“When Henry came back for us with the limousine we knew you had vomited. Henry had tried to clean it up, and all the windows were open, but it still smelled like hell. The councilman was livid for a moment and then he laughed and laughed. He told Chester, ‘Not only does your lawyer cry, but he drinks like a teenybopper.’ Jimmy and Chuckie thought that was funny as hell. Chester told them both to shut up.”

“It wasn’t the drinking,” I said. “It was the sock in my eye.”

“Now you’re being defensive.”

“I’m a good drinker.”

“Of course you are,” she said sweetly.

“I could drink both those bastards under the table.”

“Of course you could.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No,” she said. “What are we going to do about my landlord?”

“Get your friend Norvel to threaten him.”

“He’s not a friend anymore.”

She was leaning over me now, still looking at my eye, searching the black and blue as if she were searching tea leaves for hidden meanings. With her makeup off, in her sweatshirt and jeans, there was something innocently collegiate about her.

“Tell me, Veronica,” I asked. “What are you doing with these guys, Jimmy Moore and Norvel Goodwin?”

“It’s a long story. Very sad.”

“Tell me.”

“It started with a boy, a very sweet boy. He’s dead now but that’s how it started.” I thought I saw something in her eye, but I must have imagined it because as I kept looking at her it disappeared. “I’ll tell you sometime,” she said. “Just not now, please. What am I going to do tonight?”

“I’ll call you a cab.”

“I can’t go home with that dead bird on my doorstep. I just can’t.”

With a gallant shrug I stood up. “All right,” I said. “I’ll take you home and clean up the bird. But this is the last time.”

“Can’t I stay here?” she asked.

“No. And tomorrow I’ll file for a restraining order. Restraining orders are generally useless, but at least it will be something. I’ll let you know when the court sets up the hearing.”

“Can’t I stay the night on your sofa?”

“No,” I said. “Definitely not.”

I walked to the closet and was reaching for my raincoat when she came from behind and placed her arms around me. Her hands lightly rubbed up and down my chest. “Can’t I stay, please? I wouldn’t sleep knowing that bird was there, and even if you threw it down the chute I’d still see it lying there, its sad little neck bent like it is, a small dribble of blood out its beak.”

Without turning around, with her hands still floating across my chest, I said, “I really can’t.”

“It’s Norvel, isn’t it?”

“It’s everything.”

“I won’t let him hurt you.”

I pulled her arms away and turned around. “I can’t,” I said, but it came out more like “Ay kaaugh” because she had slipped her tongue into my mouth. I tasted the sexy beeriness of her breath and smelled the wetness of her hair and there was something silky and warm about the way she pressed her body into mine and though I said, “Ay ayeaally kaaugh,” I knew that I would.

Jeanne, my first lover, a funny word to use for a sixteen-year-old girl with braces, was an athlete, a distance swimmer, all shoulders and thighs, trained for long, exhausting efforts that left her shaking with weariness. I was a notable disappointment to her and we both ended up more bemused than satisfied. My experiences with Michelle were more satisfactory, she had patience and clever hands and a willingness to experiment that was just right for a beginner. Sandra was tall and cold and endured sex but I was fascinated by her blondness, white white hair, pale skin, a profound phlegmaticness. Rebecca was a virgin, but eager, and let me play the role of experienced older man, though she was only a year behind me in college. “Let’s try this,” I would say, nervously, and she’d always reply with a cheerful, “Sure.” Allyn was in love with me, which brought to the table an intensity I found uncomfortable. Sue was blonde and plump and from Wisconsin but still sweetly kinked, with a thing about her feet. And of course my ex-fiancée Julie, the one true love of my youth, earnest and sad, loosing tears when we orgasmed together with silent sighs under her down comforter. Along the way there were Tina and Bonnie and Lauren, who laughed and grabbed and shouted in French. There was a dancer, a cop, a divorced woman from Toledo with a son older than me. There were many many delightful women, every shape, every size, every political party including the Communists, and I screwed them all. Maybe I was no Wilt Chamberlain, but I was no wilting violet either and I had made love to a peck of women in my life. But I had never made love to a woman like Veronica Ashland.

When we were naked, on my unmade bed, rubbing our hands uncontrollably over each other’s bodies, she opened the foil packet she found in my drawer, the packet I had stolen from Bissonette’s love chest, and popped the condom in her mouth, placing it upon me with her teeth, leaving just the right amount of slack at the tip. Then, like a crazed leopard, she was on top of me, pressing the palm of her hand into my swollen eye, biting my neck, my breast, licking my chest and my ear, pressing my eye and biting so hard I screamed as she worked. She had a thin supple body that responded to everything like a dream, her breasts were small and sharp and prickly hot, entering her was like entering a jar of electric honey, that sweet, that wild. She bent forward and arched back and bent forward like a willow stick, grabbing my hair painfully hard along the way as she sucked a kiss from my throat. She came quickly and ferociously and best of all she came again, and again. I knew it was her, not me, and I struggled to keep up but she was always one moment ahead of me. I moaned my orgasm and she howled, snatching at the air like a lioness and then the willow bent back toward me and she buried her face in my neck and meowed. She sounded like a satisfied house cat, stretched around a newly emptied bowl of milk.

The sound involuntarily brought up a question. “There was a litter box in your apartment.”

“Yes,” she said.

“But no cat,” I said. “That was your cat the Greek killed, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

“But you acted like you didn’t care about the cat, just the mess.”

“It was only a cat,” she said with a dismissive laugh.

“But I know about women and their cats, they are like babies to them, their children. A cat gets a hairball, they grow frantic. But you let me drop the corpse of your cat into a Strawbridge bag and dump it down the chute without a tear.”

“How should I have acted?”

“Mournful, distraught, pathetically tearful. Other women would have.”

“I’m not like other women.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You are the coldest bitch I ever met,” and, like an incantation handed down father to son from the deepest mists of prehistory, the words made me hard again immediately. I twisted my hips with a violent rush, sending her sprawling on the bed, and I pressed myself into her and held her arms over her head and bit her throat like she had bitten mine and sucked her nipples when she told me to and bit her even after she told me to stop and I made her cry like no cat had ever made her cry and she came rivers.

It was the best sex I had ever had, better than I had ever hoped to have, and no matter the threat and whatever the price, I wanted more.