"Why don't you take off your coat." She steps back and sits on the bed, clutching her knees. The bed creaks. She hasn't bothered to remake it, though she did yesterday. The blankets are clawed aside, the sheet ground thin and covered with footmarks, salt rings of old scum, pale bloodstains.
But listening for footfalls in the hall he is afraid. Down to the safety of the bed he goes. The girl draws stiff obedient circles on his belly, three, four, five, then flinging her arms around his neck slides over, arching, she offers her throat, which for the moment is enough like Claire's: faintly blue, a redhead's undercooked translucence, the veins and stringy tendons and serrated windpipe nudging up at him in full view: beating life.
He leans in, touching his teeth to her neck, and the girl's faked moan is so much like the groan of the dying, her cheap imitation thrill like one's last breath, signaling him to bite, penetrating her with panic and self-disgust and the calamity of his own life, god the penetrating pleasurepain suffering giving birth to his own death in this crummy little cubicle.
"Wait a minute, Esquire." Squirming out from under him the girl floats her hand before his face, writhing it like a genie. She opens the drawer of the nightstand and gestures toward an assortment of multicolored condoms scattered like candies across the bottom.
Nathan stares blankly and the girl comes upright, her face hard She stares straight and fearless into Nathan's eyes, then, determining what is there, pushes off the bed to her feet. She leans on one hip, one arm dangling, petulant. "What's with you guys tonight? Something's got you all wacked out. Maybe it's the weather.
Nathan sits up.
She sighs, takes a pull on her cigarette and drags a metal bridge chair from across the room and props it directly in front of him and drops into it. "Okay, look, it's normally five dollars for the first five minutes, but that's already gone doing all this talking, or whatever, and you owe me ten bucks anyway. So that's already fifteen and nothing's happened yet. It's twenty for ten more minutes." She sits back. "And you can masturbate for another ten." She stabs her cigarette in his direction. "Do you want to masturbate?
It sounds like a challenge, if not a threat.
"Nobody's looking, Stein Esquire," she says, a comradely nudge. "Just you and me. You don't have to touch it."
Nathan looks confused.
"The cum. I'll clean it up."
He focuses again on the calendar on the wall behind the bed, the same one from yesterday, the band of white beach, this time the numbers blurring and dissembling. Again, the picture comes to life-he hears the sax playing in the distance-and the girl from Ipanema rises like Venus from the water, passes him up the beach, coming into view. I love you, he says-but the calendar, he sees, is flipped now to the future, to January, next month, next year: where will he be then?
Outside, the small eruptions of car doors closing. He traces the sweat behind his ears and down the back of his neck.
The girl glances at a clock that partially covers a hole in the wall. She taps her foot. "Eight minutes left."
He probes the roof of his mouth with his tongue, searching for water.
"You feel all right?"
He pats his blazer pocket, touching Maria's will, his deed to Roatan. "Fine, I'm fine."
"Come on, Esquire, you going to do it or not?"
Nathan can feel himself straining. His tool has begun to swell but by now it is the last thing in the world he wants. His eyes follow the riversystems of cracks up a wall and across the ceiling. "Que mes?" he asks.
"What? I don't speak that, Spanish, what's that?" She thrusts out her hand. "Thirty-five. Make it an even forty I'll give you something special."
Distractedly: "I have hundreds. I'll need change."
Leaning down she lifts her bag and retrieves a small beaded change purse striped the colors of the rainbow, the sort given by younger brothers as a misguided sign of affection. She sifts through subway tokens and doughnut shop receipts and a stray pink latex condom with nodules and scented cherry for that special pleasure and pulls out five-dollar bills and singles and looks up. "Let's just wait and see honey." Smiling a gapped and rotten smile, shimmying down her pantyhose, shackling her ankles, she tips back the chair, balancing on the two back legs. She parts her knees, her thighs thin and blue, a schoolgirl sitting on a toilet. With one last glance at the clock she transforms, arching backward, her eyes rolling. Her lips part to emit a single moan. That pain again, that cramp or pang of anguish, or something has come to her, a thought, an idea. Nathan hopes. Again she writhes her hand in the air, snaring his attention, and guides it downward where with one set of fingers she pries herself apart and with the other begins expertly to knead.
Nathan's face hardens into a plastic smile.
"Baby, why don't you masturbate?"
Thunder blows open a door down the hall and Nathan whirls on the bed, eyeing the fogged window, the icy radiator.
"Scared?" the girl asks, her eyes filled with maternal certainty that it is the good things that will come to stay. But she's back to work, "Baby baby baby," filling the clammy room with her hasty crescendo, stopping before the climax with a deep-throated "Yes!" drops the chair to all fours and looks up, fully recovered and breathing normally. The idea, as usual, has been no idea at all.
His eyes fall on a dead roach in the corner. "Que hora?"
"I told you, no Spanish. Speak English, hey? Hey, what do you want? "
"Do you have a phone-a phone? I just need-a quick call?"
"A phone? Here?" Eyeing him, the girl quickly covers herself with a dingy robe. "Are you going to throw up?" she says, without sympathy. "You look like you're going to throw up."
Twigs whipping his face, Santos sprints through the corridor of woods. "Nathan!" He has been wandering over an hour. Around him, the snap of splintering branches. His feet numbed by the snow, he braces against the rail. "Nathan!" There is no waterline. Waves explode up and down the beach in random detonations. One rears up and collapses and drops the body of an animal in a boil of driftwood and foam.
Santos takes the stairs two at a time. Nathan's dog is spinning in an eddy. He takes it by the collar and drags it up. One of its eyes has been gouged, or shot through. The other stares emptily, a glass bead, the tongue pooling.
Santos runs, then stops, worried that the exercise will trip the switch that turns on the asthma and shuts down his lungs. He walks the steps slowly, deliberately, then begins a slow jog through the path and along the street toward the house. But, spotting the flickers of light through the trees he is running again, pumping, forgetting himself. Claire is standing at the foot of the driveway, staring emptily upward toward the house. Her hair and clothes are sodden. Her face drenched. "I saw it," she says. "I never believed-"
The door is flung open. The van is gone. Every window is alight. The trees overhead are shrouded in red haze. Yellow flames climbing the back of the house, columns of sparks riding the updraft. Ash pools atop the snow in the front yard. He hears the crackling and everything is burning, the house is burning, his lungs are burning, the dream is burning, but here they stand, he and Claire, inside the house, where everything once seemed fine and the slippery poolwater bathed them in all their incarnations and the air conditioning silently washed them in luxury and the various roads to the future and the law and their affections were secure and they would live forever. There was nothing there. And now the curtains Claire made are crawling with fire, the flames spreading faster and faster, crackling, minor explosions in the kitchen, a large one in the basement, an eruption from below, the world around him now collapsing. The snow around the house is melting. The trees are burning. His chest is burning.