Seventh Avenue (31 page)

“Is that what I can do for you? Terry, don’t act like a whore. It doesn’t suit you.”

“For years I’ve been hearing about you from my father and all sorts of people. No one has a kind remark to make about you, except my father.”

“We’ve made each other money . . . so we’ve got something in common.”

“
You’re not as tough as you’d like people to believe.”

“Tougher. Years ago I used to go to the movies a lot - to learn how to behave in public, to educate myself. George Raft was my hero, and I thought I
was
him in real life, but I’ve learned different. I’m cast as the heavy . . . I’m not Raft, but the guy he socks.”

“
You’re really a nice guy.”

“
How would you know?”

“
I
do .
. .”

“That’s the virgin talking. You want to stop wondering, and you think I’m the guy. Everyone who ever gets involved with me loses. Don’t throw yourself away.”

She eased herself onto the bed and lay opposite him, her arms parallel to his, her long brown legs slightly arched at the knees as though she were about to thrust herself forward. Under her dressing gown, she wore nothing, and the dressing gown fell open as she moved closer to him. Her skin was a copper brown, with the slippery smooth texture of satin. The soft bellies of her breasts were the flat milky color of Chinese white, and they seemed to be framed. He turned away, and she grasped his wrist, breaking the skin with her nails.

“
Don’t turn me down.”

“I’m not turning you down. I’m trying to be decent for once. You’re a kid, and you’re about to waste yourself. For kicks,” he added.

“Not for kicks. It’s just that you’re the first man I’ve ever wanted to come near me.”

A small curtain hanging over the canopy drifted in the breeze that came from the bay, and there was the whirring noise of a speedboat in the distance that faded after a moment. Her hands were cold, and she gave short nervous little gasps when he touched her shoulder. Her eyes opened wide, and there was a look of such pure and innocent affection and trust in them that he shrank back, as though the act itself signified a betrayal, an element of deception, which would scar him. What he feared most was the aftermath, and the responsibility of yet another woman who had woven herself into the fabric of his life, because he realized that he was a man capable only of enthusiasms. He could not sustain the sinewy quality of love.

The mouth and lips of her body were moist, and he slid into her gently and without force like a man floating onto a wave. He rested inside her, on top of the small thin-skinned ball and she wrapped her legs around him increasing the pressure herself, until the ball inside broke and she gave a little groan of pain, and then he went into her harder, unyielding. She wrapped her arms tightly round his neck, and he withdrew just as he was about to come. It spurted on her stomach and dripped onto her navel, white and pellucid on her copper-brown skin. She held it against her stomach until he subsided and then still holding him she kissed him for the first time.

“
I must be crazy,” he whispered. “What the hell have I done?”

“I thought recriminations were the virgin’s prerogative. This is a switch. Are you afraid we might fall in love? Is that what you’re worried about?” she asked in a youthfully earnest way, which touched him.

“You remind me of a rainy afternoon . . . a long time ago. It was like a dream. I was in love then.”

“
For a full afternoon?” she said incredulously.

“You can carry one afternoon around with you all your life without even knowing that you are.”

“
You’re going to leave your wife.”

“
Sounds simple, like tying my shoelaces.”

