“Fine,” she says shortly, and I wait until I see the light in her house go on before I drive off. It is a bad sign that Rainey’s reaction is so unsympathetic to Andy. Other than being much more liberal, Rainey shares many of the characteristics of the average Blackwell County juror: a middle-aged white female who has at least one child. If she thinks that Andy is in trouble, I suspect he is. I wish I knew the guy well enough for him to level with me. But maybe he has.
Can’t a black man try to help a white female without everyone thinking that sex is involved?
I turn into my driveway and walk into my stale, hot house.
Woogie stretches but does not get up to greet me as I turn on the light.
“The dog days of summer,” I say to him. He makes a squeaking sound that I take to be assent. I drink a beer and go to bed.
12
Kim Keogh’s apartment (only two blocks south of Rainey house) is much smaller than I had imagined and quite a bit funkier, too. In fact, it appears to be hardly more than a one-room efficiency. Maybe there is a bedroom, though from the couch where I am sitting I cannot identify which door leads to it. On the wall behind me, on each wall actually, are blown-up pictures of old-time movie stars: Marilyn Monroe, dark Gable, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, William Holden, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, but also current ones like Robert Redford, Cher, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, and my favorite, Michelle Pfeiffer.
We managed to do nicely at dinner-a seafood place on the Arkansas River, where she considerately declined my invitation to order lobster and instead had catfish and salad.
She talked mostly about herself (which is fine with me, since in the back of my mind I am worried she will try to pump me about Andy’s case). Despite Rainey’s snide comment about how well she conceals her makeup, she is gorgeous-beautiful blond hair and the longest natural eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a human. She is sitting encouragingly close to me on the couch, which is so slick it seems inevitable that we slide toward each other.
“I was going to be a model,” she says, sipping on a glass of white wine while I drink beer, ‘but I wanted to do something really meaningful with my life, you know what I mean?”
“Sure.” I nod, thinking that her ambition to be a TV anchor would be judged, when the big meltdown comes, hardly to have qualified, but there is no doubt this woman takes herself quite seriously. And for all I know, she may be the next Barbara Walters.
She is wearing a jade cotton jersey dress that comes modestly below her knees. There is something touching to me about ambitious women who are in fields where they are required to rely on their looks. She has said enough for me to realize she has enormous doubts about herself, and with good reason. She seems to sense that it is only a matter of time before someone notices a few wrinkles that can’t be hidden-and asks her to start filling in on the 6 a.m. farm show. I find myself giving her a pep talk about how much she has achieved already.
“Half the women in Arkansas would switch places with you in a New York minute,” I tell her.
“You’re beautiful, poised, and talented. What else do you want, for God’s sake?” I do not add intelligent, because it is apparent she is probably below average in this department which will probably be her professional death.
For this rhetorical question, she has already thought about an answer. She crosses her legs and balances her wine against a thigh.
“I’d like to be quicker, smarter,” she admits, “I don’t really understand a lot of the stories I cover,” she says.
I sip at the Coors she has brought me. There is a sad, sweet quality about her that is touching. I feel heat rising as if someone had lit a boiler under me. Women want so badly to be taken seriously and listened to it is almost embarrassing. I have promised myself that I will not get involved quickly with the next woman, but I hear myself lying, “You’re a lot brighter than you give yourself credit for. I’ve watched you too many times cover difficult stories not to believe that.”
She pats her lovely hair self-consciously and gives me a hopeful smile.
“Are you serious?”
As I gulp at my beer, trying to cool down, I look at the pictures on the opposite wall. Humphrey Bogart, Sally Fields.
She is living in la-la land. Please don’t do this to this woman, I tell myself. She doesn’t want to go to bed on the first date, but she will if I handle her right.
“You’re your own worst critic,” I say, putting my beer on the cheap coffee table in front of the couch. All her money must go into clothes, I think. This place is just short of a dump.
“They wouldn’t have hired you if they weren’t certain you could do the job.”
She puts the wineglass to her lips and finds it empty. I pour her some more from the beaded, sweaty bottle in front of us. Over the years I’ve found that it doesn’t matter if you look like an orangutan-all you really have to do is listen.
From her bedside table she reaches over and pulls open a drawer. I watch her right breast swing free as she strains to reach a brown envelope. I’ve had better sex the first time but not with anyone less inhibited. The alcohol must have loosened her up, because, until the last hour she has been almost ploddingly serious. The bottle she brought into the bedroom is almost empty. I am expecting marijuana, but instead she pulls from the packet a handful of pictures. Incredibly, they are of her naked in various poses.
She looks at me through the harsh glare of the lamp and says in a slurred voice, “I had these made when I was twenty. What do you think?”
She looks incredible-slim hips and small but attractive breasts which appear larger because of the way she is bending toward the camera. My immediate reaction is embarrassment, not arousal. I am too recently spent for that. Why is she showing me these? I look slowly through them. Was she trying out for Playboy or what? I have a slight headache from the six pack of beer I have drunk and rub my head. I say truthfully, “They’re stunning.”
She nods, her right hand stroking my back, the other holding the pictures up for her to see in the light.
“I think they’re good, too,” she says, her voice sodden with the liquor.
Finally, I understand why she has shown me these pictures. She is almost pathetically insecure. Somehow, she considers the photographs are proof of her value. I say, “No matter what happens, you ‘ll have proof what a knockout body you have.”
She tosses the pictures onto the table instead of putting them back into their envelope. She smiles and rests her head on my chest.
“How’d you know that?” she says.
“My body works a lot better than my mind.”
I stroke her hair, noticing that Rainey was right. This close I can see her makeup.
“The old mind body problem,” I say. I am a little drunk myself.
She reaches down and peels off my condom and holds it up for us to inspect. Waving it over my head like a pennant, she says, “Wanna hear a joke?”
Fearful that she is going to spill my jism onto my head, I lean back but say quickly, “Yeah.”
She pulls the condom down and rests it on her pubis. “You know what the rubber said to the diaphragm?”
I pat her right thigh.
“Naw, what did it say?”
She turns her head and smiles crookedly at me.
“Was it good for you, too?”
I begin to laugh and find I can’t stop, shaking the bed and her body in the process. The truth of the joke has struck some nerve I can’t begin to understand about my own life. I guess the joke works because our protection against each other has become the most important element in the equation.
At some level we have become merely matchmakers for our own technology. I glance across the room, noticing again that the largest picture she has in her bedroom is a picture of herself. It is enormous, an eleven by fourteen, probably a promo by her employer. Kim Keogh, the latest and prettiest member of the Channel 11 news team. I wonder but do not have the courage to ask if she has had her name changed.