Afterburn (45 page)

She lifted herself off him and lay down on the sheet. He knelt between her thighs, and she kept a hand on him, keeping him hard—hard enough, at least. She guided him, and he lowered himself into her.

"Oh," he said.

"Hurt?" she whispered.

"No, no. It's good."

She wrapped her arms around him. The scars rolled under her fingers. She knew he wouldn't last long. "Come on," she whispered to him, "come on now." He started to move, and the motion wasn't smooth, had a hitch in it, went sideways a bit. She slipped one of her hands down so that her fingers pressed against him as he went in and out. "Please," he breathed in surprise, "keep doing that." She could feel the sweat come to his skin, his breathing quicken. "Come on now," she told him. "I want you to."

He pressed into her more rapidly, and she could feel the broken motion of him, it must have been hurting terribly, because of the sweat, he was laboring against some kind of pain, but she had faith in him, and she let her hands travel up his knotty back until they were around his neck, and she lifted her head up to his and looked into his wide-open eyes, knowable as blue even in the dark, and thrust her tongue into his mouth as deeply as she could, because she did love him, she loved him right now, she would never know him, but she understood now what kind of man he was and she loved him for it, for you can tell so much about a person quickly if you let yourself, and she just pressed her tongue into him to tell him she loved him and that she understood a part of his being a prisoner, for of course that was what she had been, and they felt this sadness in each other, she was sure, and she wanted to give herself to him and help him to go past the pain, the wetness flowing out of her now everywhere, urging him to press, to push as hard as he wished, and now he seemed to understand that she would take whatever was necessary for him to get it done, and so she pulled at him and begged him to go as hard as he could and promised him and kissed him and then he went fast and hard, and suddenly she felt the crazy feeling come into her head, the tension rise inside her, rise on up and shake her as he pounded her in his pain. She clenched breathlessly and fell backward, flooded with release, at the same time feeling the quickening in him, the sweat coming off his ribs and knotted back, his body shaking with razor agony, and then he cried out in wretched urgency and thrust deeply into her and shook, his head back, eyes shut, teeth bared, absolutely still—frozen, rigid, hard. And then in the dark he tipped his head back down toward her, exhaled, and opened his eyes. She saw exactly what he had so carefully hidden from her and from everyone else for so long—she saw that this man had once been a killer.

THEY LAY UNDER THE SHEETS
for almost an hour. He said very little, and she worried that he was silent out of disappointment or remorse. She took his hand and kissed it, and he cupped one of his hands behind her neck and pulled her close to him. She licked at his nipple, bit it softly. Then he said, "I think you brought me back to life here."

She was quite pleased by this but said, "You were plenty alive, believe me."

He glanced at the clock. "I could lie here for three days, Melissa."

"Do you have to leave?"

"I have a long day and then a trip on Thursday."

"China?"

"Yes. I'm going to try to fix that factory problem."

"Don't you have earnest young vice-presidents to do that for you?"

He let out a gravelly sigh, as if this was not the first time he'd been asked the question. "Sure. But then they know about the problem, which means the whole world also knows."

"Can I see you when you get back?"

"Yes." He sat up and dropped his feet to the floor. "I think that's definitive."

She pressed herself against his warm back. The sex had been pretty okay for the first time, but this wasn't just going to be about sex, she could see. More complicated than that. He made her feel safe, that was the thing. She'd have to tell him her real name, but later, after he cared for her enough. When she was ready. And maybe he can help me, Christina thought.

WHILE HE SHOWERED,
she looked through his coat pockets, not to steal but to find something, anything, that told her more about him. I can't help it, she thought. A pen, a paper clip, a piece of Hong Kong currency. Then her fingers found the folded paper he'd been reading in the hotel bar. She listened to the shower run and clicked on a light next to the bed.

Industry group: Telecommunications
Sub-industry category: Telecom component manufacturing
Company: Teknetrix
THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT IS A CONFIDENTIAL ANALYSIS PREPARED EXCLUSIVELY FOR MARVIN NOFF'S WEB SITE SUBSCRIBERS. PLEASE CALL OUR HOTLINE FOR DAILY UPDATES.
A hostile takeover bid by MT of Teknetrix seems inevitable. The companies make virtually the same components, except that Teknetrix's quality is much higher: Signal clarity, component speed, and burn-through are significantly superior in their product line. But the telecom supplier industry has been forced toward cheaper components as manufacturers struggle to squeeze costs wherever they can. In this sense MT would be buying Teknetrix's brand loyalty and distribution networks as much as its manufacturing capacity.

