Thief of Words

by John Jaffe

  “Jack, you want everyone to think you’re a curmudgeon. But I know better. Don’t forget, Pablito, you send me e-mails.”

  Over dinner, the conversation turned to writing. Annie told Jack stories about manuscripts from hell, by way of the transom, and she complimented him again. “You’ve got to write,” she said. “You’re better than most people who get published.”

  When Jack turned the compliment around (“You’re better than anybody on my staff”), Annie said, “I admit that all this e-mail has got me wanting to write again.”

  “Again?” asked Jack.

  He didn’t know it, but he had just invited Annie’s newspaper years to the table. Should she tell him? She teetered on the brink of truth. But at the last moment she backed away. It was too early for that reality. Instead she waved her hand dismissively and said, “Oh, I used to write in college and all. Nothing serious.”

  Night fell and Baltimore’s necklace began to shine. The big pink neon Domino Sugars sign dominated the northern skyline. The lights of Planet Hollywood, the National Aquarium, and other tourist attractions made luminous nets in the harbor’s wavelets. A light touch of humidity softened the air. On such a night you could believe that romance conquers all and, for the first time in history, Baltimore and Paris could be compared.

  As dinner wound down, Jack pointed across the water to a wooded park on top of Federal Hill, directly across the Inner Harbor. “My place is right behind those trees,” he said. “That’s where you drove up this evening. Let’s go and I’ll show you the view from there.”

  Twenty minutes later, they’d driven back to Jack’s apartment and walked across the street to Federal Hill Park, a block-square patch of green overlooking the city. From this vantage point, Federal troops had once trained cannon on the city and its Confederate sympathizers. Now the soldiers and cannons were frozen in bronze.

  As they approached the park’s northern edge, Annie took Jack’s arm. If any other strollers noticed, it would have seemed an innocent move. But it was a new stage in the evolution of their romance; they had left the primordial ooze and stepped onto land. Jack liked feeling Annie’s arm linked in his. He leaned slightly up against her.

  The view of the city and harbor was panoramic. Jack began pointing out landmarks.

  “Want to make fifty dollars?” he said. “Here’s a bet: How tall is the dot over the I in the Domino sign?”

  “What if I lose?” Annie said. “I don’t have that kind of cash on me.”

  “You can work it off,” he said, cocking an eyebrow.

  Annie examined the big sign, holding her fingers in front of her face in a perspective square. “I know this is a trick question, but here goes. Six feet.”

  Jack did a double take and reached for his wallet. “Good Lord, Annie, how the hell did you know that one?”

  “Just a lucky guess. Put your wallet away. You paid for dinner, let’s call it even.”

  Jack turned and pointed in the other direction. “See those lights? That’s Camden Yards. Listen, you can hear the crowd cheer.”

  He continued the city tour for a few more minutes, then turned to go back.

  “Not yet,” said Annie. “First, kiss me.”

  Jack cupped her face in his hands and brought her lips to his as tenderly as he knew how.

  The soundtrack for this scene should have been lush strings and a tasteful choir. But instead, Jack and Annie heard giggling and a mocking voice saying, “Awwww, ain’t that sweet?”

  They turned to discover that they had been putting on a show for a posse of neighborhood teens gathered under a maple tree. They couldn’t help but laugh, too. “Come on,” said Jack, “let’s really give them a show.”

  This time they performed a softcore clinch to the sounds of hooting and an approving, “You go!”

  They walked back through the park, buzzing with the voltage they’d just created. Jack had his arm around Annie’s waist. They kissed again at the entrance to the apartment complex; they kissed in the elevator; they kissed by Jack’s apartment door.

  CHAPTER 39

  They kissed before he closed the door.

  They kissed as he led her to his living room.

  They kissed as they stood before the old wooden icebox filled with CDs and the CD player.

  “What would you like to hear?” Jack whispered.

  “Surprise me,” Annie whispered in his ear and, before he could pull away, slipped her tongue into it.

  They kissed again in silence.

  “I thought you were going to surprise me,” Annie said into his mouth, and pushed her body against his.

