The Caveman's Valentine (18 page)

They collided. They squeezed the breath out of each other—and still they were not close enough. Must ratchet up the pressure. Must graft skin, cohabit the same pouch of flesh. Their tongue-flickerings burned away a few inches of candle. She stroked his cock with her thumb. He moaned, she growled gently. He showed his teeth and snarled, she snapped and their teeth were flashing at each other and then he kissed her all along the jawbone. He dipped and kissed the cornsilk of her armpit, her nipples, which were maroon, then her seven true ribs and five false ones. He made a circle of kisses around her navel. He knelt beside the bed, and she shifted and opened her legs to him.

Her pubic hair was delicate and sparse, and her fragrance was not the tropical mango of his wife but a high heath fragrance. Juniper. Frosty and sharp. He leaned in and pressed his lips to her. His tongue made a small question mark. She whimpered. He held her hands in his. They passed messages through their fingers, and he looked up across her flesh at her fluttering lashes and kept making those question marks with his tongue. She let go of his hands and tried to get a purchase on his hair, and when she couldn’t she grabbed his ears, and then letting go of those, snatched at the bedspread. She moaned. Cried out. He held her at the arch of the back, where her skin was rippled like hard beach sand, and her moans came in waves. She smothered him between her thighs. She drenched his face in her essence. Then suddenly she broke free, pivoted and then she was kissing him wildly, upside down, tongue to tongue flat out, and twisting and slithering off the bed into his arms.

They were a sprawl on the floor. Then she sat up and stretched out her arm, reached for something on the nightstand.

When she’d brought up the matches, it turned out, she’d also brought a condom.

She opened the package with her teeth. While he thought of some point at the core of her, somewhere back of her navel, the last turn in the labyrinth, the grotto of absolute dark warmth and bloodpress—and this was where he wished to be. His wishing was the only complete notion in his head.

There were, however, other
fragments
of thought.

There was a fragment of the girl who had been his first lover.

There was a fragment of the Danish girl with splendid legs who studied the flute at Juilliard and who told him she’d never known a man who so lived and breathed sex, and she guessed if he ever went a week without it, it would probably kill him.

There was that piece of Sheila in the bathtub, and other memories or half memories of her that surfaced or did not surface. So many shards, thousands of them, things that were lost to him, Jesus, so much stolen! Such goddamn incomprehensible larceny and pillage, and it was a wonder he could even get it up but he certainly could, and then he came into Moira and the losses were not canceled but anyway forgotten.

She surged against him. Kept surging, and their joined mouths were an echo chamber. She shook her hair, and a great deal of time fell out of it. The candle guttered out. At some point he heard her say:

“Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.
Oh.”

A
fter a while they pulled down the covers and crawled under them.

“We’ll have to get up very early, Rom. I’ll drive you to Poughkeepsie, to the bus. But before it’s light.”

“OK.”

They held each other.

Then he remembered something he had wanted to ask.

“Moira.”

“Hmm.”

“That girl I was with tonight? You called her Darcy.”

“That’s her name. Darcy Reynolds.”

“She called herself Cassandra.”

He felt her shrug. “Yeah, well she dreams of playing drums in some downtown noise band. I’m glad she’s picked out a name. Now all she has to do is buy a ticket to the city. I bet she never gets around to that one, though.”

“And she was Scotty’s girlfriend? But I thought you said Scotty’s girlfriend was
innocent.”

“She is sort of innocent. She just likes to sleep around a lot. Scotty never got used to that.”

“Mm.”

Again he started to drift.

Then he thought of something else.

“Moira?”

“Yeah?”

“You know someone named Clive Leif?”

Silence for a moment. Then she said, “Sure.”

“A director?”

“He wants to be.”

“Any good?”

“Sort of. He’s young. His ideas are sort of all over the place.”

“He knows David?”

“Yeah. I introduced them—they hit it off. Well, Clive’s into photography and video and all—”

“So I hear. What happened to him?”

“Clive? I haven’t seen him for months. Somebody said he quit the Great Star Search and went home.”

