CHAPTER FIVE

Her bike was a big black Honda with custom red leather seats and lots of shiny chrome. I buckled on the helmet she handed me and slid onto the seat behind her, bracing myself for the kickoff, the inevitable moment of vertigo before speed overcame gravity and the bike shot into motion. The light at the corner blinked yellow. We slid easily through it and kept going, shabby streets morphing into smarter shinier ones that looked nevertheless deserted; D.C. was definitely a commuter’s town. I quit wondering why I’d agreed to this and gave myself over to the tactile pleasures of the ride. Warm air gone cool with velocity. Big engine thrumming with banked power between my legs. The black leather outline of her back.

She gunned the engine and we poured ourselves through the late-night silence of the Mall. I’m getting the scenic route, I thought, but maybe it was a shortcut after all because in another minute, she’d angled the bike into a parking space and when I looked across the street, I saw my hotel. We both slid off.

“Thanks,” I said, handing back the borrowed helmet. She lifted one shoulder.

“Not a problem.”

She was leaning back with one hip braced against the bike, helmet dangling from the fingers of her right hand, jacket open a little in front to reveal a plain black T-shirt and a half-empty pack of Camels in the inside pocket. “Offer you a drink?” I said. “Got a whole minibar of options upstairs.”

“Would’ve been cheaper to drink back at the bar.”

“Not for me,” I said. “I’m on an expense account.”

She stowed her helmet, clicked the seat closed, and straightened up – still looking half-bored, like it didn’t matter. “Sure. Why not?”

We strolled through the wide shiny lobby, brushed past Pimples, and took the elevator to the fourth floor, standing in opposite corners and pretending interest in the changing numbers on the LCD screen above the door. Once inside my room, I excused myself to the bathroom to wash my hands and gargle the taste of vomit out of my mouth. When I came back out, she was sitting on the bed playing with the TV remote.

“Hundred channels,” she said, not looking at me. “Swank.”

“Yeah.”

“Nice book.” She indicated the Rosenkav score on the nightstand. “You into music or something?”

“Or something.” I sat down next to her. She turned off the TV and shifted so she could see me more easily.

“We need to spend any more time on small talk? Or are you good?”

“Bring it on,” I said, and she jumped me.

It was exactly like I’d hoped it would be, fast and sweaty and a little bit violent. She tangled her hand in my hair and yanked. I feinted, pulled free, and used her other arm to flip her over. Twisting it up into the middle of her back, I leaned over, straddling her hips with my knees and breathing hard, whether from exertion or excitement I didn’t know. “That all you got?”

“You wish,” she grunted, and brought the back of her head up hard to connect with my nose. Startled, head ringing, I let loose of her arm and let her buck me off. A moment later, we were both on our feet, gauging each other from opposite sides of the bed and edging sideways, ready to spring.

This, I thought. This is what I wanted tonight.

She came at me over the bed, too fast for me to avoid her completely. I managed to duck out of the headlock she’d intended to pin me with, and drove a fist into her stomach. It wasn’t the direct hit I’d hoped for, but it still winded her. We fell back together on the bed, rolling over and over a few times and grappling for the upper hand before ending up face to face on our sides.

No winner. No loser, either.

My nose was bleeding; I could tell from the taste and the metallic slosh in my sinuses. The opera-singer part of me that was still thinking was worried about what that might do to my resonance and how my breathing might be affected. The rest of me didn’t give a fuck.

She dragged my head back by my hair and set her teeth into my throat, and for just a second I went all swoony and disassociative. Then I came back into myself and started kicking. While she was dealing with my feet, I managed to get one hand in between our bodies and pop enough buttons on her jeans to work a couple of fingers inside the fly. She growled, tried to roll me, bit me again. I shoved my hand through the vent in her boxers and got her by the plastic dick she’d harnessed onto herself. She hissed.

“Cut it out.”

“You gonna stop me?”

She yanked my shirt open with her free hand, sending up a flurry of buttons like little white flares, and dug her stubby, bitten fingernails into me. “Gonna make you sorry you tried.”

“Looking forward to it,” I said, then quit talking and put all of my energy into jacking her off. At these close quarters, it was more about friction than elegance, just a ragged half-moon pattern with my closed fist that bumped the base of her cock up against her clit and got her both coming and going.

So to speak.

She was going to take me apart the minute I let go of her, so I was damn well going to exploit my opportunity while I still had it. I shoved her onto her back, wedged a knee between her thighs, and pumped her hard and fast and graceless until she flushed sunset red and started to hiccup.

Ha, I thought. Gotcha.

Before I’d finished thinking it, she’d dragged me down to the floor and put a knee in my back while she took off my pants.

“Not packing?” she growled into my ear. “I’d have expected a pair of big clanking brass ones right … about … here.” She punctuated her sentence with heavy stiff-handed blows that were far more thud than sting, too angry to be skillful. “Guess you’re just a pussy, after all.”

I spat out a mouthful of carpet lint. “Didn’t need a dick to fuck you good and proper, now, did I?”

