the living-room window, but when I went back inside there was no body. It was a moment of measurement. I felt the universe crackle and branch.
Deirdre also steals material things—two silver-plated candlesticks, and an exquisite little French clock with a gilded face and a case veneered in mother-of-pearl—that Gloria had brought to the marriage. I brought nothing from the Berkshires but my maternal grandfather’s china mustache cup and some bone-handled dull cutlery that I can still see my father’s workmanly hands, callused and ingrained with machine grease, plying upon a tough Thanksgiving turkey. My mother’s anxious face is framed between his cocked elbows as she waits to augment each set of slices with mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, and cranberry sauce, on one of those terrible holidays of childhood, those dry-mouthed group penances we owed the calendar’s faded gods.
When I dared reproach Deirdre with her thefts today, she looked me up and down with her expressionless brown eyes—tarry coffee into which some pale flecks of nutmeg had fallen—and said mulishly, “I do plenty for you.”
“But, darling, I pay you. Even more than you asked, the last time.”
Our lovemaking had some of the excitement of an auction, as she volunteered, in a breathless whisper, to perform or submit to a variety of acts beyond the basic missionary in-and-out. She even, as I tried to move my tongue from one lovely smallish uptilted breast to the other—tan but for the little triangles of a thong-bikini bra—specified, “Twenty-five welders extra if you suck both.”
“You bitch,” I panted, liking this and knowing she liked it too, this damp tangle of commerce and hostility amid the friction of our naked epiderms. “Fifteen. Not a penny more. Your tits should be part of the package. I mean, I’m paying you for your time, not for each itty-bitty bit of you.”
“Thirty-five if you suck so hard it hurts me,” she countered.
It had not occurred to me until this moment to hurt her. Now it seemed an inviting idea. The universe had branched.
“Ow,” she said, within a second, looking down maternally from within the massive Sphinx-mane of her bushy black hair, the side nearest the window glinting on the crests of its dishevelled curls. Her broad young face, simply but impressively carved but for its blunt and visibly pored nose, loomed a muddy brown, a sandstone tint, insofar as my eyes could pull color from the murk of the ambient dim windowlight. She was somehow Egyptian in this light, pharaonically opaque.
“You’re lying,” I protested. “That didn’t hurt.”
“I’m very sensitive there. Especially when I’m ovulating.”
“If you’re so fucking sensitive you shouldn’t be a whore,” I told her, slobbering on, so the small glossy slope of her profiled breast shone by virtue of what must have been, beyond our sheltered grapple on this lonely planet, the moon, the barren uninhabitable moon hanging above the yard’s retreating snow.
She was maddening me into an inflamed condition such as I had not experienced since the sweaty backseat tussles of my teens, with their excruciatingly grudging advances, piece by piece, into the forbidden, sacred terrain of a female body. “Let’s do it with you on your knees this time,” I suggested hoarsely.
“That’s fifty more welders.” Her hard little voice, with its Massachusetts accent, which erased the “r” in “welders,” sounded a touch hoarse also. “Doggie is normally seventy-five more.”
“How about up—”
“I don’t do that,” she quickly said, then added, “for less than three hundred.”
She had put herself in doggie position, presenting me with the glazed semi-rounds of her tight young buttocks, and, visible in the moonlight between them, the lovable little flesh-knot of her anus, suggestive of a healed scar. Here, too, the sun had failed to penetrate, deep between the tan buttocks, making a slim white crescent. I wondered if it was Revere Beach where she sunbathed so diligently, her swart skin fearless of the keratoses that cancerously dotted my horny old hide. The Columbus-haters are right: we Northern Europeans should never have veered south across the roiling Atlantic into this dazzling New World. It was a pit-failed Eden; it was forbidden fruit; we drank too much and lost our faith. We began to speckle and rot.
I slapped her solid glazed butternut ass, with its infantile puckered aperture, so decisively that she tumbled onto her back, her eyes stung into life by the blow. I noticed those wounded, tear-moistened eyes nevertheless flick with professional satisfaction toward my triumphantly swollen member, its undischarged juices swirling their intoxicants through my veins. My prostate ached with the