Kim Keogh’s apartment (only two blocks south of Rainey house) is much smaller than I had imagined and quite a bit funkier, too. In fact, it appears to be hardly more than a one-room efficiency. Maybe there is a bedroom, though from the couch where I am sitting I cannot identify which door leads to it. On the wall behind me, on each wall actually, are blown-up pictures of old-time movie stars: Marilyn Monroe, dark Gable, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, William Holden, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, but also current ones like Robert Redford, Cher, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, and my favorite, Michelle Pfeiffer.
We managed to do nicely at dinner-a seafood place on the Arkansas River, where she considerately declined my invitation to order lobster and instead had catfish and salad.
She talked mostly about herself (which is fine with me, since in the back of my mind I am worried she will try to pump me about Andy’s case). Despite Rainey’s snide comment about how well she conceals her makeup, she is gorgeous-beautiful blond hair and the longest natural eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a human. She is sitting encouragingly close to me on the couch, which is so slick it seems inevitable that we slide toward each other.
“I was going to be a model,” she says, sipping on a glass of white wine while I drink beer, ‘but I wanted to do something really meaningful with my life, you know what I mean?”
“Sure.” I nod, thinking that her ambition to be a TV anchor would be judged, when the big meltdown comes, hardly to have qualified, but there is no doubt this woman takes herself quite seriously. And for all I know, she may be the next Barbara Walters.
She is wearing a jade cotton jersey dress that comes modestly below her knees. There is something touching to me about ambitious women who are in fields where they are required to rely on their looks. She has said enough for me to realize she has enormous doubts about herself, and with good reason. She seems to sense that it is only a matter of time before someone notices a few wrinkles that can’t be hidden-and asks her to start filling in on the 6 a.m. farm show. I find myself giving her a pep talk about how much she has achieved already.
“Half the women in Arkansas would switch places with you in a New York minute,” I tell her.
“You’re beautiful, poised, and talented. What else do you want, for God’s sake?” I do not add intelligent, because it is apparent she is probably below average in this department which will probably be her professional death.
For this rhetorical question, she has already thought about an answer. She crosses her legs and balances her wine against a thigh.
“I’d like to be quicker, smarter,” she admits, “I don’t really understand a lot of the stories I cover,” she says.
I sip at the Coors she has brought me. There is a sad, sweet quality about her that is touching. I feel heat rising as if someone had lit a boiler under me. Women want so badly to be taken seriously and listened to it is almost embarrassing. I have promised myself that I will not get involved quickly with the next woman, but I hear myself lying, “You’re a lot brighter than you give yourself credit for. I’ve watched you too many times cover difficult stories not to believe that.”
She pats her lovely hair self-consciously and gives me a hopeful smile.
“Are you serious?”
As I gulp at my beer, trying to cool down, I look at the pictures on the opposite wall. Humphrey Bogart, Sally Fields.
She is living in la-la land. Please don’t do this to this woman, I tell myself. She doesn’t want to go to bed on the first date, but she will if I handle her right.
“You’re your own worst critic,” I say, putting my beer on the cheap coffee table in front of the couch. All her money must go into clothes, I think. This place is just short of a dump.
“They wouldn’t have hired you if they weren’t certain you could do the job.”
She puts the wineglass to her lips and finds it empty. I pour her some more from the beaded, sweaty bottle in front of us. Over the years I’ve found that it doesn’t matter if you look like an orangutan-all you really have to do is listen.
From her bedside table she reaches over and pulls open a drawer. I watch her right breast swing free as she strains to reach a brown envelope. I’ve had better sex the first time but not with anyone less inhibited. The alcohol must have loosened her up, because, until the last hour she has been almost ploddingly serious. The bottle she brought into the bedroom is almost empty. I am expecting marijuana, but instead she pulls from the packet a handful of pictures. Incredibly, they are of her naked in various poses.
She looks at me through the harsh glare of the lamp and says in a slurred voice, “I had these made when I was twenty. What do you think?”
She looks incredible-slim hips and small but attractive breasts which appear larger because of the way she is bending toward the camera. My immediate reaction is embarrassment, not arousal. I am too recently spent for that. Why is she showing me these? I look slowly through them. Was she trying out for Playboy or what? I have a slight headache from the six pack of beer I have drunk and rub my head. I say truthfully, “They’re stunning.”
She nods, her right hand stroking my back, the other holding the pictures up for her to see in the light.
“I think they’re good, too,” she says, her voice sodden with the liquor.
Finally, I understand why she has shown me these pictures. She is almost pathetically insecure. Somehow, she considers the photographs are proof of her value. I say, “No matter what happens, you ‘ll have proof what a knockout body you have.”
She tosses the pictures onto the table instead of putting them back into their envelope. She smiles and rests her head on my chest.
“How’d you know that?” she says.
“My body works a lot better than my mind.”
I stroke her hair, noticing that Rainey was right. This close I can see her makeup.
“The old mind body problem,” I say. I am a little drunk myself.
