The Kit Tolliver Stories

Jilling

There was no Graham Weider listed in the Chicago white pages.

That was annoying, but couldn’t be said to amount to a dead end. He was some sort of corporate executive, and she seemed to remember a wedding ring, so he’d be more likely to live in a suburb than within the city limits.

A branch library had all the suburban phone books. No Graham Weider there, either. But there were two G Weiders, one in Lake Forest, the other in Naperville. “Hello, is Graham there?” And he wasn’t, and neither party knew anything about a Graham Weider. The G in Naperville stood for Gloria, and the one in Lake Forest wasn’t saying.

Hmmm.

Well, all that meant was that his number was unlisted. Or listed in his wife’s name, as there were plenty of Weiders scattered throughout Chicagoland. Should she call them all?

The library had computers available, but you had to sign up, and there was a long list ahead of her. She found an Internet café and searched for Graham Weider Illinois and came up empty.

A guy hit on her in the Internet café. Her frustration must have been showing, because his approach was, “You know, whatever you’re looking for, I bet I could help you find it.” He had a couple of piercings, along with a rattlesnake flag tattoo with the traditional Don’t Tread On Me updated to Don’t Y’all Fuck With Me. Not an improvement, she thought, but maybe it was supposed to be ironic. He was the sort of young man for whom irony was a sort of default setting.

“We’ll never know,” she said, and his expression suggested that he enjoyed the put-down more than anything an acceptance might have led to. That was almost enough to make her change her mind, but not really. Better to take the tattoo’s advice.

If only she knew something about Graham Weider besides his name.

His employer, for instance. It was a corporation, and he must have mentioned its name, but if it had ever registered on her memory, time had long since pressed the Delete key.

And she couldn’t just call firms at random. Even if she limited herself to Fortune 500 corporations, how many of them had Chicago offices? Four hundred? Four-fifty?

No, that wouldn’t work. But his New York hotel would probably have his business address on file, and that would let her know where he worked.

If only she could remember the hotel.

Well, it was somewhere in New York, specifically somewhere in midtown Manhattan. And it was a first-rate hotel, not some budget bargain spot. But which one?

Why the hell couldn’t she remember? She’d been there, for God’s sake, and not once but twice — once when he took her to his room and fucked her, and another time when he stood her up and she went to the front desk looking for him. And he’d left a note for her, on a piece of hotel stationery, but of course she hadn’t kept it.

Dammit anyway. She could remember standing in the lobby, reading the note. She could even recall the supercilious look on the face of the desk clerk.

Or was that some other snotty clerk, in some other hotel on some other occasion? Or was it all just her imagination trying to fill in the blanks?

Graham Weider, she thought. Graham Weider from Chicago, not Joe Blow from Kokomo. Why was he giving her so much trouble?

She tried the phone again, working her way through the Weiders. More often than not she’d get a machine, and rang off without leaving a message. The Weiders she managed to reach had never heard of a Graham Weider. “How does he spell it?” one of them asked her, and she started in: “G, R, A—” and was interrupted. “No, Weider,” the woman said. “There are different spellings, you know.”

And that sent her off on a whole new tangent, checking all the area phone directories, looking for Wieder and Wheider and Weeder and Weidter and every other permutation she could think of. A couple of them had the initial G, which triggered some fruitless phone calls, but nothing led anywhere useful.

She gave up on the Weiders, however they spelled their names, and thought about giving up on Graham altogether. Then she remembered something she’d read about Thomas Edison, and how he’d invented the lightbulb. It didn’t just form over his head, as in a cartoon; it took hundreds upon hundreds of experiments, in which the inventor and his assistants employed one material after another in an effort to find a workable filament, one that would glow when electric current ran through it without burning up or out in the process.

At one point, someone consoled Edison for his lack of progress. And he replied that he was making wonderful progress, that he had already discovered umpteen hundred substances that would not work.

That was inspiring, all right, but she couldn’t see that it led anywhere. She went out and walked for a while, stopped for a late-afternoon cappuccino at a little coffeehouse that billed itself as “the anti-Starbucks,” and sat there wondering how she’d come upon the Edison anecdote, and whether or not he’d actually ever said it.

And then, remarkably, a lightbulb, complete with tungsten filament, formed above her own head.

There were a great many Weiders, spelled one way or another, living in or near Chicago, and most of them didn’t answer the phone, and the ones who did were no help at all. And how many Fortune 500 companies were there? That question was right up there with Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? and What color is orange juice? There were 500 of them, far too many to call, and there was no guarantee that Graham Weider’s employer was on that list in the first place.

But there were far fewer A-list hotels in midtown Manhattan. And, no matter what time of day she called, there’d be somebody there to answer the phone.

She went back to the Internet café and pulled all the midtown four-star hotels from the hotels.com site, then found a quiet bench in Lincoln Park and worked her way down the list from the top. “Hi, my name’s Susan Richardson and I’m on the organizing committee for the upcoming class reunion for Oak Park High. It’s my job to track down the graduates we’ve lost track of, and one of our class members, well, about the only thing anyone could come up with was that he always stays at your establishment on business trips to New York. So I was wondering—”

The people she talked to were remarkably cooperative. Maybe it was the wholly frivolous nature of her request; she had the feeling they’d have made less of an effort if she’d claimed an urgent business reason to establish contact with Graham Weider, but how could they resist something as pointless as a high school reunion?

And perhaps it was their positive attitude that sustained her when the first ten hotels were unable to find Graham Weider in their records. Ten more failed filaments, she thought. Ten steps closer to success.

Her eleventh call was to the Sofitel on West 44th, and this time the lightbulb blazed like the sun.

It took her an hour to pack and check out of her hotel, and most of another hour to get through traffic to O’Hare. She ate a Caesar salad and drank a bottle of iced green tea while she waited for her flight to Seattle, which was just as well, because all they gave her on the plane was a cup of truly bad coffee and a tiny packet of trail mix.

It was early evening when they landed at Sea-Tac. She picked up her suitcase at Baggage Claim and caught a cab to the Heathman Hotel in Kirkland, right across from the library and a block from Peter Kirk Park.

She’d booked a room earlier, and it was ready for her. It was spacious and tastefully appointed, and you could see the park from her window. She’d stayed at the Heathman in Portland once, so she wasn’t surprised at how nice it was, but her enjoyment was tempered somewhat by the knowledge that she couldn’t afford a long stay. Even a single night was a questionable luxury, and you could say the same for the cab ride from the airport. There was almost certainly a bus that would have made the trip for thirty dollars less, not even counting the tip, and it wasn’t as though it hadn’t occurred to her. But she’d been worn out from the travel and keyed up at the prospect of finally finding Graham Weider, and she couldn’t be bothered by the need to watch the pennies.

But she’d have to start doing just that.

She’d had a lot of expenses lately and zero income. She always paid cash for everything, wanting to avoid a paper trail, and that included airline tickets and hotels. She’d had what seemed like plenty of cash when she left Denver, but it was going fast, and she’d missed an opportunity in Phoenix. Stenchful Steve was the sort of man who’d keep a lot of cash on his person, and she’d never even checked his pants for a wallet. That was a mistake, and so was her failure to clean out the cash register. Between the two, she’d left hundreds of dollars behind, maybe even thousands.

A hell of a price to pay, just because she’d felt in urgent need of a shower.

“Graham Weider, Graham Weider, Graham Weider,” said Bob, the cheerful fellow at Sofitel New York. “Now he was a regular a few years ago, wasn’t he? And then he stopped coming. I hope we didn’t do anything to alienate his affections.”

“I understand he was based in Chicago then,” she ventured.

“Let’s just see. Willoughby & Kessel, State Street, in the heart of the Windy City. So-called not because of the wind from the lake but the legendary verbosity of its politicians. But you’d know that, wouldn’t you? Oak Park High and all that.”

She actually hadn’t known that, nor did she know if there really was an Oak Park High.

“Oh, lookie here! If he got ticked off at us, he must have gotten over it, because here he is just four months ago for three days, and again for three days the following month. But he’s no longer with Willoughby & Kessel.”

“I hope he didn’t do anything to alienate their affections.”

“If so, the aftershocks sent him clear out of Chicago. His current employer is Barling Industries, whoever they may be, in Kirkland, Washington.”

