“How do you happen to know Maury?”

“We had an affair.”

“Oh.”

Her eyes held his. “A very casual now-and-then affair over a lot of years. You know, this is funny, John. I was going to say something simple, that we were old friends, and that would have been true enough, but with you I have the feeling I can say what I mean.”

The waiter broke the moment, setting their cups of coffee in front of them. Creighton waited until he had withdrawn, then said, “Maury said you read my books. I think you told me that yourself at Stelli’s.”

“I did, and it was a lie. I hadn’t then, not yet. I went home and ordered them online. I had to hunt around for some of them, but you can find anything online.”

“They’ll all be back in print before long.”

“That’s wonderful. I’m glad, but I’m also glad I didn’t wait.

You’re a wonderful writer, John. You don’t need me to tell you that, and I’m not Michiko Kakutani, but they spoke to me in a very personal way.”

She talked about various books, and she remembered characters’ names, remembered scenes, and gave him something infinitely more to be desired than praise.

One of the questions writers got asked was for whom they wrote their books. The answer he usually gave was that he wrote for himself, and it sounded up to here with artistic integrity, but he’d never been entirely happy with it because it wasn’t altogether true. If it was just for himself, why bother writing it down? Why not work it all out in his mind and leave it at that? And, if he really was writing for himself, he’d have to say he was a failure at it.

Because how often did he sit down with an old book of his own and read the damn thing?

No, there was someone he wrote for, but unfortunately it was a person who couldn’t exist. He wrote for the reader he himself would be if he didn’t happen to have written the book in the first place. He wrote for someone who would understand at once everything he did or tried to do, who would always know what he meant, and who would be intellectually and emotionally in tune with every word.

And there she was, sitting across a rickety little table from him.

And she was gorgeous, and she was looking at him as if he were a god.

They talked. They sipped their coffee and talked, ordered more coffee and talked, sat over empty coffee cups and talked. Finally he got the check, put money on the table, and asked her what she’d like to do next.

She put her hand on his. She said, “Do you think they’ll rent us a room? If not, we’d better go back to your place.” I T W A S L I K E H I G H school or college, it was like being young again. They sat on his couch and kissed. He got hard right away, but there was no urgency to it; he could happily sit there forever, holding her in his arms, feasting on her mouth.

They were like that for a long time. Then they moved as one, disengaging. She stood up and slipped out of her blouse and skirt, and he wasn’t surprised to see that she wasn’t wearing anything under it. He was surprised, though, by the gold at her nipples, the hairless delta.

She said, “John, I’ll do anything you want, and you can do anything you want to me. Anything at all.”

A F T E R W A R D H E G O T A cigarette, asked if it would bother her if he smoked. She said it wouldn’t.

“You don’t smoke,” he said.

“No.”

He lit the cigarette, took a drag, blew out the smoke, and watched it drift to the ceiling. He took another drag but didn’t inhale, blowing a couple of smoke rings, then pursing his lips and blowing out the rest of it. He reached across her body and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray.

She asked if there’d been something wrong with it. He said,

“Maybe I’ll quit.”

“Why?”

“Lately,” he said, “I keep finding new things to live for. That makes it harder to justify committing incremental suicide.”

“And you can quit just like that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never tried before. I’m close to the end of the book, and this may not be a good time to go through withdrawal, but I can get a patch to keep from climbing the walls.

You know what? I just decided. I quit.”

He got up, grabbed the half-empty pack from the bedside table, got the carton with six packs still left in it. Outside the window, the neighborhood recycler was rooting in the trash for cans and bottles. “Hey, buddy,” he called, and tossed the cigarettes to him.

“Have a smoke,” he said. “Live a little.”

He got back in bed. “If I have them in the house, I might light up without even thinking about it. The patch will take care of the physical withdrawal. I might miss the oral gratification, though.” He looked down at her. “Maybe I’ll think of something,” he said.

T H E Y T H O U G H T A B O U T G O I N G out for dinner, wound up ordering from Hunan Pan. He put on a record, Thelonious Monk, solo piano. They sat cross-legged on the bed, eating off paper plates, listening to the music. Afterward he pulled up a chair and asked her how she knew. “Before you read the books. What made you order them in the first place?”

“When I met you,” she said, “I felt something.”

“So did I, though it didn’t register consciously. I was high as a kite on the auction and everything that went with it. I told you what Roger Delacroix said.”

“Yes.”