“You’re going to be really sorry you said that,” she promised, and shoved herself as far inside me as our awkward position would allow.

It felt good. Well, no. ‘Good’ wasn’t the word for it. It felt like what it was, a blunt cylinder of body-temperature silicone with two hundred pounds of stone-butch aggravation behind it. ‘Good’ was both overstatement and understatement. But then, I didn’t want ‘good’; I wanted to lie here with my bloody nose and my growing collection of bruises, secure in the knowledge that I’d gotten my licks in on the way down, and let her plow me hard into the hotel-room carpet.

That’s right, I thought, feeling the orgasm rise in me slow and relentless, like tide. That’s right – give it to me, let me have it, turn all my pockets inside out and let’s see what’s inside them. She pressed down hard on the small of my back, using her dick inside me like a lever to force me to a more agreeable angle. At her next thrust, we both grunted.

Yeah, I thought. Be the thing that doesn’t make sense and won’t apologize for it. God, she was in a rhythm now, and I really, really wasn’t going to last.

Yes. Be that thing. Be the thing that’s not pretending, the thing that’s as real and inexorable and inevitable as that fast-approaching moment when – oh, Jesus – my blood scatters itself brainward and my heart misses its next pulse and for just one antigravity instant, everything stops, pain and pleasure and thought and ration and yes, even the goddamn fucking opera, for the one tick that the clock cannot measure, even time itself, blue and water-tinged and holding its breath like the flash of a photograph. Be that.

And if it hurts, so much the better.

Eventually, she rolled off me, tucked herself in, and got heavily to her feet. “I need a smoke,” she said, and disappeared onto the balcony. I pulled myself up, took off my ruined shirt, and used it to wipe my face. Closer inspection in the bathroom mirror revealed that the bleeding had stopped. I sponged myself off, stuffed the shirt in the trash, and looked myself over, cataloguing the damage. Bite marks in my shoulder, minor rug burn down the side of me that she’d just ground into the floor, that vague fucked-out ache lower down and farther in. Probably there’d be bruises on my ass, too; her hand had felt like a block of wood.

Nothing long sleeves wouldn’t cover. I pulled another shirt out of my suitcase, put it on, and sat down on the edge of the bed to wait for her, feeling a little light-headed. Maybe I wasn’t as sober as I’d thought. I kept thinking about the text of this Samuel Barber song I loved: Close, my darling, both your eyes/let your arms lie still at last/Calm the lake of falsehood lies/and the wind of lust has passed. Pretty melody, sweet tremble of piano underneath it. Barber was always doing that, taking an ironic text and making it sound like love poetry. What was the last line, the one that always made me feel a little cold? Funny, but I couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember the name of the poet, either.

Didn’t matter. My wind of lust had passed, all right, and the only thing left in me was a leaden sort of fatigue. I wanted her to leave.

I wanted her to leave so I could sleep. I wanted to sleep because it seemed like the most efficient way to signal that today was finally over, and I wanted today to be over because too much bad shit had gone down since sunrise and I desperately needed to be able to put all this in the past tense.

I saw the faint glow of her cigarette blink out as she stubbed it underfoot. She left it lying on the balcony floor, a dead firefly, and came back inside, pulling the sliding door closed behind her. She was moving stiffly, I noticed with satisfaction, and there were four neatly-spaced bluish striata curving from under her ear to disappear beneath the collar of her T-shirt. I needed to clip my nails.

“You said something about a drink,” she said. I winced inwardly, but nodded toward the minibar.

“Help yourself.”

She stooped to open it, removed a handful of small gold bottles, and stowed them in the pockets of her leather jacket. “Thanks.”

“Sure.”

“I should get going. Before they tow my bike.”

I didn’t look at her. “Okay.”

Hand on the doorknob, she paused and looked back. “Hey. You got a name?”

“What the hell do you care?” I said. I meant it to sound ironic, but it came out with a sharp edge of hostility that took her aback for a second; I could see her surprise in the lines at the corners of her eyes and the way her shoulders shifted under the leather. Then she shrugged.

“I don’t.”

I had a quick impulse to say something else, something that would soften the blow, but by the time I’d thought about what it might be she was long gone. I reached for the tiny round light switch and fumbled at it until it twisted and the light above the bed snapped off.

I wasn’t good with people even in English. What was I going to be like when I had to deal with a language barrier?

Time enough for that tomorrow.

My eyes felt better closed than they had open. I let myself sink into the safe impersonal semi-darkness and listened to the distant soundscape of ‘city’ and ‘hotel’ – the faint purr of engines, an occasional horn-beep, faraway laughter, footsteps that passed my door but didn’t stop.

Frederic Prokosch, I thought. That was the poet’s name, the name I’d been searching for. And now, lying heavy-limbed and floating in my rented oasis, I remembered the last stanza of the poem.

Northward flames Orion’s horn/westward th’Egyptian light./None to watch us, none to mourn/but the blind eternal night.

Once I got to Paris, I promised myself, I’d give up casual sex. And stop drinking.

It was the last thought I had before sleep took me.