As if to prove her point, on the other side of the frosted glass a bulky shadow-figure is raising and lowering its arms in the streetlight, and Claire rubs a new circle in the window to find a man and a woman on the sidewalk, kept upright only by their attachment at their hips. The man, stone sober, has descended, Claire sees, into a black mood. The woman, caving a little, bumps her head on the glass at Claire's fingers, as though seeking her blessing or absolution. The man props her and looks up, pleading with Claire for a loyalty that once had to do with the great history of drinking and drunks. But Claire pulls back and is already looking beyond, angrily peering into a circle of spotlit snow beneath a distant streetlamp, as if at particular moments of Nathan's secret life strolling down the street before her.
What it had become with Nathan was primarily an arrangement of recognitions, a series of checkpoints at which Claire had reassured herself that she could, like him, act without loyalty to a thing. Nathan, she'd assumed, would be vastly different. The others she'd known before they introduced themselves. They were always big and thickly muscled and confessional, and she knew them in her father and her three brothers and every one of the men at her small southern college. She knew what car they drove and at what escalatored and potted-planted mall they bought their records, how they would kiss and how they would make love to her and what they would say about it and her and themselves afterward. Initially, about Nathan, she'd thought she'd known nothing. Not his order of things, not the ritual before or after, his foreign but still obviously male conceit. She did not know what to do when he first met her in her small law school dorm room and undressed before her, this Jew, the head of his cock unsheathed. Though he was not, her southern-belle mother had agreed, a jewy Jew, hook nose and all; he almost could have passed for one of their own. Nor did Claire know what to do when she was liking it and the sex was not, after all, very much like what she had had before. Nathan was forceful and investigative. The others had always been effusive, tender before, absent afterward, but ultimately unintelligent.
Still, every morning after a night with him, she woke breathing heavily, with Nathan breathing heavily beside her. She closed her eyes again and found herself trying too hard to sleep; not because she did not want to be tired the next day but because in the morning she felt fear, fear of being awake at dawn, the dust taking flight, the vodka still sharp in her head, the light slowly revealing Nathan encircled in her arms.
Then Claire made her discovery.
Outside of her, it seemed, Nathan had a favorite brand. Marlboros or Camels. Coke or Pepsi. Caucasian, black. Nathan's was Latina. It was like an aspiration. It had become a joke among Nathan's law school friends, to whom he had always brought his women for their stamp of approval, their clubby endorsement, that until Claire every one of his dates had fit a precise mold. Each of them had been extraordinarily, unusually beautiful, each finely done up, and each a young mother, a mother before twenty, before they left Honduras, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Colombia. Not merely Latina but a specific Latina subspecies: tall, athletically lean; light skinned, a shade darker than a Spaniard, say, or an Egyptian; and tightly sealed in a thin cotton shift or leather dress that left nothing to the imagination. As though Nathan had laid the outfits out on the bed. As though he had a closet full of little black dresses. And his family, Nathan's family, even his friends, Claire's friends, they'd all been complicit. All of them-even I, Claire thinks, we accepted our role, took it on, as it were-over time we became Nathan's accomplices.
Claire shifts uneasily on her stool. We were his bait. His foreplay.
Of course, Maria was disarming. Claire, actually bringing herself to follow him, saw her once from a distance. She possessed a quick tongue, Claire could tell. And she wore-well, practically nothing. A little black leather something, an afterthought. You looked everywhere. It would have been impolite not to.
After that, Nathan himself became a pattern. Claire discovered that she did after all know his lines ahead of time and found herself moving her mouth with them in the dark: also that she knew by heart his strategy in lovemaking and had found herself lying in wait in certain positions of her own. She became aware of him acting with the usual bravado of a man with all the cards. It crossed her mind that perhaps all that time she had been employed as a pontoon bridge, and that Nathan and his immigrant mistresses had been communicating across her span, exchanging goods, finding little understandings with which to build treaties of further, deeper understandings. This is how cultures self-destruct, she thought to herself, fuck by fuck.
On the other hand, she was free. Gone was any fear she might have secretly harbored that Nathan would show himself to be remarkable. Sometimes, with him, she had forgotten many times through the night that she was even with a man, and after a while had been only thinly conscious of being shaken by some hands, not knowing whose they were until the light came on and she recognized the fingers clawing her belly. She might leave those hands tonight, or next year, it would not matter. She knew she could, and would, go anywhere. The world was now clear, a transparent plain on which she would ride free from turbulence, from geographical seams. What had bound her was her illusion of another, more perfect, world. But now Claire was free from all that. Nathan had seen to it. She was freer than anything. She felt as capable of cutting through lies as walking through air.
Her last night with him, five years ago, Claire waited atop their bedspread with her back against the wall, feet extended. Her red hair was pulled back tight, her throat forward, damp, the creases faintly lined with grease. Their wedding, a myth until the invitations arrived that day in a box from the printer, was taking shape somewhere without them. Claire-her small, elegant features now undone-wore the look of the deeply pious who had jumped ship.
Nathan took off his jacket and sat at the edge of the bed, knees apart, tie loosened. Claire stood. Mosquitoes, having fought their way here through the smog, had been waiting and drew to her face. She ducked slightly, raising her arms, and pulled off her dress, letting it drop at her feet. She rose now out of the faded material, her arms and neck and face bronzed, the rest illuminated pale blue sunlessness. She reached and switched off the bedside lamp. The mattress sank beneath her. Nathan collided with her knees. She lifted her legs. He fell to her side and began to caress her face. "No," she said, and pried at him and slid under. Nathan began to kiss his way downward. "No!" she cried, and pulled him on top of her. She felt his lips against hers. She very nearly softened and opened, but then his sourness-his, the others', Maria's- appalled her and she turned and stiffened. Nathan, having given over to her demand, began the stale, anonymous thrusting. He hardly breathed. They themselves made no sound. The bed jousted beneath them. Their hands did not touch.
In the morning she woke not only fearful but also perspiring. She closed her eyes again and found herself trying hard not to think, and she sat up. Nathan slept beside her, one hand between his chubby thighs. He too was sweating, the dampness had already reached her through the sheets. Carefully, insistently, brown dawn came. The street, the cars outside, the floor and tables and chairs, her hands, everything a shade of brown. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway began its morning whine. The monstrous boats rusting in the harbor.
Claire cradled her belly. She began to murmur to it. She was pregnant with Nathan's child. About to marry a man already emotionally gone. She'd bring it to term, though. She'd have that. From Nathan now she wanted nothing else. And he was gone, with no more than his usual lukewarm whimper of protest.