  Jack grabbed her and pressed her even harder against him. “There isn’t enough blood left in my brain,” he said into her mouth.

  Annie squirmed away and smiled. “Maybe you should put your head between your legs.”

  “Maybe I should put my head between your legs,” he said and pulled her back into a kiss.

  “I think you should, but only to music,” Annie said as she put her lips to his ear again.

  Then she pushed him away and turned him toward the icebox. “Choose fast.”

  There wasn’t much choosing involved. Jack had already put a pile of CDs on top of the icebox, imagining a slow seduction of sultry music, wine, and words. But if he wasn’t mistaken, within two minutes of arriving, Annie had told him to go down on her. Fast. Where have you been all my life, Annie Hollerman? He snatched the top three CDs and began pushing buttons.

  While Jack loaded the CD player, Annie reached behind her and unzipped her dress. As he finished, she tapped him on the back. “Take my dress off.”

  Jack turned and slipped the straps down her arms. The dress fell to her feet. She stood before him in a lilac camisole and white lace tap pants.

  He reached out; his fingers brushed the base of her throat and traveled down her breastbone, stopping at the purple silk.

  “It’s beautiful,” Jack said.

  “I bought it for tonight,” Annie said and closed her eyes, remembering his imagined touch on her in the Victoria’s Secret dressing room.

  Amazingly, his hands were now following the same path. He traced the lines of her clavicles and then, turning his palms away from her, he softly slid the backs of his hands down her chest, down over her breasts, down and down until they turned around and she felt his fingers gripping her hips.

  She saw him briefly study her face, then he slowly began to kneel. She felt his lips brush the same pathway that his fingers had just traveled. His hands slipped from her hips to her bottom. He pressed his mouth against her panties, breathing hot air into the hair caught behind the white lace. He hooked his fingers around the elastic and slid the panties off her body as Miles Davis began a slow imagining of Rodrigo’s Spain.

  Annie dug her fingers into Jack’s hair and pressed him against her as she took a step back and onto the sofa. For a while—Annie could not have said how long—Jack knelt before her. Finally, she pulled his wet mouth up to hers and the monthlong journey, which began with, “What you need, Annie Hollerman, is a man with a good ass,” reached, what now seemed to them, its extraordinary and natural destination. Annie opened her legs and Jack found himself inside her. It was some time later—neither Jack nor Annie could have said how long—and they were dancing to Jennifer Warnes’s hypnotic soprano. “Way down … way way down deep,” she sang, reminding them of the place they had visited together that night.

  They turned through the music, arms enmeshed, bare bellies pressed together, damp thighs lapping against thighs. Jack brushed his lips across Annie’s face and found her mouth again; he drew wet fingers up her back.

  Around the room they danced, naked feet sliding slowly across the carpet, naked backs illuminated by dim light drifting in from an open window and the digital glow of the CD system, naked legs brushing up against the couch, where they had become naked together for the first time. “Way down … way way down… .”

  CHAPTER 40

  Annie opened her eyes.
In front of her was a wicker nightstand and an oriental lamp she’d never seen before. A bed sheet of an unfamiliar blue was twisted between her legs. Something warm pressed against her.

  She turned around to see what it was. Jack DePaul’s bare leg, then all of a bare, sleeping Jack DePaul came into view. He was facing her, splayed out in the Mighty Mouse position: on his stomach, left leg straight, right leg and right arm bent ninety degrees.

  She couldn’t remember when they’d fallen asleep. One thing was certain, she hadn’t wanted it to stop. Not the naked dancing, or his chest rubbing against her breasts, or her legs wrapped around his hips, or his mouth all over her. She’d felt strong as a werewolf in the midnight of his apartment. But finally Jack had guided her to his bed—this bed—had spooned up against her, said a jumble of sweet things that ended with, “No more, you’re going to kill me,” and fled from consciousness.

  She looked at him. He wasn’t moving. For a horrifying second she thought: What if I have killed him? He is fifty, after all. How old was Nelson Rockefeller? But, no, she saw his chest rising and falling against the mattress. She lay on her side, propped two pillows under her head, and examined her exhausted lover.

