Reprisal

SIX

Lisl glanced at her desk clock as she finished grading the last calculus test. Noon. Perfect timing. She was starved. She pulled on her jacket, picked up her cushion, and stepped out into the hall.

Al Torres, a tenured associate, was passing by, shrugging into a light sports coat as he headed for the stairs.

"Going to the caf, Leese?"

"Brown-bagging it today, Al."

"Again?"

"The diet. Can't make it work if I go to the grease pit."

He laughed. "You're really sticking to this one. And it's working. Good girl!"

Lisl was tempted to call him on that "good girl" business—she was thirty-two, for God's sake—but knew his heart was in the right place. He had two young daughters and probably used the phrase a lot.

She pulled her lunch bag from the department's ancient refrigerator and looked inside: four ounces of cottage cheese mixed with pineapple chunks, two carrots, two celery stalks, and a diet Dr Pepper. She stuck out her tongue.

Yummy-yummy. I can hardly wait.

But it was working. With a three-mile jog every morning and a strict diet the rest of the day, she'd dropped fifteen pounds in just six weeks. She was feeling more fit now than at any time in her life.

She headed for the elm tree. Will was there ahead of her, sitting on the newly fallen leaves, unwrapping a huge sandwich. Her mouth watered at the sight of the inch-high stack of corned beef between the thick slices of rye.

"You buy those things just to torture me, don't you?"

"No. I buy them to torture myself. You southerners don't have the faintest idea of the proper curing of corned beef. This thing may look good, but taste-wise it's a pallid reflection of the kind of sandwich people eat every day in New York. What I wouldn't give for a hot pastrami from the Carnegie Deli."

"So go back and get one."

Will looked away for a moment. "Some day I just might."

"You sound like a born-and-bred New Yorker. I thought you grew up in Vermont."

"I lived all over the Northeast before moving south." He suddenly leaned forward and stared between her breasts. "A new necklace?"

Don't think I don't know when you're changing the subject away from your past, she thought as she smiled and lifted the shell hanging from the fine gold chain.

"Yes and no. The chain's been in my jewelry box for years and I've had the shell forever. I just decided one day to put them together."

"What's the shell? It's a beauty."

"It's called a cowrie. The South Seas natives actually use them for money."

This was her Rafe shell. A few weeks ago she'd dug into her shoe box and pulled it out. A glossy cowrie with an intricate speckled pattern on its back. Beautiful—just like Rafe. She'd had a jeweler drill a hole and voila, she had a necklace. Only Lisl knew who it represented.

A moment later Will was staring again, this time at the impoverished contents of her lunch bag as she laid them out on a paper napkin.

"Still hanging in with that diet, I see."

"Hanging is right—by my fingernails. Six weeks of gerbil food. I just love it. I jump out of bed every morning looking forward to the myriad gustatory delights that await me."

"You're getting results. I mean I can really see the difference. Maybe you've lost enough to merit a treat once in a while."

"Not till I've reached my target weight."

"And what's that?"

"One-thirty. Fifteen pounds to go."

Whoops. She just gave her weight away. Not that it would matter with Will. She had a feeling that he was something of a sphinx when he wasn't with her. But it was not a number she wanted to slip out too often.

"I think you're fine the way you are now."

"So do the actuarial tables. According to them, a five-five, medium-frame female like me should weigh one-forty stripped. Maybe that's optimal for maximum life span, but it's not right for the clothes I want to wear."

"You still look fine to me."

"Thanks." But she knew her looks didn't really matter to Will. "I'll tell you one thing, though. Besides freeing me of some excess baggage, all this dieting has given me some real empathy for those people with lifelong weight problems. I can't imagine fighting the pounds year in and year out. It's so depressing!"

Will shrugged and took another bite of his sandwich.

"Just self-discipline," he said around the mouthful. He swallowed. "You set yourself a goal and you go after it. Along the way you make choices. The choices you make are determined by what you value more. In the dieter's case it comes down to choosing between a full belly or a trim figure."

Strange. He almost sounded like Rafe.

"It's not that easy," she told him. "Especially not when there's people around—like you, for instance—who seem to be able to manage both a full belly and a trim figure. When have you ever had to make a sacrifice hour by hour, day by day, week after week, month after month?"

