Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [43]
“Now, not the orange-haired one, do you see, with all the freckles. Behind her. The dark one.” Rodney had a witty notion. His interlocutor was a cocktail waitress: why not speak her language? “The Pink Lady: no. By no means. Rather, the Black Velvet. The Black Velvet.”
He tried to watch as the waitress delivered his note. Its recipient, again, seemed to glance and smile his way; but then a wall of new bards or jokesmiths, heading for the back room, interposed itself, and when the room cleared she was gone.
The shadow of the waitress dropped past him. He looked down at the tray she had placed on his table: the check, plus the fourth postcard, which said tersely and in neat small caps: “You talk too much.”
Triple-lipped, Rodney paid and added fifteen percent and took his leave.
It was as he crossed Tenth Street that he realized she was following him. Realized, too, in the light of day, that she was as black as night. And twice his size. His first impulse (one not quickly overcome) was to make a run for it. On Eleventh Street the darkened window of Ray’s Pizza told Rodney that she was still behind him. He halted and turned, weakly squinting, and she halted, intelligently smiling, and he took a step toward her, and she took a step back, and he moved on, and she followed. Across Twelfth Street. Now with every step his legs were getting heavier and tenderer; it felt like the marrow-ache of adolescent growth. Despairingly he turned left on Thirteenth Street. She stopped following him. She overtook him. And as her pace slowed and slackened, and as he attended to the amazing machine of her thighs and buttocks, the parts accommodating themselves so equably in the close quarters of her skirt, all his fears (and all thoughts of his easel) gave way to a reptile vacuity. For the first time in his life Rodney was ready for anything. No questions asked.
When she reached his building she turned and waited. He summoned breath to speak—but she smoothly raised a vertical forefinger to her lips. And he understood, and felt like a child. He talked too much. He talked too much … Mounting the steps, he pushed the inner glass door and held it open behind him; when he felt the transfer of its weight he withstood a rush of intimacy, as intimate as the press of boiling breasts on his spine. Dismissing the elevator as an impossibility, he began the long ascent, afraid to turn but minutely alert to her tread. His door. His keys all jammed and tangled in their ring, which he weepily picked at. Each lock turned a different way, the English way, the American way. He pushed, and felt the air rearrange itself as her shape moved past his back.
Many times, during that first half hour, speech gulped up in Rodney’s throat—and just as often her forefinger sought her lips (and there would be a frown of real warning). The finger side-on, always. But then they were standing near the piano, when she had completed her tour of his space; Rodney swallowed his most recent glottal stop, and her finger was once again raised; only now she turned it, rotating her whole hand through ninety degrees, showing him the bruised pink of the nail. After a beat or two Rodney took this as an invitation. He hovered nearer still and strained upwards. He kissed.
“Well what the fuck’s the story, Rod? You read my novel yet or what?”
Jesus: the guy was like a neighbor’s dog that just kept on hating you. You never gave him an instant’s thought until there he was, balanced upright on the tautness of his leash, and barking in your face.
“Not yet,” Rodney conceded, as he stepped out of the elevator.
“Now this is basically some rude shit we’re looking at here. Why the contempt, Rod? What’s your answer?”
Rodney wrongly regarded himself as an expert at excuses. After all, he and excuses had been through a lot together. Gazing upwards, with tubed lips, he softly said,
“You’re going to hate me for this.”
“I hate you already.”
Feeling a furry hum in either armpit, Rodney decided to change tack. The occasion called for something more than a negligent