“That's my man,” said Annabelle, standing up. The fireplace lit her with the eerie glow familiar from countless horror movies. With the music silenced, they were aware of the sound of the wind humming through the trees outside. “I don't want ⦠to die,” Marlene said in a quavery voice.
They all laughed and then V.T. stood up too. “You're too tough to kill, Ciampi. Actually, it's probably ice on the lines. It'll be morning before we have power. We'll get some lights.”
So they spent the rest of the evening in companionable semi-darkness, lit by kerosene lamps turned low. Karp and Marlene snuggled under a pile of afghans on the couch. Their hostess and host did the same on the hearth rug.
The darkness brought on an intimacy among these four private people of a kind that occurs with children at a pajama party or soldiers on the night watch. They told spy jokes and cop jokes to suit the theme of the evening. V.T. got his guitar out and they sang sentimental songs. They popped popcorn over the fire and toasted marshmallows and finished off another bottle of Margaux.
Marlene said dreamily, “This is just like Girl Scout camp. I'm going to wake up in a bunk with initials carved in the wall, and discover that my entire adult life has been just an unusually long and violent nightmare.” OK by me, she said to herself.
Karp thought, this is real life: friends, good food, fun, furniture. Why have I given this up? He could sense Marlene's happiness. Relaxed vibrations issued from her like waves of heat from the fireplace. And she was singing; she hadn't really sung since the bombing, and she was singing the saddest songs she knew, which meant she was really calm and happy. She sang “Dutchman” and “Wagoner's Lad,” and a song in French that V.T. knew how to play, full of misery. Then she sang something Karp had never heard her sing before, about a maiden who gave herself for love to an enchanted knight, and rescued him from the Queen of the Fairies. She sang full-bore, high and wild, with V.T. beating out a strong rhythm on the flat of his guitar. Karp did the same with a pen on an empty bottle, a skill he had picked up in kindergarten and not much improved since.
Around midnight Guma blew in, looking like the abominable snowman, in the company of a blond who was so obviously what she was that she might have been wearing a T-shirt with “bimbo” written across it. Guma's car had conked out at the bottom of the hill and they had trudged three-quarters of a mile through deep snow in street clothes and shoes. He was drunk, inevitably, since he considered driving so boring that he always got tanked to the nozzle before any long drive.
The woman, whose name was Sunni Dale, was about to succumb to hypothermia, having climbed the hill in the open-toed heels she wore in her nightclub act. Guma, it seemed, had invited her out for a drink with some friends, without bothering to tell her that the venue was a mountainside a hundred and twenty miles off. Guma flopped on the couch and was snoring in about four seconds. Annabelle took charge of the woman and hustled her off to a steaming tub. Karp and Marlene lit their way to bed by candlelight.
Their bedroom was tiny and cold. They shivered and giggled as they pulled off their clothes and scrambled naked under the thick pile of quilts on the antique spindle four-poster. Down in the trough provided by the ancient mattress, they intertwined every available limb in an effort to keep their body heat from draining into the icy, crisp sheets.
“This is crazy,” Karp said, “there's no heat in this house. They'll find us frozen and blue in the morning, like in Jack London.”
“Be quiet,” she answered. “This is the second most romantic single moment of my entire existence.”
“What was the first?”
“Sweeping into the Copa on prom night on the arm of Rocco Tedeschi. I wore a powder blue strapless. Everybody died.”
“You went out with a guy named Rocco?”
“Yeah, so what? Butch, I'm Italian. Anyway, he was gorgeous and bad and my folks hated him. It was perfecto. He was the one who taught me how to drive, and also how to drive cars that belonged to other people. What a night! Later I let him go almost all the way. Just the tip in. He popped in about three seconds, making me a true woman while allowing me to save my technical virginity for my Comp Lit professor two years later.”
“That's pretty romantic. Speaking of which, what was that song, about the knight and the fairy queen?”
“âTam Lin'? It's a good one. What about it?”
“I don't know, I liked it. The part where the fairies turn him into different animals and she keeps holding on to him.”
She kissed his ear. “Is that what you want? To be rescued from the Queen of the Fairies?”
