Blood Rubies

by McDowell, Michael

  “I said I wish I’d known you were a virgin. Those were the only designer sheets I have.” He raised the paper again.

  Andrea flushed with embarrassment and said falteringly, “I’m sorry, I didn’t . . .”

  Derek folded the paper and smiled. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like such a bastard. It’s just that I don’t like the sense of responsibility.”

  Andrea merely stared at him, unable to think how she should react. This business of having her morning coffee with a man whose last name she didn’t even know, but who possessed intimate knowledge of her body and had witnessed her in the throes of passion, and was now talking about this and that as if nothing extraordinary had happened between them was an unpleasant mystery to her. It didn’t seem right. How could he have been so outrageously carnal just a few hours ago, and so mundane this morning? He had totally occupied himself with her body, until she was certain that nothing on earth mattered to him but the curve of her breasts and the line of her thighs, and now he sat across from her reading tennis scores.

  “Come on,” Derek laughed, “I was kidding. The blood’ll wash out. I was only kidding, Arlene.”

  “Andrea,” she said shortly.

  “I’m so bad with names,” he replied unapologetically, as if there had been no insult. He shrugged and smiled, but then the smile faded. He slapped the folded paper hard against the edge of the table: “Hey listen, you were on the pill or something, weren’t you? I forgot to ask, goddamn . . .” He waited for her answer with widened, fearful eyes.

  Andrea tilted her head and fingered the sliver of ruby in her right ear. “Yes, of course I was,” she said at last. “I may have been a virgin, but I wasn’t stupid. Listen,” she said in a hard voice, “I have to get back to the Hill. My friend’s waiting for me there.”

  “All right,” he said, and the fact that he did not attempt to persuade her to remain made Andrea feel all the worse. His relief at discovering that she had been on the pill—or something—was evident. Well, it’s done, she thought, and it was exciting while it happened, and I don’t feel guilty or anything, so I suppose that’s something to be thankful for . . .

  Derek leaned and stretched in his chair, and smiled—the host’s smile to a departing guest. Andrea was surprised by her own thought then: that she wanted to see this man again, that she wanted to have sex with him again, that she wanted him to ask for her telephone number or a tentative date.

  “I think I might have more of that coffee,” said Andrea. “I’m still a little groggy this morning.”

  Derek shrugged. He rose and went into the kitchen, kicking aside the scattered sections of the Sunday paper. Andrea grimaced, and while he was knocking about with the kettle and mugs, she set the paper in order again on the edge of the glass coffee table. She reached over the arm of the couch to pick up the Times and Newsweeks she found there, and, one by one, stacked them neatly. Under these were newspapers, yellowed at the edges, but still white where the magazines had lain atop them. She draped these over the tattered arm of the sofa.

  Derek returned with coffee and set the mugs on the table. “I guess the place is a little messy.” He lifted the stack of newspapers from the arm of the sofa. “Where would you like these?” he asked, with a smile of amusement.

  Without thinking, Andrea brushed a wave of blond hair back from her forehead and pointed across the room. “On top of that pile in the corner.” She caught herself and looked up embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I just . . .”

  Derek laughed and did as she had instructed. He idly leafed through the top few papers after dropping them. “I’m a miserable housekeeper,” he admitted. Suddenly he yanked a paper out and examined the front page. He glanced back at Andrea, and a smile of wonder crossed his features. “Hey!” he said softly.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He stepped over, handing her the yellowed paper. Andrea laughed too: “A year ago today—you’re not a very good housekeeper.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Derek, and flipped the paper over in her hands. He pointed to a photograph on the lower half of the front page.

  “What?” said Andrea. “This article?” She read aloud: “ ‘Somerville Man Knifed to Death in Home.’ ” She shrugged her shoulders and looked up at Derek quizzically. “So?”

  “Look at the picture,” said Derek.