Barling Industries, whoever they might be, housed their operations in a concrete-block cube set in an industrial park on the eastern edge of Kirkland. And Graham Weider, whoever he might be these days, lived in a modest ranch house on a skimpily landscaped half-acre lot less than a mile from his office. She obtained both addresses from the phone book in her hotel room, and filled in the descriptions by spending some more of her cash on a taxi. The taciturn driver, an Asian immigrant with a much better grasp of the local geography than the English language, returned her at length to the Heathman, where she packed up and checked out.

She sat in the park with a PennySaver and checked the rental classifieds against a street map. Some of the more promising listings were a ways to the south, near Northwest College, but she found a woman with a room to rent within walking distance of both Barling Industries and Graham Weider’s residence. She called and made an appointment to come see the room, then studied the map and figured out how to get there by bus. It was complicated, but she didn’t feel like springing for another cab.

The house, she discovered, was very much like the one Weider inhabited, a compact ranch with a brick façade and white clapboard siding. Weider’s had black trim and shutters, while this house was trimmed in forest green. And the shrubbery here had had more time to establish itself.

Rita Perrin, whose house it was, appeared at first glance to be as safely suburban as her house. If you looked a second time, something in her eyes suggested there might be a little more to her than that. She was a few years older than her prospective tenant, and a little fuller in the breasts and hips. She was alone now, she explained, and the house was really too big for one person. There were three bedrooms, but she thought two housemates would be too much, and besides she could use the smallest bedroom as a home office, and had in fact set it up that way.

The second bedroom was clean and airy, and looked out on the garden. A month’s rent, with kitchen and living room privileges, would cost her a few dollars less than a two-night stay at the Heathman. “And the garage will hold a second car,” Rita said, “as soon as we move some of my stuff out of the way.”

She explained that she didn’t have a car, and didn’t plan to get one. She’d already established that she was in a doctoral program at the University of Washington, that she’d finished her course work and needed a quiet place to work on her thesis.

“And you didn’t have a car at the U? You’ll probably want one here.”

She’d grown up in New York City, she explained, and had never learned to drive.

“I was going to say you could borrow mine until you get one of your own, but if you never learned—”

It might be handy to borrow Rita’s car. She had a license, but it didn’t match the name she’d already given Rita. Easier to let it go.

“You know what you could do, Kim? There’s a bicycle in the garage. I never use it, I was planning on donating it to the next rummage sale. You’re welcome to the use of it. Uh, I’ve never actually been to New York. Do people there ride bikes?”

Indeed they do, she thought. The wrong way on one-way streets, and on sidewalks, and sailing through red lights. “I can’t remember the last time I was on a bike,” she told Rita. “But I guess it’s not something you forget how to do.”

“Oh, that’s what they say,” Rita assured her. “Like swimming, isn’t that what they say?”

Or drowning, she thought.

A little after five she told Rita she was going for a walk to clear her head. She headed for Graham Weider’s house, and passed a supermarket about halfway to her destination. Good — she would stop on her way home, so that she wouldn’t have to walk a mile every time she wanted something to eat.

She didn’t have any trouble finding her way, and got there by 5:30. If his workday was nine to five, and if he came straight home when he was done at the office, she would probably be on time to see him arrive. Unless he stopped for a drink, or visited a mistress, or was out of town altogether, staying at the equivalent of Sofitel New York in St. Louis or Detroit or Baltimore.

There were lights on in his house, and the picture window showed a TV screen, almost large enough for her to make out the images from across the street. That was where she stationed herself, and she would stand in one spot for a few minutes, then glance at her watch and walk a dozen yards in one direction, then return a few minutes later. The impression, she hoped, was one of a woman waiting for a friend to pick her up. That would do, although it would be even better if no one took any notice of her in the first place.

His lawn needed mowing. It wasn’t wildly overgrown, but the grass in front of the Weider house was noticeably longer than the adjacent lawns. So Graham mowed his lawn, but not as frequently as he might. What else did her view tell her about him?

Well, duh, he was a daddy. Either that or he had curious taste in transportation for a grown man, because there was a child’s tricycle at the side of the driveway.

That wasn’t much. Maybe she’d know more when she got a look at him.

She searched her memory, couldn’t picture the man. She wondered if he’d even look familiar.

Graham Weider’s suburban street didn’t get a lot of traffic, and each time a car approached she took note of it, and waited to see if it would turn into his driveway. Shortly after six o’clock, when the metallic green Subaru squareback came into view, she knew immediately that it was him. And sure enough, the car slowed as it neared the driveway. There was an unaccompanied man at the wheel, but she couldn’t make out his features, and when the garage door rose at his command she despaired of getting a better look at him.

The Subaru made the turn, then stopped halfway to the garage. The driver emerged to walk around the back of the car and wheel the tricycle into the garage. Then he returned to the Subaru, and a moment later it and its driver were out of sight behind the descending garage door.

That told her something about the man’s character. He had plenty of clearance, he could have left the tricycle where it was and driven directly into the garage. She couldn’t jump to any conclusions about his nature on the basis of that action because for all she knew he’d now enter the house screaming, “Mary, why can’t you keep the little bastard’s bike out of the fucking driveway?” But that seemed unlikely, given the air of calm acceptance he’d projected clear across the street.

But none of that really amounted to anything. The little bastard’s bike had played a more important role from her own singular point of view. Because it had given her a good look at the little bastard’s father, full face and profile, and she recognized him. Graham Weider, now of Kirkland, Washington, but once a Chicagoan in New York, who’d shared a bed with her for an hour or so and then been so inconsiderate as to skip town before she could finish what she’d started.

She stopped at the supermarket on the way home, careful not to buy more than she could carry, but the bag boy automatically placed her groceries in her shopping cart. No one came here on foot, she realized, and everybody wheeled their purchases to their cars.

She followed the cart all the way home.

What they said seemed to be true: You didn’t forget how to ride a bicycle.

She rode Rita’s the next morning to Barling Industries. The parking lot was unattended, and she was able to stash her bike between a couple of minivans and walk around in search of Weider’s Subaru. She’d had a good look at the license plate while he moved the tricycle, and made a point of memorizing the first three digits, so she knew his car when she came upon it.

So he was here. Somewhere within the concrete-block cube, doing whatever it was they paid him to do, so he in turn could go on paying the mortgage on the nice little suburban house and buy the kid a real bike when he was ready to step up from the tricycle.

Now what?

A thought, unbidden: What she could do, and it would be simplicity itself, was forget all about Graham Weider. What did the man who moved the tricycle have to do with the man who’d taken her to lunch and to bed? Why remain committed to this curious mission to purge the planet of her past and future lovers? He had a kid, he lived in the suburbs, and what did he have to do with her, or she with him?

She pushed the thought away. This is what I do, she told herself. This is who I am.

She got on her bike, rode away, rode around. And was back in the Barling lot by noon. This time she stationed herself where she could see both his car and the employee entrance, and she spotted him right away when he left the building in the company of another man. They both wore shirts and ties, but they’d left their suit jackets inside.

They walked to the Subaru, got in, and drove off. Two fellow workers, she decided, on their way to a casual lunch. She could follow, but only if Rita’s bike were jet-propelled.

So? What was she supposed to do now, hang around and wait for him to come back, then follow him home and watch him move the tricycle again?

She hopped on her bike, headed for home.

Saturday morning she took a bus to Seattle and found her way to Spy Shoppe, a retail firm with a showroom one flight above a sporting goods store. Spy Shoppe worked both sides of the espionage avenue, offering a wide range of eavesdropping gadgets and just as wide a range of devices made to foil them. Want to tap a phone? Want to know if your phone is tapped? They were like international arms dealers, she thought, cheerfully peddling weapons to opposing factions.

The gear they had on offer was so fascinating it was hard to stay focused on her reason for being there. The salesman was a prototypical geek, all Buddy Holly glasses and Adam’s apple, perfectly happy to show off for her. There was a homing device to be attached to a car’s bumper, and she asked about that, and learned how it worked.

But it was pretty expensive, and that was just the beginning. Then you’d need something to pick up the signal and locate it for you, and that was more expensive by the time you put the whole package together, and then where were you? You could find out where he and his friend were lunching, and if you pedaled like crazy on your bike, you might get there before they finished their second cup of coffee.

