“You need me?” we asked together, this time feeling more.
“You are the first man ever to care about me,” she said.
“Come on now, Lana,” I said, “Woman like you? I bet they line up just to say hi.”
“No. I mean, yes. They line up but not because they care. You paid for me and I had to beg you to come to my house. I wore skimpy little dresses and no underwear but you did not try to take me. It wasn’t until I took off my clothes that you made love to me.
“You didn’t want my body and you didn’t want to see my grades or even to see papers that said I was enrolled in school. I just told you that I was needing and you helped me. I have always loved you since then.
“Many men want to fuck me. Many men want me to put on a nice dress and make other men want to fuck me. My teachers want to fuck me and for me to make them look good with my grades and my many languages. I don’t mind. I do the work. I fuck them sometimes. But it is always trading a salami for some cheese, a loaf of bread for wine. I live like this and I don’t mind. I give my mother money. I will send for my brothers one day.
“But when I meet you, you just say, ‘I will pay for that,’ and that’s all. I have to love you. I have no other choice.”
These declarations were simple and straightforward, like her. That’s what I had always liked about Lana. Even at the restaurant she was always honest, uncomplicated. It was so much different than with Mona or my parents.
“I did something a long time ago,” I said. “Before you were born, I think.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. It was a bad thing, but I don’t remember.”
“How do you know then?”
“It’s been coming up lately. There’s a woman who knew me back then who says that we did something, but she didn’t say what.”
“Did you ask her?”
“I didn’t remember her,” I said. “I thought that she was mistaken or just mad about me messin’ around with her.”
“But now you think that she knows something?” Svetlana asked.
“I don’t know. But I feel different. I feel like you say, like a new man.”
“But you don’t like this,” she suggested, and then she kissed me. “I don’t know what I did.”
“Come,” Lana said.
She took me by the hand and led me to the bathroom.
“Stand in the tub,” she told me.
I was already naked. She turned on the water and began to soap my thighs. She scrubbed and washed me from head to toe using a glass to rinse off the lather with warm water. She dried me with the plush red towels the Reynard used, and then she took me to the bed and massaged me — for hours. Whenever I tried to speak, she shushed me. Whenever I tried to turn over, she pushed me back on my stomach. Her hands were strong and seemed to get stronger as the night went on. At some point I lost consciousness. It didn’t feel like falling asleep but more like tumbling down a dark, dark hole.
I awoke to the sounds of a man yelling and then something both hard and soft, something that made me sick. I sat up in bed gasping. The sounds gripped my heart and pummeled my lungs. For a while I didn’t realize that it had been a dream, a sleeping vision.
Svetlana was lying next to me, naked and uncovered. I watched her for a while and calmed down. Age was creeping up on me; life was passing by as if through the window of a car in the country somewhere. All of a sudden there’s a beautiful young woman lying on a bench at the side of the road. You see her and slow down. You approach her but wonder what you would do here by the roadside with a beauty who is there for you and unashamed. And then, once you decide that she has more to offer than you can take, you look back at the car and think about the monotonous road ahead of you...
These were my thoughts on that morning. It was all very poetic. It was also true. I could stay with Svetlana or go back to Our Bank. I could ask Cassius to ask Joey (or someone like Joey) to kill Barbara Knowland so that my life could begin again with Mona or Lana.
“How are you?” the Russian girl asked.
“Wondering.”
“About what?”
“If maybe the idea of suicide is not a good one for a man like me.”
Lana sat up and put her arms around me. That was what I wanted. But why hadn’t I just asked her to hold me?
Dr. Shriver’s office was at the very end of East Fifty-fourth Street. His second-floor window looked out on the East River, just like my window did. But his view seemed more intimate.
“Hello, Mr. Dibbuk,” the rangy white man said. He was my age with graying blond hair and the perpetual hint of a smile on his lips. “How have you been?”
I took the seat across from him, the one that looked out over the river. There was a lone tugboat out there, 90 percent engine and 10 percent boat.
“All that power and nothing to do,” I said.
Shriver’s face framed a question that he did not utter.
All around his office were placed and hung African images: masks, paintings, photographs, and jewelry. When I had first come to his office, he tried to engage me about African culture. He knew Africa quite well, had been there a dozen times. But he soon realized that I knew nothing about that continent, that dark unconsciousness of a hundred million displaced descendants of slaves. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know.
“The tugboat,” I said. “It doesn’t have anything to pull.”
“Does that mean something to you?” Shriver asked.
I remembered then that I disliked the analyst’s smirk. It always felt as if he was making fun of me.
“I ran into a woman at a party my wife took me to the other night,” I said. “She remembered me from nearly twenty-five years ago. Said that we had done something, implied that it was something illegal. I told her to get away from me.”
“Did you know her?”
“She knew my name. I guess she could have asked someone that, but it didn’t seem like a setup. It seemed like she really remembered me.”
“And do you know what she was talking about?” Shriver asked.
“No.”
“Not at all?”
I shook my head.
“What were you like twenty-five years ago?” he asked.
This was what he’d always wanted, I thought: to get me to talk about the earlier years of my life. I had gotten great satisfaction out of stymieing him, keeping my past secret. It struck me then as a petty contentment.
“I was a drunk,” I said. “When the sun shined I did day work in construction or some other manual labor. At night I’d drink long and hard. I’d pick up women or pick fights and wake up with a headache either way.”
“And you don’t remember this woman at all?”
“No, sir.”
“ ‘Sir’? Why call me ‘sir’?”
“But she thinks that I did something and I think she told the people at Diablerie.”
“Diablerie?”
“It’s a new magazine that my wife’s working for. They say they’re playing to the upscale market but they’re really just a sensationalist rag.”
“And what does your wife have to say about this?” Shriver asked, comfortable in this world of seeming paranoia.
“She hasn’t said a thing.”
“Then how do you know that this woman...”
“Barbara Knowland.”
“The one they arrested for those serial killings?” Even Shriver was surprised by this.
“Yeah,” I said, and then I launched into the story of how I ended up on the other side of the closet door while Mona tasted Harvard Rollins’s dick.
“You were actually in the closet watching this?” Shriver asked, wondering, I could tell, whether to believe me or not.
I nodded.
“How did this make you feel?”
“I don’t know. I was surprised that she liked his nasty talk. She never liked it with me.”