Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [23]
“It feels pretty good.”
She rocked back and had a good look at him. His skin was a coppery reddish brown, and he was leaner, his few soft edges burned away. She’d met him three years ago in the law office where she worked; Dirk had brought in a buddy who’d snagged a DUI, and while the friend met with counsel behind closed doors Dirk sat in reception and chatted up Melissa. He talked in the slow, careful manner of a man chewing cactus—it turned out he was from Valdosta, even farther south—a buff body with soulful, syrup-brown eyes and little knots of muscle at the hinges of his jaw, but it was his smile that made her anxious in an intensely pleasurable way, the coyote guile of it, his cockiness like a knockout drug. Straddling him now, rubbing his cropped hair and searching his face, she decided he looked mostly the same—a little dazed, maybe, and definitely older, his eyes newly creased with crow’s feet. Maybe Haiti aged you in dog years? He was only twenty-eight.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said, kneading his chest and ribs. He felt as hard as an I beam. “We’re gonna have to fatten you up.”
“I’m looking forward to that.”
She went to work on the buttons of his uniform blouse, flicking them loose with a picklock’s sure touch. Her bottom settled deeper into his lap; she could feel the loaf rising to meet her there, his maximum expression straining at his pants—it took only that much pressure to make her groan. Her mind was going slack, starting to empty out, awareness liquefying to pure sensation.
Dirk gently took her wrists and pulled her away.
“Lissa, stop. We got to talk, babe.”
“Talking’s for wimps,” she murmured, her voice slurred as a drunk’s. She came at him again.
“No, listen, I’m serious,” he said, and this time he firmly slid her off of him. Her ears were hissing like a lit fuse, and she felt giddy, dizzy with passion and guilt. How did he know? He couldn’t know. So how did he know—
“We can’t do this tonight,” he told her. One of his arms held her shoulders, sympathetic yet sterile, exuding a brotherly tenderness that scared the daylights out of her. “Tomorrow’s fine, we can do it all day tomorrow and frankly there’s nothing I’d rather do. But tonight I can’t.” He paused. “I can’t make love on Saturdays.”
Her lungs collapsed—there was no air, nothing inside to form a response. She found a reserve at the very tip of her mouth. “What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying is—look, it’s sort of complicated. But there’s one thing I wanna make clear right now, I’m still your husband who loves you more than anything.”
Now she was terrified; he’d never talked this way before.
“Something happened down there,” he told her, “something wonderful, in a way. And you don’t have to be scared, I promise you that. Just be patient, this is going to take a while to explain. Just trust me and everything’ll be okay.”
“Dirk,” she wailed, “what is going on?”
She didn’t follow any of it at first, the bizarre story he unloaded on her about poison powders and a voodoo priest and his initiation into voodoo society, then some garbled business about a ceremony, and someone named Erzulie. A person, or maybe not quite a person—a spirit? Who Dirk had married somehow? Melissa thought she might throw up.
“You’re telling me you got married?”
“Well, yeah. To a god. It’s not all that uncommon down there.”
Melissa couldn’t process the part about the god. “But you’re married to me.”
“And that hasn’t changed at all.” He squeezed her hand. “I know this is a lot to be laying on you, but trust me, it’s okay. We’re still married, I still love you, I’m still the same Dirk.”
She looked at him: he was, in fact, the same, so much so that it broke her heart.
“If nothing’s changed then why can’t we have sex?”
“Well, that’s only on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Those are the nights I have to devote to her.”
“Devote to her?”
“Be with her. Sleep with her.”
“What do you mean, sleep with her. You mean sleep with her?”
“In a way. It’s kind of hard to explain.”
She felt as if some part of her brain had been carved out, the lobe of reason,