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EVERY TIME THE blonde lifted a fork to her cherry-red lips, the bracelets around her wrists jangled a dissonant tune. Between munching wilted lettuce and nibbling cucumber slices, she chortled like a Marine and swore like a cop. A dreamy-eyed air often attacked her engaged expression. Something other than eating or catching up on gossip consumed her thoughts.
Lunch and laughter wound down with each passing minute. At half past the hour, she left the diner and ambled down Clark Street with her girlfriends. Soon she waved farewell. They waved back, calling out her name. “Tina!”
The name confirmed Kendra’s suspicions. Joel’s law clerk Tina Ambrose was also his intimate companion of the other day: the young thing who exchanged kisses and favors in the front seat of the Porsche before scampering into the office ahead of her boss. Between then and now, she had covered her dull brown hair with platinum glory. It didn’t improve her looks or appeal, but it made it easier to single her out in a lunchtime crowd.
Tina made three stops before going back to work. Each was a bank or brokerage firm. When the hour struck, she concluded her final errand and headed back to the office. The building’s gloomy masonry and skeletal underpinnings symbolized power, but after working there for several months, she took her surroundings for granted and failed to notice the woman following her ever since she left for lunch.
Kendra crossed the street, set up a watch post inside the protective spine of a bank’s emergency exit, and chain-smoked. The street ebbed and flowed. Dressed in unremarkable shades of gray and beige occasionally broken up by bursts of red or blue, office workers merged, formed patterns, subdivided, and regrouped. While scurrying here and sauntering there, they had no idea their lives had become open books. Kendra had always watched people like this, but never before did she feel like a voyeur.
Eventually the corner coffee shop proved a more comfortable place to watch. She occupied a two-seater located flush against the street-side window and drowned her bladder with café latte while letting time fritter away. Her patience paid off when a brunette dressed for seduction strolled from the direction of Jackson Boulevard. Kendra left the coffee shop and mirrored the other woman’s stride from across the street. Upon approaching the building’s entrance, the long-legged beauty assessed her reflection in the revolving door. Had she looked closer, she would have detected a second woman mirrored in the spinning glass panes, only the foreshortened boulevard separating one image from the other, and would have remarked that they could have been mistaken for each other. But without a second glance, she went inside.
Kendra recognized the woman from the many photos of her on the web. Her name was Juliana Morrissey Santana, the widow of Eddie Santana, the mobster who died of an unexpected heart attack just two months after their marriage.
A half hour went by. Forty-five minutes. Fifty. Having concluded her business, she emerged into the blustery winds looking more untidy than when she entered. Lipstick smudged her mouth as if a man had roughly kissed it. Her hair was snarled as though a lover had run his fingers through it. And her face was flushed as if a paramour had aroused her innermost yearnings.
She paused to light a cigarette before marching back toward Jackson. Kendra shadowed her to the parking garage where Santana presented a claim ticket. Impatient to get going, she vigorously paced the glass-enclosed waiting area. Her cell phone rang, and she answered. With the squeal of tires and a honk of the horn, the valet brought down a shiny sports car. While giggling playfully into the phone, she slipped the valet a tip and lowered herself into the bucket seat. Soon she was on her way, still talking on the phone.
Kendra retraced the woman’s path back to the tenth floor of the LaSalle Street office building. She didn’t bother stopping at the reception desk but went straight through to Joel’s private office.
He was chuckling into the phone. When he looked toward the doorway, surprise registered. He ended the call quickly by saying, “I have to go.”
“I’m sorry,” Kendra said. “Are you busy?”
“You should be home. Resting.” He was up and out of his chair. “How did it go at the lawyers?”
She shrugged. “As expected.”
“Good. That’s good.” He guided her to the leather sectional. Lavish seating arrangements met the criteria of high-powered meetings and romantic interludes. A cocktail table filled the squared-off opening. On the glass surface sat an ashtray holding two cigarette butts daubed with lipstick.
Husband and wife sat side-by-side, close enough for thighs to touch but farther apart than Mars was from Venus. Kendra made a ceremony of removing the hat. Joel sat forward, edgy, his heels beating the Oriental rug.
“The thing is, Joel, I need you. I want you to hold me.”
“Here? Now?”
“Yes, here. Especially now.”
A facile smile gave away his thoughts. He told his secretary he didn’t want to be disturbed. Then he closed the door on a hush. After taking care of the lock and dimming the overhead lighting, he sauntered back and helped Kendra off with her coat.
Distant voices and mechanical hums filtered in from nearby offices. Breaking unspoken rules of professional decorum heightened their escapade. His skin smelled of the other woman. The discovery titillated Kendra, as if she were engaging in a ménage à trois.