“But if he was a good director—”

“He’s OK—he’s not fabulous. He was good-looking—he could have been an actor maybe. I’m not sure he had the brains or the focus to direct. I guess he realized that, though. Some people hang on for years, you know? Some people never get the news. Actually, I was a little surprised Clive cottoned on so quick.”

“Terror opens the eyes.”

“Romulus?”

“Hm?”

“Just hold me for a while. OK? Don’t ask any more of your questions for a while?”

S
ometime during the night Sheila came in the room. It was pretty embarrassing, her catching him like that.

She folded her arms.

“You having fun with the white girl, boy?”

He tried to bury his head under the pillow.

She poked him hard in the ribs. He sat up.

“You hear me?”

“Yes I did. Yes. Yes I’m having fun. Tonight I had the most fun since . . . since you threw me out.”

“Threw you out? You were never around, what was there to throw? I just got myself out of the damn hotel business.”

“Right. That’s a better way to put it, right.”

“Damn zookeeper business.”

“Right.”

“Well then. Is she giving you second thoughts about your cave nonsense?”

“I don’t even have first thoughts. I’m too tired to think.”

Sheila went to the window and looked out. Her bird-of-prey profile, checking out the farm.

“Boy, I see a light on in the big farmhouse.”

“That’d be Leppenraub. He’s worrying about my next move. I’m going to get him, Sheila. I’m going to get the evidence, and I’m going to nail that bastard.”

“Uh-huh.
Have mercy on us, oh Lord of Vengeance.
So you still think you’re the great private detective? Where’s your
white
car, boy?”

“OK, I was wrong about that. The car’s red. So what?”

“But you were
sure
about that white car. You said you had an eye for things that other folks couldn’t see. You said all sorts of shit. Oh baby. If your shit was a rocket ship, you could go to the
moon.
What the hell are you up here messing for, boy?”

“Love. For love’s sake. My friend was in love with the kid Leppenraub murdered.”

Sheila looked out the window again. She was looking at that light in the farmhouse. Weighing things out. Then she turned to Romulus.

She said, “
Uh
-uh.”

“What?”

“I just said, uh-uh.”

“You don’t think he did it?”

“You’re being misled.”

“Oh, goddamn it, Sheila—who’s misleading me?”

She sniffed the air. “What’s that smell? Some kind of ointment?”

“Essence of slippery elm bark.”

“What’s that? Voodoo? I don’t like it.”

“Who’s misleading me?”

“You are. As usual. As usual, boy, you’ve picked yourself out an enemy, and he can do no right. But look at that man! You’re so scared of him, you can’t see him. If you’d open your eyes, you’d see he’s got more fear than you do yourself. And it’s not a guilty fear, baby—it’s just plain
fear.”

“You think Matthew was lying to me about him?”

She gave it a moment. “Matthew doesn’t seem like much of a liar.”

“Well then, what? You think Scotty lied to Matthew? But why would Scotty have lied? He was the
victim,
Sheila. Leppenraub did those things to him, and then he killed him to shut him up. And tonight he tried to kill me.”

“Pah! That man couldn’t kill anybody. He doesn’t have it in him. Which you know as well as I do.”

“I don’t—”

“Of course you do. I’m all in your head, so you can’t help but know what I know. You just won’t own up to it.”

“Then who came hunting for me tonight?”

“That I can’t say.
Somebody’s
up to no good, for sure. Something sure stinks here. There’s a mess of evil in this place. I don’t know what you want to be hanging around for, breathing it in. No, I do know. You’re here ’cause you’re just sick of being a
nobody.
You’re not fit for it. You never were fit for it. I heard you play tonight.”

“What’d you think?”

She waggled her fingers. “Rusty.”

“But better than at Bob and Betty’s?”

“A little. You’re not hopeless. Your brother’s got a piano, why don’t you—”

“Sheila. Leave me alone.”

“Fine. I’ll be on my way. And if you got any brains left that aren’t scrambled, so will you. You’ll get up out of your cozy love nest,
holy man,
and be gone before you get yourself murdered in your sleep.”

“Where
you
going?”

“Home.”

“How’d you get here?”

“I rode in on your dream. Which is just rags of a dream now, and fixing to blow away.”