She reaches down and peels off my condom and holds it up for us to inspect. Waving it over my head like a pennant, she says, “Wanna hear a joke?”
Fearful that she is going to spill my jism onto my head, I lean back but say quickly, “Yeah.”
She pulls the condom down and rests it on her pubis. “You know what the rubber said to the diaphragm?”
I pat her right thigh.
“Naw, what did it say?”
She turns her head and smiles crookedly at me.
“Was it good for you, too?”
I begin to laugh and find I can’t stop, shaking the bed and her body in the process. The truth of the joke has struck some nerve I can’t begin to understand about my own life. I guess the joke works because our protection against each other has become the most important element in the equation.
At some level we have become merely matchmakers for our own technology. I glance across the room, noticing again that the largest picture she has in her bedroom is a picture of herself. It is enormous, an eleven by fourteen, probably a promo by her employer. Kim Keogh, the latest and prettiest member of the Channel 11 news team. I wonder but do not have the courage to ask if she has had her name changed.
She reaches across me and casually tosses, like a worn-out sock, the swollen condom into the wicker wastepaper basket beside her bed and says sourly, “It wasn’t that funny.”
For some reason she thinks I am laughing at her. I roll her off my chest and cradle her in my arm.
“It was a good joke.”
She snuggles against my chest, “I like you,” she says, “You understand me, you know?”
So I will not have to answer, I kiss her hair, which is damp from her exertions. In three minutes she is sound asleep, snoring gently against my shoulder. For all her nude pictures, aggressive lovemaking, and vanity, the always kind and pleasant Kim Keogh who appears on TV is the dominant personality. Alcohol and a sympathetic ear have uncovered a wilder side, but before she got halfway through the bottle of Chablis, Kim moved me with her own unpublicized work as a volunteer tutor for the last two years to black girls who live in Needle Park. A nice woman, I think, sleepily, nicer than she’ll sound if I ever tell someone about the pictures….
Remembering Kim’s joke and my extreme reaction to it, for some reason I think of Amy and wonder if she had an abortion. I should call but realize I’m not anxious to be confronted by either of the choices available to her. What would I do if Kim becomes pregnant and wants to have a baby? I yawn so loudly Kim stirs beside me. Somehow, I don’t think either Sarah or Rainey would be pleased….
I awake feeling pain in my rectum and notice a growing need to defecate. I turn my head and check the luminous red dial on her clock. It is just after three. I have been asleep only an hour. Kim has turned over toward the wall, and I slide carefully out of the bed, trying to remember the location of her bathroom. After opening a closet door, I find it and sit on the commode hoping a good shit will take away the pain. Though I strain like a man who has been constipated for weeks, nothing doing. It feels like someone is going into my bowels with a corkscrew, and I break into a sweat as I stand up and look into Kim’s bathroom mirror.
“Gideon,” Kim calls through the door.
“Are you okay?”
I come into the room almost dancing with pain. She turns on the light, and I would feel embarrassed were I not hurting so much.
“Something’s wrong,” I admit and explain my symptoms as if she were a physician making a house call.
Perhaps sobered somewhat by what she is being forced to witness, she pulls the sheet over her breasts.
“Has this happened before?”
I would be less alarmed if the corkscrew feeling were in my stomach. Food poisoning would be bad enough, but I might live. There is no mistaking the location however. I begin to put on my clothes as fast as I can. If I am going to die, I don’t want to do it like this. I can see Sarah’s face as they tell her, “Your dad’s ass started hurting, and then drunk and naked as a jaybird he fell over dead on top of a pile of nude pictures of some TV reporter he had known only a few hours.” I catch my big toe on a belt loop and fall sideways on the bed. She scoots backward as if I were now trying to rape her.
“No,” I say, looking sideways at Kim as I slide up my pants.
“Please tell me if you do,” I beg.
“Do you have AIDS or some disease?”
Kim bursts into tears.
“No!” she shouts at me.
“How do you know you don’t?”
I try to think of the women I have slept with in the last year. There have been only three since I met Rainey, and, of course, they swore (as I did) that they were practically virgins.
I wore a rubber, but as one worried woman told me, even the best roof will eventually leak.
“I just know, damn it!”
The last five minutes, which seems like an eternity, have sobered her as no coffee could. Clinging to the sheet, she whimpers, “I’m sorry you’re hurting. I’m just terrified I’ll get AIDS from you!”
Thanks for the vote of confidence, I think. I have to get out of here. I cram my socks into my pockets and slide on my loafers. The pain, bearable, however, is constant now, coming in steady waves.
“I’ll call you,” I say politely.
She nods, apparently too afraid to move. In the Blazer, I pop the clutch as badly as Sarah used to do before she figured out it wasn’t a device to strengthen your knee. Where to go?
I noticed there was no blood. At least I’m not hemorrhaging to death, but I am even more frightened by the pain than when it first began. Desperate, I turn onto Fairfax, Rainey’s street. If I’m going to die, I don’t want to be like some animal that crawls off into the woods.
