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Page 23.

Chapter 10

"Hey!” Feeling himself being shaken, Jon Harney raised his head groggily and peered. His mangled bed sheets and striped mattress were wet with sweat and unpleasant dreams.

Andy Ferraro heaved his long, thin, muscular frame onto the bed. “Wake up, man. Get with it.”

Jon wiped sleep from his eyes. He sat up, suddenly refreshed and happy. “Hey. I’m glad you stopped by.”

Andy Ferraro, twenty-four, was a philosophy graduate and currently bartender by profession, and coincidentally a drily vulgar comedian. “Putan’. Get out of that crappy bed, you loser. I thought it was going to be another hundred years before I ever heard from you again, you dipshit.”

Jon stood and stretched. It was evening. The clock read seven p.m. “I slept for a few hours. I got fired today. Had a rough day.”

Andy regarded him with quizzical blue eyes in a round face under reddish-blond hair. “Wha’hoppen?”

Jon shrugged. “Just laid off, I guess.” Groggily he searched for towel and soap. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“Got anything to read while I wait?”

Jon pointed to a stack of racy magazines.

“What are you giving me these for?”

“Your level of mentality.”

“Thanks. You know why we have two eyes and women have two tits.” He had a very dry, understated sense of humor, served on a heaping plate of Italian sounding vulgarities and ironies. His degree was in philosophy; his practical application in life (thus far) at the philosophical fountain of spiritude (bartending).

“Evolution. So we can see each other.”

“Yes. Survival. Women have two eyes and we have a cock. Makes absolutely no sense.”

“That’s called a triangle.”

“Very complex geometry.” Andy’s eyes gleamed with a mix of humor and concupiscence as he sifted through the magazines looking for a cover that interested him. “You know that I only read these for the articles.”

“I have never actually looked in one,” Jon lied as he stepped into the bathroom and wrapped himself in the steam and hot water of a rehabilitative shower.

The door opened and shut as Andy came to sit atop the crapper cover with a copy of Playboy. “Do women like this really exist?”

Jon Harney soaped himself. “Nah. Not in real life.”

I’ve just been in love and lust with one.

“Hey, are you screwing some married bitch?”

Jon sputtered through soap bubbles, “Where’ju hear that?”

O my god, what now. Who else knows? Mr. LeCar? Some oily faculty fuck trying for a shot at Merile for himself, thinking she must be cheap?

“Simple deduction,” Andy said. “I didn’t hear from you for the longest time, ergo you were getting laid regularly. You weren’t bragging, ergo it’s illegal.”

Jon rinsed himself. “She’d take your breath away.”

“You were seen downtown,” Andy said.

“By who?”

“By whom?” Andy corrected. “My sister. She says she saw you pawing each other; some chick out of a fashion magazine.”

“It’s all over now,” Jon said, rinsing. “God am I glad it’s over .”

“Who is she?” Andy asked.

Jon turned off the water and reached blindly for a towel. “Some Yale professor’s wife.” He found a towel.

“You have balls like a brass monkey statue.”

Jon pulled aside the curtain. “Small town, isn’t it?”

Can’t keep any secrets here.

Andy shrugged. His shrug implied the distance between townie types and university types, between whom over the centuries there had been little empathy.

Jon dried himself and they migrated to the tangled bedroom. He told Andy, “Don’t ever get involved with a married woman. It’s hell on the emotions.”

Andy looked up from the magazine. “Don’t I know it?” Andy had the past winter involved himself with a waitress from the Beverly Inn at which he’d been tending bar. The upshot had been that the waitress, who was resigned to being beaten regularly by her husband, gave Andy a case of clap presumably obtained from her husband, and that Andy had lost his job after being seen with the guy’s wife by another member of the bricklayer’s union or something. “This is your first adventure, isn’t it?” Andy asked.

“The first and last,” Jon declared, dressing.

“Smart move,” said Andy with utter conviction.

“It doesn’t lead to anything,” Jon said as they drove in Andy’s modified Camaro into the center of New Haven, where at the moment the last stanzas of a carillon concert from the Hearkness Memorial Tower clattered in ever so wistful melody. Big bells elsewhere might proclaim boldly, but precious little Meriles like these lisped in hesitant, cute phrasings.

I ache for her.

At Jon’s request, they passed through a small side street in which Jon knew the department of Archeology was housed. Sure enough, there was a small LeCar, KD5978, parked beside the meter.

“Drive on,” Jon said.

Andy said, “What do you say we take a drive down along Milford Beach?”

“Anything,” Jon said.

Andy brought the Camaro into high gear. “I hear the chicks down there are ripe and ready.”

“Sounds like the pinkest and ripest thing to do,” said Jon, stiffly sitting upright in his bucket seat as if he’d just been in an bicycle accident with a beer truck.

Andy grinned as they headed for the distant, dusky suburb of Milford where the surf was known to seethe around slender bathing bodies, feminine in nature.

As highway air rattled through the cloth-top Camaro, Jon tried to put aside feelings of guilt and apprehensiveness. What would this Mr. LeCar do to Merile’s husband’s career? What would happen when Merile’s husband found out?

I want to hold you, rock you, shelter you in my arms.