“Up there,” she says. “Way up there? The eighty-fourth floor? That’s my office.”
She looks amazed.
“I can see you from there,” she says, and turns to him. Her teeth are very white, her skin receding into the obscure light. “Anyway, I can see your roof.”
She looks up at him, and he puts a hand on her waist, and she eases into him like a partner in a slow dance. Slowly, he kisses her brow, her cheek, her lips. Her breasts are hard against his chest. He can feel her belly pressing against his own. He inhales the soapy smell of her wiry African hair.
In the dark bedroom, a floor below the Studio, they lie together for a long while, her body pressed against his, her head on his chest. Her breathing slows into comfort, and his follows. She is wordless, and he feels that speaking would be an intrusion. He hears the ticking of a clock that sounds like the drip of a water tap. Away off, the city murmurs through the thick drapes. Finally she rises on one elbow and gazes at him, holding the sheet to her body.
“Who are you, anyway?” she says.
“I was thinking the same thing about you.”
She giggles, then sits up, Cormac thinking: Don’t go, not yet.
“Where’s the john?” she says.
She demands the tour and he gives it to her, the two of them barefoot in terry-cloth bathrobes, Cormac flicking on lamps as they pad across scattered rugs and polished plank. She looks smaller now, without shoes, engulfed by the robe. She examines the first floor as if it were a museum, her eyes moving over the long rows of tall bookshelves, the paintings, the African masks, the yellow vellum lampshades and Moroccan rugs. He hopes she doesn’t say Have you read all these books? She doesn’t. Her feet splay on the hardwood floors as she touches the polished top of the dining table, the brocaded Mexican fabrics of the chairs, the silver candelabra. They can both hear rain now spattering the four windows on the Duane Street end, the second stage of an early storm, coming in hard off the harbor. She stops to examine herself in a large white-and-gold mirror, a hand going to her rain-exploded hair, which now looks like a black wiry halo. He stands behind her, his own flesh pale beside her. He wraps his arms around her and then fumbles with the knot of the robe until it opens.
He sees his own pale hand gently holding a dark-skinned breast, and her head leaning back into him, lips parted, and his hand moving down to her belly.
To the twin spirals.
They are there. Traced lightly, delicately on her skin, facing each other like enraptured sea serpents.
His heart bumps and bumps and he is sure she must hear it and feel it. They are here: She is the dark lady with the spirals. His fingertips trace their outlines, their wide bottoms vanishing into the thick black vee of her pubic hair. She pushes back into him, and must feel his hardening.
“Are they disgusting to you?” she says.
“They’re beautiful,” he says.
“Hold me tight,” she says.
Later, rising from the floor, she tightens the robe and walks to the kitchen. He is relieved: She doesn’t review her own performance. Or his. She opens the refrigerator, which holds a bowl of fresh green grapes and some oranges, picks a crisp grape, munches it, grabs a handful, then takes a bottle of water and closes the door. She finishes the grapes, takes an amused swig from the bottle, sloshes the water in her mouth, swallows. Then she moves slightly to her left, peering down the corridor like a cat who has arrived in a new place: alert, poised, wary of danger.
“This is beautiful,” she says.
“It’s comfortable,” Cormac says, sounding to himself like a real estate salesman. “I like being here.”
She looks directly at him, her eyes liquid. “Me too.”
He leads her up the stairs again to the Studio, to the view of the Woolworth Building and the Twin Towers, all misty in rain. He opens the small refrigerator and she takes an icy bottle of Evian and hands it to him. Now she sees the desk, the computer, the television set, the CD player. The door to the Archive is closed. As is the door to the bathroom and the jacuzzi. Cormac thinks: I could paint you just like this, in that terry-cloth robe.
“I never met anyone rich before,” she says, and giggles.
“I’m not rich.”
“Come on: A place like this costs a mint.”
“Not when I got it,” he says. “It was just a dump then.”
Hoping she doesn’t ask what year. Hoping she doesn’t ask where he got the money. She doesn’t. She leans back against a bookcase full of large volumes on Mexico and Italy and other places he has never seen. She takes another gulp of water. For a long silent moment, he can feel her staring at him, can feel shapeless questions traveling in the air between them. Cormac thinks: If she asks, I might even answer.
And then to himself, and to her, he says, “I’m alive.”
That night he dreams of swimming in a vast sea, his body making wide spirals in the water, curving, turning, the forms remaining in his wake. When he finishes cutting spirals with his body, they glow against the dark waters. Something comes from beneath him, bumping, pushing him.
He awakes in sweat and tears.
The clock tells him that it’s 8:48. She’s gone into the gray morning. He is not surprised. He is, in fact, relieved. There is nothing more clumsy than the talk on the morning after the first night before. He turns in the bed, inhaling the mixed scents of her body. He pulls a pillow close to his chest. He hears church bells ringing beyond the drapes.
He walks south on Broadway in the Sunday-morning quiet, passing shuttered stores and tourists with unfolded maps and white shoes. At the Battery, he goes to the final iron railing, where he can hear the languid slapping of the sea. Images of Delfina move through him. A warm breeze brings him the salt of the harbor. He watches a Nigerian tanker heading for the open sea. A squadron of gulls wheels above the tanker, completes a swift reconnaissance, and angles away toward Governor’s Island.
They are there, Cormac thinks. The spirals are there. I’ve traced them with my tongue.
His heart quickens and he turns from the harbor and walks toward South Street, where he can sit at a breakfast table and see the masts of a sailing ship.
94.
She calls him about six. She is shy at first, holding back, uttering banalities, talking around what happened between them. Then he hears her inhaling a cigarette. She is abruptly more direct.
“My tattoos didn��t disgust you?” she says.
“Not at all. They’re kind of beautiful.”
She laughs. “Kind of.”
“Like sea serpents. Or snakes in a Hindu temple.”
“I’ve never seen a sea serpent. Or a Hindu temple.”
“Neither have I. But I’ve got a book down the hall—”
“I want you to show it to me. Soon.”
“Soon.”
She pauses, and her voice flattens.
“I got them to make myself disgusting.”
Cormac says nothing.
“I wanted to scare men away,” she says, taking a deep drag, exhaling slowly. “I’d fucked too many of them and didn’t want to fuck another. And I thought, Shit, even if I want to give in, you know, some night with too much to drink, or too filled up with loneliness, or anger, or hatred, I thought, If I can scare them with something, their cocks will die.” She likes using the hard, blunt Anglo-Saxon words, talking “street,” letting Cormac know which version of Delfina Cintron is now talking. “It was like wearing a sign that said, ‘Beware of the cunt.’ ”
Cormac wants to laugh, but doesn’t. In her way, she’s letting him know that she will take sex when she chooses to have it, but she will not be hurt. He listens to the words beyond the hardness.