If the River Was Whiskey (5 page)

I didn’t envy him. I envied the jade pendant that dangled between her breasts and I told her so.

She might have giggled or gasped or lowered her eyes, but she didn’t. She gave me a long slow look, as if she were deciding something, and then she allowed herself to blush, the color suffusing her throat in a delicious mottle of pink and white. “Give me a minute,” she said mysteriously, and disappeared into the bathroom.

I was electrified. This was it. Finally. After all the avowals, the pressed hands, the little jokes and routines, after all the miles driven, meals consumed, museums paced, and movies watched, we were finally, naturally, gracefully going to come together in the ultimate act of intimacy and love.

I felt hot. There were beads of sweat on my forehead. I didn’t know whether to stand or sit. And then the lights dimmed, and there she was at the rheostat.

She was still in her kimono, but her hair was pinned up more severely, wound in a tight coil to the crown of her head, as if she’d girded herself for battle. And she held something in her hand—a slim package, wrapped in plastic. It rustled as she crossed the room.

“When you’re in love, you make love,” she said, easing down beside me on the rocklike settee, “—it’s only natural.” She handed me the package. “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression,” she said, her voice throaty and raw, “just because I’m careful and modest and because there’s so much, well, filth in the world, but I have my passionate side too. I do. And I love you. I think.”

“Yes,” I said, groping for her, the package all but forgotten.

We kissed. I rubbed the back of her neck, felt something strange, an odd sag and ripple, as if her skin had suddenly turned to Saran Wrap, and then she had her hand on my chest. “Wait,” she breathed, “the, the thing.”

I sat up. “Thing?”

The light was dim but I could see the blush invade her face now. She was sweet. Oh, she was sweet, my Little Em’ly, my Victorian princess. “It’s Swedish,” she said.

I looked down at the package in my lap. It was a clear, skinlike sheet of plastic, folded up in its transparent package like a heavy-duty garbage bag. I held it up to her huge, trembling eyes. A crazy idea darted in and out of my head. No, I thought.

“It’s the newest thing,” she said, the words coming in a rush, “the safest…I mean, nothing could possibly—”

My face was hot. “No,” I said.

“It’s a condom,” she said, tears starting up in her eyes, “my doctor got them for me they’re…they’re Swedish.” Her face wrinkled up and she began to cry. “It’s a condom,” she sobbed, crying so hard the kimono fell open and I could see the outline of the thing against the swell of her nipples, “a full-body condom.”

I was offended. I admit it. It wasn’t so much her obsession with germs and contagion, but that she didn’t trust me after all that time. I was clean. Quintessentially clean. I was a man of moderate habits and good health, I changed my underwear and socks daily—sometimes twice a day—and I worked in an office, with clean, crisp, unequivocal numbers, managing my late father’s chain of shoe stores (and he died cleanly himself, of a myocardial infarction, at seventy-five). “But Breda,” I said, reaching out to console her and brushing her soft, plastic-clad breast in the process, “don’t you trust me? Don’t you believe in me? Don’t you, don’t you love me?” I took her by the shoulders, lifted her head, forced her to look me in the eye. “I’m clean,” I said. “Trust me.”

She looked away. “Do it for me,” she said in her smallest voice, “if you really love me.”

In the end, I did it. I looked at her, crying, crying for me, and I looked at the thin sheet of plastic clinging to her, and I did it. She helped me into the thing, poked two holes for my nostrils, zipped the plastic zipper up the back, and pulled it tight over my head. It fit like a wetsuit. And the whole thing—the stroking and the tenderness and the gentle yielding—was everything I’d hoped it would be.

Almost.

She called me from work the next day. I was playing with sales figures and thinking of her. “Hello,” I said, practically cooing into the receiver.

“You’ve got to hear this.” Her voice was giddy with excitement.

“Hey,” I said, cutting her off in a passionate whisper, “last night was really special.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “yes, last night. It was. And I love you, I do…” She paused to draw in her breath. “But listen to this: I just got a piece from a man and his wife living among the Tuareg of Nigeria—these are the people who follow cattle around, picking up the dung for their cooking fires?”

I made a small noise of awareness.

“Well, they make their huts of dung too—isn’t that wild? And guess what—when times are hard, when the crops fail and the cattle can barely stand up, you know what they eat?”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Dung?”

She let out a whoop. “Yes! Yes! Isn’t it too much? They
eat
dung!”

I’d been saving one for her, a disease a doctor friend had told me about. “Onchocerciasis,” I said. “You know it?”

There was a thrill in her voice. “Tell me.”

“South America and Africa both. A fly bites you and lays its eggs in your bloodstream and when the eggs hatch, the larvae—
these little white worms—migrate to your eyeballs, right underneath the membrane there, so you can see them wriggling around.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

“Breda?”

“That’s sick,” she said. “That’s really sick.”

But I thought—? I trailed off. “Sorry,” I said.

“Listen,” and the edge came back into her voice, “the reason I called is because I love you, I think I love you, and I want you to meet somebody.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I want you to meet Michael. Michael Maloney.”

“Sure. Who’s he?”

She hesitated, paused just a beat, as if she knew she was going too far. “My doctor,” she said.

You have to work at love. You have to bend, make subtle adjustments, sacrifices—love is nothing without sacrifice. I went to Dr. Maloney. Why not? I’d eaten tofu, bantered about leprosy and bilharziasis as if I were immune, and made love in a bag. If it made Breda happy—if it eased the nagging fears that ate at her day and night—then it was worth it.

