“I have to look at you,” he said.
“Just hurry along, if you don’t mind.”
Her cunt seemed to him a thing of unbearable beauty. Its readiness, its subtlety, its bed of dark hair. Unconcealed by adipose tissue, the individual muscles in her arms and legs were visible in their small, filet-like glory. Her retroperitoneal scar was a great circle of healed injury stretching from a point below her sternum, around under her ribs, and into the center of her back. For better or worse, his prick shuddered fully into hardness as he turned her body and followed the scar’s irregular progress, its purple and red runes, through the places where it was a bunching of the skin and the more tender-looking places where it was a stretching. He couldn’t help thinking of the aerial photograph of the San Andreas Fault he’d seen in one of her books, how the long raised seam traversed the smooth skin of the California desert, how the narrow groove down the center of the seam was cut by suture-like hatchings. He felt glad to be alive and in this bed. There had ceased to be any question in his mind that the thing he was looking at was Renée Seitchek. The focus of his love had migrated from his imagination into her body, and had taken his imagination along with it, the inescapable joining of her legs now embodying some necessary convergence of emotions in himself, the warmth of her skin identical to the warmth his eyes felt when the lids came down to cover them. He licked her cool thoracostomy scar. He kissed the ragged star of the exit wound beneath her right breast. A bullet had come through here bearing bits of her bone and her lung tissue, but she was breathing without pain now. She played with his prick, opening and closing her opposed finger and thumb, pulling strands in the clear taffy it secreted. She bent sideways and sucked on it, briefly.
He squeezed a blob of nonoxynol jelly into the center of her diaphragm, lubricated the rim and folded it in two, and pushed it into her vagina until it unfolded into place. The procedure was similar in some interesting ways to preparing a bird for roasting.
She looked scared when he settled himself on top of her. He resisted the idea that it was “important” that they were making love now, but unfortunately it did seem kind of important. Her eyes were open wide and she was blinking rapidly, as if it might have been Death and not Louis who was weighing on her chest and sliding a firm piece of his flesh into a narrow gap in hers, and more generally invading the citadel where she had kept her self, her soul, during the months when she was lonelier than she was now. He slung his left leg up over her hip to keep from bearing on her osteomyelitic femur. The position was awkward, and she lay so inertly, through little choice of her own, that he felt like he was clinging to a slippery rock with not many handholds.
“Tell me when I’m hurting you.”
“Well I’m hurting a little in a lot of places.”
“Hurting you too much I mean.”
Eyes closed, she pressed him into her as deeply as he would go. She breathed in the heavy, heedless way that made a man feel like a king and made his ejaculation an event of huge sweetness. He lay beside her and massaged the forward end of her labia with the palm of his hand until she came. He took his prick in his own hand and deposited semen in the pelvic hollow he had a fetish for. She thrashed a little, and rubbed the hollow for a long time before it stopped tickling her. They made inane and sentimental statements about breath and current genital conditions and love. They repeated the major act, straining and sweating until she became fretful and told him she was feeling really sick. He stood up immediately and covered her with the blanket. “Let me get you some lunch.”
She shook her head. She was slack-faced and miserable. “Some toast, some tea.”
“There’s no way I can go out tonight. You’ll have to call her.”
“You can sleep all afternoon. We’ll see how you feel.”
“I’m so tired of being tired.”
“Have a bite. Take a nap.”
When her door was closed and he knew that she was sleeping, he sat at the kitchen table and opened the envelope from Lauren. There was a letter in her pretty, ungainly hand.
September 20
Dear Louis,
I have to write to you today because I have to. I think about how if I’d wrote to you last fall everything would be different. I have to write to you for me, not you, so I hope you don’t mind too much. You don’t have to write back.
Well, the big news is—I’m pregnant! Its a good thing, because I already have a little bread basket. People ask when I’m due and I say April and they can’t believe it. They think I’m going to say December. I spend a lot of time walking on air. I don’t even know if you would know me I’m so different. I feel like I’ve found the real ME. I already love my baby like crazy and talk to him all the time. Well, that’s the big news.
