Black Leather Required

by David J. Schow

  He tried to push tea down his closed throat and invent nonsense to talk. To buy time.

  "Babe?" Her inflection curled up, a tone she always used–had always used–whenever he tried to dam back his emotions. She had always been able to see right through such flimsy camouflage. "Look at me."

  He did as he was told, with tears streaking his face. "I really love you," he said, voice hitching. "I never stopped."

  Oh, brilliant! She's going to think I'm fucking some other woman. Or another man. Another. Waxing penitent and throwing myself on the mercy of the Copulation Court. Schmuck!

  "Get over here."

  And he was enfolded in her arms. He babbled a facile lie about working too hard, about stress–adapting the truth to fill the circumstance.

  "I was afraid," he said, "am afraid, that one day I'll walk out that door and you won't. Be here." He was in free-fall, tetherless, navigating by dead reckoning at a million miles an hour. "It's all so strange, I mean. . .how easily we can not be here. As human beings. You or I could be gone in an instant."

  He tried to snap his fingers. Her brows puzzled themselves together. "Are you talking about one of us dying?"

  She reached for him, a reflex he had forever admired. Contact, animal warmth traded. She rubbed his arms. She took charge.

  "Darlin', why do you do this stuff to yourself? Here. Come here. You're not close enough."

  Her mouth tasted precisely parallel to his memory of it, as though she had been absent only moments. She felt around, having already decided what to do.

  "I–we can't," he said. "The sun's going down. We'll catch pleurisy or something. . ."

  "Don't shovel that shit. You're worth an afternoon of the sniffles. I guarantee you will not be cold."

  His whole body wanted to scream, seeking to blow some seam, to vent a horrific pressure.

  He escaped into her.

  Past the introductory temblor of shock, acclimation to this weird backsliding of time was easy and instinctual, just like the position into which she guided him as her legs opened, then trapped him, urging him closer to a hot and immediate penetration. She shucked his pants with her feet; her heels pressed into his buttocks and put him on course. It was all he could do to hang on and be directed.

  Their lovemaking was tinged with desperation, like that of lovers on the eve of a farewell. She would not permit him to withdraw and thrust; she kept him locked tightly where her temperature was the highest and drove him berserk with a choreography of contractions and moist pressure that reached up into his heart and grasped his soul, squeezing. He cried out when he came, something he did rarely.

  Lorelle kept him within her, did a trick, made him erect without leaving, and time spilled into meaninglessness between them. He had so much to give her; she had been gone for so long.

  It was shortly before midnight when the past–the future–intruded to dispel his calm, ruining the warm, tranquilizing sanctuary she had drawn him into.

  He realized it was, in fact, October, then. He began pressuring her about that visit to her doctor. See him early, he insisted. See him now. "Chalk it up to my own vastly overdeveloped sense of paranoia," he said, which was a kind way of demanding do it for me.

  Ugly eventualities raced through his head. He was the architect now, in planning mode. How in hell was he going to prepare Lorelle for extended hospital stay that was certain to come of the new diagnosis? This time he would accept no outpatient crap, no margin for a capricious embolism to advantage. If only, he remembered the physician saying. If only we had caught this earlier.

  "No sweat," she said. "Sure."

  He knew her words were supposed to settle him down because he was being jumpy and weird. It was exactly what she had told him a year before, when she had decided not to go in early for the checkup; her prerogative. Shopping, the bank, some such excuse that ultimately killed her.

  In the morning, he was still in the past with her. This time, she went.

  He naturally wanted to accompany her, setting off her alarms at last. She gently dissuaded him, noting, among other things, that their new home was crawling with contractors who needed supervision to ready that demon of a sliding door that you designed, mister. He released her with reluctance. It was all destined to be revised into rightness as long as she made the trip. She took the Mazda and made him promise to whip up something decadent in the wok for her return.

  It was all he could muster to keep from calling her doctor, while she was en route. He had corrected the one flaw, the sole oversight, and fate no longer needed his interference to correct the whole blueprint.

