Cutter and Bone (25 page)

At that, Bone got up and went back inside, where he found Mo holding the phone out to him as if it were a wet diaper.

“It’s the great blackmailer,” she said. “With wondrous tales to tell.”

Bone said hello, and Cutter’s voice boomed out of the receiver:

“Keeping the old home fires burning, uh, Rich?”

“Trying, anyway.”

“That’s the ticket. You hang in there, kiddo.”

“Sure thing.”

Cutter came on even stronger now, the juices of his ego fairly oozing from his voice. Was Bone at all interested in how the day’s activities had gone? Yes, of course he was. Well, Cutter was sure happy to hear that, because he hated to think his old buddy might be pissed off at him, and for no good reason either, like that half-assed note Cutter had left in the hotel room for him, which had just been a put-on of course, certainly old Rich was able to see that. Anyway, the wheels of time had done their thing and so had he. Yes, this fool had rushed in where Bone had rightly feared to tread, and would Bone believe that the thing was done, the fait already accompli? Would he believe old Alex had made high-echelon contact and was now waiting to hear from them?

“A young executive type named Pruitt,” Cutter went on. “How about that? Not Whozit but Pruitt—now is that a favorable sign or is that a favorable sign? And in the young man’s own words—he’ll be in touch with us
today
. He’ll send us a message.”

For some reason Bone could only repeat the phrase: “He’ll send you a message?”

“That’s right.”

“Which means he knows where you are? Where you’re staying?”

“Yeah, I had to improvise a little. With you gone, certain little changes had to be made in the game plan.”

“Suppose he sends you a message via the L.A.P.D.? Or a cannon?”

Cutter laughed. “No chance—believe me. I scared them shitless.”

Bone believed it. “Well, congratulations,” he said. “And good luck. I think you’re going to need it.”

“You too. Tell Mo I said she should be extra nice, because your ego has been so badly bruised of late. Tell her I said you can use the Packard if you need it. You can even sit in my chair.”

“Gee thanks.”

“It’s nothing. Goomba for now.”

Bone hung up. Mo was standing in the deck doorway, staring out at the sea.

“He tell you what happened?” Bone asked.

“More than I care to know. I don’t give a damn. Let him get his ass killed or jailed, I don’t care.”

For a time neither of them said anything more. Bone stood there looking at her sun-limned in the doorway, her face and hair a furze of honeyed fire.

“It’s only three o’clock,” he said finally. “Anything you want to do?”

She gave him a thoughtful look and then nodded, very positively. “Yes. First, I’ll feed the baby. And then I have a gallon of pretty good Chianti and some ridiculously expensive Romano cheese compliments of George. Also some Triscuits and half a loaf of dago bread. So we’ll drink and we’ll eat and we’ll drink some more and maybe play a few records and possibly even dance. How does that sound? Does it sound like something a pair of quasi human beings could manage?”

Bone was not sure. “We could try,” he said.

And try, they did. Through the late afternoon, they sat around drinking the wine and listening to records by Carole King and Elton John and Seals and Crofts, albums by Streisand and the Beatles and Sarah Vaughan and Stevie Wonder. They watched the baby and played with him and they danced together, Bone occasionally kissing her forehead or cheek, chaste kisses she did not seem to mind or even notice. Then during Wonder’s
Golden Lady
Bone slid his right hand inside her chinos and onto her buttocks at the same time he kissed her on the mouth. And when she did not resist he brought his left hand into the act too, reaching up under her sweatshirt and lightly taking hold of her breast. But at that she pulled away, very casually, however, more as if she had simply tired of dancing. Dropping onto the sofa, she told him not to bother.

“You’d only be disappointed,” she explained. “You wouldn’t be gaining a lover, you’d be losing a friend.”

Bone said he was willing to risk it, but she shook her head.

“No, I don’t think I’m in your league, Rich. I remember the night you had the black girl here, the night of the killing. I thought you two would never quit—God, was I jealous! I hated her.”

Bone tried not to look too pleased. “That was athletics, Mo. Right now I have something else in mind.”

“Like what?”

“Why don’t we find out?”

She smiled with wry affection, almost as if he were another Alexander Five, who at the moment was sitting on the floor happily ripping up a copy of the
Village Voice
.

