Festival of Deaths(111)

“You can’t retire to Jerusalem. You hate Jerusalem. You hate the heat.”

“No Jew hates Jerusalem, DeAnna. It is a matter of principle.”

“It is a matter of mental disturbance. It is about time I took you out for a little kosher wine.”

“Getting me drunk won’t solve my problems, DeAnna. It will just make one of our guests accuse me of having a secret addiction.”

“None of your addictions are secret.” DeAnna’s cigarette was out. She pitched the butt where Lotte had pitched hers. Then she got out another cigarette and lit up. The heat of her Bic lighter shot up too far and licked the tip of her nose. The smoke she blew out after her first long drag made her eyes sting. She was going to have to quit smoking again as soon as she had a chance.

“Listen. I know how you feel because I’ve been feeling that way too, but I’ve got a better idea than retiring to Jerusalem.”

“What kind of better idea?”

“‘I Can’t Help It, I’ve Got to Have Two Husbands—At the Same Time.’”

“The polyandry show?”

“Exactly.”

“But we have discussed it,” Lotte said. “We have talked to those women. They have sex lives Hugh Hefner couldn’t have dreamed of in a vision. And they talk like—”

“I know. They’ve always promised to bring videotapes. Of, you know, marital sessions.”

“No videotapes.”

“Maybe not,” DeAnna conceded.

“Even without the videotapes,” Lotte said, “we would never get away with it. We would be replaced in every market from Wilmington to Las Vegas.”

“Actually, I don’t think so,” DeAnna said. “That’s why I brought it up. I think I’ve found a way around that.”

“Like what?”

DeAnna waved her cigarette in the air, realized that wouldn’t do any good and stuck it in her mouth for safekeeping. The smoke got in her eyes, but she didn’t care. She rummaged around in her tote bag until she found a pen and a piece of paper. Then she laid the paper out on one of the sinks and bent over it.

“This is what we’re going to do,” she said.

DeAnna felt much better, and she could see Lotte did, too. That just went to prove something she’d always believed. There were no real cosmic questions. There was no honest impetus to discover the meaning of life. There was only boredom, and the answer to boredom was really kinky sex.

Not, of course, sex in the flesh.

Sex in the flesh was messy.

What you really needed was sex in the abstract.

Somebody else’s sex.

Sex so weird it made you dizzy.

To hell with Aristotle.





2


FOR CARMENCITA BOAZ, TIME was a river, just like Stephen King had said it was in the one long novel she had ever read in English, but for her it was a river of pain. The pain was almost a headache but wasn’t quite. It started in that flat place at the side of her eyes and traveled across her cheekbones to her jaw. They had given her Demerol half an hour ago. She knew the pain should be on one side of her face and not the other, but couldn’t make it feel that way. She was very tried but couldn’t sleep. Itzaak was half-sitting and half-not in a plain, armless plastic-covered chair at the side of her bed. Every once in a while, he would jump up and pace across the room. Carmencita wondered if someone had told him that it helped patients when you talked to them. If nobody had, this was a sign of nervousness beyond any she would have imagined him capable of. She wished she knew all those things Gregor Demarkian was hoping she knew: what her attacker looked like, who her attacker was, what had happened and when it had happened and why. All she remembered was standing there in that stairwell next to the elevators, waiting to buy the green card and thinking about Itzaak. After that she had nothing but the face of the doctor staring down at her and a voice saying: You have to hold very still. It was ridiculous. It was like telling a ship’s barnacle not to take a vacation to the North Pole.

There was only one light on now in this room she was in. It was a light on a metal arm like a drafting board light, that could be moved back and forth depending on where you wanted it. Itzaak had pushed it down low to the floor and turned it so the bright bulb faced away from them. It caused shadows and movements on all the available walls. On the table next to the bed was a vase with a dozen red roses in it. As soon as Itzaak had heard she was all right, he had ordered them for her.

He took her left hand into both of his and held it tightly. He got up and sat down and got up and sat down again, probably unaware that he was moving at all. Carmencita wished she wasn’t so very tired. She wished she could do something to soothe his soul and put an end to his misery.