Dressed to Kill (8 page)

The elevator stopped. She got out. She walked along the corridor. The apartment number—shit, what the hell was it? She searched in her purse for the piece of paper on which she’d scraped the number with the useless ballpoint. Pausing under a lamp, she tilted the paper so she could read it.
Five two four.
What are you like, five two four? She stopped in front of the door, took a compact mirror from her purse, stared at herself quickly (too much lipstick?), and then pressed the buzzer. Almost at once, as if the guy were waiting on the other side, the door was jerked open. He was a man of medium height, nondescript features, but he looked okay—as far as you could tell from surfaces. Sometimes you got the creeps, the weirdos, or highrollers with fat billfolds and an interest in Nazi souvenirs, leathers, wetsuits, riding crops. All that stuff made her sick. Sometimes she’d thought, with surprise: Hey, I’m straight, no kinks, look at me.

She stepped inside the apartment. The guy closed the door.

“I’m Liz,” she said.
Fly me to the moon.

“Ted,” the man said.

“Good to know you.” She looked round the apartment quickly. Average place, lived-in, nothing fancy. The guy wasn’t rich, he wasn’t poor; just another In-Between. For a moment she looked at the far wall where some kind of religious icon hung. She went closer to it: a small plaster cast of the Virgin Mary, gaudy in color, the lips bright red and the eyes too blue to be real—like the kind of souvenir you imagined pouring out of Mexican factories in their millions.

The man laughed in an embarrassed way. “It’s not mine,” he said.

“No?”

“It’s not even my apartment. I borrowed it from a friend. He’s in Maine and I’m only in town for a day or two . . .”

It’s okay. Save the lengthy explanations, she thought. Then she sensed it in the air, his nervousness, a certain tension, the need to ramble on to no real purpose. She turned away from the little statue and smiled at him. The designer of the figure had contrived to make Christ’s mother look like a Tijuana hooker. Some kind of achievement in that, she thought.

“You never used the service before?” she asked.

“No, not exactly,” he said. He had his hands in the pockets of his pants.

“They told you what I did and what I didn’t do?” she said.

He nodded. “It’s okay,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I don’t have any . . . well, what you might call exotic needs.”

“Where’s the bedroom?” she asked.

“Um, that door there.”

She went briskly towards it. She pushed it open, stepped inside, moved towards the window. The drapes were drawn; red cotton burning in the slipping-down sun. Neat: the bedspread matched the drapes and the drapes matched the rug. A blood-red room. She thought she remembered it from a nightmare. She called out, “Hey, are you coming through?”

He shuffled into the doorway. She sat down on the bed, watching him; he was as wary as some animal whose life has been one of avoiding larger predatory beasts. The meek were supposed to inherit something, she thought. She couldn’t remember what it was exactly. She smiled at him: the full dazzle this time, the come-on.

“Sit down. Here. Beside me.” She patted the bedspread.

He moved cautiously towards her.

“Did they tell you I got over my leprosy?” she said.

He stared at her for a moment. She could hear the penny drop in his head. Then he smiled.

“Cured. Completely cured.”

“Yeah,” he said. He watched her as she undid the buttons of her blouse. “Let me do that,” he said. “Is it okay if I do that?”

“Feel free,” she answered.

She watched his fingers tremble with her buttons. He was hopeless. She had to help him, first with the buttons, then with the buckle of her belt. With any luck, she thought, this could be a severe outbreak of premature ejaculation and I could be gone before the statutory hour had faded away . . . She lay back across the bedspread in her underwear, watching him hover above her. There were times when this was the worst moment, when all the fears you’d managed to keep hidden came like bats to the surface. Maybe he’d pull pantyhose from his pocket and wrap them around your neck, or pull a switchblade and stick it between your ribs. There were those times when, at your most vulnerable, you wanted to shut your eyes and drift away and imagine there was nobody else in the room with you, you were all alone; sometimes you imagined an old lover, somebody familiar and boring and wonderfully
safe.
Melvin Pike, for example. Sweet old Melvin, who had taken that graceful flower called virginity one bitingly cold Chicago night beneath the bleachers at the high-school football field. Fumbling Melvin, who could no more catch a pass than he could cut it as a lover. What she suddenly remembered now was the overpowering smell of his sulphurous acne cream and how she wanted to be sick and how quickly he’d shuddered and come and gasped like some beached fish. Dear old Melvin. He’d become a corporation lawyer and married Anita Semler and they had a house in Des Moines, two kids, an English sheepdog, and a parakeet.

