Dancing After Hours (15 page)

Doreen’s kiss dispelled those years. She gave it to him just across the threshold of her apartment, and he marveled at the resilience of nature. So many kisses in his lifetime, yet here he was, as though kissed for the first time on a front porch in summer in Dayton, Ohio. Oh plenitude, oh spring rain, and new love. He did not see the apartment: it was objects and shadows they moved through. Her unmade bed was box springs and a mattress on the floor, and quickly they were in it, his hat and clothes on the carpet with hers. He did not want it to end; he made love to her with his lips, his hands, his
tongue. The muscles of her arms and stomach and legs were hard, her touch and voice soft; he spoke her name, he called her “sweet,” he called her “my lovely,” he perspired, and once from his stomach came a liquid moan of hunger. Finally she rolled away from him, toward the bedside table, and opened a drawer; he heard a tearing sound, and she sat up holding a golden condom.

“I have a vasectomy.”

“What a guy. I’ve got an IUD.”

“I’ve mostly been married.”

“You never know.” He watched her hands as she placed the condom and unrolled it. Then she kneeled above him, guided him in, and said: “I had given up on you.”

“So had I.”

Here it was again, the hot love of a woman, and he closed his eyes and saw the ocean at night, and squid mating on its gentle swell, a documentary he watched on television one afternoon last winter; sharks swam up and ate swaths of squid, but the others kept on, just kept on.
Fucking and eating
, he thought. They were why he left home, to marry and work, and here he was over thirty years later, with a woman nearly as young as his first wife when passion drove them out of their parents’ homes and into the world, into a small apartment that was first an enclosure for their bed, and second for a kitchen to prepare food in and a table to eat it on, and third for plumbing so they could bathe, and flush body waste. All vitality radiated from the bed, enough of it to give him the drive and direction to earn money and father children; he fell in love with them, a love that
was as much a component of his flesh as the flow of his blood; and in fact it could only end with that flow’s ending. Now another flow was about to leave his body: the pleasure started in the muscles of his legs where masturbation never reached, and he saw the mockery of himself and his hand, and to rid his mind of this comparison he said her name. He said it again and again, naming her flesh and his delight, but the truth was as loud as their quick breath. His passion spurted from him, was gone, a bit of sterile liquid in a condom, a tiny bit if it were blood. It was enough to stain a sheet, make a child. His children would smile if they knew of this, if he told them he had waked to rain but had no coffee, so—There was nothing to smile about here. He opened his eyes. Doreen’s were closed.

Soon he would soften inside her, and she was racing against the ebbing of his blood. He watched her face. Long ago he had learned that in lovemaking the one giving pleasure felt the greater intimacy; beyond a certain pitch of passion, the one receiving was isolated by muscles and nerves. He could have been watching her suffer pain; he could have been watching her die. She cried out. Then she was still, her eyes open, her breath deep and slowing. Before moving away, she reached between them and pinched the condom’s opening. She took it with her, hanging from her fingers as she stood and smiled at him, and left the room.

He closed his eyes and listened to rain on the window. It saddened him now, all that rain and gray. He heard her footsteps in the hall, then soft on the carpet, and her lighter twice, and blown smoke; she sat on the bed and he spread his fingers for the cigarette; then she
lay beside him and placed a cool glass ashtray on his stomach. He opened his eyes and looked at hers and said: “What more could I ask?”

“You could have asked sooner.”

“I was trying to do something. Learn something. Do you know I could
own
a restaurant by now, if I wanted to? I never wanted to. I have money. I’m not just solvent; I have
money
. When I die, my children will be able to make down payments on houses. Big payments. I have five children. All grown, and none of them married. Nobody’s in a hurry anymore. To marry.”

“Nobody has to be.”

