by Otto Penzler
When I got ready to leave, Karen emerged from another room with an umbrella.
“I won’t melt,” I said.
“You can bring it back.” She smiled, enjoying the fact that she was so far ahead of me. Walking me to the door, she took my arm.
I was quite happy until, halfway downstairs in the elevator, it came to me that she looked a good deal like Clarissa.
I brought the umbrella back, naturally. I called ahead, and then it started to rain as soon as I got there, which led to a pretty good laugh. We just dashed around the corner and sat on the stools in a little coffee bar, talking about ourselves.
She ran the sales division of a chemical company her father had founded and sold several years ago to a big conglomerate. I figured she was one of those sleek women I noticed in airports, always looking resourceful and self-possessed in their dark tailored suits, able to climb onto the plane at the last instant and still somehow get their luggage into the overhead.
“You don’t really seem like a salesman,” I told her. “Too sincere.”
“That’s why I’m good. I don’t lie,” she said. “I never lie,” Her dark eyes rose over her paper cup in a measured warning. “I didn’t believe I could handle sales. But I needed a job after my first divorce. And when I was a kid, I was always jealous that my brothers went to the office with my father.” Her father, pushing seventy-five now, still ran the company under the terms of his buyout.
“How’d that work when you weren’t talking to him?”
“E-mail.” She laughed.
I was impressed with her rugged sense of humor about the way life had turned out. Her last name, for example, was her second husband’s.
“You really wouldn’t really call that a marriage. He was a country-club buddy of my father’s, older and very polished, but it just never took. We were together six weeks, and kind of split up at a party one night and never were under the same roof again. I thought, Oh god, I’m not going to change all my credit cards again. I just did that. They were still coming in the mail, a different one each day. At some point, you have to start moving forward.”
As we walked back to her place, a huge clap of thunder rattled the street, and the rain suddenly fell as if poured from a bucket. The small umbrella offered little protection, and I pushed her into a street-corner bus shelter, where I kissed her. I was afraid it might seem like a moment from a movie, but I guess everybody wants some of that in her life.
“That was very stylish,” she said, and rubbed one finger under her lip to deal with the lipstick smudge. “You’re a stylish guy.”
The next time I saw her, we ended up walking down to the river. It was drizzling again, but there’d been plenty of winter weather, and the River Kindle was covered by a solid frozen sheet. Standing on the ice, you could still feel the lurking movement beneath, the vibration of the Cory Falls a hundred feet away, the telltale swirls of the water and its many enigmas.
Rain glossed the surface, refracting the lights of Center City and making it possible to skate along. Karen had trained as a girl and did wonderful, graceful movements, skidding ahead on a pair of Keds, encouraging me to follow her. She’s an adventure, I thought. This woman’s an adventure. My skin went electric, not just about her but for myself.
“You’re not going to say anything to her. Tell me you’re not,” Elstner and I had stopped for a beer after the basketball game, mostly so Paul could have a final cigar before he got home, where Ann did not permit them. “Maurie will dissolve my bones in a vat of acid.”
I had figured it out a while ago, probably by the second time I saw Karen. The details were a while coming back to me. But by then, as I told Elstner, I was involved.
“For crying out loud,” I said. “I won’t say anything. I thought you’d think it was funny.”
“Sure. Funny. I’ll laugh as soon as I change my diaper.” Elstner blustered his lips. “Have you met Dr. Moleva yet?”
I had, in fact, only a few days before, when I’d picked Karen up at their Center City office. His smile was disturbing. He had bad teeth, like a farm animal whose poor bloodlines couldn’t be concealed. To his daughter, he was a source of never-ending vexation. At work he was imperious, then blamed his subordinates when his orders turned out to be wrong. As a father, he attacked her often and made a habit of overlooking what was important to her. He hadn’t been able to remember my name, although she gave it to him three times in the few minutes we were together.
“Kind of your run-of-the-mill jerk,” I said.
“And murderer,” added Paul.
“She hates him, I think. You know. Underneath.”
Elstner shivered again. “Christ,” he said. “Why don’t you go out with twenty-five-year-old women like other guys your age?”
“Hey, cut me some slack. It won’t make any difference.”
Elstner groaned. “You think you can just know something like that about somebody and it won’t matter?”
“Paul—”
“Listen. Did I ever give you advice about women?”
In our third year of law school, Elstner went out with a tall dark girl, an undergraduate who had the lean elegant moves of a whippet. Very moody. Very attractive. She smiled with notable reluctance. She seemed exotic because she knew a lot about motorcycles and introduced us to mescal—the saltshaker, the lime, the worm in the bottle. After their third date, I told Elstner I didn’t think she was really right for him. To this day he seemed to agree, but two or three months later, on a whim, I called her myself. That was Clarissa. Elstner for one reason or another never said much, not even the kind of jokes you might expect, not when I married her or lived with her for twenty-two years, not even when I told him that our life together had become a barren misery and that I’d asked for a divorce. Maybe he thought I’d saved him. Or used him. He never said. I never asked.
“No,” I told him, “you never gave me advice about women.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s the only reason I’m not gonna start.”
