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  “Fetishists?”

  “Whatever. Are you?”

  “Only as far as a certain set of toes,” I say.

  Louie moves alongside me and reaches for my feet. I try to pull away. “Oh, no,” I exclaim, “mine are the world’s ugliest.”

  “Nothing about you is ugly,” he says. He takes my toes into his mouth.

  I swoon back onto the bed, gasping. Louie is the Columbus, the Vasco da Gama, the Admiral Perry of erogenous zones. He has discovered dark continents of delight hitherto undocumented. “Stop. Please stop. Don’t stop,” I moan.

  Louie doesn’t stop.

  “Seamus hated my toes,” I pant.

  “What does he know?”

  “Quite a bit, if measured by all his degrees.”

  Louie takes my toes from his mouth and pats them dry with a corner of the sheet. He turns around and moves back up to lie beside me. He holds my chin in his hand. He pulls my face to his. His eyebrows arc into commas over his eyes. His eyes are sad. “Does it bother you,” he asks, “that I have no degrees?”

  I smile at him. “Right now I can honestly say it’s the farthest thing from my mind.”

  “Right now,” he says. “But in the future? I don’t want this to be just one roll in the hay.”

  Technically this hasn’t been just one roll, but I don’t point this out. Anyway, I have a fondness for collective nouns. For multiples. I forget about degrees. I can only focus on what Louie says about the future, a future in which there will be more in-body experiences, more tingling toes.

  “I mean,” Louie goes on, “it is weird. A mailman and a writer. A writer for Playgirl magazine.”

  “Not that weird,” I say. I climb out of bed. I slide on my erogenous toes to the bureau. I tug at the middle drawer where under its shield of half-slips lies Playgirl magazine.

  “See,” I say to Louie, back in bed. I open to the Dazzling Pictorial of the Mailmen of L.A. “We are connected in ways you’d never dream of.”

  “Wow,” Louie says. He turns the pages. He shakes his head. “Look at that!”

  I study the picture of a man leaning against a tree. His backlit buttocks gleam. Another man sits on a windowsill, letters fanned out just underneath his testicles. “Isn’t that something?” I whistle through my teeth. I eye them more closely. “Their faces aren’t so hot, though. Not that you’d notice.”

  Louie gives me a sharp look. “A brain like you. You go for this stuff ?”

  “Number one, Louie, I’m not a brain. I only got into Radcliffe because of geographical distribution. In fifty years, no one ever applied to Harvard from Old Town, Maine. Number two, the major proportion of me is not above the neck.”

  “Still, a girl of your class …”

  “This is America. We’re supposed to have a classless society.” Louie thumbs through a few more pages. He shakes his head. “When my sister turned thirty, we sent her a male stripper. He wore this G-string. She and her girlfriends tucked dollar bills into it. The way they screamed and carried on …” He pauses. “But I’d never think that you …”

  I slide my hand along Louie’s hip. Goosebumps rise against my fingers. Look, Ma, I can raise goosebumps. I can make grown men swoon. “I’ve got my own male stripper anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Katinka.”

  “Just kidding. A figure of speech.”

  “Nevertheless,” says Louie, not quite convinced. “This magazine, does it turn you on?”

  “The writing’s excellent.”

  He grins.

  “You turn me on.”

  He grins again, so wide a silver filling glints. “I do?”

  I nod. I pinch a bit of luscious flesh.

  He points at a photograph of a man splayed across the grass wearing only his postal deliverer’s cap. “This guy’s unbelievable.”

  I look down at Louie. At the slender line of hips, at his sweetly nestled genitals. “You’re miles above the lot of them.”

  He considers the photograph as if it were a test. “I don’t know,” he says. “Some of these guys are really big.”

  “That’s not only what I mean,” I pause, “not just the body.”

  “You’re talking about the soul?”

  “Of course. Besides, these magazines use all kinds of tricks. Ever hear of photo enlargement?”

  “You know, you may be right.” He reaches for me.