Louis, sometimes I miss you so much I start crying. I miss how funny you were and how considerate. But now I know God didn’t mean for us to be together. God meant for me and Emmett to be together. I’m so thankful I have a life and a good husband and (SOON) a little baby I can love. I still love you (there, I said it!) but
in a different way
. But do you know what I wish sometimes? I wish I could see Renée, just her and me. I want to kiss her on the cheek because she has you, you are a sweet boy. Is she all well again—I hope? I do hope it with all my heart, Louis.
Well, there’s the news from Texas. I’m not telling MaryAnn I’m pregnant until I know everything’s OK. I’m friend’s with Emmett’s Mom now. She took me to her church group. The people were so wierd there but I’m friend’s with them too. Oh well.
Louis, you will always be my friend even if we never meet again. “The King is dead, long live the King.” That’s what they say in England when their king dies. Get it??
Your friend,
Lauren
He left the letter on the table so Renée could read it if she wanted. He felt vaguely tainted or compromised, and he wondered if he’d had the wrong idea about Lauren all along. At the moment, at least, she didn’t compare well with the woman he’d just mated with.
His lunch eaten, he faced the problem of the afternoon. In the morning he shopped, worked on his car, did cleaning, and, until a few days ago, took Renée to the clinic for her daily antibiotics shot; in the evening they ate and went to movies or watched TV. But in the afternoon he ran up against the same hopelessness that had afflicted him ever since he lost his job at WSNE. All he could find to do while Renée rested was read books. He’d consumed the novels of Thomas Hardy one after another, not really enjoying them but not stopping until even
Jude the Obscure
was under his belt. He’d since moved on to Henry James, for whom his mood of patience and suspended judgment made him an ideal reader. He especially liked
The Bostonians
, because James’s Boston of the 1870s turned out to be inhabited by the same eternal feminists with whom Louis had marched in the big pro-choice rally in July, the same crackpots and dreamers who had funded Rita Kernaghan and come to her memorial, the same slippery journalists who were still trying to insinuate themselves into Renée’s apartment by telephone. He began to forgive the chill of this northern city. He thought about the Brahmin blood running in his own veins. He watched himself being consoled by literature and history, and, observing how much he’d changed in one year, he wondered what kind of person he was ultimately meant to be. But there was still that hopelessness or sorrow right beneath the skin of his afternoons.
He woke Renée at five-thirty. Her temperature was low enough for her to consider going out, and by six they were on their way to Ipswich. The golds of the season and the hour were in the trees reflected in the contoured glass of cars on I-93. Through the few windows that weren’t smoked for privacy, lone commuters could be seen hunching aggressively over steering wheels or talking about their lives on telephones.
“She wants to kiss me on the cheek,” Renée said.
“Oh, you read that, did you.”
“This is some southern species I don’t understand.”
“She’s a nice person. Very mixed up.”
“You pursue this topic at your own risk. You must know I’d be happier if you told me she’s a total jerk. Her and her little breadbasket.”
“What can I say? I’m embarrassed.”
It was night when they reached Ipswich. The frame of the pyramid still squatted on the house on Argilla Road, silhouetted against the moon-whitened sky, but most of the aluminum siding had been removed. It lay twisted in piles by the circular drive. Extension ladders weighted down a pair of tarpaulins covering tools and stacks of lumber near the front door.
The lean, sophisticated woman of Brahmin stock who was Louis’s mother ushered him and Renée into the living room and poured them drinks at the bar. Again buckets of money had been spent to repair the house, to demonstrate that wealth was stronger than any earthquake. Melanie’s navy-blue dress had navy-blue buttons and padded shoulders and hugged her hips and thighs and knees. She’d visited Renée in the hospital, once, and hadn’t seen her since then. She didn’t fuss over her now. It was left to Louis to make her comfortable on the sofa.
“Before our brains get too clouded,” Melanie said, “we have some business to discuss.” She took an envelope from the mantelpiece. “This is for you, Renée. I think you’ll agree that everything’s correct here?”
Renée silently showed Louis the contents of the envelope. There was a personal check, made out to her, for the sum of six hundred thousand and xx/100ths dollars, and a receipt for the same amount made out to Melanie Holland.
