9
Gosh, I’m sorry,” she gasped, pulling away from me in confusion. “You must think I’m awful. I don’t even know why I did that.”
“An instinctive reaction to danger escaped?” I suggested. “A kind of inherited reflex. The male rescues the female from danger, and saves the woolly mammoth cutlets, and the female repays him with a sexual display.” I added, after a pause, “I’m sure it was nothing personal,” hoping the opposite. She just stared at me. I opened the door to the building. “Are you all right? You’re not hurt?”
“A little bruised. And my knees are scraped. Ow!” At this, she staggered against me, trembling.
“We’re three flights up,” I said and put my arm around her shoulders. “Can you walk?”
“I don’t know. I just went all weak in the knees.”
“It’s the adrenaline. Here, let me help you.” With that I picked her up in the approved carrying-over-threshold manner and ascended the stairs. She slumped against me and did not object. Myself, I was still dizzy from the kiss.
I settled her on a sofa, supplied us both with a cognac, and went to fetch my first-aid kit and a plastic bag of ice. She had removed her ruined panty hose and had her skirt hitched up to expose her naked thighs. I gave her the ice bag to use on whichever of her bruises seemed most to need it while I bathed and dressed her knees as I had learned to do long ago in the army. I had to lean fairly close in order to pick out the tiny pieces of street debris. The erotic charge I received from this labor was nearly too much to bear, my face there close to, inches from, her delicious thighs, these lolling slightly open to enable my ministrations. I imagined she felt this too, but she said nothing, and I was able, just, to keep from diving headfirst into the shadow of that hitched-up skirt. I suppose I wished to hang a little longer under that delicious tension, something I got to enjoy when I was courting Amalie, and which we have most of us lost in this era of copulation lite.
She didn’t speak while I worked on her. When the dressing was complete, she thanked me and asked, “What did you do to that guy? Some kind of judo?”
I answered that I was a stranger to any martial art, but simply very strong, and I explained why. She took this in without comment and asked if I knew any of the muggers.
“No, of course not. Did you?”
“No, but I thought one of them was the same one who was watching me the other day, the big one who you hit over the head with his friend. It looked like the same SUV too. They were speaking Russian, weren’t they?”
“I believe so. I don’t speak it myself, but I go to a gym run by a Russian and I hear the language a lot. And you had that man on the phone with an accent…”
At this Miranda twisted her body so that she faced the back of the sofa and clutched a throw pillow over her head. Muffled sounds emerged.
Is this level of detail important? What does it matter at the present remove what one person said to another? For the record: she cried, I comforted her. And yes, I am enough of a cad to seduce a woman in an extreme state of dependent panic. She sighed and fell against me, her mouth against my neck. I scooped her up and carried her into my daughter’s bedroom. I put her on the bed and carefully removed her clothes-blouse, skirt, bra, underpants-she not helping much but not objecting either. I have to say that it was not, despite my ardor, anywhere near the Top 40, not remotely in the same class as Amalie, although their bodies were remarkably similar, the musculature and structure of the limbs, the pointed pink nipples.
Miranda lay not exactly comatose but as one in a dream, eyes closed. Something was going on, because she was making those little puffings with her lips that some women do when they are experiencing sexual pleasure, and she did that head-coming-up-off-the-pillow thing a few times, with her wide brow furrowed, as if in quiz-show concentration. In the end she made a sharp single cry, like a small dog hit by traffic. Then she rolled over without a word and seemed to go to sleep, in the manner of a guy married for years.
On the other hand, the first one is occasionally a dud. I kissed her on the cheek (no response) and covered her with a duvet. In the morning, I heard the shower go on early, and when I arrived in the kitchen she was there, fully dressed, looking fresh, asking if we could stop for a new pair of panty hose. No comment on the sexual events of the previous night and none of that familiarity of the body one more or less expects after a fuck of whatever quality. Nor did I raise the subject at that time.
I must have drifted off because it is light and my watch says it is after six in the morning. There is a thick fog on the lake and dew gleams on every leaf and needle of the trees. The risen sun is only a bright pink glow in the clouds over the eastern shore of the lake. Very strange and unearthly, like being inside a pearl. My pistol is broken open on the desk, the magazine removed and the seven bright 9 mm Parabellum rounds are lined up next to it like toy soldiers. I have no memory of doing this. Could I have done it in my sleep? Perhaps I’m going slightly nuts, from the tension and the lack of sleep and from my perfectly fucked-up life. Seven rounds. There were originally eight.
You know, you read in the paper about people who have a firearm in the house and the kid gets hold of it and does something awful, the lesson being that kids will always find the gun, no matter how carefully the parent has hidden it, but as far as I know none of us ever found our mother’s Pistole-08, none of us even knew she had it. I suppose she was a genius at concealment, a trait her children have inherited to an extent. My siblings don’t know I have it, or perhaps they are themselves concealing this knowledge. It took some doing, since technically it is an unlicensed weapon, but those with connections can usually get what they want in the city of New York, and at the time of my mother’s death I was working for one of these, a fine legal gentleman named Benjamin Sobel. When I explained the situation to him he arranged for the police to return the thing to me, although I did not expatiate upon its provenance. A valuable souvenir of the war, I explained, that could be sold to pay for the funeral expenses. But I didn’t sell it, and the expenses were slight. Paul was in jail, and Miri was off on someone’s yacht, and so it was a small band of strangers at the cheap funeral home, some people from her church and her work at the hospital, and me; her priest did not show, I assume because of the circumstances of the death, one of the sins for which I have not been able to forgive my church.
I kept her ashes in a tin can in my apartment until I got my first job and then I bought her a slot in a community mausoleum at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, not too far from Albert Anastasia, Joey Gallo, and L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, so she’s in good company. I believe I have forgiven her, although how does one really tell? I have never figured that part out. I know she was making a point because she knew I was on my way back to Brooklyn that Saturday afternoon. As the Official Good Son, I often submitted to mass at St. Jerome’s, preceded and followed by heavy Teutonic dinners and evenings of TV or cards. This particular Saturday, she had actually put the dinner on, sweet and sour tongue with dumplings, one of my favorites actually, and its odor filled the apartment as I walked into the kitchen and found her. She had arranged the chair she sat in just so and spread newspapers all around so as not to make a mess when she put the muzzle in her mouth.