  Later Louie and I go into the kitchen. Louie wraps himself in a bath towel. I tell him he looks like Tarzan in a loincloth. I put on his tuxedo jacket, which falls to my knees. Louie tells me I look better in it than he does. I bet your mother wouldn’t agree I say, remembering he told me how she took his photograph before he went out tonight. “Mothers,” he says.

  “Mothers,” I sigh, another plot of common ground. We discuss our mothers. Louie’s is of the old school. She makes enormous meals, waxes her kitchen floor to a mirror shine, wants her children to produce steady paychecks and healthy grandchildren and to live within spaghetti length of her Sunday dinner table. Louie asks about my stunning mother and is astonished to learn she’s nearly the same age as his own. I tell him about her romance, which is probably flowering even as we speak. I tell him that she’s a snob but a superficial one and that she’ll come round.

  “Come round to what?” Louie asks.

  “Whatever,” I say, ambiguous.

  Louie and I tango between the sink and the refrigerator. From the stove to the overhanging cabinets. We make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, we heat up a can of soup. We find a jar of pickles, a brick of Monterey Jack.

  “Do you live with your mother?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head. He lives in a triple-decker in Somerville, he explains, his sister and her family on the bottom, his father and mother on top.

  “Something else we have in common,” I say. I lift a finger to indicate the ceiling. “I, too, have a mother on top.”

  We are amazed by coincidence, incredulous over such bonds. “Here I am living alone, paying my rent, doing my own laundry, having been married and divorced not to mention having passed the big three-O, and I still haven’t managed to get out from under my mother—quite literally.”

  “I hear you,” Louie says, “though from my point of view, it’s not all bad.”

  I don’t ask him what his point of view is. I am less interested in picking his brain than in plucking at other body parts. We put our food on a tray and carry it into the living room. We place the tray on the coffee table. We snuggle into a corner of the sofa, clutching each other like teenagers. At our feet is slung the flour sack.

  Louie points. “Poor Daniella,” he sighs.

  I bolster her against the sofa leg to give support. “We’ve rather neglected her,” I agree. “I’m afraid I’m one of those baby-sitters who run off with her boyfriend the minute the kid’s parents are out the door.”

  “I won’t tell,” Louie says.

  Louie and I dip two spoons into one bowl of soup. We bite off opposite ends of one sandwich half. “I don’t even have a high school diploma,” Louie says.

  I am trying to unscroll a sheet of peanut butter from the roof of my mouth, so I don’t say anything. I’m not sure what to say anyway. I’m about to announce that if I were principal I’d award Louie a summa cum laude diploma in making love, but the look on Louie’s face stops me. It’s a familiar look, parental, one I’ve seen before.

  Louie finishes his triangle of sandwich. He puts his spoon on the tray. He leans over for Daniella. He picks her up. He cradles her in his arms. My heart turns over. He’s the image of Max. “You see,” he says, “I thought I had to go to work.”

  I touch his shoulder. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of. My grandfather quit school in the sixth grade. He had a widowed mother and six younger sisters to support. He was the world’s smartest man. He went to New York to make his fortune. Every Monday he took seven books out of the Forty-second Street Library. The following Monday he returned them practically memorized and took out se
ven more. He was a millionaire at twenty-one.”What I don’t tell Louie is that my grandfather went bankrupt at twenty-two, the land he bought in Florida turning out to be a swamp.

  Louie covers my hand with his own. He places Daniella in his lap. “That’s some story,” he says, “but not mine.” He pats Daniella. “If I had had one of these, maybe it would’ve turned out differently.” He leans his head back on the sofa. He shuts his eyes.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “The usual. The same old story.” Louie’s voice takes on a mechanical tone, as if the story’s so old it’s memorized. “I was seventeen. Carried a pack of Trojans around in my wallet with my driver’s license. Cheryl Corelli was sixteen. Cute with these whopper breasts. What did I know? Sex and love, it was the same thing. We only did it twice. I dropped out of school. Thought I’d get a job. We’d get married. Her parents wouldn’t have it. My dad’s a barber. Works in my Uncle Vincent’s shop. Cheryl’s father owned a store. He wanted something better for his daughter. I know it was silly, but I figured I’d keep the baby, that it might be a kid who looked like me and was good at basketball. I thought maybe my mother could take care of it while I was at work.”

