Ed McBain - Cinderella

“ We’re Grown-ups Inc.,” Matthew said.

“The way we used to be Santa Claus,” Susan said. “For Joanna.”

“Yes,” he said.

They were silent for several moments.

“Do you think Grown-ups Inc. could have saved it?” she asked. “Do you think we could have saved it, Matthew?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “There was so much anger.”

“There still is, don’t kid yourself,” Susan said and smiled. “I still think of her as The Cunt. Aggie What’s-Her-Name. The Cunt.”

“You’re different,” he said.

“How?”

“Two years ago, you never would have used that word.”

“Maybe you didn’t know me two years ago.”

“Maybe not. You used to call your period The Curse.”

“I still do. Some things never change, Matthew.”

“We’ve changed, Susan.”

“Older,” she said.

“For sure.”

“I’m thirty-six,” she said. “That makes me middle-aged, doesn’t it?”

“Hardly,” he said, and smiled.

“You should see some of the gorgeous creatures in my exercise class,” she said. “If you ever want to feel ancient, go to an exercise class.”

“Frank says the reason exercise classes are so popular is because of the costume. It makes women feel like Bob Fosse dancers. Tell them they’d have to come to class in faded blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt, and enrollment would drop off by half. That’s what Frank says.”

“Frank,” she said, and nodded, as though fondly remembering someone half-forgotten.

They both fell silent again. A bird called somewhere. Another bird answered.

“Are there any more of these little mothers?” she asked, and extended her empty glass to him.

“Jack Lemmon,” he said. “ The Apartment . The scene in the bar.”

“We were still living in Chicago when we saw it.”

“Yes.”

She nodded again. Taking her glass he went into the house familiarly, as if he had never left it, and walked to the bar, and poured what was left of the martinis equally into her glass and his. When he came back out onto the patio again, she was sitting with her face turned toward the pool and the canal beyond, one leg extended, one leg bent at the knee. He felt an extraordinarily sharp urge to place his hand on the inside of her thigh. He sat instead, in the lounge beside hers, and handed her one of the glasses.

“We musn’t drink so much that we won’t know what we’re doing,” she said, sipping at the drink.

“We can always call Grown-ups Inc. later on,” he said.

“Yes, and ask them what we did.”

“The eyes and ears of the world.”

“The mouth of the world,” Susan said.

“I felt like calling them yesterday,” he said, and told her all about his telephone encounter with Detective Cooper Rawles. She listened intently. It was like the old days, when he used to come home from the office and relate to her one problem or another and she listened because she cared , she still cared . It was like then.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“Just what I’ve been doing,” he said. “If there are questions I want answered, I’m going to ask them.”

“Despite the warning?”

“I don’t feel I’m interfering with his case,” Matthew said.

“But that’s not it,” Susan said. “Even if you were interfering, you’d continue, wouldn’t you?”

“Well,” he said, smiling, “as an officer of the court, I don’t think I’d knowingly obstruct justice or impede the progress of an investi—”

“But you’d continue.”

“Yes.”

“Because you enjoy it,” Susan said.

“Well, I...”

“You do, Matthew.”

“I guess I do.”

“Why don’t you simply learn all there is to learn about criminal law—?”

“Well, there’s a lot to—”

“—and start practicing it?”

He looked at her.

There was a shrug on her face.

Eyebrows lifted.

Brown eyes wide.

Questioning.

Why not practice criminal law?

The simplicity of it.

“Just like that, huh?” he said.

“Why not?” she said. “I have a feeling you find it more interesting than real estate.”

“ Anything ’s more interesting than—”

“Or divorce or negligence or malpractice or—”

“Yes, but...”

“So do it,” she said, and this time actually shrugged.

Why not, he thought, and leaned over and kissed her quickly on the cheek. “Thank you,” he said.

“That’s a thank-you?” she said, and reached up to him, and put her arms around his neck and drew him down to her on the lounge. For a moment, they teetered awkwardly, Matthew on the edge of the lounge, struggling for purchase, Susan trying to make room for him, the normal clumsiness of foreplay exaggerated by the suddenness of her move and his unprepared reaction to it. Like groping adolescents — and perhaps this was good because it, too, reminded them of another time long ago — they shifted weight, bumped hips, tangled arms, and finally settled, or more accurately collapsed onto the lounge in an approximate position of proximity, Susan on her side, the robe pulled back to expose her left flank, Matthew seminestled into her, his left arm pinned under his body, his right arm draped loosely over the curving arc of her hip, their lips at last meeting abruptly and in surprise.

Later, he would try to understand that kiss.

They had kissed many times before. Kissed as true adolescents in steamy embrace, when kissing was all she would permit and therefore the sole expression of their passion. Kissed after kissing had become a prelude to heavy petting, something to be got through hastily, like the dull passages of a novel, something to be skimmed or skipped entirely, merely the necessary overture to nipples and breasts and the exciting electric touch of nylon panties and the crispness beneath and the moistness below. Kissed only perfunctorily in the waning years of their marriage, on the cheek in greeting or farewell, passionlessly on the lips in bed before what had become a mechanical act. Kissed last Sunday night hurriedly and somewhat frantically, eager to get to the real thing, both of them fearful of what they were about to do and simultaneously afraid they wouldn’t get to do it before one or the other had a change of mind or heart.

Now...

It was in many respects a first kiss.

First in the sense that it brought back to each of them, in a rush of memory, the actual first time they kissed in Chicago, on the doorstep of her house, a porchlight glowing, the sounds of summer insects everywhere around them, I had a good time, Matthew, So did I, their lips tentatively brushing, clinging, her arms coming up around his neck, his hands in the small of her back, pulling her close, into his immediate erection, Jesus, she said breathlessly, and pulled away and looked fiercely into his eyes, and kissed him again quickly and hurried into the house.

But first in another sense as well.

First in that for perhaps the only time in their separate adult lives, they brought to the simple act of kissing each other an expertise they had learned not only from each other but from others as well, so that the mere anatomical joining of two orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction became something much more intense and heated and all-consuming.

They broke away.

She said what she had said back in Chicago, more years ago than he could count.

“Jesus.”

Breathlessly.

And then:

“Let’s go inside.”

Ernesto figured what they should do first thing this morning was start spreading the word around. This was Monday already, they’d been here in Calusa four days already, this was ridiculous. They had contacted this Martin Klement person at his Springtime restaurant, just the way Amaros had told them to, but they hadn’t heard anything from him since, so what they had to do now was let the word out they were looking to score. Ernesto figured unless the girl was a pro, she wouldn’t know how to get rid of four keys of coke, she’d be looking for buyers.