Pointless, really.

Of course, she could get everything she needed for free. All she had to do was date the geek.

That was something that didn’t even occur to her until he cleared his throat and stammered and looked at his feet, and blurted out that his work day ended at six, and that maybe they could meet for coffee, his treat, and uh talk about things and uh—

“Well, I could meet you,” she said, “but then I’d have to kill you.”

He stared at her, puzzled, until he figured out that it was a joke. And laughed accordingly.

Sunday afternoon she went to a movie, and when she got home Rita had dinner on the table, with two places set. “It’s easier cooking for two than for one,” she said, “so I took a chance. I hope you haven’t eaten.”

The meal was meatloaf and mashed potatoes and creamed corn, comfort food, and she let herself enjoy it, and Rita’s company. Afterward they sat in front of the TV and told stories of their childhoods. Her own were improvised, but she figured Rita’s were probably true.

She wondered what Rita would do if she made a pass at her.

And wondered where that thought had come from. She’d never been with another woman herself, although she’d thought about it from time to time. Never very seriously, though, and she wasn’t giving it serious consideration now, but it did raise some questions. For instance, would it count? Would she feel the same need to wipe the slate clean afterward?

Monday morning she didn’t get to the Barling lot until 11:45. It wasn’t until 12:20 that she spotted him, and for a change he was all by himself. He headed for his car, and she began walking in that direction herself. Oh, aren’t you Graham Weider? A chance meeting in a parking lot where she had no reason to be. No, she thought, maybe not.

She stopped walking and watched as he got into his car and drove off. He was wearing a jacket this time. It was at least as warm as it had been the other times she’d watched him head off to lunch, and previously he’d always gone in shirtsleeves, so what would Sherlock make of that?

A lunch date with someone from outside the company. A business associate? A golf or tennis partner? Or, just possibly, a lady friend?

If she had a car she could follow him. If someone had just left a key in their ignition—

Oh, please. What were the odds of that? No point in looking, and couldn’t she come up with a better way?

She got out her phone, punched in numbers, found a way around Voice Mail. To the woman who answered she said, “Is Graham Weider there? I missed him? I was afraid of that. I’ve got something he needs for his meeting and I was supposed to drop it at the restaurant, but I can’t remember... Yes, of course, that’s it. Thanks, thanks so much, you’ve been very helpful. And could you please not tell him I had to call? He’ll think I’m an idiot.”

It took fifteen minutes of hard pedaling to get her to the Cattle Baron, a strip mall steak house that didn’t look very baronial from the outside. Was she dressed for it? Could she leave her bike and expect it to be there later? And, after all that bicycling, did she smell?

She brushed the questions aside and entered the restaurant. She spotted Weider right away in a corner booth with three companions, all of them men in suits. Which made it easier, really, than if he were with a woman.

She told the maitre d’ a friend would be joining her, and he put her at a table for two. She ordered a white wine spritzer, then went straight to the restroom to freshen up and put on lipstick. She checked, and her underarms passed the sniff test. While she didn’t exactly feel like an Irish Spring commercial, neither was she likely to knock a buzzard off a slaughterhouse wagon.

She headed for her table, then did a double take when she caught sight of the four men in the corner. She hesitated, then walked directly to their booth. They all looked at her, but she looked only at Weider.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but aren’t you Graham Weider?”

He hesitated, clearly not knowing who she was, and the man sitting next to him said, “If he’s not, ma’am, then I am. I’m sure I’d make just as good a Graham Weider as he ever could.”

“It’s been a few years,” she said. “And I only met you briefly, so you’re forgiven if you don’t remember my name.” Or, clearly, anything else about me. “It’s Kim.”

She had no idea what name she might have used when she was with him. She’d become Kim when she moved into Rita’s house, so it was simplest all around to remain Kim with Graham Weider. And it would be an easy name for him to remember. Though not, she trusted, for very long.

“Kim,” he said, as if testing a foreign word on his tongue. He had a gratifying deer-in-the-headlights look.

“I don’t want to take any more of your time,” she said, “but do you have a card? I’d love to call you and catch up.”

She gave each of them a smile, especially the one who’d volunteered to take Weider’s place. He was cute, and he’d be about as hard to get as coffee at Starbucks. How tough would it be to fuck him in the restroom and leave him dead in a stall?

Without returning to her table, she caught up with her waitress and gave her enough money to cover the drink. She’d had a phone call, she explained, and her lunch partner had to cancel, so she was going straight on to her next meeting.

Her bike was right where she’d left it. There was a hardware story right there on the strip mall, and she went in and bought a bicycle lock. Just to be on the safe side.

She didn’t really need his card. She already knew how to reach him at his office. But if she called him without having been given his number, she’d look for all the world like a stalker.

Which, come to think of it, she was.

She called him late that afternoon, caught him before he left for the day. “It’s Kim,” she said, “and I want to apologize. I never should have barged in while you were with other people. But it was such a surprise to run into you after all those years.”

“I’d like to catch up,” he said, “but I’m not sure—”

“That the phone’s the best way to do it? I feel the same way, believe me. Why don’t we have lunch tomorrow?”

“Lunch?”

“My treat,” she said. “You bought me lunch last time. So it’s my turn. But I’m new in the area. Can you suggest a place?”

The restaurant was Italian, its Mulberry Street décor of checkered tablecloths and straw-covered Chianti bottles at odds with its strip mall location. She’d allowed herself half an hour to get there and made it with seven minutes to spare. After she’d stashed Rita’s bike and locked it, she used the restroom at a convenience store, checked her makeup, freshened her lipstick. She entered the restaurant right on time, and he was at one of the three occupied tables, a cup of coffee at his elbow.

He got to his feet when he caught sight of her. He was wearing a jacket and tie, and — no surprise — a wary expression. A handsome man, she noted, and felt a little quiver of anticipatory excitement. This was going to be fun, she thought, and it would end well, too.

He had a hand extended, but instead of shaking it she gripped his forearm with both hands and leaned forward, giving him no real choice but to kiss her cheek and breathe in her scent.

“Well,” she said, and held his eyes for a moment. Then she sat down, and so did he, and he asked her if she’d like a drink. “If you’re having one,” she said.

“Just coffee for me.”

“That sounds good.”

He signaled the waiter, and he asked if she’d had trouble finding the place. She said she hadn’t, but managed to tell him she’d come by bicycle. Isn’t that crazy? Some idiot hit my car and I can’t get a loaner while it’s in the shop, so I’ve been getting around on a bicycle.

Then the waiter brought her coffee and refilled Graham’s cup and left them alone, and after a thoughtful silence he said, “When exactly did we—”

“It was a few years ago. I was living in New York, and you were there on business. You were with Willoughby & Kessel, and you were staying at the Sofitel.”

“That’s where I always stayed.”

“I can see why,” she said. “You had a lovely room.”

“I guess we did more than have lunch.”

“I’ll say.”

He took a sip of coffee. “I won’t pretend I recognized you,” he said, “but when I saw you I had the sense that we’d been, uh, intimate.”

“We had lunch and went back to your room. Then you had to go to a meeting, and we arranged to meet again later that day. But you didn’t show up, and left a note for me at the desk. You had to fly somewhere.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “I remember now.”

“Well, good, Graham. I thought that might trigger your memory. I figured it was either that or show you my tits.”

She thought that would get a smile. Instead his face darkened, and he reached again for his coffee cup, the way a person might reach for a real drink.

And, while she didn’t realize it yet, that pretty much explained everything.

“In those days,” he said, “I was doing a lot of drinking.”

Was he? “I guess you had a drink or two with lunch,” she said. “I don’t think it affected you.”

“Oh, it affected me.”

“Not back at the Sofitel it didn’t. Not in the performance department.”

“Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. I guess that must have been a good day.”

“A very good day,” she said.

He colored. “This is hard for me,” he said.

It was certainly hard for me, she thought. But she left the words unvoiced, sensing that double entendre was not what the situation called for.

“I was married then,” he said.

She glanced at his ring. “So? You’re married now.”

“Different lady.”

“Ah.”

“See, I drank my way out of my first marriage.”

“And into a second one?”

He shook his head. He hadn’t even met his second wife until a full year after he’d stopped drinking. First his marriage ended, then his career went into the toilet, and eventually he found his way to rehab.

