A tear left her right eye, and she made no move to stop it as the bead dropped from her cheek and stained the blue silk above her breast. He continued to stare at her, immobilized.
“You’re not alone in this world, Michael.” She slowly wagged her head from side to side. “You simply haven’t met all of your soul mates.” Then she blinked, released his hands, wiped her face with her fingers, and took a long pull from her drink.
They sat inside a private silence for a while, watching the scurry of the waiters, listening to the ring of silverware, the release of laughter held in check throughout an urban workday. O’Donovan experienced a wave of relief. He did not have to keep his secrets locked away, unshared for fear of judgment. There were others out there, women who would not be frightened by his dreams, for they had night-mares of their own. A life with someone like her would begin on a different plateau. How wonderful, he thought, to be free to fall into a somber mood of memory. “What’s up?” she would ask. “Just Iran,” he would answer. She would nod in understanding, maybe kiss him with her beautiful mouth. “I know,” she would say. “I know.”
Then all at once that fantasy was replaced by melancholy, as he realized that here no paths could lead to that Utopia. Her interest in him was surely fleeting, and probably her presence in New York as well. Her permanent satisfaction here was about as likely as his finding happiness in a Bedouin encampment. A love affair with her would be like a cruise ship romance: all-encompassing, while the band played and the moonlight sparkled on the sea. Then, speared by reality in the harsh light of dry land. Ruth O’Donovan. He shook his head. He might as well be falling for a Martian girl.
“Would you like to talk about your father?” he offered, searching for a subject to kill the mood of intimacy.
Ruth looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “Or how about bleeding ulcers?”
“No, really,” said Mike.
“No.” She shook her head. “Really.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll just work myself up.”
“Sure.”
She sighed. “But maybe I need to get past that.” She crossed her arms. “He wasn’t home a lot. But like lots of Israeli kids, we weren’t special. I have two brothers. They’re in the service now.” She picked up her handbag, found a tissue, swiped at her nose, and then crumpled it into a ball. “When he was home, he acted like any other father with a crazy work schedule. He never talked about it, as if he was just a dentist or something. Aw, just another wisdom tooth, kids.” She turned toward O’Donovan, closing her fists. “But he wasn’t a dentist, or a lawyer, or a bus driver. We knew what he did, and he wouldn’t share it. He couldn’t, but it still hurt. Me, at least.” She waved a hand and frowned. “Silly childhood psychosis.”
“Your trouble isn’t trivial,” said O’Donovan, “just because you know what it’s called.”
Ruth made to answer, then stopped herself, thinking that no shagitz had the right to be this stunning, this smart, with a heart so large, shoulders like those, eyes so blue. How dare he have the audacity to become more in these few minutes than the promise of a night or two of amusement? Where the hell could they ever hope to go with this thing?
She reached out with her thumb and finger and gently gripped his chin, feeling the soft sand of his shave. “Remember this, Michael,” she whispered, with the intensity of a demanded oath. “Wherever you are, whenever it happens, with whatever woman you have them. Be first for your children.”
“If it happens,” he agreed, his lips barely moving.
“It will. Make a pledge.”
“I promise.” He reached up and touched the wrist that hovered near his throat. “If you’ll make one too.”
“What?”
“That your daughters, if they’re like you . . . won’t touch men like me and then walk away.”
It took her a second, but then she understood. She raised herself from her chair and bent forward. She hesitated when her mouth was very close to his, their gazes wide as their pulses began to tremble, and then he met her. Their eyes closed and they touched their lips together, sighing gently into each other, a sweet taste of smoke and ice, sealed by incredibly soft heat.
Ruth slowly pulled away, her hair trailing from his cheek as she sat. His eyes were still closed, and she watched expectantly as they fluttered open. He took a long breath, placed his right hand over his heart, and mouthed something.
She leaned forward. “Pardon me?”
“Call nine-one-one,” he repeated as he held his chest. Then he grinned through his blush.
