why: he was disgusted by the smoking, being a tan, buff, fantasy-baseball type. But not disgusted enough by the smoking to say no to the sex. He was neither shocked nor disgusted enough to say no to the cigarette-tainted sex. Rather he said yes. In fact he said yes speedily.
Most men were like that, when it came to sex. Their own desires came first, before whatever scruples, even revulsion they professed. Most women also. That was the definition of a scruple: something you consciously ignored to do whatever you wanted. Hell, what did he care. For him, no one had died.
And for herself, on this specific point—the timing of the sex—she did not feel guilt. She knew she should, likely. She felt anger, but it had no target beyond herself. As far as she went, she had ended Hal already. That black deed was done. Hal was over. Nothing could bring him back, nothing she did—no virgin purity, no nuns. Everything she did now was irrelevant, irrelevant to Hal, and though she would always be unredeemed Hal was not here to see. Hal did not care and Hal would never care again.
She closed her eyes, swaying with the drinking she’d done, and felt, uncalled-for, the edge of things, the brittle, slicing edge—the yellowing edge of old bone . . . she pushed it away by bringing Robert down. They were a warm mass against the woolen throw rug, which she and Hal had bought long ago at Ikea. Blocks of warm red, brown and beige. At the time they had thought the rug was a temporary measure, but then the rug from Ikea had stayed. As it turned out, she thought while Robert went down on her, the cheap rug from Ikea had stayed with them forever.
Robert was not particularly skilled despite the pointers she’d given him over time—had a robotic technique, in fact. In any case her mind wandered. What made her pull him off her after a couple of minutes and ask him to finish was a decision that arrived inappropriately: she had to see Hal’s body. His body was in her mind, suddenly.
She had never seen a body, she didn’t come from an open-casket culture. Her family had been more or less Protestant, uptight anyway and not given to sordid spectacles, and as a result to this day she had never been to a funeral where you saw the deceased. But she needed to see Hal. She needed to touch the seam.
“Sorry, not in the mood,” she said, when Robert asked why she had stopped him.
“No kidding,” he said, and got up, sticky and dangling, to get Kleenex for her stomach. He had slight rug burns on his knees.
Most other men she’d been with wouldn’t have asked, would have realized the effort was futile from the start. A failed comfort. It was where she went, but of course it was a dismal failure. So what.
Lying on her back, she looked up at the chandelier, whose dimmer had been turned down so that the filaments of the bulbs glowed a deep, warm orange. That was, in a sense, the benefit of Robert, whose critical capacity was low. He did not examine past a point, and was therefore unobtrusive. Almost streamlined, in fact. He was not hindered by complexity. Whereas Stellan, for instance, from about four months ago, had been overly given to psychoanalysis. Sex with Stellan, who hailed from some cerebral northern land like Finland or Sweden, was an extended therapy session. Nothing could be more annoying. Still, for a while she had relished her annoyance. Stellan, whose habit it was to sit naked afterward, smoking pot and discussing the quote-unquote relationship, was like a persistent itch—aggravating, but satisfying to scratch.
Was she relieved, slut that she was? Was there something in her that was relieved by any of this? If anyone could admit to such a thing, she should be able to. She was not only a slut but a killer.
But no. She was not relieved: she was robbed and it had left her empty. Hal had been robbed and she was robbed too, robbed of him, and now she was missing something and she always would be. That was all she had now: the freedom of nothing.
Nothing.
She realized she wanted Robert to stay, wanted it with a rare desperation despite the bad-sex episode and the fantasy-baseball element. She would smoke the cigarettes he had brought and drink his booze and talk to him: she would use Robert