Michael Chabon

“Could we please do it slowly?”

“No,” he said, and he was right. We did it very rapidly, in the Weatherwoman’s bed, passing from toothed kisses through each backward and alien, but familiar, station on the old road to intercourse, which loomed there always before me, black and brutal and smiling, more alien, more backward, and more familiar than anything else. Then, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes after my arrival at the house, with a hard, spongy fistful of him in my right hand, and my left hand flat against his stomach, I was overcome with a feeling that made our black destination cease to seem looming. My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to feel myself for once the weaker.

“Here,” I said. “Right here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Please. This is okay. Now or I’ll never do it.”

“We need some slippery stuff.”

“Hurry.”

He scrambled out of bed and ran around the bedroom, tossing newspapers everywhere, rummaging through drawers, then disappeared into the bathroom. I heard the medicine chest squeak open, then slam. He flashed naked out the bedroom door and I heard him thump down the steps, stumbling with haste at the bottom. I lay on the uprooted sheets and blanket of the bed, looking without a thought of time at the hands of the alarm clock. My sides ached with rapid respiration and this feeling of a heedless desire to be fucked. The clock moved, the loose old screen on the window billowed; I heard Arthur’s footsteps again on the stair. He came back into the bedroom, gasping for breath, but grinning and carrying a bottle of corn oil.

“Slippery stuff,” I said, and my laugh was like an iridescent bubble rising to the surface of a pool of molten tar. “Come on.”

“Relax, I’m all out of breath, give me a minute, give me a kiss,” he said.

It hurt a great deal, and the oil was cold and strange, but when he said that he had finished, I did not want him to stop; I asked him not to stop, and he did his best, but then I started to cry. He held me, I stopped crying, and we were laughing again about a sound he said I had uttered, our faces inches apart, when his eyes grew round and he sat up abruptly, then came back in for a closer look.

“Your nose is bleeding,” he said.

He stood up and went to the tall, wide bedroom windows, parted the drapes, and threw open the panes. A breeze and the late sunlight came through the wrought-iron rail into the room, and a row of thin shadows fell across the floor. There was blood on my pillowcase. When I got up to find Kleenex for my nose, Arthur purposefully stripped the stained linen from the pillow and went to the window with it. When I came back, he stood by the sill, grinning with the wondrous news he had just published to the neighborhood.

18

PERSPICACITY

“EVERY WOMAN HAS THE heart of a policeman.” Later, much later, long after the summer had blown up and fallen to the earth in little black scraps of ash and Japanese paper, I sat in a cafe in a deserted Breton resort town, talking to a kid from Paris who gave me this aphorism. He drank Pernod, sweet and cloudy, bitter and calm, and to illustrate his maxim told me a story about the detective powers of an old fiancée of his. Throughout their engagement, he had lived on the third floor of an old building in the Fifth Arrondissement, and on the sixth floor of this building lived a young woman, who tempted him. She would stand waiting for him by his door, wearing only a thin robe, when he came home from work in the evening, would leave flowers and colored ribbon in his mailbox, would call him late at night and have nothing to say. But this woman was poor, and crazy, he said, and he was engaged to be married to the brilliant daughter of a prominent Jewish family, members of the Socialist elite.

He said that although his neighbor was pretty, for over a year he managed to avoid her embrace, and he never, of course, mentioned her to the rich fiancée. Then, one Sunday afternoon, and for no particular reason, he finally surrendered. Afterward, the neighbor woman rose from his bed and pulled on her dress and sandals, to go down to the corner for a bottle of wine. On the stair she passed the fiancée, who was coming to surprise the young man with an expensive gift. The two women exchanged a very brief glance. The young rich girl came upstairs, knocked on the door, and, when he opened it, slapped the man’s face. She threw the gift, a gold-plated man’s toilet set, through his television screen, then departed, and he never saw her again.