Thief of Words (16 page)
Then, turning his palms away from her, he slid the backs of his hands down her chest, down over her breasts, down and down until they turned around and she felt fingers gripping her hips. She felt herself pulled toward him, until she could feel his breath feather her face. But the kiss never came; instead he stopped just short.
Through half-closed eyes she saw him briefly study her face, then slowly he began to kneel. As he descended before her, she could feel his lips brush the same pathway that his fingers had just traveled.
Down he went, his hands slipping around back to her bottom. Then he was on his knees looking up. There was a hand at the band of her underwear…
“How’s everything going in there?” It was the saleslady.
“Fine, fine, everything’s fine,” Annie said, trying to hide the gasp in her voice. “I’ll call you if I need you.”
Annie waited until she heard the woman walk away, then crumpled down on the pink plaid chintz stool. Jack was gone; the jungle noises were replaced by a Muzak version of “Michelle.” It was just her, face flushed, dressed in a purple camisole. She zipped through the rest of the lingerie she’d brought into the fitting room.
“Do you have any plain bags?” Annie said to the saleslady, who’d just slipped her purchases into a pink-and-white-striped bag with big white block letters announcing “Victoria’s Secret.”
She was going to her office to meet Fred this morning, to go over what happened last week when she was away. If she walked in carrying that bag, she might as well just announce to Fred—and herself—that when she drove to Baltimore tonight, she wasn’t planning on coming back till tomorrow morning.
“Sorry, this is all we have.”
J
ack went outside to tell Annie there would be a fifteen-minute wait for a waterfront table. He found her leaning against a railing, her back to the harbor and the sun. She wore a sleeveless brown silk dress with a delicate bamboo print. The early-evening light, refracting through the masts of anchored boats, created a nimbus of her hair and made amber of her skin.
As he walked toward her, Jack took stock of things. His fifty years were resting lightly that evening. Unless he was forced to sprint to the National Aquarium and back, he could fool himself into thinking he was thirty, maybe thirty-five. Courtship was rejuvenating, like an illegal serum made of monkey gonads. He breathed in deeply. A sea smell spiced the air.
“You seem happy,” Annie said as he joined her.
“I am happy. I feel positively… positive,” Jack said.
“Me too,” she said. “I’ve been looking forward to this night for a long time. Since we tumbled down the hill together in California.”
Jack paused.
Just as Annie started to silently berate herself (Trip was right, I scare people away with my big mouth), Jack took her hand and said, “You can’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this night.
You look beautiful framed in the sunset. I’ve never dated a woman who glowed before.”
Annie laughed. (Trip was wrong, so what else was new?) “Must be the irradiated papaya I ate this morning.”
“Baltimore becomes you. Baltimore doesn’t do that for many people.”
Annie turned to face the water. From Remmy’s she could see the entire sweep of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. “But it’s beautiful.”
“This is just a necklace on the skunk.”
“Jack, you want everyone to think you’re a curmudgeon. But I know better. Don’t forget, Pablito, you send me e-mails.”
Over dinner, the conversation turned to writing. Annie told Jack stories about manuscripts from hell, by way of the transom, and she complimented him again. “You’ve got to write,” she said. “You’re better than most people who get published.”
When Jack turned the compliment around (“You’re better than anybody on my staff”), Annie said, “I admit that all this e-mail has got me wanting to write again.”
“Again?” asked Jack.
He didn’t know it, but he had just invited Annie’s newspaper years to the table. Should she tell him? She teetered on the brink of truth. But at the last moment she backed away. It was too early for that reality. Instead she waved her hand dismissively and said, “Oh, I used to write in college and all. Nothing serious.”
Night fell and Baltimore’s necklace began to shine. The big pink neon Domino Sugars sign dominated the northern skyline. The lights of Planet Hollywood, the National Aquarium, and other tourist attractions made luminous nets in the harbor’s wavelets. A light touch of humidity softened the air. On such a night you could believe that romance conquers all and, for the first time in history, Baltimore and Paris could be compared.
