A Long Line of Dead Men

I walked west on Fifty-seventh, but instead of paying a call on Jimmy I went to the high-rise apartment building diagonally across the street. The doorman had been told I was coming; when I gave him my name he said I was expected and pointed to the elevator. I rode up to the twenty-eighth floor and her door opened even as I knocked on it.

"I really was," she said. "Thinking of you just before you called. You look tired. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"It's probably the humidity. This is going to be some summer if it's like this in June. I just put the air on. This place cools off pretty quickly."

"How are you, Lisa?"

She turned aside. "I'm all right," she said. "Do you want some coffee? Or would you rather have something cold? There's Pepsi, there's iced tea…"

"No, thanks."

She spun around to face me. She said, "I'm glad you're here, but I don't think I want to do anything. Is that all right?"

"Of course."

"We could sit and talk."

"Whatever you say."

She walked to the window. Her apartment faces west, and there are no tall buildings to block her view. I moved up behind her and watched a couple of sailboats on the Hudson.

She was wearing perfume, the musky scent she always wore.

She said, "Oh, who am I kidding?"

She turned to face me once again. I circled her waist and linked my hands, and she leaned back and looked up at me. Her forehead was shining and there were beads of sweat on her upper lip. "Oh!" she said, as if something had startled her, and I drew her close and kissed her, and at first she trembled in my arms and then she threw her own arms around me and we clung together. I felt her body against me, I felt her breasts, I felt the heat of her loins.

I kissed her mouth. I kissed her throat and breathed in her scent.

"Oh!" she cried.

We went to the bedroom and got our clothes off, interrupting the process to kiss, to clutch each other. We fell together onto the bed. "Oh," she said. "Oh, oh, oh…"

Her name was Lisa Holtzmann, and it would not be inaccurate to describe her as young enough to be my daughter, although she had in fact been born almost ten years before my elder son. When I first met her she'd been married to a lawyer named Glenn Holtzmann, and pregnant with his child. She lost the baby early in the third trimester, and not long after that she'd lost her husband; he'd been shot to death while using a pay phone just a couple of blocks away on Eleventh Avenue.

I'd wound up with two clients, one of them the dead man's widow, the other the brother of the man accused of shooting him. I don't know that I did either of them a world of good. The alleged killer, one of the neighborhood street crazies, wound up getting stabbed to death on Rikers Island by someone no saner than himself. The widow Holtzmann wound up in bed with me.

That it happened does not strike me as extraordinary. Traditionally, widows have been regarded as vulnerable to seduction, and as more than ordinarily seductive themselves. My role in Lisa's personal drama, the knight in tarnished armor riding to her rescue, did nothing to hinder our falling into bed together. While I was deeply in love with and committed to Elaine, and by no means uncomfortable with that commitment, there is something in the male chromosomal makeup that renders a new woman alluring simply because she is new.

There had been no other women for me since Elaine and I had found each other again, but I suppose it was inevitable that there would be someone sooner or later. The surprise was that the affair wouldn't quit. It was like the Energizer rabbit. It kept going and going and going…

You didn't need a doctorate in psychology to figure out what was going on. I was obviously a father figure to her, and only the least bit more available than the genuine article. For several years back home in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, he had come to her bed at night. He had thrilled her with his fingers and his mouth, teaching her to gasp out her pleasure like a lady, softly, so the sounds would not carry beyond her bedroom door. He taught her, too, to please him, and by the time she went off to college she had become skilled beyond her years.

And still a virgin. "He would never put it in," she said, "because he told me that would be a sin."

While she and I had not drawn any such line, in other respects our relationship echoed what she'd had with Daddy. Although she had originally made the first overtures, giving me to understand that she was available to me, since then she had initiated nothing. She never called my home or office. I always called, asking if she felt like company, and she always told me to come over.