Chapter 10B

I lay on my side with Martha spooned behind me. Gazing out the small window that overlooked East 87th Street, I gradually returned to earth. I was startled at how quickly and completely I had fucked and climaxed. In trying to recall each detail of the past few moments, I felt I'd lost all control and all awareness; the whole event seemed blurred.

Martha slid a hand down my arm and up again, as if learning anew the textures her fingers found there.

She said softly, "I missed cumming like that."

"I'm surprised I remembered what to do," I whispered. I wiped sweat from my brow, beginning to notice how humid her apartment was. I said apologetically, "I, uh... I got a little carried away."

She said, smiling to herself, "I did too." She sighed, tired but content, and smoothed back her short, nearly blonde hair. "I hate to say this, but... there's no rest for the weary..."

"Oh, no. What next?"

"We have to grab a little snack. Some of that weird tea we bought at the store should perk us up. Then I'll show you where to put your clothes and things, and we'll dress and meet Ronnie at the Stage Deli when she gets off work. We'd better shower -- Ronnie has radar in her nose and can smell sex a mile away."

Martha sat up beside me, and then suddenly uttered a surprised "Oh." Quickly she yanked a tissue from the box on the little table beside her. She held the kleenex between her legs and whispered, "Hon, you're... getting very healthy." With one hand pressing the tissue to her pussy she headed for the bathroom. I lay in bed and heard water running and Martha working furiously behind the closed door.

After she completed her toilet in the tiny bathroom, I joined her in the cramped shower stall in the kitchen. Under the thin warm spray we stood toe to toe, nipple to nipple, with no room to spare. As if studying a lab specimen, she quickly scanned the face and body she had not seen in two years. She ran her fingers through my hair. "You have yellow highlights," she mused. "It looks very good on you. But while you're here I'll have to teach you how to get the right kind of haircut. Whoever cuts your hair in Memphis has no idea what they're doing." She scowled at a mark on my lower cheek. "What's this scar?"

I told her it was a boil that had been lanced a few months ago.

"Wonderful," she muttered dryly. "Any doctor who lances a facial boil that way would be better off in a butcher shop. Don't ever let anyone do that to you again."

She held my face and kissed my nose. "You've been having a hard time down there, haven't you? But you're still you..." She draped her arms around my shoulders. "If only everyone in New York were so easy to get along with." She kissed my nose again. She looked at me. I looked at her. Again, she kissed my nose. Her hands cradled my face. With water splashing and gurgling around us, she simply looked at my face for a moment, her eyes searching mine.

Abruptly she closed her eyes, leaning against me with her forehead pressed to my chin and her hands loosely atop my shoulders. She took a deep breath. She swallowed hard and said, "Steven... I'm not used to this."

"I'm not either," I said, and I stroked her temple and kissed her ear.

She went on hesitantly, "I'm not used to... having people around like this."

"I'm not either."

"I mean, you'll find out things... about me--" She stopped and took another impatient breath and said, "Remember--you promised to be my friend."

"Sure I did."

"All right," she said quietly. She leaned more closely into me, her forehead moving down to my chest, and she looked down my torso. I brushed away water that cascaded from my wet hair. The next thing I knew, she placed her palms against my hips, her fingers pointing down, and while water splashed onto her back she slid her palms down my thighs and up again. "I mean... I didn't expect this. We have to be careful."

I put my hands on her shoulders. "Careful?"

She raised her head and stepped back and grabbed the bar of soap from the little holder on the shower wall. She said mysteriously, watching her hands lather the soap, "Never mind. We have a lot to talk about. There's no time right now."

More water ran down my face and I wiped it away, saying behind my hands, "I hope this isn't going to be as complicated as it sounds."

"It is very complicated," she said, her eyes level with mine for a few seconds. "Needless to say, I'm very impressed by--" She stopped, and she put the soap onto its little dish. She began briskly swabbing my chest. "We *must* control ourselves, now. We have a lot to do and I want us bright-eyed and bushy-tailed so you can meet Ronnie."