She smiled back. “I’ll race you to the ambulance.”
“Ahem.”
They turned to the sound of apologetic throat-clearing. The maître d’, a young man wearing an olive double-breasted suit and a short brown ponytail, was standing at a tactful distance. He smiled down at them.
“Evening, folks.”
They nodded.
“If you’d care to order dinner, could I impose upon you and offer a table for two?” He gestured across the room. Mike and Ruth looked at one another, each trying to read the other’s eyes. “Or maybe if you’d just like another drink, I could suggest the bar? Next round on the house.” He was still smiling, even though they were becoming a financial liability.
O’Donovan could have flashed his badge, and the man would have gone away. But his father had taught him that such behavior was what made the public eternally suspicious of policemen.
He handed the maître d’ enough cash to cover the tip as well.
“Thanks so much,” the young man oozed as he withdrew.
“Happy holidays,” said O’Donovan.
“Do you have another place in mind?” Ruth asked.
“Not really. How’s your appetite?”
She looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe a little aroused.”
“Little Italy?”
“Kind of far.” Her face took on an attempt at innocence. “Tell you what. Even though you lost, I won’t make you cook.”
“Wise choice.”
“There’s a good Chinese place on the Upper West Side.”
“Great.”
They both stood, buttoning their coats, pulling on their gloves. Ruth took his elbow and looked up at him.
“I live nearby,” she said. “We could take it out.”
“To your place?” He wanted to be sure, make no clumsy assumptions.
“I could show you my database files.”
He grinned at her. “The modern equivalent of ‘etchings’?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’ll explain it later.”
“Fine,” she said. “Lay on, Macduff.”
“Hey! You’re quoting the Bard!”
“I’m a college girl.”
They walked from the Grill, arms locked and bodies close together.
At the far end of the Grill’s oval bar, a small man perched on a stool, the fingers of one hand playing over his upper lip, as if reading Braille across the freshly shaved skin. It was a strange sensation for Fouad, as he had always worn a full black beard since adolescence. Yet the mission demanded an unpious naked face, and he only hoped that he would be forgiven.
As he watched the tall American and the striking Jewess embracing immodestly and making for the door, one might have thought that the discomfort of a fever caused his next action. He glanced down into the well of the lower-level dining area, raised an icy green bottle of O’Doul’s nonalcoholic beer, and rolled it across his forehead.
Ten feet below and thirty feet away, a trio of diners sat at a corner banquette. The wide backs of two well-dressed men were exposed to the crowd, while across from them a woman appeared to be enjoying the attentions of her “double date.” Her hair was long and straight, black as Siberian mink fur, with a crop of bangs cut low across coal eyebrows. She wore tinted, blue-framed glasses above a carefully painted maroon mouth. Her dress was a thick gray knit, with a hem to her crossed ankles.
The woman he
ld a long white cigarette, whose glowing tip made little arcs as she chatted animatedly, smiled at her escorts, and sipped from a wineglass. Nothing in her posture indicated that she had seen Fouad’s gesture from the bar, although just afterward, she toyed briefly with a gold electronic lighter, and ignited its flame twice.
Fouad dropped a ten onto the bar, slid quickly from his stool, and hurried after the couple. He could see them through the hotel’s glass facade, getting into one of the cabs at the sidewalk. That was fine. He would be inside Muhammed’s follow car before the man panicked and took off without him.
The woman at the banquette reached for her purse. She extracted a digital beeper, switched off the volume, and propped it up so she would be able to clearly see the liquid crystal readout.
She looked at the two large young men and almost laughed, for they still maintained those fixed silly smiles with which they had been responding to her meaningless chatter for nearly an hour. One of them had just received a large platter of chicken salad, the other a dish of pesto pasta. Yet both meals remained untouched.
“Now we wait,” said Martina. The two men looked at her, immobile. “Eat your food.”
They rolled their muscular shoulders and bent gratefully to the task, as if she had been starving them.
