans,” Chantal said. “No European would have left like that. Here you had all this acclaim and opportunity, and you had earned it. You had the right to get everything out of it you could. A European would have.”
“We’re an odd breed,” I said. “Some of us, at least, I guess. Anyway, that was how I met my wife. She was a Lake Forest socialite. Or, rather, she was a would-be socialite. Her grandfather did very well, in Lake Forest, in the ’twenties. But Samuel Insull’s stock mergers put him under. Her father never recouped.”
“So she transferred all her social ambitions onto you?” Chantal said.
“You might say.” I took a long, deep breath, and drank down some whisky, then pouched out my lips and blew the breath out through them.
“You said you were falling in love with me. I thought I’d better tell you all this.”
“So that it would make me fall less in love with you?”
“It ought to, shouldn’t it? All this old dirt? It’s not a very heroic tale.”
“You’re either dumb. Or else you’re a lot smarter than I’ve given you credit for: That kind of life story, told by a bundle of muscle like you, only makes a real woman fall more in love. Not less.”
“You’re awfully sure you’re a real woman,” I said.
“That’s one thing I’ve never really had to worry about,” Chantal said. She slid over in the bed, and touched the place beside her. She had nothing on, under the sheet. “Come on in. Do you want me to prove it?”
I stood up and began taking off my clothes. I was suddenly dead beat and dog tired.
“My God, look at that side of yours,” she said.
“I’m not sure I can do you any good,” I said as I got out of my pants. “After all this whisky. And after this—” I didn’t know what to call it. I didn’t want to say, Murder. “After what’s happened.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Chantal said softly. “Shh. Shh. Just rest a while.”
I started by kissing her, and running my hands over her breasts. They lay a little flatter than a young girl’s, maybe. I didn’t mind that. I liked it better. I put my nose against her hair by her ear. The faint odor of perfume and light female sweat in the night heat was soothing, and delicious.
“Don’t worry about making love,” she said. “Just lie quiet.”
“I’m sick,” I said to her ear without moving my nose. “I’m sick all over. I get sick in my heart and sick in my guts and sick at the base of my skull, when I think about her out there in the water, bleeding, and that damned boat propeller coming down on her a second time. It makes me sick in the middle of my crotch and right under my toes on the soles of my feet. My toes curl up.”
“I know. It’s sad. It’s terrible,” Chantal said. “But there’s nothing we can do.” One of her hands was kneading the small of my back. Right where the tension was.
“Not a damn thing,” I said. “Not for her, anyway. But there’s damn sure something I can do for me.”
“You’ll do it,” Chantal said, soothingly. “You’ll do it.”
“I mean to.” I ran my hand over her left breast again. Its nipple was puckering up and tightening and rising. Almost of its own volition. As if it had its own little mind. So it seemed.
And oddly enough it was happening to me. I was getting hard. I wasn’t even thinking about sex. I was thinking about Marie, bleeding. Bleeding in the water, and the boat turning to come back.
It was as if all the little cells in both of us had lives of their own, without ever caring what we thought or felt. As if both of us were nothing but collections of undersea hydroids and zooids and medusa buds swimming around in the salt water, cells mindlessly mating, mindlessly breeding, mindlessly forming chains, mindlessly producing the polyps that produced the free-swimming medusae that bred polyps again. The picture was so cruel it brought me up short. The ferocity and raw greed and unconcern of simple cellular life shocked me. Poor Marie.
I raised up on my elbow and looked down at Chantal, and suddenly her head turned into the head of my wife. Joanie’s head went on talking to me and soothing me.
“You’ll do it. It’s all right.”
I made myself blink, but Joanie’s head didn’t change back to Chantal’s. It went right on talking to me, trying to soothe. It wasn’t any fantasy. It was the real head. The body was Chantal’s. I wondered if I was losing my marbles, what few of them I had left.
Before I could react, the head changed again. Joanie’s head became Marie’s head and went right on talking, crooning to me.
“It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”
I decided to risk wiping my eyes with my hand. I did. Marie’s head went on crooning to me. And suddenly I wanted to weep, for all of them. For Chantal, for Joanie, for Marie. For everybody. For anybody, and everybody, but mainly for me.
What a situation our race had got itself into. Condemned to separation. Not wanting to be separated. But loving it. Hanging onto it for dear life. Anyway we had no choice anyway. Cellular collections. Zooids and hydroids. We would be laughable, if it didn’t hurt so much.
The head on Chantal’s body now was Chantal’s. I took it in my hands and kissed her on the mouth, before it could get away.
“You don’t have to talk to me,” I said.
“I don’t mind,” she said. Her hand groped my crotch. “What do you want? Do you want me to do something special for you?”
“No. I’ll do something special for you,” I said. “Don’t do anything. Just lie back.”
I started at her breasts, and worked down. I took a long time. The tiny blonde hairs on her skin, invisible except up this close, seemed to quiver all on their own. Separately. I tried to put into my lips and tongue and teeth and nose all the sad delightful things I’d never been able to say to any of them, to any woman. Women were so valuable—to men. Her navel pulsed, like a pursed mouth, contracted to meet my mouth. From above me she moaned. I had her going, and that was what I wanted to give her. Her crotch hair tickled my nose, crisply, like curly endive lettuce when I’d held batches of it to my face to sniff it. And then the woman smell: faintly perfumed, faintly pissy, faintly polecat, faintly something else.
“Oh. Oh God. It’s never been like this,” Chantal said above me. “Oh God. Oh. Nothing’s ever been like this.”
She was right. I’d never done it like this. I’d gone down on a lot of women, but not like that. It was for all of them. For Marie. And for Joanie. And for Chantal. For a hundred others. All the ones I’d failed with, and who had failed me. All the ones I’d wanted, but hadn’t got. All the ones I’d wanted and got, but had left, or who had left me. All the ones I’d only seen, and wanted. All the wounded ladies. It was for all of them. Chantal reaped the benefit.
Her legs jerked under my forearms. “UNNHH. NNHHNN. AARR. NNHHH! NN! AAARRRGGHHH!” Chantal called.
I let my head rest on her belly and through my ear felt the muscle contractions diminish and fade.
“Oh, fuck me!” Chantal said from above me. “Oh. Fuck me, Lobo, fuck me. I want you inside me. I want to feel it in me.”
I rolled around and mounted her. I could feel the inside parts of her come down to touch me. “Oh. Oh.” Her eyes stared up at me sightlessly. I don’t know what she was seeing. Herself, maybe. Her portrait mirrored in my eyes. Then I came myself, exploding.
After a while I rolled off of her.
“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay the night,” I said dully.
“Stay as long as you want,” she said. “Stay forever,” and she put one arm under my head and pulled my face against the dampness of her armpit.