Will stared at her, and for a moment something flashed in his eyes, then he looked away. His gaze found the horizon and rested there. Again, the question flashed through her mind: What have you seen, what have you done?

"Don't…"Lisl's voice faltered. "Don't brush it off until you've had to do it."

"I wouldn't think of it," he said.

They ate in silence for a while. Lisl finished her cottage cheese and veggies and was still hungry—as usual. She nursed her diet Dr Pepper.

"Didn't you tell me this was your first diet?" Will said.

"Yes. Rafe says it will be my last. I hope he's right."

"Is this Rafe fellow pushing you to lose weight?"

"Not in the least. As a matter of fact, he wishes I'd ease off because we don't go out to eat anywhere near as often as we used to. He says he liked me just the way I was when he met me."

She felt a little smile flicker across her lips as she remembered Rafe telling her how his taste in the female figure tended to run on a line with Reubens's. But that hadn't stopped her from starting her get-in-shape program.

Will grunted.

"What's that for?" Lisl said.

"It means that he doesn't strike me as the type who leaves well enough alone."

"How can you say that? You don't know him."

"Just an impression. Maybe because he's too good-looking and appears to have had too much money for too long. Those kind tend to think the rest of the world exists for their exclusive use."

"Well, you know the old saying about books and covers. Look at yourself. Who'd believe you've done the kind of reading you have?"

"Touche."

"Rafe is very deep for his age. You'd like him if you got to know him."

"I'm hardly in his league. He drives a brand-new Maserati; I drive a Chevy that's almost as old as he is. He doesn't seem the sort who likes to hang out with groundskeepers."

Lisl hid her growing annoyance with Will's attitude.

"If you had something interesting or intelligent to say, as you usually do, he wouldn't care what you did for a living."

Will shrugged again. "If you say so."

Lisl wondered at Will's hostility toward Rafe, a man he'd never met, and then she realized: He feels threatened!

That had to be it. Lisl was probably the only person in Will's small world with whom he could communicate on his own level. And now he saw Rafe as a rival for her attention, someone who might take her from him altogether.

Poor Will. She searched for a way to reassure him that she'd always be his friend and be here for him, a way that wouldn't let on that she knew what was eating him.

"I'm pfenning a Christmas party," she said.

"It's not even Thanksgiving yet."

"Thanksgiving's only days away. And besides, everybody starts planning Christmas around Thanksgiving time."

"If you say so."

"I say so. And I also say that you're invited."

She sensed rather than saw Will stiffen.

"Sorry."

"Come on, Will. I'm inviting people I consider my friends, and you're at the top of the list. You'll finally get to know Rafe. I really think you two will hit it off. He's a lot like you. You're both deeper than you seem."

"Lisl…"

She played her ace: "I'll be very hurt if you don't deign to make an appearance."

"Come on, Lisl—"

"I'm serious. I've never thrown a party before and I want you to be there."

There followed a long pause, with Will staring into the distance.

"Okay," he said with obvious reluctance. "I'll try to make it."

"'Try' isn't good enough. You were going to 'try' to make it to Metropolis last month. I don't need that kind of try. I need a promise."

Lisl caught a trace of hurt in his eyes that contrasted sharply with his smile.

"I can't promise. Please don't ask me for something I can't deliver on."

"Okay," Lisl said softly, hiding her own hurt. "I won't."

As they finished what was left of their lunches in uncharacteristic silence, Will thought about Losmara. A strange character. A loner. Didn't seem to have any friends but Lisl.

Like me.

He'd seen him from a distance and hadn't been impressed. His recurring nightmare was that the close-up Rafe would be a limp-wristed, foppish Latin-lover type with a pencil-line mustache, reed thin, draped with half a dozen gold chains, wearing a blousey, open-necked, lacy-cuffed white shirt.

Lisl deserved a Clint Eastwood; Will was afraid she'd wound up with Prince.

And if she had, so what? As long as he made her happy, as long as he wasn't taking advantage of her vulnerability.

And she was so very vulnerable. He'd sensed that the first day he'd met her. Like a gentle forest creature who'd been cruelly treated, she'd drawn her defenses tight around her and tried to seal herself off from further hurt. But her defenses were thin. Behind her buzz of constant activity, Will saw a lonely woman, aching to love and to be loved. An oblique approach, clothed in gentle words telling her what she wanted to hear, and Will knew she would respond. Treated with a modicum of warmth and tenderness, she would open like a flower to the morning sun.