When you’re having great sex, it seems to be the center of the world. Everything else—work, the news, people on the street—has a remote, second-tier quality, as if none of it will ever fully reach you. The rest of life seems a pretext, a recovery period before the shuddering starts again.
Over the holidays, Clarissa and I divided time with the boys. For Christmas she took them on the annual journey to Pennsylvania and her parents’ home. Knowing their absence would be hard on me, I accepted when one of my partners offered his cabin up in Skageon. Clarissa hated the cold, and it had been years since I had passed any part of winter in the woods. On a chance, I invited Karen and she accepted, eager to avoid the annual holiday collisions with her father.
We left late on the twenty-fifth and made an elaborate Christmas dinner while it stormed outside. What followed were three of those crystalline days that occasionally bless the Midwest, when the snows magnify the available light and the lack of clouds leaves the air thin and exciting. We snowshoed for hours, then, exhausted by our treks, passed the long dark nights in bed, an intermittent languor of sleeping and reading, lovemaking and laughter. Driving back to the Tri-Cities, to the year-end deadlines of my law practice and the turmoil of my broken marriage, I felt the exhilaration of having finally, briefly, lived the life I’d longed for.
I spent the next couple of nights at Karen’s apartment. I had second thoughts about the Levitzes, who also knew Clarissa, but they were away. Even in her own bed, Karen slept poorly. Initially I was afraid it was my presence, but she said she never got more than three or four hours in a row, which seemed somehow at odds with her resigned exterior. She would buck awake, thrashing with the demons of a savage nightmare.
“What was the dream?” I asked the second night.
She shook her head, unwilling or unable to answer. She was naked and had her arms wrapped about herself. When I laid my hand on her narrow back, I could feel her heart hammering.
“Go back to sleep,” she said.
“I’ll get up until I calm down.”
I asked what she would do.
“I have my things. I like cognac. I like Edith Piaf, in some moods. Or big symphonies. It’s a good time to reflect.”
Clarissa also did not sleep well. She read. In the middle of the night I’d find her propped on her pillow, a minute lamp clipped onto her book. The only pleasure I ever took in business travel was in not having to sleep with a pillow over my head.
Without warning Karen said, “I was dreaming about a fire.” She was looking at the ceiling and a plaster rosette sculpted where a gas lamp had hung decades before. “I was in a fire with my father. I was watching the fire come toward him and there wasn’t anything I could do.”
“Frightening,” I said.
“It’s not what I dream that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s the way I react. All I had to do was shout, ‘Watch out.’ But the person I was in that dream—she didn’t even know that shouting was possible. Why do you think you’re yourself in a dream when you don’t know the most basic things?”
Perhaps that was how life really was, I said, full of blind spots and the inability to do what seems obvious. She didn’t take much to the suggestion.
“Do you dream about your father often?” I asked.
She wrinkled her mouth. “Why would you ask that?”
I didn’t have an answer, not one I could speak. She went for her robe and told me again to go back to sleep.
“You know, my father likes you,” she said in the morning, as I was driving her to work. “He says you’re solid.”
I wasn’t sure what basis Maurie had to comment, although it was a remark that, a year before, I might have made about myself.
“He has a lot of good qualities,” she added. “He’s not all one way. Did you know he was a war hero?”
“Really? What kind of hero?”
“Are there kinds? A hero. He has medals. From Korea.”
“Did he kill anyone?”
“God,” she said. “What a question. Like I’m going to say, ‘Daddy, who’d you shoot?’ It was a war. He saved some people, He killed some people. Why else do they give you medals?” She kissed me before leaving the car, but bent to eye me from the curb. “What’s your thing with my father?” she asked.
Karen and I spent New Year’s Eve with the Elstners, enjoying dinner at their home, then, as midnight approached, a few minutes of revelry in the local hangout where Paul made an appearance most nights to smoke a cigar. I thought it had gone well—Elstner and I had engaged in our usual good-spirited mocking of one another, amusing the women—and when Paul and I went to a game later that week, he made it a point to say how much Ann and he had liked Karen.
“The only thing is,” Elstner said, as he drove to the University Field House after dinner, “I nearly soaked my socks every time she mentioned her father. She always talk about him that much?”
“She works with him, Paul. He’s her boss.”
He gave an equivocal nod, clearly not inclined to question my hasty defense.
“Truth is,” I added, “I always wonder how she’d be about her father if that story you told me had the right ending—you know, if Maurie got nabbed for offing his relative, and Karen knew it. Probably make a big difference, don’t you think?”
“How’s that?”
“She has no perspective on him. I mean, he’s her dad. So whenever he clobbers her, she’s inclined to think maybe it’s her fault, that he’s really a good guy underneath. But if she knew what a cruel character he is, an actual killer, that would have an impact.” I was moving full throttle with the idea that had propelled me for months now, the belief that new perspectives and new information could make life a happier enterprise.
“Well, that didn’t happen,” he said. “Maurie’s roaming free. And nobody’s going to be diming him out now. Right?”
“Right,” I said. “But it’s strange knowing.”
