Indeed, as we chatted over a meal of lobster bisque, grilled lamb chops, and champagne, you never would have believed we had sex on our minds, for we seemed to be getting together for the sole and exclusive purpose of discussing Yeltsin, the Middle East, the greenhouse effect, education, and the fluctuating state of the economy. I can’t quite remember how we got from the deficit to Oriental erotica, but that’s where we’d got to shortly before P.M., when Philip opened his robe to display what he called—as he gently urged my hand upon it—his Weapon of Love, his Precious Scepter, his Jade Stalk, his Crimson Bird, the Lingam with which he yearned to fill my Yoni.
“Excuse me,” I told him, “I grasp the idea, but I don’t grasp the context.”
Philip was happy to help me with the context.
It seems that while he was doing research for his TV program on Oriental art, he learned that this art included the art of erotica—exquisitely painted and highly graphic and (to him) profoundly arousing portrayals of often esoteric acts of love. By the time he had finished pursuing his intriguing line of research, he had had—well, let him tell it—“an epiphany. I understood that the interpenetration of the esthetic, and the erotic was my path to a thrillingly total soul/body experience.” (Which, of course, is how I picked up that damn phrase.) Philip had also acquired, in the course of his thorough review, of the material, a vivid and varied vocabulary of arcane sexual postures and bodily parts, legitimized by references to the Taoist and Tantric teachings of Eastern philosophy.
He spoke knowingly of these matters in his aristocratic voice. He spoke with his hands.
“The union of woman and man,” he explained, unbuttoning my blouse, “precisely mirrors the mating of Earth and Heaven. In making love”—he adroitly unhooked my new red peekaboo bra—“we recapitulate, microcosmically speaking, the macrocosmic harmonies of the spheres.” He paused to taste what he characterized as the Immortality Peach Juice of my breasts, causing my breathing to quicken and his Crimson Bird to flutter under my fingers. And then he went on to say—as he unzippered my skirt and dropped it to the floor, along with my stockings, lace garter belt, and panties—that what we were embarking upon wasn’t mere carnal contact but the merging of Positive Peak and Pleasure Grotto, of Yang Pagoda and Purple Peony.
“This just isn’t me,” I started to say as Philip removed his robe and stretched me out on the rug with my legs in the air. But then I reminded myself that I was here precisely because I didn’t want to be the old sexual me.
As Philip straddled my hips and draped my ankles around his neck, preparing my Honey Pot to receive his Ambassador, I huskily whispered, “Philip, wait. The Trojans.”
“We’ll try that one later,” he promised, resuming his efforts with an ardor that almost made me forget about safe sex. Fortunately, my purse was on the floor, within reach of my hand, and despite great distractions I finally extracted a condom. Which, after a few more moves that took me up to, but not over, the brink of bliss, he paused to put on. But instead of returning to what he proudly informed me was an inspired variation of the ever popular Pawing Horse position, he sat me upon his lap, easing my Precious Conch Shell onto his Jade Flute, and swayed us backward and forward, not to mention from side to side and round and round, in the even more in spired Shouting Monkey Embracing a Mountain Goat variation.
Once again Philip brought me to the very portal of paradise and stopped an instant before the bell was rung, a tantalizing tactic that he repeated again and again with impeccable timing. My nerve ends revved and ready, I eventually attempted to accelerate, but Philip—twisting our bodies into increasingly improbable positions—said we must move to the music of the spheres. And so he bent and folded me into the Mysteries of the Clouds and Rain position. And then he stood me on my head in the Donkeys in the Third Moon of the Spring position. And then he arched me over into the—
“You’re asking a lot of my lower back,” I was about to complain, when the music of the spheres picked up its beat, and Philip’s Faithful Servant addressed itself without restraint to the final requirements of my Valley of Joy.
And yes I said yes I will yes (I am, of course, quoting Molly Bloom in Joyce’s dense but deeply rewarding Ulysses) as inner and outer . . . and heaven and earth and micro- and macrocosm interpenetrated.
• • •
While the floor, two pink chairs, a floral print couch, and a Chippendale conference table had served as the sites of our acrobatic amours, we never got anywhere near fee bed until after. But after our passions were spent, we summoned the strength to crawl between the pristine sheets, where Philip napped and I evaluated.