Love was what she needed most. Romantic, sexual love. And that was the one thing Will could not offer her. He could work at opening her mind, but not her heart. He could offer her anything but that kind of love.

Not that the idea hadn't occurred to him more than once. Many times, in fact. Though he was almost two decades older, there had been a phase during his relationship with Lisl when he had sensed that the time was ripe for a joining of more than minds. But that was not the way for him to go. He was gearing for other things, slowly retooling himself to return to the life he had left behind. There was no place for a woman in that life.

So Will was glad that someone had found the key to Lisl's heart. He fervently hoped it was the right someone. Lisl was very special. She deserved the best. He did not believe in meddling in other people's lives, but if it became evident that this Rafe Losmara was taking advantage of her vulnerability, of her trusting nature, he would have to step in.

He could not allow anyone to hurt Lisl.

Will was startled by the thought.

Me. Protector of the defenseless. I can hardly take care of myself!

Yet why shouldn't he have strong protective feelings toward Lisl? She had grown to be an enormously important part of his life over the past couple of years, his only friend in the world—at least the only one he could talk to. In his own way he loved Lisl. What she possessed was rare and precious, and demanded protection. Will would do his best to provide that protection.

Will smiled again. Lisl had told him so many times how much she thought she owed him for opening the worlds of philosophy and literature to her. If she only knew. She had done more for him than he could ever do for her. Her unstudied combination of sweetness, innocence, intelligence, and vulnerability had gone a long way toward restoring his faith in humanity, in life itself. When all had seemed blackest, she had provided a ray of sunlight. And as a result, Will's whole world was brighter now.

Lisl left the campus early that afternoon. The days were getting shorter and she reveled in the autumn coolness. When she reached Brookside Gardens, she realized she didn't want to be in her apartment. She sat in her car in the lot and wondered what to do with the extra time she'd found this afternoon. She told herself she should invest it in her paper for Palo Alto, but that didn't appeal to her. Too restless to sit in front of a computer terminal. Restless. Why?

Then she knew.

Lisl didn't feel like being alone today.

This wasn't like her. She'd always been a loner, always with so much on her mind that she could keep busy enough not to miss human company. But not now. Today she felt the need to be with someone else.

And not just anyone.

A memory of what she had come to think of as "Metropolis night" wafted through Lisl's mind and she shuddered. She and Rafe had spent many other nights together since then, all of them wonderful, but that particular night remained special because it was the first, and because it had awakened an almost-overwhelming appetite in her, one that could be temporarily sated, but never for long. She was a sexual being now, a whole person, and she reveled in it. And Rafe… Rafe was like a satyr—always ready.

Probably ready even now.

Instead of restarting her car, Lisl got out and began walking toward the park. She cut across its grassy southwest corner to Poplar Street. From there it was four short blocks to Rafe's condo in Parkview, the town's haven for yuppies who either didn't want or couldn't yet afford their own home.

But as she entered the development and walked among its contemporary two-story row house condos finished in blue-green stained cedar clapboard, a tiny knot of apprehension began to form in her stomach. He might not be there, of course, but that wasn't it. This was going to be a surprise visit. What if she were the one who wound up surprised? What if she found him there with another woman? What would she do then?

Part of her said she'd die right there on the spot. And another part of her whispered that she wouldn't die at all. Why should she? She'd been betrayed before—in spades. And being betrayed by someone like Rafe would be no more than she should have expected, no less than she deserved.

Stop it! she told herself. Negative thinking. Rafe had warned her time and again about tearing herself down like that. And Lisl tried. But it was a habit. And lifelong habits were difficult to break.

Once a nerd, always a nerd.

And what was a nerdy broad like her doing trysting with a younger man like Rafe Losmara? Handsome, brilliant—what could a man like that see in her?

Yet he did see something in her. Had to. They'd been a "thing" on campus for almost a month now. They did their best to keep it a discreet, off-campus affair, but it was impossible to hide a relationship as intimate as theirs in such a close-knit community.