“I was lying about never having seen you. Once when I was home from school - everything seems to happen to me when I’m home from school. My life at school is a long pause, like a sentence made up of a two-letter word and a hundred periods, stop, stop, stop.” She paused abruptly, and her hair rested on the pillow, the black thin strands spread out like a duenna’s fan, long, black, perpendicular to the cross-running brass bedstead that reflected them and that Jay, like a mesmerized cyclops, fixed his eye on. Her body was so wonderfully formed that it caused him physical pain to look at it. “The mud was thick and gummy with lumps of dirty gray clay sticking to my shoes - I had to throw them away because I broke a heel and I limped around like a horse that’s thrown a shoe. My father was very aggravated because of some - I don’t know what - sewer or something. I kept on imagining a long gray rat with white pointed teeth running around in a mad dance underneath us. It was drizzling, and you stood by a maroon colored Chevrolet, and your trousers were mud-spattered. I asked my father who you were, and he said: ‘The criminal who’s responsible for all this - a sewer rat who I made the mistake of helping once before I knew he carried the plague.’ I couldn’t equate my father’s opinion of you with your face because I thought you were the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. And then a red-headed woman came up, quite pretty in a loud sort of way, and she took your arm. You didn’t look at her, and you automatically unhooked yourself. Then she sat down on the running board of your car and stared at you as though you’d just stabbed her, literally . . . I watched her face change from that terrified hurt expression children get when they’re not wanted, to one of pure love. It was the most amazing transformation I’d ever witnessed . . . like you were Christ, and she was a nun. I was absolutely electrified - my father kept going on and on about sewers with a little man whose face and name I can’t remember. After a while she said something to you that I couldn’t hear and you fobbed her off by waving your hand in her face without even turning to her, and then you did turn your face and you smiled and she walked through the gates of heaven. For weeks, months, after I got back to school I kept dreaming of the two of you in bed . . . the expression on her face changing from pain to pleasure and back to pain. For some crazy reason I imagined you had a hammer in your hand and you always bashed her head in with it after you made love and then she’d become a spirit and after a while - when you commanded her - she’d assume human form. I had a fixation or something like that on you and I hoped that one day I’d feel about a man the way she did about you . . . that I’d be crushed, destroyed, and put together again and I wanted you to be the man, but I realized that that would be impossible.

“The whole thing with Mitch was a joke from beginning to end and I never took him seriously . . . I waited and hoped, and when my father casually mentioned that he was going to ask you down here for a week to discuss business, I decided to cut school. Isn’t it all a little crazy? For four years, from the age of sixteen, I’ve been running after you, and finally last week I flew two thousand miles because I knew that no matter what happened to me in the future I had to have a chance now to get what I’d dreamed about.” She gave a short husky laugh. “So at last, here we are, you with your bloody hammer. Jay, do you understand what I’ve been saying?”

“
You’ve made it all up.”

She started to giggle, and he recognized the nervous schoolgirl underneath.

“Would it matter?” she said, extending a hand and rubbing his face. “Smile at me, please.”

He did as she
asked,
and she said:
“Of course it’s true . . . Somehow a meeting was arranged for us on that horrible wet afternoon, and we’ve been unable to avoid it. Did you love the redhead?”

“
It really isn’t any of your business. You got what you wanted.”

“
You’re
afraid .
. . that’s why you won’t answer.”

“
Afraid? Of what?” he demanded.

“
Of what’s happening to you.
Of me being stronger.”

“God, what a lot of crap you talk. Is that what they teach you in college? All this . . . You’ve got a line in bullshit that can’t be beat.”

“I don’t even mind your filthy mouth. Did you love her?” she insisted.

Jay pressed his hand to his forehead; he was sweating despite the fact that the night air was cool.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter now. For years, I was chained hand and foot without knowing it. I thought I loved Eva, and I did for a while, before her husband died. Then it dawned on me that I was being strangled by a dead man, and we were both sorry,
and
because he was dead I had a stronger feeling for him than I did for her. He committed suicide because of us, and I didn’t have the guts to drop her. He had to die for
something.
And just as he held us together, that’s how he kept us apart, I couldn’t even marry her.” He turned to Terry and saw that she was asleep, and he shrugged his shoulders, which sent a searing pain down his back.

He woke her at five in the morning and insisted that she return to her own room. With that exquisitely channeled balance of naïveté and belligerence and nascent power young women possess after their first turn in bed, she said: “But my father’ll have to find out.” She threw back her head triumphantly and a little too magnificently for five in the morning.

“Scram,” Jay said. “He’ll find out when I think he ought to, and not before.”

