“Hey, you! Hold up a minute!”
Her voice. By now he would recognize it anywhere. He looked around, and he saw her approaching him, walking along Raphael between the Victorian town houses and apartment buildings.
“Who…me?” was all he could think to say.
“I don’t see anybody else,” she answered. She had put on her sunglasses again. She came on toward him, her ponytail swinging.
Time seemed to freeze for him. It seemed to stop like a photograph, and if he lived to be a hundred years old he would never forget the sight of Debra Rocks coming toward him in the golden October sunlight. She got within fifteen feet.
“Want a buttered finger?” he thought he heard her ask.
He almost choked. “What?”
“You know.” She reached him, stood right in front of him. She put her hand down into the grocery bag. “A Butterfinger,” she said, and offered him the candy bar.
He didn’t know if he flushed crimson or went white, but he managed to say, “Thanks,” and he took the candy from her.
“They’re my favorite. Used to be I liked Almond Joys best, but they did somethin’ to the coconut. They don’t taste like they used to.”
There was a sense of unreality about this. John felt as if he were perspiring on the inside of his skin. His legs were still throbbing fiercely, and he didn’t know if he could pedal three blocks, much less make it back to the church. She watched as he peeled the Butterfinger’s wrapper back and took a nervous bite.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“John,” he said before he could think about it.
“Oh, another John,” she said, mostly to herself, and she smiled slightly. Fine lines, as precise as if etched by an artist’s pen, bracketed her lips. “What’s the rest of it?”
“Uh…” What, indeed? And as his mind raced he remembered, crazily, the packs of cigarettes strewn around him in the grocery store. “Lucky.”
Her smile slipped a notch or two. “You’re kiddin’,” she said.
“Why? Isn’t that a good name?”
“John Lucky,” she repeated. Thought about it, and shook her head. “This has been one strange day!”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Lucky,” she said. “I like that. It kinda grows on you, huh?”
John shrugged, had the sensation that behind her dark glasses her eyes were picking him to pieces, seeing right through the pores of his skin to his soul. At any moment he expected her to say, You’re a holy guy, aren’t you?
But instead, what Debra Rocks said was, “I live a block that way,” and she motioned in the direction of her building. She turned and started walking toward the corner. John just sat on his bike and stared. In another moment she stopped and looked around. “You comin’, Lucky?”
He knew there were moments of great decision in life. Sometimes you were prepared for them, and you could handle them easily. Most times, though, they were like this: there without warning, and, once offered and refused, would never be offered again. The question hung in the air like a ripe fruit. Shame speared him; he thought: I have seen your sexual organs, and somehow that seemed so indecent, as if he were a voyeur who’d peeped his eye through her keyhole. Well, he thought, I am a voyeur. A wretched, unworthy…
“You want to come on, you’re welcome,” she said, and she began walking away again.
In another few seconds she heard—as she knew she would—the squeak of the bike’s tires as he walked it along behind her.
9
DEBRA ROCKS UNLOCKED THE door to her third-floor apartment, and John stepped across the threshold.
Her apartment was not seedy, or nasty, or look as if she lived out of cardboard boxes. In fact, it was nice. The living room was small, but the furniture—sofa, chairs, and coffee table—were tasteful and clean. On the walls were not posters of porno movies but framed photographs of sunrises, sunsets, and the ocean. John could see a little slice of the bay from her window; the water was reddening as the afternoon aged. The room smelled vaguely of spices—incense, he thought it must be. Or scented candles, because there were a lot of candles around. But what really amazed John was the number of potted cacti she owned. Not only were they standing like gnarled green sentinels on the sill of the high bay window, but there were at least fifteen more of varying sizes in clay pots around the room.
She set the sack of groceries on the pale green kitchen counter. “I guess you see I like cactus, huh?”
He nodded.
“They’re tough,” she said. “They grow even when nobody takes care of ’em.” She started putting the groceries away. “You want a chain and padlock?”
“Pardon me?”
