For example, they'd gone to an arty party, and a woman had been holding forth on Diverse Ways of Meaning, the Science of Signs and the Clash of Cultures. Millie spotted her for a poseur: not only did she smoke, but she held her cigarette upright, between her thumb and forefinger, like some kind of Russian film director or maybe a Nazi. She made no bones about edging in on Mihovil. After delivering a nearly in-comprehensible spate on the Evils of American Cultural Imperialism, she asked Mihovil what he thought.
He said, "I think what you said is bullshit. No, wait-it's worse than that. We talk about the black people in Uganda and the brown people in New Guinea, and you say that we push our cultural artifacts upon them… You mean, medicine? You mean, TV? You mean, cars? Those people are just as smart as we are. They'd love to sit around a swimming pool and drink lemonade and listen to Eminem and get flu shots when they need them.
"You want to keep thern in some kind of crazy zoo, hunting with spears, so we can look at them and study their culture. That's bullshit. I've done that. I lived in a zoo, I lived in a tent when I was a kid and drank sewage and had the shits for six years in a row. I'd kill somebody to keep from going back to that. I can goddamn well guarantee if you took one of those guys out of the jungle in New Guinea and gave him some jeans and T-shirts and a good pair of shoes, he'd cut your heart out before he'd let you send him back.
"I'd bet you anything that they'd rather live in a nice apartment with a stereo and a toilet and running water that you can drink. So what I think is, you're arguing that you have to allow the niggers to stay in their place. That's about half a step from we gotta keep, the niggers in their place. Simple racism is what it is."
ANYWAY, HE WAS A BLUNT GUY. She wasn't the least embaressed by any of his blunt sexual suggestions, except for the suggestion of ignorance.
"If you'd tell me what to do, I'd do it," she said.
"I don't know what you want, I only know what I want. You have to tell me what to do, and I tell you what to do, and we're both happy."
"That sounds kind of… icky."
"No, no, no," he said, moving his index finger like a windshield wriper, a gesture she'd only seen from people who'd grown up outside the U.S. "Not icky. Icky is the wrong word. Dirty, maybe. Like Catholic dirty. Or… I don't know. But not icky. Icky is like when somebody sneezes and blows snot on your croissant."
So she started telling him what she liked.
She found out that she liked telling him.
ANY OTHER TIME, she'd have been nothing more significant than a college girl discovering sex. Not this time. This time, there was a predator hovering next to her.
She was the most vocal woman he'd ever encountered, talking, analyzing, demanding-a long-running commentary that might have been a template for an advanced version of The Joy of Sex.
All that turned him on. But what really got to him, on an emotional level, something that went beyond any simple erotic twitch, was her or-gasms. They started with a growl, a sound that was almost doglike, and proceeded up in pitch and intensity until she was screaming like a cat; yowls that must have woken half the building.
If he had ever sat with her, and told her what he really felt, how he wanted to go a step beyond anything she'd ever contemplated, wanted to go there with steel and rope…then they'd lock him up. They'd know that he'd already been there with other women, and they'd put him next to the Gods Down the Hall, and they'd come and look at him like a goldfish in an aquarium.
But God, he'd like to talk about it; just to tell her how her howls were tearing him apart. To go just one more step with her…
5
LUCAS WAS HALF AWAKE when he heard the whap of the Pioneer Press hitting the front porch, and the deliverywoman reversing her car out of the driveway. Ten minutes later, as he was about to go under again, having punched his pillow flat, the second deliverywoman came in, with two whaps: the Star-Tribune and the Wall Street Journal.
He tried to get back to sleep but was only marginally successful, slipping in and out of confused dreams that sometimes seemed like memories, sometimes like fantasies.
His problem was the empty bed. He'd slept by himself for years, and now, groaning through his later forties, he couldn't sleep without Weather beside him.
On the other hand…
The house was certainly neater than when the family was home.
THE FAMILY WAS IN LONDON. Weather had gotten a prestigious fellowship in maxillo-facial surgery, and had first thought to go alone. But she hated the idea of three months away from Sam, the baby. And Letty, their ward, started whining around about never getting to go anywhere, and the housekeeper wondered what she'd do if everybody left…
Finally, Weather decided to pick up the whole bunch of them and transplant them to London for the summer. "We don't have a money problem, so why not?" she asked.
"I'd be happy to take care of everybody, and you'd have the time to yourself,"Lucas had said. She was suspicious-he got along quite well on his own and often seemed to pull a loneliness around himself. And she really didn't want to be away from Sam…
So they packed it all up, everything they would need for three months, surgeon, baby, ward, and housekeeper, and at enormous cost, left for London, leaving him alone in the house.
He'd cluttered the place the first few days the family was gone. Then he'd picked it up and resumed his bachelor ways: he'd never been exactly tidy, but he kept things in their places. When the family was around, nothing was ever where it was supposed to be. The amount of junk that came in the door was befuddling: new clothes and electronics and DVDs and school supplies and Pampers and snack food and medical journals and what seemed like an endless pile of cardboard boxes and wrapping plastic and empty bottles.
That all stopped.
Still. The hole in his life seemed to be getting larger; and he waited every morning until she called from her office in London, to tell him about the day she'd had, and what the kids were doing.
WHEN THE PHONE RANG, he sat up, groggy, looked at the clock: too early. She never called this early. He picked up the phone, and Rose Marie Roux said, "Your secret serial killer is all over the front page of the Strib."
"What?"
"This guy really is a monster," she said, conversationally. She sounded as though she had a cup of coffee in front of her and a cigarette in her hand, which she probably did. Rose Marie Roux was the commissioner of public safety, and, indirectly, Lucas's boss. "Cutting their throats with a straight razor and scourging them with a wire whip? Where do you even get a straight razor these days?"
Lucas said, "Shit," scratched under his left armpit, and said, "They get straight razors from the same place they get lead pipes. The cliche mine. What else do they say?"
"Pretty well-written piece, if you have a taste for the Gothic," Rose Marie said. "You're still in bed, right?"
"Right."
"I'll read it to you." She did; and when she finished, she said, "This is gonna be trouble for my favorite cop. The newsies are in it now."
"I better call Sloan," Lucas said.
HE DIDN'T CALL SLOAN RIGHT AWAY. He went back to sleep, and the next time he cracked his eyelids it was two minutes to eight o'clock. He fumbled past the lamp, through the pocket junk that he dropped on the bed stand each night, past watch and wallet and lucky stone and cash receipts from the gas station, a small wad of currency and two dollars in change, and finally dug out the cell phone, turned it on and lay with it on his chest.
Two minutes later, right on time, it rang.
"Do anything good today?" he asked.
"Gave a lecture on the… on a facial muscle and the nerve that operates it," Weather said.
"I wish I'd been there. Did you show slides?"