  Besides, permitting her to leave, tough as it was, rewarded him with a small cycle of time in which to get his bearings. To recover. To think. To do better when the phone call came later in the day, as he knew it must. To reverberate, and orient himself into this regained year of life.

  Not mere life, now, but living again.

  Irrationally, her absence still frightened him. See? She's gone again . . .

  . . . but the difference is that you'll see her tonight, and we'll have a medical hell to stroll through, a passage of fire, but we'll do it together, and when it's done, she'll be saved and maybe you can write a bad novel about love and time travel. . . that no one will publish, so you can lock the manuscript in a cabinet, and with it, all the stupid questions you shouldn't waste time asking. . .because you've lucked out, you undeserving fool, and gotten her back.

  His body was fried, exhausted inside and out. He succumbed to quick sleep on the corner sofa group, in the midst of bustling workmen. The sofa was still swathed in factory plastic and crackled as he lost track of consciousness. The workmen knocked off early and the man did not wake up until the phone next to the sofa rang.

  He did not permit the machine to field the call. He snatched up the handset and steeled himself for the bad news . . . because he already knew the good news.

  The caller was neither Lorelle nor her doctor. It was a trooper of the California State Highway Patrol, regretfully notifying him of an automobile fatality on the coast road leading into town.

  In drowning, the capillaries of the lungs explode as they struggle to aerate. The eyes bulge. The anatomy blows out its weakest links first. Water is drawn into the throat and windpipe, irritating the mucus membranes and causing the production of a large volume of foamy lather, inhibiting the passage of air into the lungs. Severe fright and the violent necessity of breathing induces a powerful spasm in the muscles of the throat, neck and chest. Unconsciousness follows.

  On the beach, a discarded magenta bathing suit attracts no notice. It is night.

  In the water, Kayce makes love for the last time. Undertow pulls her feet first into deeper water, like a demanding paramour. The force that takes her now is so uncompromising that it will not allow her even the honesty of a scream.

  Another water death for Lorelle, this one not nearly so peaceful. She had swerved to avoid an ambulance, blaring along on a frightening, disruptive Code Three. The ambulance, in turn, had veered into Lorelle's lane to avoid a motorcyclist who had shaved the turn. The curvy seaside highway had always been seductive; the flashbar of the ambulance, riveting, and Lorelle had let the speed of the Mazda creep up. Her car had flown through the rail, and having flown, tried next to swim. Lorelle asphyxiated on saltwater and her own snot, all the way to the bottom.

  The man looked to the night sky through blots of looming storm cloud. For him, she had been alive again for less than a day. He bore irises and orchids to her funeral, just as he had a year ago, a few days further on. He would bring the flowers again, the next time he saw her buried.

  That took about eighteen months, given that he now thought of Lorelle every time he looked at the sliding glass section of the wall, which, incidentally, got installed at last–just as expertly as it had the first time.

  The man regained a year of time, but not of age, if anyone can be said to notice the difference of a year and change on their own features. He observed his fort
y-sixth birthday a second time, but did not celebrate it. He toasted the memory of his dead wife and spent a lot of time wondering what in hell to try next. It was, after all, free time.

  Bonus time.

  Try not to think of a purple rhinoceros.

  For the first time, he knew the calendar date on which he would see the woman in the magenta bathing suit–for the first time. This time, she would evoke recollection. There could be no initial attraction for her, since the man had pondered her now and again over the course of his repeated year. It was torturous, for the man rested certain that his foreknowledge of events might now doom him to regathering his forty-fifth year a third time. . .all in a quest to win another chance at Lorelle, and most likely lose it in a few pointless hours of mammal warmth and nothing chat.

  Lorelle would never know the difference. The truth, the horror, would accumulate in him, not her, until he was handicapped into total dysfunction, terrified to twitch an eyelid for fear of even worse consequences.

  This did not diminish his craving to warn her somehow, nor his simpler, ape-man urge to save her, be a hero, get it right this time.

  Next time.

