What He's Poised to Do

“Stop avoiding me,” she said. Many thoughts drifted across his face, slowly at first and then quickened by the winds of his panic. He was triumphant, he was contrite, he was friendly, he was brusque. Mostly, he was limp, skinny, and pale, and she was delighted. Having gone at him, she could now set him aside. The power had shifted entirely. She had been wary of returning to men, but this was precisely why her decision was immoderate. She took a cigarette and stood by the window as he got dressed.

“Next week, I will be in a different hotel,” he said. “And another after that.”

“Well, then, I will see you in one of those,” she said.

When she called Boatman the next day, she explained herself forcefully. “Got him,” she said. “Two strikes, one after the other. The second time around he took it to me a little bit more. It was like he saw something on the surface and had the courage to go in after it.”

“Right-o,” Boatman said. He was as unfazed by her as ever. “Who’s on tap for tonight? The prime minister?”

That night she read but retained little, and when she finally gave up, she did not sleep. She expected to have kept something from her time with Hebert: memories, pictures. But her recollection of the evening was pitch-black. She reread his book to try to jog her memory. The next night she painted better, but still no memories. She was drawing a deep blank. On Friday night, she went to a café down the street and allowed herself to be chatted up by a young French lawyer who loved to talk about automobiles and drugs and gourmet foods, after which she followed him to his apartment and engaged in a drunken and spirited session on a bed he had not bothered making from the night before. The morning after that, her memory of him was sharp, down to individual smells and textures. There was a patch of hair on his lower back. But she could recollect nothing of Hebert.

The following week, Hebert held another event at another rock club. She attended. He read. The audience was somewhat more hostile this time; a young man stood up without being acknowledged and challenged Hebert on his decision to speak only English. “Don’t get so exercised about it, man,” Hebert said, and enough of the crowd laughed that he was able to move on. Afterward there was a reception in the lobby, as before. Deborah stood in the corner with her legs crossed and watched Hebert work the room. It should have been a source of excitement to see him swerve from guest to guest. He noticed her and drew near. “Hello,” he said. He was looking at her like she was already hooked, and she decided to play along. She heard a murmur ripple through the crowd standing near the door. In the cab he said nothing. In the elevator he said nothing. They sat on the edge of his bed and watched television. At last she grew impatient, reached into his pants without an invitation, and began to work on him. The result was not what she had expected. His entire body was consumed by a spasm of pleasure. He leapt up and plunged back down. “Oh! Oh!” he yelled. His face was as red as his eyes were bright. During the next hour he made love to her three times, each more intensely than the last. He took her out to sea. Stretched out beneath him, she wondered if she would forget this, too.

SHE DID, WITHIN A DAY. She shut her eyes tightly and tried to recover it, any part of it, but she could not. She did not even tell Boatman that she had gone back to Hebert. “I have a magazine for you,” Boatman said. “How about lunch tomorrow?”

“I feel a little sick,” she said.

She canceled a second lunch date and then the cures began to come in on two legs: Wilbon, who owned a watch shop; Denis, a musician; Leigh, a British actor who had worked briefly in adult films; Charles, an optometrist. She even considered a dalliance with Boatman, raised the issue with him at lunch. He looked at her, then burst out laughing, then took her hand in his. “I’m going to have to say no,” he said. “I’d rather keep living through you, if that’s okay.” This she remembered down to the last precise thing—the streak of blue ink on Boatman’s right hand, which had the appearance of a vein—but she could not retrieve a single detail about Hebert. She went back to read his essays, found them brilliant as always, but had no memory of the man. What did he smell like? How did he conduct himself while at her breast? “What is happening to me?” she asked Boatman. He laughed but said he didn’t believe her. She flipped through the blips in her mind: the tall one, the skinny one, the goatee, the glasses. She could see them perfectly, but when she tried to come around to the other side of them, she could not. They were pictures in a deck of cards. She shuffled them, but it was no consolation. She called Boatman on the phone and was humiliated by the safety he felt.