Lisl was sure some of her fellow faculty members and their wives tsked and shook their heads when they saw them together downtown, but no one had told her to cool it and drop him. She was sure it would have been a different story if Rafe were doing graduate work in her department. Their relationship then would be perceived as a blatant conflict of interest and she had no doubt that Harold Masterson, as chairman of math, would have come down on her like a ball of fire. But since Rafe's work was overseen by the psychology department, their relationship was tolerated, viewed not with disdain, but rather with wonder and astonishment.

Go ahead and stare, she'd think with a smile. I've got mine, you get yours.

But did she really have hers? Or was she only fooling herself?

She loved him. She didn't want to. She hadn't wanted to place herself in that vulnerable position again, but there was no helping it. And she couldn't help but wonder how he felt about her. Was he stringing her along, playing with her?

Lisl paused as she stood before Rafe's door, unannounced. He was so young—she could not let herself lose sight of that fact. Would he tire of her? Could he ever be truly satisfied with her? Was somebody else inside with him now?

Only one way to find out.

Taking a deep breath, Lisl knocked. And waited. No one came to the door. She tried again with no result. Maybe he wasn't home. Or maybe he wasn't answering the door because…

Better not to know.

But as Lisl was turning away, the door opened. Rafe stood there with dripping hair and a bath towel around his waist. He seemed genuinely surprised.

"Lisl! I thought I heard the door but I never dreamed—"

"If—-if this is a bad time—"

"No! Not at alü Come in! Is anything wrong?"

The whiteness of his condo never failed to strike her—the walls, the furniture, the rugs, the picture frames and most of the canvases within them—white.

"No," she said, stepping in. "Why should there be?"

"Well, it's just that this is so unlike you."

She felt her confidence draining off. "I'm sorry. I should have called."

"Don't be ridiculous. This is great!"

"Are you really glad to see me?"

"Can't you tell?"

She glanced down at his towel and saw how it was tented up in front of him. She smiled, her spirits lifting. That was for her. All for her. Hesitantly, she reached out and loosened the knotted portion of the towel at his hip. It fell away.

Yes. For her. Just for her.

She stroked him ever so gently with her fingernails, then knelt before him.

"I don't deserve this," Lisl murmured.

"Don't deserve what?" Rafe whispered in her ear.

She sighed. She was so happy and at peace now she could almost cry. The exhausted afterglow of their lovemaking was almost as delicious as the lovemaking itself.

"Feeling this good."

"Don't say that," he told her. "Don't ever say that you don't deserve to feel good."

They lay side by side, skin to skin, on his white king-size bed. The waning sun was beaming through the window, suffusing the pallor of the room with red-gold light.

"Want me to pull the shade?" Rafe said.

Lisl laughed. "A little late for that now, don't you think? Whoever's out there looking has already gotten quite an eyeful."

"No worry about that."

Right. Rafe's bedroom was on the second floor. There were no other windows in sight from the bed.

Making love in the day or with a light on had bothered Lisl at first, back when she had been a pudgette. She'd preferred then to cloak the excess fatty baggage on her body in darkness. But now that she had slimmed down some, she didn't mind. In fact, it was kind of exciting to exhibit her new, trimmer proportions for him.

"You've lost more weight," he said, running a hand along her flank.

"You like?"

"I like you any way you want to look. What's more important is how you like the thinner you."

"I love it!"

"Then that's all that matters. I'm for anything that gets you thinking better of yourself."

"And I'm for anything that makes you enjoy looking at me as much as I enjoy looking at you."

Lisl loved looking at Rafe. He'd told her that his mother had been French, his father Spanish. His features favored the Spanish side—his almost-black hair, the thick lashes around his eyes, and the irises of a brown so very dark they, too, seemed almost black. His smooth caf6 au lait skin was utterly flawless. She could have resented that skin. Its perfection was almost feminine. She could have wanted it for herself.

But there was nothing feminine about the way he approached sex. Lisl had only made love to one other man in her life: Brian, who she considered, in her limited experience, to be good a lover. After her first night with Rafe, she had learned just how limited her experience had been. She thought that maybe there was some truth after all to that old cliche about Latin lovers.

He put his face between her breasts.

"You're a Prime. You deserve to feel good about yourself. You've allowed the host of lesser creatures around you to determine what you think of yourself."