As dinner wound down, Jack pointed across the water to a wooded park on top of Federal Hill, directly across the Inner Harbor. “My place is right behind those trees,” he said. “That’s where you drove up this evening. Let’s go and I’ll show you the view from there.”
Twenty minutes later, they’d driven back to Jack’s apartment and walked across the street to Federal Hill Park, a block-square patch of green overlooking the city. From this vantage point, Federal troops had once trained cannon on the city and its Confederate sympathizers. Now the soldiers and cannons were frozen in bronze.
As they approached the park’s northern edge, Annie took Jack’s arm. If any other strollers noticed, it would have seemed an innocent move. But it was a new stage in the evolution of their romance; they had left the primordial ooze and stepped onto land. Jack liked feeling Annie’s arm linked in his. He leaned slightly up against her.
The view of the city and harbor was panoramic. Jack began pointing out landmarks.
“Want to make fifty dollars?” he said. “Here’s a bet: How tall is the dot over the
I
in the Domino sign?”
“What if I lose?” Annie said. “I don’t have that kind of cash on me.”
“You can work it off,” he said, cocking an eyebrow.
Annie examined the big sign, holding her fingers in front of her face in a perspective square. “I know this is a trick question, but here goes. Six feet.”
Jack did a double take and reached for his wallet. “Good Lord, Annie, how the hell did you know that one?”
“Just a lucky guess. Put your wallet away. You paid for dinner, let’s call it even.”
Jack turned and pointed in the other direction. “See those lights? That’s Camden Yards. Listen, you can hear the crowd cheer.”
He continued the city tour for a few more minutes, then turned to go back.
“Not yet,” said Annie. “First, kiss me.”
Jack cupped her face in his hands and brought her lips to his as tenderly as he knew how.
The soundtrack for this scene should have been lush strings and a tasteful choir. But instead, Jack and Annie heard giggling and a mocking voice saying, “Awwww, ain’t that sweet?”
They turned to discover that they had been putting on a show for a posse of neighborhood teens gathered under a maple tree. They couldn’t help but laugh, too. “Come on,” said Jack, “let’s really give them a show.”
This time they performed a softcore clinch to the sounds of hooting and an approving, “You go!”
They walked back through the park, buzzing with the voltage they’d just created. Jack had his arm around Annie’s waist. They kissed again at the entrance to the apartment complex; they kissed in the elevator; they kissed by Jack’s apartment door.
T
hey kissed before he closed the door.
They kissed as he led her to his living room.
They kissed as they stood before the old wooden icebox filled with CDs and the CD player.
“What would you like to hear?” Jack whispered.
“Surprise me,” Annie whispered in his ear and, before he could pull away, slipped her tongue into it.
They kissed again in silence.
“I thought you were going to surprise me,” Annie said into his mouth, and pushed her body against his.
Jack grabbed her and pressed her even harder against him. “There isn’t enough blood left in my brain,” he said into her mouth.
Annie squirmed away and smiled. “Maybe you should put your head between your legs.”
“Maybe I should put my head between your legs,” he said and pulled her back into a kiss.
“I think you should, but only to music,” Annie said as she put her lips to his ear again.
Then she pushed him away and turned him toward the icebox. “Choose fast.”
There wasn’t much choosing involved. Jack had already put a pile of CDs on top of the icebox, imagining a slow seduction of sultry music, wine, and words. But if he wasn’t mistaken, within two minutes of arriving, Annie had told him to go down on her. Fast. Where have you been all my life, Annie Hollerman? He snatched the top three CDs and began pushing buttons.
While Jack loaded the CD player, Annie reached behind her and unzipped her dress. As he finished, she tapped him on the back. “Take my dress off.”
Jack turned and slipped the straps down her arms. The dress fell to her feet. She stood before him in a lilac camisole and white lace tap pants.
He reached out; his fingers brushed the base of her throat and traveled down her breastbone, stopping at the purple silk.
“It’s beautiful,” Jack said.
“I bought it for tonight,” Annie said and closed her eyes, remembering his imagined touch on her in the Victoria’s Secret dressing room.
Amazingly, his hands were now following the same path. He traced the lines of her clavicles and then, turning his palms away from her, he softly slid the backs of his hands down her chest, down over her breasts, down and down until they turned around and she felt his fingers gripping her hips.