Had I liked it? Hey, I’d loved it. All my molecules were humming. The sheets could ignite from the heat coming off of my skin. Every inch of my body—including my earlobes, my eyebrows, my belly button, my toenails—quivered with voluptuous satisfaction. My big Oriental O bad been, without any question, a once in-a-lifetime experience.
But once was enough.
Yes, even if I had been into long-term adultery, once with the Pair of Tongs position and the Bee Buzzing Over Man position, not to mention die Fixing a Nail and Soaring Seagulls and Spinning Top positions, was quite enough.
Why? Because it’s a miracle that I didn’t wind up in traction ate all of those tricky gymnastic gyrations.
But also, and mainly, because Philip never smiled.
What I mean is, he brought to his efforts to wed the esthetic to the erotic a dedicated, unrelenting solemnity. What I mean is, the man was remorselessly sincere. There were times when I wanted to laugh—when I thought I’d explode if I didn’t laugh—when the only response was to laugh—but I didn’t dare. Now believe me, I am willing—just as willing as anyone else—to be reverent abort acts of sexual love, but how can a person feel reverent when doing a back bend? And while I was truly grateful for the attention that Philip’s Warrior had lavished so warmly on my Pleasure House, how could he speak those names with such a straight face?
Lying beside him in bed, I began to giggle—softly at first, and then dementedly. Yes, I thought, clamping both hands on my mouth so I wouldn’t disturb his rest, once was enough.
I drifted off to sleep, and when I awoke I found Philip gazing upon me adoringly. Adoringly, but as I was later to learn when we met the zoo, with full awareness of each and every physical imperfection from laugh lines to . . .
Anyway, there was Philip, gazing and quoting—I guess—from some Eastern book of love; “How delicious an instrument is woman. How capable is she of producing the most exquisite harmonies, of executing the most complicated variations, and of giving the most divine of erotic pleasures.” His Precious Scepter was showing some definite signs of perking up as he continued. “With minds freed from doubt and shame, we have not cooled the natural urges of our passionate—”
“Philip,” I interrupted, not wanting to deal with any uncooled natural urges. “It’s getting late. I’ve really got to go.” Which is when he insistently asked how soon we two could meet again. After which, complications set in.
• • •
My Philip Eastlake reveries and my end-of-the-bottle-of-Chardonnay golden glow were banished in a flash by the sound of his-and-her voices quarreling on my front porch. The voices belonged to Wally and Jo, who weren’t supposed to be at the house this evening. Their words, despite the closed windows, came through step and clear. I don’t think you call it eavesdropping when people are speaking so loudly that you’d actually have, to leave the room not to hear. I did not leave the room.
“I said I’d drive you home, but I didn’t say I was coming in with you,” said Josephine.
“You’re not staying here. I can’t stay with you at your sister’s house. What,” Wally angrily asked, “is going on?”
“Separation-individuation,” Josephine Said, “is what’s going on.”
‘That’s fine. You go and separate-individuate from your father. That’s probably an excellent thing to do. But, damn it, Jo, we love each other. I’m the g
uy you’re marrying. Don’t separate-individuate from me.”
Wally’s voice broke as his hurt and bewilderment overrode his anger. He (and his loving mother) were close to tears.
“I won’t feel guilty,” Josephine snapped. “I won’t let you make me feel guilty because I want some psychological space.” She let out a heavy sigh. “Oh, Wally, don’t you understand that I can’t just go from my dad’s domination to yours?”
Wally shouted “Christ!” and pounded his fist against the front door. “That’s nuts!” he said, and pounded the door again. “I am not your father. I do not want to dominate you. And if that’s what your shrink is telling you, then tell her for me that she’s totally full of—”
Josephine, sounding more like her father than I could have ever imagined, snapped, “Don’t tell me what to tell her. Don’t you dare! And don’t you start putting her down just because she’s got me—” she paused, cleared her throat, and continued unsteadily, “to ask myself some questions about our relationship.”
A long silence followed her outburst, and then Wally grimly said, “So what are you asking?”
Josephine’s voice dropped so low that I had to—I still don’t think you could technically call this eavesdropping—move from the couch to a nearer-the-window chair. “I’m asking,” she told him nervously, “if our feelings for each other are based on—uh, you know—love or just on need.”
