The Nix(148)

He pulled up and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Breaking curfew,” she said. She glared at him, stood stiff and straight, a pose of abstract anger and resistance.

“You want to go through this again?” he said.

“Do what you’re gonna do, pig.”

So again he cuffed her, pressed her against the car. Again she was carrying nothing. All the way to the lockup she stared at him. Most people slumped against the door, defeated, almost like they were trying to hide. Not this girl. It unnerved him, her stare.

The next night he saw her again, at the same spot, the same time. She stood leaning against the wall of a brick building, one knee up, hands in her pockets.

“Hey there,” he said.

“Hey, pig.”

“Breaking curfew again?”

“Among other things.”

He felt a little afraid of her. He was not accustomed to people reacting this way. The freaks and hippies were unbearable, of course, but they could be trusted to act rationally. They did not want to go to jail. They did not want to be hassled. But this girl, she emitted a kind of danger, a flirtatiousness and fierceness that he found alien and unpredictable. Maybe even thrilling.

“You gonna cuff me?” she said.

“Are you causing trouble?”

“I could. If that’s what it took.”

The next night was his night off, but he found someone to trade shifts. She was there again, same spot. He drove past her once, then again. She followed him with her eyes. She was openly laughing at him by the third time around the block.

The first time they screwed it was in the backseat of his police cruiser. Alice was at her usual spot, at the usual time. She’d simply pointed at the alley and told him to park the car there. He did. It was dark, the car almost completely hidden. She told him to get in the backseat. He did. He was not used to taking orders from girls, from hippie street freaks especially. He felt briefly resistant to the whole thing, but that evaporated as soon as she got into the backseat with him and closed the door and removed his belt, which fell loudly to the floor, holding as it was his radio and nightstick and gun. A great thud and clatter on the floorboards. And Alice didn’t even try to kiss him. She didn’t seem to want to, though he kissed her—it seemed gentlemanly, to kiss her, to stroke her face with his fingers, a gesture that he hoped conveyed thoughtfulness and human affection, that he wanted more than simply what was in her pants, except that what was in her pants was mostly what he wanted, at that moment very much so. She yanked at his slacks and all thoughts of his wife and the guys back at the station and the superintendent and the mayor and the slim chance of somebody walking by and seeing them, they were all obliterated.

They didn’t have sex “together” so much as Alice had vigorous sex with him while he lay there also participating.

Afterward, exiting the car, she turned and smiled her sly smile and said, “See you around, pig.” And for the rest of his shift he obsessed over what she meant by that. See you around. Not “See you next time.” Not “See you tomorrow.” Not even “See you later.” She’d said See you around, which was the least forward-thinking, most noncommittal thing she could have said.

Each encounter followed roughly the same basic emotional pattern: massive relief that Alice had returned, followed by ceaseless worry that she’d never come back.

And he needed her to come back. Desperately. Harrowingly. It felt like his chest and guts were held together by a single wooden clothespin that she could remove by simply not showing up. He imagined arriving at their usual spot and not finding her anymore and feeling his insides burst like a water balloon. The rejection would be terminal. He knew it. This led him to a morally questionable but, in his mind, totally necessary employment request: He asked to be assigned to the Red Squad.

After which his full-time job became to spy on Alice, which was really excellent because he could both keep track of where she was at all times and, even better, have a somewhat-plausible excuse if anyone found out about them. He wasn’t having an affair; he was undercover.

He bugged her room. He photographed her going into and out of various known subversive meeting places. And he felt more free when he screwed her. That is, until she asked him to do things to her that he found more than a little weird.

“Fuck me while I’m handcuffed,” she’d said that first time their lovemaking changed from standard-issue backseat sex to something kinkier.

He asked her why on earth she would ever want something like that and she gave him that withering, crushing, sarcastic face he hated so much. “Because I’ve never tried it in handcuffs,” she said.

But he hadn’t thought that was a very good reason. He could think of a million things he had never tried and had no interest in.

“Do you like balling me?” she’d asked.

He paused. He hated this, all this talking about himself and his feelings. One advantage to his wife’s post-child metamorphosis was that she had stopped asking personal questions completely. It occurred to him that he hadn’t had to express his feelings verbally in years.

Yes, he’d told her. He liked making love to her, and she laughed at that—the quaintness of a phrase like “making love.” He blushed.

“And did you ever think that you’d enjoy screwing a freaky beatnik like me?” she said.