She raised her head and looked at the guy. With his back to her, his spine inclined slightly, he was undressing, slipping his pants off. His legs were thin and white, but in the sunlight that came through the red cotton drapes they seemed blotchy, as if he suffered from some skin ailment.

Hurry, she thought. He turned to the bed, still bent a little at the hips in the fashion of someone undergoing an attack of shame. He was erect and his hands, dangling, masked the erection. She wanted to say,
Look, I’ve seen it all before.
But she said nothing, waiting for him to reach her in silence. He sat on the edge of the bed and slipped the strap of her bra from her shoulder and, moaning a little, leaned to kiss the side of her neck. A moaner, she thought. She felt his hands tug at the bra and she wondered how much of her two years she had left. Fourteen months? Thirteen?

She put her arms up around his shoulders and pulled him down.

The next bit was the trick, the whole magic show. How to distance yourself from the customer while maintaining the delicate illusion of participation. How to be yourself and not yourself, simultaneously. A juggling act. She shifted her hips underneath him, glanced at his face, saw the earnest expression locked into the features. She felt almost sorry for him for a moment, like she was a nurse with a terminal patient.

Think stocks, think shares, she told herself. Think of your bank balance and Wall Street and Max in his little office. Then you won’t have time for the creeping affliction of sympathy.

She listened to the guy grunt.

Sometimes it was hard to be the complete materialist.

4

The time, the goddamn time, how had the time slipped so quickly away? She reached for her watch and it slithered from her fingers to the floor, taking with it the wedding ring she’d removed and laid on the bedside table, so she had to go down on her hands and knees to pick them up again and the ring, that small gold hoop Mike had given her with such awful solemnity, had disappeared under the bed. She felt for it, her fingers touching a pair of rolled-up socks, a sandal, an item of discarded clothing. In the darkened room she squinted at the watch—it was five twenty. The afternoon had evaporated. And the lunch, Christ, she’d missed the lunch. Mike would be furious. An excuse, she thought. You need an excuse.
I picked up this guy, Mike, I don’t even know his name, I was in the Museum and something kinda came over me and the next thing we were in a cab and we spent the afternoon in bed and I had a terrific time, Mike, the sort of time I don’t get from you
. . . She couldn’t think of one. She felt only a weird panic, like a paralysis of the brain.
We fucked, Mike, and it all began in the taxi, and then there was the missing glove
. . . She walked up and down the bedroom, looking at the figure of the sleeping man, the dark hair spread on the rumpled white pillow, the tiny curled hairs that crisscrossed his chest and looked like small tattoos in the half-light. She wanted to wake him, say something to him, but she didn’t. All she could think of was going home, facing Mike, an excuse, an excuse. But why couldn’t she get her head to respond? She went inside the bathroom and ran cold water and splashed it across her face and she wondered: Will Mike know? Will he know just by looking at me? Is there some kind of sign? A light in the eye, something out of place?

She switched on the light. She picked up a hairbrush from the counter around the sink and ran it quickly through her hair, but it didn’t look right. I don’t have time, she thought. I don’t have time to make myself neat or meticulous. She shivered and returned to the bedroom, picking up her clothes from the floor. She dressed hurriedly, fighting with the panic, thinking: What did I do?

Why am I here? And then on some other level there was a sense of shame, not of regret, just shame, and then she couldn’t think what to say to Mike, as if the confusion and the shame were one and the same.

No underwear.

No underwear. She moved around the bed, searched the floor, wanted to turn on the lamp but didn’t because for some reason she didn’t want to wake the man. No underwear . . . And then it came to back to her. The cab.

No.

That couldn’t be. She couldn’t have left them in the cab.

She closed her eyes, tried to remember, recalling how his hand had gone under her pale gray skirt, how the skirt had been pushed up to her thighs, how torn she’d been between her own urgent excitement and the cabbie’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

The cab. She must have left them in the cab.

