Was he laughing at her?
“Do it again?” she repeated.
“You know—” He set the glasses down on a low table between the couches, then stretched out own his arms, spun around once and tripped. “You’re a bit more graceful.”
She, graceful? His eyes were so warm. Then, yes—if Ray wanted, she would do it again. She spread her arms, she threw back her head. Stood on tiptoe and twirled, room whirling, out and out she flew until he caught her and they staggered together and fell on the carpet. Beneath her the floor went on whirling as if the whole house might go on spinning until it broke apart, but the weight of Ray’s body on top of her held her still.
She did not know how long they had been kissing when his hand, which had been holding the curve of her breast through her blouse with no resistance, now began undoing the buttons at her collar. All at once she froze.
“Stop.” She caught his hand, pulled it away. If he opened her shirt that would be the end. But when he did stop, drew back, puzzled and hurt, her body, her burning tattooed body, reached out for his again and engulfed him. She wrapped her arms around him, her legs. For a minute she thought she could let him fuck her with all her clothes on. But that belonged to Joe, his coming home drunk and throwing himself on top of her whether she wanted it or not. She would not have Ray like that: nothing was worth the ghost of Joe having another fuck on her again.
Evelyn disentangled her limbs from Ray’s, got up on her knees beside the hearth and whispered, “Look.”
He thought she meant the flames in the fireplace. Then in one motion she pulled off her dress.
The sweet heat of her body, the taste of her luscious peach mouth had already fogged his brain. Then the cheap dark dress was sliding up over her head, then a pale slip following like a satiny fountain, revealing—what? When he saw that her body was emblazoned with color, his first confused thought was that she must be playing some sort of joke.
She must have drawn it all on with markers, he decided; it could not be real.
Then he saw her face. Her mouth defiant, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Jesus God,” he said faintly. He looked down at the hearth rug, looked back at Evelyn. The tattoos began a few inches above her breasts and angled up toward her shoulders in a graceful curve, extending like a low-cut gown of ink whose sleeves began just at the shoulders and ended above her elbows. She was fully tattooed the length of her torso, down her belly and back, and halfway down both thighs, where the forest of color ended in twin garters of dark green leaves. Ray noted vaguely the presence of a tiger, a snake, a map on her arms, but everything was crowded together. Across her belly swam a mermaid whose tail curved all the way around Evelyn’s navel, which cleverly doubled as the opening of a pink and orange conch shell. Ray put his hand over his eyes, to shut out the visual cacophony. Tattoos.
A door slammed and he opened his eyes again. Evelyn had disappeared into the bathroom. He gazed at the door. It was one color only: white. He got up and crossed the room, knocked.
From the other side Evelyn said, “Get me my clothes, please.”
He opened the door and she pushed past him, a blur of pigment, and went to the fireplace, seized her crumpled dress and pulled it on. Except for her bright hair, the riot of color disappeared.
She looked distractedly around the room. “Where’s the phone? I’ll call a taxi.”
He went to her. “No. Evelyn, no. But why didn’t you tell me?”
She was crying and only shook her head.
“Just sit down for a minute. Please?” He took her wrist and led her back to the sofa.
Tattoos. Ray did not know anyone with a single tattoo save for Frank, the custodian at Dunlap and Scott, who sometimes stopped to talk to him when Ray was working late. Frank had a Navy tattoo on his forearm. Exposure to sun and time had blurred the original image—a girl in a hula skirt—into an amorphous creature of thick greenish lines. Hadn’t Janis Joplin had a butterfly tattoo? I always liked Janis Joplin, Ray thought. Yes, but
one
tattoo, not an entire body full. Ray felt a surge of despair rise in him, but it was outpaced by another, stronger swell, this one of desire. To look again, touch and taste again. Who was she, this woman plastered with the stamps of places he barely knew existed? She was like the taste of an unfamiliar spice on his tongue—she left his mouth both hurting and watering for more of her. Nothing like her was in his kitchen, in the world as he knew it.
He reached over and laid a tentative hand on her arm. When she did not resist, he took the hem of her dress and lifted it a few inches past her knee. Saw the garland of leaves, the band of blue and purple waves. She was still crying, staring fixedly into the fire.
“Evelyn? I don’t want you to go. I was just shocked, that’s all.” As if it were so easily past tense and he was shocked no longer, as if he were not staring in dumb fascination at her leg, as if he didn’t want to throw her dress back to her waist and stare at all of her, kneel between her opened knees, touch what was told there, fit his mouth to her thighs to see if he could taste the different colors.
That she had ventured this far into his life, was, he realized, brave.
“Evelyn, just look at me a minute.” He took her chin in his hand and gently turned her face toward his. Her blue eyes were red and spilling. “I still want you, you know,” he said.
He put his arms around her. “I want you,” he said, and he could feel how true it was. He felt through the fabric of her dress how fast her heart was beating, and he felt his own heart speed up to match her frightened tempo. He wanted the warmth of this living heart, the insistence of its pounding. “I want you,” he said in her ear. His tongue retraced it, moved to her temple. Her skin was cream with a light dusting of cinnamon. The taste of her skin went straight to his cock. This was more than want, it was need. My God, he thought, what’s happening to me?
There was a little sigh as she let out her breath. Her body relaxed against him, trembled once, leaned into him with all her weight.
They made love on the hearth rug, on the sofa, then finally upstairs in Ray’s bed. The lights on. Everything wet and color.
It was, Ray told her later, like fucking a rainbow.