  This was the first time she’d seen his face without glasses, in the light. His nose had a crook and bump that she hadn’t noticed before. It added a craggy note: Richard Dreyfuss aging into Spencer Tracy. His beard swirled in and out of colors—brown, white, gray, brown. The sheet covered half of his rounded butt. If only you knew how right you were, Laura Goodbread. His chest looked deeper than she had remembered. She put out her left hand against it to measure. He shifted and she quickly pulled her hand back.

  The movement stirred the air between them and Annie was suddenly engulfed by a new sensation. She put her fingers to her face and breathed in the musky, sweaty smell of sex. She breathed in again. A primal perfume of lust and pubic hair. She closed her eyes. It was a smell that made her want to say dirty words and buy crotchless panties.

  Annie looked again at her sleepy hero splayed out in his heroic cartoon posture. She leaned over him and sang, “Here I come to save the day.”

  He jerked awake and slowly focused on her face. “Hi, angel,” he said, and then, after a moment, “what happened?”

  “I think you passed out.” Annie moved to within kissing distance of his mouth. She felt like one of Rubens’s women, made for sex, acutely aware of her curves. She felt the air trace the outlines of her body; every cell in her skin was saying, “Touch me.”

  Jack pulled her to him. They kissed long and hard. When they came up for air, Jack looked over at the nightstand clock. “Jesus, it’s ten o’clock. Should we get up?”

  Annie smiled, the taste of sex on her lips, the smell of it in her nose. “Not yet, Mighty Mouse.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Come on, he won’t notice,” Jack said. “He’s a guy.”

  Annie scrunched the left side of her face in a get-real look. “You don’t think a long silk, spaghetti-strapped dress and Joan Crawford fuck-me shoes are a little dressy for a coffee shop? You think he won’t notice that?”

  Jack looked Annie up and down. “Hmmm, nice,” he said. “You’re right. He’ll know you didn’t just drive up this morning. But he knows that anyway. I told him we had a date last night and, with any luck, you’d be joining us for lunch. He’s a grown-up, Annie; he can handle the fact that his father’s not a virgin. Come on, he’s dying to meet you.”

  “He’ll think I’m a trollop,” Annie said.

  “Yeah, so?”

  In deference to Annie’s spike heels, they drove the four blocks to One World Café, Jack’s favorite breakfast hangout. As usual, the mismatched tables were jammed with latte drinkers and Sunday New York Times readers. Luckily, a trio in running shorts got up just as Jack and Annie walked in.

  Annie claimed the table as Jack waited in line. She’d wanted to wait for Matthew, but Jack said he was always late. “Plus, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. I worked hard last night.”

  By the time Matthew arrived—twenty minutes after the agreed noon meeting—Jack and Annie had finished two sticky buns and were starting on a spinach-feta omelet. Their table was turned away from the door and they didn’t see the brown-haired young man, who looked like a memory of Jack, standing in line, watching them.

  Matthew looked at his father talking and waving his fork around like a little baton. The woman, holding a coffee cup that never quite reached her lips, was laughing. Laughing, Matthew was certain, at something his father had said, because he recognized the triumphant grin on his father’s face.

  Their body language surprised him. They were looser— younger—than he expected. The woman touched his father’s hand and he squeezed hers in return. Their familiarity gave him an unexpected pang—she wasn’t his mother—but his father had needed someone for a long while, and, judging by his smile, he might have found her.

  Matthew thought about saying something snappy like, “Hi, I’m the younger, better DePaul,” but he knew this meeting was important to his father. When they’d arranged to meet for lunch, Jack had told Matthew at least three times that Annie might join them.

  So with all the dignity a twenty-two-year-old can muster, he walked over, reached out his hand to the woman in the long silk dress, and said, “Hello, I’m Matthew.”

  Then, because he was only twenty-two, he smiled at his father and said, “Nice dress, Annie.”

  For an hour, the three of them sat knee to knee at the small table, drinking coffee and talking. Matthew regaled Annie with Anasazi research and how the PC spin on them was all wrong. “Gentle natives?” he said, making the same sweep of hand that Jack did when he got excited. “Peacefully grinding corn in matates? How about roasting skulls by the fire? They were cannibals.”

