Nine & a Half Weeks (9 page)

A hand shakes my shoulder. “This is… friend of mine, still makes housecalls.” A pink-cheeked man looms above me, beaming square, oil-slicked teeth that rearrange themselves incessantly and with terrifying speed. A tongue depressor in my mouth, someone probing. Later his voice again,”… getting stuff at the drugstore,” and then pills to swallow. I still intend to explain how 1 want no one around me when I’m sick, have been adamant about this since adolescence. But my body aches too badly and it doesn’t seem to matter enough, just then, to warrant the effort.

I wake up to a dim room, the bedside alarm clock saying 4:00. My muscles ache even worse than before but at least I’m no longer dizzy. “They call that sleeping around the clock,” he says, from the doorway. “I’m glad you’re up, you have to take some more pills.” “What do you keep giving me?” I say. “Stuff Fred prescribed. You’ve got the flu.” “What are you doing here?” I say and he grins. “I live here.” 1 am too weak to banter. “Why aren’t you at work?” “I called in,” he says. “For you, too. You need somebody home for a couple of days.” “No, I don’t,” I say, but even in mid-sentence I know very well that yes, I do need someone with me, and yes, he is right to stay home with me, and yes, I need to be taken care of. 1 say no more and neither does he.

He stayed home the next day and the morning of the next. I was in bed for five days, then spent the weekend taking naps and sitting on the living room couch. He bought a bed tray-an elaborate thing, painted white, with legs and a compartment on the side for newspapers, and a shelf part that slants up on hinges like a music stand. He fed me aspirin and antibiotics. He concocted a brew that I drank for three days before asking what it was; it turned out to be a third each apricot juice, grapefruit juice, and rum, heated to just below boiling. I sat, propped against the headboard, in his air-conditioned bedroom, July sizzling outside as if on another continent. Inside, the shades were drawn; his ski sweater over my shoulders, I drank steaming yellow stuff, sleeping well after each eight-ounce mug. Later, soups, then milk shakes he got at the corner, alternating vanilla and strawberry; finally our regular meals according to his rotating calendar. By then I was awake for longer periods of time. My head was clear, though my body still felt as if it had been dropped from a great height. He lugged the TV into the bedroom and put the remote control on the pillows next to mine. And a heap of magazines. In the evenings he sat on the chair next to the bed and told me gossip he had selfconsciously amassed by taking one of my colleagues to lunch, then read the paper aloud. He taught me to play poker and let me win. He slept on the living room couch.

I had not been nursed this way since having the chicken pox at the age of eight.

TODAY IS THE last day for me to come up with a present for my mother’s birthday with any hope of getting it to her on time. It is a sweltering Saturday. One would not, however, suspect that it is ninety degrees outside: the air in Saks is chilled to a crisp, swarming, wallowing hordes of customers notwithstanding. We are bent over one of the jewelry counters, fingering lockets and thin gold chains. I have narrowed the choice down to a heart-shaped one and one that opens to reveal a minute bouquet of hand-painted forget-me-nots, when he whispers, “Steal it.” I bolt upright, upsetting the heap of packages that the woman next to me has wedged between the front of the counter and one raised thigh. His back is moving away from me in the throng. My ears burn as if to set my hair afire. I wait for the blood to recede from my face. I watch a vein pulse in my left hand lying on the counter, I lose track of the vein and look at my hand instead: it has closed over the heart-shaped locket.

The saleswoman stands two feet to my right. Three customers are talking to her at once. There are circles under her eyes and the skin around her smile is tight. It’s not fair to steal on a Saturday, says a small voice in my head. Look at her: she’s clutching the edge of the counter as if under siege, she’s tired, she’s especially tired of being polite; she would happily shout at us all: give me a break! get lost! let me go home! What a rotten thing to do, says the small voice, at least you could pick a Tuesday morning, and why you went all these years without pocketing a left-behind dime in a pay phone only to start shoplifting at this stage of your life… I pick up the second locket in my right hand, and the nearest gold chain, and say loudly, in the saleswoman’s direction, “I’ll take these, may I have these, please.” She smiles at me and says, “That one’s my favorite too.”

