Hardly Knew Her

“Crap wine,” he said. “And I am sick to hell of Gui

The first crack of the door against his head was too soft; all it did was make him bellow. But it was hard enough to disorient him, giving Bliss the only advantage she needed. She straddled his back and slammed the door repeatedly on his head and his neck. Decapitation occurred to her as a vague goal and she barely noticed his hands reaching back, scratching and flailing, attempting to dislodge her. She settled for motionlessness and silence, slamming the door on his head until he was still.

But still was not good enough. She wrestled a corkscrew from its resting place-fifteen euros-and went to work. Impossible. Just as she was about to despair, she spied a happy gleam beneath the bedspread, a steak knife that had fallen to the floor and somehow gone undetected. She finished her work, even as the hotel was coming to life around her-the telephone ringing, footsteps pounding down the corridors. She should probably put on her robe. She was rather…speckled.

“HOW OLD ARE YOU, THEN?” the police officer-they called them gardai here-asked Bliss.

“How old do I look?”

“You look about twenty-five, but the records require more specific data.” He was still being kind and solicitous, although Bliss sensed that the fading mark on her cheek had not done much to reconcile the investigators to the scene they had discovered. They were gallant and professed horror that she had been hit and insulted. But their real horror, she knew, was for Rory.

“Really? Twenty-five? You’re not just saying that?”

“I’d be surprised if you could buy a drink legally in most places.”

Satisfied, she gave her real age, although it took a moment of calculation to get it right. Was she thirty, thirty-one? Thirty, she decided. Thirty.

A GOOD FUCK SPOILED

It began i

Luckily, neither did his wife, Marla. But she was enthusiastic about Charlie’s new hobby, if only because it created a whole new category of potential gifts, and her family members were always keen for Christmas and birthday ideas for Charlie, who was notoriously difficult to shop for. And as the accessories began to flow-golf books, golf-themed clothing, golf gloves, golf hats, golf highball glasses-Charlie inevitably learned quite a bit about golf. He watched tournaments on television and spoke knowingly of “Tiger” and “Singh,” as well as the quirks of certain U.S. Open courses. He began to think of himself as a golfer who simply didn’t golf. Which, as he gleaned from his friends who actually pursued the sport, might be the best of all possible worlds. Golf, they said, was their love and their obsession, and they all wished they had never taken it up.

AT ANY RATE, THIS CONTINUED for two years and everyone-Charlie, Marla, and Sylvia, his former administrative assistant-was very happy with this arrangement. But then Sylvia a

“Look, I want to fuck you,” Sylvia had said out of the blue, about six months after she started working for him. Okay, not totally out of the blue. She had tried a few more subtle things-pressing her breasts against his arm when going over a document, touching his hand, asking him if he needed her to go with him to conferences, even volunteering to pay her own way when told there was no money in the budget for her to attend. “We could even share a room,” she said. It was when Charlie demurred at her offer that she said: “Look, I want to fuck you.”

Charlie was fifty-eight at the time, married thirty-six years, and not quite at ease in the world. He remembered a time when nice girls didn’t-well, when they didn’t do it so easily and they certainly didn’t speak of it this way. Marla had been a nice girl, someone he met at college and courted according to the standards of the day, and while he remembered being wistful in the early days of his marriage, when everyone suddenly seemed to be having guilt-free sex all the time, AIDS had come along and he decided he was comfortable with his choices. Sure, he noticed pretty girls and thought about them, but he had never been jolted to act on those feelings. It seemed like a lot of trouble, frankly.

“Well, um, we can’t,” he told Sylvia.

“Why? Don’t you like me?”

“Of course I like you, Sylvia, but you work for me. They have rules about that. Anita Hill and all.”

“The point of an affair is that it’s carried on in secret.”

“And the point of embezzlement is to get away with stealing money, but I wouldn’t put my job at risk that way. I plan to retire from this job in a few years.”

“But you feel what I’m feeling, right? This incredible force between us?”

“Sure.” It seemed only polite.

“So if I find a job with one of our competitors, then there would be nothing to stop us, right? This is just about the sexual harassment rules?”

“Sure,” he said, not thinking her serious. Then, just in case she was: “But you can’t take your Rolodex, you know. Company policy.”

A month later, he was called for a reference on Sylvia and he gave her the good one she deserved, then took her out to lunch to wish her well. She put her hand on his arm.

“So can we now?”

“Can we what?”

“Fuck?”

“Oh.” He still wasn’t comfortable with that word. “Well, no. I mean, as of this moment, you’re still my employee. Technically. So, no.”

“What about next week?”

“Well, my calendar is pretty full-”

“You don’t have anything on Thursday.” Sylvia did know his calendar.

“That’s true.”

“We can go to my apartment. It’s not far.”

“You know, Sylvia, when you’re starting a new job, you really shouldn’t take long lunches. Not at first.”

“So it’s going to be a long lunch.” She all but growled these words at him, confusing Charlie. He was pretty sure that he hadn’t committed himself to anything, yet somehow Sylvia thought he had. He had used the company’s sexual harassment policy as a polite way to rebuff her, and now it turned out she had taken his excuse at face value. The thing was, he did not find Sylvia particularly attractive. She had thick legs, far too thick for the short skirts she favored, and she was a little hairy for his taste. Still, she dressed as if she believed herself a knockout and he did not want to disabuse her of this notion.

(And did Charlie, who was fifty-six, with thi

“I’m not sure how I could get away,” he said at last.

“I’ve already thought that out. If you told people you were playing golf, you could get away Thursdays at lunch. You know how many men at the company play golf. And then we could have Saturdays, too. Long Saturdays, with nothing but fucking.”

He winced. “Sylvia, I really don’t like that word.”

“You’ll like the way I do it.”

He did, actually. Sylvia applied herself to being Charlie’s mistress with the same brisk efficiency she had brought to being his administrative assistant, far more interested in his needs than her own. He made a few rules, mostly about discretion-no e-mails, as few calls as possible, nothing in public, ever-but otherwise he let Sylvia call the shots, which she did with a lot of enthusiasm. Before he knew it, two years had gone by, and he was putting his golf clubs in his car twice a week (except when it rained, which wasn’t often, not in this desert climate) and he thought everyone was happy. In fact, Marla even took to bragging a bit that Charlie seemed more easygoing and relaxed since he had started golfing, but he wasn’t obsessive about it like most men. So Marla was happy and Charlie was happy and Sylvia-well, Sylvia was not happy, as it turned out.