Teknetrix is rumored to have a new microprocessor, the Q4, in very rapid development, but the company is also said to be behind in the construction of its new factory in China. Management is perceived to be lean but too entrenched. The guesswork here is that the Teknetrix board, which doesn't own much stock, can be forced by shareholder pressure into a sale and that MT can digest Teknetrix within the next eighteen months, increasing both its market share and stock price considerably. Recommendation: Sell Teknetrix, accumulate MT.

She didn't know what it meant exactly, just that it was not good. Maybe this accounted for his gloominess earlier. She heard him turn off the shower, and she slipped the paper back.

When he came out of the bathroom, she helped dress him. Usually men acted triumphant after having sex with you for the first time. But he seemed moody again, and asked her if she minded if they left the hotel separately, just out of deference to the chance that he might run into someone he knew.

She pretended not to be bothered. "That's fine, Charlie."

He pulled on his suit jacket, tossed the room key onto the dresser.

"I want to see you when you get back," she said.

He nodded. "Six or seven days. Maybe sooner."

"You mind if I check with your office?" she asked, realizing that he couldn't call her.

"You can, but my secretary won't tell you when I'm returning."

"Can you tell her to tell me?"

He knotted his tie. "I can, but she'll find that unusual."

"I might be a little hard to reach. That's why I'm asking."

He considered this. "You never gave me a phone number."

"No," she admitted.

"I could just call you when I get back," he said.

"Maybe it's better if I call you."

He stared at her but didn't say anything. He's too smart to ask why, she thought.

"Call my office in five days," said Charlie, "and tell my secretary, whose name is Karen, your name. I'll leave a particular message just for you."

"Okay," she answered.

"Okay-just okay, or okay-good?"

"Okay-good." She hugged him. He made her feel safe, he really did.

AFTER HE LEFT,
she went to the window and wondered if she might see him outside. It would take a few minutes to get downstairs, and she waited until finally a tall figure that looked like Charlie crossed the street carefully, perhaps with pensiveness, and limped into the shadows under the trees. I kind of love him
already
, she thought, but I'm not going to let myself do that. She got up and walked to the bathroom and washed her face and reapplied her lipstick and put all of the soaps and shampoos and other miniature toiletries into her bag. She looked in the minibar and took a couple of the airplane bottles. Then she took the rest of them, plus a candy bar and a jar of cashews. She opened a whiskey and finished it in three swallows. Wow, she said. Then she brushed her hair again and sighed aloud and said
okay
into the mirror, trying to convince herself that she was ready to leave, that everything was fine. Why wouldn't it be?

No one bothered her on the way out, no one looked at her as if she was a hooker or something. The doorman in the gray top hat and white gloves just nodded and asked if she needed a cab and she said yes, feeling a little dreamy. This was the way money worked. If there's money, people open the door for you. The cab pulled up. So, okay, it was an older-man thing. Fine. It wasn't going to be about sex, not really, but she'd been turned on, actually. Next time would be better. He'd liked her, she was sure. He'd taken a while but he'd responded. She felt good about it, even happy.

The cab flew down Fifth Avenue, the lights of midtown pinwheeling past, and she could tell that the driver was surprised where she was going, considering where he'd picked her up. She asked him to stop at the corner of East Fourth Street, where she got out and picked up some groceries at the all-night deli. A minute later, inside her doorway, she found her key and then sleepily climbed the steps.

She reached her floor carrying the groceries and glanced down the hallway—her door was open. She stopped. All the doors to the other rooms were shut; behind one she could hear reedy Indian music and maybe smell the drift of pot, but the hallway felt empty, desolate. No one had noticed she was standing there, just as apparently no one had noticed that someone had opened her locked door. Who was in there?

She took one more step. Maybe it would be better to go back to find the landlady. But Mrs. Sanders was an old woman with cat food in her ear. She took two more steps, heard nothing. If someone was waiting for her, he'd be standing silently. She pulled a glass jar of tomato sauce out of the bag to throw. She slipped off her shoes and slid down the hallway.