  I stroke Louie’s hair. His voice is hushed, his face a mask of dramatic suffering.

  He hesitates like a comic waiting to deliver the punch line, though not, in this case, expecting laughs. “Then she went and had an abortion without letting me know.”

  “Oh, Louie,” I say. I pause. “Though maybe it was the best decision—under the circumstances.”

  “I agree. It was probably all for the good. But somehow, after that I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t go back to school. Didn’t really work. I drank beer and watched TV with the blinds pulled shut. I wasn’t even against the idea of abortion like so many Catholics are. Everything just seemed kind of empty. I was pretty messed up.”

  “We’ve all felt like that.”

  He nods. “I know this now. That everyone has tough times. But then … Of course Cheryl had no idea what she was doing, she was so confused. She says this still.”

  I sit up. “You see her still?”

  “Sometimes.” He shifts, rubs at his cheek. “It’s funny, we had nothing in common before, but after. Well, it’s been a kind of bond.”

  “I can understand that,” I say. “You made a child. You had a loss.” I pause. With the introduction of Cheryl, my role as Lady Chatterley seems about to switch into a character closer to An American Tragedy. “What happened to Cheryl?” I ask with more desperation than I intend. “Did she marry? Have kids?”

  “Nope. She lives at home. She works as a nurse’s aide in Children’s Hospital. Sort of, you know, to compensate.”

  Louie strokes the sack of flour in his lap. I stroke Louie. I have a thousand questions I want to ask. They bobble to the surface like so many bubbles rising in our champagne flutes. What does Cheryl look like, what do they talk about, does she still have whopper breasts and how does he know, what does she wear when she’s not in her nurse’s uniform—black leather, pastel polyester, bikini under-pants? I think of Louie’s story. If I read it in a magazine at the doctor’s office, saw it on TV, it would be the stuff of soap opera. That’s the difference between life and fiction. What’s trite in fiction is real in life. Right here, on this sofa, is Louie’s life.

  I take Louie in my arms. He pulls me against him. There is nothing between us but a towel, a tuxedo jacket, and Daniella. We get rid of Daniella. Then the towel, then the jacket. We go to bed.

  Sometime in the middle of the night I wake up. I check my clock, which clicks quarter to three. Louie’s arm is flung across my breasts, his knee wrapped around my thigh. There is noise in the outside hall, and that and my shifting weight awaken him. “Are you up, Katinka?” he whispers.

  I twist around to face him. His hair is tousled over his forehead. I smooth it back. His breath smells of peanut butter, of pickles, of cheese. His cheek is creased from the pillowcase and his eyes are crusty with sleep. He rubs his eyes. I think of what he must have been like at seventeen, his startled eyes. I’m not surprised that Cheryl of the whopper breasts fell for him. What surprises me is that she didn’t stay fallen. How could she resist? Did she? Has she? Does she still?

  In the vestibule, footsteps stomp. Voices rise. There is laughter. The outside door bangs shut. “What’s that?” Louie asks. He rises on one elbow.

  “Somebody must be having a party.” We hear the bleat of a paper horn.

  “Oh my God,” Louie says.

  “Derek …”

  “… and Gregory’s party,” Louie finishes.

  We have entirely forgotten. “We missed the party,” I groan.

  “We didn’t miss anything,” says Louie. He locks his arms behind my back.

  “Ah,” I say.

  Gently he pushes me against the pillow. He moves on top of me.

  * * *

  It’s after noon when we get up. I put on a bathrobe. Louie puts on his tuxedo, which, to me now blinded by a night of love, could be what the Duke of Windsor might have worn. I make coffee. I scramble eggs. We eat jammed together at one end of the table. And then Louie has to leave. He has to go home, take a shower and change his clothes, climb the stairs to his mother’s Sunday manicotti in marinara sauce.

  At the door, I can barely let him go. We kiss. We hug. I wipe egg from the corner of his jaw. “When can I see you again?” I ask.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow, when I deliver you your mail.”

