Mysteries of Motion (12 page)

His mouth closed with a snap. Ollie. Ali. Ventura’s swami. All in a second he saw the moneybags under Ventura’s eyes, the trap he must be in, and he, Mulenberg, might be in. Saw his own too-late-stammered-out identity—and himself on the floor, a mistaken-for corpse.

On his right the one window facing north glowed with the last light; the other was fully draped. Though the bedroom was unlit, a light was on in the bathroom beyond. Striding through the bedroom, he flung open the bathroom door. Nobody there. But he didn’t feel foolish. Eyeing a closet door opposite the bathroom, he tried the key, all the while keeping his back to the wall. The closet was shallow and full of clothes. He left it open. Fire escape. He’d forgotten that. It was off the bathroom, outside a padlocked window paned with metal-reinforced glass. Nothing but a fireman’s ax would get through it. Or a machine gun. He came out, closing the door behind him, the toy gun trained. On the front door. But when they came in she had locked it, triply. She was standing in front of the kitchenette door, watching all this. He sat down in the cushioned rocker. He didn’t have a weak heart. Its pounding beat slowed. He still didn’t feel foolish. “How do I—” He choked on it.

“How do you know I’m not in with them? You don’t.” Her head arched, smacking the doorframe. She rubbed it angrily. So full of nature he had to believe her. And she’d let him have the gun.

He lowered it. “How did you know I was—who you said?” He didn’t want to say Ventura’s name.

“I didn’t.” She was still angry. “All along, I figured it was the other one. He looked the part. In every way.” She made a sullen mouth at him. “Until that last time when I followed you. Ollie caught me at it. Thought I was following
him.
The way Ma used to.”

“Following him? Where?”

“On his route, where else? From the A.C. block to the Plaza’s front steps, and all the way around again. Ma found out long ago it was Ollie’s drop. For anything. He won’t use limos.” She slapped the table. “Those Plaza steps, he never even goes up them. Just a gander at who ever’s waiting, then pass on. To maybe a park bench. Same thing going past the A.C. Where he caught me. ‘You should’ve worn a turban, sis,’ he told me. ‘Nobody ever catches on to me. What’s one more turban?’ And he’s right. In that crowd to be really noticed, you’d have to be a—a two-headed—” she flung up her hands. “Pterodactyl.”

He stared. “A what?”

Her lips twitched. They were fuller than he’d thought. “What I said.” She pressed those long hands together. “First time I saw the two of you standing out front there, I was just passing. After all, I live here too.” She came closer to Mulenberg. There was no scent to her. “Once Ollie found me out, you bet he liked it. Thinking maybe I’d join up with him after all.” Her mouth tightened again; the voice had softened. A shoulder came forward, her eyes brooded. Coaxing something out of herself; what did she remind him of? Nothing. Or all women. “But then, all of a sudden he let me know he knew. Warned me off. Trouble, he said; didn’t say for who. But I could tell; he’d mentioned you and them once. Ollie talks.”

“Ollie’s drop,” he said. For girls? For anything, she’d said. He thought of Ventura’s pasty cigars.

He got up out of the rocker. “How’d you find out for sure? Which of us was—which.”

Wasn’t she going to answer? Maybe, but in her own time. Outside, the dusk was turning on, in city glitter. She went to a lamp shaped like a stocky two-foot glass mushroom. At her touch it glowed orange, stem and all. For a minute her hands, laced on the glass, were charcoal with a penumbra of pink. Living with a woman like this you would have to get used to another style of fleshly being. “Ollie fingered you. I asked.”

To put her off the track? But had she believed him?

“And you were—disappointed. In me.”

She wasn’t going to say. “‘That’s him,’ Ollie said. ‘The one with the beard.’”

“You could have checked the Oyster Bar. One of those dinner dates.” But she hadn’t. Not if she still thought he was Ventura.

“Uh-uh.
Ollie’s not alone there. He’s watched.” She was toying now with a little pierced-brass pot, lifting the lid, replacing it. “And I would have been, later. I won’t have that. I won’t have any truck with that. Not in this house.” She arched her neck in a way he was getting to know. “And I couldn’t have brought you here.”

They examined each other.

