The Hinky Bearskin Rug (31 page)

Wilma frowned.
Why should you lose her?

“Once she
knows about you, it’s over for me. It’s over anyway,” he admitted bleakly.

You are so negative! How do you expect
to keep a hard-on like that?
Wilma said in a scolding, motherly tone.

“Look, amazing
as it seems, I do not need sexual help from you.”

She sniffed.
That’s not the song you were singing before.

“Never mind.
I’ve got you twenty-four-seven now, exactly the way Jewel’s got Randy.”

Wilma put her
hands on her tiny armored hips.
I don’t
understand this. Bill Tannyhill and I had sixty glorious years, and he loved
being my avatar. He had lots of girlfriends and none of them minded me.

“Bill
Tannyhill was divorced, and apparently a sexual omnivore. I don’t want a
girlfriend. I want a wife.” The sound of his own voice saying it gave Clay a
shiver. He’d made it to thirty without getting stuck. And, now that he was
stuck good and tight, the girl was out of reach.

Jewel would be
back from the store any minute now.

A totally
unfamiliar urge gripped him, an urge to be honest and decent and do the right
thing, whatever it cost.

He hauled out
his cell phone. “Did you get back to my suite yet?” he said when Jewel picked
up.

“No. Why?
Where did you go? Where the hell are you?” she demanded from the phone. He
could hear her voice faintly through the bathroom door, too.

“I got tied
up. Listen,” he said around a lump in his throat the size of a golf ball. “Do
me a favor.”

“When you get
your ass back here. I’ve been on the phone with Ed. He’s scheduled a debriefing
with the Chief Attorney late this afternoon.”

“I’ll be
there,” Clay said.
I hope.
He stood
up to improve reception. “When you get back to the suite, go in the bedroom
closet and find the chinos I was wearing yesterday. They’re hanging up.”

“I need you
here at The Drake now and I need you at that meeting later.”

“Humor me.
There should be a letter in the pocket. It’s addressed to you.”

“To me? Clay,
what the—”

“Just look for
it, will you? I don’t have a lot of nerve left, and I’m using it all up on this
phone call.”

“Are you
running out on me?” she said with discovery and anger and disappointment and
I-knew-it in her voice.

Clay,
Wilma said,
I think
I hear someone calling me.

His courage
failed. “Read the letter and get back to me.” He thumbed the phone off, feeling
like he had triggered a bomb. “Well, that tears it,” he said over the ringing
in his ears. “Just when I’d got rid of Randy, too.”

Clay, this is important! If someone
calls me, I have to answer!

He felt dizzy
and unsettled and far away from his feet. He sat down on the toilet lid,
pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. A feeling of outrageous well-being
made his head swim.

“It’s over.”

This didn’t
feel so bad. Maybe doing the decent thing carried unadvertised benefits.

As he thought
that, he felt a sexual rush so strong that it rippled over him like a dip in an
acid bath, from the soles of the feet up.

He looked at
his unwelcome visitor, still perched on the edge of the tub in her Porn
Valkyrie costume. “Is that you doing that?”

Wilma’s tiny
eyes grew round.
I have to go now.

Out in the
suite, he heard his bedroom door open and close.

The bathroom
spun around him. The rush reached his scalp and popped, with a musical note
that he heard in his head, not in his ears, like a soap bubble with a song
inside it.

Without
warning, he passed out.

o0o

The buzzer
came again and Lena nearly jumped out of her skin. Taking a deep breath, she
answered.

Sharisse
whispered, “Steven’s here. He’s screaming at your mom in her office.”

Lena set her
teeth. “I wish she would scream back.”

“Geri from PR
looked through the window and said your mom looked like she was ready to blow.
I’ve never seen her do that.”

“And you
won’t,” Lena said. “Thanks for telling me.” She hung up, feeling her anger
fizz.

I don’t have to go out there.
She could leave and call Jewel and
Jewel would come and bust Steven. Onika’s plan was stupid. What was the point
in getting him to crack up? He’d been wacko for weeks. Onika was just being
vindictive.

But she found
herself holding her breath, listening for shouting. Why would her mother put up
with that?

The answer
popped through her mental guard.

She’s holding him in her office so I
have time to get away.

And he was
screaming in her face.

Lena slapped
Steven’s desk.

For that, he
would pay.

She leaped up,
slammed open the door, and nearly marched smack into Steven, who indeed looked
dark with fury.

He bounced off
her as if he’d hit a wall. All the color drained out of his face.

“Hello,
Steven,” she cooed.

Mademoiselle Heiss, Corncob Building I,
on the Chicago River,
Jewel
read in Randy’s beautifully loopy handwriting. She put the envelope down. The
letter was handwritten on sheets torn from a yellow legal pad, closely covered
with the same loopy writing. A phrase caught her eye,
in your strong buttocks
and she stood up straight as a shiver
passed down her spine.

She realized
she still had her phone open in her other hand. She shut it.

She sat down
to read.

My dearest Jewel,
the letter began.

What did he
mean, his
dearest
Jewel? Her heart
was pounding so loudly she couldn’t hear the yellow sheets rustle in her
fingers.

She squinted,
heart thundering.
He’s never spoken this
many words to me, ever.
And,
I wonder
what he wants to tell me,
although that was a lie, she already knew, or she
knew what she hoped, anyway.

o0o

My dearest
Jewel,

I am brushing
your hair. The brush travels down your back, brushing your skin as well as your
hair. Tense muscles ease in your back. You arch against me, then away from me,
so that the brush can touch more bare skin. The brush moves lower, smoothing
away the hot angry day in your strong buttocks, your right thigh, down the back
of your right knee, tickling your achilles tendon at the ankle. The brush
passes over the sole of your right foot, tickling, then soothing. Your toes
curl.

