Lily could not believe the dizzying waves of happiness washing over her. She was having sex again! She was having SEX. She wanted to shout it from the rooftops, wanted to tell about it to strangers on the street. She wanted to have it with the windows open, with the shades up. She wanted to do it in public places, in corridors, on the bus, on the subway. To Paul, to whom she ran for hair color on Monday, the first thing she said was, “I’m having sex!”
“You are? Congratulations! Maria, come here!” Paul yelled across the beauty salon. “Did you hear? Our Lily is having sex!”
“Having sex, you? With who?” Across the salon!
“Like that’s important,” scoffed Paul. “Nobody cares, Maria. She’s having SEX, didn’t you hear?”
“I hear, I hear.”
They were so loud, so fantastic.
Rachel came in to work, and Lily didn’t even have time to open her mouth, Paul was already volunteering information. Rachel said skeptically, “Sex with a man in his forties? Is that even possible?”
“Well, obviously.”
She remained unconvinced. “Is he any good?”
“Oh my God, crazy good. Why?”
“I don’t know. I hear men in their forties stop being any good in bed.”
“Where did you hear such nonsense?”
“I read it in Cosmo,” Rachel said, flipping her hair back, forward, sideways. “Their sex drive disappears. Can they even get it up at that age?”
“Lil’s brother somehow managed it,” said Paul, and was instantly slapped on his bleached head by Lily, who said, “Why, why do you have to ruin absolutely everything?”
“Well, don’t just give us the bare bones, mama, tell us everything,” said Rachel, grinning. “What does he do?”
“What doesn’t he do?”
“I don’t know how you did it. How did you do it—snag him?”
“You should try getting mortally sick; I think that’s what did it,” said Lily, running out, manicured, pedicured, thoroughly waxed, her tufted patchy head full of copper highlights.
He had stayed overnight, woke up in her bed; a naked Spencer woke up in her bed, stayed with her all day Sunday. They had a shower together, ordered Chinese in, ate in bed, crawled out to watch a movie, she already couldn’t remember what it was. On Sunday night he went home because he had to work the next day, and here it was the next day. Lily walked past his precinct wondering if she should go in, say hi, beep him maybe. She decided not to. She rushed home instead, to see if there were any messages for her. Since when was she so eagerly checking her messages? Since she was having SEX again!
And there was a message from him. Even his voice didn’t sound the same anymore, it sounded deep and husky, it was a voice that was having sex—with her. “Hey,” he said in the message. Lily loved the familiarity. Not even an “It’s me.” Just “Hey.” “Hey. Where are you? Pick up. I’m out all day in Jersey, and then uptown in Washington Heights. I’ll call you later. Try to be home.”
Lily never moved from the phone the rest of the day. She didn’t even have music on, just in case some tympanic drum would mask the sound of the phone ringing. She made sure it was charged and plugged in, and all the lights were invitingly green.
When it rang, she was in the bathroom—of course!—and she lunged for it and said the most expectant “Hello?” of her life.
“This is your grandmother. How are you feeling?”
Lily was on the phone for ten minutes. She hoped the caller ID was working. She waited until seven in the evening for him to call. He didn’t. She painted, she drew. Unfortunately all she saw in her mind to draw was naked bodies, naked male bodies, lean muscles, lean waists, the space between the navel and the pubis—and then some. The wide spread-out hands, the fingers, all the digits, his and hers, at the moment of their greatest tension. Two large masculine hands tightly gripping two female calves. The man’s lips from heaven, ready for more, wet, slightly parted. Lily couldn’t sell these pictures on a Saturday afternoon on a family street. They were nearly pornographic.
Nearly?
At seven o’clock, Lily was finishing up a drawing of a man’s thigh when she heard a strong knock. She jumped up, she ran to the door, then slowed down to open it, trying to appear calm, but she was out of breath, and there he was, standing in the hall, smiling at her. Spencer smiling. He must be having SEX too!