“Exactly. And that’s all I ever was. What are people now? Their jobs? I started behind the bar and in kitchens. Now I read all this stuff. History. Philosophy. Looking for myself, where I fit in. I must be part of it, right? I’m here. So I must be. You know where I fit? I earn and invest and spend money. You know why? Because I fell in love. When I was very young. If I hadn’t, I might have joined the French Foreign Legion. Then I’d know, wouldn’t I? What my part was. My part was this—” He gestured with a hand toward his penis; then he touched his heart. “And this. If you look at the country today, you see families torn apart. Kids with blood splashed on them. It all started with families. Like this, you and me, naked. People made love, settled land, built towns. Now the beginning is dying and we’re left with the end. I’m part of that, too. Three divorces. So that’s where I fit. At the beginning and the end. It was always love for me, love of a woman. I look back and I think love needs tenacity. Maybe that’s what I didn’t have. And where is love in all this? It’s not here. You don’t love me.” Her eyes were gentle as she shook her
head. “Probably I could love you. But what for? Reverse my vasectomy and start over? Own a restaurant? Somewhere I missed something. Something my cock can’t feel. Even my heart can’t feel. Something that keeps you from fucking while sharks are eating your neighbors; while one is coming for you. I broke the hearts of three wives. It’s not what I set out to do. We were in bed, and there were all those fins. I ripped childhood from five children. It’ll always be with them, that pain. Like joints that hurt when it rains. There’s more to it, but I can’t find it. It’s not walking with a cane and giving cigar rings to grandchildren. You know anyone in AA?”

She nodded. Her eyes were damp, and he knew from them what his own face showed.

“You know that look they have when it’s really behind them? When they’ve been dry for years? Like there’s a part of them that nothing in the world can touch. Not pain. Not grief. Not even love. But where do I go for that? What street is it on? Where’s the door?” He held the ashtray and sat up. “Where?” Looking at Doreen, he felt tears in his throat, then in his eyes and on his face. “I want that door,” he said; then he could not speak. His stomach tightened, his body jerked forward, and his head bowed as he wept. She took the ashtray and cigarette from him and tightly held him with one arm, and with a hand she petted his cheek, pressing it against hers; she gently rocked him.

“You poor man,” she said.

He knew what she felt, at the core of her tender voice and touch. He had held in his arms suffering women and children, knew that all anyone could do was hold and touch and speak, watch and listen, and
wish the pain would end. Gratefully he leaned against her, moving with the push and pull of her arm. He could see nothing beyond this sorrow, could not imagine what he might say or do when it left him in Doreen’s embrace.

T
HE MURDER BEGAN SOMEPLACE IN HER
heart, a place she had never been: it was like a shadowed mountain pass, then a brilliant plain. The plain drew her. She stepped into it one night in bed with the sixteen-year-old boy. They lay naked in the dark room; it was late winter and cold still, and the light of streetlamps came through the windows. The boy held her; his breath was slowing now, and he pushed his hair away from his left eye. Soon he would be ready again. She was twenty-five; she was a guidance counselor at the only high school in town; her husband coached three sports. Now it was basketball, and he was thirty miles away, at a game.

She was on the bed she had chosen with her husband nineteen months ago, when they bought the
house and began to buy things to put in it. They were engaged then, and they married a month later. Now she did not feel the bed holding her, or the room, the dead witness of its walls; she felt only her body, as when running early in the morning in this New England town where trees shaded lawns and the park and her office at school, she felt only her blood and muscles and breath, and not the earth her feet struck; as on the high diving board she felt only her gathered flesh, and not the board that held her above air and water. She said: “We could kill him.”

Her voice, her words, seemed to stay in the air above their faces, as though, looking at the boy’s eyes, she could reach up and with a finger touch each word. She could look at them; she could listen to her voice: it was low and strong, and slightly buoyant, enough so she could brush away the words, scatter them in the dark air, say she did not truly intend them; and in her tone was muted anticipation of the boy saying yes, and so taking the words from the air, making them part of his body, and of hers. The boy said: “Why?”

“I’d have the house. There’s insurance on the mortgage. And another policy for two hundred thousand. We could do anything.”

He believed her, and he would tell the detectives this, when they broke him; and he would say it on the witness stand, crying, looking again and again at his mother and father. He would tell it first on a warm spring afternoon to a boy who had been his friend since they were six; the boy would be horrified and, after days of pain, would tell his older brother, then his parents.

