“Ten minutes.”
“I’m gone,” he’d reply, already standing with his keys in his hand. Eve always called from pay phones, and she always managed to be waiting for him when he arrived at their assignation.
In the beginning they used Bienville. Waters had suggested that they meet in various empty houses, as though Eve were showing him properties for sale, but she rightly argued that this would create more problems than it would solve. If she toured him around town in a sham of house-shopping, word would quickly get back to Lily that her husband was looking at antebellum homes, and she would wonder why, since they already owned one that she had no intention of selling. Moreover, few other properties had the advantages of Bienville. Though situated in the middle of town, the mansion was totally isolated by its elevation and its verdant gardens. The only risk of being seen came when either of them turned into the narrow gravel drive that led off of Wall Street. From that moment until they drove out again—usually hours later—they were safe from the prying eyes of passersby.
Waters came to know the mansion in a way he did not know his own, the way the child of a house knows its secret spaces and idiosyncrasies. They made love in every room, not by design but by serendipity. Exploring the house between sessions, they would find a cozy nook they hadn’t noticed before, or a bathroom countertop set at just the right height, and a different sort of exploration would begin. Sometimes they would look down at the street from the half-moon window on the third floor, watching the people passing below, oblivious to the naked lovers above. Their hands would intertwine, they would kiss, and the rest followed as naturally as flowers opening to the sun.
These were moments of searing purity to Waters, existential epiphanies that made irrelevant all that had come before and all that might come after. But this purity had nothing to do with morality, or even with light. There was more darkness in the house than light. Darkness within Eve, and also within himself. That darkness was the shadow of Mallory Candler, who haunted the empty mansion with them during these lost hours. When they made love, Mallory was always there, watching from beside the bed or from over Eve’s shoulder. The whole experience was a kind of shared madness, but Waters had lived without passion for so long that he would deny almost any insanity to drink of it. Before long, he found a way to think about it that he could live with. It was like dating an insatiable schizophrenic; the conversations could be eerie, but the sex was explosive.
It was in her sexuality that Eve most resembled Mallory. For just as Eve and Waters avoided dwelling on the underlying truth of their situation—riding the wave of passion without looking beneath the dark water that carried them forward—Mallory too had used sex as an escape. Even before the “black wings” that she later named broke loose in her head, Mallory fled into the sanctuary of physical ecstasy, struggling to drive back an amorphous threat that Waters felt but could not see. With Mallory, directness was the thing. Foreplay was exactly that, and she was not much interested in play. Sex was penetration; all else was secondary. Even now, he could see her near-mindless stare as she bucked and strained toward her peak, her renowned beauty shed like a husk as some primal thing took her over, the way a woman in childbirth is hijacked by larger forces, primordial compulsions that drive her through pain that a conscious body could not otherwise endure.
After Mallory’s deepest drives had been sated to some degree, she could spend hours exploring, caressing, and kissing—but all that was lagniappe. What had stuck in his mind was her aggressiveness. She was usually ready for him before they were alone, and she could not get her clothes off fast enough. Sometimes she didn’t bother to remove them; she wore skirts so that she could simply climb astride him in the car, or lift her leg in a fortuitous hallway or bathroom and take him into her standing up. She dared him to take her in crowded places, where discovery would have instantly shattered the perfect image grafted onto her by the town and then the state. She brought inanimate objects into their coupling, things Waters would never have thought of as sexual, and which frightened him for her when he did. The perversity of her needs—and her ruthless directness in seeking to satisfy them—kept him in a state of continuous arousal. He went through his days with a woman whom young and old alike admired and adored, whom many Mississippians thought of in the way they thought of the models for Ivory Snow, all the while knowing that her true nature was such that no one in their insular world could have imagined or believed it.
All this Eve Sumner resurrected in the empty mansion on Wall Street. Rather than analyze her behavior, Waters shut his mind and embraced it, reveling in her unrestrained eroticism. Eve gave orders; he obeyed them. He abased himself before her. He worshiped at the pagan altar of her sex. Only one heresy did he cling to in the shadows of this hidden world. When she demanded that he call her “Mallory,” that he give voice and thus legitimacy to the shadow that lived with them in the house, he refused. To do so, he sensed, would be to leap from the thin ledge of sanity where he now perched into the depths of madness.
The manifold dangers of their repeated trysts he saw but ignored. Blackmail was the most obvious risk, yet he no longer believed Eve intended anything of the sort. The fear of disease lingered until the day she casually left a copy of her blood tests on the piano, dated a week before their meeting at the soccer field. Being caught was always possible, and sometimes images of Lily’s face passed through his mind, how she would look if what was happening in the house on Wall Street were somehow revealed to her. Yet it was Eve who insisted they adhere to strict rules of security: no calls between their homes; no actual conversations when she called his cell phone; no following each other; no “surprises” in the mall or the grocery store. Her preoccupation with these matters gave him a feeling that some dark purpose underlay all her actions, but to think too much about this might have broken the spell she had cast upon him, and he had no desire to do that.
