Nina flinched.

  “People of the highest class know it is bad taste to keep the bottom button buttoned,” he said.

  For some strange reason he seemed to want to teach her how to dress. Nina was speechless.

  For a moment.

  “Of all the inane, controlling, superficial arrogance from a man with no manners, no style, and apparently no brains….” She rebuttoned the sweater. “Let’s go.” she said.

  She didn’t have much hope of that, and after all what could she do to make him? And if he wouldn’t go, she couldn’t get out of the car to leave him.

  Walker tried to kiss her. She pushed him away with all the force of her arms, made strong and muscular from years of doing more than their share of forced exercise. Even so, she would not have been able to move him if his approach had not been tentative. Walker certainly had no intention of fully forcing himself on her.

  “What are you doing???!!!! Aren’t you supposed to be protecting me from people like you!”

  Walker laughed sheepishly. Rebuffed. “I’m not going to do anything. It’s just that….you are just so strangely attractive to me…. Even I don’t understand it… .I took a chance….I thought…. since I know you wouldn’t get away…”

  There it was: the geisha syndrome, the love of female feebleness, feet bound so they too could not get away. Bondage. Control. Imprisonment. Law enforcement. Nina would never let him have the control he wanted. It was one of the things she could not let men have. Not the scary men who insisted on kissing her in elevators because she was trapped there. Not the silly men who ordered her to always wear something red.

  Walker saw that Nina was repulsed. He couldn’t stand that. But he could not really explain what was pushing him towards her. “No, I’m sorry…I don’t mean…Look, I started this wrong, but can’t we…I mean, I really would like to be involved with you, get to know you, be with you.. to help you….”

  “You’re married.”

  Walker said nothing. Nina hoped he was not another man who would try to convince her that he realized he didn’t even like his wife as she was walking down the aisle.

  Then she added, “And to me a wedding ring is the O in ‘nO’.”

  But she lied to him. Nina was not concerned about getting involved with married men. The truth was she had once been very big on other people’s husbands. Even though she shared the same DNA as Regina, Nina had much different ideas about love than her sister, who was still mooning over that kaleidoscope of contradictions who was her ex-husband. “Married men are a single girls most valuable resource,” Nina once cruelly told her, when Regina confided about Marius’ infidelity.

  Married men were drawn to Nina like free money. She was so un-wifely. They did not have to live with her, so they could enjoy her challenging ways, and sharp tongue. What did she care what she did or said, she wasn’t auditioning for a permanent position. So she operated with a reckless emotional freedom that seemed to create for men a kind of intimacy of its own.

  In spite of her brief marriage, Nina felt she had been single all her life, and still was, as opposed to the reality of being husbandless through widowhood. Her husband had been an unexpected blip on the cardiogram of her largely unconventional love life. He came, confused everything, then disappeared out of the world, leaving her back where she started.

  “Don’t you feel guilty?” Regina asked her on those occasions when Nina, for one reason or another, told her sister that she had taken up an affair with a married man, which she never initiated .

  “Don’t you owe anything to the wife? It could have been you, you know,”

  “Couples don’t take their vows in three’s,” Nina told her, “so what has it got to do with me? I didn’t make promises to either one of them.”

  But in truth she had gotten bone tired of married men, their sneaky unsureness, the guilty reluctance that traveled alongside their propelling passions, so that every encounter was like watching an animal in the wild eat: they would take a bite and quick look over their shoulders. She had gotten tired of the drunken calls in the middle of the night after, sometimes, years of silence. “I love you. I love you.”

  And they would cry.

  Tired of their adolescent confusion and emotional greed: “You know what I wish?” one of them told Nina as he was hurriedly putting on socks to catch the next train back to the suburbs, “I wish I could bring you home with me and we could all live together.” He seemed to mean it, but Nina knew that the only things she would get from him were an umbrella and a shoehorn left behind.

  She was tired of the inventive lying---of the man who would send theater tickets to one of her friends, his mistress, so she could be in the same audience as he and his wife, in order that all three could share the same experience. And if they couldn’t enjoy commenting to each other directly as the play unfolded, well, at least they could briefly catch each other’s eye in the lobby as the wife, innocently unaware, chatted with friends.

  Tired of watching suburban families ice-skating together on bright winter Sundays: Nina knowing that devoted father, comfortable husband was no doubt also another person, a stranger to this same family, living a lie with the people closest to him, forcing on them a false life and the waste that comes with it, his betrayal shrinking all their other possibilities as they lived in a land of their own making, all the major landmarks left off the map, taking them far afield of where they thought they were headed and where they would have chosen to be.

  Some of it she understood. Nina knew that when you live with someone you lose appreciation for their best traits; that a wife, the woman who knows a man as well as himself, would have to become both ally and enemy. She knew that married men love their wives for their familiarity and their history, but get bored with them for the same reasons: that they love their mistresses for their mystery and uninvolvement, but are removed from them for the same reasons.

