Inside a Silver Box (17 page)

Lorraine enjoyed swabbing her tongue around and under his tongue and between his teeth and lips. She reveled in the little sighs and grunts of surprise and pleasure that came from him. When she put her hand down the front of his jeans, he froze.

“Calm down,” she said. “Nobody can see.”

She pushed his shoulder back with her left hand while with her right she moved up and down at an impossible rate while making sure not to hold the erection too tightly. She watched his face contort.

He tried to grope under her dress but she said, “No. I’m doing you,” and he stopped.

When he started to make a gasping cry, she whispered, “The bus is coming. Do you want me to stop?”

“No, no, no, no,” he said, each syllable punctuating a pulse of his orgasm.

Lorraine smiled and held tight to Alton’s erection. His eyes opened wide, trying to see as much of this strange young woman as he could.

“Okay,” she said. “You got to brace yourself, ’cause I’m gonna do it again.”

*   *   *

A
WHILE LATER
they were sitting at the bus stop. The older black woman had taken the bus. Alton was holding the book and trying to think of something to say to the olive-skinned blond-haired girl with the multicolored eyes.

“If you want more than that,” she said after a while, “you can come with me to another bench down from my parents’ condo on the Upper East Side. If you wait while I’m up there arguing with them, I’ll take you home afterwards and fuck your brains out.”

Lorraine heard these words coming from her lips, knew that it was her on that bench next to the egghead commuter, but she didn’t feel like herself. Her death and revivification had left her with what felt like an open heart—vulnerable to every passion and willing—no, compelled—to act on whatever it was she felt.

Before her encounter with Ronnie Bottoms and the Silver Box, Lorraine had made the time to read a book almost every day. If she did not have the time to read, she got nervous and sad. But after her death, she had no interest in the written word or thoughts that not did not lead to sensual expression.

*   *   *

“M
ISS LORRAINE!” NOVA
Triphammer-Louise exclaimed at the front door of the Fell condo.

“Miss Nova,” Lorraine replied as was their ritual.

“Girl, you look too skinny and what happened with your eyes?”

“I’ve actually gained weight,” Loraine said as she walked into the vestibule and then down the long hallway toward the sitting room. “And I was sick. A doctor told me that this sometimes happens when people get certain infections.”

“But you’re okay now,” the lifetime housekeeper said.

“Never been better or clearer or happier.”

They had reached the large sitting room, which was replete with a white and blue marble bar, a picture window looking onto a terrace that hovered above the East River, original oils that were insured for ten million dollars, and a teak worktable that Lorraine, her parents, and her brother, Damian, worked at when she was young.

Mr. Patrick Fell was tall and dashing except for his pale complexion. He played tennis, golf, and rode horses in jumping competitions from Connecticut to Virginia. His blond hair was seeded now with gray but he looked forty rather than fifty. His usual smile was missing, but other than that he was as he had always been.

Mrs. Alora Teeman-Fell was also tall and slender. She played tennis doubles with her husband and ran three miles a day. She was a vegetarian except when her mother came from Columbus to visit, and aloof, though Lorraine was always sure of her love.

“We expected you sooner than this,” Mr. Fell said to his daughter.

“I’ve been busy.”

“Let’s sit down,” Mr. Fell said.

Obediently Alora went to a chair at the near end of the long table, lowering onto it with exceptional poise.

Lorraine had always felt awkward in the presence of her mother.

“I’d rather stand,” Lorraine said. She was feeling the tension of this meeting in her legs.

“I said, sit down.”

“No.”

“This is my house, Lore.”

“And this is my ass, Dad. I will remain standing.”

“Lorraine!” Alora Teeman-Fell complained.

“No, Mom. No. I came here because I knew you’d be upset. I want to talk to you about it, but I will not be bullied.”

“I’m not bullying you,” her father said, holding up a finger that was both instructional and threatening.

“Then don’t tell me when to sit like I’m some kind of fucking dog.”