I fumble with my charge plate, sign the receipt, snatch at the paper bag…. He is leaning against a bus stop sign across Fiftieth Street. He waves to me and simultaneously raps at the window of a cab just then sliding past him. He waits, holding the back door open, until I have crossed the street and sit in the far seat, gets in, gives his address to the driver, and gloats: “Pretty fair timing, if I say so myself, and air-conditioned, too.” Only then does he hold out an open palm in my direction. I drop the locket-slippery wet from my fist-onto dry skin. “I bought another one,” I say. “1 couldn’t just leave….” He laughs, ruffles my hair with one hand, pulls me toward him with the other. My head comes to rest on his chest. His shirt feels crisp. His skin smells as immaculately of soap as if he’d just had a shower. “That wasn’t quite what I had in mind,” he says, “but it’ll do.” And in mock bewilderment, “Are you shaking?” He holds me tightly.

He is pleased with me, but so matter-of-fact and at ease that I think: he knew all along that I’d do it, he never had a doubt. I turn my head until my face is buried under his arm and close my eyes. It took no time at all, I think, and very little effort, really; a lark.

As soon as we get home he addresses an envelope, wraps the locket and its $39.95 price tag in several layers of toilet paper, and sticks a stamp on the envelope. “Run down to the lobby and mail this, there’s a good girl. They should have it back by Tuesday.” 1 stare at him, then at the envelope. He snaps his fingers: “You know what we forgot? Wrapping paper for your mother’s locket, why didn’t you have it giftwrapped? I’ll go get some at the drugstore and by the time I’m back I hope you’ll have that silly look off your face. You didn’t exactly crack Fort Knox, sweetheart, remember?”

A few days later he shows me the loveliest knife I have ever seen. I am sitting on his lap when he pulls it out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Its handle is silver, inlaid in mother-of-pearl. He shows me how to make the blade snap out of its sheath with a frivolous click, how to make the shiny steel disappear again between silver scrollwork. “Do you want to try it?” The slim handle lies in my palm, cool and precise and as well known to me as if I had received it years ago, as a gift: to herald the age of consent.

I hand the lovely object back reluctantly. He slips it open once more, lays the tip of the blade very lightly against the skin of my throat. I bend my neck back, back some more, back until it will not bend any farther. The steel tip feels harmless-a toothpick. “Don’t laugh,” he says, “It’ll go right through…” but I do laugh and he has known I would and has long moved the toothpick out of the way by the time I burst out giggling. “I withdrew this knife point in the nick of time,” he says. “Nick of time, get it?” “You make the worst jokes of any man I’ve ever met,” I say, in a guttural voice, my head still arched toward my back. “Don’t try to arouse me with tales of your former lovers,” he says. “It’s so tacky. Only trash does that.” “That’s me,” I say, “showing my true colors at last.” “True colors at last,” he says, “what insufferable arrogance, as if I didn’t know what you were the minute I laid eyes on you.” “Oh, yeah?” I say, sitting up. “Oh, yeah?” I’m at a loss of what to say next, but I need not have worried. He interrupts my fumbling, half-grown, incoherent scraps of thought and says, “Next week you’ll rob somebody. In an elevator would be easiest, you can dress up in your Bluebeard outfit, don’t tell me about it in advance. Now get off my lap, my legs won’t wake up for three days as it is.”

I know immediately which elevator. I have often picked up a friend of mine for lunch, at her office down two blocks from mine. I know that the second floor in her company’s building has been vacant for months, its door to the stairwell unlocked. The following day I have an appointment at three. It is over within half an hour and I take the subway to his apartment instead of going back to my office. It’s a humid day and the ride back uptown is uncomfortable. How can they stand being dressed like this, I think, in the middle of July. I am sweating in shirt and vest and suit jacket, women in sleeveless dresses looking airy to me and as if in flight. I finger the smooth oblong in my pocket, expecting instructions to flow from it as from a talisman-guidebook.

I have, on several occasions, exchanged nods with this doorman. That he does not recognize me makes me feel invisible and giddy. I stand before the board listing the names and suite numbers of the companies in the building, glancing sideways at the people to my left: two women are waiting in front of the banks of elevators leading to the upper floors, a middle-aged man before those for the lower floors. I walk toward the opening doors of one of the elevators serving floors one through eighteen.