  No, she was not afraid she would get involved with Walker. Nor was she concerned with protecting the sanctity of his marriage. That was his job. In any case, Walker’s timing was bad.

  His married predictability made her skin crawl.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  i.

  It used to be that when Regina had any contact with Marius she would sob all afternoon, and drink beer with Oreo cookies.

  She didn’t do this anymore; he had lost that part of his hold on her.

  But after a much-welcomed and almost reassuring long period of silence from whomever it was who wished her harm by blowing her up, suddenly finding the new envelope, stuck in the threshold of her loft door, actually slipped by hand halfway under it, with just a newspaper article about a family recently killed by a letter bomb, drove her right back to him.

  There were no stamps on the envelope and no postmark. It was a plain, ordinary #10 letter envelope, nothing elaborate. With only her name typewritten on it—not even her address-- and no note inside.

  Just the article, with its overt menace.

  Hand-delivered.

  As never before.

  SOON I WILL BLOW YOU UP, the first note from Texas warned. But what would it mean to her safety now with the ominous article… not from far away Texas… but right on her front door step?

  It was logical for her to assume that the person threatening her was right where she was, and pushing the threat into the very specific sanctuary of her life.

  Regina thought: Everybody’s days flip through the cosmic calendar to death. But it is one thing to know everybody dies, it is another to know it is going to be you. “Oh, you mean me?!”

  ii.

  What was it that people counted on everyday that made life so important to them, made them want to cling to the good solid earth? Did they understand how much misplaced faith they put in this globe of molten liquid and flaky pie crust where nothing was stable, where the inner core sped faster than the outside, where even the continents wandered? Where our life-sustaining star threw temper tantrums of dangerous solar flares, and
meteorites collided like billiard balls. Never mind bomb threats; the galaxy itself was untrustworthy.

  But before worrying about the cosmic implications of being dead, she first had to worry about dying. Regina could not get her brain around the idea of “not here anymore.”

  She remembered what a friend said would be the worst thing for him about being dead.

  “I would miss getting my mail.”

  She had never dwelled for very long on her own death to actually be afraid of it. But these recent events made her acutely aware of its possible suddenness. When would it happen? Would it really be fast? Would the bomb ruin her paintings? Did she actually wish--BANG! and it’s all over? But did she want it to be all over? There was a relief in having it be over. But why was that? Could it be she under-appreciated her life? No, maybe she didn’t want it to be sudden, afterall. Death when you least expect it can be undignified...make a fool of you. You could be found in a ludicrous, maybe even ugly, position that you would never want to be found in life.

  A reporter friend once told her that when he was covering the murder of a woman killed in a Central Park bathroom, what stayed with him was not the young, pretty, half-naked girl on the dirty tile floor, not the whimpering, now abandoned little dog she had obviously been walking, but the two brown turds she had just left in the toilet.

  No, sudden death was too ungraceful.

  But was that the worst thing about it?

  Regina concluded the worst thing would be the regret. Regret for the loss of her unduplicatable past, present, and future. Regret for the extinguishing of her particular flame, for a life come and gone without even casting a shadow, for the way the living discount the dead, thinking of them as an old idea, as failed survivors. Regina secretly felt superior to the dead, as though they had foolishly opened the wrong door.

  “I’m going to hate being dead!” she thought. “I miss myself already.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  After Regina found the frightening article hand-delivered to her front door, she reluctantly called Det. Walker.

  She did not want to.

  Especially since her sister revealed how he had harassed her, even though Regina knew Nina could hold her own.

  But she had to.

  Det. Walker did not seem surprised to hear from her, and with as little conversation as possible said he would send Det. Angela Vega right away to pick up the envelope. He told her not to handle it too much.

  Regina did not want to be hysterical, but having these two law officers of questionable concreteness at hand did not help her.

  So she called Marius.

  When Marius finally picked up the phone, after his new secretary—who, like all the others, was a little closer to him than she should have been--- maliciously put her on hold for five minutes, she just blurted out everything. She had not wanted to sound so alarmed. She had planned to be more subtle and appealing, especially after not speaking to him for so long, but his voice triggered her new desperation. And perhaps some old as well, which is really what she did not want him to hear.

  “I just need you now,” she told him.

  Marius said he would come as soon as it was possible for him to get away.

  Like most men when you need them, he would be there right away if sex were involved. Since Regina was not sleeping with him anymore, she would have to wait awhile longer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Regardless of anything that had gone between them, to Regina Marius was still physically attractive; his body was her dear old friend. She couldn’t stop the gladness that washed over her just seeing again that craggy, brown-eyed face; his familiar and welcome smell, and the comfort and security of the problem-solving life force standing at the door.

  She introduced him to Det. Angela Vega.

  Marius tried to be lighthearted so his concern would not make Regina’s fears worse.

  “This is probably some poor man whose heart she’s broken and who wants more attention because she’s ignoring him,” Marius offered Angela.

  “Do you think so?” Angela asked. “That’s often the case.”

  “Of course not.” Regina said. Then she couldn’t resist adding for Marius’ sake: “There is no man interested in me who is not getting my full attention.”

