Marked Man

33

Later that night she lay naked beneath me, facedown on the bed. I was naked atop her, my thumbs gently kneading the taut muscles of her back and neck. She was purring like a lioness stretched out in the noonday sun, I was vibrating like a hyena over a freshly felled giraffe. But it was not mere animal lust that was driving me, though I freely admit to lusting like an animal. No, I was filled with some sharp emotion as I stroked and massaged.

I leaned down, kissed the knife’s edge of her clavicle. She reached up with her hand to rub the nape of my neck. I nuzzled her earlobe and with my tongue flicked lightly the flesh beneath it.

I have heard tell that the capacity to love is a sign of mental health, which meant, I suppose, that I was just then the healthiest man in the city, mentally wise at least, seeing as I was falling in love with every woman I laid my gaze upon. I pined for them, I felt lost without them, I was sure that each of them, the woman beneath me being no exception, could save my life.

I kissed her again. Her bracelets jangled lightly as she rubbed my neck harder than before. I wasn’t even sure who she was, really, in her soul, but the raw emotion she coaxed out of me with every purr and every touch cut like a jagged shiv through my heart.

But even in my besotted state, I knew I couldn’t be feeling true love so indiscriminately. No, what was flooding my blood that night, along with the lust, was a potent cocktail of fear and desperation, of loneliness and need, of a pathetic yearning for the merest breath of salvation. What I was searching for, in my deepest soul, was someone to pull me out of a bottomless hole whose dimensions I couldn’t fathom.

I nibbled her flesh. Her fingernails dug into my scalp with a lovely pain.

Yet even as I recognized the fallacy of my emotions, I couldn’t give up the hope that maybe, just maybe, this woman, this one, here, now, not womanhood in general but this specific woman in particular, could actually be my savior. The others might have been counterfeit totems to a false hope, but maybe this one, here, was actually the true answer to my questing heart.

Suddenly she arched her back, lifted her torso out of the bed, bent her legs back and locked them around my own, like a breaststroker doing a scissor kick. I felt myself being pulled under.

“Wait,” I said. “What are you doing? Whoa. Whoooa.”

She was laughing as we fell into a rhythm, and I started laughing, too. My God, maybe it was the real thing, maybe I had found it after all.

You are the one, no you, no no you are the one, beneath me, right now, you.

“Right there,” she said. “That feels good. Oh, yes.”

I wanted to kiss her just then, not on the shoulder or on the back of the neck but on her mouth, hard and clean, as we gazed at each other eye to eye.

I slid down and out, rose onto my knees, reached under her arm, gently spun her around until I was staring with a longing heart straight into the face of Sheila the Realtor.

I AM AS appalled writing this as you must be reading it. But there is a simple explanation. Really.

So I was drinking with Rhonda Harris upstairs at the Monaco Living Room, feeling the love, so to speak, and hoping that things might actually lead somewhere with someone this time, when she glanced at her watch and leaped out of her seat. “Got to go,” she said.

“Really?” I said, trying to keep my crest from falling.

“Sorry, Victor.”

“I was thinking maybe dinner. Maybe Italian.”

“Can’t. Not tonight at least. Will you talk to Charlie for me, please?”

“I guess.”

“I’ll call you.”

“I’ll be waiting,” I said, like a puppy.

I was sitting forlornly, alone with my drink, when the pretty young waitress brought another round that I had optimistically ordered a few moments before.

“She coming back?” she said, indicating Rhonda’s spot.

“Not tonight,” I said.

“Too bad,” said the waitress, cleaning Rhonda’s side of the table. She was lean and athletic, with long black hair and big eyes. “I guess you won’t be needing the Cosmo, then,” she said. She had a fresh rosy complexion that said soy milk and yoga. I didn’t know about the soy milk, but I could learn yoga.

“Since the drink’s already ordered,” I said, “you want to join me?”

“Can’t. Against the rules.”

“When do you get off?”

“December,” she said.

I lifted up my new Sea Breeze. “Merry Christmas.”