“So, go then.”

“I’m going. This is the craziest you’ve ever been, Romulus. You better wake up. You hear me? Have I ever told you wrong, baby? When I come to you like this, have I ever lied to you?”

He shook his head, slowly, reluctantly.

Said Sheila, “Then listen to what I say.
You’re being misled, and you better wake up.”

“Go, Sheila.”

“I’m
already
gone.”

S
he was. And Romulus was wide awake.

Listening to the sound of a car.

An engine running. Smooth as butter. So smooth that at first it fooled him into thinking it was his own steady breathing. But when he held his breath, the engine kept on, softly churning.

He lifted his head from the pillow and looked out the window. Splashes of moon, a clearing breeze. Maybe it was just the sound of that breeze he’d heard.

He reached for his lover in the dark. But that didn’t work—didn’t ease his anxiety at all. His lover wasn’t there.

He rose. Quickly in the dark he found his pants and pulled them on. Skip the shorts. Nor did he have time for socks, nor for buttoning his shirt. He got his shoes on, and grabbed the coat and jacket and shoved the socks into the coat pocket and went out into the hall, and listened.

He heard a voice. Low, a man’s voice. Downstairs. Somewhere in the big storage room. Then just a musical ripple on the silence—this must have been Moira’s voice.

It was reasonable to suppose that his assassin had arrived. Also a solid conjecture that Moira wouldn’t be able to keep him down there for very long.

He tiptoed across the hall and stepped into Moira’s big upstairs parlor. He got to the window and pushed it up. Got it up about a foot before it stuck. He put out his head and squeezed his shoulders through, and then he human-jacked the sash, straining against it, pushing it up with his shoulders.
Everything you’ve got.
He worked another four inches out of it. The last inch coming with a small screech. Pray that the hunter hasn’t heard, and you can just forget a graceful exit—
scramble.

He wriggled out headfirst, onto the steeply pitched gable roof. The shingles were still slick with rain, and he was no sooner out the window than he started to slide forward. He put his hands down to stop himself but he kept sliding. He shimmied sideways as he sailed over the edge and managed to grab hold of the rain gutter with one hand. Then the gutter shuddered free of him and he dropped. Landed in the fallow flower bed below and there was another swarm of thorns, his old friends the thorns.

He was back of the coach house.

No lawn, just straight into the woods here.

He picked his way through the moon-tattered trees, and angled over to the tulip-tree road. He crossed the road and clambered over the rock wall, and he was out in the open. The broad field before him. Away down at one end of it was the big barn and the house.

Just as Sheila had said, there was one window lit up in an upstairs room of the big house. He aimed for that light.

Figuring he’d keep to the field, skirt around the house and then make his way to the road out of here. And we’ll see from there.

He kicked through the high grass. A cool wind came up and above him the moon sailed into a patch of clear sky. And he noticed a faraway sheen to his right and realized this was the Hudson River. Lovely night. He wasn’t afraid now, and though he felt light-headed from lack of sleep, there was little trouble in his head. The Moth-Seraphs weren’t stirring at all. In fact, maybe they were gone, maybe they’d all flown the coop, flown out through his ears when he was making love to Moira.

Making love to Moira. He brought his fingers to his nose and breathed. Her scent was all over his fingers, and after breathing it in he was doubly light-headed, and his walking through the grass had a bit of dance in it, and a bit of stagger.

Abruptly he stopped. Looked about him.

Just hold on now. Doesn’t that moonlight have an uncommon and unlikely
green
undertone to it?

He studied that shifting vague viridescence, and he woke up—woke up suddenly and truly now to what was going on.

Oh, the deceit was very subtle.

Of course
there was no stench of Y-rays here.

Stuyvesant could never have done
this
with Y-rays.

Y-rays were for helling over a place. Y-rays were for crudely hewing out the forms of backed-up toilets and tax collectors and kids caught in drug-war crossfire and the gray death gathering on the faces of subway straphangers—

But for
this—

For this sheen on the Hudson and for martinis with little onions in them, for the complacency of his drowsy loins, for the smell of sex and the smell of a rich man’s fields after a rain shower—