  “Well, I don’t know....” Marius said, “you know how you are.....”

  Regina noticed that Marius could keep even Angela quiet. He was wiry, energetic and couldn’t sit still. He wandered around Regina’s loft straightening things out, picking things up and investigating them out of an idle and distracted curiosity, making some remark totally off the subject at hand, checking her books, talking about the authors, and finally telling Angela:

  “You have to have someone watch her. You have to put a cop on her, day and night. Listen, this may not be just her. Maybe it’s someone you need to catch for other bombings.”

  “This is not a bombing,” Angela reminded him, “this is a newspaper article.”

  He was furious. “...Yes!...About a bombing!!,” he yelled at Angela, “Of course, it’s a bombing...or a near bombing... or a plan to bomb....!”

  Marius turned to Regina: “You have to move. Detective, tell her she has to move...You should get a dog. It could alert you, so you could avoid the danger altogether. You know, they train dogs who can detect nearly 20,000 different types of explosives. They never fail, right, Detective? Look, Regina, I’ll help you....” His cell phone rang. It was his office.

  “I have to go . I’ll call you. Listen to what I told you. Detective, tell her I’m right.”

  He hugged Regina swiftly. “I don’t think your people are doing their best for her,” he shot at Angela, as he went out the door.

  Angela saw Regina’s face crumble.

  “Is that ok, his leaving?” she asked, “If you want, I can get him back here...”

  Regina shook her head, “No.”

  If he’s gone, she thought, I don’t have to watch him not love me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Some people think too big a deal is made out of unfaithfulness. They must, since so many people do it.

  Countries like France and Italy institutionalize it.

  Regina was not sure how she felt about unfaithfulness. Certain promises you can’t expect other human beings to keep, even if they believe they can.

  “Hell,” she thought, “I can’t even keep my own promises to myself.”

  Regina was not sure why his unfaithfulness started.

  A centuries’ old folk wisdom says that when a man strays, there is something wrong at home.

  Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  Regina knew of other men’s excuses that ranged from:

  “She wore her hair short when I liked it long.”

  “She wouldn’t take time to iron my shirts.”

  “She wore dowdy clothes.”

  Regina knew these men would be unfaithful anyway, however willing their wives were to accommodate them. Because the only thing “wrong” at home was that their wives had been seen by them too often.

  Yet that did not seem to be her problem. To the contrary, Marius made her feel loved. When he told others how much he loved her, tears came to his eyes. And he was full of surprises, leaving funny notes for her on her car, sending postcards from the city they were already in. He made up little jokes between them. And offensive, loving nicknames. He phoned her at the office all day, as if he could not be away from her too long, as if she were not only important, but necessary.

  He let her make the mistake, as so many women do, of believing intense attention is lasting love.

  But Marius seemed to love everyone who fell within the circle of his enthusiasms, for as long as that particular enthusiasm lasted. He did not notice the contradiction between his eager presentations and lack of follow through. Or more simply put: the number of promises not kept.

  Not on purpose. He wanted to be that strongly taken with something, but it couldn’t always hold him. Once he
had completed a transaction to his satisfaction---building a house, a business, a love affair—he needed to leave it and start the process all over again.

  Nina called him “a possibilities junkie.”

  Regina felt it was not entirely satisfying to share with Nina her attempts and failures to keep Marius’ attention. Considering Nina’s own approach to love.

  “Nobody can take all of you even if you give it to them,” Nina told her sister “It’s too much; it would be like actually living in Venice.”

  Regina was familiar with too much and too close. She was aware if you get too close to something, its nature changes. Sit too close to the stage at the ballet and all the thumping on boards is louder than the music. Sounds like a creaky gymnasium. Or at a concert? You can hear the players spit and wheeze into their instruments.

  The magic goes.

  Nina was often upset to see Regina’s futile efforts to be more of what Marius wanted---needed. Over the years she tried to caution Regina from going too far down that path.

  “If you live for others, there’s no guarantee you’ll make their life better, and it’s possible your own life will be lost in the process. So isn’t the only life you can do something about, worth polishing to its finest sheen?”

  Regina had always been resistant to anything that might pull her further away from her still cherished closeness with Marius.

  “I do not like to think of love as a contest between two separate, highly-polished lives.”

  “Be that as it may,” Nina said, “but if a man makes a woman disappear from herself, who would it be that loved him?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  “Walk with me,” Angela said when she saw how upset Regina was at Marius’ leaving. “I need to talk to you a bit more. Besides, you look like you could use some fresh air.”

  Regina hesitated. She was torn between keeping her privacy or needing a little comfort, even though she didn’t think Angela would be the person to get it from.

  But seeing Marius always left her a little shaky and unable to operate in her own best interest. “I’m ok. It’s just hard to understand …..”

  “Understanding is overrated,” Angela interrupted.

  Detective Vega’s offer of a walk was tempting. Regina thought it might help to distance herself from Marius’ visit, which seemed to have backfired from her original intent.