by Robert Daley
There were ritual aspects to love, and these were much the same as before. In fact Powers sometimes found himself engaged in the same actions and conversations as twenty or more years ago. Such experiences were not always thrilling. Often they were simply confusing. Take one of the more simple questions lovers always put to one another: age. He remembered the day he had asked Eleanor how old she was. “Twenty-two,” she answered, with a touch of pride at being so old. Casual question, casual answer, as if he had asked how much change she had in her purse, and she had replied: twenty-two cents.
But two days ago in a restaurant he had put both his hands over Carol’s and said, “Carol, how old are you?”
It was not a casual question at all. It was as if he were asking the contents of her bank account. Her eyes dropped at once to the tablecloth, and she looked about to cry, as if he wanted too much from her, more than she could give.
He had been circling the subject for days, the way, as a boy courting Eleanor, he had circled the subject of sex, edging ever closer to the big mystery. Sooner or later they would plunge in together, and it would be revealed for both of them.
Powers knew Carol was sensitive about her age, for he had watched her hide the clues, burying them deep. She had avoided this subject as Eleanor had avoided that one, almost desperately.
Powers said stubbornly, “Tell me.”
“What do you want to know for?”
If he had met her years ago when such questions were important, he would have asked her, “Are you still a virgin?” A hesitation then or now, meant only that the answer she must give was the wrong one, would reveal tainted goods, threatened their relationship, might even end it.
“Please tell me.”
Her guilty secret, she saw, could not be kept, though she went on trying. “What difference does it make?” There were always mysteries between couples she seemed to be saying. Her voice was pitched very low. And she was almost pleading. Why could he not accept this, and let the matter drop? Why crave the bad news that would make neither of them happy?
“I want to know,” he said. Back then he would have wanted to know the answer to the other question too, because that was the way a boy fulfilled his function, was it not? Or so it seemed to courting males of whatever age - a boy’s job was to undress a girl completely, strip her naked, leave her nothing.
“I am forty-two years old,” Carol said. Her eyes did not rise.
Immediately he was satisfied. “So what’s so bad about that?” he said cheerfully. “I’m not interested in eighteen-year-olds, you know.”
“I don’t see why you had to know so badly,” she muttered, and now she sounded annoyed.
One’s age, Powers told her somewhat pompously, was the single most important fact you could know about him or her. It set that person in a historical perspective. In the case of a cop, for instance, it told you who was commissioner and what the climate was in the department during his impressionable years in the job. It told you how far he had advanced in his career. In the case of a woman, it told you little things, the kind of clothes she had worn in college and the music she had danced to. And big things, such as what kind of world she had grown up in, affected by which specific political and social traumas. If you knew a person’s age you could tell approximately how he or she was likely to behave under certain pressures. Powers nodded his head vigorously. Oh yes, you could tell a lot about a person from his or her age. “How old are you?” Carol asked.
To his surprise, he found he did not want her to know.
“Forty-six,” he said.
“You have a hang-up about your age,” she told him.
Now in the dark in the movie theater, he became aware that Carol had shifted in her seat beside him, snuggling up into his armpit, so that he put his arm around her, and she in return grasped his thumb in one hand, his pinky in the other, holding the two fingers like someone milking a cow. His remaining three fingers and hand she draped over her left breast. Her nipple rose up promptly under the tissue - thin bras women wore these days - Eleanor wore them too - and he began to rub it gently, like someone polishing the brass ferrule on a walking stick, making circular motions which kept it caught within his palm.
So here he was feeling up a date in the movies twenty-five years later, and he found the experience as unsettling now as he did then. It was exciting, he certainly did not want anyone to catch him doing it, and he could not keep his attention on the screen. His attention was on Carol.
She slid her hand into his lap. “I see you’re not concentrating on the movie.”
“Neither are you.”
“Let’s go home.”
He parked in her driveway, and as they crossed the lawn, she told him conversationally that something was wrong with her dishwasher, perhaps in the morning he could fix it. Seemingly she took it for granted that he neither had to go home nor wanted to, as if, in the jargon of teenage girls, he would be “sleeping over,” as if sleeping over was as innocent for him as for children, and fraught with no more implications.
To Powers it was the biggest shock of the night and one of the biggest of his life. Had he really moved this far from Eleanor, from his marriage, his sons, his home, from all that he had cared about during more than half of his life?
They stepped up onto her front step.
“Carol.” He laid the words out rough as bricks, sharp-edged, hard. “I can only stay about an hour,” he said. And her head spun around.
She was really very perceptive, which was part of what fascinated him about her - that she was so quick. It was as if he had tossed her a heavy object. She had caught it at once and begun to examine it. It was like a diplomat’s pronouncement. It had weight. He watched her turn it this way and that. It could be benign - or set armies marching - which?
“You stayed all night the last time.”
She had unlocked her front door and switched on the lights.
“Yes,” he said as they entered the hall, “and felt awful about it after.” Did he really want to say this to her?
