Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  Later, in the dark of the bedroom, Caroline broke the silence. “Tell me why you have sex with me.” Her voice was oddly bright and awake.

  “No.”

  “Tell me how is it different than with your wife.”

  “No.”

  “Your wife is attractive, right?”

  I grunted. “I bet you might know the answer.”

  “I might.”

  I rolled over so that I could look Caroline directly in the face. “Did you go—”

  “Yes.”

  “—to her office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I was curious.”

  “She knew you were lying.”

  “I guess, yes.”

  “It was an extremely fucked-up thing to do.”

  Caroline drew back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “She’s smart, Caroline. She’s very, very smart.”

  “Smarter than me?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t like my answer. “How do you know?”

  “Nobedy is smarter than my wife, believe me.”

  “Smarter than you?”

  “Double or triple.”

  Caroline was quiet. I felt the difference in our ages.

  “My wife is a good person, Caroline,” I said, “and I really don’t want her to be hurt by this.”

  “I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sort of interested in her, though. I mean, I’m supposedly going to be a married woman sometime.”

  “You were a married woman.”

  “Not really. It didn’t feel like that. It was always just a strange arrangement. Simon never knew me, I think.”

  “He never knew you?”

  “Well, he knew me really well in some ways, but in other ways he had no idea. He wanted to. He kept trying to turn me inside out.”

  “It was never something where time just went by,” I interpreted.

  “I wasn’t really a wife to him.”

  “What were you?”

  “A—I was—a specimen.”

  “A specimen of what?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “I think you’re actually a fine specimen.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  “Are you a specimen of something?”

  “Maybe—probably. But it was never of a married woman. That’s why I’m asking questions about your wife.”

  “I don’t mind telling you things, but no more contact with her.”

  “All right.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “I said all right.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll ask a question now.”

  “Sure.”

  “Is she good in bed?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You love her and she loves you?”

  “Very much, yes.”

  “Then how is it different?”

  “If you don’t have children, it’s hard to understand, I think.”

  “Try me.”

  Her question seemed naive, but I attempted an answer. “After you have kids, death gets into it. You understand, now, like you never did earlier, that you are going to die. I didn’t get that before I had kids. Now I worry all the time about them getting sick or dying, and I know that my wife is worrying, too. I think, What happens if I die? What happens if she dies? And who will die first? Who will be left alone? What happens if one of the kids dies? All this sort of gets into the sex. I mean, I watched both kids be born.”

  Caroline rolled back toward me. “What did it look like?”

  “The head looks like a little wet tennis ball. With Sally, Lisa had back labor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The baby is pushing against the spine, hitting the spinal nerve. Lisa was delirious with pain. I told the doctor to give her an epidural.”

  “That’s a shot for pain?”

  “They stick a long needle into the spinal cord. They have to time it between contractions.”

  “Did you see the umbilical cord and everything?”

  “I cut it.”

  “What’s that like?”

  “It’s sort of like a thick bluish rope.”

  “Is the afterbirth disgusting?”

  “None of it’s disgusting.”

  “They pull out the placenta?”

  “They put it in a stainless steel tray and you can have a look at it. Looks like a piece of liver the size of a phone book.”

  “Both kids were okay and everything?”

  “Sally had jaundice, which is not so bad, though she had to go back into the hospital, but Tommy came out blue.”

  “Why?”

  “The cord was around his neck.” I took a breath, perhaps sympathetically. “We got through that and then he caught pneumonia nine days later. That wasn’t fun. An oxygen tent and so on.”

  “He’s okay?”

  “He’s very okay.”

  She was quiet a moment. “All this is in the sex with your wife?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “Do you think about other women with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Temptresses of my own devising.”

  “Have you had sex with her since having it with me last time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Once?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “So maybe eighteen hours ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you take a shower?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Did you think of me when you were with her?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I mean thinking of me not just because you feel guilty about me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean you were fucking her but actually thinking about fucking me.”

  “Yes.” I looked at her. “I can sort of switch back and forth with no interruption.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “No, actually I’m not.”

  “Did you think of her just now when you were with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And not just because you feel guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  Her voice rose. “You thought of her just a few minutes ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about the other temptresses of your own devising?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think of men?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She thought. “Are you having sex with them?”

  “No.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They are men and they are not me exactly but I am them. I am watching them have sex with the temptresses of my own devising.”

  Caroline seemed dissatisfied. “What are some of the other differences between us?”

