spreading bullshit. Well, fucking allora, Sallie, if a very much alive Marisol, trailing perfume, doesnât get into the Bluebird, help herself to a smoke from the pack on the dash, and ask, âKnow where a girl can get a drink around here?â
Joe unzips the gym bag, hands her the bottle of scotch, and she asks as if she already knows, âWhat else you got in that bag, Joe?â
âWhataya mean, what else? Gym stuff.â
âWhew! Smells like your athletic supporterâs got balls of scomorza, â Marisol says. âBut what do I know about the secret lives of jockstraps.â
Joe looks at her and laughs. She always could break him up, and not many beautiful women dare to be clowns. Capri was funny like that, too, and no matter who heâs with he misses her. Whereâs Capri now, with who, and are they laughing? Marisol laughs, then quenches her laughter with a belt of scotch and turns to be kissed, and Joe kisses her, expecting the fire of alcohol
to flow from her mouth into his, but itâs just her tongue sweeping his.
âWhat?â Marisol says.
âI thought you were going to share.â
âDahlink,â she says in her Zsa Zsa accent, âyou donât remember Iâm a swallower?â
Joe remembers. Remembers a blow job doing eighty down the Outer Drive on the first night he met her at the Surf, a bar on Rush where she worked as a cocktail waitress; remembers the improv theater heâd go see her in at a crummy little beatnik space in Old Town where sometimes there were more people onstage than in the audience; just say something obscene about Ike or Nixon or McCarthy and youâd get a laughâshit, he laughed, too. He remembers the weekend right after he got the Bluebird when they dropped its top and drove the dune highway along the coast of Indiana to Whiteyâs so-called chalet on the lake, water indigo to the horizon, and night lit by the foundries in Gary.
âSo, luvvy, is here where weâre spending our precious time?â Marisol asked, turning on the radio.
Joe shifted through the gears as if the alleys were the Indianapolis Speedway and pulled up to Brunoâs. He left Marisol in his idling car, singing along with Madame Butterfly on the opera station, while he ran in for a fifth of Rémy, her drink of choice, then brought her back to his place.
âWhereâs all the sheets and towels?â she asked. âJoe, how the bloody hell can you live like this?â
âTheyâre at the Chinkâs. I been meaning to get them, but I been busy.â
âYou better watch it before you turn into an eccentric old bachelor, luv. I think maybe youâre missing a womanâs touch.â
That was all she had to say, touch , and they were on the bare mattress.
Her blouse, an old white shirt of his, came undone, and he
pressed his face to her breasts, anointed with layers of scent, lavender, jasmine, areolas daubed with oil of bergamot, nipples tipped with a tincture of roses. He recalled the single time sheâd invited him to her place on Sedgwick and how, in her bedroom, a dressing table cluttered with vials and stoppered bottles smelled like a garden and looked like the laboratory of a witch. Touch , she said, and he straddled her rib cage, thrusting slicked with a bouquet of sweat, spit, and sperm between perfumed breasts she mounded together with her hands. A womanâs touch .
When he woke with Marisol beside him it was night and his room musky with her bodyâlow tide beneath the roses. An accordion was playing. It sounded close, as if someone in the alley below was squeezing out a tune from long ago. âHear that?â he asked, not sure she was awake.
âTheyâre loud enough to wake the dead,â Marisol said. âWhen I was little I used to think they were bats and their squawks were the sonar they flew by.â
âI didnât mean the nighthawks,â Joe said. âThose new
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