She looked at me again and seemed ready to say something. Instead, she planted a loud smack on my forehead and continued bathing. We finished our shower, and while we dried and dressed Martha grew quiet and subdued, as if preoccupied.

We speedily finished our chores, with Martha going over the schedule for the weekend and the week ahead. She could not get the entire week off; she had meetings Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. But she would leave the office early, by four o'clock. I'd be on my own those three days until she returned. She told me about her neighbors in the four story building so that I'd know who they were and so they wouldn't think I'd broken into the building if they saw me in the stairway. Then there was a mind boggling series of details about her part of town and how to get around the city. She gave me subway and bus maps, a tourist guide, and a couple of magazines about New York. She had tickets for "West Side Story" on Monday night, reservations for Ronnie and us on another night, tickets for an off-Broadway play, tickets for a lecture at Columbia, and there was a staff cocktail party coming up...

"And I want to show you places where you can shop for clothes," she told me as she cleaned the teacups in the little sink. "And I want to take you to the United Nations, and to Columbia to meet some people I work with, and the Museum of Modern Art, and Fire Island. The Museum's a favorite hangout. And Fire Island... well, that'll be very special, that's a full day's trip. And then there's a beatnik joint in the East Village..."

Just before five, we left for midtown Manhattan to meet Ronnie at the Stage Deli.

The food at the restaurant was a revelation. I chomped into the corn beef sandwich as if my life depended on that one dish.

"Good?" she asked, amused.

"Delicious!" I growled, my mouth stuffed.

She flicked her cigarette's tip on the corner of her ash tray. "Bet you never had corned beef like that in Memphis."

"Memphis?" I asked. "They serve corned beef out of a can."

"Don't eat yourself into a coma. We still haven't ordered the cheesecake, and Ronnie will be here any minute."

Overcome with gustatory delight, I pushed my plate away so I could pause and catch my breath. Unconsciously, I reached into my shirt pocket and withdrew a cigarette, which I lit without even thinking about it.

"What are you doing?" Martha asked, taken aback. "Steven. I don't believe it. When did you start that?"

"I dunno. Long time ago."

She frowned reprovingly, then she smirked. "Well, I'm not going to sit here with a cigarette in my hand and preach, but I see you're still full of surprises. I hope you don't chain smoke. Ronnie chain smokes now and then, and I can't stand it."

"I have it under control," I lied.

"Do something for me."

"What?"

"See that sign, the big blue menu sign they have posted on that big mirror over there? By the restroom door on the other side of the room?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me what it says."

I squinted at the sign. I could tell from my side of the room that the hand lettered writing was oversized, but I couldn't decipher the first item in the list. "I think it says, uh... stew. Oyster stew."

"Why aren't you wearing your glasses?" she asked, her face hardening with mild impatience.

"How'd you know I wore glasses? Did my mother tell on me?"

"In your suitcase you had a case with your glasses in it. Why aren't you wearing them?"

"Well... they're just reading glasses."

She took a fast puff off her cigarette and exhaled quickly, leveling her eyes at me. "The lenses are too thick to be reading glasses. And you squint at everything, even when we're just walking down the street. Why don't you wear your glasses?"

"Oh..." I started casually. Her insistence was unsettling. I wished she hadn't seen them in my luggage. Absently, I groped at a pimple on the side of my face.

"Steven, don't do that. Leave your face alone." She flicked her ashes again. Then she gave an exasperated little laugh and shook her head. "Oh, listen to me nag. I'm sorry, Steven, don't let me nag at you like that. But this is so unlike you."

"I know," I said, shifting uneasily in my seat.

"Are you lying to me about those glasses? Was that one of those tiny, itsy-bitsy, teeny white lies?"

"Yes."

"Please don't do that." Her eyes looked past me and she straightned in her seat and smiled. "Hold onto your hat. Here comes Ronnie."