“I need you,” Wally exploded, like I need a hump on my back. You and that family of yours—that’s what I need? There are plenty of nice Jewish girls around who don’t have crazy fathers and fear of botulism. God knows I don’t need you, Jo, but”—Wally’s voice turned sweet as syrup—“honey, I love you.”
A rustling on the porch suggested that Wally was conveying his love nonverbally. “Don’t kiss me. It mixes me up,” I heard Josephine groan. “Okay, so you say you don’t need me but maybe you need me to need you. And maybe that’s what I’m doing instead of loving you.”
Now Jo was crying, and Wally was crying, and I started crying too, for Jake and me as well as for Wally and Jo. I cried for young lovers everywhere and for middle-aged lovers too, for the way we were—and the way we screw it up, for that please-believe-me-I’ll-die-if you-leave-me, that are-you-pretending-it-can’t-be-the ending, that high-as-the-mountain-and-deep-as-the-ocean devotion which ends with our lonely heart calling, in the chill still Of the night, lover come back to me.
“Oh God, oh God, it’s so sad,” I wailed. My body shook with sobs—two-thirds sorrow, one-third Chardonnay. As tears streamed down my cheeks and my sobbing reached a loud, crescendo, all of a sudden I heard somebody say» “Mom? Is that you?”
I had, in my grieving for love’s labours lost, forgotten that Wally and Josephine were, right there. Now they knew that I was right there too. “It’s me,” I said, thinking fast. “I was taking a nap, and I just woke up from a terrible nightmare. Come on inside and I’ll make us all some coffee.”
I opened the door to let them both in, but Josephine told me No, thanks, explaining that she had studying to do.
Wally grabbed her hand and said, “It’s really important to me for you to come in.”
Josephine slipped her hand away. “It’s really really important,” she said, “for me not to.”
“It actually isn’t that cold tonight,” I said to Wally and Jo, trying for a constructive intervention. “Compromise! Have coffee out here on the porch.”
“Forget it,” said Wally, and stormed into the house.
“Good night, Mrs. Kovner,” said Jo, and walked to her car.
Saturday night, I said to myself, is the loneliest night of the week.
I made myself a lonely cup of coffee.
And since Wally said no—a rather sharp no—when I asked if he wanted to talk, and since Jake was God knows-where with God-knows-whom, I decided the best thing to do was to go to sleep. Tomorrow—when I was thinking more clearly and looking a whole lot better—I’d figure out how to make up with Jake and how (once again!) to murder Mr. Monti.
• • •
Sunday started out badly and got worse.
The phone rang at 7A.M. with my sister Rosalie saying, “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
There are three answers to this question. The direct approach: “Damn right you did. Who calls at seven A.M.?” The smart-ass reproach: “Certainly not. I had to get up to answer the telephone anyway.” The comforting lie: “Oh, no, I’ve been up for hours.”
In the interests of sisterhood, I chose option three.
“So why,” Rose persisted, “are you sounding so groggy?”
“Maybe I’m getting a cold,” I said. “Rose, I’m up.”
“Because if I did wake you up, you could tell me. I can deal with that I’d rather have you say it right out than secretly thinking I’m selfish and irresponsible.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” I fibbed. “I’m thinking that if my sister is calling at seven A.M., it must be important.”
“In other words,” Rose said triumphantly, “I did. I did wake you up. And you hate me for it.”.
As I think I’ve already mentioned, ours has never been an easy relationship.
It took about ten minutes to get beyond this opening gambit to the purpose of Rosalie’s early-morning call, which was to let me know that she and Hubert would be coming down on Wednesday. They would need to stay, she reminded me, two or maybe three weeks, till the work on Carolyn’s yard was well under way. “Unless—and you can be honest with me, Brenda—” she tensely said, “you’d rather that Hubert and I went somewhere else.”
“You’re more than welcome,” I assured her.
“Is that ‘you’ as in me or ‘you’ as in Hubert and me?”
“You’re both welcome here,” I said. This was not the truth.
“I know you don’t really like dogs, Bren, but I couldn’t come without Hubert.”
“I wouldn’t want you to.”
“I mean, a Great Dane is a sensitive breed, and Hubert happens to be especially sensitive. And intelligent. And intuitive. And dignified and proud. And deeply devoted.”