She turned swiftly to face him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He was being forced for the first time to take a position, to dig in like a soldier on one hill out of several. But he could not decide which hill to choose, nor was he sure how strongly he wished to defend it. He did know that, for the most part, she focused only on her own needs, never on his, and this could not be allowed to continue. He had obligations both as husband and policeman, which she treated, for the most part, as though they did not exist.
“It means I’m still married, that I have a wife I care about, and sleeping all night with you feels to me about ten times more unfaithful to her than simply making love to you.” He realized he was trying to explain the unexplainable. He couldn’t really explain it even to himself. He just knew it was there, his guilt, his remorse, or whatever it was.
He found he was staring into the hardest blue eyes he had ever seen.
“Maybe,” said Carol, “you had better decide which one of us you want, her or me.”
Her words were as inflexible and transparent as glass. As brittle as glass also. “Please, Carol. I’ve known you a few weeks. I’ve been married to her for twenty-three years. You’re asking too much too fast.”
“Do you want to stay all night, or don’t you?”
He shook his head gently, a gesture to smooth over the hard words, like a trowel smoothing out cement.
She said: “Don’t shake your head. Say what you mean.
His jaw became set. “I’ll stay an hour.”
“I didn’t invite you to stay an hour.”
“Okay.” He turned toward the door. “Good night, then.”
When she neither moved nor spoke, he stepped out into the darkness. Pulling the door shut behind him he moved off across the lawn to his car, and though he scrutinized his emotions, he couldn’t tell which ones he was feeling at the moment. It wasn’t misery or disappointment or elation or grief. Perhaps it was relief. She had
torn him in too many directions for too long and now it was ended, and perhaps he was relieved. He remembered having felt much this way on nights that various girls had thrown him over - the pain of loss did not begin until the next morning.
The grass was wet on his shoes. There was a big high moon. Standing beside his car he looked up at it, sucking in drafts of cold damp air. He grasped the Mustang’s door handle.
He did not hear Carol’s front door open nor her footsteps on the lawn. He did feel her bosom pressed against his back, her arms around his waist, her forehead against the nape of his neck.
“This is crazy,” she murmured into the space between his shoulder blades. “You’re right, I want you too much. I want you on any basis I can have you. An hour can be worth a lifetime. If that’s all I can have, I’ll take it. Come back into the house.”
Arm and arm they recrossed the lawn, adding two more sets of footsteps to those imprinted so clearly ahead of them in the dew in the moonlight.
“WHAT’S THIS case you’re working on?” she asked a little later.
“Oh, just a case.”
“Don’t trust me, eh?”
It was a joke, but not a joke - he had to tell her something, and it occurred to him that he could use her. He could get her interested in the story, so that if ever he needed it leaked - if, say, Duncan or someone tried to take administrative action against him - he could hand her the rest of it and she would tell it for him.
Carol had decided to use him too, if she could. There was no reason why he couldn’t be a news source as well as a lover, and in truth there was no better place to worm information out of someone than in bed. Either from passion, contentment, or gratitude men were always anxious to accord women favors in bed, to give them presents. In bed woman was not queen, but king. If a woman could ask for diamonds at such a time, then why not for information?
“Of course I trust you,” he said, trying to decide how much to tell her.
“What kind of case is it? Is it drugs?”
Now they were each attempting to use the other.
“Drugs, gambling, extortion, murder - you name it.”
“Pretty big, eh?”
“Pretty big,” he conceded.
“Is it the Mafia?”
“Not the Italian Mafia.”
“The Chinese Mafia?”
“Headquarters says there’s no such thing.”
He felt her quicken, the way a woman did sometimes in the course of sexual arousal.
“But you think there is?”
“I’m obliged to believe what headquarters believes.” That was all he intended to tell her.
She purred with contentment, and he thought it was because he was idly stroking her back, her hip, her behind. It wasn’t. She was thinking not of Powers pressed naked against her, but of Lurtsema. She had her hook at last. The Chinese Mafia - a headline Lurtsema would go for.
Since she sounded aroused, Powers moved his hand over her. Mat of hair as coarse as bark. She stirred, still purring.
“Who’s the head of it?”
“Not a name you would know.”
Carol was annoyed. She wanted to give herself over to what Powers as lover was doing to her, but couldn’t until she got Powers as news source to give her a bit more information. She half rolled over, kissing him, and her fingers surrounded him, though only barely. From this she realized that the conversation was proving extremely sexy to both of them. It was kinky sex, in a way. It was like an erotic game they had invented to heighten their excitement. They might have played at being father and daughter in bed together, but this game was better. It was like sex between fourteen-year-olds; their innocent questions were not innocent at all, this conversation was dangerous and forbidden, and both of them knew it.
“But it is one man? A specific guy?” purred Carol, wanting to make him tell, and her cheek moved down him, crossed his abdomen cool as ice, crushed his curls. Her tongue darted out once, twice, and left a blind part of him questing it in the darkness.
“Yes,” he said. His whole body had stiffened, and the word was almost a gasp.
“A Chinese guy. What is his name?”
“Oh Carol.”
His hand cupped her upthrust buttocks.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“But he’s big?”
“The biggest.”
“A Chinese godfather,” said Carol triumphantly.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, Carol, yes.”
