“We’re going in different directions,” she said. “You’re running into the dark and I’m running away from it. I tried to be cool with you before, I was honest, I told you what you wanted to know, so why are you fucking with me now?”
“I’m not fucking with you, Claudia. I…”
She glanced at my wedding ring. “Go home to your wife, Plato.”
“My wife’s not at home.”
Her dark eyes blinked at me through the candlelight. “What do you think I’m running here, a lonely hearts club?”
“I’m sorry to just show up like this,” I said. “I just…”
“You just what? Jesus H., you got any complete sentences going on tonight?” Claudia stood up, holding the towel tight against her chest. “You think you can just come strolling in here like Joe Stud and fuck me, is that it? Or you just slumming tonight, out for some cheap thrills? Wife’s gone and you’re all fucked up, so what the hell, me being a used up old junkie whore and all I’d have nothing better to do than to put my legs in the air for you, right? Man, what a lifesaver, thanks for coming by.”
“It’s not like that, I—”
“Get out.” She moved out from behind the coffee table. “Just get out.”
“I only want to talk.”
“No you don’t.”
I stood staring at her, still dripping like some pitiful lost puppy wandered in from the storm. I had never felt so ridiculous, and never quite so alone. “Did Bernard ever come here?” I asked.
She left the candle behind on the coffee table and joined me outside the light. “Yeah, a few times. So what? Why?”
We were standing so close I could hear her breathing. “Do you ever still feel him?”
She closed her eyes as if hopeful that not seeing me might mean I was really no longer there. “I don’t feel much of anything anymore.”
“Claudia—”
“Just get out and leave me alone.”
“Drop that wall a minute and let me talk to—”
“It’s a good wall, a sturdy wall. Been building it for years. It keeps me safe.”
“It keeps you numb,” I told her. “I know because I’ve been behind one for years too.”
“Better to be numb than in pain.”
“At least if you’re in pain you know you’re alive.”
“You don’t have to be alive to feel pain.” Her eyes glistened. “The dead feel it too.” She walked away and mumbled, “Get out.” But as she slipped into the hallway she allowed her towel to loosen, and it fell open to reveal her bare back and the curve of her buttocks in the faint candlelight.
I followed her. The hallway was short and narrow and led first to a bathroom that was filled with lit candles placed around the tub and on the sink and counter. I hesitated in the doorway, but she was not there, so I continued on to the bedroom at the end of the hall. A handful of candles burned here as well but did little to combat the darkness. The only furniture was a bureau and an old unmade bed, the sheets in a heap near the foot. Over the bed was a framed but faded black and white poster of Billie Holiday. The floor was bare. I stood just inside the room, watching the flames play in the night, illuminating what they chose to show me, including Claudia, standing beside the bed and still holding the towel in place in front of her.
Our eyes locked for what felt like hours, and though neither of us made a sound, countless words passed between us.
The towel fell to the floor in a twisting motion and lay at her feet.
An enormous black tattoo began at her left calf, wound upward, wrapped along her thigh and encircled her waist. It ended just below her navel, where it split in two. The forked tongue of a serpent, coiled around her, marking her.
Her pale skin contrasted with the dark hair on her head and between her legs, but the tattoo was so dominant it was difficult to look at anything else. She seemed smaller out of clothes, more petite and delicate, at ease and not nearly so tough. But the essence of her—the physically weathered essence—remained even in candlelight. The majority of scars Claudia had collected over the years were internal, but a handful lived in plain sight, material evidence of a brutal past sprinkled across her body.
She radiated a primordial animalism in her movements and stances, and even in her nakedness she possessed a raw and dangerous edge, a kind of unpredictability one might encounter in a tiger just released from its cage. I imagined her as sexually aggressive and wild, if not outright violent. Heart thudding, my eyes skulked across her body. When my eyes finally returned to hers, her face bore a look as alluring as it was defiant. “This is what you came here for, isn’t it?” she asked quietly.
I nodded.
“Do you even know why?”
“No,” I said.
“I can feel what you think.”
As could I, and it sickened me. I wanted to take her, to fuck her. Hard. I wanted to hurt and abuse her in every way the darkest corridors of my mind could conjure. I wanted to hear her scream. And I didn’t know why. My anger and fear was frothing, bubbling to the surface, and I wanted to take it out on her. Maybe because others had, maybe because I could, maybe because I imagined it was all she knew.
“I’ve never had thoughts like this,” I stammered.
“Yes you have. You just keep them bound like all good devils.”
“They’re not me. They’re not who I want to be.”
“They’re not who any of us wants to be.”
There is instinct, and there is judgment.
I crossed the room in two long strides. My hands were suddenly in her hair, pulling her into me. Our lips met, and as I held her against me our tongues entangled and her hands slid up my chest and onto my shoulders, grasping me there with surprising strength before she broke the kiss and pushed me away. Nearly out of breath, I kissed her again. She tasted of cigarettes and rainwater. She cupped my face and looked up at me in a manner I had not until then thought her capable of. Deep inside her shreds of innocence still remained, vulnerability and need. “Not so rough,” she whispered. “Slower… gently. Like this, it’s better like this.” Her lips brushed mine, and her tongue softly traced my bottom lip before slipping into my mouth.
Still locked in our embrace, I lifted her from the floor, and the violence and madness left me like blood flowing from a fresh wound. In its wake lay the simple beauty of passion, of two scared and lonely people pooling their sorrow, trading it in for tenderness, for a chance to be safe and wanted and loved and needed unconditionally and totally, even if only for a short while.
At that very moment, I thought of Toni. But as Claudia wrapped her legs and arms around me, the thought retreated, leaving us alone.
There, in the dark.
CHAPTER 31
I met Toni in high school and immediately thought she was the sweetest, most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Cynical even for a teen, the instant and often overwhelming love we felt for each other surprised me, but like most couples that meet and commit in high school, our relationship was very intense. The highs were amazingly high, the lows amazingly low—a typical stormy romance—and not long after graduation we were forced to make a decision. Either we stayed together and got married, or went our separate ways as a test of our relationship, and ultimately, ourselves. If our love was real and meant to be, our theory concluded, then we’d end up together eventually anyway. Although it was painful for us, we decided the best move was to split up and see other people for a while. Little did we realize three years later we’d be back together and engaged, and that a year after that we’d be married. In the time we were apart both of us dated and slept with other people, but since our engagement I hadn’t been with anyone other than Toni.