And again from
the scalp downward, this time on the left side. You lie face down on the bed,
smelling sunshine on the sheets, and feel the brush sweep slowly down your body
in long, soft, upward-flicking strokes. Stroke by stroke, the brush sweeps away
distress. You feel lighter.

The backs of
your knees relax. Your aching feet and ankles give up their pain, until your
skin tingles, as if it was once dark and now glows. You arch your feet. You are
ready to turn over.

The brush
returns to your beautiful bottom. Your life is packed into this part of you,
although you are only sometimes aware of it. Tremendous power lies dormant
here. You begin to feel it stirring as the brush passes over your bottom,
stimulating your skin, bringing up the fine down, making you tingle. Deep
inside, your inside is growing bigger than your outside.

You are ready
to turn over. I place one hand on the back of your neck and the other hand at
the base of your spine.
Lie still.

You lie still.

Deep in your
flesh, something like a belt of emeralds dangles from your hipbones down into
the curls below your navel, the girdle of Venus. Although you lie perfectly
still, this girdle moves inside you like a sleepy snake. Your right buttock
clenches, then your left. You relax them but the emerald snake still moves. You
feel my hands, hot on the base of your neck, hot on your tailbone, pressing
down. Ever so slowly, the snake turns over. You want to turn over.

The brush
begins its slow stroke again while my hands hold firm. From the crown of your
head down your neck, your shoulders, lightly along the backs of your arms, into
your palms, the brush raises a tingle on your smooth skin. One hand, then the
other. Thus you can focus, anticipate.

Your right
hand commands, so the brush dips into the hollow of your right palm, teasing
the fingertips, making your hand lie still and yet filling it with a fizzing
lightness.

Your left hand
receives. It is the vulnerable hand. The brush moves slower over your left
palm, drawing the need from your belly up into your sensitive fingers, sending
a message into deep places: Lie still.

You lie
heavier on the bed, while bits of you become light.

Deep inside,
the girdle of Venus writhes.

o0o

He really does know how it feels.
Jewel squirmed a little.
He doesn’t know how I’m reacting to this.

He can’t. Can he?

She turned to
the next page.

o0o

It’s no use, I
can’t make love to you without my own voice. Yet all I would do is give back to
you what you have given me: yourself, a single remarkable star in the night of
my long life. To your courage I can only bring endurance, not brave endurance,
but the endurance of a dog at the spit, chained forever, running within smell
of the roast. Your honesty I answer with reticence, bred into me from birth,
for the earl was not taught to tell his love nor had much love to tell, and the
incubus has held his tongue for two centuries. You must know that you are brave
and honest. These are your duties as an officer of the law.

But do you
know how your imagination has set me free? In my dark prison, I hungered for
flight, and you gave it me. For another woman I could be a priest, a long-dead
lover, a stableful of lusty grooms, but only you could make me a Pegasus, a
dragon, a swan, a lightning bolt.

In the dark,
below the edge of your awareness, I hold congress with your fancy. You endow me
with powers I could never invent for myself. If I have known you, it is because
you are honest enough to stand naked before me; if I have flown you to
paradise, it was you who gave me wings; if I am ever to do these things again,
as my heart hungers to do, it will be because you are honest enough to want me
and brave enough to come for me.

Any man would
want you for your beauty.

But who would
carry you shrieking into the stormy sky, cradle you in cloud, tickle you with
rain, soak you with sunbeams?

Come for me,
bright Jewel.

o0o

Breathless,
she turned the page. The folded paper rattled, and something shiny fell out and
tinkled to the floor. She picked it up. It was a key.

She looked at
the next page.

o0o

Again I must
struggle to match your honesty.

I have many
wants I do not speak of.

I want to be
free. I want to restore my name and style. Also to regain my property. Also to
pursue my enemy, for I haven’t forgotten the woman who damned me merely for
being bad in bed. These are ungenerous wants, but they have kept me sane, years
in which there was no light, no occupant in my bed. For all I want only your
pleasure when prone, perpendicular I am a selfish creature.

Thus the
importance of being prone with you so often. Sex may be a poor tool, but it is
all I have to woo you with.

I should tell
you more truths. But what?

That I have
felt lucky to be sharing your life. I shared many unhappy, bitter lives, many
of them near their ending by the time I found them. Whereas you are happy and
brave and young enough that I have time to give you everything I have and know.
Thank God you are young. I have your lifetime to repay you for your gifts:
drive your oily chariot under the sun, load the dishwasher with my own two hands,
scold and be scolded in the grateful daily bickering of lovers. For these
simple things I would give up your gift to me of flight.

To be human
again, I would give up... much.

I should
confess that I respect your lustiness. To perdition with all my criticisms;
they are only my jealousy, ill-cloaked. In truth I treasure how deeply desire
wells in you. Not only does your fire please me, but it is good for your
health, your life expectancy, and, I believe, your honesty and courage. Only
someone who has found her own life-source, burning white-hot like the heart of
a smoking mountain, can stand as you stand, strong but not hard, sweet but not
weak, in the face of this city, this world, this century.

If I have said
otherwise, I take shame.

I should say
that I would change the past for you if I could. I would make up for all the
nightmares I have witnessed in your sleep: grant you sunshine in place of
night, warm skin for snow, happiness, not dread.