  As an architect, he favored indirect lighting, soft and dramatic. As a man, he enjoyed candles–mellow flames that gently rebuffed darkness, instead of murdering it in a flash. He liked glowing votives and tapers, the special scent of their smoke. Fire was elemental, one with the ocean out there, the stars, the night that would wizen into dawn and regain its cool, coffeed blackness mere hours later.

  Tapping, at the glass, jolted him out of abstraction.

  "Hel-lo?"

  His heart started punching, making more room by force inside his ribs. "Lorelle?" He rushed to the sliding door, the sudden exertion causing his head to spin and his vision, skew into blur.

  "Whoops. I guess you've mistaken me for someone else." The woman in the magenta bathing suit smiled and shook her head to herself, in the manner of someone who is capable of laughing at their own small goofs. Then she concentrated on him, watching to see how he was dealing with her. Without knowing, she said the one thing that could guarantee entry.

  "Should I leave?"

  They shared cabernet, lit fresh candles to supplant the exhausted ones, watched the ocean, and tried, each in their own charmingly maladroit way, to get past the small talk.

  "My parents were upwardly social, politically correct, boomer-consumers," she said. "They named me Katherine Celeste. Determinedly. That's the sort of name that can cause you to lose your identity by first grade. All those Kathys, and Debbies, and Michaels, and Jeffreys–those were the biggies, for the class of '83. I was young and contrary, of course, so in high school I shortened it to initials. K.C. Since then I changed the spelling . . . probably just as predictable."

  He wanted to tell her that Lorelle's birth name was Lorelei; he decided not to bring up that topic so directly. "I used to know someone who talks the way you do," he said, intending it as a compliment.

  "Is that who you were waiting for?"

  "No."

  "You sure?" She kept smiling, as though intrigued by him. "I mean, candles, wine at the ready . . ."

  "The wine lives in the rack. I never get much of a chance to make good use of it."

  "I'll take that as a good review." She motioned with her glass for more, and as he poured she saw his grip tremble, even in the poor, moody light.

  "Sorry" he said, sheepishly. "Nervous."

  "That's not going to do you much good as a draftsman."

  "Architect. Draftsmen are to architects what lithographers are to painters. What brings you out onto the beach all by yourself, at night?"

  Again, the rueful smile. "I could say I was admiring your handiwork from afar. Actually, I was contemplating tossing myself into the ocean, just like a brooding artist."

  "Kind of chilly, for swimming."

  She nodded and did not pursue it. "I changed my mind. I felt more than a bit silly. The ocean can dwarf your ego, especially if you've got a huge ego."

  "This is my ego, all around us." He spread his arms to indicate the limits of the house, but it seemed to Kayce he was also turning himself inside-out, exposing secret truths to which she was not party. "I've got a stack of magazines and journals that says so. Nothing worse than vanity of design."

  "Never say worse," she said. "There's always worse. You can bring it on just by saying things couldn't get worse."

  "Amen to that." They, aimed their glasses and made the crystal chime. Such a long while, he thought, since there had been anyone for him to make a toast with–the sound of one glass clinking.

  Kayce took her leave and declined his offer to escort her back toward the pier. She neglected to tell him where she lived; purposefully omitted key bits of information so as not to give the impression of eagerness, of desperation. Enough that she had detoured meeting the water this night; had permitted herself to be distracted from self-destructive whimsy by the slimmest of new hopes. He promised to see her tomorrow, and that was sufficient for her to get through the night. She was dipping into the rulebook again, playing the woman of vague mystery. For her it was like trying to wipe away tears so no one will notice the crying–the act attracts the undesired attention anyway.

  She forced herself to plan. He had seen most of her body; here, certainly, was a man with a schooled eye for the structural. When next they met, she would wear something full-length and open-throated, drive him to remember the contoured vee of her groin and the smooth divide of her breasts, swelling against fabric. First you showed them, then you covered up what they knew to be there. It was a technique that drove men loopy with want.

  Tonight's difference was that she wanted this man to want her. For no logical reason whatsoever. Human beings are rarely logical in their own self-interest.