“The most important man in Chinatown?”
“Yes.”
As he rolled her on to her back, she was in a state of such sexual excitement that she was almost overwhelmed by it. She thought the Chinese godfather must be the mayor of Chinatown, Mr. Ting, and she was satisfied she could find the rest out for herself, and in any case she could no longer concentrate on that story, she was working on this one. She wanted Powers now. She had a grip on him, and he was ready, he was always ready. He was like a teenager with her, a fact they had not discussed, but that no doubt surprised him as much as her every time. She had never had a more willing lover, he was always ready, and she guided him where she wanted him to go.
As he began to ride her she knew he wouldn’t last long. He was too close to the edge for that, but so was she, her whole body tingling, her mind tingling too, delighted with what she had found out, delighted with Powers both as lover and news source, delighted with herself. She heard him begin to gasp and squeal, noises that came to her over and above the racket she was making herself. For once the tumult of a man’s completion, this man’s completion, was enough to release her own. She almost never had orgasms during sexual intercourse, only three or four times in her life, but now she experienced an unending, unendurable, agonizing, exquisite series of convulsions; she was so totally unraveled that she cried out, “Marry me, Artie, oh marry me. Divorce your wife and marry me.”
ANOTHER SMALL, airless room. No window. A desk, two chairs, one beside the desk, one thrust into it. A filing cabinet that occupied an entire corner. Add two people and the room would be full, overfull. With two people, thought Luang, this room - any room - became a theater. The drama could take place. With only one person you had nothing, an actor without an audience, an audience without a play. Luang, hands on the backrest, stood behind the chair rammed into the kneehole. He had not sat down because the second person had not yet arrived. A Chinese newspaper, printed that morning in Chinatown, lay splashed open in front of him. It was a stage prop only. Luang was waiting, not reading. He was rehearsing his lines.
He wore his one business suit. It was six or seven years old, gray, threadbare, shiny, and in places as thin as paper. In Chinatown, where threadbare suits tended to seem reassuring, there were many like it. The Chinese asked that form be preserved. They did not ask for proof of prosperity. Some of the richest men in Chinatown showed no wealth ever. They owned blocks of buildings, but wore suits like Luang’s. Ostentation was dangerous. There was a Chinese adage: If you do not wish your house disturbed by robbers, do not fill it with jade and gold.
Koy was an exception, of course, Luang reflected. Koy wanted everyone to know how rich he was. But Koy was not your usual Chinese.
The door opened and a woman teacher led in the boy, Quong. A middle-aged Jewish lady, small. Taller than Quong though. Smiling, she had him affectionately by the arm. Quong wanted nothing to do with her. His expression was surly, and he kept trying to shrug his arm loose from her grasp like a hooked fish flapping against the floor of the boat, a reflex action, automatic, mindless.
“I’ll send him back to class in a few minutes,” said Luang.
Both Chinese watched the door close behind her.
Upon first noticing that Luang was Chinese, the boy’s face had lit up, and for a moment he had ceased to struggle.
“Who are you?” he said now. His former surly expression had returned. Luang was perhaps Chinese, but to the pupil he was still the enemy.
Luang folded the Chinese newspaper, thrusting it ba
ck into his briefcase. Under it a nameplate now stood revealed. Luang had more than one prop and was using them carefully. The nameplate too had come out of his briefcase. It read: GUIDANCE COUNSELOR.
This meeting with Quong had been arranged through the school principal, Mr. Goldfarb, another middle-aged Jew. Goldfarb was sympathetic to the problems of his young Chinese newcomers. He was also aware of the threat posed to them by the Chinese youth gangs. If Luang wanted to interview Quong, this was fine with Goldfarb. But Luang had said nothing to him about passing himself off as a school guidance counselor.
“I didn’t know they had Chinese teachers here,” said the surly child. There were no Chinese words for guidance counselor. Supervising teacher was as close as he could come.
“I’m not a teacher,” said Luang, and he nodded toward his nameplate. But the deception irked him. It was necessary, probably. If the kid was to lead him anywhere he had to pose as something. So he had had no choice. But to deceive another human being was evil, and law enforcement personnel, he already realized, did as much lying - maybe more - as the criminals they arrested. They played roles, as Luang was doing now, sometimes giving virtuoso performances - without ever warning the audience that the show was a show. They made promises to witnesses, to informants, that they knew they couldn’t keep, and in the interest of taking felons off the street they swore out false search warrants and arrest warrants. If necessary to secure a conviction they often enough gave perjured testimony on the witness stand. All this was unfortunate. To combat fraud they multiplied fraud. Criminals, in the course of their depredations, murdered victims relatively rarely; cops murdered truth every day. They destroyed trust. They were guilty of one of the worst crimes of all, the proliferation of the lie.
Luang, staring at the boy before him, chased all these thoughts from his head, or tried to. They would never have occurred to a white demon he was sure, and if he was to do his job properly he had best not dwell on them. This kid would be easy to deceive, and nothing else counted.
“Say, it’s good to talk Chinese for a change,” he said jovially. He leaned on the joviality. He hammered it home, drove it in like a spike.