Lorraine was continually surprised by her own quick temper. She’d almost killed Lance. She
had
killed Ma Lin. All her manners and good upbringing seemed to have drained away with death. She had jettisoned the restrictive limitations like a too-tight corset or four-inch high heels and was now ready to run. This thought brought a smile to her face while her mother fretted and Mr. Fell scowled.

“I will not have that kind of language in my house, young lady,” he said.

“You called Uncle Bernie a fucking horse’s ass in this very room,” she replied. “It was Thanksgiving dinner, and Mom laughed.”

“He’s not really your uncle,” Alora objected.

Lorraine smiled and then grinned.

“Lance Figueroa called to tell us that you’re living with that black thug,” her father said, “in the condo that I put the down payment on.”

“You want me to move?”

“I want him out of there. I want you to come to your senses.”

“Ronnie saved my life,” she said. “He’s homeless and he’s trying to do what’s right. He sleeps on the couch and even if he were in my bed, you have no right to tell me what to do in my own home.”

“I can stop paying the mortgage.”

“That’s your choice,” Lorraine agreed. “Is that all you want from me?”

“Lore,” her father pleaded. “I’m your father.”

“You are,” she said, “but what you don’t understand is that I am no longer your little girl.” This was it. This was why she had come, why she ran for miles and then dominated bookish Alton Brown.

“The child you knew is gone from this body,” she continued. “She’s dropping out of Columbia. She’s not sitting when you tell her to. If you stop paying the mortgage, she doesn’t care one whit. It would be best for you and Mom to think that I had died when I went missing and that the girl you knew is gone from the world.”

“But, honey,” Alora said. “We love you.”

The words sounded uncomfortable in the socialite’s mouth, but Lorraine believed them anyway.

“I know, Mom,” she said. “I know, but the Lorraine you love is a memory now. She doesn’t fit into the world we lived in. You still have Papa and Damian. You still have all those times that we spent. If you want to get to know me and understand how much I’ve changed, I’ll make sure that you always have my address and number.”

Alora burst into loud crying, the tears literally jumping from her eyes.

Lorraine had never seen her mother cry before; neither had her husband or Nova, who came running from some hidden nook to comfort her employer. Patrick Fell also hurried to his wife’s side.

From what seemed like a great distance, Lorraine watched the family unit so torn by her death. Alora wailed while the black servant and the white aristocrat tried to restrain her flailing arms.

The dead daughter quietly exited the room and the home she had known so well. Downstairs, in the concrete turnabout that looked over the East River, she found Alton Brown with
One Hundred Years of Solitude
unopened on his lap.

“You waited,” she said.

“I never met anybody like you before.”

“I know. You want to go fuck now?”

He stood up quickly and Lorraine grinned.

TWENTY-EIGHT

“Y
OU DON’T TALK
very much, huh?” Alton Brown asked Lorraine Fell on the long walk from her parents’ Upper East Side condo down to her place on Fifth.

“I used to,” she said, consciously slowing her pace. Lorraine’s legs wanted to run but she needed company after bringing so much pain into her parents’ lives. “Though I never said anything.”

“You must have told people about how you felt and what you liked and didn’t,” Alton argued. “That’s something.”

“You ever had some smart kid in one of your a graduate seminars who would go home and in one night read the entire
Grundrisse
or
Moby-Dick
? And then at the next class meeting they would be able to recall long quotes along with the page numbers for all the salient moments that had to do with that day’s lecture?”

“What’s the
Grundrisse
?”

“
Capital
was the first part of six separate sections Marx conceived on political economy,” Lorraine said, feeling like the smart-assed student she’d been before she died. “Though unfinished, the
Grundrisse
was all the other five.”

“Yeah,” Alton said. “Ben Smithy.”

“Who’s that?”

“The guy you’re talking about,” Alton said. “The guy who seemed to know everything about what you were studying in class. He would also know how all the ideas came together and proved, or didn’t, whatever anybody said about it. We all hated him because he acted like he was so far ahead of us.”