  Tomorrow she would see him. Not bad, for someone who had not planned her life beyond a couple of hours ago. She had felt fulfilled in taking a chance and now felt the need for caesura, to push her past the moment of first contact.

  It was only when she was halfway home she realized she had overlooked an important aspect of the ritual. She was slipping, she thought with a smile; she had not taken an advantage. She had forgotten to ask his name.

  The next day, when she came to visit him bearing flowers, she found his hypnotically beautiful house empty. She killed herself shortly before midnight, beneath a moon fuller by a sliver, her heart drained, her emotions betrayed, her trust violated. The blossoms and petals she bore marked the location of her death for the briefest of times, and were scattered by the receding tide. By morning, even her footprints were gone.

  The man was not in the custom of drinking alone, but having begun with company, he cycled through a fresh bottle of the cabernet with few jabs of regret. Alone again, he leisurely recaptured her smile, her turn of head, the way she curled a phrase. Prior to this night, his only real solace had come from sleep, thin and fitful, or brooding like a proper existentialist.

  The alcohol finally shoved him through. Another flammable liquid, like his forsaken cans of gasoline.

  He awoke when it was all over. He did not wish to remember what took place. The jags of it retained by memory were sharp-edged and lethal, ceremonial mutilations of the mind that would stick, as counsel, to instruct him in the things to avoid if there ever came another next time. It was no dream. It was a nightmare, real as pain.

  Drunk on the smoky red, he had fallen through the door, his constant mantra of Lorelle derailed by intoxication and his close encounter with Kayce. His success was accidental–he knew this when he heard Lorelle's voice, entreating iced tea from the roof deck–and therefore, totally unplanned.

  He was so polluted, so achingly precipitous, that he ruined it all.

  He remembered Lorelle wrestling him off her.

  Sex, vulnerability, trust, all his careful and civilized talk sedated, leaving recriminations, anger, a card house of vacant words and boundless hypocrisy, his morals a sham, his compassion fled, his low
primitive ebb worse than any beast. . .

  She left him in loathing. She died by fire. In the Mazda, as previously. It was not until he saw the departing taillights that his own terror sobered him in a snap. He ran downstairs, staggered after her, lost the race. He collapsed onto the driveway paving, which was where he was awakened by the sun.

  A fragment: During their fight, just a phantom track, really, he had called her a bitch, wanted to throttle some sense into her. Didn't she realize he was trying to save her life?

  The Mazda hit a patch of oil in the dark and destroyed itself on the cliff rocks near the sea. Lorelle had spent a very long time burning. As painful as the drowning death must have been, it had happened inside of two minutes. The fire took its sadistic time obliterating her, and her nerves must have recorded enough shock for an eternity. This time there was no traffic and no witnesses, and Lorelle died alone, trapped in blast-furnace compacted metal, screaming as her arms and legs cooked down to bone, the bone burned to ash by the intense heat.

  And in the aftermath, this time, a new wrinkle: The man had never before visited a morgue. The charred mass stuck to the steel drawer was not remotely identifiable as something he had spent time loving. Someone. Still did love.

  He dropped the irises and orchids atop polished mahogany, and watched her go down to meet the earth a third time.

  It could have been worse, he kept saying to himself, horribly. He might have gone berserk and strangled her, or bludgeoned her to death in his besotted haze. The next time–if there was one–he might tip over the rest of the way and become the actual cause of her death, as opposed to catalyst. With the best and most noble of intentions, he might kill the woman he loved.

  During his newly-regained forty-fifth year, he wondered how Lorelle would have handled this, were their fates reversed. He hoped she would have gotten on with a life, found someone new. He hoped she would be blessed to bypass this deadly loop and evade its snares. Fruitlessly, he wished she could, achieve some magical understanding that the raving animal had not been him, but a thing pulled out of his psyche by grief. There was no guidebook on how to navigate his predicament; no template for the procedure apart from his own groping trial and error. He needed absolution and forgiveness, and would not reap either, even through Lorelle. If she returned again, it would be with no memory of the previous time-track erased. No warning bells. No "worse" alarm. Never say worse.