He laughed. “The Queen of the Fairies is named Marvin Belkin and he hangs out on Christopher Street. He's never shown any special interest in me, but ⦔
“God! Will you look at that!” Marlene exclaimed.
The candle, which they had placed on the window-sill, had gone out, a victim of one of the bedroom's vagrant drafts, and in the instant of its extinction, as the reflection of its flame died in the window, the moon burst from a nest of shining, ragged clouds and flooded the room with cold silver.
“Yeah, it's pretty,” he said after a moment.
“Pretty? It's ravishing! Moonlight on the newfallen snow, snuggling under perfumed quilts in an eighteenth-century farmhouseâI could stay here forever!”
“Tell me about the tapes.”
“Tapes? Oh, fuck a duck, Karp, you really know how to enhance a mood. You're as good as drugs.”
“Sorry. But reallyâ”
“But really, I don't know shit. Iron Tits once vouchsafed to me in the girls' crapper that Bloom had some sort of Nixon arrangement for taping conversations, but ⦠shit! What's that noise?”
The house had begun to vibrate with a strange thumping, like the sound that might be made by a spastic dragging a dead calf over a barrel. There was a thump at the door. “Sunni, goddammit, where are ya? I can't see shit.”
Marlene giggled. “Mr. Guma, Esquire, retires for the evening.” The steps receded down the hallway. Then they heard a door opening and a muffled conversation that resembled the audio portion of a Punch and Judy show. Then silence.
“Anyway,” she resumed, “that's all I know about the tapes, but I would guess they're kept pretty tight.”
“Uh-huh, I guess.”
“Mmm, I can see the wheels turning. But how could we get our hands on them? We don't even know where they're stashed.”
“I don't know. I'll think of something.”
“Yeah, I bet. Christ! What's
that
noise?”
“Umm. Sounds like somebody getting nooky on a creaky old bed, not unlike the one we currently occupy. I would guess Guma from the force of the thumps.” They listened breathlessly for a few minutes. “Ha, a screamer. I figured her for a moaner, like you,” he observed, stroking her back and kneading her small buttocks, hard as handballs.
“Jesus, it sounds like Moloch fucking a piece of bombazine, in Henry Miller's immortal phrase. By the way, I'm not a moaner,” she said, throwing a leg over his hip and pulling him even closer. “I'm a gasper. Oh, my, you're getting my attention now. Let's see what's going on down here.” She pulled away and he felt fingers flickering over his belly.
“Uh-oh, it's disappeared.”
“It's the cold.”
“Yeah. Maybe I should blow on it.”
“No, Marlene, I think you mean âsuck,'” he said. “âBlow' is just a figure of speech.”
The roar of a snowplow awakened him, and the first thing Karp saw was the rear of his beloved, who was standing by the window, looking out, dressed in a heavy white sweater and nothing else. Her delicious round bottom and the enticing space between her slim thighs were at his eye level. He stared for several pleasurable minutes until she caught his eye in the window's reflection and turned around.
“What are you looking at?”
“The greatest ass in North America.”
“Fah, it's way too fat.”
“Bullshit,” he replied, lifting the covers, “come on back to bed, and let me use it.”
“Yuk! You're turning into an animal. You're as bad as Guma. No, I'm getting dressed. I want to get out in this glorious day.”
“Don't play in the snow,” he said grumpily, pulling the quilts over his head.
But after a while he got dressed, pulled on some old galoshes he found in the mud room, and went outside. It did not seem possible that a sun so bright could yield so little heat. The air was as clear and hard as lead crystal, and cut his nostrils. He crunched through the drifts, following Marlene's deep footprints across the farmyard. As he neared the huge barn, Marlene caught him behind the ear with a snowball. He scooped up a handful of snow. “OK, Ciampi,” he snarled, “you're dead meat.” He heaved, she ducked, giggled, and ran into the barn. He picked up some more snow and set off in pursuit.
After the brilliance of the snowy morning the barn was like a coal mine. He stumbled over lumber and bounced off posts while his eyes adjusted. He heard a sound and saw Marlene moving toward the foot of a ladder leading to the barn's loft. He fired and had the satisfaction of seeing a white burst of snow against the back of her red parka. She laughed and ran up the ladder, and he followed her.