“I was Ben Smithy,” Lorraine said. “I read books fast as a goddamn laser copy machine. I knew three different versions of Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
by heart, and I learned German so I could study everything from Kant to the Frankfurt School in the original texts. I ran a marathon, had the most beautiful boyfriend you could imagine, my parents are rich, and I believed that all that stuff made me a superior kind of person. But even then I never compared myself to anyone else, because I knew that hubris would make me seem like I wasn’t absolutely perfect.”

“Wow,” Alton said.

Lorraine stopped walking and Alton did too.

She balled her fists and wondered why the rage had grown so suddenly in her heart.

“But you know what?” she asked.

“What?”

“I couldn’t write one poem. I didn’t have a single original thought in my head. I was a high-functioning fool who never, not even one time, took a chance on anything I might fail at.”

“Like what?”

“Like asking some boy on a bus stop bench if he wanted to kiss me. Like taking a metal shop class in high school.”

“Why not?”

Lorraine turned and started walking again. Alton had to scurry after her because she had picked up the pace.

“Because I thought that if I stayed perfect in everything that I’d never die or get old.”

“That’s kinda crazy, isn’t it?”

Lorraine stopped again, grabbed Alton’s shirt with both hands, and, using her body as a counterweight, swung him around until he was teetering on the edge of the curb. Cars were careening by just a foot or two away, but the young man didn’t try to get away from the hold. He just stared at the rage in Lorraine’s face.

Lorraine saw in his gaze a thirst for something, maybe knowledge; for the kind of awareness that was physical and real.

She pulled him back on the sidewalk and said, “I live with this guy.”

“At the place we’re going?”

“Yeah.”

“Won’t he mind if you, you bring me there?”

“No.”

“Is he your lover?”

“The way I felt when I did everything perfectly,” Lorraine said instead of answering the question, “was that if I died by mistake, I could actually come up out of the grave and make God give me my life back.”

Fear and wonderment took over the geography of Alton’s face. Lorraine felt like laughing at him but she didn’t.

“Ronnie’s not my lover,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t even like him.”

“So … so why do you live together?”

“Sometimes,” she said, “most of the time there’s no reason for a thing to be. People like me and Ben Smithy like to pretend that there’s a reason behind everything but we can’t write one word from our hearts. All we do, all I ever did was walk down the path laid out in front of me and then brag about how I knew how to put one foot after the other.”

She started walking again; this time slowly, looking inward.

“You’re really deep,” Alton said after they had gone a block or so in silence.

Three minutes later Lorraine said, “I used to be. But now I know that all the books I read were just exercises when I needed something deeper, real … absolute.”

“Like what?”

“Death.”

“How do you mean that?”

“I mean that Death came up and grabbed me by my throat. He choked me until I was either unconscious or dead. And there I was—in a limbo that I had no idea existed—and I knew all of a sudden that I had wasted all the minutes of my life leading up to the last moment.

“Can you understand how that feels?”

Alton, still looking for something, had no words but simply shook his head no.

“I want you to fuck me, Alton.”

“Right here?”

The question and the fear that framed it made Lorraine laugh.

“No,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m not crazy. It’s just that I live by a different set of rules now.”

“I’d like to know what they are,” he said.

“Me too.”

TWENTY-NINE

E
ARLIER THAT DAY,
at 2:27 in the afternoon, Ronnie Bottoms arrived at the third-floor office of Florence Steinmetz—his court-appointed parole officer.

The third floor was only Department of Corrections business. The front desk was tenanted by a burly, florid-faced man dressed in a green corrections department uniform that was a size too small.

“Ronnie Bottoms for Miss Steinmetz,” Ronnie said. “It’s a two thirty appointment.”

The doubtful officer looked down on his daily admittance sheet, tracing it with a cigarette-stained thumb. “I don’t see you.”

“Could you call her office?” Ronnie asked. “She is my PO and I need to know when to come back.”

The big man—his nameplate read
TRUMAN
—sighed heavily and then picked up his phone. He hit three digits and grunted.

“Yeah,” he said, “Truman here. I got a—What was your name again?”