Now, lying in bed beside him, Evelyn sighed and shifted, unable to sleep. Joe’s ghost was still watching her from the doorway, Ingrid was down in the kitchen in Ray’s old trench coat. Only Ray was asleep, snoring peacefully on his side of the bed. Sweet Ray, ignorant and good. Evelyn ran her hand along his bare shoulder, then put her fingers into his thick dark hair. She loved the way his hair felt, like the fur of a well-groomed animal. Something taken care of, something loved. She caressed his temple. The cut from the flying glass was a thin scab now. She kissed it, then began kissing his closed eyes, his mouth. His mouth moved, first in sleep, then woke against hers, unfolded her kisses and made them into his own.
Outside, Ingrid stepped down off the back porch.
2:21 a.m., and someone was out there in the darkness, Mister, a wrong gee with another rock in his pocket.
Detective Slade on a night job, casing the perimeter of the house. There was the broken window with a plastic bag taped over it
and every room dark as a mob boss’s heart, the whole town holding its breath while the killer breathed easy—
Ingrid froze. A sound had come from inside the house, a moan that cut the darkness and yet was part of the darkness, so dark was its sound. Ingrid held her breath, her whole body listening into the silence. Was a prowler really there after all? Had he gotten in the house?
Nothing, nothing, and then another groan. This time Ingrid identified the noise correctly. She stood very still, head tilted up toward the half-open window of the Shepard’s bedroom. The people making love in there, who were they? No relation to the woman in the kitchen afraid of being seen in her bathrobe in the middle of the night. No relation to the man in the corduroy pants who had showed her how to bolt the lids onto the garbage cans so the raccoons wouldn’t get them. The man who wrote the detective story, A. B. Shepard, was he the one in there making the woman with the red hair moan?
It was Mrs. Shepard she was hearing. Ingrid felt all the blood in her body rush to her face. The blood must have come straight from her chest, for the space around her heart felt strangely cold and empty. And her hands were cold—maybe she was smoking too much. She went back inside, climbed the stairs silently except for one bad creak, took off Ray’s trench coat. She climbed into bed and turned out the light. One cold hand strayed south, a small animal looking for warmth and finding it in the dovetail of her thighs, in the animal nest of unbidden hair she tangled in her fingers for a while. It was stupid for people to fall in love when everything was so precarious, when you could die at any moment, either from some hidden poison inside you that mutated your cells one by one, or from some half-asleep guy hitting the wrong button at his console and launching a nuclear missile. That would be the less painful way to die. The best thing to do would be to go outside into the darkness, stand in the middle of the lawn and wait. She touched and touched herself, and when she came it was to the accompaniment of the mushroom cloud in her mind unfolding in pure silence, obliterating all other noise on the planet, even the moans of those strangers writhing in the next room.
I’m not lonely. I just work alone. There’s a difference, Mister.
8.
In the morning Ray overslept, which he had not done since Evelyn and he were first dating. His wife had kept him up for a full crazed hour, teasing him, kneeling over him, her body sliding onto his and then off again and finally fucking him until he came so hard he didn’t notice the groans escaping from his body, or the pain of his head hitting the headboard as he thrashed. He was an animal alive in the pleasure of instinct, freed from the tortured abstractions of the human mind. He was also nearly an hour late for work. When he arrived, face flushed from running from the parking lot, he came face to face in the hall with Dunlap, who stopped him to inquire, with utmost politeness, if Ray was now ready for the meeting that had started ten minutes ago. Ray was still hung over enough on sex endorphins to smile and say, in a tone of genuine goodwill, that he was; then he walked straight into the conference, leaving Dunlap to follow along behind him.
His happy mood persisted all day, even through the delivery of a two-inch stack of door and window schedules for a new hospital wing: mind-numbing grunt work. They were punishment from Dunlap, brought on, he suspected, by his complaining last week about the hospital wing’s questionable lack of natural light. But who cared, who the hell cared at all when he’d made his wife groan,
Don’t stop, Ray, don’t stop
—? He shoved the stack of schedules into his briefcase and left work with time enough to buy Evelyn flowers on the way home.
He went up the front walk whistling, found the first floor of the house empty. Called for Evelyn, but it was Ingrid who appeared on the landing.
“Hey,” she said, coming down the stairs, “I liked your story.”
“My story?”
“Yeah, ‘Too Much Ice.’ It was cool.”
She’d liked it! He’d almost forgotten he’d given it to her. He tried to look casual.
“You really enjoyed it?”
“Yeah. Hey, nice flowers.”
He looked down at the irises and roses in his hand. “Where’s Evelyn?” he asked.
“Grocery store.”
Ray went into the kitchen and rummaged for a vase. Ingrid followed and perched on a stool, watched while he put the flowers in water and mixed a Manhattan.
Then she said, “So how come you don’t write more of that stuff?”
He sipped his drink. “It’s been years and years since I wrote anything like that.”
“Why?”
He looked at her, amused. Only a very young person would ask such a question. “I’m too old,” he said, felt old then.
“Whaddaya mean, old? You’re not too old to write that architecture stuff.”
“But I’m an architect. That’s what I do. You only have so much energy, so many hours in a day—you’ll see.”
She was looking at him but not listening; frowning as if trying to remember something.
“When you wrote the detective story,” she said slowly, “were you different?”
“Of course. I was twenty-one, for one thing.”
“Did you ever really carry a gun?”
He laughed. “No, I didn’t carry a gun; I’ve never even fired one, actually. I wasn’t in Vietnam.”
“But were you different in other ways? When you wrote that?”
“You mean, was I six inches taller and broad-shouldered with a mean left hook? No, Ingrid, I was a skinny college kid who was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown from overwork and general adolescent angst.” He sat down on the edge of the kitchen table. “While everyone else went off to Bermuda or Switzerland for Spring Break, I lay around in my parents’ house reading detective stories. A few months later I tried my hand at writing one myself, and I got lucky, it was published by the first place I sent it to. That’s all.”