The doctor’s office was in Scarsdale, in his home, a two-tone mock Tudor with a winding drive and oaks as old as my grandfather’s Chrysler. He was a young man—late thirties, I guessed—with a red beard, shaved head, and a pair of oversized spectacles in clear plastic frames. He took me right away—the very day I called—and met me at the door himself. “Breda’s told me about you,” he said, leading me into the floodlit vault of his office. He looked at me appraisingly a moment, murmuring “Yes, yes” into his beard, and then, with the aid of his nurses, Miss Archibald and Miss Slivovitz, put me through a battery of tests that would have embarrassed an astronaut.

First, there were the measurements, including digital joints,
maxilla, cranium, penis, and earlobe. Next the rectal exam, the EEG and urine sample. And then the tests. Stress tests, patch tests, reflex tests, lung-capacity tests (I blew up yellow balloons till they popped, then breathed into a machine the size of a Hammond organ), the X-rays, sperm count, and a closely printed, twenty-four-page questionnaire that included sections on dream analysis, genealogy, and logic and reasoning. He drew blood too, of course—to test vital-organ function and exposure to disease. “We’re testing for antibodies to over fifty diseases,” he said, eyes dodging behind the walls of his lenses. “You’d be surprised how many people have been infected without even knowing it.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. On the way out he took my arm and told me he’d have the results in a week.

That week was the happiest of my life. I was with Breda every night, and over the weekend we drove up to Vermont to stay at a hygiene center her cousin had told her about. We dined by candlelight—on real food—and afterward we donned the Saran Wrap suits and made joyous, sanitary love. I wanted more, of course—the touch of skin on skin—but I was fulfilled and I was happy. Go slow, I told myself. All things in time. One night, as we lay entwined in the big white fortress of her bed, I stripped back the hood of the plastic suit and asked her if she’d ever trust me enough to make love in the way of the centuries, raw and unprotected. She twisted free of her own wrapping and looked away, giving me that matchless patrician profile. “Yes,” she said, her voice pitched low, “yes, of course. Once the results are in.”

“Results?”

She turned to me, her eyes searching mine. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”

I had. Carried away, intense, passionate, brimming with love, I’d forgotten.

“Silly you,” she murmured, tracing the line of my lips with
a slim, plastic-clad finger. “Does the name Michael Maloney ring a bell?”

And then the roof fell in.

I called and there was no answer. I tried her at work and her secretary said she was out. I left messages. She never called back. It was as if we’d never known one another, as if I were a stranger, a door-to-door salesman, a beggar on the street.

I took up a vigil in front of her house. For a solid week I sat in my parked car and watched the door with all the fanatic devotion of a pilgrim at a shrine. Nothing. She neither came nor went. I rang the phone off the hook, interrogated her friends, haunted the elevator, the hallway, and the reception room at her office. She’d disappeared.

Finally, in desperation, I called her cousin in Larchmont. I’d met her once—she was a homely, droopy-sweatered, baleful-looking girl who represented everything gone wrong in the genes that had come to such glorious fruition in Breda—and barely knew what to say to her. I’d made up a speech, something about how my mother was dying in Phoenix, the business was on the rocks, I was drinking too much and dwelling on thoughts of suicide, destruction, and final judgment, and I had to talk to Breda just one more time before the end, and did she by any chance know where she was? As it turned out, I didn’t need the speech. Breda answered the phone.

“Breda, it’s me,” I choked. “I’ve been going crazy looking for you.”

Silence.

“Breda, what’s wrong? Didn’t you get my messages?”

Her voice was halting, distant. “I can’t see you anymore,” she said.

“Can’t see me?” I was stunned, hurt, angry. “What do you mean?”

“All those feet,” she said.

“Feet?” It took me a minute to realize she was talking about
the shoe business. “But I don’t deal with anybody’s feet—I work in an office. Like you. With air-conditioning and sealed windows. I haven’t touched a foot since I was sixteen.”

“Athlete’s foot,” she said. “Psoriasis. Eczema. Jungle rot.”

“What is it? The physical?” My voice cracked with outrage. “Did I flunk the damn physical? Is that it?”

She wouldn’t answer me.

A chill went through me. “What did he say? What did the son of a bitch say?”

There was a distant ticking over the line, the pulse of time and space, the gentle sway of Bell Telephone’s hundred million miles of wire.

“Listen,” I pleaded, “see me one more time, just once—that’s all I ask. We’ll talk it over. We could go on a picnic. In the park. We could spread a blanket and, and we could sit on opposite corners—”

“Lyme disease,” she said.

“Lyme disease?”

“Spread by tick bite. They’re seething in the grass. You get Bell’s palsy, meningitis, the lining of your brain swells up like dough.”

“Rockefeller Center then,” I said. “By the fountain.”

Her voice was dead. “Pigeons,” she said. “They’re like flying rats.”

“Helmut’s. We can meet at Helmut’s. Please. I love you.”

“I’m sorry.

“Breda, please listen to me. We were so close—”

“Yes,” she said, “we were close,” and I thought of that first night in her apartment, the boy in the bubble and the Saran Wrap suit, thought of the whole dizzy spectacle of our romance till her voice came down like a hammer on the refrain, “but not that close.”

S
O MAYBE
I come on a little strong.

“Hey, babes,” I say to him (through his interpreter, of course, this guy with a face like a thousand fists), “the beard’s got to go. And that thing on your head too—I mean I can dig it and all; it’s kinda wild, actually—but if you want to play with the big boys, we’ll get you a toup.” I wait right there a minute to let the interpreter finish his jabbering, but there’s no change in the old bird’s face—I might just as well have been talking to my shoes. But what the hey, I figure, he’s paying me a hundred big ones up front, the least I can do is give it a try. “And this
jihad
shit, can it, will you? I mean that kinda thing might go down over here but on Santa Monica Boulevard, believe me, it’s strictly from hunger.”