“A chain and padlock. For your bike.” They’d left it down in the vestibule. “You ought to lock it up or somebody’ll rip it off for sure.” She slid her sunglasses up onto her head, and John stared at her face. His heart had swollen again. Oh, that face! She glanced up at him, then rummaged in a drawer and offered him a slim chain, a padlock, and a key. “Better go down and lock it up right now.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “I’d better.” He took the chain, and felt an electric charge tingle up his arm as their fingers brushed. He walked to the door.
“You live around here, Lucky?” she asked, putting away the frozen dinners.
“Close by,” he answered.
That seemed to satisfy her. John went out, and eased down the stairs on his aching legs. He stood next to his bike, chain and padlock in hand. He could see that the shadows were growing on the street. The time was becoming late. There would be Mass in the morning, and he must pray and ready himself for its spiritual rigors. It was time—past time—to leave this place and go back to the church.
She was upstairs. Three flights up. Waiting for him. Yes, him alone. No one else in the theater now; just he and she, and a film yet to be created.
Stop it, he told himself. Stop it, you damned fool! If you dared to make love to that woman, you would be casting both yourself and her into eternal, wandering purgatory!
But it seemed to him suddenly that most of life itself was already purgatory—a wandering over cold, heartless landscapes. Surely both he and Debra Rocks were already occupants of that netherworld.
John fastened the chain and padlock together. He locked his bike to the stairs, and then he ascended to her again.
She had opened a can of tuna and was spooning chunks onto a flat brown tray. “Do you have a cat?” he asked her.
“No. I hate cats. They make me sneeze my head off. Come on, Unicorn!” she called into another room—the bedroom, he guessed it was. “Dinner’s on!” She set the tray with its tuna chunks onto the kitchen floor. “Well,” she said when nothing appeared to accept the food, “he’ll eat when he’s hungry. You want a ham frozen dinner or turkey? I’ll pop it in the microwave, just be a few minutes.”
“Debr—” He stopped, before the rest of it got out. He remembered the woman at the cash register calling her Debbie. “Debbie,” he said, “why did you ask me to come here with vou?”
Something about her face had sharpened. Her eyes were hot gray pools. “How do you know my name?”
“That woman at Giro’s. I…guess I heard her use it.”
She stared at him for a moment. Then her face softened again, but there remained in it the wariness of an animal who might have smelled a trap. “Oh. I’ll buy that, I guess.” Again she looked up at him. “You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”
“No!” he said, shocked. “Certainly not!”
“Good.” She liked the way he said that; now her face lost its hardness and relaxed once more. She let her hand drift from the drawer where the knives were.
“I’d still like to know. Why did you ask me here? I mean…you don’t even know me.”
Debbie opened a ham dinner for herself and chose a ham for him too, since he didn’t seem to have a preference. She shrugged. “Intuition, maybe.”
“Intuition? Like how?”
“I won the monthly contest at Giro’s,” she explained. “Giro draws a number from a big bowl on the first Monday of every month. If you’re that number customer, you win a hundred and fifty bucks. I’ve been goin’ to Giro’s for four years, and I never won the contest until today.”
“What’s that have to do with me?”
“Well,” she went on, and as she spoke, she took the sunglasses off her head and undid her ponytail and that magnificent black hair cascaded down over her shoulders with a suddenness that almost made John gasp, “if you hadn’t bumped into me I wouldn’t have won. See, I would’ve just bought my stuff and gone. Somebody else would’ve been that number. But I had to go back and get the eggs, and when I went through the register, the winnin’ number was me. See?” She flashed a brief smile at him, and her teeth were startlingly white against her tan.
“I think so.”
“And then, you havin’ the name Lucky and all. I mean…it’s like a sign, you know?”
“A sign of what?”
She looked at him, disappointed that he didn’t seem to grasp her meaning. “A sign,” she said, “that everything’s gonna go right for me from now on. That’s why I came after you. I couldn’t let you just walk on out of my life. And I knew it for sure when you told me your name.”
