A Woman's Eye (1991) Anthology by Sara Paretsky

Author:Sara Paretsky [Paretsky, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2009-10-14T07:00:00+00:00

MARY WINGS’s amateur detective Emma Victor has solved two cases to date-She Came Too Late and She Came in a Flash, novels that have been published in England, Japan, Spain, Germany, and Holland as well as in the United States. After living in the Netherlands for seven years, Ms, Wings moved to San Francisco where she now works as a graphic designer.

KILL THE MAN FOR ME

Mary Wings

“It was okay,” you said after the first time we’d made love. You said it very neutrally as if you’d been talking about the weather. Or snowflakes. Or cornflakes. “It was okay.” “Nobody’s ever told me that before,” I joked. You were lying next to me saying, “It’s no big deal. No big deal to say, ‘It’s okay.’”

You leaned up on your elbow. I traced your collarbone with my eyes. You tried tracing my eyes with your eyes.

“It’s our first time,” you said, “We need to learn some more things about each other.” Your voice was warm, instructive. Of course, you’d been in practice a long time. Or so they had said.

“Sure!” I crowed. “Learn some more things. Discourse about intercourse! Sex as perception,” I burbled at you. “Sure!” But I also knew that you were telling me that we had a future. I laughed in the darkness. I would get what I wanted. And I would get you.

Later I would tell you that when I made love with you, the memories of former lovers abandoned all claim upon my body. I told you I was free.

We curled up together and fell asleep. The next day we would be stuck in gridlock traffic for three hours. On the way home.

I joined in the sighs of relief when you spoke at public gatherings. You’d summarize, make the contradictions manageable. We’d been anxious. You’d satisfy us. One of them came to a lecture once. But it wasn’t a problem. You were attentive to me at these gatherings. You’d ruffle my hair. I was a portrait by your side. You’d let me know with the slightest of gestures at the end of a publicly spoken phrase that you were, in fact, only speaking to me. Of course, all you told anyone was what they wanted to hear. Pure pap.

Except this morning when you said, after we’d come out of the shower, “Don’t you ever comb your hair?”

And then I remembered, that’s what you used to tell them.

You were laughing, “What did your parents ever do to you?” You were hardly exasperated at all. And I’d spilled the garbage bag on the floor for the third time that week. I was on the floor too.

I was watching Jackson the terrier make pesto sauce paw prints the color of avocado. She was making them on the rug of desert tan. I was crying. And I was tan. We were all tan. We lived in Los Angeles.

“What did your parents ever do to you?” you repeated. But you knew better than I did what my parents had done to me. You’d been my shrink.

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