“To stop drinking,” she said.

“Well, that was the first rehab. For drinking.”

“There was a second?”

He nodded. “It turned out drinking was the symptom. The second rehab addressed the real problem.”

“And what was that?”

“Sexual compulsivity. I was addicted to sex.”

“Maybe that’s why you were so good at it.”

Most men would have taken that as a compliment, but he recoiled from it as if from a blow.

“It almost killed me,” he said. “I was lucky. I went through rehab for it, and I joined SCA, and—”

“SCA?”

“Sexual Compulsives Anonymous.”

After the waiter took their orders — pasta and a salad for both — he told her his story in more detail than she really required, and she found herself boiling it down to a single long sentence: I used to drink and I used to smoke and I used to gamble and I used to fuck around and now I don’t do any of these things but instead lead this glorious rich fulfilling life of fidelity and sobriety and moral decency and utter unremitting stifling boredom.

“I guess that explains the coffee,” she said.

“Uh-huh. But there’s no reason you can’t have a drink if you want one.”

“And risk an arrest for drunken bicycling? No, I’m fine with coffee. SCA, huh? Are their meetings like AA? Do you tell each other all the things you used to do in the good old days?”

“We tell our stories,” he said, “but it’s a little different, because we have to guard against getting off on what we tell, or what we hear. So the stories are intentionally vague. ‘I acted out with a partner, I acted out alone, I acted out with a group—’ ”

“ ‘I acted out with two nuns and a sheep.’ I was thinking that the meetings might be fun, but you nipped that little fantasy in the bud. So you used to act out and now you don’t, and I gather you’re happily married, and did you say you’ve got a kid?”

He nodded. “And speaking of bicycles, he’s learning to ride one.”

It’s a tricycle, and he still hasn’t learned to put it in the garage. But of course she couldn’t say that.

The food came, and he said he knew she’d offered to buy him lunch, but it was going to have to be on him. This, he said, would be a small way of making it up to her for the way he’d treated her in New York, back in the bad old days.

“You treated me fine,” she said.

“I was acting out sexually, and I exploited you.”

“Acting out? Whatever it was you were doing, I was doing it, too. And I must have enjoyed it, and felt just fine about it, or I wouldn’t have hit on you yesterday.”

“You weren’t hitting on me.”

“Yes I was,” she said. “It’s what I’m doing now, too. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Kim—”

“I know you’re attracted to me. Aren’t you?”

“You’re a very attractive woman.”

“And you’re an extremely attractive man, and if there weren’t other people around I’d be under the table with your cock in my mouth. You used to like that, and I’ll bet you still do.”

“We shouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Why not? Graham, I know you, I know what you like. Are you going to try pretending you don’t enjoy having your cock sucked?”

He just looked at her. He was getting hard, she could tell. And something came back to her, some rush of memory from out of nowhere.

“You wanted to fuck me in the ass! That’s what you promised me, when you went off to your meeting. We’d meet for dinner and come back to the room, and you’d have plenty of lube on hand, and you’d fuck me up my ass.” She looked at him levelly, licked her lips. “See? If you want to make it up to me, that’d be a good place to start. You owe me.”

The son of a bitch was hopeless. He went to AA meetings and SCA meetings, so no wonder he didn’t have time to mow his lawn. SCA might have been fun if there was a decent amount of backsliding involved, but he took it seriously, the idiot, and he took his wedding vows seriously, especially the part about forsaking all others.

It infuriated her, and she was on the verge of losing it when she caught hold of herself. No point in cursing the fish when it wouldn’t take the bait. More effective to reel in and try again.

“I’m sorry, Graham,” she said. “I guess I’m not used to rejection. It’s not something I get a lot of.”

“I’m not rejecting you, Kim. It’s just—”

“I understand. You’d actually love to fuck me, but you won’t let yourself. Because it doesn’t fit with your new life.”

“I might not have phrased it quite that way. But that’s close enough.”

“So now we’ll go our separate ways,” she said. “Will you think about me when you masturbate?”

He flushed deeply.

“I get it,” she said. “You don’t do that anymore either, right?”

“It’s a form of acting out,” he said, “that we don’t encourage.”

“We meaning SCA?”

He nodded.

“I’m glad I’m not a member,” she said, “because I have to tell you, Graham, I’m gonna have my hands full tonight. I’ll put on some music and I’ll get out my sex toys and I’ll imagine all the things you and I aren’t gonna do to each other. Oh, is this conversation making you uncomfortable?”

“I think you know it is.”

“Well, if you get all worked up, you can go home and knock off a good one with Wifey. The two of you do have sex, don’t you?”

“Of course we do.”

“You’ll be thinking of me,” she said.

“That’s not true.”

“It’s not? Oh, I think it is. You’ll be inside your precious wife, in whatever position’s ordinary enough so that it doesn’t come under the heading of ‘acting out,’ but in your mind you’ll be doing me in the ass. You’ll be hotter than a forest fire and she’ll wonder what got into you, and in the morning you’ll be all racked with guilt and have to go to a meeting to confess your sins to your buddies. But you won’t dare be too specific about it, or they’d all get hot and the meeting would turn into one big circle jerk. Which, now that I think about it, would be a big improvement all around.”

Well, gee, she’d lost it after all, hadn’t she?

Rita was cooking something. The aroma, richly inviting, caught her up when she opened the door.

She’d prowled around restlessly all afternoon. First a movie at a mall theater, where she kept changing her seat. That was easy enough, the theater was weekday-afternoon empty, but she couldn’t find a seat that wasn’t too near or too far from the screen, couldn’t let herself get into the story, and finally couldn’t remain in the theater for longer than forty minutes.

She stalked out, then roamed the mall, walking in and out of stores and up and down aisles. She didn’t need anything, didn’t want to buy anything, but she tried on a pair of jeans in one boutique and flirted with a cellphone salesman in the Radio Shack. It occurred to her to take him in back, to an office or rest room, and scratch the itch that Graham Weider had inflicted. Blow him, fuck him, whatever. And then kill him, but with what? There might be something in the back, a pair of heavy-duty scissors, a letter opener, a heavy glass ashtray to hit him with. No, not an ashtray, because smoking wouldn’t be allowed, but maybe a desk lamp, maybe a paperweight.

Could you count on finding something? No, of course you couldn’t. And the guy was a doofus anyway, built full in the hips, and he waddled like a penguin, and she didn’t really want to do him in the first place. She wanted to do Graham Weider, and she couldn’t, the bastard had turned her down, and the way her luck was running today she’d get the same reception from the penguin, and she wasn’t sure she could take it.

She got out of there. And found another store to walk into, and walk out of.

And now she was back home, and Rita was telling her that she hoped Kim hadn’t eaten, because the only way the Beef Bourguignon recipe worked was if you cooked enough for four, so—

“It smells terrific,” she said, “and no, I haven’t eaten. In fact I didn’t have much of a lunch. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, how’s that?”

She hopped on her bike and rode to a liquor store she’d noted earlier. What did you drink with Beef Bourguignon? The clerk, who couldn’t keep his eyes off her tits, recommended a Nuits-Saint-Georges or a Chateauneuf du Pape. The Nuits-Saint-Georges was two dollars cheaper, and that made the decision for her.

Pull the clerk into the back room? The look on his face suggested he wouldn’t put up much of a struggle, and afterward the wine bottle would serve as a handy blunt instrument. He was all alone in the store, so she could go through the register on her way out, and very likely pocket a few hundred bucks for her trouble. And then she could take the murder weapon home and share its contents with her landlady, and that had a certain undeniable appeal.

Oh, get over it, will you?

She got on her bike and headed for home.

The wine made quite an impression on Rita. “Oh, I bought wine,” she said, “but nothing anywhere near this good. I picked up a half-gallon of California red and used half of it in the stew, thinking we’d drink the rest with the meal. But we have to have yours, it’s a Burgundy, it should be perfect with Beef Bourguignon.”

As indeed it was. The meal was simple, just the main course and a salad, and she hadn’t eaten since she stormed out of the Italian place in the middle of lunch, and Rita had prepared a superb meal. She had the radio tuned to an Easy Listening station, and the conversation stayed comfortably superficial until they were about halfway through the bottle of Nuits-Saint-Georges.

Then, complimenting the meal again, she said that this was turning out to be an acceptable day after all.