“I don’t, know Hubert that well,” I said, trying to stanch the flow, “but I’m looking forward to getting to know him better. And now, if you’ll excuse me”—I employed my old trick for getting off the phone—“my doorbell is ringing.”
“Who would be ringing your bell,” asked Rose, “so early in the morning? Don’t they care about waking people up?”
“Wednesday, Rose,” I said, and hung up the phone.
When I went outside to bring in the Sunday papers, I saw something on the windshield of Wally’s car. Stuck under the wipers, a raggedy note announced in big block letters, ON HALLOWEEN THE CLOWN TURNS A GHOST.
I had no problem deconstructing this terrifying message. It obviously was naming the date on which Mr. Joseph Monti intended to do in my baby boy.
The sidewalk lurched under my feet. The sky started falling. A full-scale dizzy spell was about to begin. No, I said to myself, I won’t let this happen. I won’t let them hurt him. I won’t be helpless. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t let that bastard win.
The doziness passed.
I reminded myself, as I tore up the note and tossed it into the trash can, that Halloween was more than a month from today. Which meant that Wally was safe for a while, that I didn’t need to feel pressed to swing into action and rescue him right away. There was time, and I had to have time, to prepare another foolproof plan to kill Mr. Monti.
How much time, did I have to win back Jake?
I was brooding over this question during a meager breakfast of coffee and dry toast when I got a telephone call from Vivian Feuerbach.
“I wanted to check on your health, my dear,” she said to me in her Katharine Hepburn voice. “You sounded so dreadful on Friday when you canceled.”
What in God’s name was she talking about? For a moment my mind was blank. And then I remembered. “Oh, right. But I’m fine today.”
And I also wanted to tell you that I’m going out to the shack for a couple of weeks”—this, shack was. her two-hundred-acre estate in Middleburg—“so whatever you wished to see me about will have to wait until I have returned.”
My mind, no longer a blank, flashed, That’s too late.
I guess I must have moaned, because imperious Vivian quickly, graciously added, “Unless—well, if it’s important, I could make the time to see you this afternoon.”
I told her it was important. I told her I’d get back to her immediately. I called up Louis and asked could he meet us today. “We’ll take her to Anacostia, and then we’ll take her to Harmony House, and then you’ll make your pitch about converting Jeff’s properties into group homes for the homeless, and then she’ll agree it’s a great idea, and then she’ll agree to buy them, and then Jeff will be all right, and then maybe Jake . . . maybe Jake . . . maybe Jake . . .”
“Brenda! Brenda! Slow down! You need me to meet you and Ms. Feuerbach, I’ll do it.” Louis’s voice was soothing arid concerned. “But—no offense intended—you are strange, I mean sincerely strange, today.”
I took a deep breath and told Louis that I was suffering from a case of sensory overload—“I need to unjam a few circuits and I’ll be okay.” I decided I wouldn’t say that I needed this real estate coup not merely to bail out Jeff but to score some urgently needed points with my husband, whom—I also didn’t say—I seemed to have significantly alienated.
“I don’t want your praise or apologies,” I imagined cooing to Jake, when—having been told (dramatically) about Jeff’s ruinous real estate deal and (modestly) about my brilliant solution—he looked at me with new respect in his eyes. “I don’t want your praise or apologies—just your love.”
• • •
In the early afternoon Vivian Feuerbach and I—and Jeff, who of course we needed to come with us—were crammed into Louis’s Honda on our not-so-merry way to Anacostia. To one of the meaner sections of Anacostia. To, in fact, one of the meaner streets of one of the meaner sections of Anacostia.
The day was pay but mild, and a silent cluster of teenage boys, in the hanging-out mode, looked us over when we stopped at a light. As I, in turn, looked them over—looked at their unsmiling faces and what-you-doing-here eyes—my hand, without my permission, reached out to push down the locks and roll up all the windows. Red light, red light, turn green, I nervously said to myself, this chant of impatience dredged from the mists of my childhood. But when the light turned green, our way was blocked by a wiry lad in high hair and a headband, who darted into the street and, rhythmically pecking his head and jabbing out his elbows, started dancing to an improvised rap song.
Murdering Mr. Monti Page 16