“And I’m not what you expected?” She’d watched him the way adolescents in his home town used to obsessionalize from afar some candidate whose orbit they never had enough nerve to break in on. The summer he’d worked in the depot, the stationmaster’s young niece had brought the man lunch every day. Mulenberg could hear the slight creak of the basket now if he wanted to, smell the chicken salad, see his sneakers scuffing the cinder dust, feel his chest swell valentine-warm, and watch the girl float in from her galaxy, her eyelashes permanently lowered, as they had been for thirty years. He could stand here in his own star drift for another thirty; she would never raise her head.

But this girl had broken into the orbit, and decoyed.

“Or am I?” The one expected, all this time? She’d created him by watching, then drawn him into the actual. Whatever her reasons at first, he could feel their velvet now. There was no death in her.

He moved in close enough to see into the brass pot, which held a small green cone of the kind his mother and her friends, ladies of the western provinces, used to burn before dinner parties to keep down the cabbage smells. The way this girl’s hands hoarded the pot—different, the way the one hand scooped a matchfolder into its palm, cat’s-paw. The way she looked at him, from snub eyes. He felt that slow, cellular bloom of success start up all along his body hairs. His eyes unfocused, on the cone. She struck a match to it. Spiraling up into his arms with the smoke.

He tasted her with it. She tasted him. The stuff of her dress felt like coarse sugar. All their body planes fitted, except for her breasts—cones too, not sloped. Together they dawdled across the floor, a double snake, vertical. At the kitchenette she stopped them, bending to the ice door. Two champagne glasses were on the drainboard already; he’d missed those. The two splits opened between her knees with an inching caress; her eyes were uplifted to him, but inward. The refrigerator hung half open. And her mouth. “Sexy icebox,” he said. He could scarcely speak. The frail glasses seemed to fill themselves; the two bottles disappeared with a clink. She stood tall, one shoulder bare where he’d dragged at the dress. She’s had a blueprint of how this is to go, he thought; she’s had it right from the start.

He slipped the dress from her other shoulder. Now both were bare, symmetrical. He had his own blueprints. He touched the neck hollow, that U-shaped pulse center-collarbone, which sometimes winked like an infant’s fontanelle. Certain places in a woman’s body were more vulnerable than sexual. A Montparnasse street girl had once angrily clawed his mouth away from her nape. Saying, “I am whore. It is owed to respect that,” in argot he’d later got the barman to translate. “What the hell did you do?” the barman said. He’d brought in emotion—or whatever that had been to her. Somewhere he’d slipped the traces of what was decently, routinely lecherous. Maybe this came from his long troth to one body. Toward any female body he had no class-consciousness.

This could get him into scrapes. As Ventura had warned.

The girl was waiting for him, ruefully. They never liked to have a man’s meditation slip from them. But this girl was far more impenetrable than her skin; he had no clue to her.

“Pterodactyl—” he said slowly. “Are you a college girl?”

For a second, his mock horror fooled her. Then the two of them rocked with laughter.

They idled into the bedroom, hands joined. The bed was brass, its coverlet of some harmless, babyish cotton such as his daughters had had. He tossed the gun on it.

Her body was willowy and shaded, like the ink strokes made by an old-fashioned nib pen. In the end he put his mouth into her bush, then his hardening self, and almost his heart. Almost all the way, he felt her follow him. They dozed then, the semen stealing down their legs.

He woke guardedly, afraid she wasn’t a whore. She was already awake. “How old are you, Veronica?”

“Twenty-seven.” She grinned. “Going on thirty.”

She didn’t look it. But from the texture of her sexual responses he’d thought she might be somewhere along in there. “And what’s your nationality?”

The chain of a locket she wore lay tangled in his beard. The locket slipped to his chest. Above him, her eyes veiled. “Next question: And how did I get into this? Right?”

Under the beard, his face fell. If she wasn’t a whore, how did she know?

“My own mother was from Senegal, emigrated to French Canada. My father was Jamaican, brought up in Barbados. He met her when he was on a mission to Montreal. He settled there. She died when I was four. That answer you?”

“Some.” The accents. But what kind of mission?

“Ollie’s mother, Vivie, was Bajan. His father was English. She never said who.” Whenever she mentioned the woman she gestured to the room, the chair, as to a presence. “Daddy brought them up from there. Barbados, To Canada. She was our cook. I was fond of her. Later on, he married her. Then he died, too. While I was still in grammar school.” She raised up on elbow. “There. That what you want to know?”

She knew it wasn’t. And, like him, that there wouldn’t be time for it. He touched the snailed hair. “Who does that for you, your—?” He’d almost said “mother,” not thinking of the woman over there, the stepmother, but of the household women of his hometown boyhood, at their windows leaning over the Sunday school child. Probably his ideas on black life were as virtuously out-of-date.

