Joe unzips the gym bag, hands her the bottle of scotch, and she asks as if she already knows, “What else you got in that bag, Joe?”
“Whataya mean, what else? Gym stuff.”
“Whew! Smells like your athletic supporter’s got balls of scomorza,” Marisol says. “But what do I know about the secret lives of jockstraps.”
Joe looks at her and laughs. She always could break him up, and not many beautiful women dare to be clowns. Capri was funny like that, too, and no matter who he’s with he misses her. Where’s Capri now, with who, and are they laughing? Marisol laughs, then quenches her laughter with a belt of scotch and turns to be kissed, and Joe kisses her, expecting the fire of alcohol to flow from her mouth into his, but it’s just her tongue sweeping his.
“What?” Marisol says.
“I thought you were going to share.”
“Dahlink,” she says in her Zsa Zsa accent, “you don’t remember I’m a swallower?”
Joe remembers. Remembers a blow job doing eighty down the Outer Drive on the first night he met her at the Surf, a bar on Rush where she worked as a cocktail waitress; remembers the improv theater he’d go see her in at a crummy little beatnik space in Old Town where sometimes there were more people onstage than in the audience; just say something obscene about Ike or Nixon or McCarthy and you’d get a laugh — shit, he laughed, too. He remembers the weekend right after he got the Bluebird when they dropped its top and drove the dune highway along the coast of Indiana to Whitey’s so-called chalet on the lake, water indigo to the horizon, and night lit by the foundries in Gary.
“So, luvvy, is here where we’re spending our precious time?” Marisol asked, turning on the radio.
Joe shifted through the gears as if the alleys were the Indianapolis Speedway and pulled up to Bruno’s. He left Marisol in his idling car, singing along with Madame Butterfly on the opera station, while he ran in for a fifth of Rémy, her drink of choice, then brought her back to his place.
“Where’s all the sheets and towels?” she asked. “Joe, how the bloody hell can you live like this?”
“They’re at the Chink’s. I been meaning to get them, but I been busy.”
“You better watch it before you turn into an eccentric old bachelor, luv. I think maybe you’re missing a woman’s touch.”
That was all she had to say, touch, and they were on the bare mattress.
Her blouse, an old white shirt of his, came undone, and he pressed his face to her breasts, anointed with layers of scent, lavender, jasmine, areolas daubed with oil of bergamot, nipples tipped with a tincture of roses. He recalled the single time she’d invited him to her place on Sedgwick and how, in her bedroom, a dressing table cluttered with vials and stoppered bottles smelled like a garden and looked like the laboratory of a witch. Touch, she said, and he straddled her rib cage, thrusting slicked with a bouquet of sweat, spit, and sperm between perfumed breasts she mounded together with her hands. A woman’s touch.
When he woke with Marisol beside him it was night and his room musky with her body — low tide beneath the roses. An accordion was playing. It sounded close, as if someone in the alley below was squeezing out a tune from long ago. “Hear that?” he asked, not sure she was awake.
“They’re loud enough to wake the dead,” Marisol said. “When I was little I used to think they were bats and their squawks were the sonar they flew by.”
“I didn’t mean the nighthawks,” Joe said. “Those new mercury vapor lights bring the bugs and the bugs bring the birds. Supposed to cut down muggings. Or at least line the pockets of a few contractors. I had to buy fucking venetian blinds to sleep.”
“You need earplugs, too,” Marisol said. She rose from the dark bed and crossed through the streaky bluish beams, then raised the blinds. The glare bestowed on her bare body the luster of a statue. “Liking the view in the vapor lights?” she asked. “Ever think of a window as an erogenous zone?”
“Always the exhibitionist,” Joe said. “But why not? You’re beautiful as a statue.”
“Statues are by nature exhibitionists, even when they’ve lost their arms or boobs or penises. Where’s your mirror? I want to watch statues doing it in mercury vapor.”
“No mirror.”
“You don’t have a mirror? Don’t tell me — it’s at the Chink’s.”
“It’s in the alley.”
“That’s a novel place to keep it. I may be an exhibitionist but I’m not going to screw in the alley.”
“It’s broken.”
“Seven years’ bad luck, Joe. Poor unlucky bloke doesn’t get to watch the statues with their shameless minds.”
“Allora!” Joe said. “It’s not that broke.”
He went down the back stairs into the alley. The mirror was still where he’d set it beside a trash can. April’s morning-glory dress was gone; some size-six bag lady must have had a lucky day. The mirror no longer appeared to be cracked, as if it had healed itself. It reflected an arc light. Nighthawks screeched. No one was playing an accordion in the alley, not that Joe thought there would be, but he could still hear it, a song he’d heard as a child, something about blackbirds doing the tango that his grandpa played on Sundays when he’d accompany scratchy 78s on his red accordion. Joe listened, trying to identify the open window from which the song wafted. Every window was dark. The music was coming from his window. He saw the flare of a lighter, and a silhouette with its head at an awkward angle, gazing silently down at him.
Marisol was still at the window, smoking a reefer, her back to him, when he returned to the room. “You didn’t get mugged. See, those new streetlights must be doing their job,” she said.
He propped the mirror against the wall.
“I’ll share,” she said, and exhaled smoke into his mouth. He felt her breath smoldering along the corridors of his mind. She handed him the reefer, and the crackle of paper as he inhaled echoed off the ceiling. “That paper’s soaked in hash oil,” she said. The accordion pumped louder, as if it tangoed in the next room. Lyrics surfaced in his mind and dissolved back into melody. “E nell’oscurita ognuno vuol godere … in the darkness everyone wants pleasure.” When he opened his eyes, he could see in the dark. “L’amor non sa tacere … love can’t keep silent …” She was in his arms, and he smoothed his hands over her shoulders, down her spine, over her hips, lingering on and parting the cheeks of her sculpted ass.
“Have any oil?” she whispered.
“What kind of oil?”
“Like you don’t want me that way. Almond oil, baby oil, bath oil, Oil of Olay, Vaseline if that’s all you got.”
“Hoppe’s Number Nine,” he said.
“That’s a new one on me.”
He gestured with the reefer to the bottle in the ashtray next to the Old Spice on the bureau top. She picked it up and sniffed. By the lighter’s flame, she read the label aloud: “‘Do not swallow. Solvent frees gun bores of corrosive primer fouling and residue. Preserves accuracy.’ Jesus, Joe! Don’t you have some good, old-fashioned olive oil? What-a kinda Day-Glo are you?”
“Maybe in the kitchen,” Joe said.
Brandishing the lighter like a torch, she went to the kitchen. Joe waited on the bed, listening to the accordion playing with the mesmerizing intensity that marijuana imparts to music … “Love can’t keep silent and this is its song … la canzon di mille capinere … the song of a thousand blackbirds …” when Marisol screamed. “God, what am I stepping in? What’s leaking out of your fridge, Joe? You have a body in there?”