“Take your time,” Martina chided, and they slowed the rapid shoveling of their food. She thought of how the Central Intelligence Agency had acronymed her operators as HOGs, and for a moment she wondered if the Americans had somehow been privy to their eating habits. Then she smiled again as she envisioned the policeman who had chased her, and the daughter of Benjamin Baum.
No need to hurry, she mused silently. Those two will dance before they fuck.
Ruth and Mike had not, in fact, danced. Yet they had not hurried, either.
In the long taxi ride northward, their conversation diminished as they approached Ruth’s neighborhood, the anticipation drawing each of them privately inward. They stopped at the Chinese restaurant on Broadway, a Cantonese place, called Ping Tung, and as they waited for their order they stood before a large aquarium, staring at a menagerie of bulbous-eyed goldfish, neither of them really thinking about ocean life.
They walked to Ruth’s apartment, hunched against the crosstown wind, arms unlinked now, with Mike carrying the brown shopping bag. Number 550 was a large old building without a doorman, and Ruth, hugging a pair of soda bottles, found her keys and shouldered open the heavy door. They rode the old broom-closet elevator to the third floor.
Her apartment, at the end of a long hallway, brought shudders of relief. Its spitting and creaking radiators had filled the modest space with warmth, and as Mike stripped off his jacket he was struck by the resemblance to his own place, twenty blocks south. The paint was the same, layers upon layers of that beige cream, as if all Manhattan landlords filled their buckets from a communal vat. A large Persian carpet supported modern yet unmatching furniture in the living room. Above a small tan couch, a large aerial photograph of Jerusalem was framed under glass. A blond coffee table was nearly obscured by psychology texts and loose papers. Six earthenware urns held bouquets of dried flowers and thistles, as if no one had the time or inclination to water here.
Mike looked across the narrow salon to its far end, where a pair of open doors revealed small separate bedrooms.
“Got a roommate?”
“In name only,” said Ruth as she hung their jackets and recovered the bag from Mike’s hands.
“Where is she? Or he?”
“She is temporarily absent.”
She pulled the chain of a standing lamp and walked toward an archway leading to a kitchen alcove. “She’s in love.”
“Do you like her?”
“Like her?” She stopped before entering the kitchen, frowned, and turned, searching for something. “She’s funny, accommodating, Jewish, and absent. If I was gay, I’d marry her.”
He smiled as he watched her focus on the coffee table. She walked to it, lifted a foot, and in one deft motion swept all her books and papers onto the floor. She placed the bag on the table, brushed her hands together, and grinned at him.
“Dinner is served,” she said grandly.
“Too fussy for me.” He moved to the couch. “I like it informal.”
“Speaking of which,” said Ruth as she looked down at her skirt, “I’m changing. Be right back.”
As Mike pulled the contents from the oil-stained bag, Ruth reemerged from her bedroom sporting blue jeans and a gray Columbia sweatshirt. She was barefoot. To him, she could not have looked sexier had she been wearing a silk bikini set from Victoria’s Secret.
She turned on a small television and they sat together on the couch, watching a local news report as they demonstrated their lack of chopstick dexterity. Though barely four days old, the bombing at the Israeli Consulate had been relegated to third tier, after the latest White House link to Iran-contra, and a more regional flap over the mayor’s tennis vacations. There was no mention of last evening’s shootout on the Upper East Side. No wounds, no news. Gabe Pressman, whom Ruth liked very much, finally raised the bombing issue. But he was inclined to interview another journalist, Robert I. Friedman of The Village Voice, whom Ruth despised for his career built on self-hating exposés. Friedman declared that the bombing was the work of Kahane-following fanatical Jews, and Ruth booed him roundly.
She tasted Mike’s beef and snow peas and said, “Fooyah!” He countered by trying her triple-starred lobster, and promptly gulped half a glass of soda.
