Mysteries of Motion Page 10

  This could get him into scrapes. As Ventura had warned.

  The girl was waiting for him, ruefully. They never liked to have a man’s meditation slip from them. But this girl was far more impenetrable than her skin; he had no clue to her.

  “Pterodactyl—” he said slowly. “Are you a college girl?”

  For a second, his mock horror fooled her. Then the two of them rocked with laughter.

  They idled into the bedroom, hands joined. The bed was brass, its coverlet of some harmless, babyish cotton such as his daughters had had. He tossed the gun on it.

  Her body was willowy and shaded, like the ink strokes made by an old-fashioned nib pen. In the end he put his mouth into her bush, then his hardening self, and almost his heart. Almost all the way, he felt her follow him. They dozed then, the semen stealing down their legs.

  He woke guardedly, afraid she wasn’t a whore. She was already awake. “How old are you, Veronica?”

  “Twenty-seven.” She grinned. “Going on thirty.”

  She didn’t look it. But from the texture of her sexual responses he’d thought she might be somewhere along in there. “And what’s your nationality?”

  The chain of a locket she wore lay tangled in his beard. The locket slipped to his chest. Above him, her eyes veiled. “Next question: And how did I get into this? Right?”

  Under the beard, his face fell. If she wasn’t a whore, how did she know?

  “My own mother was from Senegal, emigrated to French Canada. My father was Jamaican, brought up in Barbados. He met her when he was on a mission to Montreal. He settled there. She died when I was four. That answer you?”

  “Some.” The accents. But what kind of mission?

  “Ollie’s mother, Vivie, was Bajan. His father was English. She never said who.” Whenever she mentioned the woman she gestured to the room, the chair, as to a presence. “Daddy brought them up from there. Barbados, To Canada. She was our cook. I was fond of her. Later on, he married her. Then he died, too. While I was still in grammar school.” She raised up on elbow. “There. That what you want to know?”

  She knew it wasn’t. And, like him, that there wouldn’t be time for it. He touched the snailed hair. “Who does that for you, your—?” He’d almost said “mother,” not thinking of the woman over there, the stepmother, but of the household women of his hometown boyhood, at their windows leaning over the Sunday school child. Probably his ideas on black life were as virtuously out-of-date.

  “A salon. Called—Le Zebre.”

  Took him a minute. Le Zebre. A second-floor sign on Fifty-seventh. Catered to black women. Le Zeeber it was called, hereabouts. “Like a map,” he said, touching her head. “Of waterways.” Or jungle trails seen from a small plane.

  “Takes half my take,” she murmured, stretching. Even on elbow, they were the same height.

  He kept his voice down, also. “How much is it? Your take.”

  “Six-seventy.”

  He wasn’t staggered—quite. For her class of girl, then. And pimp. And gun. Which was now on the night table, her side. He’d put it there. If she was a pross, everything in the last couple of hours was out of line.

  “An odd sum. Veronica.”

  Those eyes showed nothing. The mouth did. “After taxes. Per week.”

  In the middle of their scuffle he saw his watch. More than two hours. “Will Ollie come here?”

  “Never. Not since—Vivie.” She punched a pillow. “Oh, he lives up there. When he’s home. Has his girls go there. Not for tricks. Vivie wouldn’t have it. Just to hang around, powder their noses.” The bed-sheets were pulled every which way; she straightened them. “Or you know. When it’s for him.” She raised her head, flushing. He was beginning to know the ways of that skin.

  But—how much she knew of that life. When it was for him, she’d said. Even if she’d turned red for it.

  “Bet no one ever called you Ronnie.”

  She sucked in her lips. “Not quite.”

  “What, then?”

  No answer. Eye to eye.

  “What is your job?”

  “I’m—on a magazine.”

  “Oh? What kind?”

  She hesitated.

  “Fashion?”

  “You could say that.”

  His daughters had taken such magazines. Some subscriptions had continued long after the two were out of the house.