All the lights in her room were on. She pushed at the door. Inside—her bed, her bureau. They'd poked around but not torn it up. The boxes of papers belonging to Melissa Williams were untouched.

The bathroom—a sound. She screamed and threw the jar of tomato sauce. It broke against the wall, the sauce leaving a smear of red down the tiles.

She waited.

Nothing. She looked in the tub. How stupid she felt. It was simple. Maybe Mrs. Sanders had been through and had forgotten the lights and door. Maybe the electric meter needed to be read. Something like that.

It was when she pressed her door shut to lock it safely that she saw the Polaroid taped at nose-height. At first she didn't understand. It was simple to understand, she knew, but she was not yet understanding. She wasn't ready to understand it. The fact of the photo, as well as the care with which it was placed, were confusing in and of themselves, but not as much as what it showed—a man with a trimmed beard looking right at her in fear. It was Rick, that was Rick's face, with some kind of swollen, bluish wound to his cheek, and he was holding up—something—he was looking right at the camera, face sweaty and afraid, and he was holding up his—now she saw it, saw the horror—they'd cut it
off
. His left arm, above the elbow, something clamped on it to stop the bleeding—they'd cut off his left arm just above the elbow, cut clean like a butcher cut a ham, and with his other arm he was lifting the stump up to her.
Come forward
, his eyes said,
go back
.

She knew then, beyond her fear that Rick had been punished for her acts, that he had again turned her life against the direction she sought. She understood, without the how or the why, that he'd led them to her. All she wanted, had ever wanted, was to be free, to have some peace. She felt the return of a very old weight, a weight she'd first carried before she'd been arrested, when she knew she had to escape Rick and the others; it was huge, a pile of bricks, a weight that had achieved its most vicious unmovability in the days after she'd arrived in prison, when, looking at the walls and the razor wire and the deadened eyes of the women around her, she'd thought, If this is what has come of love, I will be careful in the future, I will think about how I love in a different way, because the old way has just about killed me. I will start new on love and not expect it to look or sound like it did before. And that was what happened with Mazy, who was so hollowed out by sorrow that she'd responded to the simplest of affections with parched appreciation. The weight had lessened then, as Christina decided that she'd live among the other women and not against them. It was not their fault she was there. Now, looking at the clean, wet cross section of Rick's muscular arm, and with Charlie's crisp business card in her purse and his semen between her legs, she felt the old weight return in its full measure, the heaviness like a pile of bricks the size of a church, and she thought again—not yet with bitterness or sudden fear but with an appalled sadness: This is what has come of my love.

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Emergency Room, Bellevue Hospital,
East Twenty-seventh Street and First Avenue, Manhattan
September 22, 1999