“You had a bad day, Kim?”

Could she talk about it? She’d have to drop the central element, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk around it a little.

“I’ve been running around like a bitch in heat,” she said. “I’ve been so damned horny all day I could scream. I probably shouldn’t be talking like that—”

“Oh, I’ve heard worse.” Rita raised her wine glass. “And had days like that myself. A lot of them, actually.”

“Maybe it’s the bike,” she said. “All that low-grade stimulation in that general area.”

“The vibration and all.”

She reached for the wine bottle, filled Rita’s glass, then her own. “Here’s to vibration,” she said.

“You said it.”

“Speaking of which,” she said, “that’s what I should have bought. I kept walking in and out of mall stores, and never buying a thing. Maybe that’s what I was really looking for.”

“A vibrator?”

“Uh-huh. The one I had gave up the ghost after years of loyal service. God, will you listen to me? This wine must be having an effect.”

“It’s the company,” Rita said. “I have the feeling you and I can say things to each other that neither of us could say to anybody else.”

That had to be the wine talking, she thought. On the other hand, wasn’t there supposed to be truth in wine?

“Not that I absolutely have to have a vibrator,” she found herself saying. She raised her hand, wiggled her fingers. “I come prepared. And, as far as that goes, I’m prepared to come.”

“Kim, you’re a riot!”

“Well, why pretend the evening’s going to end with prayer and meditation? When the wine’s gone I’m going to hole up in my bedroom and treat myself to an orgasm that’ll make the walls shake. And I might as well tell you about it, Rita, because you’ll probably hear me. I tend to make a little noise when I get off.”

“Oh? Did you hear me the night before last?”

“No.”

“It’s probably just as well.”

“Oh?”

“Can I tell you? I probably shouldn’t. But—”

“Oh, come on, Rita. Don’t be a tease.”

“Maybe if I have another glass of wine. Oh, the bottle’s empty. Do you think we could switch to the jug wine? It’ll be a disappointment after the Nooee — I don’t know how to pronounce it.”

“The French stuff.”

“That’s it, the French stuff.”

“And at this point it’ll taste fine, Rita. We’re past the point of being able to tell the difference.”

“I think you’re right. Well, here’s to the French, and the wonderful things they come up with.”

“God, I’ll drink to that.” She did, and said, “This tastes fine to me. And now you can tell me about the night before last.”

“Oh God. Well, okay. I was on the phone.”

“With—?”

“Someone I met on the Internet, except I didn’t ever actually meet him. I got his number, and I call him, and we give each other phone sex.”

“How does that work?”

“Well, you know.”

“Rita—”

“We talk dirty.”

“Like ‘I want to eat your pussy, I want to suck your cock’? Like that?”

“Some of that. More like telling stories.”

“Things you did.”

“Except they’re partly made up. Mine are, anyway, and I’m pretty sure his are, too. Not over the top, like pornography, because it’s more exciting if it’s realistic enough so that you can believe it.”

“And he’ll tell you a story while you—”

“Pleasure myself. Pretty pathetic, huh?”

“It sounds hot.”

“You think?”

“I’m getting hot thinking about it,” she said. “You’ve got his voice in your ear and your fingers in your pussy. You bet it’s hot.”

Rita giggled. “One problem,” she said. “Can you guess?”

“You can only use one hand.”

“That’s right! Omigod, how did you guess it so fast?”

“It just came to me. What’s the matter with Speakerphone?”

“I’ve only got it on the kitchen phone. Anyway, you wouldn’t want the whole room echoing with it, would you?”

“I see what you mean.”

“It’s nicer to have his voice right there in my ear.”

“And your finger right there in your cunt. Ooops, I said the C word, didn’t I?”

“I love the C word! It’s supposed to be disgusting and demeaning to women, but I just don’t get that at all. Cunt, cunt, cunt! Could anybody ever come up with a hotter word than that? Just saying it is getting me hot.”

“I may not be the only one who ends the evening jilling off.”

“Jilling — oh, like jacking off but for girls! God, I never heard that before. No, you won’t be the only one, Kimmie.”

Kimmie?

“In fact, I was trying to think of a way to offer you the use of my vibrator.”

“But you’re going to need it yourself.”

“I’m going to need something.”

“Will you call your friend?”

“My friend? Oh, Paul. If that’s his name, which I’m sure it isn’t, any more than mine is Justine. I wouldn’t dream of giving him my real name, so why should he give me his?”

“And you call him?”

“In other words, can’t he get my number and trace me that way? I bought one of those prepaid phones. Lots of luck tracing the number.”

“You bought it just for phone sex?”

“God, doesn’t that make me sound like a pervert.”

“More like a femme fatale.”

“A femme fatale! Much better. But no, I won’t call him tonight. You know what he wanted me to do? Call him on Skype. It’s like a phone call except you do it online, so you can see each other on your computers. No way I’m gonna do that.”

“You don’t want to see him?”

“On the phone,” Rita said, “he looks just the way I want him to look. And I look however he wants to picture me. But it’s more than that. I couldn’t possibly say the things I want to say if I’ve got him looking me in the eye. So I’ll stick to the phone, but not tonight, because I won’t need him. My cunt’s on fire already.”

“I see what you mean about the C word.”

“I know, isn’t it just the cuntiest word there is? I can’t believe it, we finished the wine.”

“I don’t feel drunk or anything.”

“No, neither do I. I just feel good.”

“Me too.”

“And hot.”

“Well, I told you what I’ve been like all day long. But then it just felt frustrating, and now it feels kind of nice.”

“I know what you mean, Kimmie.” A sigh. “So I guess we ought to go to our separate rooms and pretend we can’t hear each other moaning.”

“Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“We could give each other phone sex,” she said, “but without the phone.”

“How would that work?”

“It’s not something I’ve ever done, Rita, and I can’t imagine ever doing it with anybody else—”

“And?”

“Suppose instead of going into separate rooms,” she said, “we both sat in the living room. And we could tell each other stories, but real ones, you know? Things we did that were hot.”

“And touched ourselves.”

“Right.”

“Played with our cunts. Our own cunts, I mean. ’Cause I don’t think—”

“No, I wouldn’t be up for that myself.”

“Good, because neither would I. Did you ever—?”

“With another girl? No, never.”

“Neither did I.”

“Though I’ll admit there were times I thought about it.”

“Oh, how could you help it? But thinking and doing—”

“Two different things.”

“Exactly. But telling stories and getting each other off that way — Kimmie, we’ve just got to try it.”

“I know.”

“I can almost come just from the idea of it, you know? Kimmie — God, I should have asked, is it all right if I call you Kimmie?”

“Sure.”

“Do lots of people call you that?”

“You’re the first.”

“Honestly? And you’re sure you don’t mind?”

“I kind of like it.”

“Rhymes with gimme.”

“I was thinking that.”

“ ‘Gimme, Kimmie.’ You know what let’s do? Let’s put on nightgowns, because I wouldn’t want us to be naked, but we ought to have—”

“Access.”

“Exactly!”

“Except I don’t own a nightgown.”

“You don’t? So you’ll wear one of mine. It’ll be a little big on you, but that shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Not at all.”

“And borrowing one of my nightgowns isn’t quite like using my vibrator.”

“And sticking it up my cunt.”

“Oh, God, stop it! You’re just saying that word because you know what it does to me.”

“After working there for one hour, I knew two things for certain. One, I couldn’t stand the raw animal stink of that man. Every breath I took felt like I was putting something filthy in my lungs. And two, I was going to have sex with him. The smell might be making me sick to my stomach, but it was sending a message straight to my clit. Nothing on earth was going to keep me from fucking him.”

They were in the living room, curled up in armchairs on opposite sides of the marble-topped coffee table. Their shortie nightgowns were identical except for color; Rita’s was shell-pink, hers apricot. They’d sat there for a few minutes, lamenting that the wine was finished, agreeing that they didn’t really need any more of it, and anticipating the rest of the evening with edgy excitement.

Rita’s vibrator sat on the coffee table. Rita had switched it on to check the batteries, and it hummed softly for a few seconds before she silenced it. It was the exact color of its owner’s nightie, a simple pink cylinder with nothing specifically penis-like about it aside from its overall shape. That made it less blatant than some anatomically-correct device with a glans and veins, but it was right there where either of them could reach out and take hold of it.

