All I Did Was Shoot My Man

26

I got home at nearly midnight. The house felt empty, but maybe that was just me.

I went to the hall bathroom and got in the shower. Standing in the doorless stall, under the ice-cold spray, I shivered, and castigated myself for doing wrong even when I was trying to do right.

There was a cardinal rule in boxing: You can’t win if you don’t throw punches, but when you go on the offensive you have to accept the reality that you will most likely get hit. That’s why so many fighters are counterpunchers — they wait for their opponent to make the mistake.

I had taken the initiative; moved to get Zella’s conviction overturned. Shuddering from the cold, I knew that Stumpy and Bingo had been casualties of my ill-considered quest. Rather than helping, I made things worse — much worse.

“You remember when we used to take showers together?”

Katrina was one of the few people who could sneak up on me. I used to kid her that this stealth explained how she roped me into marriage — the joke wore thin in time.

She was wearing a black lace teddy under a yellow-and-black kimono. Her white skin was perfect, her eyes more engaging than I had seen them in years. She held a snifter in either hand, each loaded with a triple shot of cognac.

“Yeah,” I said. “You told me that you couldn’t take the cold.”

Katrina’s blond hair was piled up on her head rather carelessly. I knew she had been drinking because her slight Swedish accent became more pronounced when she was tipsy — tipsy, but not when she was full-out drunk.

I never understood this foreign inflection, seeing how she was born and raised in Middle America.

“I’m very delicate, Leonid.”

“Like white sharks and alabaster.”

“Like a voman.”

I stepped out of the shower and she handed me a plush red towel, leaning back against the sink as I rubbed and blotted the water from my body.

Katrina is a beautiful woman. Past fifty, she’d done everything to keep her body and face young. And though I’m not handsome I have the body of a fighter — hard and blunt. We both had something to look at, it’s just that we were no longer interested in looking.

She handed me a snifter.

If you can’t beat them, become them, my father once told me. That’s how the great cultures of the past ultimately tamed and therefore outlasted their conquerors.

There’s a small room on the street side of our apartment. Sometimes we call it the TV room, at others the little front room. There’s just enough space for the maroon sofa and the royal blue stuffed chair, facing an old console TV. Katrina led me there and sat next to me. She clinked my glass and we both drank — deeply.

“I vanted to talk vit you, Leonid.”

I sat back and away from her saying “talk.”

“Sit up,” she said and I obeyed.

I was wearing my blue suit pants and a T-shirt that was once white.

“Where are the kids?” I asked.

“Dimitri is vit his whore. Twill — who knows where he goes? He said he vas vorking for you. And Michelle is out somevair sucking on an old married man’s cock.”

Katrina and I were definitely man and wife. Maybe we were no longer in love but we knew how to get under each other’s skin.

“That’s something you know a lot about,” I said, wanting to attack my daughter’s attacker.

I downed the rest of the cognac and Katrina reached back behind the other side of the sofa, producing the new bottle. She poured me another drink.

“I vas looking for love,” she said, her blue diamond eyes staring into my brown ones.

To say I felt the stirrings of an erection would be a gross understatement. This biological reaction was shocking to me but not to Katrina. She looked down on the lengthwise tent of my trousers and shifted over, laying her left hand on it.

“I used to kiss yours,” she said. “I used to cry out for you.”

Her grip tightened and I thought about pushing the hand away. Instead I took another drink.

Katrina started moving her hand up toward my belly button and then down again.

“Do you vant to come like this?” she whispered. “Like a teenage boy on a date with some fast girl.”

“Ummmmmm.”

“Or do you vant me to show you what I have done with my lovers? Do you vant me to take you right here on this couch?” Her voice was getting stronger. “Do you vant to get on your knees and suck the pussy?”

“What...?” I said.

“Vat did you say?” she asked me. She leaned over and gave me a wet kiss.

“What did you do?” I asked. “With them.”

I already knew. One of her old boyfriends had hired a detective to take pictures of her with the new man. The jilted lover sent the photos to me, expecting that I would exact retribution. He miscalculated. I threatened him and put the pictures in my safe.

But hearing her tell me was better than any pictures. Having her position me and encourage my manhood was exactly what I needed right then.

I don’t think that Katrina was trying to help me. She was just angry at life and getting back at the world by seducing me. It made no sense but I wasn’t really thinking... “Shouldn’t I use a condom?” I remember asking at some point.

“I don’t need it anymore,” she said into my ear.

In the morning I woke to find the empty fifth of cognac on the night table next to our bed. Naked, Katrina was on her back, half out from under the covers, and snoring. The erection from the night before reappeared but I was sober enough to ignore it this time.

I lurched from the bed and went down the hall, holding a towel around my waist in case one of our kids had come in during the night.

Another cold shower and I was out the door and down to the street. I felt like a young man with a hangover. My dick was waiting for any excuse, as my mind wandered from here to there with no direction, no reason.

I stopped at a greasy spoon on Seventy-first Street and ordered fried pork chops with an American cheese and garlic omelet. That, with home fries, white toast, and grape jelly, put enough poison in my system to slow down the rampaging hormones awakened by a woman who I now understood was overwhelmed by her change of life.