Such a crime as Teresa’s violent murder was unheard of in our neighborhood and it put the residents on edge when the police failed to find the killer. And the most puzzling thing of all is that the police could not find a single thing missing from the house. The thief had apparently been spooked by Teresa and ran off without taking the time to gather any booty despite the fact that small quantities of cash and a pair of diamond earrings lay on a dresser just a few feet from Teresa’s remains. The police interviewed all of the neighbors, myself included, seeking witnesses to the crime; if not an eyewitness someone who may have seen a suspicious person in the neighborhood. I was no help at all.
It was immediately after Teresa’s death that my best friend Tommy Sullivan moved away which left a large void in my life; but fortunately for me it was also about the same time that Catherine’s family, having lost their farm in Kentucky due to several years of drought and poor financial planning, moved to
Cleveland so that her father could work at the factory where Albert, having put in a good word, also worked. This was a dream come true for me. I spent every spare minute of every day with Catherine, who while living several miles away (closer to the city) made regular visits to Albert on the excuse that he needed tending-to since Teresa was no longer there for him. Catherine wove me into her schedule between school and caring for Albert and we took advantage of the many opportunities, when while Albert was out getting drunk at the bar after work, we would sneak into Albert’s guest bedroom and make- out. Catherine having already relinquished to me her virginity let go her inhibitions. Catherine liked to read dirty stories from Albert’s hidden stacks of pornographic magazines and afterwards we tried to replicate the fantasies of the stories as best we could while we made love. Catherine gave herself to me in every conceivable way. Back then, in the burgeoning exploration of our sexuality, in the midst of the sexual revolution, Catherine had a voracious sexual appetite. One time while Catherine and I were busy mussing up the sheets of Albert’s guest bedroom bed Albert walked in on us stinking drunk, a half-dollar size hole burned through the breast pocket of his work shirt, and just stood and talked to us as if he were interrupting a television show instead of two naked teenagers tearing one off. Albert rambled on for several minutes about the Cleveland Indians baseball team needing more starting pitching before Catherine sat up and faced him as though she were not naked and had not been caught in bed with me and coolly asked him how the hole had gotten burnt into his shirt. Albert said that his heart was burning with pain because he missed Teresa so much and that it must have burnt clean through the shirt. Then he walked out of our bedroom and into his own bedroom and collapsed into his bed. We did our best to contain our laughter afterwards, but even if it didn’t register to his whiskey laden brain he must have heard us. Albert died just a few weeks later, heartsick as he was, from having turned too often to alcohol to relieve the pain of his loss.
Albert’s funeral was a sad affair if only for the sparseness of its attendance. No more than a dozen people showed up for his wake which was arranged by Catherine’s parents.
Only a few of Albert’s coworkers paid their respects. As nice a man as Albert was he was obviously nothing more than wallpaper to the people with whom he worked and played.
Catherine and I had Albert’s house all to ourselves for almost a year after Albert’s death while the house was stuck in probate before its eventual sale. We lived a teenagers dream exploring each other’s bodies daily;
often through the night. It was almost as if we were married. And still, with all of the time we spent together, we never tired of each other’s company.
But as I sat in my car, Sarah fast asleep, waiting for Amber (my only transgression if truly it was a transgression in so many years of marriage) I could not help but to contemplate the possibilities. I wondered if Amber would actually cheat on her husband as Catherine had cheated on me. I wondered, given the pain I felt at Catherine’s transgressions, if I could do the same to Amber’s husband. I wondered if, after twelve months of build-up, if we would be disappointed in each other, Amber and I, if we did consummate our relationship. I still wasn’t sure of what she would look like. I had sent her an honest photograph of myself, but as for her I did not know. The only picture she had sent to me was a photograph taken of her, she said, several years earlier. In the photograph she was stunning, clad in a shoe-string bikini on a palm littered white-sand beach, her long blond hair cascading down past her shoulders and her curvaceous tanned body perfectly toned and sumptuously beaded with perspiration.
Amber and I had been talking for almost a year before the day I finally met her. Our first conversation was quite generic; a chance encounter in which I took an application from her for the liquidation of an investment by telephone. Had it not been me that Amber seduced it probably would have been someone else. During our first conversation she talked about how she wanted to withdraw some cash from an annuity in her husbands name because her husband never gave her any money and, she said, he never spent any money on her. After she had completed the application I told her that I would call her later in the day. A few minutes later she called me back. I thought perhaps she had wanted to alter her application. “No, I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
“Sure.” I said, thinking she probably wanted to know to whom she was entrusting her finances.
“What color is your hair?”
“Brown.” I thought it a strange question.
“What color are your eyes?” “Blue.” A stranger question still.
“Has anyone ever told you that you have a really sexy voice?”
“No.”
“Well you do.”
What does one respond to this? “Thank you for saying so.”
I heard her giggle nervously, as if working up her courage, “How big are you?” she said.
“What?” I thought perhaps I had misunderstood the question.
“I said how big is your prick?”
I paused, stunned by the audacity of her question, “I’m very good in that department, thank you.” I couldn’t help but to laugh uncomfortably as I felt my face warm with blush.
“Come on now, I know how all of guys measure them. How big is it?” she whispered in a low sultry southern whisper.
“I can’t really talk about it right now.” My cubicle was far from private. “Why don’t I call you during my lunch hour?”
“Do you promise?” “You have my word.”
Since our first conversation we must have spoken to one-another at least a few hundred times; sometimes to vent and sometimes to play; but more often than not just to talk, as friends do, and we seemed to have truly become friends. Amber’s sexual courage reminded me of Catherine’s uninhibited sensibility during our early years together. Sexually, Amber revived me from the dull and effortless love-making which the longevity of twenty-some years of marriage had ultimately reduced our intimacy to.
As regards my friendship with Amber, I came to know as much about her if not more than her husband could have possibly known. I think that the geographical span that divided us gave Amber the security of knowing that she could tell me literally anything without fear of repercussion. Her husband, as far as I could tell, was a conservative hard working but somewhat immature man who liked to control the purse strings among other things. He was adequate in bed, she said, but he was boring, preferring five minutes in the mercenary position followed by an orgasmic grunt and a nap. Amber was his untamed mare, a spirited girl a bit too wild and a bit too young for him. She had lived a hard life, molested by her father from the age of nine; she left home when she was just thirteen. She grew up in El Paso Texas and she migrated to the city of Dallas at the age of sixteen and she put the only asset she had to use: her body. She obtained a fake driver license which made her out to be eighteen and she went to work as a stripper. She used cocaine recreationally and made extra money on occasion by sleeping with the patrons of the strip-club when she did not find their physical appearance or their company too offensive. Charlie, her husband, was such a patron. He fell in love with her and married her, promising her eternal happiness, and he took her away to a secluded piece of land in Hutchinson Kansas where they built a home, had three children and lived a somewhat cloistered life, away from the bustling world with which she had become accustomed, and under the shadow of his mother’s rather large, as Amber described it, suspicious nose. Charlie’s mother smelled a rat, or so Amber said, since the moment she flared her nostrils in displeasure when Charlie first introduced Amber to his mother as his fiancée. It may have been that his mother was simply overprotective, as most mothers are, and felt that no woman was good enough for her son, or it may have been that Amber’s unabashed way with words had put Charlie’s mother onto the scent of the risqué life that Amber had been leading. Amber was a very forward girl and they clashed because, as Amber confided to me, “I’m not going to take her shit just because I married her son!”