“
Jay, you’re a bastard.”

“
I could’ve told you that for nothing.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I want them to be as happy as I am . . . it isn’t defiance.”

“
Well, for a little while longer let them be miserable.”

Not until he sat across from her at breakfast, which was served on a curved wrought-iron table facing the bay, did it occur to him that there could be any more between them than a fugitive one-night stand. The glimmer of her brown skin, and her black hair, which seemed like coal burning in the chalk-white stream of sunlight descending on them, held out a promise of grace and hope that had not been possible two days earlier. She had a freshness and sense of joy completely new to him, and even though only a few short hours before he had initiated her, establishing a certain intimacy in the darkness, he was now ill at ease and strangely embarrassed by her. She did nothing to suggest suspicious behavior, but underneath the courtesy smile she gave her mother and the innocuous small talk she engaged in with her father, there was an underlying knowledge of something secret and personal between them. He watched with amazement his own reactions to the mask of surface indifference she assumed for his benefit, and he had a deep nagging desire to touch her, to kiss her, to tell her that she was magnificent. Later when they were alone for a minute at the edge of the pier before going on the boat she whispered matter-of-factly: “It’ll be okay . . . you’ll see . . .” He put his hand on her breast, and she let it remain there until her mother appeared, and he lost his nerve and withdrew his hand. He resented having to share her all morning with her parents who had decided to give him a tour of the islands surrounding the beach in
TERRY I
. He sat in a cane chaise longue inattentively listening to the endless drone of facts about alligators, Seminoles, swamps, hotels, fishing, international millionaires, all at Denise’s fingertips. She continued in a monotone well on into the afternoon, and he could no longer fight against the sleepiness that had crept over him. Through his doze he heard Terry say: “Mother, can’t you see that you’ve bored the poor man to sleep.” Abashed, Denise swallowed her seventh martini and disappeared below. Terry touched his arm, and he propped himself up on an elbow.

“I know why Arabs cut people’s tongues out.”

“She makes up for Daddy.”

“Has he caught anything?”

“Only the sun. He never catches fish, but he makes believe he does. The blue marlin in the living room cost him two hundred dollars.”

“When are we going to be alone?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” she said nonchalantly, as though the idea had never occurred to her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Take it easy. You’re going to be here a week, aren’t you?”

“Hey, what’s your story? I haven’t thought of anything else since this joyride started.”

She averted her eyes and leaned against the rail of the boat. Jay studied the contours of her face, slightly oval, the shimmering jade, aquamarine alchemy of her eyes, and the long curling lashes that fluttered like a geisha’s fan when he attempted to turn her chin to him. The undulating littoral of the island they passed seemed carved by a shaking hand, and she gazed at it as though a mystery was about to be unraveled.

“Tell me what I’ve done?” he asked on the edge of panic and surprised at the crumbling weakness in the pit of his stomach. “See” - he wagged his finger – “I knew you’d be sorry. Why couldn’t you’ve been sorry before?”

“I’m not sorry about last night. You are an ass.”

“Then what?”

“I expected too much, that’s all. But you’ve been perfect,” she added sarcastically.

“What did you expect?” his voice cracked and there was a terrible rumbling in his ears as though his brain would explode.

“I want you to love me.”

“Love you!” he repeated.

“Incredible to be as silly as I am.”

He forced her round to him and slid into the hollow between her legs.

“But I do . . .”

“I can’t stand liars,” she said, “or living on illusions any longer. You gave me what I asked for, so there’s no need for hypocrisy.”

“I don’t know what’s happening to me. I come away to make up my mind about my wife and here I am involved in something I never dreamed of. I do love you, at least I think I do. No, it’s the real thing,” he contradicted himself. “I can reach out and touch it.”

She kissed him on the cheek, and he wrapped his arms around her.

“I want everything,” she said with a decisiveness that surprised him. “When you’re back in New York, get rid of your wife. Quickly.”