  Andrea studied the accompanying photograph. In it, two women sat on the edge of a four-poster bed. The woman on the left had dark hair cut in a style that was much too young for her; she was weeping, leaning her head on the shoulder of a sober-faced young woman with blond hair. The caption identified them as the wife and daughter of the murdered man.

  With her finger resting on the image of the older woman, Andrea looked up at Derek. “Am I supposed to know her?”

  “The other one. The daughter. Look at her close. She looks just like you. The face is the same.”

  Andrea read the caption again, this time carefully: “Mrs. Anne Dolan is consoled by daughter Katherine, shortly after the brutally slain body of her husband, James Dolan, was discovered in the kitchen of their Somerville home.”

  Andrea stared several seconds at the image of Katherine Dolan. She looked up at Derek. “She doesn’t look anything like me. I’d never wear my hair like that, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in a middy blouse. How can you say this girl looks like me?”

  17

  During the summer months, to please her parents, Andrea took a job as saleswoman at the Svelte Lady Shoppe; and this piece of business turned out to be not so onerous as Andrea had feared, since Mrs. Marks wanted her only for several hours around lunchtime. This gave Andrea ample opportunity to laze in the hot sun. On the weekends, when Cosmo joined Vittoria in Yarmouthport and Marsha was supposedly staying at the LoPontis’ house in Weston, the two young women generally spent their evenings in Boston. Andrea carefully told her parents of at least half these trips, and parroted to them—as if the criticisms had been her own—reviews of the films, concerts, and plays she told them she had seen. She assuaged her conscience over these lies by not accepting the money that Cosmo offered to reimburse her for the tickets.

  In Boston, it became Joanna Liberman’s habit to let Andrea and Marsha accompany her to whatever bar she intended to visit that evening; and Joanna, because she knew trouble when she saw it, was perhaps a better chaperone than someone oblivious of real danger.

  “I can look at a man in a bar,” Joanna said to them one evening in a taxi, “and tell if I can handle him or not. If I don’t think I can, then I won’t have anything to do with him. You could do it too—it’s only the really dumb girls who get in over their heads, the ones who just walk around blind. I don’t know who first said you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I’ll bet you anything he never went to a singles bar.”

  But one weekend Joanna went to Tanglewood, and Andrea and Marsha decided to spend the entire weekend in Joanna’s Mount Vernon Street apartment. On Friday night they went to the Brimmer House, where they had been once before—and where, they knew, the bouncer was lax in checking identification of good-looking but underaged girls. The Brimmer House was located only a couple of blocks away from Joanna’s apartment, in the parlor and basement of a renovated townhouse on Beacon Street. The basement bar had a dance floor of ample size, where dancers moved beneath soft amber and pink spotlights. Upstairs there were long, angled leather couches and dark-tinted mirrors. Discreet lighting broke the shadows, and handsome men and women, all casually but expensively dressed, leaned close to one another in earnestly flippant conversation.

  After looking over the dance bar Andrea and Marsha went upstairs again, out of the range of the disco music. On the parlor level a selection of smooth jazz and blues played at a volume that actually encouraged conversation. The men were mostly in their late twenties, lean and handsome. The two young women found space on one of
the leather sofas, and when no waitress appeared after a few minutes, Andrea went to the bar and ordered their drinks.

  “. . . heavily into mutuals . . .” said a bearded man, who cast Andrea a flattering glance as he spoke to his companion at the bar.

  “. . . won twice at racquet ball, but I still couldn’t get my pulse above . . .” another was saying.

  “Best address in the South End,” said a young woman standing near Andrea, “and I can’t imagine it will be more than thirty thousand for renovation, we’ll be able to take care of that in a couple of years . . .”

  A man standing at Andrea’s left turned to see who was behind him. Andrea smiled, and he smiled in return—but his eye was caught by another woman farther down, and he moved quickly away. Andrea frowned, but then another man, handsomer than the first, stepped in beside her. He brushed back a blond wave from his forehead and smiled with complete self-assurance. His eyes were blue and his teeth perfectly aligned. He introduced himself.