Rita’s legs showed clear to the tops of her thighs. They’d never hire her to model stockings, but they were nice legs all the same. And she’d already noted that Rita’s full breasts were nicely shaped, but the sheer nightie gave her a much better view of them.

She took a breath and got the ball rolling.

And she told all about Steve, and the diner in Phoenix. Except, of course, she had to change things. She relocated the place from Phoenix to Denver, situating it on one of the side streets off Colfax Avenue. She changed Steve’s name to George, and she made herself younger, putting the whole incident four years earlier, when she was a college student on summer break.

More to the point, she changed the ending. There was no knife, no feverish thrusting with the blade, no blood spattering her clothes, no blood pooling on the kitchen floor.

And it didn’t feel as though she was holding anything back, because the story changed first in her mind, and all she had to do was recount what happened with George, and how he looked and smelled, and how he fucked her. The first time was as it had been with Steve, but in the telling now there was a second time as well, and then he reopened the diner for the noon rush and she worked all afternoon, smelling of him, while his bodily fluids leaked out of her vagina and trickled down her thighs. Except she didn’t say vagina, she said cunt, just to make sure Rita stayed interested.

And then there was a third time, after he closed the place for the day, and he took her in the kitchen again and made her go down on him, with his dick reeking of both of them, and then he fucked her like a mad bull, and she went home and took a dozen showers and burned her clothes and never went back.

Early in the account, she’d seen Rita’s hand slip under her nightgown. It stayed there, but it wasn’t always busy, and she knew that Rita was holding back, keeping herself on the edge, wanting her own climax to coincide with the story’s.

She almost made it. She held off until, during their final trip to the kitchen, she got off a few sentences before George did.

“You never went back.”

“Rita, I wouldn’t even walk down that block. I was afraid to walk past the diner.”

“Like you’d be powerless to keep from going inside?”

“Sort of.”

“Wow. I have to tell you, Kimmie, this is tons better than phone sex with Paul.”

“Well, sure. This way you got to use both hands.”

“Were you watching?”

“Of course.”

“That made it hotter, somehow. Watching you watching me. But the main thing was you told it so well, Kimmie! It’s like I was right there while it was happening. I could smell him myself.”

“Whatever you imagined,” she said, “the real George was worse.”

“Gosh.” Deep breath. “I guess it’s my turn, huh?”

“Your turn to tell all,” she said, and put her hand under her nightie. “My turn to play.”

Rita had married young. Her husband was her own age, and not much more experienced than she was, and their sex was all vanilla and white bread. He never went down on her, and when she demurred at his suggestion that she go down on him, he seemed almost relieved. So she never did, and he never brought it up again, and after half a dozen years during which they were unable to conceive a child — “And thank God for that!” — they were divorced.

Eventually she started dating again, and the next man she went to bed with introduced oral sex into the relationship. At first she didn’t like it when he went down on her, but then she did. Like, a lot. So she couldn’t really pull away when he steered her face toward his dick.

“But I didn’t know what I was doing, you know? And I didn’t have a lot in the way of natural aptitude. Maybe some girls are born knowing how, or these days with all the Internet porn you can at least see how it’s done, and maybe that’s a help. But whatever I was doing, he didn’t like it much. He actually made me stop.

“And I thought, well, I’ll try to do better next time. But there wasn’t a next time, because he didn’t call me again.”

There were other men, and she began to enjoy giving head, and didn’t wait for her partner to suggest it. She liked when it was small and soft and she could make it grow in her mouth. But when her mouth had worked its magic, transforming small-and-soft into big-and-hard, then she didn’t know what to do with it.

Sometimes it worked anyway, sort of. “The first time a guy came in my mouth I loved it. Loved it! I was afraid I’d be disgusted, but I wasn’t, not at all, and I wanted to gulp down every last drop. I swear I could feel all that energy going right into the cells of my body.”

But she still wasn’t good at it. What she needed was a course of instruction, and she was trying to build up her courage to hire a prostitute to give her lessons, when something better came along.

“What is it they say, Kimmie? When the pupil is ready the master will appear? That’s exactly what happened.”

The master was her hairdresser, Brian, a flamboyant queen who told the most outrageous stories and somehow invited confidences. “It’s not that I don’t like to do it,” she told him, “it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing.” And then, after they’d discussed the subject for a while, “I’ll bet you could teach me.”

He showed up the following night with a present for her, and she knew what it held before she got it unwrapped. “A dildo,” she said, “and unlike my discreet vibrator, you could say it was anatomically correct, veins and all. They must have done a casting. Kimmie, if I ever meet the guy whose dick they used, I swear I’ll be able to recognize him, because it’ll be like running into an old friend.”

Brian taught her what to do, and watched what she did, and commented on her technique. She was horribly self-conscious at first, but she got over it, and it began to seem natural enough, sucking on a rubber cock while her coach critiqued her performance. Then he left her to practice, and she sat up for hours fellating the dildo.

“Then I took it and stuck it in. In my cunt, Kimmie, and after I got off I took it out and sucked it some more. Before, the one thing wrong with it was it didn’t taste like anything, and now it tasted like me.”

She had a hand under the borrowed nightie, stroking herself gently while Rita went on talking. This was no fabrication, no improvement on the truth, like her transformation of Steve into George. She could tell that Rita was recounting her education exactly as she remembered it, but at the same time it was very much a performance, designed to excite her good friend Kimmie.

And it was working. She’d been horribly frustrated, unable to seduce that moralistic moron Graham Weider, and thus unable to cross him off her list of unfinished business. And she’d have masturbated this evening, she’d have had to if she was going to get any sleep, but this was worlds different from fingering herself in the privacy of her bedroom.

This was kind of gay, actually.

She was listening to Rita, hearing how they’d had a second lesson, which concluded with Brian telling his pupil that she’d be able to make some lucky straight guy very happy. And she was watching Rita, watching her lick her lips, watching her put her own hand between her own legs and finger herself idly as she talked. And she was checking out the swell of Rita’s breasts, and the shape of Rita’s legs, and she could feel Rita’s eyes on her own body, and without really thinking about it she whipped the nightie over her head and tossed it aside.

Rita’s story stopped in mid-sentence.

“No, don’t stop,” she told Rita. “I was just feeling warm, you know? And if I’m going to sit here jilling off in front of you, it seems silly to hide my tits.” She cupped a breast, and could feel Rita’s gaze on it. “Or my cunt,” she said, and opened her legs, holding the pose for a long moment before putting her hand back where it had been before. “Now tell me the rest,” she said. “Once you got your diploma from the Academy of Brian, who was the lucky guy?”

The lucky guy, as it happened, turned out to be Brian.

It wasn’t his idea. She had to suggest it, and then she had to talk him into it. “I’m gay,” he kept insisting. “It’s not as though I’ve never been with women. I have, on several occasions, but let’s just say I’ve been there and done that, and it’s just not me.”

“I don’t want to get married,” she told him. “I don’t even want you to kiss me goodnight later. I just want to blow you. What’s so bad about that?”

Nothing, as it turned out.

He agreed, finally, and it turned out to be a lesson, because he offered suggestions and feedback as she went along. And somewhere along the way she graduated, because there was a shift in the energy and she was in command, she was in control, and what a delicious feeling that was.

Afterward, he suggested that maybe he should open a school, an academy of fellatio.

“Won’t you offer any other courses?”

“Like what? Brian Van Horn’s Academy of Fellatio and Hairdressing? I don’t think—”

“There must be something else you could teach me,” she said. “And I’m not talking about hairdressing.”

Rita looked at her, took a deep breath, and took off her own nightgown. “And now you can see my tits, Kimmie, and watch me play with my cunt, while I tell you how he taught me all about fisting. Among other things.”

So hot.

She had never been with a woman. It was not as though it had never occurred to her. But whatever thoughts she’d ever entertained had stopped somewhere between speculation and fantasy. She’d certainly never thought about acting on them.

Or acting them out, as Graham Weider would put it.

It would be so easy now. They were both naked, they were both touching themselves, the whole evening was about nothing but sex, and all she had to do was cross the room. Let me give you a hand, Rita. Let me play with that for you. What a beautiful cunt, Rita. Can I touch it? Can I kiss it for you?