  5

  It’s mid-morning on February second, and I am taking a break from the story I’m writing about the terrible suffering of an unwed father. I pour myself a cup of coffee and bring it to the kitchen table. I glance at the front page of the Globe. It’s Groundhog Day, and one of the Globe’s star reporters has been put on watch. There’s a photo of him, wrapped in sheepskins and ponchos like some Arctic explorer poised over a mound of frozen earth. In mittened hands the size of boxing gloves, he holds a camcorder and steno pad. The weather has been gray all week. Sleet slides across the window. If I were a groundhog I wouldn’t leave my hole.

  I stir another spoonful of sugar into my coffee and gulp it down. I’ve been getting enough exercise these days—or nights—so that for the first time in a while I don’t have to watch my weight. I look over an article about business in the downtown department stores. Christmas sales were one of the best in a long time, the director of Macy’s proclaims. Just yesterday, the first, I was in the Prescott Pharmacy refilling my birth control pills. I prided myself on chatting so casually to Barney Souza I could have been stocking up on aspirin rather than obsessing about whether he had noticed the long hiatus followed by recent heavy market activity on the fertility front. “Christmas was pretty good,” Barney admitted, “but January has been out of sight.”

  “I know what you mean,” I agreed, smug about my own contribution to the clanging of his cash registers.

  Louie has been spending a couple of nights a week in my bed, enough so that he’s gotten to see all of my sheets through several rotations. Most times he comes for dinner, though between the first course and the entrée there can be astounding delays.

  So far we’ve been pretty discreet. Louie comes late. After work he goes home, has coffee with his sister downstairs, a grappa with his parents upstairs, protesting all the while the huge meal he shared earlier with his fellow mail deliverers. He naps, he showers, then comes to me. We eat, we fool around, we eat some more. He rarely runs into any of the people in the building. And if he does they don’t recognize him out of uniform. Once, he said, Arthur T. Haven held the door for him and wished him a good night as you would a stranger you tip your hat to on the street.

  He leaves at five in the morning. He has to be at the central post office to sort the mail at six. Then it’s still dark and even the most intrepid jogger isn’t out yet. Though I’ve offered to get up with him, to make coffee, toast English muffins, scram
ble eggs, he wouldn’t think of it. “Have a nice day, beautiful,” he says, then kisses me and leaves me curled up in my warm and musky-smelling bed.

  “It won’t last,” says my friend Milly of the Formica kitchen table. “Sex like that never does.”

  I remind her of her own acrobatics when the kids are off to summer camp.

  “We feel obliged. It’s real work.” She sighs. “We’ve been married fifteen years and I think we’re both ready to call this teenage stuff quits. But who’s going to admit it first?”

  Perhaps what’s going on between me and Louie is teenage stuff. But it doesn’t feel like it. Not like the groping in the back seats of cars in Old Town with bodies smelling of Noxzema and Clearasil. Not even like the rolling around on Seamus’ office floor. Louie and I talk over our sorry reheated dinners. We share past secrets the way lovers do. I tell him about Seamus, how he picks his toenails, how he reads trashy novels on the toilet seat. “Somehow I can’t figure Seamus reading so much as the sports page.” Louie shakes his head. “I bet Albert Einstein never did.”

  “Geniuses go to the bathroom. Besides Seamus isn’t a genius.”

  Louie shakes his head again. His hair ripples. He and Seamus have talks sometimes when he delivers Seamus’ mail. Heavy talks. “He knows so much,” Louie says, “he’s all brain.”

  “That’s all he is,” I say.

  Later, Louie asks me about my old job at Widener, about the students who haunted the stacks. As I talk, Louie listens with his head cocked. His body seems primed to catch the words before they’re half-formed. When it’s his turn, he describes his own job: he likes it, the people he meets, the outdoors, the fact that he doesn’t have to own a bunch of gray flannel suits. The pay is pretty good. Especially, he adds, for someone who lives rent-free. Though he’s not sure it’s something he wants to do all his life. He talks about his parents, about Cheryl. “What does she look like?” I ask every time he brings her up. I can’t help myself.

  “Not half so gorgeous as you,” he says this time. Last week he called her ordinary.