He wiped his face of remaining streaks of lather and dabbed on some aftershave he’d just bought himself, and combed his close-cropped hair. Dora had cut it before his shower and it seemed darker and thicker than he remembered it and with the music of her woman’s voice and the smell of real cooking it seemed he was now in a wholly different life. There were already noticeable changes in his apartment. She was good about not leaving anything obvious of hers behind, such as jewelry or clothing, after he’d made it known that he preferred her not to. And yet there were clearly indications that he was no longer living by himself; the bed was made differently in the morning, with tighter corners than he ever bothered to make; his toothbrush and toothpaste were put away inside the medicine chest; his three pairs of shoes lined up neatly beside the door; and with each night she spent, another diaphanous layer of her presence seemed to settle upon him and everything else, this fine dust of her that he could almost taste on a spoon, on the rim of a glass.
For nearly two weeks now Dora had been consorting with him and they had already gone past the point in time he would have normally nudged her on her way. She was joyful and effortlessly kind to him and like a revelation these simple facts made him joyful, too, or something close to it, and he thought he should do whatever it took to preserve the feeling. He had come to appreciate her surprisingly optimistic spirit-who at Smitty’s ever spoke of life actual years hence, about such a thing as traveling, or taking a college class at night? Even if her cheerfulness were more a late-rigged buttress than any natural, inner girding, the product of one of the self-help books she always carried in her handbag, he certainly didn’t think less of her for it. So what if she believed that advice from a book could work. So what if she held herself to a standard far beyond any possibility of attainment. Isn’t that what every normal, decent person did? Maybe she drank too much, like the rest of them, but she was dogged in pursuing her interests, this better idea of herself, paddling furiously even if she wasn’t yet getting too far.
As a girl she was accidentally shot by her stepfather during a duck hunt-he was a drinker, too, a small-town Ohio banker with a temper as unknowable as heat lightning who sometimes made visitations to Dora or her sister late at night-and she told Hector that from time to time she was sure she could still feel the pellets the surgeon had to leave undisturbed in her neck and back for fear of paralyzing her; like an echo the pain was both angular and diffuse, and she suffered it all her life, though these days she said it arrived with certain kinds of weather, with the tides and the moon, with her female cycle, which had just gone intermittent.
She had been fine since spending time with him but just last night she was whimpering in her sleep and Hector could not wake her and in a ghoulish state with her eyes open wide but unseeing she’d crawled on top of him and moved her hips until he felt her wetness painting him. He already loved the ready pliancy of her flesh, the faintly damp hand of her skin, the confected, buttery odor of her scalp and hair, all these combining in an insuperable womanly embrace, which was to him a true summons to rest. To sleep. With her racked expression he wasn’t sure if he ought to comply but after he did she slept the rare and peerless slumber of the gratified dead.
But he had not slept as deeply. Since hearing of June he was being hounded again by an old nightmare, the iron obstinacy of it like a railway spike fixed through his gut. The nightmare was not about June. Instead, still reigning in his thoughts was the sentinel of Sylvie Tanner, looming naked before him, perfectly alive and beautiful, her skin aglow with a pure unrivaled shimmer.
I’m too warm, she would say, and his heart would begin to skip out of time.
Please don’t, he begged her.
Don’t worry, she’d answer. It’s okay. She would then scratch lightly at her shoulder, like she had an itch. But instead of simply scratching she would tuck her fingers beneath her fine skin and then, with no effort at all, no pain, peel it off as if it were a full-length glove. She’d do the same with the other arm, and then start in with her torso, pull it down with a terrible measure, down over her breasts, her belly, slowly skinning herself and revealing to him not blood and tissue but the charred ruins of her insides, all blackness and collapse.
He had awoken hugging Dora’s legs, smothering his own face in her belly, as if to throttle himself in penance. She took his powerful grip for ardor and whispered that she ought to wash down there quickly but he only buried himself deeper and she let him, soon enough pulling and pushing him by his hair. He was more than glad; he wanted to be aligned with her good rhythms, to be her sightless, obliging implement. But could he devote himself to Dora, ongoing? Be good to her and adore her beyond his squalid little universe? He was almost certain he wanted to, and yet his fear of leaving her somehow in shambles ruled him, too, causing him to clam up in moments when he should have been sweetly generous, making him delay before meeting up with her, all of which, of course, only served to make her more unsure of herself than she was and seek his attentions all the more. Although she tried to hide her feelings he could see the welling anxiousness in her eyes, a grime of remorse freshly layering his heart whenever she peeped “It’s fine!” when he showed up thirty minutes late at Smitty’s, or said he had to get to work when he really didn’t. It wasn’t fine, not even close, it was rotten and cowardly and weak, and if such notions of his conduct hadn’t bothered him in years, they were bothering him now.
Yesterday he had tried to take a first small step toward being a respectable mate. Dora had been worrying about his fight with Tick, not mentioning it directly but sighing and saying again how it scared her when he got into fights, that she never wanted to see him hurt. He didn’t want to be hurt, either, not anymore, but it was giving-hurt that disturbed him most. Since the tussle with Tick he’d been thinking how pathetic it was for a fifty-five-year-old man to be so keen to mix it up, how sorry and shaming a picture, and then doubly so from the idea that Dora might have seen him that night standing over poor Tick, pummeling him monstrously and without pause. So at work he had roused Jung from his early-midday nap and told him they were going to drive to Teaneck, where Old Rudy lived. Jung naturally didn’t want to go, saying he had just over half the money together, and that in fact he was going to go there himself next week after he gathered the rest he owed. Hector knew that “gathering” meant “betting,” which would only end in more trouble, and like any comrade might he hoisted up the drowsy man by the collar and counseled him that partial payments were always accepted.
Jung cried out, “What, GI, you work for that old fuck now?”
“I’m working for you, friend.”
“Fuck that, I don’t want to go.”
“We’re going.”
“Don’t betray me, Rambo!”
“We’re going now.”
Jung saw that Hector was serious and relented, if unhappily, grabbing a fresh fifth of Chivas for the road. He cracked the seal and took deep slugs from it while Hector drove his fancy Lincoln coupe, heading them west on Route 4. Hector knew where the house was because he had been there once or twice, years back, to see Old Rudy’s daughter, and only child, Winnie.
Winnie was just twenty-six at the time, a statuesque, buxom woman with huge brown eyes and a sandbox of a voice and who was much like her father in the seismic potential of her temper. She was volatile and sexy and could be downright dangerous if she felt threatened or wronged, a notorious instance of her local legend being that she’d nearly gelded a two-timing boyfriend with a steak knife in a restaurant bathroom. Hector was forty then, as primed and handsome as a fellow ever was, fit for eternal bronze, and in a period of his life when he was bedding women with an almost pathological zeal. For a long time after leaving Korea he had isolated himself, existing, ironically, like some toiling monk, erasing himself and all his memories of the orphanage and June and Sylvie Tanner with unceasing hard labors, and, of course, drink. But eventually an oceanic surge of loneliness and desire roiled him and once he let himself go it was as if he were diving through endless, dense schools of women. He never meant to cause unhappiness or heartbreak but he couldn’t bear anything but serial connections, and with each union’s demise it was their angry tears and shouts that would echo in his head, causing him to move on only quicker.