But once again caution prevailed:
‘I’m still… I’m still a bit overwhelmed by things,’ I said lamely.
‘Of course.’
Trixie, the girl next to me, took my hand. ‘Poor baby,’ she breathed. She shifted over and gave me an intent squeeze. She smelled of bubblegum and patchouli. It was a strange, painful delight to feel a woman’s body against mine. I was careful to keep my own hands on the sofa either side of me. After she let go, I noticed that Sister Cathy was still looking at me. Her eyes were long and narrow, set like curving willow leaves above the high, almost horizontal planes of her cheekbones. A fierce, sensual heat seemed to spill from them. As she continued staring, I realised to my horror that I was going to blush. I sat back in the sofa and lapped frantically at my tea, hoping to conceal the scarlet fire racing up over my face. But I had become luminous: I felt it; pulsatingly incandescent! My whole head was throbbing like a beacon.
The meeting ended shortly after, and I went straight to my room, too disconcerted to think of pursuing my mission any further that evening.
After a couple of minutes there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find Sister Cathy.
‘May I come in?’
She shut the door behind her and stood close, eyeing me in silence. I looked back at her, not knowing what to say; feeling only that things were moving out of my control.
After a moment she spoke:
‘Do you know the scientific explanation for blushing?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s an evolutionary anomaly. It’s controlled by a part of the mind that answers to the interests of the social group rather than those of the private self. It alerts people to the fact that something duplicitous is occurring in their midst.’
All her features, I noticed, were a little larger than life – her long eyes and full-lipped mouth, the high, smooth planes of her cheeks. She was like an image created to be gazed on from afar. Up this close there was something overpowering about her.
‘Are you hiding something, Marlene?’
‘I thought it had to do with sex – blushing,’ I said; an attempt to disguise my nervousness under a mask of flippancy.
A sardonic smile appeared at her lips.
‘You’re attracted to me?’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe…’
Her smile remained.
‘Well I’m afraid I’m a nun,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken a vow of chastity.’
I said nothing.
‘I’m also heterosexual,’ she added.
‘Yes.’
‘But perhaps that’s why.’
‘Why I blushed?’
‘No. Why you’re attracted to me.’
I was unsure what she meant. I said nothing. She reached her hand out to my cheek, then drew my head toward hers. Her other hand ran down across my chest, under the lapel of Barbara Hellermann’s padded jacket. For a split second I thought I was about to find myself in a situation of excruciating awkwardness. But a moment later she smashed her knee into my groin and I fell to the floor, writhing.
‘I know who you are,’ I heard her say before she left the room. ‘She isn’t here. Now take your things and fuck off.’
CHAPTER 11
It was Melody who had suggested the outing to the Plymouth Rock: Melody Schroeder, the actress girlfriend of Carol’s colleague. Blumfeld.
I remembered this as I sat nibbling a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Corinth. The place had emptied; waiters had begun stacking chairs on the tables. I had six more hours to kill before the next bus out of Corinth. I was in my own clothes now: tired but strangely content, as though I had accomplished something after all, though I wasn’t sure what it was.
As I thought back to the moment when Melody had first mentioned the club, it seemed to me that I could hear her offering, as an added incentive to go, the fact that an acquaintance of hers, a colorful character, frequented the place, and that we might run into him there if we were lucky. And through the murk of elapsed time a phrase suddenly flashed out at me: a European guy; totally bizarre…
I could hear Melody saying it, clear as day. Her voice had a gravelly rasp that was pleasantly at odds with her fresh, girlish appearance, and I remembered thinking (only a little disapprovingly) that she knew this contrast was appealing.
A European guy; totally bizarre… The description, of course, had meant nothing to me at the time. But now, as the implications of Sister Cathy’s parting remark began unraveling in me, and the circumstances of my ejection from the shelter started resonating with those of a similar confusion of identity and a similarly violent ejection after I’d made my own pilgrimage to the Plymouth Rock that night, it dawned on me that her remark might not have been without significance.
Was it possible, I wondered, that in both instances I had been mistaken for the same man?
The upturned chairs were approaching like a herd of inquisitive cattle. I paid and left. Out in the damp air, I wandered through the town. Handsome old brick buildings, browed with fancy moldings, lined the streets. There were churches everywhere; resplendent edifices from the last century – white-spired wooden toyboxes, stone mini-cathedrals with florid finials and crockets. Apparently Corinth had once thrived, had had a reason for springing up here on this dreary plain, though whatever it was, there was no trace of it left. I found a bar down a side street, and sat for a couple of hours, continuing to puzzle out what had happened.
After our guests had left that night, taking Carol with them to the club, I had felt piqued and a little resentful. Though I had merely tried to put Carol in mind of the healthy skepticism she would normally bear toward the kind of thing she now seemed intent on doing, she had retorted with such vehement and cutting defiance that I was left feeling as though I had been caught – I, of all people! – trying to exercise some defunct male prerogative over the comings and goings of my spouse.
Alone in the apartment, I had cleared away the dinner, trying hard not to start reading things into Carol’s uncharacteristic behavior. We had a blissful, solid relationship: I was certain of that. We might not have married as soon as we had if my continued residency in the US had not required it, but there was no tension attached to the fact that we did. We had had the ceremony at City Hall, then gone out to dinner with friends. It was all very simple, and we hadn’t tried to pretend it meant anything more than it did. Even so, I think I was not alone in finding surprising new depths of emotion opening inside me in the days that followed. I remember feeling undeservedly lucky in having found someone whose every quirk and foible, from the calls she would make to our congressman whenever an important bill came up, to the way her fingers moved when she flossed her teeth at night, touched off different nuances of affection in me, as though some splendid shimmering mosaic of love were being assembled piece by piece in my own heart.
Before this dinner party there had been no sign that Carol felt any differently from the way I did. I told myself not to set any store by the episode. It was a freak occurrence, I remember thinking; a one-off, without significance. Maybe she had certain ancient, deep-seated erotic fantasies connected with the kind of role-playing activities Melody had alluded to. If so, she was possibly a bit embarrassed at having disclosed this, and had become aggressive as a way of covering up her embarrassment. That was all there was to it, I assured myself. Telling me get the fuck off my back will you in front of her friends, as she had, was just an unconsidered outburst. It wasn’t intended to imply that I had been in any way on her back, that there was some prior act in this drama which I had been unaware of playing a role in.