“A salon. Called—Le Zebre.”

Took him a minute. Le Zebre. A second-floor sign on Fifty-seventh. Catered to black women. Le Zeeber it was called, hereabouts. “Like a map,” he said, touching her head. “Of waterways.” Or jungle trails seen from a small plane.

“Takes half my take,” she murmured, stretching. Even on elbow, they were the same height.

He kept his voice down, also. “How much is it? Your take.”

“Six-seventy.”

He wasn’t staggered—quite. For her class of girl, then. And pimp. And gun. Which was now on the night table, her side. He’d put it there. If she was a pross, everything in the last couple of hours was out of line.

“An odd sum. Veronica.”

Those eyes showed nothing. The mouth did. “After
taxes.
Per
week.”

In the middle of their scuffle he saw his watch. More than two hours. “Will Ollie come here?”

“Never. Not since—Vivie.” She punched a pillow. “Oh, he lives up there. When he’s home. Has his girls go there. Not for tricks. Vivie wouldn’t have it. Just to hang around, powder their noses.” The bed-sheets were pulled every which way; she straightened them. “Or you know. When it’s for him.” She raised her head, flushing. He was beginning to know the ways of that skin.

But—how much she knew of that life. When it was for
him,
she’d said. Even if she’d turned red for it.

“Bet no one ever called you Ronnie.”

She sucked in her lips. “Not quite.”

“What, then?”

No answer. Eye to eye.

“What
is
your job?”

“I’m—on a magazine.”

“Oh? What kind?”

She hesitated.

“Fashion?”

“You could say that.”

His daughters had taken such magazines. Some subscriptions had continued long after the two were out of the house.

“Vogue? Harper’s Bazaar?”

“You’re—very in the know.”

She wasn’t going to say. A model, then?—how many ways had Ventura been right? He’d have to breakfast with him after all. And talk turkey to him. Doubling his own promises to the man if necessary. To keep him away from his friends. In thanks. “I must have seen you in one of them,” he said. “I think I did.”

“They always think they did,” she said.

When they were twined together again, he said, “Four times, you passed those steps on my account,” and kissed a breast. “Once a month. For four months.” She didn’t answer. But when they were apart again, except for the long fingers plunging his hair, stroking him nose to beard and finally patting his crotch, she said, “You’re safe here. Problem might be—to get you out.”

He roused himself. “I’ll take care of that.” Again he touched the scalp between the minute braids, captured the long fingers—knobbled like a newborn calf’s leg, he told himself, double-jointed the wrong way.

He knew very well what he was doing. Separating her into parts, so that she would have less personality for him.

“I thought you would,” she said.

They regarded each other, stony-faced.

“Got a cigarillo?” he said. “One of—Ollie’s?”

It was a cheap thing to do. He didn’t smoke. She took so long to answer, serve him right if he’d axed things by it.

“I don’t keep that stuff in the house. Any of it.”

Both were breathing competitively fast; the second time around had exhausted them. Less mystery to it already, he told himself, and there’d be less and less, yet he was wrenched. He allowed himself to touch the old locket she wore, too battered for her, rumpled gold, with a pearl washed to a bead. His hand was slapped back. Well, they all had their—nape.

He left the bed, not looking back.

When he stood at her window again, showered and dressed because she’d made him go first, he craned to see whether she could see the Gulf & Western from here. Though at night its huge lighted shaft dominated Columbus Circle, where Columbus himself seemed turned to stone on his pedestal by the sight of his new world, here, only a quarter mile away, it was blocked by the hodgepodge side streets in which the real city hunched. During his first years as a “worldwide industrialist,” when mountains first shrank at his bidding and his handshake could lift important citizens toward him as if by their lapels, only his ceaseless circling of the world had kept him democratically sane. All the while his money power seemed to be educating his eye to be an emperor’s, the airports, revolving before him like one-and-the-same lecture hall, reminded him that anybody with a flight bag was now equally an imperialist of space. In the struggle between money and people, he could even see that the side streets were always slowly winning, although the actual people struggling in them might never for long be the same ones. Maybe this was why these little city apartments still got to him, sunless little caves of self-important shadow, shunted to violet, hoarding their contents against the running footsteps of outer life. He’d better leave, for the sultans and their sticky palaces. His next stop was Bahrein.