Three men and one woman emerge and file past the middle-aged man and me. I step into the elevator after him. He presses 9. I push 2. Even before the doors have closed, the slim silver handle is out of my pocket. The playful click coincides with the onset of our ascent. There’s the tip of the switchblade at his throat, which arches backward at an angle familiar to me. I hold out my free hand. A leather wallet-still warm-lies in my palm just as the doors open. I stand outside. We look at each other, somber as in a turn-of-the-century photograph, until the doors slide shut. Neither of us has spoken. I walk ten steps to the stairwell, down one flight, through a gray metal door into the lobby. The doorman is drinking from a Styrofoam cup and exchanging jokes with the afternoon mailman. I walk past them and out the revolving door and two blocks to the subway and up the subway steps a few miles farther south, and four blocks to his apartment.

There’s enough time for me to undress and put my own clothes back on and scrub the glue off my face before he comes home. I am sitting on the couch, pretending to read the evening paper. He says, “Early, aren’t you,” and, “I bought a porterhouse, the damn thing’s worth its weight in gold.” I do not look up from the print, which blurs before my eyes. A delayed reaction has set in: I need to make a concentrated effort to keep from sobbing, and I am trying to understand why my thighs ache, why muscles deep inside my vagina are opening up and out, why I am aroused as if his tongue were goading me toward air that is dangerously thin and piercing.

The newspaper slides into my lap without a rustle. He has discovered the wallet on the coffee table. “Ah…” he says and puts down his briefcase. “Open it.”

Open it… open… open it: my body interprets the words as having nothing to do with the wallet. I slip off the couch and kneel before the low table. He sits behind me, rubbing my neck and shoulders. I take out, one by one, a small address book, a checkbook, an American Express card, a Diner’s Club card, a Master Charge card; a driver’s license, a thin, black, refillable pencil, a crumpled scrap of paper with two phone numbers scrawled in ballpoint; a florist’s card, a mortician’s card, a classified ad torn from the Village Voice offering cut-rate carpentry services, a pink receipt from a Third Avenue dry cleaner, and three hundred and twenty-one dollars.

“Hm,” he says. His chin rests on my right shoulder now. His left arm is curled around me, his palm caresses my breasts. His right arm-slipped between my rib cage and my right elbow-stretches before me toward the tabletop, where it lines up the contents of the wallet in an orderly row.

“Leonard Burger, August 14, 1917,” he reads off the driver’s license into my ear. “What a clever name they gave him-our Leo’s a leo. Unless he’s just a Len. But what do you make of the mortician’s card? And why the carpenter? Was he pricing coffins, got discouraged with a seller’s market and decided to trust a drummer on dope who’s handy with a saw? Or does he just need new kitchen cabinets… ?” He tells me to call the numbers off the rumpled piece of paper, hands me the phone: one is busy and stays busy, there’s no answer at the second.

“This is losing its charm,” he says. “Call Len. Leo. Tell him his wallet’s in the trash down the street….” “Here?” I say. “You want him to come here?” “It’ll be fun to watch.” “We don’t know his number,” I say, my voice unfamiliar to me, my composure in the elevator unfathomable in retrospect. He points to the first page of the address book. PLEASE RETURN TO, it says, and then there’s his name, an address, and below that a telephone number. A woman answers. “Mr. Burger’s wallet is at the corner of…” She says, “What?” in a high-pitched voice, and, “Who… ?” but he has motioned me to hang up. “I give him half an hour,” he says and leaves the room to start my bath. The salad is prepared and the table set when he leads me back to the living room window.

We stand next to each other. His hand follows the shape of my buttocks over and over. A little yellow car pulls up to the curb, miles below us. A tiny man scrambles out. The toy car zips away while the toy man scurries toward a pretend garbage can. “Try this,” he says in a low voice, into my ear, and when I look at him he grins and hands me his field glasses. A CinemaScope face, drawn and gray, looms inches from mine. I recognize the wart on the left cheek, large beads of sweat glisten on a heavily lined forehead. One earlobe, a gray sprig of hair protruding from the cavity above, looks, incongruously, as if it had once been pierced.

He has hidden the wallet under only one layer of newspaper. “What if someone else finds it first?” I had asked. “Too bad for Leonard.” But no one has taken the wallet, there is no need even to forage. Spidery-veined giant’s hands hover, gingerly lift a vast sports page, a Spandex watchband catches the low sun. I put the glasses down. The toy man snatches up a grain of dust, stands immobile, swivels its head, waves a tiny arm at a little model Checker, and is gone.