Primes—Rafe had called them Creators when he'd broached the subject after Metropolis in the Hidey-hole Tavern, but that had been for simplicity's sake. In private he divided the world into Primes and everyone else. Primes, he'd told her, were unique people, like prime numbers, divisible only by one or by themselves. It was his favorite topic. He never tired of it. Always pointing out examples. After weeks of listening to him, Lisl was beginning to be convinced that it might have some validity.

"I'm not a Prime," she said. "What have I created?"

Rafe was a Prime, no doubt about that—Homo superior in every way. But Lisl? Not a chance.

"Nothing yet, but you will. I sense it in you. But let's get back to what you think you don't deserve. What don't you deserve? And why not?"

"Don't you think…" she began, then paused as Rafe nuzzled one of her nipples and sent new chills up and down that side of her body, "a person should have to do something special to merit feeling so happy and content? It's only fair."

Rafe lifted his head and looked into her eyes.

"You deserve the best of everything," Rafe said. "As I said, you're a Prime. And after the kind of life you've had until now, after what you've put up with, you're long overdue for some good feelings."

"My life hasn't been so bad."

Rafe flopped onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

"Right. Sure. A lifetime of being knocked down and kicked around by the people who should have been supporting you and encouraging you to keep going. That's a long way from 'not so bad.'"

"Since when do you know so much about my life?"

"I know what you've told me. I can guess the rest."

Lisl rose up on one elbow and looked down at him.

"Okay, wiseguy. Tell me all about me."

"All right. How's this? Nothing you ever did really pleased your parents."

"Wrong. They—"

Rafe overrode her. "They were always on your case, weren't they? Even though all through grammar school and high school you got straight A's. Right?"

"Right, but—"

"And I'll bet your project took first place at the science fair, didn't it? Even though you did it all on your own. With no help from your folks—who always seemed to have better things to do—you beat out all those other kids whose fathers and brothers and uncles—who also had better things to do, by the way, but who gave a damn—did most of the work for them. And how did your folks respond when you came home and showed them your blue ribbon? I'll bet it was 'That's nice, dear, but do you have a date for the prom yet?' Am I far off?"

She laughed. "Oh, God! How do you know?"

"And I'll bet your mother never let up on you. 'Put down that book, get up, get out, meet boys!'"

"Yes, she did! She did!" This was uncanny.

"What single phrase during your developing years most typified her attitude toward you?"

"Oh… I don't know."

"How about, 'What's the matter with you?'"

The words pierced her. That was it. God, how many times had she heard that through the years?

She nodded. "How—?"

"Your mother never paid you a single compliment, I'll bet. An insecure bitch who couldn't bring herself to say that you looked nice, couldn't stoop to bolster your confidence. You got the message: 'Sure you're a brainy kid, but so what? Why don't you date more? Why don't you dress more in style? Why don't you have popular friends?'"

Lisl was getting uncomfortable now. This was striking a little too close to home.

"All right, Rafe. That's enough."

But Rafe wasn't finished yet.

"And when it wasn't something they said or did that cut you off at the knees, it was what they didn't say, didn't do. Never went to parents' night to hear your teachers gush about you. I'll bet they never even went to the science fairs to see how your project stacked up against the others."

"That's enough, Rafe."

"But somewhere along the line, late in the game, I'll bet, your father became a believer. Throughout most of your adolescence he was afraid you'd become a spinster schoolmarm and hang around the house forever. Then somebody told him that your SAT scores made you prime scholarship material, that you could qualify for a free ride at one of the state universities. Epiphany! Suddenly he got religion and became Lisl's big booster!"

This was becoming too painful. "Stop it, Rafe. I mean it."

"Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he was bragging about his daughter, how she was going to tap into the state for big bucks and get him back some of the taxes he'd been paying all those years."

"Shut up!"

It was true—too true. She'd seen it then, she'd known it all along, but she'd never faced it. It had hurt so much she'd buried it in some deep, dark recess. But now Rafe was digging it up, rubbing her nose in it. Why?

Rafe smiled. "Suddenly Daddy was standing foursquare behind his precious little academic meal ticket!"

"Damn you!"

She swung a fist at him. He didn't turn, didn't try to block it or fend her off. She felt her knuckles land square on his chest with a meaty impact, saw him wince.

"He was a creep!" he said.

She hit him again. Harder. Again, he took the blow.

"He drained off your self-esteem like a drunk guzzles beer. So what did you do? You hooked up with a creep in college who was the same. Good old Brian! He proposed and you accepted. He let you support him through med school and then he dropped you the first time a pretty nurse smiled at him!"