  “Vogue? Harper’s Bazaar?”

  “You’re—very in the know.”

  She wasn’t going to say. A model, then?—how many ways had Ventura been right? He’d have to breakfast with him after all. And talk turkey to him. Doubling his own promises to the man if necessary. To keep him away from his friends. In thanks. “I must have seen you in one of them,” he said. “I think I did.”

  “They always think they did,” she said.

  When they were twined together again, he said, “Four times, you passed those steps on my account,” and kissed a breast. “Once a month. For four months.” She didn’t answer. But when they were apart again, except for the long fingers plunging his hair, stroking him nose to beard and finally patting his crotch, she said, “You’re safe here. Problem might be—to get you out.”

  He roused himself. “I’ll take care of that.” Again he touched the scalp between the minute braids, captured the long fingers—knobbled like a newborn calf’s leg, he told himself, double-jointed the wrong way.

  He knew very well what he was doing. Separating her into parts, so that she would have less personality for him.

  “I thought you would,” she said.

  They regarded each other, stony-faced.

  “Got a cigarillo?” he said. “One of—Ollie’s?”

  It was a cheap thing to do. He didn’t smoke. She took so long to answer, serve him right if he’d axed things by it.

  “I don’t keep that stuff in the house. Any of it.”

  Both were breathing competitively fast; the second time around had exhausted them. Less mystery to it already, he told himself, and there’d be less and less, yet he was wrenched. He allowed himself to touch the old locket she wore, too battered for her, rumpled gold, with a pearl washed to a bead. His hand was slapped back. Well, they all had their—nape.

  He left the bed, not looking back.

  When he stood at her window again, showered and dressed because she’d made him go first, he craned to see whether she could see the Gulf & Western from here. Though at night its huge lighted shaft dominated Columbus Circle, where Columbus himself seemed turned to stone on his pedestal by the sight of his new world, here, only a quarter mile away, it was blocked by the hodgepodge side streets in which the real city hunched. During his first years as a “worldwide industrialist,” when mountains first shrank at his bidding and his handshake could lift important citizens toward him as if by their lapels, only his ceaseless circling of the world had kept him democratically sane. All the while his money power seemed to be educating his eye to be an emperor’s, the airports, revolving before him like one-and-the-same lecture hall, reminded him that anybody with a flight bag was now equally an imperialist of space. In the struggle between money and people, he could even see that the side streets were always slowly winning, although the actual people struggling in them might never for long be the same ones. Maybe this was why these little city apartments still got to him, sunless little caves of self-important shadow, shunted to violet, hoarding their contents against the running footsteps of outer life. He’d better leave, for the sultans and their sticky palaces. His next stop was Bahrein.

  “What you looking at?” She was behind him.

  “For my office building.” He didn’t turn. “Think I’ll sleep there tonight.”

  “Which one?”

  “The G & W.”

  “The—? Oh.” Her nostrils indented. Small, well cut, they moved with each of her expressions. Not all of which he had learned yet. “Can’t see that one from here.”

  He saw that she’d changed to a housecoat; this too was
often routine. Hers was neatly tailored and initialed. Her legs were too long for it. “But it’s there.”

  She shrugged. “Heard it for sure, the other night.”

  “When they bombed it? Cuban nationalists. They only got some windows. Pieces of the steps.”

  “Cool.”

  “Who? Them?” He wouldn’t put it past her.

  “You,” she said. “But they weren’t Cubans. They don’t spread the red that style.”

  “How would you know?”

  She turned aside her head.

  Against his will he came closer. “Do Ollie and his friends? Spread the red?”

  “Them? Nuh. They’d sell nitro to a nipple-baby. But not for love.”

  “Love? You call that—that mass mayhem—love? What they do anywhere? Terrorists?”

  “Know any?” She had a scent now, sharp as her voice.

  In Venezuela, his first job. Maybe. In Iran once, never turning his head. “I’m not sure. I—prefer not to.”