She turned off the television and warmed up the compact disc player, inserting a medley of nostalgic Israeli folk songs rendered by Arik Einshtein. When a languid wartime longing for a girl and home played in the background, Ruth translated for Mike.
I have a girl named Ruti,
Who waits for me on those shores . . .
There were no further confessions of painful army histories. They shared some simple childhood experiences, searching for similarities that really were not there, smiling at the images of each other in those awkward, helpless years of prepubescent frustrations, schoolings, summer camps, discoveries. And when they reached the teenage years, where both had certainly been preoccupied with the wonders of the opposite gender, they fell to silence.
“How about some mud?” Ruth said when they had finished the meal.
“Is that an offer for a facial or a wrestling match?”
“Coffee. Turkish style.”
“You cook?”
“Let’s not exaggerate.”
She moved to the kitchen, and Mike was content to sit on the couch, listening to the guitars and the soft melodies sung in her language. The singer’s voice was warm, the tones like Italian or Greek. Mike had fully expected the disconsolate whines of Arabic ouds, and he was somehow ashamed. He knew that his ignorance could not be remedied in an evening.
He watched Ruth’s back through the archway as she stood before the stove, her hair thrown back over her shoulder, repeatedly lifting the conical brass pot as she brought the brew to the boil and then snatched it away before it overflowed. When she inserted a spoon into the finjon and began to stir, and her bottom swayed like an orchestra conductor’s, he had to look away.
They were seated together again, sipping the sweet dark “mud,” when she pointed across the room.
“There’s my monster.”
Mike had not really noticed the computer before. Such devices had become as mundane as bathroom commodes. It sat on a small desk tucked beneath an H-shaped bookcase, which looked as if it might buckle under its burden of volumes.
Ruth walked to it, pulled out a caster chair, and turned on the cpu. Then she stretched her fingers like a pianist and began to play.
“I’ll call up the juicy stuff,” she said as she waited for the computer to awaken. How long is it going to take him? She tapped on the rim of the keyboard. I already kissed him once, and I’m not going to do it again. “I use D-Base Three, but I’d like to upgrade.” If he was Israeli, we
never would have made it to the food, she complained to herself. “I really need a faster machine.” On the other hand, if he were Israeli, it would have been over in ten minutes and he’d be complaining about the cold food now. “Here we go. Let’s look for Mistress Klump.” She began to type instructions: Search for Terror; Change Directory to German; Change Directory to RAF. Maybe it’s the garlic. She ran her tongue across her teeth, mistyped a word, slapped the keyboard, and began again. Come on, Michael. Say something. Do something, or I’ll pack you off!
“It’s in Hebrew, for God’s sake.”
Ruth stiffened. He was standing behind her. She could feel his body brushing her back, his voice vibrating down through the top of her head.
“Not for God’s sake,” she said. “For security.”
“Well, I can’t read it.” His fingers came to rest on her shoulder.
“I can translate.” Her voice emerged in a thick whisper. Careful what you wish for, she warned herself now, a small alarm spreading heat to her face even as she wished more fervently. “This stuff is sensitive, you know.”
She felt the hair being swept gently back from her right shoulder, and then his fingers touched her throat, moving to her chin. She tilted her head back and looked up.
“So are you,” Mike whispered as he bent his head. “Despite the facade.”
And then he kissed her.
At first their mouths were tentative, a light touch without hunger, without movement. Then Ruth pressed her bare feet to the floor, and as the chair turned, their faces swept around, their lips parted, they stole a glance into each other’s eyes, and joined again. She reached up to his face and held it to her own as he knelt between her knees.
Their mouths could not be stopped now, their fingers at each other’s faces, eyes, hair. Ruth opened her lips and sank into a dream of tastes, a flood of warm swirls, the food, the coffee, the sweet liquids of his mouth. She held the back of his head and strove to envelop him, and then she slid away and kissed his eyes, his brows, his hair, as his lips found her throat and they slipped to the floor.
The Nylon Hand of God Page 25
