“I like you, so I’m nice.” He shrugged.
“But I didn’t think you would be that way.”
“What did you think?”
“I thought … I don’t know. I was afraid that you might be like, I had already invited you, given you permission.”
“You haven’t done that.”
“No, but I thought maybe just making it personal and not business might make you think in a different way. You know, about me.”
“Do you wish it had?”
“No. Not then. Maybe I do a little bit now, though. Just a little.”
He kissed her again, and this time the atmosphere had changed. At first the change was so slight and gradual she might have thought she had imagined it, but this time there was no pulling back to talk, no pause or hesitation. In a short time he was removing her blouse and then unzipping and pulling off the black uniform shorts, then peeling off the shiny pantyhose, and then she was naked. The kissing and touching went on for a long time, and as it went on, at some point he finished removing his clothes too.
After a few minutes he could tell she knew there was a problem. She waited and appeared to be expecting nothing more to happen, as though the problem would solve itself, but Kapak could feel that he was doomed. He said, “I’m sorry.”
She sat up straight. “Just a second.” She got off the couch and disappeared into the bathroom. She returned with a glass of water and a blue pill.
“What’s that?”
“It’s medicine. Take it and it will make things nicer. You won’t be sorry”
“It’s Viagra, isn’t it? What if I have an erection that lasts four hours?”
“I don’t think you have much to worry about.” She smiled.
He took it and squinted at it suspiciously. “Where did you get it?”
“Someone I know bought it online. I can tell you it’s real, and I know it works.”
“On who?”
“None of your business.”
He put the pill on his tongue and washed it down with the water, looking at her as he drank it. She took the glass, turned, and walked off. He followed her to the bathroom, where he found her running water into an oversized tub. She got in while it was filling, poured a little bubble bath in, and beckoned to him. “Get in with me.”
He stepped into it, facing her. “This is a really big tub.”
“It’s one of the reasons I chose this apartment. I always thought I would bring a man in here. It never happened until now.”
He sat in the water, and they found that they could both fit if he kept his legs straight, and she put hers over his. After a few minutes she straddled his thighs and leaned forward to kiss him. They stayed that way for a time, and then she said, “I think it’s time to get out, don’t you?”
“Yes.” He looked down and cleared some of the suds from the surface of the water. “How long will this last?”
“Long enough. Don’t talk now.”
They dried off and went into the bedroom. In concentrating on Sherri, Kapak almost immediately forgot that it was the medicine that had changed everything, and not some return of his youth. Then he forgot everything but her. She seemed to him tonight to be a composite and holder of the best qualities of all the women he had slept with when he was young: his wife, Marija; Ava the thirty-year-old whore he had paid with stolen money when he was fifteen and visited on the way home from school every day; the college girls in Budapest. She seemed to him to be a gift—maybe the final gift—the universe letting him remember why its creatures fought so hard to be alive.
Afterward, Sherri lay with her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and slept. He lay there staring at the ceiling of the unfamiliar little bedroom. He didn’t want to move because if he did, she might not come back to his shoulder. He lay still for a long time, and while he thought, he began to feel the sensation. It wasn’t exactly pain, just an uneasy awareness that something inside his chest wasn’t right. It was almost a sadness. This was happening too late, after he had gotten old.
It didn’t go away. He started to feel short of breath. It was as though each breath he took was more difficult, and when he exhaled, a belt tightened on his chest so the next breath would be shallower. Then there was a feeling as though weights were being piled on his chest. “Sherri.” He had to take two breaths before he could say it again, so he touched her foot with his and said it louder. “Sherri!”
“What?” She lifted her head and brought her face closer.
“Something’s wrong. It’s in my chest. I’ve got to go to a hospital.”
She got up quickly. She found his clothes and tossed them on the bed beside him. “All right. I’m going to drive you to Valley Presbyterian. It’s the closest, and it’s big enough to have a lot of doctors on duty.” She drew back the covers and crawled onto the bed beside him. “I’ll help you put on your clothes. If something hurts, just tell me.”
“It’s like a tightness. Hard to breathe.”
She dressed him efficiently, and then threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. They walked out into the living room. As he passed the couch where they had been sitting, everything looked different. The clear sides of the half-empty bottle of Armagnac had a film that looked sticky and nauseating. The uniform he had taken off Sherri was still lying crumpled on the floor. She snatched up her purse, led him to the top of the exterior staircase, and said, “Wait here.”
He gripped the railing and stood still, watching her lock the door, then run down the stairs to pull her Volvo out of the garage, then run back up to him. “Feel any different?”
“No.” But he did. Besides the tightness in his chest, or maybe because the tightness had gone on for a time and made his muscles tense, it hurt. And time was part of the discomfort. Everything seemed to take an eternity. He let her help him down the stairs and into the passenger seat of her Volvo. She ran around the car and drove.
She drove with care all the way to the emergency room of Valley Presbyterian Hospital. He sat in tense immobility on the end chair of four that were connected, while she talked to the receptionist, then the triage nurse, and then some kind of clerk who handled insurance matters. As soon as she had her back turned, people came and sat down beside him on the row of chairs. Every one of them sat by simply releasing the tension in their knees and letting their buttocks drop a foot or so onto the chair. Each time it happened, Kapak would be jolted suddenly, his muscles would contract, and the pain would increase.
Finally, to nobody in particular, he announced loudly, “I’m having a fucking heart attack.” All conversation in the room stopped while everyone looked at him. It was still a wait before the nurse called him into an examining room off the hallway, let him lie on a gurney, took his vital signs, gave him two aspirin, and disappeared. By then he had lost his sense of time. Sometime later another nurse took blood for a test, and he fell asleep. A young woman doctor in a long white lab coat appeared after that and spoke to him.
“Well, Claudiu, how do you feel now?”
“Like a crap sandwich.”
She hesitated. “Crab?”
“Never mind. It doesn’t seem to hurt as much, but I feel this weird pressure on my chest. Did I have a heart attack?”
She looked uncomfortable. “We looked at the test, and it’s inconclusive. There’s an enzyme we test for. If you haven’t had a heart attack, there’s no enzyme in your blood. If you did, there is. You had a tiny amount, so we can’t really be sure. A cramp in the esophagus feels exactly like a heart attack. If you had one it was small. It was like a warning.”
“A warning?”
“Your age is a risk factor for heart disease. So is your weight, and the fact that you get no exercise, and probably the cholesterol, fat, and sodium in your diet.”
“So what happens now?”