  Her nostrils dilated again. “Practical man.”

  “Have you? Ever known any? Or maybe…victims?”

  This was a new face on her. She knew that, quickly receding backward with it, skimming quick as an animal into the brown alcoves that a floor-through handily provided. That was why certain people lived in such warrens, often without knowing so. And often at great price. He heard the bathroom door go plock.

  Know any now?—he should have asked. Would all that explain everything? Her brains and her looks, for instance—the way those people now did things. And why she hung on here would be understandable too, in a house that would have so many—outlets. Also her collection of near-nationalities; weren’t nihilists, anarchists, terrorists, as often trying to get into the world of nations as not?

  Above all it would explain what infused this room, a sense of some passion hoarded, which he’d first taken to be wholly sexual but was extra to it, free-floating in the room and around her person almost palpably, like the sense of purpose that clung to a lab technician’s shoulder blades. Work—the way it molded, anywhere. Work was what he himself went around the world on, seeing the fanatic patterns it made in other people, as clear in the Ottoman Bow Grindlays Bank in Muscat, as it had been in the shack on the North Concho where his father had taken him, aged eighteen, for his first pair of handmade boots. Such work as he was imagining for her would explain the money and her easy way with it. The magazine would explain nearly everything—except him.

  Unless, lured here because of what he was, he was the explanation. He’d long since stopped worrying how his life looked to other people. Bad enough to know so many of the secrets behind the headlines that the most honest of newspapers went limp in your hand. Or to be able to recognize, in the chilly intimacy of those haunts where the future was architected, people who knew much more. He hadn’t been born poor enough to crave being as rich as he had turned out. He had been born free enough to see that power, once it continued past the possession of the mere decencies of life, always became incidental to something else its possessor’s temperament wanted—in his case, to see the Earth exhaustively, below its crust and above. Wittingly, his life had become a construction toward that end.

  “Your husband keeps forgetting who he is,” a vice-president, flown out to the ranch to persuade Mulenberg to attend a promotionally useful royal wedding, had exploded to Mulenberg’s wife. Often true, but not that once. The royal highness in question wasn’t his friend; to have the power not to go was a luxury he did like. He’d just returned from a site, not Oak Ridge but related to it, where he’d seen projections, still controversial, which might change man’s relationship to Earth entirely—and had been standing outside the bedroom door, his arms full of impatiens plants for his wife’s window box, wondering how that humble, tough plant would take to non-gravity (the decencies of life were becoming so curiously mutant). He heard the visitor repeat himself, a characteristic of vice-presidents which came from there being so many of them. “Who he is, Tess. Why won’t he remember it?”

  From her bed, his wife said—bless her—“Because he never intended it.”

  Outside, the street was quieter now. This was the lull while people were at the movies, gone from the restaurants, not yet into the night clubs. He could go.

  She came out of the bathroom turning on lights, turning off shadows, confident. Who was she?

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Cramps.”

  “Mental or physical?”

  “Works both ways.” She reached to pull the window drape across, then thought better of it, staring out. The initials on her housecoat were the right ones. “I was in Cuba once. Ten years ago.”

  “At seventeen? Doing what?”

  “Cutting cane.”

  “Cutting—what the hell were you doing that for?”

  “A girl like me?”

  Nobody laughing, this time.

  “Oh, not for Castro,” she said. “Didn’t know I liked beards yet…And sure ’nough not for the hammer and sickle—never heard of them till we got there. Then they gave us each a cane knife, shorter but just as sharp, and explained the connection.”

  For a minute he had an extreme sense of what she was. Versatile. “What’d you go for then?”

  She hadn’t touched him since he’d left the bed; now she seemed about to. His flesh tensed, not knowing what it would do.

  “For love.”

  He was silent.

  “To get out of it.” She was watching him almost tenderly, not like a colleague of the night. More like one of the club’s exercise pros, monitoring his charges, whose history he knew without having to be told, from the rich fat on them. Watching them jog off the pounds of the night before.