By then I was a little too comfortable in my seat and couldn’t quite face going home to my ruined apartment to flop down on my ruined couch and spend another night watching the reception flicker on my cableless portable television. So I reached for the phone in my jacket pocket. I was going to call Beth, whom I hadn’t spent enough time with lately, or maybe Skink, who could cheerfully turn the evening in a more sinister direction, or anyone in the directory who could provide a little company. But with my phone I inadvertently pulled out a card that had been sitting in the same pocket. Sheila the Realtor’s card. And I remembered the way her eyes had shone when she told me to give her a call.

So I did.

And I’ll say this for her, she was all business, was Sheila the Realtor, and she knew how to close the deal.

“I’M SO glad you called,” she said after, as we lay in bed together while she smoked. She used her cupped left hand as an ashtray. “This was such an unexpected treat. Want a cigarette?”

“No thank you,” I said. “I’m nauseated enough already from the sex and the drinking.”

“I smoke to keep thin.”

“I throw up,” I said.

“I do that, too. So who is Chantal?”

“Excuse me?”

“The name on your tattoo. Is she your girlfriend?”

I looked down at the heart on my chest. “Not really.”

“An old girlfriend, then?”

“Something like that.”

“Not too old, since it looks fresh enough. What do you do when you tattoo a lover’s name on your chest and then you break up?”

“Look for someone with the same name.”

“Sort of limits your options.”

“Maybe that’s why I don’t get out much.”

“They can remove tattoos with lasers now. You can lose the tattoo and have a peel all at once.”

“Convenient,” I said.

“It’s important to keep your facial skin fresh. Your partner Beth made an offer on that house.”

“Are the sellers going to accept?”

“I think so. It’s lower than they want, but the place has been vacant for a while now. She’s getting a tremendous deal.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that? Why has the house been vacant for so long?”

“Ghosts,” she said.

“No, seriously.”

“I’m perfectly serious. There was a suicide there. It was about fifty years ago, but the most recent tenants complained about strange noises and creaking floorboards before they moved out in a panic. They’ve had a hard time finding a buyer since.”

“Does Beth know?”

“Not from me.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“Beth looks lost, Victor, don’t you think?”

“She’s doing okay.”

“No she’s not. She clearly needs something in her life, and what I’ve found is that real estate fills so many gaps. I didn’t want a silly piece of nonsense to get in the way of a fabulous opportunity. She won’t find anything near as wonderful within her price range.”

“Are you always selling?”

“Oh, come on, Victor. We’re talking ghosts. And you saw the size of the kitchen.”

“With the morning light.”

“Well, some mornings. It’s there for the first few weeks of April, maybe. After that it sort of slides into the house next door.” She sat up, the sheet fell from her breasts. “This was fun, but I have a big day tomorrow, appointments lined up back-to-back, and then my fiancé is flying home from Milan.”

“Your fiancé?”

She turned to me, leaned close, brushed my cheek with her right hand. The smoke of her cigarette floated into my eye, and I started blinking it away.

“You’re sweet,” she said. “Are you sure you’re a lawyer?”

“I’m not very successful.”

“Call me again sometime.” She tossed off the rest of the sheets, kicked her long legs off the bed, and stood, stretched, headed to the bathroom. “Got to be going.”

“Going? Isn’t this your place?”

“Please. This is right on South Street. Why would anyone in her right mind live here? This condo is one of my listings. You can stay as long as you want, but please make the bed before you leave. I’m showing it tomorrow.”

“It’s sort of nice.”

She stopped, twisted around, stared at me with her cigarette held elegantly to the side of her face and a renewed interest in her eye. Was there a real connection between us after all? I found myself, against all reason, hoping so.

“If you’re serious, Victor,” she said, “I could get you a fabulous deal.”

I suppose that was it, right there, the moment when I fully realized how much trouble I really was in. I was lying in a bed that was not my own, blinking wildly still from the smoke, tearing, staring at a naked woman who was affianced to someone else, and feeling strangely deflated because all the time she was trying to close a deal. If I was capable of sleeping with a Realtor, was it possible to fall any lower?

I needed something, anything, to pull me out of this hole, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what, even when the answer was in front of me from the very start.