Salvation Boulevard (34 page)

“Can I flirt with you while I talk?”

“Sure.”

“How much? Am I allowed to touch you?” she asked, taking my hand again. “Big, strong hand. Hurt hand. Did it feel all better when I kissed it?” This time she kissed with her lips open and wet, her tongue briefly coming out and teasing. I wanted her mouth on my mouth. I wanted her mouth all over my body.

She stopped and said, “You're different than him,” talking about Nathaniel. “But like him. ‘You don't know what you have until you've lost it.' Maybe that's why . . . . ” She smiled and made a gesture from her to me that ended with her caressing my upper arm. “We would make a good couple, the academic and the tough guy.”

Then, changing focus, she said, “That was his question. You can't just stop things with reason. Reason says that sex is for having children. If you want four children, you should only have sex four times. But you can't reason desire away.” Her fingers walked the words down my arm, back to my hand. “God is an answer to other things we desire,” she said. “Can't just reason him away. You have to offer something else instead.”

“What? What do you offer?”

“Ourselves. We claim we worship God because He made us, but if we made Him, shouldn't we turn it around.”

“Shit,” I said. Maybe that was a reflex. I'd heard a hundred sermons against secular humanism as the mock religion of me, me, me, limitless indulgence, no rules, no salvation, nothing higher than our petty, crawling, sinful selves to answer to.

The waitress came with fresh drinks and, after asking, cleared away the dinner plates.

“Do you know the story of the three hundred?” Teresa asked. “The Spartans who stood up against the three hundred thousand, or million, or whatever it was, Persians.”

“Yes,” I said, irritated because I felt she was talking down to me in her little game of the educated intellectual slumming with the illiterate stud.

“Well, I don't know what you know and what you don't know,” she said defensively. “I don't know if you read Herodotus.”

“It was a comic book too,” I said sarcastically. “Then it was a movie, but the comic was better.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Whatever.”

“The point is that they fought for glory. They knew they were going to die, but they fought for glory. Nathaniel said that kind of glory belongs to each of us because every human being stands at the edge of the abyss, his whole life long, battling to hold back the chaos. To fight that endless war, we created love and honor and glory, rationality and tools and justice and all the rest. We did that. God didn't do it. We know that we're going to die in the end, but still we fight, and that's glorious. That's what we should celebrate, the human struggle against chaos and destruction.”

“Does that work for you?” I asked her.

“Nate thought that was the answer because glory was what Nate wanted,” she said. “He wanted to answer the big questions. Most people get over that during sophomore year and realize they're just sort of ordinary.” She said that last with wistful sadness, a great sadness, like someone looking at a landscape she used to know as a wide and shining lake, the sun glittering off the clear, sustaining water, that had somehow gone dry, the space now empty, the earth barren and cracked.

“Did he? Get to the answers?”

“Put your arm around me. Will you put your arm around me?” she asked.

I did, and she leaned in close into my shoulder.

“So, did he?” I asked again. It felt good to hold her, warm and sexy and comfortable too.

“Yeah, I guess. I don't know. I mean, it depends more on who you are and what you need than on what the answers actually are. Find the book, and you can judge for yourself. Or you can just stay with me, and I'll tell you about it, or what I think is in it, bit by bit, like Scheherazade, for a thousand and one nights.” Her hand was on my leg, stroking lightly. My hand was nudging up against the
side of her pliant breast. “Personally,” she said, “I would take love over glory.”

“Is that what you want, love?”

“Umm,” she murmured. “You don't know until you've lost it.” Then she said, “I have a question.”

“Alright.”

“Promise you won't get mad at me. It's just a question.”

“I'll do my best,” I said, drinking with one hand. The other—healed, I'm sure, by her kisses—slid down along her waist and began to explore her hip and thigh.

“I'm happy for you—maybe a little disappointed for myself—that you and your wife are back on solid footing. Really, I am. And I don't want to undermine that. But if I were just a disinterested friend, you know, there are things that would bother me.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“It's like you've been telling me two different things at once,” she said slowly. “One story is that you think that as a husband in this Christian marriage—”

“It's not just about being Christian,” I said, upset.

She misunderstood the reason for the stress she heard in my voice. “I'm not mocking,” she said. “You have this marriage where it's up to you to make the decisions, and she follows, which she does, except for a brief moment caused by your own mistake, and now she's back on the right track. Is that what you said?”

“Yes,” I said, “that's about it.” And although I was talking about Gwen, I was only really thinking about how smooth Teresa's skin felt through her skirt and how much I liked the shape of her and wondering if I could inch that skirt up and get to the flesh beneath it without being seen in the restaurant.

“I heard another story at the same time.”

“What's that?”

“It's your wife's story. Her story is that her faith—this church you belong to and its pastor—comes first. That you're head of the house, sure, but she only has to follow you to the degree that you follow
them.” She said this thoughtfully, her hand idly tracing patterns on my thigh. “And each time she had a choice, she chose them over you.”

“You're a bitch,” I said, just stating a fact. My hand tightened on the leg it had been caressing, twisted and squeezed hard, not a rejection, an adjustment in our relationship. “You're not going to drive a wedge between me and my wife.”

“Don't be mad,” she said. “I'm not driving anything. What you didn't tell me was
why
she would change.”

“Yes, I did,” I said.

“What?”

“That she thought about it. She had time to think about it.”

“You want to believe her, don't you?”

“Yes. And I have reason to,” I said, taking my arm from around her. I moved her off my shoulder and turned to face her. “You live in a world without belief, even in people. You like it there. Fine, stay there.”

