I sat down. Mona took the imaginary cigarette from her lips, her island-brown eyes studying me.
“What?” I asked after an appropriate wait.
“Why do you stay with me, Benny?”
“Come again?” I said, to keep my distance until I could gauge the virulence of her attack.
Because it would certainly be an attack. Mona wanted more out of me, more out of everything. Seela wasn’t a good-enough student, I wasn’t a good-enough husband, her parents had never done right by her either. Only her cousin Minna, who’d died of cancer years ago, had ever been exactly what Mona wanted.
“Are you... happy?” she asked.
“Of course I am,” I said. “I could be dead but instead I have a daughter at university and a wife so pretty that she could have a twenty-year-old boyfriend if she wanted.”
“Bullshit.”
“What’s wrong, Mona?”
“I think it’s because it would cost you too much,” she speculated. “College plus two households. You’d have to take care of me for life, you know.”
“I see you’ve thought about it,” I said, still feinting, still gauging the opposition.
“Do you love me?” She brought the phantom cigarette halfway to her mouth.
“Yes. But it’s more than that, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Do you remember when we met?” I asked.
“Yeah?”
“I was sick and getting sicker all the time.”
“You had viral pneumonia,” she said, as if correcting me. “You needed rest and medicine.”
“That was the outside of it. But on the inside I felt that I was hanging over a precipice, like I was dangling from a frayed rope that was only holding on by a thread.”
“You were sick,” she said. “People feel like that when they’re sick.”
“No. I was like that all the time. I’d left Boulder and stopped drinking. Every day I felt like I was going to fall into that hole. The pneumonia was just a part of it. I ate junk food and was depressed but didn’t know it. When you nursed me to health, you saved me from falling in. You do it all the time, almost every day. That, that hole, that abyss, is a fixture in my mind, and if it weren’t for you, I’d have fallen in and broken my neck a long time ago.”
I don’t know why I said all that to Mona right then. I hadn’t even seen Barbara Knowland yet. I hadn’t thought about Colorado in many years.
“What are you saying, Benny?” Mona asked. “Is this some movie you saw or something?”
“What do you mean?”
“Abyss? Frayed rope? Holding on by a thread?”
“It might be trite but I feel it all the time,” I said, lying by telling the truth. “I felt it today with Seela. If I didn’t have a family, I wouldn’t have anything.”
There was a colony of competing and conflicting thoughts behind Mona’s stern grimace, like the roaches I smelled teeming beneath Seela’s floors.
My words stymied the argument she was nursing. They rang of truth somewhere, and Mona always reacted to truth. She was angry that she couldn’t let the rage in her breast roil up against me. I had admitted something personal and she had no rebuttal against that.
“But you don’t tell us that,” Mona said. “You just, you just sit there staring out the window.”
“Yeah, I know. Way in the back of my head there’s this, there’s this, I don’t know. You’re the only one who sees it, honey. When you call me on it, you call me back.”
“You still don’t talk to me.”
“What am I doing right now?”
The frustration showed in Mona’s slender, still quite lovely face. The only thing I had to do was to stifle the grin rising from my diaphragm. Whenever I defeated her in our jousts of words, I wanted to smirk — not laugh or smile or chuckle. I wanted to gloat over her stumble. Here she had laid a trap for me, the goal of which neither of us knew or understood. We just wrangled, disputed over anything: Seela’s future, our sex routines, what life had or had not brought to either of us.
“You’re saying that I save you?” she asked. “Me. The woman you barely touch, hardly ever talk to. Me, the one lying in your bed when you come back from who knows where in the middle of the night.”
Three months before, the phone rang at a little after two in the morning. Mona answered it.
“Benny?” she said, tugging my shoulder. “It’s work.”
“Hello?” I called into the void of the receiver, wondering what reason anyone at work had to call me in the middle of the night.
“I want to suck your cock right now,” Svetlana whispered into my ear. “I got up thinking about you and now my pussy needs your cock.”
“So... what’s wrong?” I asked, trying to keep my erection down and Mona from figuring out it wasn’t work at all.
“If you don’t come fuck me right now, I’m going back to my old boyfriend in Coney Island. My pussy is crying over you, weeping all over my bed.”
“Did you try the JCL?”
“I’ve got to have your cock right now, before one hour I have to have your cock deep, deep, deep.”
“Okay. All right. I’ll come in. Yeah. Run the other jobs, all except the totals routine. If you run that, the whole system will go down.”
I stumbled from the bed gasping for breath, my nearly fifty-year-old cock stiff as a mummy’s thumb. I was thankful that Mona didn’t turn on the light, just yakked at me in the dark room.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know who’s on night shift anymore,” I said. “But the checking account subroutine went down and I have to go fix it. Fix it.”
I had hurried on my pants and was buttoning a loose-fitting shirt that hung down over any vestiges of the erection.
I put on shoes with no socks and then hit my shins on the night table.
“You haven’t had to go in at night in twelve years,” Mona said, doing the math in her head and sounding suspicious.
She turned on the light.
At this time of morning she looked all of her forty-five years, and then some. Sleep was hard on Mona. Her disappointments and perceived failures gathered in the pool of night.
“I don’t know what it is. Maybe some date trigger or an update to the system that no longer accepts the JCL.”
“You know I don’t understand anything about computers,” she said angrily.
“I don’t know why,” I said in retort. “I’ve been a programmer ever since we met. I talk about it every goddamned day.”
“Don’t raise your voice to me.”
“And you could get your fuck ass outta bed and offer to help me, to make me a coffee or call me a car. Instead you complain that you don’t know what I’m talking about when I’m going to work to pay the rent.”
“You know I hate it when you use that kind of language.”
“And you know I have to go to work.”
On the street, in the nighttime East Side, there was a solitary yellow cab prowling for a fare. I waved it down and hopped in. It smelled of woody incense and resounded with Indian music. The driver sang along with the high-pitched woman vocalist. He only asked me for my destination. I only gave him Svetlana’s address.
She was waiting at the door in a bright yellow terry cloth robe.
“Take off your clothes and lie down on the couch,” she commanded.
I was very excited, still erect. I did what she said in seconds.
She dropped her robe, squatted down over me.
“Is your heart beating hard?” she asked.
I nodded, suddenly aware of the thunder in my chest.
“I don’t want you to move,” she said. “I will do everything. Just lie there and feel it. If you move, I will scratch your face with my nails and you will have to explain that to your wife. Do you understand?”