“But there had to be a reason why I kept your card. It’s still in my sock drawer. I missed my chance to call, but I wasn’t going to throw away your number. What made you come over to the table, though? The whole room must have been talking about my book deal. From a jail cell to the bestseller list, ladies and gentlemen. You wanted to see what kind of guy made that kind of leap?” She shook her head. “I was already interested in you.”

“How come?”

“I can’t explain it, not in any way that makes sense. I was drawn to you before I knew your name. Or what you looked like, or anything about you.”

“That’s very mysterious.”

“I know, and I don’t mean to be mysterious. I’m trying to think how to say this, but what difference does it make? I’ll just say it. I knew Marilyn Fairchild.”

“Oh.”

“Not well, we weren’t friends, we were barely acquaintances.

She found me my apartment. We were friendly enough, but I never saw her after that. And then I heard she’d been killed, and there are murders every day, it’s a fact of life, but somehow . . .”

“It got to you.”

“I wondered who it could be, how it could have happened. And then they announced your arrest, and it turned out you were a writer, you lived in the Village. It wasn’t some degenerate who crawled out of the sewer, some drooling psychopath who spent his childhood wetting the bed and torturing animals. She met some guy in a bar and took him home and he killed her.” Before he could say anything she put a hand on his wrist. “I know you didn’t do it,” she said. “But I didn’t know then.”

“How could you? How could anyone?”

“When I learned that was you at Stelli’s, I had to go over there, I had to meet you, to introduce myself. I didn’t know that was your agent, she could have been a wife or a girlfriend, but I had to do what I did. Of course I heard about your good news, the place was buzzing with it, and maybe that gave you more of an aura, I don’t know, but I think I’d have done the same thing anyway.” A lot to take in, he thought. He leaned forward, touched his finger to the underside of her breast. “When did you get the piercing done?”

“A couple of months ago. Do you like them?”

“Yes, but it must have hurt.”

“It’s an interesting story,” she said, “and one I’ve never told. It’s a long story, though.”

“It’s not as though I’ve got a train to catch.”

“It may show me in an unflattering light.” She sat up on the bed, gathered her legs under her. “But maybe that’s important.

You have to know who I am.”

“Y O U N E V E R W E N T B A C K .”

“No,” she said, and touched her nipples. “I decided these were enough.”

“And once with Medea was enough?”

“Well, that was her decision. If I went a second time, it would be a simple business transaction.”

“You think she’d have stuck to her guns?”

“Maybe I could have changed her mind. But maybe not. She’s a strong woman, she seems to know what she wants and what she doesn’t want. And maybe once was enough. One piercing was enough.”

“Two.”

“One session of piercing, then. One visit to the piercer. Did you like the story?”

“Well, take a look,” he said. “Consider the physical evidence.” She reached out, took hold of his hardened penis, held it gently in her cool hand. “I knew your cock would like it,” she said. “What about your mind? Do you like me as much as before you heard the story?”

“More.”

“Because now you know I’m hot?”

“I already knew that. No, because I know you better.”

“And the better you know me, the more you like me? I wonder if that will be true when you hear the rest.”

“I thought you only saw her once.”

“There are other people. I have a lot of stories, and you might not like them all.”

“Try me.”

“Not tonight. It’s late, and you have a book to finish. And I’ve already cost you a day’s work.”

“I got some work done before Maury called.”

“And you’ll work tomorrow, but when will you stop working?

And would you like me to come over?”

“Come around dinnertime. Say six-thirty? We’ll have an early dinner in the neighborhood, then come back here. And Scheherazade can tell me another story.”

twenty-seven

AT TWILIGHT, Atrim gentleman in his later years walked at a brisk pace in Riverside Park, approaching the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. He wore a navy blazer with brass buttons, a pair of white canvas trousers, and a black-billed white cap in the style of a Greek fisherman. He stepped confidently onto the floating dock and walked to his boat, the Nancy Dee. A couple of other boaters saw him and greeted him with a word or a wave, and he acknowledged them with a sort of half-salute, raising his right hand, index finger extended, to shoulder height.

He climbed aboard the ship, and in due course piloted the small vessel away from the pier and out onto the Hudson River.

I T W O U L D H A V E B E E N simpler, the Carpenter thought, if Peter Shevlin hadn’t gone straight to his boat. If he’d gone home to change first into his idea of what a proper yachtsman ought to wear. But no, he’d gone from the subway to the restaurant and then directly to the Nancy Dee, almost as if he knew this would be his last night at the helm and wanted to maximize his time on the water.

So he’d been wearing business clothes, quite useless to the Carpenter. On the other hand, perhaps it was as well that the man had been bareheaded. A cap might have cushioned the blow.