  Marsha finally had to go to the bar herself to get the drink that Andrea had bought for her. Andrea introduced her to the advertising executive in a tone of voice that distinctly told Marsha to take her drink back to the sofa alone—and after Marsha had clumsily shaken hands with the man, she did just that.

  At half past twelve, Andrea left with the advertising executive and walked the short two blocks to his condominium on Marlborough Street. The man was an affectionate if not an ardent lover. The next morning, after taking her to brunch at Front Street restaurant, he walked her to the corner of Mount Vernon Street. He did not ask for her telephone number, and Andrea, disappointed, wondered if she had proved inadequate in her own lovemaking. Although she looked out for him the next time she visited the Brimmer House, she did not see the man again.

  On the next Friday night, Andrea visited the studio of a graphic artist. When she returned next morning to Joanna’s apartment building, it was with a feeling of confidence about the way she was able to meet men in the singles bars. She stood in the vestibule and rang the buzzer, and in a moment Joanna Liberman’s voice came on: “Who is it?”

  “Andrea,” she replied into the speaker, and smiled at the young man who had just entered the vestibule with his dalmatian.

  Joanna buzzed her in. Andrea pushed open the door and ran upstairs, smiling at her own high spirits. She had conclusively joined the sorority of nonvirgins.

  Andrea helped Joanna and Marsha prepare a light breakfast of heated pecan coffee cake, chilled orange juice, and coffee. The three of them chatted idly, but Andrea sensed that something was disturbing Joanna and that Marsha knew what it was. When they finally settled in their chairs at the round dining table between the front windows, Andrea had taken no more than her first sip of coffee when Joanna said, “You’re not on the pill or using any sort of device, are you?”

  Instead of answering, Andrea looked at Marsha, who appeared absorbed in the task of spreading half a stick of butter onto a small wedge of coffee cake. “No,” said Andrea at last.

  “I’m not trying to guilt-trip you,” sighed Joanna, “either of you—but you might see your way clear to giving it a little thought,” she added sarcastically.

  Neither Andrea nor Marsha said anything for a few moments; then Marsha, after taking a bite of the coffee cake, remarked, “Joshua always uses a raincoat.”

  “A condom is about as safe as wiping up with a Kleenex afterwards,” said Joanna severely. “A man who’s half decent in bed will break through any rubber that’s on the market. The point is that both of you have a decision to make. One alternative is to take the risk of getting pregnant, and go through the hassle of waiting rooms and tests and then telling your parents and then getting up the money for the abortion—or you can make a little visit to the health clinic right now, and get a prescription for a little circle of pills.”

  “What’s the number?” said Andrea, wondering at her own stupidity and glad that the matter had been taken in hand.

  “The appointment’s for eleven o’clock. You’ve got time for another cup of coffee,” said Joanna. “But, Andrea, tell me something, tell me one thing—”

  “What?”

  “How could you not have thought of this before? I mean, weren’t you afraid?”

  Andrea looked up sheepishly from her cup. “I did think about it, but—”

  “But she always makes ’em jump ship before the hold blows,” said Marsha quickly, and they all laughed.

  Andrea smiled stiffly when the female doctor at the women’s clinic prescribed birth control pills, but was humiliated when she demanded blood samples and vaginal and throat smears to check for syphilis and gonorrhea. “Is there any reason,” the doctor asked blithely, “why I ought to take a rectal smear as well?” Andrea, shocked, shook her head no.

  Leaving the place with Marsha, she was silent, for she had realized why she had not gone to a doctor before. She had equated birth control pills with promiscuity: protection against pregnancy meant an insatiable desire for sex. And now, for better or worse, she considered that she had committed herself to a way of life. Promiscuity was perhaps too hard a word, but what would her mother have said if she had known that Andrea had slept with three different men in a single month? Really though, it had been not so much a question of sex as it was one of achievement—she had wanted to master the singles bars the way she had mastered Russian verbs. But how could she explain that to her mother? Fearful of Vittoria’s discovering the disc of pills in her purse, Andrea had slipped it into her back pocket. And now, back at Joanna’s, she begged Marsha to tell her truthfully whether its outline could be seen through the denim.