  “You don’t want to get into that,” I said.

  “No, you don’t want to get into that.”

  I shrugged.

  “There’s a physical difference?” she asked. “I mean does it feel different, inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “She’s had two kids. You’ve had none, as far as I know.”

  “It makes that much difference?”

  The question hung in the dark room, the music rapid and faint above us somewhere. Outside it had started to snow.

  “It makes a difference.”

  “Do you look at your wife when you’re having sex and think ‘I am going to be with her until we die’?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you think about that?”

  “It’s both a comfort and a horror.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s comforting to think that we will be together, and also I am horrified to think what time will do to us, to all of us. I am terrified by that. So to answer your original question, the difference between you and my wife, asid
e from all the obvious differences, is that with you I am not responsible for our future. I am not beholden to you, or you to me. It’s all here, now. It’s new snow on the windowsill. Very lovely now, then gone. You’ll go off and do God knows what, marry Charlie, and I’ll go back to Lisa, and I think we both know this. You are now. You will not age before my eyes for the next forty years. You will be here and that will be it. I can be with you and also not care whether you love me.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “From the moment I saw you.”

  She smiled, pleased. “Maybe it was just cheap lust.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Really?” She gave me a little punch. “Well, maybe I was just a temptress of my own devising, catching you in my little web.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “No.”

  “But I could have all kinds of schemes—”

  “I don’t care.”

  She retrieved a cigarette and match from the bedside table. “Why?”

  “I’m smart enough to get out.”

  The match flared. “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I’m very, very smart and you won’t get out of my web.”

  “I’ll get out.”

  “Why are you sure?”

  “I’m smart.”

  “Smarter than me?”

  I thought of various answers. “We don’t know yet, do we?”

  I turned over to see her reaction, but she had closed her eyes, the lashes so thick and long they seemed to rest upon her cheek. I cursed myself for being fascinated by her. What an asshole I was. There was Sally, perhaps that very minute, cutting a piece of red construction paper with a pair of rounded scissors, or there was Tommy dragging one of his soiled stuffed animals through the apple juice he had just spilled, and there was Lisa, running the warm bathwater; all this while I, father, husband, protector, lay on a king-size bed uptown, my dick wet and limp against my leg, with another woman. Yes, I cursed my fascination with Caroline, but so, too, did I feel uncommonly happy for it.

  “Tell me something else, about the difference,” she said.

  I thought. “Well, there’s the ugly difference.”

  “Oh?” she said with interest.

  “When my wife and I have sex, it’s at the end of the day. We’re tired. She’s tired. She’s worked hard, the kids have worn us out with dinner and the bath and the pajamas and the stories and so on, and we’re tired. Usually she reads a little while—”

  “What does she read?”

  “The most terrifying stuff she can find. Right now, something called Poison. Anyway, when we get into bed, we’re going to sleep the night through, we’re finding something together and then that goes into sleep, into unconsciousness, into death in the future. With you, you’re not tired, your life doesn’t have much going on. Maybe you worked out. Maybe the mail arrived. A few bills, some catalogs. Maybe you dusted your coffee table or called Charlie or told the maid to clean the shower—”

  “Oh, fuck you.”

  “Let me finish. The point is that I’m a diversion, a game. A trifle. A bonbon in the afternoon. I know this. I’m not taking you anywhere you want to go. I’m taking you away from the place you don’t want to be. I don’t suspect that you think much of me when I’m not here. You go to the gym and talk to your friends and go to Bloomingdale’s or the movies or whatever, but I’m not part of your life, not in any way that’s important. We’re screwing each other. That’s what this is, Caroline. Nothing more, nothing less. You know this. It’s at the surface, nothing deep. There are no stakes, no mortality to be found in the relationship.”

  “That’s pretty harsh.”

  “I’m taking you to the next level.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “It’s the only advantage older guys have.”

  She smiled and rolled over and kissed me. “So since you’ve got this death-is-life thing, tell me a story about death, sweetie.”

  Now, I understood, she was bothering to know me. I glanced outside, again saw the snow. “Get me another drink.”