“You poor sap,” she said. “You really are a slave to it, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want any
it
,” he told her.

“What then?”

“You.
Us
.”

“Love?” She said it without total mockery, almost as if she were testing the word, testing him.

“Why not?”

And she laughed. “A thousand reasons.”

Bone was sitting next to her now, leaning back, about ready to give up, for he had learned a long time ago that one rarely talked a woman into the act. One made his move and either succeeded then or not at all. But suddenly he realized she had changed her position on the davenport. Tucking one leg up under her and turning toward him, she began to search his eyes with her own, a long cool unreadable look that he had to force himself to meet. And then suddenly she kissed him, on the mouth, barely touching his lips. At the same time her hand came to rest on his lap, on the mound of his erection.

“I guess it’s be worth a try,” she said. “What could we lose?”

Bone tried to take her there on the davenport, but she put him off, saying she first had to take care of the baby and then herself.

“You wouldn’t want to make love to a slob, now would you?” she asked.

She changed the baby’s diapers and then gave him to Bone while she took a bath. So Bone found himself lying in bed bouncing the baby up and down on his stomach, lifting him above his face, shaking him and rubbing noses, making the little fellow gurgle with laughter. And it made the whole thing seem very routine, very orderly and domestic. That was how she came back into the room too, like a wife, very matter-of-fact, casually pulling shades, turning on the one dim dresser light, picking up the baby and placing him in the makeshift playpen next to the bed formed by two walls and the back of a chest of drawers and the bed itself, so that he had the option of standing next to them and observing their lovemaking if he wished. But he was more interested in an old coffeepot and an alphabet block, which he carried to the center of the pen and, sitting down, began to bang together.

It was in this simple domestic setting then that Bone and Mo came together in the bed. But from the moment he touched her, took hold of her shoulders and gently pulled her down onto him, there was no single routine second between them. It was Bone’s experience that lovemaking was almost never that so much as a mutual act of masturbation in which the partners used each other’s bodies in place of their own hands or other devices. And he found nothing wrong in this, in fact believed that it led to sex at its fullest and best, as with the black girl last week, those hour-long sessions in which the participants practically fed on each other, carefully searched out those special little morsels of sensation and then picked them clean, blood and sinew and bone, tearing and crunching and sucking, devouring all in a long sweet feast of the flesh, a kind of gluttony perhaps, but still very satisfying and very human, hurting no one. At the same time, neither did it reach Bone’s spirit or touch his heart. That kind of lovemaking he had known only rarely in his life, first as an eighteen-year-old boy with a church summer camp director’s wife and then in the first months of his marriage to Ruth and in only two affairs since then, just four times in all his life when he had made love to a
person
, someone who had lived in his mind as surely and vividly as he himself. And ironically the sex then rarely had been the best, had almost always been complicated and weakened by the human feelings sweeping back and forth between him and the loved one. Yet even then, during these less than perfect performances, what he had felt as he held his woman and entered her had no counterpart in the other “lovemaking,” the masturbatory variety. For what he had felt was a kind of death of self, an immolation, as if he had briefly penetrated to the cool still fire at the heart of things.

And he felt something like this now as he made love to Mo, his lips brushing her hair and eyes and cheeks before twining with her mouth finally in a kiss that lasted until he could feel her begin to come and then he burrowed his face in her neck as he rushed to follow, crushing her body to his, killing it, killing his own. And immediately she was weeping in his arms, her face a lovely saltlick to his mouth. It was then he heard himself uttering the heavy, forbidden words:

“I love you, Mo. I love you. I love you.”

In response she held his body tightly, locking him in the bracelet of her legs, and began to return his kisses, ardently, her mouth suddenly the sweetest spring in all the desert of his life. So it was only natural that within a short time they were making love again, but more slowly now, more deliciously, like a pair of moths playing at the very edge of fire. And possibly they played too near, for when they reached climax this second time it was as if they had consummated a kind of death instead. Suddenly the whole thing was gone, murdered. In her touch alone Bone could feel the thing’s death, feel it draining out of her as surely as the blood from his penis. Wordlessly he got off her and lay back on the pillow beside her, but apparently even that was not separation enough, for she abruptly rolled away from him and reached out to the baby, who was still sitting on the floor, engrossed in trying to get the alphabet blocks out of the coffeepot. But he gave it up for his mother’s finger, squeezing it, lifting it to his mouth.