And then what?

Would she have to kill her?

She considered the question later, lying alone in her own bed. She had stayed in her chair, and had confined her caresses to her own body. There had been that moment when they might have made love, and they hadn’t done so, and the moment had passed. Now they were in their separate bedrooms, and all that was left to do was sleep.

But what if she’d made love to Rita. That was lovely, Rita. My very first time with a woman, and I have to say I liked it. Excuse me a moment, will you? I have to go to the kitchen to pick up something sharp.

Or not. How could she be sure?

When she stepped outside herself, when she allowed herself a little perspective, it wasn’t hard to see why she acted as she did. The signal event of her childhood and adolescence was the long affair she’d had with her father, who’d very artfully seduced her and then, ultimately, rejected her. And she’d erased that blot from her life by erasing the man himself, and once he was dead it was as if he had never been.

Except, of course, that it wasn’t. But he wasn’t alive, couldn’t sit smirking, remembering what he’d done to her, what he’d taught her to do to him. He remained on the list, but there was a line through his name, and whenever another man had earned a place on that list, she’d seen to it that his name had a line through it.

All but four names.

If she had sex with a woman, would hers be the fifth name? And would she feel a compelling urge, an actual need, to draw a line through that name?

No way to know. Not for sure.

She didn’t want to kill Rita. She wanted to kill Graham, Christ how she wanted to kill him, and she thought of all the other men, most of their names metaphorically crossed out almost as soon as they’d been inked in. She’d wanted sex with them, and afterward she’d wanted them dead. For a while it was a matter of taking care of business, but when she thought of Steve in Phoenix, she realized that it had become something more than that. She’d reached a point where the sex act itself wasn’t complete as long as her partner had a pulse. That was the true orgasm: when she struck like a cobra, and the man died.

Withheld, she was left with an itch she couldn’t scratch. Even now, after God knows how many orgasms, after she’d finished herself off with the vibrator, its surface still dewy with Rita’s juices, even now she found it maddening, infuriating, that she’d found a Graham Weider who’d become immune to her powers. Was he going to be on her list forever?

Oh, for Christ’s sake.

The answer came to her in a flash. With it she felt a emotional release none of the evening’s orgasms had managed to provide, and she drifted off and slept like a baby.

“Graham? It’s Kim. Please don’t hang up.”

A silence. Then, “All right.”

“First of all, I want to apologize. I don’t know what got into me yesterday.”

“That’s all right.”

“No,” she said, “it’s not all right. It was completely inappropriate and wholly unwarranted. I was disrespectful to you and made a fool of myself in the process.”

“I’ve had plenty of apologies to make,” he said. “So it’s not hard for me to accept yours, Kim.”

“Thank you.” She drew a breath. “Those apologies,” she said. “Would they be in connection with those meetings you’ve been going to?”

“It’s a 12-Step program,” he said, “and yes, making amends is very much a part of the program.”

“You told me the name of it, but I—”

“Sexual Compulsives Anonymous.”

“Right, SCA. Funny how I can’t seem to remember the name. Or maybe it’s not so funny after all.”

He waited, and she let the silence stretch.

Then she said, “My life’s not working so well these days.”

“I see.”

“Not just these days. For quite a while now. What was the term you used? ‘Acting out’? It seems like all I’m ever doing is acting out, or trying to, or thinking about it.”

“I understand, Kim. I’ve been there.”

“Can anyone go to these meetings? Or do you have to be a member?”

“Would you like to come to a meeting?”

“Would I like to? Probably about as much as I’d like to have root canal. But it’s that or lose the tooth. Graham, it’s not a question of would I like to. I think it’s something I have to do.”

“Hold on a minute. Okay, let’s see. There’s a meeting in downtown Seattle this afternoon, but I’ll be busy. If you don’t mind going by yourself—”

“I think I’d be more comfortable if you went with me.”

“Well, let me see. How’s lunchtime tomorrow? There’s a 12:30 meeting I sometimes go to in downtown Redmond near Marymoor Park. I could meet you there and we could walk in together.”

“I’m not sure I could find it. And on a bike—”

“No, that’s too far by bicycle. Maybe—”

“Graham? Suppose I come to where you work? I could meet you in the parking lot. At twelve? Or maybe a little earlier, so you can tell me a little about it before we actually walk in?”

She stayed out all day, ate dinner by herself at an Indian restaurant that served bland food dumbed down for the Western palate. She got the waiter to bring her hot sauce, and that helped, but she’d have been happier if the heat had been cooked into the food, not spooned on top of it.

It was almost eight when she got home, and she steeled herself to walk in to the smell of a home-cooked meal, and a housemate who wanted a reprise of the previous evening. But she encountered neither; there’d been no cooking since last night’s dinner, and no car in the garage.

There was leftover coffee and she reheated a cup and drank it at the kitchen table while she read that month’s Vanity Fair. She’d almost finished the coffee when she heard the garage door ascend, and she stayed where she was until she heard Rita and a man in conversation. She rose quickly, scooped up her cup and the magazine, and was in her room with the door closed before the two of them had cleared the threshold.

“Kimmie? Are you awake?”

No one, not even a devout Crystal Methodist, could have been more thoroughly awake. But did she have to admit it? If she just kept silent—

“Kimmie?”

If she kept silent, Rita would walk right in.

“I’m awake,” she said. “But kind of drifty.”

“He’s gone. I sent him home.”

Oh? Were you with someone? I never would have guessed.

“I suppose you heard us.”

“Just barely.”

“He was a guy who hit on me a couple of times. I was never interested. But after last night — well, let’s just say I was in the mood.”

No kidding.

“Kimmie, you’re half asleep. We’ll talk at breakfast.”

Footsteps receded. Rita’s door opened and closed.

And she lay in bed, waiting for daybreak.

A toasted English muffin and a cup of coffee. And Rita, wearing a belted housecoat, with her own English muffin and her own cup of coffee, and a full report.

“We fucked on the couch,” she said. “He’s going bald, and he could stand to lose a few pounds, but he was okay otherwise. Nice circumcised dick, medium in size. We didn’t do anything you couldn’t find in the Kama Sutra, but it was interesting enough. I mean, I came a lot.”

“I know.”

“That was on purpose. The noise, I mean. I knew you could hear, and the idea of you hearing made it a lot more exciting. You know what I was wishing?”

“What?”

“That you could sneak in and watch.”

“Would you have liked that?”

“Are you kidding? I’d have loved it.”

“It never even occurred to me.”

“I didn’t think it would. Or that you’d do it, even if you thought of it. You know what was going on in my head the whole time? Absolutely the whole time? How hot it would be when I told you all about it.”

“Really.”

“How’s that for weird? I mean, it’s like normal to think about fucking while you masturbate, but having fantasies of masturbating while somebody’s got his dick in you?”

“But I can see how it could happen.”

“So you don’t think I’m weird?”

“Oh, you’re plenty weird, Rita. But not in a bad way.”

“I’ll settle for that. And I could probably say the same about you.”

“Moi?”

“You and that guy who smelled.”

“Yeah, I can see where you could call me weird for that one.”

“I might have done it myself,” Rita said, “but I’d have wanted to kill him afterward.”

Oh, sweetie, if you only knew—

“Oops,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ve got an appointment I’ll be lucky to get to on time.”

“You want me to drive you?”

“No, I’ll be fine with the bike. But I was thinking maybe tonight—”

“We’re on the same page. But I’m not gonna bother cooking. You up for it if I order a pizza?

“Sure. And I don’t know when I’ll be home, so don’t order it until I get here.”

“And this time I’ll buy the wine. How do you say what we had, Nooey San George’s?”

“Close enough.”

“And don’t worry that this is going to make us lesbians. I mean, that was a guy I was on the couch with, you know?”

“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” she said. “the thing is, I still get a lot of pleasure out of it.”

“Acting out?”

“Right. I realize I’m compulsive about it, and it’s almost as if I don’t have any choice, but, you know, it feels good.”

“Of course it does,” he said. “And you may not be ready to stop. It always felt good to me, too.”

“It did?”

“But less so,” he said, “toward the end. That’s not why I stopped, I stopped because sexual compulsivity was making my life unmanageable, but the pleasure did drop off as time went on. Even at the moment of release I’d find myself thinking about the next time. And, of course, regretting everything that was regrettable about the present moment.”