Ronnie, entering hurriedly in a gray business suit and carrying a purse and a pharmacy shopping bag on one arm, appeared with a loud clicking of high heels and headed for the chair between Martha and me. "Oh, good!" she said breathlessly, "A chair! Oh, god. Feet, just a few more steps, you can make it. Hello, people, hellohello. Oh, please, please let me sit!" She hastily flung her suit jacket over the back of the chair and sat slowly, with a prolonged wince. "Aaaaah! Oh, god. Don't look under the table, Martha. It's just me, slipping my shoes off." She was a young brunette, about Martha's size and age, her medium-length, black hair combed back in loose, fluffy waves. "And this -- this must be Steven."

"Ronnie," Martha said, "meet Steven."

"Steven. Yes." She smiled broadly and shyly. "Yesyesyes." She bent toward me earnestly and placed her hand on my arm. Small mouthed and with a slender, somewhat pointed nose, she had dark, sapphire blue eyes. "Not to worry, Steven, I'm recovering from a week at work that I would like to forget for the rest of my life. Ignore. Do what you were doing."

Martha said, "Steven, if you haven't guessed, this is Ronnie."

"Hi, Steven. Ronnie." She grinned and extended her slender hand across the table. I gave her a brief handshake that she returned with a quick, warm clasp, and she turned to glance around. "Oh, Where's that waiter I always get in here, what's his name? Marco? Is he around? I am desperate for coffee. Desperate."

Ronnie waved a waiter to our table. She ordered coffee. "Black," she said. "And that white wine and vermouth thing you guys make here, know what I mean, Marco? Just fill the glass with ice cold wine, and then *lean* near the glass, you know? With your lips just a few inches away? And whisper 'Vermouth'. Whisper, now."

The hefty, bull necked waiter rolled his eyes and nodded and said wryly, "Yeah, yeah. I'm hangin' on every word. What else?"

"A hot pastrami with cole slaw. And coffee. Black."

The waiter scribbled on his order pad. "Right."

"If the coffee's left over from this morning, even better."

The waiter shrugged. He said sarcastically, "We might not be able to locate the one cup we were savin' just for Madame."

Ronnie smiled at him familiarly. "Whatever's on hand."

"Anything else?"

"That'll do for a start."

The guy said dryly, "Whatever madam wishes." He left quickly to take an order at another table as Ronnie said dryly, "Oh, Marco. You're such a doll."

We chatted. Ronnie chain-smoked and did most of the talking. Martha asked Ronnie about Ronnie's date with a guy named Harvey, whom Ronnie met at a party recently. "Harvey? Right. I need Harvey like I need breast cancer. What a jerk. He takes me to this AWFUL movie with Pat Boone, something called 'Bernadine' or whatever. Steven, can you imagine Pat Boone and a bunch of forty year old phonies playing people your age? Oh, Steven, please, don't get upset, I'm not talking years, I'm talking a case of arrested mental development. And this silly plot about a sugar-sweet telephone operator? Come on. And Harvey RAVES about it -- 'Better than Gone With the Wind!' he says. Then he gets the idea I'm having such a great time, and he's such an attractive moose, he wants to go someplace where we can be alo-o-one. Hey, won't he even let me finish my popcorn? Come on, he says, we're two adults. I said, no, Harrv, we're NOT two adults. We're one adult named Ronnie, and one JERK!"

At dessert time, Ronnie warned me that it was illegal to remain in New York without having a huge slice of the deli's homemade cheesecake. The three of us indulged in servings of the cloying stuff, thick with sour cream and cream cheese on a bed of crunchy vanilla wafer crust. Martha ate sparingly, finishing only half her slice, while Ronnie and I groaned with each bite. I finished Martha's helping after my own.

By that time, Ronnie's fourth wine had begun its work. "Get Steven an egg cream, Martha!", Ronnie playfully demanded. "Steven, you'll love this. Egg creams. I can't even LOOK at them, I get one after another until I burp foam."