The advertisement begins with the whine of maudlin violins and Ike looks at Eva and says, “Listen to me. There was a box in today’s mail. Just like last time. It was addressed to box nine. It was wrapped in plain brown paper. There was no return address. I cut it open.”
He pauses. A voice from the radio is saying something about when the time comes, we’ll be ready.
Ike takes a breath. “Now listen to me. It was a box full of human fingers and blood.”
“Jesus Christ,” Eva says, hands going up to her mouth.
“The sight of it made me faint. I was on the floor for a few minutes, I guess. When I woke up, the box was gone. And there was no one else in the room.”
“Why didn’t you come and get me?”
Ike stares at her.
“You think I took the box?”
He doesn’t say a word.
“You think I sent the box? You think I’m involved in this?”
He sinks down slightly into the bed.
“For God’s sake, Ike, how can you suspect me? Don’t do this, Ike. I can’t be alone on this.”
“I’m going to try to sleep now,” Ike says, drawing the covers up to the fold between his neck and shoulder.
Eva stares down at him. The ad on the radio finishes and the host comes back on, his voice sounding refreshed.
HOST: We are back and our caller is Lois.
LOIS: Yes, hello, Ray. Let me tell you a little story about how these skinheads accosted my mother downtown last week, right on the common, near the reflecting pool …
Eva eases her shoes off her feet. She stands and begins to undress. She quickly folds each item as it falls away from her body and places it in a neat pile on the floor. When she’s naked, she takes a corner of the sheet and quilt and yanks it back from the bed.
Ike’s eyes snap open and she lets him take a long look at her. She drops hold of the bedclothes, places her hands lightly on her hips, model-like, and does a very small twist from side to side, to indicate she’s on display, to give him a full chance at observation.
“Eva,” is the only thing he can manage to say and it comes out as a stunted question.
She raises an index finger to her lips and gives the ancient quiet sign.
“You don’t want to talk,” she whispers, “we won’t talk.”
She climbs into the bed and advances at once, pulls her body across the mattress until its full length is parallel with his. Then she puts her arms around him, cradles him, pulls their chests together, flattening herself. She intermingles their legs and can already feel him growing against a thigh. She’s pleased, bordering on being something like proud, comforted by the fact that he’s getting hard in spite of his shock and depression and paranoia and confusion and terror.
They fumble, pull him free from sweatpants, T-shirt, underwear, all the while kissing, wet, breathless, tongue-crazy.
The only noise beyond their breathing and muted, guttural groans is the talk-show host, Ray, starting up again, voice rising in both pitch and volume, building another ranting theory, preaching his endless warnings of decay.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Lenore sits in the Barracuda for a few minutes. She’s parked across the street from Rollie’s Grill. It surprises her how much she can see through the front windows of the diner. It’s like a little diorama, a small scene enclosed in a porcelain-framed case. An intricate picture of dozens of interacting parts becomes clearer the longer you look. She can see that half the booths are filled. She notices an enormous customer in mechanic’s coveralls perched on a counter stool. She spots one of Harry’s cousins, possibly Lon, clearing the empty tables. She can see Isabelle behind the counter stirring the contents of the big kettle. And Harry is next to her, his mouth moving, jabbering a story as he chops peppers.
She thinks that Harry and Isabelle have always struck her as an odd but instantly appealing and attractive couple. And now it dawns on her why. At first glance, their glaring disparateness, most obviously, but not limited to, their racial difference, makes them seem like such separate entities. But then, constantly on the heels of that observation, there’s the indisputable fact of their togetherness, this plain happiness of their mutual attraction and love, and it burns away the separateness and acts as a billboard for the possibility of family, wholeness, belonging.
An image forms in Lenore’s mind. She hates it, instinctively, but like an annoying and persistent daydream, she can neither eliminate it nor alter it. She’s stuck with it: herself as Isabelle tending a pot filled with an exotic stew. And here’s the tough part: Woo as Harry, dicing up vegetables and babbling the pleasant fables of his grandfather.
A fact becomes apparent that’s so bizarre it makes her dizzy. She could love Woo. There’s the genuine possibility that she could care for, pledge herself to, undertake a life with this odd Oriental linguistics professor. The Barracuda is full of the smell of him. And she knows this is why she lingers, why she doesn’t want to get out.
He had suggested that they shower together. That she call Miskewitz, tell him she needed some sleep in order to keep going. That they push book piles aside and have a postcoital picnic on the floor of his library. He’d said he could make a huge gourmet omelette for two, something special, a surprise. He’d stroked her forehead and said she had to sleep soon, that it had been days since she’d really slept and that something could happen to her, emphasizing the word so that it conveyed a childlike fear, a dread of inconceivable monsters.
She’d lain in his arms and listened to him speak, kissed his chest, run her fingers over his bony cheeks. But she’d left the loft, still wet, her legs a little unindependable, her nervous system shorting out slightly, sending small blue flashes before her eyes as she found her way back to her car.
She knows she should have gone back to the green duplex, searched for a Valium, called in to the lieutenant for a break, collapsed into bed, and crashed. But instead she drove to Rollie’s Grill, intent on black coffee and overspiced food. And something else. Now, staring through the boxy, rectangular windows, she’s intent on studying Harry and Isabelle, on paying attention to their gestures, their mannerisms, the number of times they touch one another. She wonders about the sound of their voices as they speak to one another. She wonders if there’s a signal that two people give off when they’re bound together, committed in some old-time, superstitious way. Do they learn some difficult, shared language, some bizarre and insulated code only understood by the two bound parties? At night, in bed, at the end of the once-endless day, do they dispense with language entirely, fall into a lazy, sleepy telepathy? Do they utter sounds on a frequency that outsiders can’t hear? Do their inner organs vibrate when their mate comes within a certain perimeter? Like some birds, do they have an ability to will their own death when a spouse dies? Like swans? Like her parents?
There has never been anyone that Lenore felt this way about. She’s been involved with a number of boys and men over the past fifteen years. She has never felt rejected. Normally, she was the one who decided to sever a relationship. But even when she wasn’t the one who called it off, she always felt relief, never rejection. It was always like a great weight had been lifted.
But now images she can’t eliminate or adapt to are coming into her head, stuff so alien that she doesn’t know what to do with it: She sees herself moving into Woo’s cavernous loft, preparing to bake bread on his gleaming black counters, folding her freshly washed sweaters on the couch as he works at his ridiculous desk, instructing burly, ethnic moving men on where to put down the new bed. She sees herself and Woo hosting a small dinner, a homey, old-fashioned casserole of some kind, dense with noodles, cheese, multicolored vegetables. Woo sits at one end of the new teak table—we’ve got to lighten this place up a little, honey—and Ike, their sole guest this evening, sweet Ike, still having trouble renting out the empty half of the green duplex, sitting at the other end. And Lenore in the middle, equidistant from each, closest to the kitchen area so she can run the show, pull things from the oven and refrigerator, grab a new bottle from the wine rack. She sees her own mouth opening. Words come: Fred, honey, you should really take Ike up to the new courts with you next week. Ike, they’ve built some beautiful new racquetball courts up on the hill. Fred could show you the basics. It would really do you a world of good …