I ring her bell and pound on the door like a wild man. In just a few moments I hear her yell through the door, “Who is it?”
I scream back, “Gideon. I’m sick!”
She throws the door open, and standing there in a thin cotton robe, cries, “What’s wrong?”
I tell her and beg, “Will you take me to the St. Thomas emergency room? I’m having horrible cramps.”
Looking dazed and scared, she says, “Of course, wait just a second,” and disappears into her bedroom while I sit on her couch.
In less than a minute she appears, dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes. Her hair is still a mess, and without makeup she appears like a ghost, but at the moment she has never looked better. In her car, she asks, “Where were you when it started hurting?”
There is not hint of snideness in her voice. She is wondering why I didn’t call first. I want to say that I just happened to be in the neighborhood but don’t feel up to it. I swallow hard and admit, “I was watching the local news.”
Rainey taps the steering wheel sharply with the palm of her right hand. She doesn’t require much explaining.
“How interesting she says, her voice taking on a characteristic drollness.
I look out the window into the darkness. There are a dozen snotty things she could say but won’t. Still, I feel like some lowlife snake running back to his wife after playing around and getting into trouble. Why do I feel this way? We’ve agreed to be just friends. For God’s sake, we’ve never seen each other naked, yet guilt begins to bubble up like boiling oil alongside the pain in my rectum. What is a friend for if you can’t tell her something without feeling guilty about it?
Maybe it is true men and women can’t be friends.
She whips into the St. Thomas emergency room parking area, and brakes to a halt at the security guard station. A black guy who looks a hundred sticks his head through the window on Rainey’s side and asks, “Is he going to need a wheelchair?”
Through the light shining through the windshield, I can see the barest hint of a smile on Rainey’s face. She says, “I think he can walk.”
Embarrassed now, I hiss, “Of course I can.”
Fortunately, it is a slow night at St. Thomas. Only a couple of people are waiting, and they look so miserable I can’t tell whether they are family or patients. I look at Rainey, who yawns and says, “I confess that there is a part of me that hopes you’re really sick.”
An hour later (the pain began to recede thirty minutes ago, but I am too embarrassed to admit it has gone away entirely) I am told I am simply middle-aged.
“Prostatitis,” says the intern who had stuck his finger halfway to China.
“How old are you?” “Forty-four,” I say, wishing his pants were a little cleaner.
Dr. Wacker, according to his nameplate (for all I know he may be an orderly pressed into service because the regular doc is off sniffing glue with one of the nurses), looks about Sarah’s age but not as responsible.
“Does this mean I’m going to lose my prostate gland?” I ask. Hell, maybe it would be a relief if I couldn’t get it up anymore. All it’s done since Rosa died is cause me trouble.
“Shouldn’t,” the baby doc says casually.
“You’ve got a little infection, but an antibiotic should take care of it.”
With a twenty-five-dollar prescription for a bottle of pills (Septra) I walk into the waiting area feeling relieved but a little foolish. Rainey’s face looks frozen in worry. She stands, holding her hands together as if she is about to pray. I had told her the pain was better, but I didn’t tell her how much before I went in.
“Prostatitis,” I mumble to Rainey as I come out into the waiting area.
“Just an infection. I’ve got a prescription for it.”
I head for the door. Do I just imagine it or are the nurses smiling? Rainey walks beside me and says loudly, “You got me out of bed at three in the morning for prostatitis? Women have infections all the damn time.”
Outside, it is humid and sticky as we walk to her car. I feel like an idiot. I had given the hospital my group insurance card from Mays amp; Burton, but I have little hope I’m covered.
“It hurt like hell,” I say, realizing I am whining.
“I thought I was dying.”
Rainey unlocks her door. In the brightly lit parking lot, she looks as exhausted as I feel. She stares at me over the roof of her car.
“You’re such a baby!”
We ride in silence to her house. How did I have the nerve to put her through this? I wouldn’t wish me on my worst enemy. Still, I can’t suppress the feeling entirely that I’ve dodged a bullet. I turn my head toward the window and smile. I’m okay. After a moment, I say sincerely, “I panicked I’m really sorry I put you through this.”
Rainey’s voice is harsh as she pulls up in front of her house.
“Damn you, Gideon, you had me worried to death!”
I stare straight ahead. I have already apologized once, and I’m getting a little tired of being cussed out. Sure, I overreacted; most people would if they thought the plug was about to be pulled on them. I’m sorry I ruined her beauty sleep, but supposedly that’s what friends are for.
“I’ll call you to morrow,” I say and open the door to get out.
She shakes her head angrily and turns off the lights and motor.
“I can’t wait,” she says as she gets out of the car and stalks into her house.
I drive home, whistling, thrilled I don’t face surgery to morrow. What is her problem? She is the one who wanted to be friends. I turn onto my street. What am I supposed to do wait until I’m seventy for her to decide I’m good enough for her? I yawn until I can’t see. I wonder if she thinks that I am playing games with her. I have committed a lot of sins in the sexual wars. But that is not one of them. Not consciously anyway.