You expect her to apologize afterward, but she merely inspects your wounds, says “You’ll live,” and then gets out of bed and slips on her robe.
You watch her searching for the sash. “Can I ask a question without setting you off?”
She finds the sash, ties it, sits on the bed. “Sure.”
“Why do you get so defensive?”
“It’s not defensiveness, it’s I’m irritated. You do pry a lot. And that hiding-back-of-a-tree thing was just stupid.”
“Maybe so, but you totally overreacted.”
A shrug. “Didn’t you have fun?”
“Fun? At the end I did. It wasn’t much fun earlier.”
“I enjoyed every minute.”
It takes you a moment to absorb this. “You mean you weren’t angry?”
“I was angry…but not that angry. I thought letting the anger out would be a healthy exercise.”
She’s a wholly different woman than she was a half-hour before. The way she’s sitting there, fussing with the end of her sash, giving off a cheerful, self-possessed vibe. It’s difficult to picture her shrieking, infuriated…though not so difficult as once it was.
“So you were…” You grope for the right word. “Acting out? We could’ve gotten hurt.”
“I have complete confidence that you’re my physical superior. I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“You hurt me.”
She makes a wry face. “Oh, yeah. You’re scarred for life.”
You tell her you don’t see how going straight from minor disagreement to a violent confrontation is going to do other than muddy the waters.
“Do you feel muddied?” she asks. “I don’t. I feel perfectly clear. And we went from a disagreement to violence to sex. You left out the sex.” She stands, cinches the sash tighter. “Life is the reasoned exercise of passion. When it’s not, it’s death.”
You’re becoming accustomed to her use of homespun aphorisms, but still it tends to piss you off, as do the lectures that invariably follow. But you’re too worn out by the reasoned exercise of passion to do other than listen.
“People today are like tigers who’ve forgotten how to be tigers,” she says, moving toward the door. “Which explains why everything’s so fucked. We have to teach ourselves to be tigers together. That’s how we’ll last. I realize I haven’t been forthcoming with you, and I realize that makes you crazy, because you’re the inquisitive type. We have to push back the limits slowly, gradually reveal our natures. You’ll learn everything about me in time. And about yourself. Until then we need to snarl and claw on occasion, and let sex heal us.” She pauses in the doorway, gives her sash a final tug. “Want something to eat?”
Each Friday you catch an early bus to the U District and prepare for your 11 o’clock seminar in one of the coffee shops along the Ave. One morning in late May, while you’re poring over an article on protozoan genomes amid conversational clutter and the smells of exotic grinds, a little man stops beside your table, bracing on his cane. He’s got snappish blue eyes edged by crowsfeet and deep lines bracketing his mouth and unkempt reddish-brown hair and beard that make it seem he’s peering at you through a hedge. It’s an odd face, an old young face like a leprechaun’s. Hard to put an age to him. He could be in his late twenties or, just as easily, in his forties. He has on scruffy jeans and a denim jacket covered in patches that celebrate Jimi Hendrix, marijuana, Peter Tosh, and a sampling of leftist political causes. His torso is twisted—there appears to be something wrong with his spine. With a labored movement, he lowers himself into the chair opposite, draws a deep breath and releases it unsteadily.
“So you’re her latest,” he says; then he cocks his head and says in an altogether different voice, a reedy British voice, “Latest what?, you might ask. Lover? That would be the obvious assumption.” He leans forward, pushing into your space. “Perhaps he’s referring to something else. Something more sinister, eh?”
You’re accustomed to being approached by whack jobs—the U District is their natural habitat—and experience has taught you to be brusque. Yet in this instance, you’re pretty sure that “she” refers to Abi and you ask him what he’s talking about.
“About Abimagique.” He stares at you intently. “Your fat whore. Are you aware you’re sleeping with a fucking monster?”
“Watch your mouth.”
“It cost me a lot of pain to come here today, man. You need to hear this.”
You begin stowing books and papers in your pack.
“My name’s Richard Reiner,” he says, and tries to connect with your eyes—you look away, make a pretense of signaling the waitress. Maybe he knows Abi, but he’s still a whack job.
You tell him your name’s Carl, thinking it would be unwise to tell this madman your actual name. His face tightens, he swallows dry. Managing his pain, you suppose.
“I met her five years ago,” he says. “She wasn’t my type, but there was something about her. You know what I mean. Once you hook up with her, it’s like an addiction.”
You say, “Yeah,” to keep him moving along, certain that his experience with Abi—if, indeed, he had one—could have nothing in common with yours, though his reference to addiction strikes a chord.
“She lived in the same house, wore the same clothes. Looked the same. Nothing ever changes for her. Anyway, I moved in with her. Just like you.”
“How do you know that? About me moving in?”
“Because I been checking you out, Carl,” he says, giving the name a sardonic emphasis. “You want to be Carl, that’s fine with me. But don’t think…”
You zip up the backpack, scrape back your chair.
“Hey! Where you going?” Reiner grips your forearm, but you shake him off. You’ve heard enough to validate your judgment. The guy’s a flake, possibly a dangerous stalker.
“The thing she does when you fuck,” he says. “The thing with your lower back? You don’t want to let her do that anymore.”
That surprises you. Angry at Abi for using that trick, one you’ve come to relish, with another man, and angry at Reiner for forcing you to confront what seems, against ordinary logic, an intimate betrayal on her part, you ask, “Why not?”
“She’ll turn you into a cripple, man. Before she did it to me, my spine wasn’t a fucking corkscrew. I could walk more than ten steps without having to stop. That shit she makes you eat…all that fucking seaweed and algae and herbs. I think that’s tied with it. I think it makes you susceptible. Or maybe there’s drugs in it and that’s how she keeps you under control.” He grabs your arm again as you try to stand. “It’s the truth!! I was her first…”
The waitress materializes and you order another Americano, tell her you’ll pick it up at the counter. She asks Reiner what he’s having and he says impatiently, “Nothing, okay?” and glares at her until she walks away. “I was the first,” he goes on. “But she’s done it to six other guys. There might be more, for all I know. Here…” He two-fingers a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and pushes it toward you. You unfold the paper and look at the six names and addresses written thereon. One, belonging to someone named Phil Minz, sticks in your mind, because it’s in a building where you used to live.
“She must have fucked it up with me,” Reiner says. “Punched the wrong buttons. Or maybe she just needed more practice, because the others are all in wheelchairs.”
“I have a class,” you say.
“You’re not hearing me!” Reiner slaps the table, frustrated. “I used to be into it, man. Way she’d slip her hands down there and start poking around. I was like all…” He puts on a show of panting rapidly, like a dog. “I couldn’t wait for her to set me off. And then this one day, it was like she hits me with the A-bomb. I was fucking drooling. In a stupor. Jesus couldn’t have made me feel any better. The next morning, I was all seized up. Not like I am now. It got worse over a period of about six weeks. But she did it to me. The doctors, they can’t say what happened. When I tell ’em, they don’t come right out and laugh, but…” Reiner leans back and rests his cane across his knees. “You’re not laughing. You know what I’m talking about.”