“Oh.” John felt a new heaviness inside him. “I see.”
She opened the refrigerator and checked to make sure she had enough white wine. “My birthday’s November third. What’s yours?”
“March eleventh,” he said, and he went to the window to look out and think about what was happening here at what felt like the speed of light.
“See? I knew you weren’t in Giro’s by any old accident!”
“What?” He turned toward her.
“We’re soul mates!” she said. “Scorpio and Pisces! Two water signs!” She frowned slightly at his blank expression. “Don’t you read your horoscope?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, we’re soul mates. Take my word for it.” She got two of her nicest wineglasses out of a cabinet.
He had to ask the next question, and as soon as he did he damned himself for it: “Debbie…what do you do?”
She poured the glasses full of wine. “My job, you mean?”
“Yes. Your job.”
“I’m an actress,” she said with no hesitation. “Commercials and stuff. I do modeling too.” She went right on, though he didn’t wish to hear any more. “I do a lot of TV work. I did a commercial for this wine right here. Gallo. That’s why I drink it.”
His heart hurt, a deeper hurt than anything he’d ever experienced in his life. The false cheer of her voice almost squeezed the tears out of his eyes. “Here y’go,” she said, and offered him a glass. He took it, sipped, and was afraid to look at her for fear of what he might see—or what his own face might show. “Know what? I’m up for a movie part right now. Believe it!” Her voice was now full of genuine excitement, and John thought that at least this part of it might be true. “Mv agent. Sollv Sarmerstein in L.A. got a callback from my first readin’. They want me to go back and read again on Thursday. It’s Bright Star Pictures, and they’ve done some real bitchin’ flicks. Ever see Destruction Road?”
“I don’t go to movies very much,” John told her.
“Man, you must be from another planet!” She laughed, the sound like a stream flowing over smooth warm stones. She watched Lucky sip his wine, and she admired his profile. “So what do you do?”
“I’m a…” He paused. Tell her the truth, you gutless sonofabitch! “I’m…in public relations,” he said.
“Yeah, me too. Kind of.” She strode back into the kitchen. “You want some dinner now?”
“Yes,” he said. “That would be good.”
“Sorry I can’t cook worth a shit. I just pop the fuckin’ frozen dinners in and that’s about it. Don’t taste worth a fuck, but—”
“Please don’t curse,” John said.
Debbie abruptly halted with a frozen dinner in each hand. Her back was to Lucky. Something about what he’d just said bothered her, but she couldn’t get a handle on it. Had somebody said that to her just recently? Where had it been? She couldn’t remember. The toot was burning out her memory cells. Well, fuck it! She looked at him, standing there in the slanting golden light, his shadow thrown across her floor. “You’re weird,” she said.
There was a scuttling noise. John stared down at the kitchen floor. A land crab the size of a dinner plate was moving across the linoleum tiles toward the tray of tuna chunks.
“There’s my baby Unicorn!” Debbie said. She put aside the TV dinners, gently picked up the huge crustacean, and kissed its plated back. “I call him Unicorn ‘cause he’s always so horny.” She laughed, but Lucky didn’t seem to get the joke. “Well, / thought it was funny,” she said, and lowered the crab to its food. “Eat ’em up, babe!”
When the TV dinners were ready, John and Debbie sat at the little circular table in her kitchen and ate. She ate fast, as if afraid someone was going to jerk the food away from her. He watched her lips move, and his crotch began to stiffen with the memory of her masked face in Rough Diamonds and what her mouth was doing. He shifted uncomfortably, and asked her where in the South she came from.
“Louisiana. Town called De Ridder. Between Merryville and Sugartown.” The way she said it let him know she didn’t want to talk about it.
He shifted again. His legs were beginning to ache once more, the muscles knotted. He rubbed his calves and winced.
“Come on,” she said when she’d finished her food. “Let’s fix that right now.”
“Fix what?”
“Your legs are hurtin’, aren’t they? Been ridin’ that bike too much. Come on, get up.”
