For the moment I was on a roll. I worked it. "I don't know. Is that his name?"
Instead of answering, she brought her glass up to her lips. She didn't drink from it, though, just slithered her tongue along the rim a couple seconds. Finally she said, "Pete. I ask you a question and all you do is ask a question back. Are you always such a tease?"
Candidly I said, "I don't get to be a tease that often so I try to make the most of it."
She pulled her glass in close to her and touched its frosty base to her chest. "This back and forth, this sparring—you find it sexy?"
I didn't know how to answer that, so I didn't try.
"I do," she went on. "The restraint. The squirming . . . But I still want an answer to my question."
"But then the foreplay would be over," I pointed out.
"And the real thing could begin," she purred.
My throat slammed shut and I drank some scotch to scour it open. I glanced at my hostess's chest. I thought dirty then tried to think practical. I remembered Kenny Lukens' matchbook and took a guess. "Okay. Let's say the business was water sports."
Bad guess. Or rather, a good guess but a bad answer. Lydia didn't like it at all. Her shoulders tightened, her lips flicked back from her teeth, and she said, "So you are with Mickey Veale!"
Confused now, I moved to deny it. I didn't deny it fast enough, and Lydia Ortega threw her drink at me.
She didn't throw it at my face. She threw it at my crotch. Iced vodka stung my thighs; I couldn't tell if it was the cold or the alcohol that gave rise to a vivid but not pleasant tingling in my privates. Squirming, slapping ice cubes off my lap, I finally managed to say quite clearly that I didn't even know who Mickey Veale was.
This gave rise to an uneasy silence. Then Lydia laughed. It was not a pretty laugh and I wouldn't swear that it was sane. It was the hard laugh of a mean child, half proud of, half embarrassed by her bad behavior. She cackled for a moment, then bit it off quite suddenly. "My mistake," she said, without remorse. "So tell me, Pete: Just who the hell are you, and what the hell is going on?"
With a lapful of booze it wasn't easy to maintain either the bantering tone or my composure, but some vague and maybe perverse instinct told me not to tip my hand just yet. "Ah," I said, "I've made you curious."
"Yes," she admitted. "But now you're starting to piss me off, and that isn't a good thing to do."
This did not sound coy. There was conviction in it. However tardily, it dawned on me that there was no percentage in playing cute with someone dangerous. Since I didn't know what else to say, I said, "Then I guess I'd better go." I took a last swig of my giant whiskey, then put my glass on the coffee table and started standing up.
I didn't get very far. She shouldered me across the thighs and knocked me backward, then threw herself on top of me and gave me one hard, assaultive kiss, for which I wasn't ready. My lips were locked against my teeth, pinned down as helplessly as a losing wrestler's shoulders, and I could neither kiss back nor escape. Her breasts squeezed down against my shirt; her loins briefly wriggled in my soaking lap. Then she pushed up with a wicked shove against my arms, and suddenly was standing over me.
Her blouse was twisted, her chest heaved, and there was fury in her eyes. In a voice that whistled slightly through bared teeth, she said, "You don't toy with Lydia. Lydia toys with you." Her hand shot forth in an imperious gesture that pointed toward the door. "Now go."
People being animals, I was no longer so sure, after that bizarre and violent kiss, that I wanted to. But the decision had been made. I was being banished. For the best, no doubt, but something nagged at me, something that I couldn't figure out. Through the whole interview with Lefty's daughter; I thought I'd handled myself pretty well. Kept my wits about me, got some information. So was it only my wet, cold shorts that made me feel sheepish and defeated at the end?
Like a woozy fighter; I got up slowly from the couch. I didn't say good night and my hostess didn't move to walk me to the door.
But as I was crossing from the living room to the foyer, she called my name. I stopped and turned to face her. Her hands were on her high Cuban hips. In an age-old combination that everybody knows spells doom and that guys always fall for anyway, her eyes had softened, wide and dreamy, but her lips were curled into a snarling dare. "Come back some time," she said. "When you're feeling less like a tease and more like a man."
13
We've all had evenings when it's 8:30 but feels like 1:00 a.m.
This has to do not with fatigue but with bewilderment, sometimes helped along by a titanic cocktail in place of dinner. At such junctures, it seems that time has hiccuped, that the world is a formerly familiar room in which the furniture's been moved; as with a jazz record started in the middle, you're tantalized but can't quite find the tune. This is how I felt as I dragged my damp ass out the front door of 2000 Atlantic.