She twisted her hands together, feeling disgust. The cabdriver. The eyes in the mirror. He must have been watching. How could he have pretended otherwise? And the man, teasing her with his fingers, laughing sometimes as if he’d understood her hunger and how easily he could control it, satisfy it.

She moved up and down the room. She couldn’t find the underwear. She couldn’t even remember the color of the panties. She strapped the wristwatch around her wrist, then she looked back at the man—the way he turned in his sleep, as if he were about to wake and push the bedsheets aside and tell her to get back in beside him. I would do it too, she thought. I wouldn’t hesitate. No, she told herself. You can’t stay here. You have to leave. You wish you could wake him and tell him how good it was, but you don’t have time for that.

She walked out of the bedroom. She moved across the thick rug of the darkened living room. She found a lamp, turned it on, saw the light gleam in the chromium of the modernistic furniture. Something, she thought. There’s something I’ve forgotten. She couldn’t think what. That emptiness again, the mind just draining away. She gazed at the coffee table, the desk set against the wall by the door. She thought: I don’t even know his name. She went towards the desk. There were a couple of envelopes, windowed envelopes containing bills. Warren Lockman, the name read, but somehow she couldn’t associate the name with the man asleep in the bedroom. They were separate entities. Then she wished she hadn’t bothered to discover his name, she wished it had remained unknown, a wonderful secret . . .

She saw another piece of paper lying alongside the envelope, half-buried, an official-looking form of some kind. She pulled it out from the pile and looked at the heading: NEW YORK CITY HEALTH DEPARTMENT. For a moment it didn’t dawn on her, the dark print blurred in front of her eyes, she wanted to crush the paper, crumple it, set it alight. WARREN LOCKMAN. I don’t know anyone by that name, she thought. I never met anybody called Warren Lockman. Just a man, an afternoon lover. INFECTIOUS VENEREAL DISEASES. No, she thought. LIST OF ALL—

The paper was bent. She couldn’t read the rest of it without unfolding the form. She didn’t want to do that. LIST OF ALL—

How could she belong to the list of somebody she’d never even met, for God’s sake? She turned the paper over. LIST OF ALL—

But the dark print was liquid again, black water, ink spilled over paper and turning into Rorschach blots in the margins. SEXUAL CONTACTS TWO WEEKS PRIOR TO INFECTION. THEY MUST BE NOTIFIED AND EXAMINED FOR GONNORHEA. She let the paper slip from her hands, watching it flutter to the floor, watching it settle on the rug as though it were a singularly ungainly butterfly. Then she couldn’t think, she couldn’t get it straight, all she understood was she had to get home, she had to confront Mike, lie to him, she had to see Peter, surround herself with that entity she called family . . . because that’s where she’d be safe.

She stepped into the corridor, pulling the door quietly shut behind her. LIST OF ALL, she thought. But she hadn’t read the rest of it, had she? No, there hadn’t been time for any of that. It was just a form, just printed matter. It had no connection with her. She pressed the button for the elevator. LIST OF ALL—LISTOFALL—then it was just meaningless nonsense. She heard the elevator rise in the shaft. It made a level humming noise. She’d get inside. She’d go home. Everything was going to be okay. The doors slid open. She entered. She pressed the button for the ground floor. She closed her eyes. If you don’t think, she told herself. If you just don’t think. She pressed her hands together.

There was no wedding ring.

Oh Christ, Mike’s ring. She must have left it on the bedside table. After scooping it from under the bed she must have laid it on the table and then forgotten it.

How could she have done something like that?

She’d have to go back up. She’d have to press the button and make this car stop and then press another button, but she couldn’t remember the floor number now. Nine? Ten? She stared around the elevator, as if she might find some answer in the panelled wood. Nine, ten, how could she tell? If all the goddam floors looked alike, how the hell could she tell? She wanted to weep. She kept on stabbing at the buttons, but the car was still going down, down, and somehow she imagined that the further down it went the faster it moved, but that couldn’t be. Control yourself, Kate. You find the apartment. You ring the bell. You get your ring. A simple series of actions. ABC. Nothing to it.

But why wouldn’t the cab respond to her pressing the fucking buttons? Figure it out. Simple, if you wouldn’t panic, if you’d only stop to think. Somebody has pressed the call button on another floor. Right? The thing won’t respond to you until it’s answered the prior call, right?