She told him she guessed she could relate to that.

She’d met him in the parking lot at a quarter to twelve, wearing jeans and a modest top, with a capacious shoulder bag on her arm. She’d locked her bike to the cyclone fence and joined him in the front seat of the Subaru. And now they were on their way to the meeting in Redmond, and conversation was no problem, because all she had to do was get it started and he’d carry the ball, telling her chunks of his story of sin and redemption. It would have been more interesting if he’d gone into detail, but as she already knew, not going into detail was part of the SCA program, because God forbid any of them should get any pleasure out of anything for the rest of their miserable lives.

“Here we are,” he said, eventually, and waited to make a left turn into a church parking lot. There were a handful of cars all clustered at the front of the lot, and nothing but a van farther back.

She said, “Graham? Could we stop for a minute? There’s something I need to say.” He braked, and she said, “Maybe if you could pull up, oh, near that van? Like, away from all these cars?”

He drove to the rear of the lot, swung the Subaru around and pulled up next to the van. That vehicle’s side bore the name of the church, and the injunction to get right with God.

Now you tell me.

She unbuckled her seat belt, slipped her right hand into her shoulder bag. He kept his own seat belt fastened, she noted with approval, so he’d be safely buckled up during the hazardous five-mile-an-hour return trip to a parking spot with his SCA buddies.

“There’s this thing they do in AA,” she said. “According to what I’ve read. Like, sometimes when they’re taking a man to his first meeting, or to a rehab, they give him one final drink on the way. So he won’t go into withdrawal. So what I was wondering—”

Oh, the look on his face!

“I guess that’s a no, huh?”

“Kim—”

“Oh, c’mon,” she said. “That was a joke, for God’s sake! But what I really do need to do is I have to tell you why I came on so strong.”

“Believe me, Kim, I understand. I’ve been there myself. The idea of taking no for an answer—”

“That’s only part of it. See, I’ve got this list. There are only four names on it, and you’re one of them.”

“Well, I’m flattered, but as I said—”

“No, don’t be flattered. What I wanted to do, I wanted to be able to cross you off the list, and in order to do that I’d have to sleep with you first.”

There was a padded mailer in her bag. Her hand slipped into the open end, fastened on the handle of the knife. He was saying something but she paid no attention, concentrating instead on the move she’d make, visualizing it in her mind’s eye.

“And when you turned me down,” she went on, “I just couldn’t stand it, and I was so upset that it kept me from seeing what should have been obvious.”

“Sometimes the hardest thing to see is what’s right in front of our eyes.”

Gee, Graham, I’d better go write that down.

“What I didn’t let myself realize,” she said, “is that I’d already fucked you. I mean, that’s how you got on the list in the first place, right? So I didn’t have to fuck you again, much as I might want to. All I had to do to cross you off the list, was, well, this.”

Just as she’d visualized it: her right hand emerging from the shoulder bag, gripping the kitchen knife, bringing it in one graceful motion into the center of his chest.

Just like that.

“You fucking idiot,” she said. “You sanctimonious asshole. You could have died happy.”

Did he even hear the words? Hard to say. There was no blood to speak of, so she must have found the heart and stopped it. His eyes were wide, but the light was leaving them.

Three.

Now what? Her plan had worked perfectly, but it hadn’t included the aftermath.

Just leave him here? But she had to go back to the Barling lot for her bike, and how was she going to get there? Call a taxi?

Take his place behind the wheel? The key was right there in the ignition, and despite what she’d told Rita, she was perfectly capable of driving it. All she had to do was dump his body and drive his car back to where she’d left the bike. His car could return to the slot where it belonged, and she could bike off into the sunset.

Dump his body where? Just leave him in the church parking lot? They’d find him soon enough, and connect him to the SCA meeting, and who was to say he hadn’t talked about her with some of his we-don’t-fuck-anymore buddies? It might not lead to her, but it would guarantee headlines.

How about the church van? It was dusty, so it probably didn’t get used much, and by the time anybody found a body in it there’d have been a dozen other 12-Step groups meeting there. Not a perfect idea, but—

Forget it. Fucking thing was locked up tighter than an SCA member’s asshole.

If the Subaru had a trunk, that would work. Probably be a struggle getting him into it, but she could reposition the car first so that it screened her actions from observers. But the thing was a squareback, the contents of its rear compartment glaringly visible, so scratch that.

So what did that leave?

Switching seats with him wasn’t the hardest part. It was a little complicated, she had to maneuver him from behind the wheel into the passenger seat, but it went smoothly enough. She fastened his seatbelt and tightened it so it would keep him in position, then took his place behind the wheel and drove out of there.

Now it got tricky. Not finding her way — that was easy, as the Subaru had a GPS device, complete with a woman’s voice to tell you when and where to turn, and Barling Industries was already available on his list of recent destinations, so all she had to do was select it and follow the prompts.

But there she was, driving through traffic with a dead man sitting up next to her. The premise, of course, was that his condition wouldn’t be evident to a casual onlooker, and no one would see blood, because she’d adjusted his necktie to cover the wound. But he still looked dead as a doornail to her, and every time she braked for a stoplight with another car alongside, she found herself holding her breath. At any moment she’d hear sirens and there’d be people screaming and cops yanking the doors open and—

And each time the light changed and she drove away.

“Approaching right turn,” the voice told her at length, and this final right turn brought her into the Barling lot. “You have arrived.”

No shit, Sherlock.

Did the GPS doohickey have a memory? Could it tell the police where it had been?

Well, they’d have to find it first. She unhooked it from its moorings and dropped it into her handbag. Something to get rid of down the line, along with the knife.

Did the SCA people know about the GPS? Like, were they okay with him having an authoritative female voice telling him where to go and what to do? Like, couldn’t he have a male voice, just to remove another possible occasion of sin?

Fucking moron.

She left him in his car, parked right where it had been when she joined him for the ride to Redmond. She took a moment to put him back behind the wheel; it would help keep him upright, and was a more natural spot for him, although it wouldn’t fool anyone who took a good look.

They’d think he’d had a heart attack. Got behind the wheel, stuck the key in the ignition, and the poor devil’s ticker quit on him. They’d know different soon enough, and it wouldn’t take a formal autopsy to spot the knife wound in his chest, but by then she’d be long gone.

She took a moment to wipe the surfaces she might have touched. And at the last minute she remembered to go through his wallet. He had just over three hundred dollars, mostly in twenties and tens, and something made her look in the compartment behind his State of Washington driver’s license, where he’d tucked away two fifties and a hundred for an emergency.

Well, this was an emergency, all right. The Nuits-Saint-Georges had left her alarmingly close to broke.

She locked the car on her way out, unlocked her bike, and left.

Now what? Back to Rita’s house?

For pizza and French wine and another session in the living room? This one, she knew, would go further than the last. Their hands wouldn’t be limited to their own flesh, and she could see how the evening might well end with one or both of them getting eaten out.

It wasn’t really a lesbian experience, Kimmie, because we’re not lesbians.

What would it be like, having another woman do that?

Or doing it herself?

She was getting hot thinking about it. But it wasn’t going to happen, and she was going to make sure it didn’t happen by skipping the pizza, skipping the wine, and skipping Rita’s house altogether. If she went there, what could possibly happen afterward? Either she’d want to stay with Rita and try to make some kind of a life together, or she’d feel the need to kill her before moving on. She didn’t want to kill the Rita, not now, not in the least, and she couldn’t stay with her in a town where she’d just murdered a man. She wanted at a minimum to be on the other side of a state line, and ideally clear across the country.

And she’d looked ahead enough to tuck what she could into her handbag. Not all she’d have liked to take, the bag was really no more than an overgrown purse, but enough to hold her until she had a chance to buy something new.

More to the point, nothing she’d left in Rita’s spare bedroom could be traced back to her. Sooner or later she’d call Rita, and by then she’d have a story ready to explain her abrupt departure. But for now all she could do was disappear.

A pity she couldn’t return the bike. Park it someplace, tell Rita where to find it? No, keep it simple.

She left it unlocked a block from the bus station, propped it against a lamp post and walked away from it. Someone was sure to adopt it — before her bus left, and before anyone could begin to wonder who stuck a knife into Graham Weider.