Peter Abrahams - Lights Out

Eddie went into the showers. He was drying himself with one of the fluffy towels when he saw a sign: Steam bath: Co-Ed-Please Cover Up. He wrapped the towel around himself and went in.

Eddie had the steam bath to himself. It was small, with wooden benches lining three sides. He sat at the back, leaned against the tile wall. Steam hissed out of a nozzle in one corner, filling the room with wet heat, wonderful wet heat that reminded him right away of the shed by the red clay court.

I need more memories, he thought. He got hotter; sweat poured off him. Eddie forgot about the shed and simply felt his body relax, relax as though gravity had failed and all the muscles, ligaments, and tendons could finally stop straining to hold his bones together.

“Tell me your plans,” El Rojo had said.

And he’d answered, “A steam bath. After that I’d only be guessing.”

There was nothing wrong with the steam-bath part. It was a good plan. He wished he’d carried it out sooner. As he sweated he imagined that all the foulness, dirt, and corruption of the past fifteen years was seeping out of him, leaving him clean, pure, untouched.

Time passed. A man with a sandy mustache peered through the window of the steam-bath door but didn’t come in. Eddie grew thirsty, but he was so calm, so detached from everything outside that steam bath, that he made no move to leave. Even his thirst was strangely pleasant, perhaps because he knew he could slake it at will. Slake: he liked the word. It had lake in it, so it meant an endless supply of drinkable water. It was also good for rhyming.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,

We could nor laugh nor wail;

Through utter drought all dumb we stood!

I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,

And cried, A sail! a sail!

Arm biting, bloodsucking: Eddie had seen crazy things like that. He was remembering some of them when the door opened and a woman with a towel wrapped around her body materialized in the clouds of steam. She sat down on one of the side benches, sighed, and leaned her head against the wall.

The woman had a trim body, nicely cut hair, cool blue eyes. Because he didn’t think New York was the kind of place where you ran into people you knew, and because she wasn’t wearing her tortoiseshell glasses, it took Eddie a few surreptitious looks before he was sure he recognized her: Karen de Vere.

“Hi,” he said.

She gave him a cold glance, said nothing.

Karen? Miss de Vere? He wasn’t sure of the proper form. Ms. de Vere? Ms . sounded funny to him; he’d never used the word in conversation and it brought to mind eye-rolling black servants in old movies, but he had a hunch it was the right choice.

“Ms. de Vere?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re Karen de Vere, aren’t you?”

She squinted at him. “Do I know you?”

“Ed Nye. Jack’s brother.”

“Oh, my God. I’m sorry. I’m blind as a bat without my glasses.” Her towel slipped slightly, exposing the tops of her breasts. She hitched it back up.

“Jack’s a member here, isn’t he?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I never see him. I do aerobics and he’s into squash. The two crowds don’t mix. I suppose you’re a squash player too.”

“No,” Eddie said, trying to imagine Jack on a squash court. Even with the added weight, he’d probably be good. There wasn’t a game he couldn’t play.

Karen was starting to sweat too. Her skin shone; a drop rolled down her neck, disappeared between her breasts. Her eyes went to the “Yeah?” tattoo on Eddie’s arm, then up to his face.

“What do you do to keep in shape, Eddie?”

“Swim.”

“Do you belong to a place like this in Albany?”

“Albany?” said Eddie, and then remembered. “I use the Y.”

Karen’s towel slipped again. This time she didn’t bother adjusting it. “What do you do up there?”

“Nothing too hard,” Eddie said. “Just stretching out a little.”

She laughed. “I didn’t mean in the pool. I meant for a living.”

Why not tell her the truth? Eddie thought of a reason immediately: Jack did business with her, and knowing his brother was an ex-con might give her second thoughts, especially if Jack had spun some cover story about him last night. On the other hand, Jack might have told her the truth. “Didn’t Jack tell you?”

“He was very mysterious.”

“There’s no mystery. I’m looking for work.”

“In what area?”

“The junk-bond revival.”

Karen laughed. Jack had already prepared her for the fact that Eddie was a bit of a character.

“It’s tough out there, I know,” Karen said. “Any leads?”

“Plenty. I’ve got friends in low places.”

Karen laughed again and the towel slipped some more. Eddie didn’t think there was anything to it: this was just big-city sophistication.

“But at least you’re taking courses in the meantime,” Karen said. “That’s smart.”

“Courses?”

“That Monarch you dropped. Don’t worry-I won’t snitch to your prof.”

“Prof?”

“I had one who confiscated any crib she saw. Like it was smuggled dope or something.”

Eddie’s muscles, tendons, ligaments, didn’t feel so relaxed anymore, and he was very thirsty. “It’s just for pleasure,” he said.

She smiled. “Dope?”

“The Monarch.”

“I’m teasing. What kind of Monarch does anyone read for pleasure?”

For some reason, Eddie didn’t want to tell her. He could see no way to avoid it. “ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ ”

“You’re kidding.”

“I guess it’s just a trifle,” Eddie said, recalling Ram’s opinion; a trifle like “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

“I hope not,” said Karen. “I wrote my senior thesis on it. ‘The Cruciform Bird: Christian Symbolism, Coleridge, and the Fate of the Mariner.’ ”

Karen laughed. Eddie laughed too. This was fun-fun to sit in the steam bath with this beautiful woman, wrapped in fluffy towels, throwing words around. The man with the sandy mustache peeked through the window again and went away.

“If it’s for pleasure, why not just read the poem?” Karen asked.

“I know the poem,” Eddie said. “It’s just that-”

“What do you mean, you know it?”

“By heart.”

“The whole thing?”

Eddie nodded. She looked at him, bathed in sweat now. “I don’t believe you.”

Eddie could have recited the beginning, as he had for the bookstore boy. Or he could have recited the arm-biting stanza, since it had just been on his mind. Instead, he began:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold.

His voice dropped.

“Go on.”

He didn’t want to go on. The sentiment was crude, the comparison inappropriate, applying to Sookray, maybe, but not to this woman.

Karen, in a low voice, finished it for him:

Her skin was as white as leprosy,

The nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,

Who thicks men’s blood with cold.

There was silence, except for the hissing steam.

“What does your crib make of that?” Karen said.

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I got it to find out something else.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s kind of stupid.”

“I doubt it.”

They looked at each other through the steam. Her legs had parted slightly. Her left knee was almost touching his right. His whole right leg tingled, as though it were being acted upon by some force.

Eddie cleared his throat. “I’m trying to find out why the Mariner shoots the albatross in the first place.”

Karen didn’t smile, didn’t laugh. He started to like her. “There are only two explanations I can see,” she said.