Lisl was almost blind with fury now. Why was he doing this? She rose to her knees and began slapping at him, scratching him, pounding on him. She couldn't help herself. She hated him.

"God damn you!"

But Rafe wouldn't stop.

"They all dumped on you! And you know why? Because you're a Prime. And all those petty nothings who raised and educated you hate Primes. But worse than that, you're a woman! A woman who dares to be intelligent! Who dares to think! You can't do that! You can't be better than them! Not unless you're a guy! And even then, don't be too much better!"

Lisl kept slapping, scratching, pounding. Rafe flinched with each blow, but took it all.

"Go ahead," he said in a lower tone. "Get it out. I'm you're mother. I'm your father. I'm your ex-husband. Beat the shit out of me. Get it out!"

Like smoke in a gale, Lisl's anger suddenly dissipated. She continued striking Rafe, but the blows were fewer and lacked their previous force. She began to sob.

"How could you say those things?" -

"Because they're true."

Lisl gasped when she saw the scratches, welts, and bruises on his chest.

I did that?

"Oh, Rafe, I'm so sorry! Did I hurt you?"

He glanced farther down and smiled. "Not so's you'd notice."

Lisl followed his gaze and gasped. He was erect again. Hugely so. She let him pull her atop him. He kissed away her tears as she straddled him, then he slipped smoothly inside her. She sighed as her turbulent emotions faded and became lost in the misty pleasure of having him so deep within her. She couldn't be sure, but he seemed bigger and harder than ever before.

"I can see we've got a lot of work to do," Rafe said as Lisl got dressed.

Lisl's hands shook as she rolled her panty hose up her legs. Never had she experienced anything like their second bout of love-making today. Numerous smaller eruptions had led to a final explosion that had been, well, almost cataclysmic. She was still weak.

"I don't know about you, but I think we've got that down pretty near perfect."

Rafe burst out laughing. "Not sex! Anger!"

"Who's angry?"

"You are!"

Lisl looked at him. "Rafe, I've never been happier or more content in my entire life."

"Perhaps." He sat down beside her on the mattress and put his arm around her. "But way down deep inside, where you don't let anybody go but you, you feel you really don't deserve it and you're convinced it's not going to last. Am I right?"

Lisl swallowed. He was right. He was so right. But she didn't want to admit it to him.

"Lisl, you've said as much, haven't you?"

She nodded.

"And you don't want to feel that way, do you." It was not a question.

She felt a tear form in each eye. "No."

"It makes you angry, doesn't it."

"I hate it."

"Okay," Rafe said. "Now we're getting somewhere. You 'hate' it. That's the key, Lisl: anger. You're riddled with it. You seethe with it."

"That's not true."

"It is. You've bottled it up so well behind this placid exterior of yours that even you don't know it's there. But I do."

"Oh, really?" His know-it-all psych grad student attitude was beginning to annoy her now. "How do you know?"

"Recent experience," he said. "Like maybe half an hour ago."

She glanced at his chest. The wounds she had inflicted—the scratches, the welts and bruises—were almost completely gone. She ran her fingers over the near-normal skin.

"How—?"

"I'm a fast healer," he said quickly, pulling on a T-shirt.

"But I hurt you!" She stifled a sob. "Oh, Jesus! I'm so sorry!"

"It's all right. It's nothing serious. Forget about it."

How could she forget about it? She frightened herself.

Maybe Rafe was right. Now that she thought about it, she did resent her parents for the way they had managed to denigrate all her interests and cheapen her accomplishments. And Brian—God knew she had reason enough to hate her ex-husband.

"It'll never happen again, I swear it."

"I didn't mind, believe me. As a matter of fact, I want you to take some of your anger out on me. It's good for both of us. It binds us more closely to each other."

"But why… why would you want to put up with that?"

"Because I love you."

Lisl felt her heart swell within her. It was the first time he had said it. She threw her arms around him and hugged him to her.

"Do you mean that?"

"Of course. Can't you tell?"

"I don't know what I can tell. I'm so mixed up now."

"We're going to have to fix that. We're going to have to find a way to cleanse you of all that anger."

"How?"

"I don't know just yet. But I'll think of something. You can count on that."