Eve questioned him often about guilt. His feelings surprised her, and she seemed not to trust his honesty on this point. Ever since Lily lost the baby on the ultrasound table—and with it her passion—Waters had worked hard not to feel resentment about his wife’s inability to let go of that pain. But he was human, and eventually the thousand small humiliations he endured accreted into resentment. Lily’s emotionally detached efforts to relieve his frustration only made the problem worse, and as months—and then years—passed, he struggled to keep his resentment from twisting into something worse. He thought he had succeeded. But now, experiencing all that Lily had denied him, and that he had denied himself, he could not feel guilt. He knew he should feel it, yet he did not. What he was experiencing with Eve, he desperately needed. He had wanted that ecstasy with Lily, but it was simply beyond her power. Lily’s inmost self had been wrapped in chains to which Waters did not have the key.
When he was home, he walked through the house like a secret stranger, a double agent who believed his own cover. I am a husband, he would tell himself. A father. I love this woman. I love this child. And he did. Sitting with Annelise in the evenings, he would listen in wonder as she told him about her day, each experience a suspenseful drama seen through the stark lens of seven-year-old perception. When he kissed Ana good night, her smile warmed him in a way nothing else could. Yet even before he passed through the door leaving her room, images of Eve would rise into his mind, as impossible to ignore as a fever in the blood. The urge to telephone her was almost irresistible, but he remembered her proscriptions and forced himself to wait until the next day, when she would call his cell phone. One night, though, the fever overcame him. He went to a pay phone and called her home. Eve was furious until he explained where he was. She met him on a deserted county road and made love with him on the ground, her dark eyes reflecting the moonlight, her voice weaving its ceaseless spell in his ear as he grunted like an animal into the surrounding forest.
The next day, when he took the portfolio from his desk drawer to look at Mallory’s picture, his eyes settled on the unopened bundle of her let
ters. That he had not yet opened this forced him to realize how badly he wanted to experience a reincarnation of Mallory without exhuming the darker remains of her personality. But that was as impossible now as it had been twenty years ago. Ominous flashes of her instability had already broken through the bright facade Eve worked so carefully to maintain.
More and more during their time together, she brought up Lily’s name. She questioned him endlessly about her. What had initially drawn him to her? Why had he married her? Was Annelise more like her father or mother? Eve asked these questions as though the answers were of only passing interest, but whenever he said anything even mildly complimentary about Lily, Eve’s face tightened in a way that sent a chill through him. More disturbing, as the days passed, she wanted him to stay later and later at the house. Twice he drove out of the narrow driveway after dark, distressed by the knowledge that Lily and Annelise were waiting for him at home. At first, Eve kept him late by increasing the intensity of the sex as evening approached. But when Waters tore himself away in spite of this, she reversed strategy and drew out the foreplay, so that he stayed late in order to find the release that days before had come in the first hour after his arrival. Beneath Eve’s subtle games he sensed a battle beginning with Lily, and in this Eve truly bore out Mallory’s shadow side. For the Grendel that lived in the dark cave of Mallory’s mind was jealousy, an unthinking possessiveness that could swallow a man whole and not be sated. The fact that Lily did not even know she was in a war began to work on Waters’s conscience in a way that simple sexual betrayal had not. Yet still he returned to Eve, diving ever deeper into the well of her passion, and leaving farther behind all that he deemed precious.
One night, as dusk fell outside the half-moon window on the third floor, he was trying to find a graceful way to make his exit. Sensing his mood, Eve shook her head and began to caress him. He had thought himself spent, but with patient ministrations, Eve brought him back to a state of arousal greater than that in which he’d begun the afternoon. They started with him above, but as he tired, she rolled him over and sat astride, taking control of their movements. Waters hovered in a purgatory between ecstasy and exhaustion, striving for release but unable to achieve it. With tireless rhythm Eve brought him to a point of exquisite torture, a tightrope in the dark, with pain on one side and pleasure on the other. As he strained against her, feeling as though he might faint, her mantra began again.
“Say my name, Johnny…”
He shut his eyes and tried to lose himself within her. Her teeth bit into his neck.
“Say it, Johnny…say it and you’ll be there. It’s so easy. It’s your magic word…”
Blood pounded like drums in his ears, and his muscles burned, but still he could not find release. Panting for oxygen, he opened his eyes and found himself staring at the place of their joining. The crosshatched pattern of scars on Eve’s inner thighs had grown red and prominent with her arousal, scars he hadn’t seen for twenty years.
“Say it, Johnny,” she begged, not even slowing her motion. “Say my name….”
As she repeated her eternal demand, he heard another voice answer hers. Three whispered syllables filled the room as completely as the screamed confession of a heretic.
“Mallory.”
Eve froze above him, her eyes locked onto his. Then she gave a moan riven from the depths of her being.
“Mallory,” he said again.
She gripped his head between her hands. “Say it again! Say it! Save me!”
“Mallory? Mallory, Mallory, Mallory…”
Tears poured from her eyes like rivers of grief and joy. She sat down with all her weight, the tears dropping onto his face, into his mouth, not warm but cold against his superheated flesh. And though she was not moving, something suddenly broke loose in him, and the point he had struggled so hard to reach came without effort, leaving him shivering beneath her like a malaria patient. Eve lay prone atop him, breathing shallowly.
