"I worry to death that someday I'll get breast cancer. Or worse, cancer of the uterus. When I was in the life, I used to worry all the time about picking up a dose. I was lucky, but can you imagine what those poor girls have to worry about nowadays? I mean, gonorrhea or syphilis you can cure. But herpes is for life, and AIDS is for death. I never worried about cancer, though maybe I should have. I'm scared to death of it now because my mother died of cancer. Jewish women never get cancer of the uterus, you know, or at least not many of them, because Jewish men have their cocks circumsized, it's a shame I'm not Jewish. Uterine cancer is mostly a Gentile disease, it's from rubbing against a man's foreskin. But my mother died of cancer, so you see I could be prone to it. That's why I saved all those articles about breast cancer because who knows what might happen one day? Would you love me if I had only one breast?"
… and pictures of fashion models snipped from Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and Seventeen…
"When I was in the life, I used to dream of being a fashion model. They only get sixty, seventy dollars an hour, most of them, and I was getting sometimes three hundred an hour, but oh, how I used to dream of trading places with them. I used to pose in front of the mirror naked and practice standing the way models do. You have to stand differently, you know, like this sort of, with one foot in front and the hips sort of sideways. I have narrow hips, a plus for a fashion model, and small breasts, too."
"Your breasts aren't small," Willis said.
"Well, I'm not your earth-mother type, that's for sure," she said. "But thank you."
There was a whole file of material on World War I in the storeroom, including some 1919 copies of a newspaper she'd picked up in an antiques shop on Basington Street…
"Because, you know, that's a war that really fascinates me. All those men sitting out there in trenches, just looking across No Man's Land, with rats crawling all over everything, and jerking off and whatnot to while away the time. It wasn't like modern-day warfare at all, where people just drop bombs on each other. I hope they don't drop the big one, don't you? If they do, I hope we're in bed together. Do you know what I'd really like to do some day? Please don't laugh. I'd like to write a book about World War I. That's ridiculous, I know, I haven't got a shred of talent. But who knows?"
Her legacy from the years she'd spent in Buenos Aires was a command of the Spanish language that floored Willis, especially when she turned it loose on an unsuspecting Puerto Rican cab driver who—driving them back to the house after lunch out that Saturday—had the gall to take them a few blocks out of their way. She spoke the language fluently, colloquially, and obscenely as well, peppering her diatribe with directives such as "Vete el carajo" (which she told Willis meant "Go to hell"), and epithets like "hijo de la gran puta" and "cabeza de mierda," the latter causing the diminutive cabbie to come out from behind his wheel shouting some choice language of his own, both he and Marilyn squaring off in the middle of the street, nose to nose and toe to toe, screaming at each other like Carmen and an arresting army officer, while crowds gathered on the sidewalk and a uniformed cop looked conveniently the other way. In bed with Willis later that afternoon, she told him she'd only called the cabbie a shithead.
She was not, he discovered that weekend, much of a housekeeper.
A woman came in to clean for a few hours on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but between visits—as now—Marilyn let the house "return to the jungle," as she put it. The kitchen was total chaos. The sink was cluttered with dirty dishes, pots, and pans because Marilyn found it easier to use her entire supply and leave everything for the housekeeper to clean when she came in. The refrigerator was a brand new model, but the only things in it were several open containers of yogurt, a wilted head of lettuce and a slab of rancid butter. Marilyn explained that she rarely ate at home, or if she planned to it was easier and more healthful to stop in the grocery store on the Stem just two blocks south, to buy fresh produce or milk and eggs or whatever when she needed it, instead of letting it sit in the fridge. There was a pile of dirty clothing on the bedroom floor and even in the living room just inside the entrance door. Marilyn liked to take off her clothes the moment she came into the house, locking the door behind her, dropping blouse and skirt, or jumper and leotard, kicking off her shoes, wandering around in her panties. She explained that the house was very well protected from the street and no one could see in, and besides even if some guy in the park across the way happened to look up and spot her starkers, he wouldn't be seeing anything a hundred thousand other guys hadn't already seen.
"I'm sorry," she said at once. "Does that bother you?"
"Yes," he said.
"I promise I'll never mention the life again, I swear to God. But it's what I did, you know. For a long time."
"I know."
He was thinking lots of cops ended up marrying prostitutes; he wondered why.
He also wondered why marriage had popped into his mind.
On Sunday afternoon, they smoked pot together.
He'd never smoked pot in his life, though he knew other cops who did.
They were lying in bed together when she got up and went naked to one of the antique dressers. When she came back to the bed, she was carrying what appeared at first glance to be a pair of cigarettes.
"I don't smoke," he said.
"These are joints," she said, and of course, now that she extended them on the palm of her hand, he recognized them at once as marijuana.
"This is a joint," he said, grasping his erection.
"That's a joint for sure," she said, "but these are joints, too. Come on, sweetie, we're going to turn on."
"I'm turned on already," he said. "Witness the joint."
"Put that thing away for now," she said. "This is very good stuff, it'll make the sex even better."
"How can it possibly get better?"
"Well, don't you know?" she said, and then looked at him in surprise. "Haven't you ever smoked pot?"
"Never."
"Oh, goodie," she said, "a virgin! Come, let me teach you."
"I'm not sure I want to learn."
"Oh, come on," she said. "I'll bet even the Commissioner smokes pot."
"Maybe so, but…"
"It's only a little pot, Hal! Nobody's about to stick a needle in your arm."
"Well…"
"What you do is you take a very deep drag on it, much deeper than you would on a cigarette, and you swallow the smoke and hold it in for as long as you can."
"I've seen it done," he said drily.
"When you finally let out your breath," she said, "there shouldn't be anything but the tiniest trace of smoke left, okay?"
"Marilyn…"
"Just watch me, and stop being such a Goody-Two-Shoes. I'll take the first drag so you can see how it's done, and then I'll pass the toke to you. Please drag on it right away, Hal, because this is Acapulco Gold and not a Winston or a True."
She inhaled on the joint and handed it immediately to him. He took a deep drag and began coughing violently.
"Oh, my," she said, and clucked her tongue. "Try it again."
He tried it again. This time he didn't cough.
"Good. Now let me have it."
They passed the joint back and forth half a dozen times until it was scarcely more than a glowing little stub. Holding the roach between her thumb and forefinger, Marilyn sucked on it noisily and then dropped the coal in an ashtray on the bedside table.
"Evidence," she said. "In case you're planning a bust."
"I'm off duty," he said.
"Boy oh boy, are you!" she said. "How do you feel? Do you feel anything yet?"