  18

  Andrea and Marsha were perched on the top rung of the railing that ringed the enormous roller coaster at Nantasket Beach. Their leather sandals were hooked about the lower rung, and each leaned forward, arms folded, elbows resting on her knees. A cigarette dangled between Andrea’s fingers, and she passed it to Marsha.

  The young women’s eyes followed the segmented roller coaster cars as they were dragged screechingly up the first and highest arc of the track, paused at the hump, and shot down the other side, the passengers shrieking in gleeful terror. When it came round at the last to where they were, Marsha suddenly sat up straight and waved to two small boys sitting petrified in the last car. The children gazed at her with wide, frightened eyes and clung to the guardrail with white-knuckled hands.

  Andrea leaned back and shook her hair; she took the cigarette back from Marsha and inhaled deeply. “Don’t you think five times is enough?”

  Marsha shrugged. “One more time, and they’ll be ready to go home. You know,” she said, looking ruefully round the amusement park, “this place is always tackier than I remembered it.”

  A tall, well-built young man with curly blond hair and set, handsome features passed slowly before them. His wide-set blue eyes scanned Marsha with perfunctory interest, but they lingered on Andrea. He carried a large tan beach towel in one hand and a bottle of Coppertone in the other. Leaning against the railing a few feet down from them, he flung the towel over his shoulder and pretended to watch the roller coaster while he took appraising side glances at Andrea.

  Andrea looked him over, but just as he was about to engineer a smile with just the right amount of interest in it, she shifted her green eyes coolly away.

  The blond young man sighed in exasperation and sauntered off.

  “Well you scared that one away,” said Marsha, and waved her cigarette after the retreating figure.

  “No loss,” shrugged Andrea. “He didn’t look as if he could work his way through Dick and Jane.”

  “Who cares about his reading comprehension?” snapped Marsha. “Honestly, Andrea, ever since you discovered a technique that works in the bars, you act like you invented sex.”

  “No,” said Andrea quietly, “that’s not it at all. You’
re the one who said the men I had been dating were too young and inexperienced, I—”

  “I said they were wimps.”

  “Well,” said Andrea, “the men I’ve met this summer have been older and more . . . experienced.”

  “I’ll bet you managed to show them a thing or two.”

  “Maybe,” said Andrea. “But I’ve done most of the learning. That boy who wanted to speak to me just now was probably very nice, and he probably could have made his way through Dick and Jane, but I think he would have barked and rolled over if I’d asked him to. Just like those others—those wimps, as you call ’em. You see what I mean?”

  “You want to be dominated?”

  “In a way, yes, I guess I do. Not tied to the ceiling or beat over the head with a dead fish or anything like that. And I have no interest in finding a man who’s going to tell me how to live my life, either.” She raised her hands in frustration. “I’ve been thinking about this, and I can’t figure out exactly what it is that I do want.”

  “I’m not sure I want you to find out.”

  “But I know one thing,” nodded Andrea: “I have no interest in any man who hangs out at an amusement park.”

  When Andrea had recounted for Marsha the loss of her virginity to Derek Whatever-his-name-was, she had been truthful; her tale had been unenthusiastic and laden with off-putting detail. But since that night spent on St. Botolph Street, the image of Derek had entered Andrea’s dreams. She envisioned his taking her with great force, kissing her with such ardor that her lip was bloodied. No matter with what waking resolution she dismissed him from her thoughts, he returned to her dreams regularly.

  Marsha’s small cousins walked unsteadily down the wooden ramp from the roller coaster to the asphalt path that went along the railing. Marsha smiled indulgently: “You two want some pizza? Lots of pepperoni and hot peppers? Then some cotton candy and candied apples to take home with you? Snow cones?” she asked.