“Do you love me, Johnny?”
Before that day she had often said, “I love you,” but she’d never insisted that he do the same. At those times he’d sensed a careful vigilance over her emotions, as though she knew that moving too fast could ruin everything. Now she had thrown caution to the wind.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I honestly don’t know.”
“I do,” she said. “I know you do.”
As Waters drove up to his house that night, he felt like a man on the verge of madness. Eve had not demanded that he call her Mallory again before leaving, but neither had he called her Eve. And having surrendered this ground to her, he sensed that only one moral redoubt remained: the renunciation of his love for Lily.
The next morning, Cole walked into Waters’s office, sat down in the chair opposite his desk, and asked if he had the new maps ready.
Waters looked blank.
“You said you had a prospect in West Feliciana Parish,” Cole reminded him. “A close-in deal. You said you’d have it ready in a week.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Can I see it?”
“The mapping’s going to take a little longer than I thought.”
Cole gave him a hard look. “What the fuck are you up to, John?”
Waters shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Nothing but banging the bejesus out of Eve Sumner. Which would be fine by me, except you ain’t doing any work.”
A flash of temper covered Waters’s shock. “I do more than my share of work around here, and you know it.”
Cole’s face reddened. “And you make more money.”
Waters dismissed this with a flick of his hand. He should have known Cole would be on to him. It wasn’t hard to figure out. For no apparent reason the partners had suddenly swapped lifestyles. Cole, usually absent from the office during the odd hours he catted around town, was coming in early every day, making phone calls, evaluating producing wells for possible purchase and workover. Waters, the obsessive workaholic, arrived at nine but usually left by ten, and sometimes didn’t return until four. When he was in the office, he locked his door and took no calls.
“Come to think of it,” Cole said, leaning back and crossing his legs, “your banging Evie isn’t fine by me for another reason. ’Cause you’re breaking rule number one.”
“What would that be?”
“Don’t lose your perspective. That gets you in big trouble. And you have a lot on the line, John Boy.”
“I should take advice from you?”
“In this case, yes. That chick ain’t worth it.”
Waters stiffened. “What do you know about Eve?”
Cole looked incredulous. “What do I know about her? I fucked her, remember? I know plenty. Evie’s hot to trot, and you’re just the latest in a very long line.”
The words stung Waters like the lash of a whip. The knowledge that Cole had been inside Eve nauseated him. He knew how ridiculous he must look. He was like a young soldier in love with a whore, defending her honor to a laughing village. But he couldn’t control his feelings.
“She’s not the same woman you slept with,” he said quietly.
“No?” Cole’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
Cole shook his head, his eyes filled with amazement. “Holy shit. At first I thought you meant she’d reformed or something. Changed her ways. Got born again. But that’s not what you mean, is it?”
Waters looked away, not sure just what he had meant.
“You’re still on your Mallory kick, aren’t you?” Cole leaned forward, his forehead knotted in thought. “Don’t tell me you were right about ‘Soon,’ and all that? Eve’s not actually trying to run that line on you? That she’s Mallory?”
Waters said nothing. A saying of his father’s had always stuck with him: Two people can keep a secret, if one of them’s dead. Yet the temptation to confide in Cole was strong. As far as he knew, his partner had never spilled any of his secrets.
“Eve knows things,” Wa
ters said softly. “Things no one but Mallory ever knew.”
“We talked about that, John. You don’t know what Mallory told people about you. She lived for, what? Nine years after you two split as a couple?”
“I know. But that’s not all. Eve…”
“What?”
“She kisses the way Mallory did. Exactly like her.”
Cole barked a laugh. “Do you really remember how Mallory kissed? Does a guy remember that? There aren’t really any unique ways to do it. This is in your head, mon.”
“I remember how she kissed. It was unforgettable. It’s like muscle memory. Like riding a bike. You can’t forget it. It’s deeper than conscious thought.”
“You’re losing your mind, Rock. You need a week in Cabo.”
Waters shook his head. “I’ve seen her handwriting. It’s identical to Mallory’s. She left me a note at the cemetery, just like Mallory used to, and the handwriting was exactly the same.”
For the first time, Cole looked intrigued. “Do you have this note?”
“No. I think I left it at the cemetery. I may have put it back in the jar.”
“Back in the jar.” Cole nodded like a cop humoring an escaped mental patient. “I see. And this note was signed ‘Mallory’?”
“Yes.”
“John, Eve Sumner is either batshit crazy or running a scam on you.”
Waters thought of the scars on Eve’s arm and thighs, but he did not want to mention them. Since he had never told Cole about Mallory’s self-mutilation, Cole might think he had made it up on the spot.
“Personally, I think it’s a scam,” Cole asserted. “She’s looking for money, baby.”
Waters shook his head. “She doesn’t want money.”
“What, then? You think that forty-one-year-old dick of yours is different from the last ten she had? She wants your money, boy, nothing else.”