  “Hungry?” she said. Like them, without moving an inch.

  He was starving. Girls sometimes offered. If the place was theirs. “No thanks. I couldn’t eat a thing.”

  “I bet.” She folded her arms. “Well then—I’m waiting.”

  So was he. For a sign of how he was to do this. “For what, Veronica?”

  “To see how you make it. Out.”

  He picked up his jacket then, feeling for the wallet from which he’d removed credit cards, leaving only his Blue Cross card and the couple of hundreds, in tens and twenties, from which he would have settled beforehand, normally. There were girls who flapped a bold palm sideways for it, elbow on hip; there were a few who took it with a tea drinker’s pinkie; most took the money matter-of-factly, slipping it quicker than the eye into some marsupial pouch. Then there were those who looked him over and upped the price; others took something off first, maybe a bra. He didn’t choose all variants, but he knew them. His coat had an extra silk slot, pointed out to him by an unamused Edinburgh tailor, to keep extra bills in, in case he was rolled; he’d never been. The identification card said John Mulenberg, One Gulf & Western Plaza; if he were blown up or otherwise illegally damaged, would Blue Cross pay?

  Hustling into the jacket, he side-glanced her bookshelves, tabbed in sections extending to the ceiling: Literature, Philosophy, Physics, no other science, nothing on his own long-gone subject, geology. A lot of poetry. No fashion magazines that he could see, a lot of small ones, mostly pamphlet size. No Marx. “You still go to school?”

  “Uh-uh. Just leftovers.” She was amused.

  A few shelves down, he saw why. Way up high, two diplomas, hers, high school and college.

  “Any books in that office of yours?” she said. “Or only ledgers?”

  “A few of each.” He was prowling now for the focus to all this. Sometimes you found such a thing right on the person’s own body, openly displayed in reactions they thought hidden. Or you had to dig for it, the way a man from the De Beers diamond trust had told him their miners were probed from anus to crown. You would get nothing as easily as that from this girl.

  Sexually, he now felt happy and lumbering. The girl standing at the window, her housecoat fallen back to show lacy bra and pants of a tan that made her ski
n slate-blue, lounged there with a slackness she couldn’t conceal. As his father used to say, working beside him in the family greenhouse, he had brought her off. Have to bring a woman off, Johnny; they feel things, too. By rights, all animals. Shouldn’t wonder if the plants.

  But this woman wasn’t putting her history on the sexual line exclusively. Or not anymore. Must he give her money now—or not? Under those eyes roving after him he had an idea he’d be clouted for it either way. Depending on why he was here. Or as who.

  Ventura. He’d altogether forgotten him. To be taken for that over-sueded man who nervously mowed his lawn by Garden City protocol and at poolside proudly slapped his hairy, veinous self—that was to laugh. Yet Ventura ought to be thanked. In the morning Mulenberg would advance the tanker money and up it a trifle, saying “For the boy,” or some other sentiment. Ventura, by now inured to owing, would put up no argument. What a weakness, though—not to know when other people had payed out enough rope.

  This girl would always know. Meeting her glance, he got that. Within the hull of whatever her obligations, mental or real—people always had both—she would manage herself. Somewhere beyond, though, she had her own romance she was keeping up.

  A shiver went over him, but he kept on pacing, around the books again, past the old woman’s chair. He could still feel his luck, luxuriant even, as always just afterward. But like any physically based confidence, always on the borderline of change. Sometimes he felt the one overbalance the other; he knew damn well which he felt now. There were places one had to leave with more style than one had entered with; she’d as much as said. Not much admiring him for being practical. He set hands on Vivie’s rocker. Funny how he could see the stepmother, the son, clear as clear. “Can’t decide about you, Veronica. For an amateur, you’re pretty professional. For a professional, you’d be pretty ama—Hey! Watch it.”