He did.
“Shuck your pants off,” she said, and went into the kitchen.
“No. Listen…wait a minute.” He watched her return with a bottle of Wesson oil. “What are you going to do?” His voice trembled.
She blinked. “Give your legs a massage. Work those kinks out. Come on, shuck your pants and you can lie down right here on the carpet.” She got a pillow from the sofa and laid it down for his head. Then she knelt, waiting.
“I’m all right,” John said. He swallowed hard. “Really.”
“No you’re not. You’re hurtin’. I can tell.”
He looked at her strong brown hands, then at the bottle of Wesson oil. Get out of here! he urged himself. Right now! But he stood where he was, and he said, “You don’t have to.”
“I want to,” Debbie told him, and patted the pillow. Then, before John could react, she reached up and unzipped his trousers. He sprang back as if fire had licked his crotch. Debbie laughed softly. “Wow!” she said, amazed. “You’re shy, aren’t you?”
“Listen…this is wrong. I’ve got to tell you—”
“I’ll tell you,” she said firmly. She began to unbuckle his belt. “It’s right.” And then he stood and squeezed his eyes shut while she tugged his trousers down to his knees. Now he was only a pair of Jockey briefs away from total, soul-searing damnation.
Debbie patted the pillow again. “Come on, put your head here.” She unscrewed the bottle, poured a little oil into the palm of her right hand, and rubbed both palms together. John felt his insides twist into a lump of Silly Putty. His willpower was water, and hers was flame; commingled, there would be steam. But his legs were hurting. What would be the harm in a massage that would last at the most two or three minutes? He could control himself; he could rein in his sensual urges.
He hoped.
He lay down on his stomach, his cheek against the pillow, and she said, “Cute ass,” and began to knead the knotted muscles of his calves with her warm, slick fingers. The first touch made him jump, and she laughed softly and said, “Relax.” Her hands dug down into the core of his soreness, fingers rippling in the muscles. There was a lot of pain for the first minute or so, but gradually her hands kneaded away the pain and got down to the pleasu
re.
She felt Lucky tremble under her hands. He was sure a strange dude. She’d never met anyone quite like him. He looked fine, but why was he so shy? Gay, maybe? No, she could tell those things. She liked the way he said “Pardon me” instead of just “Huh” when he didn’t understand about the chain and padlock. He was… God, it was corny, but Lucky was a gentleman. She didn’t see many of those; the breed was almost extinct.
She was working hard. “Lucky?” she said. “Would you take off my sweater for me? I don’t want to get oil on it.”
John slowly sat up. Debbie lifted her arms. His fingers burned when he touched her red sweater. Quickly, before he could change his mind, he pulled the sweater up over her arms and head. Underneath, she wore nothing but a black lacy bra, and over the rise of her jeans her stomach was hard and flat. Her shoulders and stomach gleamed a little with the sweat of her effort. “Thanks,” she said, and then John lay back down again with an inner groan, and her fingers began to work his calves once more.
“Just relax,” she urged him, her smoky voice gentle. “You’re too stiff!”
Oh, Lord, John thought. Oh Lord oh Lord oh Lord oh…
Debbie leaned her weight on his legs, her hands sliding across his flesh.
John closed his eyes. He couldn’t stand much more of this. Oh, God, he couldn’t take it! But he didn’t tell her to stop, nor did he try to get up. Her hands felt so good, so soothing; the pleasure was in his brain now, and he felt all his muscles unkinking. If this wasn’t paradise, it might be the closest earth had to offer. Even the memory of the porn scenes began to fade from his mind, and his brain relaxed. He thought about nothing but sensation, the sheer pleasure of warm flesh pressing yielding flesh.
He opened his eyes.
The pressure of her hands was no longer there.
He lifted his head from the pillow—and found himself looking into the face of the huge land crab, or as much of a face as the armored creature had. He sat up, startled, and the crab shot with surprising speed under the sofa, where it folded itself up and glowered at him.