“Hi,” Lily said, stepping out of the way for him to come in.
“Hey.” He came in.
How to ask? “You said you were going to call.” Like that, she guessed.
Spencer turned around to glance at her bemusedly. “I was with Gabe all day. I could hardly call you with him right next to me.” He stood in his suit. She stood in her H. Starlet sweats, in her little tank top with no bra.
“Did you forget your key?”
He shook his head. “Perhaps you’ve never heard me knock before. I always knock before I barge right in.”
“Oh.”
“So are you hungry?” he asked.
“Starving.”
“Me too.”
They had SEX on their couch, he still wearing his lead investigator, detective-lieutenant suit. He did show the presence of mind to pull down his trousers, whispering that his other suit was at the cleaners and he couldn’t get this one messy. And then, too soon, he was lying on top of her, his silk tie rubbing against her bare shoulder, and whispering, “Liliput, is that the sexiest thing or what, you under me all naked while I’m wearing my work clothes…”
Lily laughed, holding him to her. “You say work clothes, but it’s not like you’re in the construction business, or lumberjacking. You’re wearing a suit. You could be an accountant, for God’s sake.”
“Yes, but I’m not an accountant, and you know how you can tell? Put your hands a little lower down and feel my Glock.”
Lily laughed until she became aroused again.
They ordered Odessa in (it was worth it just to see Pedro’s expression when he delivered the food to a barely clad Spencer), but he went home at midnight. “I have to be at work at seven, Lil. I can’t be doing this all night long. I’m an old man.”
The next day he called when she was in the shower to say he was in court and then in Jersey until late and would call her later, but later came and he didn’t call. At midnight when Lily was already in bed, she heard the key in the door and then his footsteps walking through the dark living room to her bedroom. The door opened. He came in, kneeled by her head. Lily opened her arms to him. He went home at three.
On Wednesday he called first thing in the morning and asked if she wanted to go out to dinner.
“Spencer, are you asking me out on a date?”
“No. I’m asking if you want to go out or dine in.”
She laughed.
When he knocked on her door, Lily said “Come iiiin,” and he used his key and came in, saying, “Where’s the gatekeeper?” From Ghostbusters! But the gatekeeper in the form of Lily was sitting nude on the couch, her legs parted and drawn up.
“I’m here,” said the gatekeeper. “Where’s the keymaster?”
Spencer dropped the keys, barely shutting the door behind him and kneeled on the floor in front of Lily. Did they go out to dinner that night? Lily didn’t know. She didn’t know anything anymore.
She had been with only boys before, clumsy fumbling boys, eager, ever at the ready, but without any idea of what to do or not do to enhance and gladden Lily. But Spencer was a man, and there was nothing clumsy or fumbling about him. He did this thing that had never been done to her, this enslaving thing that made her burn in her whole body when she even thought of thinking about it, that made her unable to look him in the face when she even thought of thinking about it. He spread her apart with the palms of his hands, holding her tightly open before he put his soft mouth on her. It felt like she was coming before his lips ever reached her. And then—he wouldn’t stop holding her open, wouldn’t stop anything, not even when she begged him up and down the octaves to cease and
desist.
“I’m not sure, but I think,” Lily breathed out, clutching to him in bed, “that you’re muddling my brain. I forgot to take my pill on Monday, forgot to go for my blood work yesterday.”
“Oh, no.”
“I didn’t even know it until they called.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to double-up tomorrow.” She grinned. But she had no intention of taking it tomorrow. Lily was skipping cancer this week.
“What were you doing Monday that you forgot?”
What was she doing Monday? “Getting my nails done.”
“Ah. Vital, yes.”
“Getting highlights.”
“Essential.”
“Getting a Brazilian wax.”
“Well, now you’re talking.” He was on top of her.
“I thought you didn’t notice. You didn’t even mention it.”
“Lily, ahem, I can hardly help but notice. I thought my being here every night would speak for itself.”
And it did, it did.