THE GIANT TOMATO PLANTS
lay in exact lines, each perfectly staked, and he walked along them in the sun, touching the basketball-sized fruits, most red, some still green, and their absolute perfection pleased him; not one was bruised or damaged by insects. If he pressed his nose through the vines and peered close to the tomatoes, actually brushed his eyelashes against their tightened skins, he could see inside them like translucent balloons; to his delight each contained his mother's red face, her eyes shut in private exhaustion, her mouth open just enough to take another shallow, labored breath. She'd tied a handkerchief over her thinning hair. Her eyes opened unevenly, like the weighted lids of a doll. Hello, Ricky-love. Mommy's tired today. She smiled with a false sweetness that begged him to go elsewhere for affection, for she was busy dying—your mother is very sick, son, we have to keep the house quiet for her—and then she could no longer even smile, and her eyes closed, again unevenly like a doll's, except this time one eye remained open a few seconds too long, watching strangely. He drew back from the tomatoes and resumed walking through the rows, toward his yellow truck parked nearby, and as he stepped over the soft earth, the plants changed in size, not only shrinking from the height of his shoulders to his waist to his knees to his feet but the rows narrowing as well, such that he understood that
his
size was changing, that he was growing up and away, so much that the tomato plants were now merely a green velveteen fuzz he brushed with his fingers. An excremental black ooze appeared, exactly the same stuff that came out of the diseased oysters that dragged up in the fishing net. You didn't want the oysters, they made you sick, but here they were growing all over his truck, little ones covering the bumper and hood and doors and roof, and he had to flick on the wipers to keep them off the windshield. The wipers crunched the oyster shells, leaving a brown-green smear across the glass. He got out of the truck and grabbed the snow shovel he kept behind the backseat. You had to scrape them fast before they grew back, and of course he was taking some of the paint off the truck, couldn't be helped. He worked for a few minutes and pushed the oysters into a crunchy pile, shoveling them like heavy-grade gravel, then retrieved the gas can from the truck and splashed it over the oysters. The matches were in his breast pocket. A quick puff of flame, then black smoke. Fucking oysters. The shells softened and sagged in the heat, burning like rubber, bubbling and fusing into a blackened soup that cooled quickly as the flames died away. A large black pancake remained. He pushed the blade of the snow shovel under one edge and lifted; as he suspected, a glistening metallic undersurface revealed itself. With the shovel he loosened around the edges and flipped over the giant black disk. The thing was immensely heavy; he could feel the quadriceps in his thighs gather, tightening the tendons around his knees, his calf muscles knot as they contracted. Easy, Rick, keep it balanced so you get the perfect flip. The edges sagged over the snow shovel like a dead thing. He took a breath and flipped the shovel. It landed heavily and the shimmery underside resolved itself into a silver pool. He bent over, peered down. He dropped his leg in, boot and all, and lifted out the flapping tail of a sea bass attached to his leg. He could feel it thrashing independently of his intention. A beautiful thing, every scale perfect. He dropped his fish-leg back in and pulled out his normal leg. Toes wiggling in a warm sock. Excellent. But what about his arm, could he do it with his arm? The question made him anxious. Come on, Rick, you pussy, you pussy-
lover
. Put it in. Paul would never do it. Paul would say, You got away with the leg, don't put in the arm. Don't fucking do it. Don't! Well, this was where they were different, he and Paul. At age twenty-nine he had injected himself with human growth hormone for three months and won the New York State Regionals, his biceps as wide around as a can of paint. At age twenty-four he had swallowed some kind of chemical in liquid suspension that was used to stimulate male horses on stud farms. Very illegal, very dangerous, and according to the other bodybuilders, very amazing—and then he'd fucked a girl off and on for six hours straight, his dick swelling up so hard that the skin began to fail, even splitting in a few places. Never mind the hallucinations and the sickening spasms in his chest. Never mind that he lost seven pounds. The next day his lower back was so cramped he couldn't walk, and the girl was under the care of her gynecologist. It was not his fault that she attempted suicide when he said he didn't want to see her anymore. At nineteen he had walked up the main cable of the Brooklyn Bridge, sliding one foot in front of the other as the slope of the cable steepened toward the top of the bridge's stone tower. When he reached the summit, he'd spray-painted his name over the other names, smoked a cigarette, and thought about jumping. So what was the big deal about sticking your arm into a pool of silver? At
fifteen
he and two other guys had set the southbound service lane of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on fire, using ten mattresses stolen from a motel outside JFK International that they'd soaked with gasoline. So fuck you, Paulie, fuck everything about you, your car and your wife, your paper shredder and your clean teeth. What have you ever done? I always did it, and I'm going to do it now. You always hated me, and I always hated you. I'm going to stick my arm in there and show you. He shoved his left hand into the cool thickness of the silver. Felt almost wet. Right down past the elbow, opening and closing his fingers in the warm chill of the liquid. When he pulled his arm out, it was a roaring wide-belt floor sander, spitting the silvery liquid everywhere. A loud fucker, vibrated his whole body. Industrial stand-up model, ran on 220 power. Took two guys to carry it up a staircase, but here he was waving it around. Better than the fish. Don't let the spinning belt touch you, take the flesh right off. He dropped the floor sander back into the shining pool. He could feel the machine stop spinning, the weight disappear from his shoulder. Everything was okay. But what came out was a length of rusted anchor chain that pinched him, pinched and rubbed and hurt, you could say that the fucking chain even
burned
, strangely, right through his arm halfway above the elbow, burned in a perfect line so much that you couldn't touch it—oh, God, you wanted to touch it to see if it was really true, but it hurt so much that—