“Carl,” she said softly, “Carl . . . I'm trying to—”

“Leave Gwen out of this,” I said.

“Carl, here's what we're talking about. You're going to break into—you're not going to just walk in—you're going to break into some huge institution in the middle of the night. Don't they have security there? Cameras? The university does.”

CTM has very good security. I could see it in my mind's eye, the cameras over every door, including the service area in back, where I planned to enter. And yes, there were people who watched those images all night long.

She nattered on. “And you're going to do this because you want to believe in your wife.”

“Gwen wouldn't—”

“Belief blinds us.”

“I know my wife,” I said. “You're trying to say she's setting me up.”

“How long has your wife belonged to that church?”

“A long time,” I said.

“She works there. She socializes there. All her friends are from there. How important is it to her?”

“It's her life,” I said. “Aside from Angie and me.”

“What if they told her that they just needed to talk to you, to explain. What would she do?”

“I've already dealt with that,” I said. “I told her if they wanted to talk to me, they could pick up the phone.”

“Her belief makes her blind to what they are. Just like your belief makes you blind to what she is.”

Gwen was all I had left, Gwen and Angie, and this bitch was trying to take them away from me. I reached into my pocket, took out my wallet, threw enough money on the table to cover the check, and walked out.

She came running out into the parking lot after me.

I ignored her, but she caught up to me and grabbed hold of me by my jacket.

“Wait,” she said.

“No,” I said, trying to pry her hand loose.

“The men who tried to kill you, they haven't been able to find you, right?”

“No,” I said. Polasky's death hadn't ended anything. Alvarez was still out there, as was Jerry Hobson. Probably looking even harder.

“What do you do, if you can't find someone?”

I took her fingers and bent them back off my jacket. It had to hurt. She didn't try to pull away; she didn't complain.

“I was watching TV,” she said, blathering away frantically. “I know it's stupid to talk about something you see on TV, but the cops couldn't find someone, so they set up a sting—told the guy he had won the lottery or something, but he had to come in to sign for the money. They can't find you. So they dangled something you want, something you're looking for, that girl. And they used someone you trust to send the message so you would believe it.”

There were a few people in the lot, either headed in or back out to their cars. Mostly they ignored us. A certain number of the conversations
across the dark, intimate tables at Barbarosa are the kind that end in yelling and tears. But one or two looked on, amused.

“You're a fucking bitch, Teresa. You're prepared to destroy everything good in my life just so you can get laid.”

“That's not why I'm saying this.”

I let go of her hand and said, “Get a vibrator and leave me alone.”

I started walking away from her, around the back, where my car was. She came after me.

“You're a fucking bastard,” she said, grabbing hold of me again.

“What, you want me to stop believing in my wife so we can bang each other?” I snarled at her, grabbing her by the wrist and twisting it. She liked the pain, and right then, I liked hurting her.

“I want you. I do want you,” she said. “I told you that from the start.”

“There was no start. There's nothing.” But there we were again, pressing against each other.

“That's not true,” she said, her mouth reaching up for me.

The fingers of my other hand found their way into her hair. I pressed my mouth down on hers and kissed her violently. She yielded eagerly, almost sobbing, as our hungry mouths slobbered at each other. The hand that held her wrist didn't let go either, but squeezed and twisted. I was hard and hungry for sex and angry and drunk.

I let go of her wrist and lifted up her skirt. She reached for my zipper and belt and started opening them up.

I turned her around and pushed her face down on the hood of the nearest car. As I shoved her skirt up and pulled her thong down, she arched her back, eager for me.

I leaned on top of her, pressing against her, and I spoke into her ear. “Let me tell you something. If I do this, we unleash the chaos.”

“Take me,” she said.

“Do you want love, or do you just want to be used?”

“Carl, I want you. I want you.”

“After this, we'll get drunk a lot, and I'll fuck other women.”

“I don't need to own you,” she said.

“It'll hurt you because I'll hate you, because there's no going back for me. And you'll try to hurt me back, but you'll lose because you'll love and I'll hate. You understand that?”

“Take me. Just take me,” she said, hips moving, seeking.

“It won't take long. Maybe this one fuck is all you get.” I wanted to break her. “There's already someone I want more than I want you.” I said it to break what was between us, because I didn't have the strength to control myself. “Who I think is better and more beautiful than you. So if I have you, it'll be this one, quick fuck, and then I don't care what I do anymore, and I move on and go after her.”

It hurt her as much as I wanted it to. She turned over toward me, her skirt all crumpled, the heat and lust crumbling from her face. “You're a bastard, a fucking bastard.”

Clean and sober, Sunday morning I went out in my rental car.

I followed Gwen as she headed toward the Cathedral, then on Route 28, between the Borders and Devontown Mall, I pulled up alongside her, honked my horn, and motioned her over. She went into the mall with me following. I passed her, parked, got out, took my kit with me, locked the car, walked over to her, and opened the passenger-side door.

“Carl, I thought . . . ”

“Change of plan,” I said, getting in beside her.

She looked at the scrapes and bruising on my face. “What happened to you?”

“Gwen, we have to talk. First, I'm going to ask you, did you get all the codes? Can we get up the elevator, preferably Plowright's private elevator? And into his private apartment?”

“Yuh . . . yes . . . , ” she said.

“Good,” I said. “If we're going to do it, we'll do it this morning.”

“But . . . it's time for church.”

“I know that.”