Wendy Ma put down the coffee cup, smacked it down, splashing hot coffee all over Luke’s breakfast-nook table. Her perfect oval features were hard, her voice barely under control.
“What the hell did you think would happen, for God’s sake?”
Luke couldn’t look right at her. He fumbled for his cigarettes, failed to find them, and then turned to stare out the window of the flat, at the thin bare tree branches, at the scraps of dead leaves flying windblown and crazy down the cobblestone walk, at the cars hissing by on Court Street. A pale pink light was tinting the roofline of the apartment across the street, and ten thousand feet above the city, the rising winter sun was glinting off the shining hull of a La Guardia jet rising into the dawn. It looked like a diamond set into a pale pink crystal bowl, or like someone dragging the point of a diamond cutter across a windowpane etched in winter frost. Luke watched it awhile, wondering what would happen if God struck the bowl of rose-colored glass with a silver hatchet. Would the whole world crack open? If it did, what would they see? Suddenly dead-bone weary, Luke considered Wendy, studied her masklike face and the way the early morning light lay upon her cheek like a dusting of rose-colored powder.
“What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have stayed in touch! You could have called the poor woman, as soon as you heard! She should have heard it from you. But no. You wander off to some bar and play dice, for God’s sake. You play dice to see if you’ll tell her. You arrogant shits! Like it’s your business. This is her pain, Luke, not yours. You don’t own it. She does. Where was your brain?”
“I was trying to work it through with—”
“The guys, right? The goddamn guys!”
Wendy got up, pulled Luke’s shirt closer around her, and went over to the stove to pour herself a cup of coffee. Luke found his cigarettes and lit one up, puffing the smoke against the chilly surface of the windowpane beside the table. He watched Wendy’s body under his shirt, the way she moved, the tanned expanse of slender well-muscled legs. She turned with the cup, stopped short, stared at him.
“Don’t tell me you were staring at my—in the middle of all this, you find the time to ogle me? Luke, the word is evolve, we’re e-volving, not de-volving. Who were your ancestors, anyway? Those guys in Quest for Fire?”
Luke set the cigarette in his mouth, leaned backward in the metal chair, ran his hands through his hair, and then rubbed his eyes. Sleep, that was what he needed now. A year would do nicely.
“Wendy, I made a mistake. I know that. There were other things to consider. There was Doc—this thing with the pills. When Walt told me that, man, I didn’t know what to do. And I wanted to be sure before I called her.”
Wendy sat down across from him, her blue-black hair falling down across her cheeks, framing her eyes. There was a light deep inside them, and Luke could see his own image in her eyes, a bare-chested man with a wild corona of hair, wreathed in a shroud of smoke.
“Luke, I understand what you meant to do. I know—I think I know you well enough now—”
“I hope so.”
She smiled, reached out and took his right hand, began to rub his gold Marshals Service ring. “So do I … but you have to understand. To be assaulted, Luke, to be stripped of everything you have, all your power, your sense of control—and they go on, you know, the average sexual assault lasts four hours, did you know that? Think about it. And if you cooperate, you try to … you do what’s necessary, then if you live, you have that on your soul forever, what you did, what you gave up, what you allowed, how you sold yourself. That mark never ever fades, Luke.”
Luke was looking at her.
Never fades. Well, that was very true. And not just for women. “I tried to … I called—”
“Doug Powys? I should hope so. What happened?”
“He was home.”
Wendy sighed, waited. The interval grew.
Finally: “And?”
Luke stared out the window, hearing the rising thunder of trucks and cars on the Gowanus, the booming of tires on blacktop.
“And then I drove to the Jersey state line.”