She was not lying about the house and the money,
but they were not the truth. The truth was in this place where she breathed and her heart beat as she lay in the boy’s arms. She felt the boy’s breath on her cheek, felt her own going out of her parted lips, and she could see how to do it. She could see him doing it, and she could see herself at that moment sitting in the café, drinking tea. She knew now that he would say yes. He had said “Why?” and he would say
How?
and then he would say yes, not with that word alone, but with many words. She would use many words, too; that is how they would plan it. She would talk about the house and the money, and where they could go with the money, when he was older, when he did not live at home; she would say: “We can make love in Spain.” But she would never tell him where they were truly going. She would plead not guilty, and people would hear and read what the boy said about the house and the money. In prison she would tell the truth only to her pale and thin girlfriend, weeping as she told it, because she was young and smart, strong and pretty, and she was in prison forever.

In bed the boy stared; they had been lying in the dark long enough for her to see the light in his eyes. No naked girl had kindled this boy until she did. In her office, before she invited him to her house, his eyes were bright, as they were now: he sat in the chair in front of her desk and he could not look away from her; he looked at her hands on her desk, her shoulders beneath pale blue cotton, her blond hair, her mouth; he could not look at her eyes. This was in autumn, and she wanted his frenzy inside her. In bed that night in late winter, the skin of her face felt his eyes, as if their focused light were a point of warmth. He said: “He’s really big.”

“You could use a gun.”

“I’ve never shot one.”

“You’ll be close. Can you get a gun?”

“My brother-in-law has some.”

“You could take one. Then put it back.”

“Where would he be?”

“In his car. You’ll wait in the backseat. At night while they’re playing a game on the road.”

“What if guys are in the parking lot?”

“He does things in his office. He always goes home last. I’ll give you a key. You’ll take his money and his watch, and throw the watch in the river.”

“Do you hate him?”

“He’s just ordinary. I can do better.”

The boy thought better meant him; she saw this in his eyes.

On the winter night of the murder, she sat in the café, at a table covered with a white cloth, and drank tea with a slice of lemon. She wore a brown sweater and jeans and hiking boots; her leather purse was on the table, and her dark blue parka hung on the back of the chair. She lifted the cup with her thumb and forefinger, felt the solid curve of its handle, the heat of tea in her mouth and throat. She glanced at her watch, knowing the time before she saw the gold hands. She felt each second in her chest and stomach, faster than her breath, slower than her heart. She watched a graying man and woman wearing sweaters and eating cake at a table; they put forks of cake in their mouths, looking at each other, as if they were speaking, or smiling. She watched the large and pleasant woman in a loose
green blouse, sitting behind the counter and looking out the window, where people from the movie theater were on the sidewalk.

It would be soon now, the boys leaving the locker room, her husband in his blue suit and white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, the knot of his maroon tie pulled down from his throat, standing in the doorway of his office, talking to the boys as they left. In the car the boy lay waiting, the revolver warm in his hands, the boy afraid of failing and afraid of not failing, afraid of his parents and police and prison; but he was ablaze; he would do it. She watched two teenaged girls drinking Cokes at the counter, and saw the boy on the floor of the car and her husband at his desk in his office; they were inside her, in that place where she lived now.

This place would not have come to her if she had not taken the boy. Before she took him, she knew: even as she waited for him at her house on the first night, she knew that he was not what she wanted, that the boy and her desire were the form of something else she moved closer to when he rang the bell and she opened the door, and pulled him inside and closed the door, and locked it. People she knew, people she had always known, would call it passion, or happiness. They did not know. They were someplace behind her—they always were—and people like them came into the café now, moviegoers sitting at the counter and tables. She watched them. She had watched her husband, these days of snowfall and sunlight, these nights since the one when she said: “We could kill him,” and in her heart then he was dead and she was in motion; and for the next eleven days and twelve nights she heard and saw him from that distance, and she made love with him
because it was dazzling. The boy was behind her, too; she believed she would keep him for a while, and someday spit him out of her, return him to the place she watched herself watching now: people eating cake and sipping tea.