On Thursday Lily went to visit her grandmother, like always, because she didn’t want anyone to get worried about her. She stayed for dinner because Grandma seemed lonely and wanted her to stay. Spencer called her at her grandmother’s. “How do you know this number?” Lily said, flattered pink to be tracked down.
“I’m paid to track people down. That is what I do.”
Very quietly she said, “Why does that sound so damn hot?”
Very quietly he said, “I’ll come pick you up.”
“Wait, wait.”
Spencer waited. Grandma would go through the roof if she saw Lily getting into his car. He must know that.
“In an hour.”
“No, Spencer, wait.”
Grandma called from the other room. “Lily, are you coming?”
Spencer waited.
“I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Either from them or from me, Lil,” he said and hung up.
Oh, dear Mary, Mother of God, the next day, the next day.
“Lily! Are you completely out of your mind? What in the world do you think you’re doing?”
Who was that? Grandma? Anne? Amanda? Her mother? All of them? Grandma in the space of one morning managed to tell everybody, and Lily meant everybody, because even the Korean Soo Min called to wag a finger at her. Grandma said, “How do you think your brother is going to feel knowing you’ve taken up with Inspector Javert?”
“First of all, you’re being melodramatic.” And tiresome, Lily wanted to add.
“I don’t think so.”
“And second of all,” Lily calmly continued, finally speaking up good and proper, “My brother is in no position to be passing judgment on anybody, don’t you think?”
Grandma had asked her not to come Thursdays. She said it was shameful what Lily was doing, shameful and immoral.
“I know, I know. I’ve heard this a thousand times. I’m the shameful one, the immoral one. The rest of you are saints. You know what, Grandma, I think you’re right. It’s best I don’t come for a little while.”
“And have you even called your mother?”
“No, but that’s all right, because she’s been calling me. The other day before she hung up on me, she cursed me to the devil, telling me for the hundredth time some parable about a mother who put a curse on her daughter who then died.”
“Why are you talking about your mother that way?” Grandma said quietly. “You don’t know what she’s been through.”
They were wrong about Spencer—he was worth it. The night he picked her up in Brooklyn, he parked his car by the Greenpoint docks, and with Manhattan Island twinkling across the East River, they had fumbling, cramped, orgiastic teenage sex in the back-seat of his Buick while Springsteen’s “Ramrod” rocked on the radio.
Friday night Spencer was in Pennsylvania: there was a custody abduction and he went to retrieve the twelve-year-old twins from their father and bring them back to their mother. He called to say he would go back to his place to sleep but would come to her art sale on Saturday. By the time he made it, Lily had already sold every one of her erotic drawings (in record time, she was embarrassed to say) and was sitting at the empty table sketching herself sitting at an empty table. A woman in a mini-skirt walked by, bought the unfinished drawing, asked Lily to draw her, and that’s what Lily was doing when Spencer ambled by, in scuffed jeans and a worn T-shirt. “I’m forced to take in extra work while waiting for you,” she said mock-plaintively, but he stepped over to her chair, threw her head back and kissed her so deeply that the hot pocket exploding in her belly made her drop her pencil. She gave the woman the drawing for free. And next week drew ten versions of the man in jeans leaning down to kiss the girl in the white shirt sitting in the chair with her face raised to the heavens. They sold in minutes.
Saturday night they went out to dinner. They got dressed up and went out to Union Square Cafe, where they had calamari and pot roast and apple hot cake, where the waiter said, “would you like a cocktail”, and Lily nodded and Spencer shook his head, ordering two more Cosmos for her so that she was very tipsy by the time they blew off the movie and rushed home where the SEX they had was so unrestrained, Lily thought she had gone deaf and blind.
And on Sunday night, during their movie night, he took off her clothes and made her watch Moonstruck completely naked, while he sat close to her in jeans and played with her for half the movie before he made love to her. Lily did not hear a word of Nicolas Cage or Cher. She did hear Spencer, though, and all the things he whispered to her. Lily made a mental note to watch that movie again when she became sane and stopped moaning aloud at the barest thought of him.