Paul had been keeping a close eye on the traffic. We were caught in the pregame rush, staggering a few feet and then stopping again as the cars funneled into the lot, but Elstner turned to me fully now. He might as well have said I told you so.
“Maybe strange is what you want, champ,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you could have walked away as soon as you figured out who she was.”
“Hey, I like this woman. More than ‘like.’”
Paul had worked his mouth into a funny shape as he reflected. “Here,” said Elstner, “mind if I tell you a weird story?”
“Another one?”
He paused to give me a sick smile, then asked, “Remember Rhonda Carling?”
“Rhonda Carling? The woman you went out with before Ann?”
“Her. Did I ever tell you about our sex life?”
“Christ, I don’t think so.”
“This was the bad old days, right? Virginity mattered.” He grimaced. “Listen to me. ‘Bad old days.’ A man with two daughters.”
“Don’t act like a Cro-Magnon. Rhonda Carling and her virtue. I have the context.”
“Well,” he said, “she liked to play halvsies.”
“Halvsies?”
“You know. To go just partway. So she remained, you know, intact.”
“No,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Now, I really dug Rhonda. And this halfway stuff, it had its moments. Kind of like surgery, very exact, and very exciting, with all the fuss and bother and holding back. And all the danger. I mean, I’m always trying to figure out what happens if we go one angstrom too far. Am I engaged or dead on the side of the road?”
Only Elstner, I thought to myself.
“But it was also pretty frigging strange. The whole thing really bugged me. What was wrong with her? Or me? It was bizarre, but it went on the whole time I was seeing her. Finally, I met Ann at her brother’s at Thanksgiving, which is just about when Rhonda got interested in a guy she was working with, and we sort of faded away.
“One night, say six months later, I bumped into Rhonda at the A&P and we went out for coffee, just to sort of officially throw the dirt on the grave, and she tells me this other fellow has popped the question and something else. ‘Are you hurt?’ she says. ‘My pride,’ I say. She smiles, nicely, we liked each other, she says, ‘Halfway’s all you wanted, Paul.’ And soon as she said it, I knew she had that just right. ”
Paul lowered the window to pay the parking attendant, then surged forward into the lot. As ever with Elstner, I was having a hard time following his logic.
“Meaning what? I should think about marrying Karen?” Even saying it seemed preposterous. I was still at the stage where I couldn’t imagine being married to anyone but Clarissa.
Safely in a space, Paul threw the car into park and studied me.
“Forget it,” he said finally. “It’s just a story.”
My law firm followed the quaint custom of holding a formal dinner at the conclusion of the firm’s fiscal year in January. It was intended to celebrate our successes, but was frequently an occasion for teeth gritting among those who were upset about the annual division of spoils. I looked forward to having Karen with me, both to buffer me from the simmering quarrels and to show her off to my colleagues, before whom I’d suffered the shame of not holding together my home. Already in my tux, I swept by her office to collect her. She walked to the car mincingly, trying not to dirty her silk shoes on the icy street. She was in a long gown, its revealing crepe neckline visible in the parting of her coat. I whistled. She smiled as she peeked down through the car door, but made no move to get in.
“I can’t go,” she said. “There’s a presentation tomorrow. My whole staff is upstairs. Somehow my father forgot to mention he had rescheduled with the customer, until he saw me dressed. I must have told him ten times how excited I was to be going with you tonight.” She leaned inside. “Will you kill me?”
“Not you. Better not ask about Maurie. I thought you said he liked me.”
“He d
oes. You’re not the issue. Believe me.” She shook her head in sad wonder. “Why don’t you come back when you’re done?” She gave a salacious little waggle to her brow. “I’ll letcha take me home.”
When I returned near midnight, I found her unsettled. She’d had words with her father, the usual stuff about his indifference to her. I was angry enough with him to relinquish my customary restraint.
“Have you ever kept track of how much time you spend being upset about Maurie?” I asked her.
“Who knows? Sometimes it seems as if I’ve lost years that way. What’s the point?”
“I guess I wonder now and then why you put yourself in harm’s way.”
“You mean cut myself off?”
“Keep a distance. Nobody forces you to work with the guy.”
“It’s a family business. I’m in the family. And I refuse to just hand it all over to my brothers. You don’t like my father, do you?”
I weighed my options. “I don’t like the way he treats you.”
“Neither do I, sometimes. But he’s my father. And my problem,” She did not speak for the rest of the ride.
I suspect we were each ready to call it a night. But we hadn’t had many disagreements, and experience had taught us both the perils of parting angry. I came up. We had a drink and talked, then got around to doing what we did best.
As we groped, she slid from my arms, already naked below, and with a naughty grin pulled the belt from my trousers. I thought she was going for my fly, but instead she pushed me to a seated position on the bed, then threw herself across my lap. She bent one leg from the knee and touched her lip impishly. She put the folded belt in my hand.
“Spank me,” she said.
I looked down at her behind as if it were a face. This was a new note between us. All I could think of to say was, “Why?”
“Why not? I feel like it.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” I finally said.
“I’ll enjoy it. I’m asking you to do it. This isn’t whips and chains. Use your hand, if you’d rather. I’ll enjoy it.”