“You’ll notice I’ve dated it the thirtieth,” Melanie said. “You’ll recall this was the deadline we established. Louis, you’ve witnessed that she has the check in her possession?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“If you’ll just sign the receipt then, Renée.” Melanie held out a pen which Renée looked at blankly. “Or is something not correct?”
Silently Renée took the pen and signed the receipt. Melanie folded it in half, tucked it in the breast pocket of her dress, and delivered herself of a huge sigh. “Well.
That’s
taken care of. Now we can relax a little. How are you, Renée?”
Renée raised her chin. She held the check in her lap like a handkerchief she’d been using. “Not too bad,” she said.
“That’s marvelous. You’re looking so much more like yourself than the last time I saw you. I hope Louis is taking good care of you?”
Renée turned and looked at him as if she’d forgotten him until this mention of his name. She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.
“Louis, that reminds me of the other business I wanted to discuss. This is our
last
piece of business for tonight, I promise.” Melanie gave a false little laugh. “I suppose you know I haven’t been able to sell this house. I realize it’s not simply my own personal misfortune that there isn’t a buyer to be found between here and New Jersey for a house at last year’s prices. I’m willing to accept the depression of the market in the Northeast and whatever loss that entails for me. Unfortunately, we had another little tremor up here last Tuesday. You can hardly blame me for being surprised. I know I wasn’t alone in thinking we’d seen the end of all that. But no, there was another tremor. Fine. Perhaps there’ll be more. Fine. But in the meantime—”
“Glad to see you’ve calmed down about this, Mom.”
“In the meantime, Louis, I wondered if you and—Renée, too, of course, if she likes—would have any interest in staying in this house. It would be rent-free and very comfortable. If you’re here, Renée, and you still want to work at Harvard, I realize it might be a longish commute. But the advantages, I think, are obvious. I can pay you a caretaker’s fee as well, especially if you’d be willing to show the house to prospective buyers. You see, I can’t help thinking it might lift your spirits to get out of Somerville. And of course the extra income and the savings on rent, Louis, as long as you’re out of work and not sure where you’re going . . .”
Louis looked around the room. In spite of himself, he’d expected to feel the presence of ghosts—a spirit named Rita, a spirit named Jack; the spirits of Anna Krasner and his father. They’d all haunted this living room when he was far away from it, especially when he was in Evanston. But now when he looked at the blandly replastered walls and stolid furniture, he knew he could wait as long as he wanted, and he’d still see only the empty present.
“You don’t have to decide now,” Melanie said.
“What?” He looked at her as if
she
were a ghost. “Um, I don’t think so. But thanks.”
“Well, think it over.” She excused herself and went to the kitchen.
A silence fell in the unhaunted room.
“I’m surprised,” Louis said. “I thought she’d be different.”
Renée tugged on the ends of her check, making the paper snap. “I didn’t.” There was a pack of matches from the Four Seasons Hotel in the ashtray on the end table. She lit one and held it before her eyes until the flame licked her fingers. She blew it out and lit another one. She held it over the ashtray and pushed a corner of her check into the flame just as Melanie returned from the kitchen. When she saw what Renée was doing she began to lunge, instinctively, to stop her. But in the blink of an eye she’d caught herself. She crossed her arms and watched with impersonal amusement as the check took fire and dwindled to a warped black cinder.
“Well,” she said, eyebrows raised. “I guess that’s quite a statement.”
“Let’s forget it.”
“Yeah, what’s for dinner?” Louis said.
♦
On the last day of the regular season the Red Sox clinched the division title and Renée’s orthopedist pronounced her well enough to do whatever she felt like doing. She had been scheduled to begin work in New York on October 1 as a research fellow at Columbia, and Louis had urged her to go, provided she consider taking him along, but she had still been so incapacitated in mid-August, when the final decision had to be made, that she instead asked Harvard if she could stay on for another year. Harvard had been hoping all along to retain her and came through with an offer of an open-ended position as a post-doc. It wasn’t as if Renée’s feelings about Boston had changed. But somehow getting shot in the place and weathering its earthquakes and spending a month in one of its hospitals had given her a feeling of obligation towards it, a sense of belonging that she had lacked in her six years of normal life here. She didn’t want to leave Boston on crutches. She also recognized that she was fully capable of hating any other place she went to just as much.