The Affair

Chapter 44

Afterward we lay side by side, naked, breathing hard, sweat pooling, holding hands. I stared up at the ceiling. Deveraux said, “I’ve wanted to do that for two whole years. That damn train. Might as well make use of it.”

I said, “If I ever buy a house it’s going to be next to a railroad track. That’s for damn sure.”

She moved her position and snuggled next to me. I put my arm around her. We lay quiet, and spent, and satisfied. I heard Blind Blake in my head. I had once listened to a cassette tape of all his songs, transferred from beat-up old 78s, the absurd roar and scratch of ancient shellac surface noise almost drowning out the quiet, wistful voice and the agile guitar, as it picked out the rhythms of the railroad. A blind man. Blind from birth. He had never seen a train. But he had heard plenty. That was clear.

Deveraux asked me what I was thinking about, and I told her. I said, “That’s the guy my brother’s note was about.”

“Are you still mad about it?”

“I’m sad about it,” I said.

“Why?”

“This mission was a mistake,” I said. “They shouldn’t have put me on the outside. Not for this kind of thing. It’s making me think of them as … them. Not us anymore.”

Later we had a languid conversation about whether she should go back to her own room. Reputations. Voters. I said the old guy had come upstairs for me when Garber had called. He had gotten a good look inside the room. She said if that happened again I could delay a second and she could hide in the bathroom. She said they rarely knocked on her door. And if by some chance they did the next morning and there was no reply, they would assume she was out on a case. Which would be entirely plausible. She wasn’t short of work to do, after all.

Then she said, “Maybe Janice Chapman was doing what we just did. With the gravel scratches, I mean. With her boyfriend, whoever he was. Out in her back yard, at midnight. Under the stars. The railroad track is pretty close by. Must be amazing out of doors.”

“It must be,” I said. “I was right next to the track at midnight last night. It’s like the end of the world.”

“Would the timing work? With the scabs?”

“If she had sex at midnight she was killed about four in the morning. What time was she found?”

“Ten the next evening. That’s eighteen hours. I guess there would have been some decomposition by then.”

“Probably. But bled-out bodies can look pretty weird. It would have been fairly hard to tell. And your department doctor isn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes.”

“So it’s possible?”

“We’d have to explain why she put on a nice dress and pantyhose sometime between midnight and four in the morning.”

We pondered that for a moment. Then we surrendered to inertia. We said nothing more, about dresses or pantyhose, or voters or rooms or reputations, and then we fell asleep, in each other’s arms, outside the covers, naked, in the still silence of the Mississippi night.

Four hours later I was awake again and confirming my longest-held belief: there is no better time than the second time. All the first time’s semi-formal niceties can be forgotten. All the first time tricks we use to impress each other can be abandoned. There’s new familiarity, and no loss of excitement. There’s a general sense of what works and what doesn’t. Second time around, you’re ready to rock and roll.

And we did.

Afterward Deveraux yawned and stretched and said, “You’re not bad for a soldier boy.”

I said, “You’re excellent for a Marine.”

“We better be careful. We might develop feelings for each other.”

“What are those?”

“What are what?”

“Feelings.”

She paused a beat.

She said, “Men should be more in touch with their feelings.”

I said, “If I ever have one, you’ll be the first to know, I promise.”

She paused again. Then she laughed. Which was good. This was already 1997, remember. It was touch and go in those days.

I woke up for the second time at seven o’clock in the morning, thinking about pregnancy.