She saw him briefly study her face, then he slowly began to kneel. She felt his lips brush the same pathway that his fingers had just traveled. His hands slipped from her hips to her bottom. He pressed his mouth against her panties, breathing hot air into the hair caught behind the white lace. He hooked his fingers around the elastic and slid the panties off her body as Miles Davis began a slow imagining of Rodrigo’s Spain.
Annie dug her fingers into Jack’s hair and pressed him against her as she took a step back and onto the sofa. For a while—Annie could not have said how long—Jack knelt before her. Finally, she pulled his wet mouth up to hers and the monthlong journey, which began with, “What you need, Annie Hollerman, is a man with a good ass,” reached, what now seemed to them, its extraordinary and natural destination. Annie opened her legs and Jack found himself inside her. It was some time later—neither Jack nor Annie could have said how long—and they were dancing to Jennifer Warnes’s hypnotic soprano.
“Way down … way way down deep,”
she sang, reminding them of the place they had visited together that night.
They turned through the music, arms enmeshed, bare bellies pressed together, damp thighs lapping against thighs. Jack brushed his lips across Annie’s face and found her mouth again; he drew wet fingers up her back.
Around the room they danced, naked feet sliding slowly across the carpet, naked backs illuminated by dim light drifting in from an open window and the digital glow of the CD system, naked legs brushing up against the couch, where they had become naked together for the first time.
“Way down … way way down… .”
A
nnie opened her eyes. In front of her was a wicker nightstand and an oriental lamp she’d never seen before. A bed sheet of an unfamiliar blue was twisted between her legs. Something warm pressed against her.
She turned around to see what it was. Jack DePaul’s bare leg, then all of a bare, sleeping Jack DePaul came into view. He was facing her, splayed out in the Mighty Mouse position: on his stomach, left leg straight, right leg and right arm bent ninety degrees.
She couldn’t remember when they’d fallen asleep. One thing was certain, she hadn’t wanted it to stop. Not the naked dancing, or his chest rubbing against her breasts, or her legs wrapped around his hips, or his mouth all over her. She’d felt strong as a werewolf in the midnight of his apartment. But finally Jack had guided her to his bed—this bed—had spooned up against her, said a jumble of sweet things that ended with, “No more, you’re going to kill me,” and fled from consciousness.
She looked at him. He wasn’t moving. For a horrifying second she thought: What if I
have
killed him? He is fifty, after all. How old was Nelson Rockefeller? But, no, she saw his chest rising and falling against the mattress. She lay on her side, propped two pillows under her head, and examined her exhausted lover.
This was the first time she’d seen his face without glasses, in the light. His nose had a crook and bump that she hadn’t noticed before. It added a craggy note: Richard Dreyfuss aging into Spencer Tracy. His beard swirled in and out of colors—brown, white, gray, brown. The sheet covered half of his rounded butt. If only you knew how right you were, Laura Goodbread. His chest looked deeper than she had remembered. She put out her left hand against it to measure. He shifted and she quickly pulled her hand back.
The movement stirred the air between them and Annie was suddenly engulfed by a new sensation. She put her fingers to her face and breathed in the musky, sweaty smell of sex. She breathed in again. A primal perfume of lust and pubic hair. She closed her eyes. It was a smell that made her want to say dirty words and buy crotchless panties.
Annie looked again at her sleepy hero splayed out in his heroic cartoon posture. She leaned over him and sang, “Here I come to save the day.”
He jerked awake and slowly focused on her face. “Hi, angel,” he said, and then, after a moment, “what happened?”
“I think you passed out.” Annie moved to within kissing distance of his mouth. She felt like one of Rubens’s women, made for sex, acutely aware of her curves. She felt the air trace the outlines of her body; every cell in her skin was saying, “Touch me.”
Jack pulled her to him. They kissed long and hard. When they came up for air, Jack looked over at the nightstand clock. “Jesus, it’s ten o’clock. Should we get up?”
Annie smiled, the taste of sex on her lips, the smell of it in her nose. “Not yet, Mighty Mouse.”