He pushed aside her clothing, unbuttoning here, unzipping there, and exposing just enough flesh to make the hunt exciting. She did the same with even more urgency, struggling with his belt and tearing at the knot of his tie. He tugged at a Bobby pin and loosened her hair. She stifled a giggle. He swallowed a groan. She applied shuddering fingers to her task. He used his burning mouth to find all the erotic zones that pleased her.
For Kendra, testing the limits of respectability heightened the climax. Desire didn’t enter into her side of the bargain. Inflicting a perverse kind of revenge was her motive. She wanted to make him want her more than any other woman. She bit down on the soft pad of her hand to silence her moans. After everything, Joel still had the power to arouse her.
He collapsed against her, his eyelashes fluttering against his cheek and his breaths slowing to shallow whistles. Kendra checked her watch. Joel sensed the gesture and stirred. He muttered sleepy nonsense that cogently meant, Don’t go.
“I’m beat. I’m going home.”
He shook his head into her breasts, exposed like underdone eggs in the sulfuric lamplight.
“When will you be home?”
“Latish,” he said, “but not late.”
“Should I make dinner?”
“I’ll bring home Chinese takeout,” he mumbled. “Wear something see-through. And red. We can nibble chow mein and each other with chopsticks.”
“When’s the Santana case coming to a head?”
“Not for weeks,” was his garbled response. “Weeks and weeks and weeks.”
“Then I won’t wait up.”
His eyes opened, groggy and black. “I’ll cancel the meeting.”
“Duty waits for no attorney. Jordan is counting on you to be as dysfunctional as he is.”
They sat up and reassembled themselves. Kendra put her hair back up, jabbed the hatpin into place, and pushed to her feet. He accompanied her to the door, where they performed the customary rites of separation: kisses beneath the jaunty hat, rehearsed pleasantries, affectionate caresses, and monosyllabic assurances.
When he opened the door, Tina Ambrose was waiting on the other side, a file gripped in her hand. Up close, the Geisha complexion and rosebud lips made the girl seem breakable. Yet despite loud jewelry, she was as plain and unattractive as an Amish housewife. She introduced herself with a fishy handshake, afterwards handing Joel a document for his signature. To Kendra, she offered stale condolences. Upon excusing herself, she left behind a perfume different from the fragrance slathered on the couch.
Kendra gave Joel a peck on the cheek and showed herself out.
Back on the street, Kendra walked straight into the wind. The gusts swept away unshed tears and dried her eyes to a flawless glaze. A block away, she became aware of a man dogging her heels. She lengthened her stride and lost him in the pack but couldn’t shake the feeling that he was watching the stiffened curve of her spine and guessing what kind of sordid tryst had just happened.
At the gift shop, Kendra presented a shopping bag containing a pair of Gucci sunglasses. A price tag dangled from one of the earpieces. Kendra didn’t have a receipt, nor did she remember buying them. All the same, she found them in her dresser drawer, tucked inside a stack of sweaters.
The sales clerk said, “If you like, we can credit your account.”
“Do I have an account?”
“Why, yes. You do.”
“If you wouldn’t mind going to the trouble.”
“Not at all.”
As Kendra folded the return receipt into her purse, the sales clerk asked, “What’re wearing? The perfume?”
“I just purchased a bottle. Do you like it?”
“Very much.”
“It’s called Black Orchid.”
Kendra visited the pawnshop on Jackson Boulevard. Burglar bars and a buzzer entry system protected the seedy storefront. The proprietor looked as sleazy as his establishment. Too cheap to put up the thermostat, he wore a ski jacket and a Russian cap with the flaps turned down. When Kendra presented the pawn ticket, he groaned to his feet and trolled along the glass case. She recognized the Movado watch he slid out from a tray. Joel had given it to her on Valentine’s Day two years ago. She wore it only on special occasions. The proprietor didn’t remember her or the watch, but even if he had, his was a business requiring the briefest of memory and the fuzziest of recall. “You can have it back for fifty bucks.” He gave Kendra a second look and the offer a second think. “For you, sixty.”
“I’ll give you seventy-five.”
“Deal.”
Her next stop was a trickier proposition. The maître d’ denied ever seeing her before. The waiter gave her the same line. Neither recalled two women, identical meals, and a scene of epic proportions. Or else they didn’t want to fess up to a wronged wife in search of a scandal and a philandering husband.
Upon exiting the restaurant, she was taken aback by the reappearance of the exhibitionist. He had assumed his former post with the same feigned posture of disinterest. It seemed too coincidental that he should be here, at this hour, and of all days. In a zip of time, she was transported to that blustery night and conveyed back to present day. Her heart restarted, and her breath returned in a rush. When he didn’t blush from her open-eyed stare, Kendra grasped what she had become: a magnet for debauchery.