  Jack had already heard the details of Matthew’s work, but he encouraged his son on, saying, “No way,” or “Amazing,” or “That’s incredible,” at the key—and infrequent—moments that Matthew was silent. Jack smiled; his son was taken with Annie, too. Matthew’s discussions with Jack about his research had been far drier.

  And Annie? Jack watched as she listened to Matthew. She seemed more interested in the Anasazi than could be humanly possible. With each question she asked, Matthew seemed to swell bigger and bigger as he dug deeper and deeper into the arcana of paleobiology. When Annie suggested he consider writing a book, Jack thought Matthew might float to the ceiling like a giant Bullwinkle in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  It would be easy to think Annie was just being nice; she was, after all, meeting the son of the man she thought she was falling in love with. But the truth was, Annie found Matthew charming. Annie remembered that Jack had once written of the man he used to be, before he felt the wind blow through him. Watching Matthew, she could see who that man had been.

  It was nearly 1:30 when Annie stood up and told the DePaul boys she had to go back to Washington. “I’m still trying to catch up with work since my North Carolina trip,” she said. Then she reached over the table and gave Matthew a hug.

  “You’re everything your father says you are—and more,” she said.

  At another time in her life, Annie would have stayed the afternoon—and the night. But if she’d learned anything in her forty-four years, it’s that men need time to process. Jack was looking a little frayed, plus she knew he wanted time alone with his son.

  Jack walked Annie to her car. Before she got in, they kissed and held each other, hands on waists, like two swing dancers.

  “Thanks, Jack, I had a great time,” Annie said. Then she rolled her eyes, groaned, and said, “God, could I get any more inane? Let me try again…You were wonderful…I mean… it, we—”

  Jack kissed her in midsentence, then said, “You were wonderful, too, Annie. Really wonderful. I know there’s a better way to say it, but right now I can’t think how—except to say I think we should see each other again, as soon as possible. Tomorrow night?”

  “Can’t.
I’m meeting an author.”

  “Then Tuesday night?”

  “Your conference, remember?”

  “Oh, shit,” said Jack, “I forgot about the stupid conference. Well, I’ll be back Saturday afternoon. What about Saturday night? What if I came down to D.C.? What if I brought my sleeping bag?”

  “I don’t think a sleeping bag will be necessary, do you?”

  With the subject of sleeping together reintroduced, they looked at each other silently for a second, both reviewing images from the past night.

  Finally, Jack broke the spell. “I’ll e-mail you tonight, okay?” “You better,” said Annie, “or I’ll chop your hands off. Worse: I’ll sic Laura on you.”

  When Jack returned to One World, Matthew was finishing up his omelet and the leftovers on Jack’s plate, too.

  Before Jack could ask the obvious question, Matthew answered it. “She’s awesome, Dad.”

  Jack nodded. “I think so, too. But could you try to be a little more specific?”

  “What can I say? She’s smart and funny. She’s got great hair. She’s hot. I can’t figure out what she’s doing with an old fossil like you.”

  “I can’t either,” said Jack. “It must be the e-mails.”

  “Yeah,” said Matthew. “This rewriting the past thing is powerful voodoo. Remember Jennifer? The girl I was with at One World a couple of weeks ago? She’s a total babe. I’m going to have to try it on her.”

  “You’re missing the point, Matthew. Jennifer is what, twenty? First you have to have a past in order to rewrite it.”

  Matthew shook a forkful of feta at his father. “The point is, Dad, you better not screw up this time. Annie’s a keeper. She’s real. You can tell. She shouldn’t be another stop on your midlife crisis tour.”

  Jack wondered just when it had happened that his twenty-two-year-old son became the dad and started giving him advice on life. He looked at Matthew for a second; his heart was flooded by one of those tsunamis of love that parents feel. If I never do anything else in my life, at least I’ve done this. I wish it had been different between your mother and me, he thought, trying to telepath his regret to Matthew’s brain. I wish I’d never told you about Kathleen Faulkner.