“Look, isn't this great, Butch? We could have a dance,” she said, twirling in the center of the barn's great loft. The loft did have something of the disco about it. Although it was gloomy under the eaves, the wall was pierced by chinks and knotholes, which lit the floor and the far walls like random spotlights. At the far end was a perfect square of absolute blueness where the loft door opened to the sky.
Marlene began to hum “The Blue Danube.” She put her arms around Karp and led him into a clumsy, shuffling waltz. She upped the tempo little by little until they were whirling breathlessly across the dusty floor. They stopped. Karp kissed her hard. Her hair smelled of wood smoke. She pulled away and looked at him, her expression odd and unreadable. She stared at the blue square for a moment, then turned back to him, and said, “It looks like a swimming pool from the high board. It's a swimming pool for birds.”
He yawned and started toward the ladder. “Yeah. Hey, let's go back to the house and see what's for breakfast.”
Marlene didn't answer. Karp heard her footsteps against the boards. He spun around and saw her running full tilt toward the open door. He realized with mounting horror that she was not going to stop. With a cackling yell she launched herself into naked space, and a last image of her against the blue heavens was burnt into his mind's eye: her thin, jean-clad legs spinning like egg beaters, her red parka flapping, her arms wide, her black hair a crazy halo around her head.
For a moment he was paralyzed, frozen between the impulse to run toward the door where she had vanished and the more sensible idea of going down to ground level. In the absolute silence he could hear the blood pound in his ears. Then he broke loose and hurled himself down the ladder and out to the front of the barn.
The square door was a black eye patch against the silvery wood, thirty feet up. Beneath it was a huge pile of snow pushed up by the plow. Karp ran to it and clambered up its side. At the top there was a Marlene-shaped hole, chillingly gravelike, and at its bottom was Marlene, looking like a frozen princess.
She appeared to be unconscious. His heart in his throat, he leaped into the hole, knelt down, and touched her face. “Marlene!” he wailed.
Her eye opened and her tongue stuck out at him. “That was great,” she said. “I want to go again.”
“You crazy idiot!” Karp yelled. “You could have killed yourself. There could have been a piece of goddamn farm equipment under the snow.” He climbed up out of the hole and looked around. “Hey, you jerk! Will you look at this?”
Marlene stood up. Karp was pointing wordlessly at a large lump in the snow pile, from which emerged the corner of a rusted metal frame and several long curved steel teeth. “You missed that by about two feet.”
Marlene giggled. “Yeah, it would have been a harrowing experience.”
“Stop it!” Karp bellowed, grabbing her shoulders. “It drives me crazy when you pull stuff like that.” He shook her and the words gushed out of him without thought. “You can't do this to me, Marlene. You're not some wacky kid. I love you! I can't stand this stuff, and your on-and-off shit. This isn't real life. I want to be with you. I want to get married.”
Marlene looked up at him with a broad grin. “Well, well,” she said. “Well, well, well, well, well.”
“Well, well, what?”
“Well, this sort of bowls a girl over, Butch. My heart's all a-flutter. But, ah, there's a couple of things ⦔
“Like?”
“Like, if we're going to getâhow can I put it?âengaged, you are going to have to meet my family.”
“I'm not marrying your family.”
“I beg to differ, but in any case I do not intend to sit through another Sunday dinner making polite conversation with nice unmarried Italian certified public accountants, who have been getting older and more desperate-looking in recent months.”
“OK, right, meet the family, you got it. You'll want a ring too, I guess.”
“You guess right, buster, and I want it flagrant, I want my mom happy, and my cousins squirming in envy. And I want to get married in white in St. Anthony's on 97th Street in the County of Queens.”
“Come on, Marleneâ”
“No, you come on. You ask me to marry you, you unleash long-buried lower-middle-class instincts. Well, what about it, is it a deal?”
“It's a deal. But you got to promise to stop trying to kill yourself and pulling weird shit.”
“Fine, no problem,” she said. Then she wrapped her arms around him and pulled his mouth down onto hers.
“There is one little detail, though,” she whispered into his ear.