She turned east and walked at a fast clip. The flasher followed. When she glanced back, he feigned disinterest, eyes peeled to the sidewalk and hands plunged deep into his pants pockets. At intersections, when Kendra’s progress was impeded by the flash of a Don’t Walk signal, he would pick out another woman to admire or approach a man to ask the time of day. Mostly, he rocked back on his heels and pretended to be a typical pedestrian. When at last the traffic light changed, Kendra quickened her pace. So did he.
She headed for the subway station but changed her mind and turned south, hoping to lose him in the crowd. He kept up, shadowing her a few paces to the rear and matching her stride for stride.
She approached a traffic cop. “That man, over there. He’s following me.”
The police officer looked at her as if she were crazy. “What man? Where?”
When Kendra turned around, the flasher was gone. “But he was just ...”
“Ma’am, are you all right?”
She saw herself in the reflection of his eyes and shrunk back from the distorted image of a madwoman. Cars honked. The cop blew his whistle and flagged oncoming traffic. Kendra staggered away.
A block farther on, she sought support from the cornerstone of a building. The plumb lines and flat surfaces stretched upward toward a single point of perspective. Dizziness overcame her. When she swung her head in a wide circle, the scenery spun at a faster clip.
Kendra ambled on, heedless of direction. She found herself in front of the art museum. Its Parthenon façade welcomed her with an embrace of familiarity. She paid the admission fee, checked her coat, and climbed to the upper galleries, where van Gogh unveiled his insanity in a self-portrait and Seurat put sunbathers to sleep in a pointillist world. Kendra would have gladly entered either canvas.
Footsteps echoed hers. She glimpsed her patron with a skewed eye. A smile rose on his feral lips. He wasn’t as fearful as Kendra supposed. Though he hadn’t shaved for a few days and his fair hair was unkempt, he was clean and neat. His relaxed posture and blasé attitude put her at ease. He had found his milieu, here among masterpieces painted by dead men.
When he angled closer, she allowed him the nearness. A spicy aftershave billowed in his wake. Their roles switched. He wasn’t following her anymore. She was tracking him.
He made a full circuit of the Impressionist galleries, moving at leisure from painting to painting and admiring each with an artist’s eye. He alternately drew nearer the canvases to analyze brushstrokes and stepped back to take in the illusion. By appreciating the same paintings Kendra had long loved, he forever turned them into nonsensical compositions of rhomboids and tetrahedrons.
After viewing Renoir’s terrace, Caillebotte’s Paris street, and Picasso’s blue guitarist, he led Kendra to the cafeteria below and paid for lunch. They dined at a table for two. His tray was loaded with meatloaf and cherry pie and hers with a Caesar salad and iced tea. Throughout the meal, he ran an appraising eye over her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he saw her as a valuable painting set inside an antique frame.
They didn’t speak a single word to each other.
When they had eaten their fill, he walked her past stained-glass windows and banks of Medieval armor, and finally shepherded her out to a bleak cityscape filled with diesel-spuming buses and lost mittens. They crossed Michigan Avenue, sauntered inland, and turned onto Wabash Avenue. Upon arriving at a hotel, he offered an elbow. Slipping her hand into the crook of his arm, she allowed him to escort her into the upscale establishment.
A room on the eighth floor was available. For men like him, perhaps a room on the eighth floor was always available. He registered under the name Hunter Steele and presented an American Express card.
When they stepped off the elevator, he swung her into his arms and left a bruising kiss on her mouth. Voices approach from the far end of the corridor. They separated and strolled past an older couple who eyed them with curiosity. At room 815, he unlocked the door and allowed her to cross the threshold ahead of him.
The carpet was olive-green. The walls were orange and tan. The drapes were dusky gold. The bed was made up with mints placed upon the pillows and a DO NOT DISTURB sign slapped on the bedspread. Guilt confronted Kendra, not because she had checked into a hotel room with a hustler, but because she intended to vacate the premises in an hour or less.
When Hunter slid the door chain into its slot, she started. He allowed the stillness to return before striding forward and helping her off with her coat. From beneath sun-bleached eyelashes, his clear irises looked down at her with admiration. “I like the hat,” he said. “Too bad you can’t wear it when we’re making love.”
“I don’t see why not.”
He chuckled. Angling his head, he eyed the ruby earrings dangling from her earlobes. Fascinated, he reached forward and jiggled one of them. Then he lifted her hand and kissed the palm, skimming his lips from ringed finger to ringed finger. He stopped when he reached the nakedness of her primary ring finger. “You’re not married? I thought ...”
“They felling down the sink.”
“Freudian slip?”
She chuckled the way he did, with a jaunty flip of her head.
