Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“It’s been a while since… since I’ve been on a date,” she said.

“I can’t believe that,” Sam said, reaching his right hand for the ends of her hair.

When Martha had called him for dinner, he had agreed without hesitation and immediately began planning their first intercourse. Sam made notes in a pocket-sized leather-bound notebook he carried (coded notes, in case they were ever lost or discovered), with everything he knew about Martha (which was little) and everything he assumed based on women like her he had known. The letters and symbols added up to a formula (of sorts) equal to some combination of techniques, positions, and bawdy requests from his sexual repertoire.

So determined was he to get it exactly right, he arranged for a run-through the week before, hiring a pricey hooker, whom he arranged to meet at the Swissotel (he never gave hookers his real name, and never brought hookers to his apartment – if they knew who he was, he couldn’t be unrestrained, and it protected him if things got out of hand, which, regrettably, had happened twice). He was specific with the escort service, describing Martha’s height and weight and hair color, the relative size of her hips and waist and shoulders, and even her voice, which was in a lower register and rounded on the edges without the nasal Midwestern vowels. Martha sounded as if she came from either money or Ontario, and that was how he put it to the service’s automated receptionist.

They did well with the match. She called herself Fonia (“as in Sinfonia,” she said at the bar, as if that was supposed to have relevance for him), and while her features didn’t especially resemble Martha’s, they certainly could have shared wardrobes, so close were their shapes. She was much younger than Martha (she might have been as old as twenty), but up in the room, once he had started the script, he could easily imagine Fonia’s thighs and ribs and nibbles and moans were Martha’s. He never gave her specific words to say, but several times asked her to tone down the enthusiasm when he thought she was overplaying her part. “You’re making it hard, baby,” Fonia said over her shoulder, and Sam smiled and said nothing more about it.

Once, he slapped her across the jaw a little harder than he intended. Not hard enough to leave a mark, but harder than he thought Martha would accept from him. Fear crossed Fonia’s eyes for just an instant, but Sam apologized and sounded sincere and Fonia seemed fine with it after. Just a little startled, she said. This was exactly why he wanted to practice.

On Martha’s couch, Sam grabbed tangles of her hair and put down his wine and leaned forward, head tilted so his open mouth could make a landing on her neck. Startled, she set her glass on the coffee table in a panicked rush and it tipped on the edge of a thick magazine, spilling onto the beige carpet.

“Oh shit, ” she said.

“Leave it,” Sam whispered sternly, hoping to set the tone for the kind of sex he had in mind: unhurried, choreographed, a little bit painful in the moments just before release, but not so harsh as to leave a lasting mark. Something she’d never experienced before. She hesitated, the arm that wasn’t pinned between them suspended in the air over the glass, then kissed him uncertainly – with curiosity and hunger and ambivalence. She hadn’t been on a date in a long time, Sam thought. She had been lonely. She had felt unwanted. He was counting on all three.

With a wrestler’s control, he grabbed her wrist and spun her away from him, facedown on the couch, pressing his hips against her spine and twisting her head back so her mouth could join his. She protested unconvincingly, struggling in small fits but still reciprocating with her lips and tongue. He lifted her dress and pushed down on her shoulder, waiting for her to submit completely before he entered her. Sam wriggled free of his shirt and belt and threw them past her head onto the floor. She cried out for him to stop: once, twice, and again, the third time desperately as he pressed harder against her. She lifted herself onto the armrest like a frightened swimmer to a pier, and told him again, no. He laughed and pushed and waited. She would give in soon. If he was right about her, she would give in.

Instead she reached for a ballpoint pen on the end table and, clicking it once, drove it backward into the soft part of his thigh.

Sam yelped and reared back on his knees. The point hadn’t entered him with great force, but it surprised him. He looked down to see if the mark there was blood or ink as Martha wriggled free and slid to the floor, gasping. Sam composed himself and silently customized his conciliation speech, the one he pulled out on nights of miscalculation like this one. I’m sorry, baby. I thought that was what you wanted. I was getting a thing from you, a vibe. Wow, you haven’t been out on the scene in a while, have you? A lot’s changed in ten years. Men and women are less inhibited. More in tune with their animal urges. Hell, they write about S amp;M and rough sex in the weekend section of the Tribune now. But we can do it your way. Any way you want.

He never got a chance to deliver it.

When he lifted his head he saw Martha on the floor beside the sofa, her hair dissembled, her eyes angry and wet, her lips shaking with bewildered rage, her neck red where he had gripped her, her body bent roughly like an Adirondack chair, propped up on her arms, her legs tensed, ready to bolt if he moved toward her. She was waiting for him to say something, trying to think of something to say, in that segment of a second before she saw in Sam’s face that he’d seen something shocking, and she figured out that the boy was standing behind her.

She flipped and crawled to Justin in a scramble, standing and wrapping her arms around him, forcing his face to her shoulder so he couldn’t see her or the half-dressed man in their living room. “I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Justin.”

Sam stepped off the couch, glad that he hadn’t undone his pants completely. He stepped the long way around the coffee table to avoid mother and child and wondered if she was going to send the kid out of the room so they could resolve this. If he could rattle off an insincere apology and get an indication from Martha that she wasn’t going to call the cops, he’d feel better about leaving.

“Get out,” Martha said. Her words were less hysterical than they might have been if she didn’t have the boy pulled against her, shielding him from Sam, from even the sight of him. She was exposing a degree of shame with which Sam was unfamiliar, and it made him pity her a little.

“Okay, yeah, okay,” he said softly. “Jesus, sorry.” He picked up his shirt and flipped his arms through the sleeves. He didn’t bother to button it. He folded the belt in his hands, the way he had intended to do later when he thought she might let him raise a wonderful red-and-blue mark across her buttocks. Now he slid past Martha and Justin, turning away from them as he walked toward the front door, thinking how fucked-up this all was and, from the way she was holding her kid, that she was raising a little wuss. A mama’s boy. As much as the thought of doing a hot suburban mom had excited him this past week, he should have known better.

As his midsection twisted in the narrow space between Martha and Justin and a glass cabinet against the wall, Sam’s shirttail flew up and away from his body, revealing his bare back and a few inches of blue boxer shorts where his unsuspended pants had slid down his hips. As it happened, Justin opened his eyes and peered past his mother’s shoulder, bare now where the strap of her dress had fallen, and he wiped his damp nose against her skin, which smelled faintly like the deodorant he was only now beginning to use every day; and he watched the man leave and realized even in that instant that he could never tell his mother that he remembered the man from the store or how much of what happened tonight he had seen and understood.