And for a while that was how things remained—Mo lying at the edge of the bed, broodingly playing with the baby, while Bone lay alone, waiting. Finally she spoke:

“So you love me, do you?”

He was slow to answer. “If not you, then no one.”

“Maybe no one, then?”

“No—you, Mo.”

“How much?”

Bone could almost feel the ground opening under him, the abyss forming again. “I’m no good at math,” he said.

“You love me enough to be my man? Enough to go to some lousy job every day and make the bread so I can take care of this one, feed him, clothe him?” The baby was standing at the side of the bed now, playing with his mother’s hair. She waited a few moments before making the hole wider. “And in the middle of the night, Rich, when I wake up and can almost hear my terror scratching along the walls—will you be here then? Will you be here to hold me, Rich? Will you love me then?”

He thought of asking her whatever had happened to that hard-nosed women’s-libber who expected nothing of men, who would not even accord them the role of fatherhood let alone economic dominance. Apparently that Mo had only been a front, a pose. But he did not bother to ask. Silence was so much safer. And of course it answered all her questions anyway, better than any words could have. Sitting up, she gave him a slight enigmatic smile, a look carrying something beyond its usual burden of irony, something new and subtly alien, as if the light gray-green of her eyes had turned a muddy brown.

“Well, I guess you can relax now, Rich. No more holdouts. The Richard Bone fan club is complete.” She started to get out of bed.

“Mo—” Bone took hold of her arm, staying her for the moment.

She was smiling brightly now, falsely. “Yes? Was there something more?”

He waited, but her smile did not change. He let go of her.

“Good. I must be about my son’s business.” After slipping into her kimono she picked up the baby and took him into the kitchen.

Bone got up and dressed slowly, feeling almost ill with disappointment, the way it all had ended. But it was not his fault, he told himself. Nor hers either. It was just life, that was all it was, always just life, the inability of people to do what they wanted, have what they wanted. Always something else would enter the picture, some need or condition or commitment, some complicating factor that democratically robbed the rich and poor alike, robbed them of fulfillment. Mo understood his position, there could be no question of that. In fact, more than anyone else she and Cutter were always giving him the needle about it, what he was and how he lived, old Golden Boy, the Duke of Unemployment, the Prince of Welfare. So even as she was saying all that a few minutes ago, putting him on the spot that way, she already knew what his answer would be, what it had to be. This winner among winners who could barely feed and clothe himself—how in God’s name was he suddenly to become the All-American Provider again? There was no way. And Mo knew it, had known it all along. So it was not his fault, not his worry. There was no need for him to sweat the thing. She would be all right. It had been the wine talking, that was all. The wine and the sex. She had probably already forgotten the whole thing. Why shouldn’t he do the same?

In the next hour Mo dragged back and forth between the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom, taking care of the baby, changing and feeding him and getting him ready for bed. Every so often she would take a drink of the wine, which was over half gone now. And once Bone saw her in the bathroom shaking a few pills into her hand and popping them into her mouth like peanuts. He tried to stay out of her way. He sat in the living room perusing the ravaged
Village Voice
and he drank a little more of the wine and finished off the last of the bread and cheese.

After she had put the baby to bed, Bone suggested they put on something warm and go out on the deck and watch California doing her thing, the lights of her cars moving along the coast. Shrugging, Mo brought along the bottle of wine but rejected the idea of putting on a coat—keeping her warm would be his responsibility, she said. And after he had sat down in the one sturdy deck chair, she settled snugly onto his lap, pulling his coat—Cutter’s actually—around her and tucking her head in under his chin. The night was beautifully clear, with a late Santa Ana coming down out of the canyons and pushing the normally heavy night air out to the islands, so Bone was able to see up the coast to Goleta and beyond, a kind of miniature electric Milky Way through which the traffic on 101 moved steadily, like a river of meteors. Mo did not bother to look. The air was cold and she lay against Bone shivering, her eyes closed. He kissed her on the forehead and in her hair a few times but she did not react at all, and when he tried to tell her about the events of last night, Cutter doing Sunset Strip, she said she was not interested. In fact about all she did seem interested in was the wine she had brought out with her and which she sipped at every now and then.