He slipped off her suit jacket and let it fall to the floor. He urged the diaphanous blouse over her shoulders, baring her bra and soul with equal ease. When he finished pushing the skirt down over her hips, he wrapped her in his arms.
He asked, “What perfume are you wearing?”
“A favorite of my husband’s. Do you like it?”
“Not particularly.”
She wanted to laugh. Instead, she tugged him against her and drank in the outdoorsy smell of him. “Is that your real name? Hunter?”
With pointed concentration, he used his thumbs to outline the shape of her breasts, finishing the heart-shaped pattern at her bellybutton. “There’s a middle name. Delano. After my father.”
She unbuckled his belt with steady fingers. The boldness of her actions winded him. “Are you sick, Hunter?”
“Sick at heart. I’m infatuated with you, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“I do.” With the skip of a heartbeat, Kendra realized she was as dissolute as Hunter Steele. Did it happen on this day and at this moment? Or had she always been wanton but deftly hid the truth behind pretense and respectability, even from herself?
They climbed onto the bed from opposite sides and balanced on their haunches. He stroked her arms with the lightest of touches. Eyes pierced eyes as their breaths harmonized.
“That day when I first saw you,” he said, reaching in for a kiss, “you were with him.”
“With Joel?” His statement confused her. “Were you in the restaurant? I don’t remember ...”
“He was outside, checking his cell phone for messages.” He edged the side of his finger along the profile of her face as if sketching it indelibly into his memory. “You called out his name, came running up the street, and jumped into his arms. He twirled you round and round, the way they do in the movies. I wanted to be him, holding you in my arms just like that.”
The way he touched her made her breathless. He was teasing her with the drip of his fingertips and tantalizing her with the promise of more to come. “Wasn’t me. Another woman. One of his clients. Juliana Santana.”
“The mobster’s wife?”
“She looks like me.”
Having no doubts of what he saw, he shook his head. “It was you, all right. I wanted you right then. Didn’t give a damn what I had to do to make you mine.”
“You remind me of my husband.”
“Do I?” he said. And then, “His hair is darker. His face, narrower. His personality, plastic. He’s an imitation of what a man ought to be. Nothing is really there.”
“You don’t like him.”
“He has you, doesn’t he?” Using the tip of his finger like a brush, he drew a new face from the old one, emphasizing the perfection of her cheekbones, the broadness of her brow, the refinement of her nose, the shapeliness of her lips, and the roundness of her chin. In a moment of revelation, she understood something profound: she had sold herself like a painting at auction, where the bidding started at zero and ended at the same amount. She was as cheap as they came.
“An hour and a half later, you left, but without him. You were in a hurry.”
“From the restaurant or the office building? In October or today?”
“Both times.”
He was right. There were differences between him and Joel. His lips were fuller. His cheekbones flatter. His brow narrower. His nose longer. His chin weaker. But they were the same, too. Like bookends facing in opposite directions. Both intense. Both sexual. Both needy. And both possessive.
“Ten, fifteen minutes later, you came back to the restaurant, but from the opposite direction, as if you’d walked around the block to think things over. You were breathless and in a hurry, fighting the rain and the wind with your red umbrella. You looked like a different woman. Same hair and eyes, but different. You saw me that time, not like before, and were shocked for some reason.”
“I saw you jacking off.”
“You’re mixing me up with someone else.”
They switched positions. He was on his back and she was on top, her arms braced on either side of his pale body. He turned his head aside, lost in ecstasy. His eyes were crying, but his face was stoic. “I’m an admirer of beauty, it’s true,” he said. “I saw your anguish. So remote. So vulnerable. Maybe ... okay ... I was aroused. But it was an expression of love, not an act of depravity.”
“I must affect men like that. Make them want something they can never have.”
“Never?”
“I can’t give. Only take. Just like Joel. Would you know the other woman if you saw her again?”
“She looked like you. She was you. What’s your name?”
“Kendra. Kendra Swain.”
“And your husband is Joel Swain. I have it now.”
“You’ve been following me ever since that night, haven’t you?”
“But then you knew that. And encouraged me.”
“Did I? I didn’t mean to.” She was questioning herself as much as him. “After being with you like this, how can I trust myself ever again?”
“Why shouldn’t you? You’re the same woman you were when the sun came up this morning.”
“Am I?” She thought about it. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’ll never be the same woman again.” His body odor was familiar. The way he moved his limbs, contracted his muscles, and responded to her caresses were predictable. “It’s as if I’ve known you for a lifetime. You’re like an old shirt left in the bottom of a drawer.”
They stayed in the hotel room much longer than an hour. As darkness fell on the city, they dined by candlelight, clinking celebratory champagne glasses and feasting on Chateaubriand and lobster bisque.