He went home on Sunday night, and on Monday Lily got up and dragged herself to Mount Sinai where she was soberly reminded of what she had forgotten during an intoxicating seven days—that her neutrophils and platelets and red cells and white cells were being slowly destroyed by Alkeran, which was in turn keeping her from dying. They gave her VePesid by IV and an anti-emetic to help her nausea, and told her not to forget her Alkeran anymore, but the VePesid made her so tired that when she got home, she lay down and went to sleep and didn’t wake up until Tuesday, when she felt like she was rotting from the inside. And worse, sexless again. Sexless once again. How short-lived that was, Lily thought weakly, retching in the toilet. How joyous and yet fleeting. And how joyless this is, and yet how much there is of it.
She stopped taking the Alkeran. Stopped cold. It was doing nothing for her counts and it was affecting her SEX Life. It was either cancer or SEX. Lily chose to have both.
Then, a miracle! The following week the platelets were up to 150, without any drugs! The white cells were not elevated! The red was almost normal. DiAngelo was very impressed with her platelets and the flush to her cheeks; he said her blood looked good and clean. He shook her hand and sent her home.
Lily skipped from the hospital on 66th down Fifth Avenue, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, past the pews and the priests and the crying rooms. She couldn’t wait to get home before she called him, so she beeped him from the noisy street near the Empire State Building. When he didn’t call back in five minutes, she beeped him again.
“Guess what?” she burst when he finally called. “I’m clean!”
“Is that so?”
“No…I mean I’m clean.”
“That’s great. Thanks for letting me know.”
“My counts are all up. No more chemo, Spencer. Do you understand? No more Alkeran. No more tiredness, throwing up, feeling horrible, looking horrible.”
“I understand.”
“Where are you?”
“In the car.”
“Your police car?”
“Yes.”
“Are you alone?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” Lily was still out of breath, but so giddy, so happy, and feeling a little mischievous. “But sometimes you’re alone in your police car,” she drawled, loweri
ng her voice to bedroom.
“Yes.”
“Mmm. Say you’re alone drivin’ in your car, and you find me in the street, like now, say, being rowdy, disobedient, suspect me perhaps of being…indecently exposed, would you, mmm, pull me over?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe turn me around, pin my hands behind my back, splay my front against the hood of your car, my back to you…”
“…Yes.”
“Put the cuffs on me…”
“All right then, thanks for calling.”
“And search me between my legs…”
“Right, yes, that was very helpful. Call me if you have any more info.”
“Because, Detective O’Malley, I’ll confess right now, under my short short denim skirt, I’ve got a completely bare p—”
“Thanks, you have a great day yourself.” He hung up as Lily laughed with joy.
Gabe was driving and he looked over at Spencer, who sat staring straight ahead. “Nice charade there, O’Malley. You think your terse little yeses and nos are going to fool a homicide detective?”
“Oh, nothing can get past you, McGill,” said Spencer, trying in vain to calm the fire in his loins.
At lunch they walked up 5th Street to Second Avenue. Gabe pointed to a public phone booth on the corner, where stood Lily, her back to them. Spencer took her in, Gabe said isn’t that your friend, and then Spencer’s beeper went off. Gabe raised his eye brows. Spencer glanced at the display. Harlequin it said.
He motioned to Gabe to keep quiet, moved his gun back a little so it wouldn’t accidentally hurt her and came up behind her, gripping her with both hands just above her hips. “Very very naughty,” he said into her ear.
He knew she would get scared, and she did, she squealed and whirled around, his hands remaining on her hips, and then saw them, and relaxed, punching Spencer lightly in the chest as he stepped away from her and laughed. “Detective O’Malley, isn’t it against the law to frighten young civilian women?” she said. “Hello, Detective McGill.”
“Hello, Lily. Nice to see you again.”