“OK?”
“OK.” I gazed at her. “You know, I wasn’t sure we were going to see each other again,” I said. I tried to say it lightly, but my voice shuddered as I spoke.
“You knew we would.”
“Yeah, no, you seemed equivocal.”
“I’m a married woman, birdbrain.”
I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed, lightly. She fell back, giggled.
“Why would I write him a note?” she said, returning to the subject. I put my hands on her thighs. “Or is it because I’m a journalist you figured I’d want to, what? Document it?” I straightened my fingers so that the heels of my hands and my thumbs were pressing against her thighs and then moved them slowly up and in. “Or because you’re a writer? Write a note, explain everything.” I put my fingertips on the thin band of flesh that had appeared between the waist of her jeans and the hem of her blouse, moved them up and under the blouse, felt smooth skin and the ridged swell of her rib cage. “It’s like when someone commits suicide. They always ask did he leave a note.” I moved my hands back out from under her blouse and placed them on either side of her torso, put one knee on the bed between her thighs, and leaned over her to kiss her. She grabbed me by the hair and pulled me toward her. For a few minutes it was all tumble and sprawl, friction of clothes against skin, seams twisting the wrong way and digging in, gasps and moans. It was different than it had been in the car — that had been tender and tentative. Here it was clear that a decision had been reached, that all second thoughts would be afterthoughts. I reared back and pulled off my sweater and turtleneck, then helped her remove the blouse. Beneath it she wore a red brassiere, and she sat up to unhook it. I pushed her back down. I wanted to sustain the intermediary stage, half exalted flesh, half responsible grown-ups ready to swing ourselves into business casual and head off to more upright pleasures. But my taste for the intermediary waned as quickly as my initial hesitancy. Her torso was warm and sleek, with uncanny musculature, not worked-out but toned and responsive under the stretched buttery surface. I reached for her waist and undid her jeans, worked them off, slipping, for comic effect, off the edge of the bed onto the carpeted floor and bringing the pants with me. She raised herself on her elbows, an amused smirk on her face. She wore a red satin thong, something I might have found corny in the abstract but here, now, it was the thing I had been put on earth to witness, these sculpted thighs and this plump crotch made salient by the grace note of these panties, the few wiry black pubic hairs spiking above their waistband, the stomach that sprang back from the touch like a freshly baked cake. I bent and undid my shoes, kicked them off, then removed my pants, revealing the dumb familiar sight of my erection holding the fabric at the front of my boxers aloft like a tent pole. Her face had lost the smirk and become candid with anticipation; the playground face that wants, risks, takes, loses; forgets risk and loss to want again. She took my dick and pulled me toward her.
WE STOOD UNDER the shower, bunched up at one corner of the tub as the pulsating spray of the massaging head buffeted us. I had my hands on her shoulders and was kissing her, but I was spent, a deep, satisfied exhaustion that required only the burrow of kind words and sleep. Or so I thought. Kat reached down and grabbed the bar of hotel soap from the dish, removed the paper wrapper from it.
“Ugh,” she said, her voice reverberant in the close tiled space, “I hate this stuff. When you’re close enough to get below the fake patchouli and herbal scent, it always smells like you could clean an oven with it.”
She worked the bar in her hands, building up a lather, then began washing my dick, shampooing my pubic hair with the tips of the fingers of her right hand, almond eyes studying my face, her black hair slick and beaten down by the water. She put the soap back in the dish and began kneading me gently with both hands. I looked down, saw mostly her impossible body, its curves and angles, the prominence of the veins stretching from her pubis to her hip, ghostly and slightly green under the dark skin, but with weight, weight and texture. She had very prominent veins, I saw now, veins across her upper torso, her throat, encircling her forearms like old wisteria vines, massing on the backs of her hands. Flaw or miracle, who knew. I ran my hands from her shoulders down to her backside, hefted both cheeks slightly and then let them drop. She stepped to one side to allow the spray from the showerhead to rinse me off, and when it had, I removed the thing from the mount and adjusted it so that fat pulses of water rushed from the nozzle, felt the throb of the thing in my hand, lowered it to her crotch and pointed it at her clitoris, watching the flow of water against gravity, pooling bubbling in her dark pubic hair, then falling against the enameled metal of the tub floor, a solid concentrated drumming keeping time against the ostinato of liquid whining through pipe. Kat put her head back against the tiles, eyes closed, breathing through her mouth, and I put my mouth next to hers, we breathed each other in and out for a minute, the shared taste and smell and sound as powerful an intimacy as any, and I hung the showerhead up again, half-crouched before her, and pushed into her.
It was too late when we had finished and stumbled from the bathroom’s steam-bath fog to the bed. The same fifty or hundred words appeared on the screen of the laptop, though it seemed as if I’d first glimpsed them days or weeks before, in a context I no longer recognized.
“Maybe,” I said — and even as I was summoning the words I realized that I’d said the very same thing to Susannah when things had seemed simple and clear, when the state of ignorance in which we’d willfully placed our spouses still seemed a kindness and not a form of contempt—“Maybe,” I said, “we could carve out a space for ourselves, just the two of us, where nobody else can come.” But it’s never that simple.
Kat just said, “Let’s not go overboard here.”
We were done talking for the night. Kat lay with her eyes closed, and we contented ourselves with distracted, Tourettic touching. Soon she was breathing slowly and deeply; her face relaxed into the unselfconscious composure of sleep, while I considered the emotional siege of a first encounter. Here we go again, is what I thought.
27
IT was a little after ten a.m. by the clock radio on the nightstand, and I lay in bed, watching idly as Kat dressed. I felt vaguely jealous as she dipped into her enormous suitcase to pull out a clean pair of rust-and-maroon-striped corduroys and a beige cashmere sweater — not merely envious of her fresh clothes (mine had spent the night in a tangled heap on the floor), but jealous of the million subtle puzzle pieces, the life in and out of the suitcase, all the magpie accretions women gathered and kept, and where were you supposed to begin asking how to put it all together? Why did people like me who couldn’t be bothered to learn another language, who would never study flower arranging or avidly reconstruct historic chess games, who would never dream of mastering hang gliding or woodworking, persist in taking on the monumental and disappointing task of trying to decipher other people? And to start, always, with the crudest parts of the puzzle: Who else has seen you take those cords off and put them on? Did you ever leave one of those earrings behind in someone’s bed? What does your husband say when he comes? Attraction and its discontents. A trade-off, I thought, admiring the curve of Kat’s ass in clean white panties. She turned and caught me looking. “Do you want to meet a friend of mine today?”