  She did, and one for herself, too, and we pulled ourselves up in the bed under the blue blanket, and I found myself remembering for her one winter in my little town in upstate New York, when I was twelve. “It had snowed heavily for three days and my friends and I had heard that the freight cars were frozen to the tracks. To the twelve-year-old mind this is a fascinating idea, for we had spent hour upon hour watching trains go back and forth, throwing sticks and rocks at them, putting pennies on the rail, even a dead raccoon, the decapitation of which we studied with great seriousness. On that day we tramped through the deep snow down to the far end of the passenger station, which had a number of side tracks. Two freights were frozen in place next to each other fifty yards south of the station, and we hiked down there, examining the engines for signs of activity. There were none. We knew that we should not be near the train, but we had not climbed past any fences or gates to get there, and anyway, we enjoyed that boyish certainty that the town was ours, made for our inspection. We clambered over the engine for a few minutes, kicking off great pillows of snow and looking into the narrow, streamlined windows at the gauges and controls and what seemed to be a small, uncomfortable seat. Then we climbed down, having discovered that the wind had piled the snow between the adjacent boxcars of the two trains, almost to the actual tops of the cars themselves—perhaps sixteen feet. A tunnel. That is what boys think of, and we set about digging one between the two boxcars, postulating snowy caverns lit by flashlight. That is what boys think of, not that they will find, while digging, a boot—”

  “Oh,” Caroline said aloud.

  “—which, in but a moment, turned into a boot with a frozen leg attached, and the tip of a hand. The two other boys jolted backward, screaming. I was a few feet away and had not seen it. The others took off hollering across the train yard, running awkwardly through the deep snow, exercising their terror, invoking an official adult response. I was left there. I began to run but was not compelled to do it. I turned back to the anonymous leg, and then stepped between the boxcars of one of the trains and in the woods stripped a leafless branch from a young maple. Then with the stick I swept the snow away from the body. The boot and leg became two legs. Then the hand became an arm and shoulder. I gingerly brushed the snow from one side of the face. The head was sunken into the chest. A chin. A cheek. A frozen, glassy eye. It was an old man, and the snow stayed piled on his hatless bald head and on his ears. The other eye was almost shut. His ears had snow in them. There was a cigarette butt frozen to his collar. I was terrified now, but also strangely thrilled, and I kept brushing at the body, even using my hands a bit. We seemed to be in intimate relation to each other. I took off my glove, looked over my shoulder, then touched my finger to his cheek. It was hard as ice. I could see that he had built a small, useless fire next to himself. The little bottle in the paper bag, the week-old newspaper—no doubt gathered from one of the trash cans in the train station—the hat on the ground. It was a tableau of the last despair, and I stared at it for a long time, begging to hear the secrets contained within, desperate to know what was happening to me as I looked. Then behind me came the excited shouts from my friends as they raced ahead of the stationmaster, a fat man of maybe fifty who huffed up and yelled at me with nervous anger to step back. Not long after that, the town sheriff ordered us to leave and go home, and I held myself a few steps away from my friends, feeling myself made different and strange by what had happened, by what I had chosen to do while they were gone.”

  I stopped, looked at Caroline.

  “That was a good one.” She moved close to me in the darkness, as a siren raced down the avenue below. “Tell me another.”

  “Is this what we do for entertainment? Lie around at night and tell dead-people stories?”

  “Yes.” She flicked an ash off her breast. “It’s fun and you know it. Anyway, I’m
just accommodating your perversions.”

  The cigarette smoke was poisoning me deliciously. “You don’t know me well enough to know what my perversions are.”

  “Yes I do,” she laughed.

  “Tell me.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  Silence. Then: “You look for death. I think that’s a kind of perversion.”

  “You were right,” I said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t want to know that.”

  “Tell me another one,” she said.

  “There’s the first body I saw as a newspaper reporter.”

  “Okay.”

  “I was nineteen.”

  “Did you know anything yet?”

  “No,” I said. “Did you know anything when you were nineteen?”

  “I knew how to get in trouble. Tell me your story first.”

  “I was in Jacksonville, Florida. I was a summer reporter at the Florida Times-Union, a big regional paper. My girlfriend at the time and I drove down in her ’sixty-nine MG convertible, full of rust, you could see the highway going by between your feet. We rented a cockroach apartment. She got a job as a cocktail waitress, I worked at the newspaper. I started out on the news desk but they moved me to features, because there wasn’t much local news, really, just corrupt real-estate deals and navy pilots dumping their planes, and they could see that I could do the feature stuff. So one of my features was a day in the life of an ambulance crew. Pretty clichéd story, but I was a kid, I didn’t know anything. So I rode around in the ambulance. There was a lot of boring stuff, heart attacks, stuff like—”