Iceberg Tempting Read online

  That’s what it’s like to be a writer.

  ***

  We’re at Maria’s again, that next Saturday night. It must mean something when two people are together on what was it, five consecutive Saturday nights? Maria was mostly done with the Royal Cleaning Lady, and I watched as she painted, in that wonderful smock of hers, that fleshy connection between her and the stool, and I’m jealous of it, ooo, sit on my face like that for a while. But we had just had sex like the deranged again, and she really needed to finish this, more for her own sanity than anything.

  So go ahead, finish it, already.

  And here was where the weirdness began to get in the way. “Shhhh,” she said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Don’t.” Deft strokes on canvas as she made love to it.

  I sat there for about twenty minutes, and watched, which was fun for a while because I could just stare at Maria’s great shape, but she was concentrating so hard on her work, and I was no longer there. She was beautiful, granny glasses and all, and her runner’s legs, the bare ass, and the blonde hair, and I seemed to have covered all of this before.

  “Maria?” I started.

  “Stop it,” she said. “Stop it, or get out of here.”

  “Maria, Honey, I think the cleaning woman would look better holding a feather duster instead of a flower.” And I got up, and kissed her on the cheek, and left.

  Driving back to Bucktown, I was sort of pissed at Maria. I wondered if I shouldn’t just give Gracie a call, Hey, bring ‘Putney,’ maybe there was still time for pizza and beer.

  No, don’t do that, Maria will be along any time now. She’ll miss me in a bit, she’s done that before, and she’ll get in her car and drive right over. I just knew it.

  I woke up at four a.m. No Maria.

  ***

  I called Maria at noon on Sunday.

  “Bubba,” she said, exactly as if nothing had happened, “you have to come here and see the painting.” Not a word in there that vaguely resembled ‘sorry.’

  “Breakfast?” I said. A few mixed feelings, I was trying to understand the artist in her, but honest, she was just a little bit stranger than me sometimes.

  “Baby, we can do it all,” she said. “Just get over here.”

  I drove all the way out to Oak Park again, and climbed the steps, and knocked. And knocked. And knocked.

  No answer. Nobody home. I thought briefly of kicking the door in, or calling the Super. What if something was wrong?

  Let’s not get nuts, okay?

  I knocked one more time. Hey, she’s just not there.

  So I went back to Bucktown.

  ***

  “Hey Bubba,” Maria said on the phone, “I fell asleep.” It was eleven o’clock at night. Sunday night. “Why didn’t you come over?”

  “I did. Pounded on your door. Worried that the cops were going to come and take me away.”

  “Sorry, sometimes I sleep like the dead.” She paused. “Hey, Bruno, I’ll be right there.”

  She was coming here? Man, I was ready for bed. I had to go to work tomorrow.

  An hour later, Maria was at my place. She carried a big pizza box, or that’s what it looked like to me. “Hey, Bubba,” she said, and kissed me with confusing passion, I’d wanted to stay mad at her a little longer, and she wasn’t going to let me. “Worked all night on this,” she explained.

  Maria opened the box. It was the portrait of the cleaning lady. The woman was holding a feather duster, and she was smiling, and was not quite so formal, probably much more like the woman had been in real life. Looking at the painting, I just knew that about her. That’s how good Maria was, capturing the subtlety, bringing the woman to life. The painting moved me. Maria had done it again.

  “Thanks for the tip, Jake,” she said. “Mind if I spend the night?”

  And what do I say to that?

  Chapter Eight

  In the morning, we showered and dressed for work. Maria had started to leave things at my place, a spare outfit or two in the closet, and the deodorant and her special soap in the bathroom; the usual overnight stuff. Oh, yes, and a full-length mirror in the bedroom, so she could see to get dressed, the tiny Amish mirror being woefully inadequate for that purpose.

  “Why’d you park so far away?” she said, on the three-block walk to my car. “There was a spot right outside your apartment last night.”

  I hadn’t mentioned the two punctured tires to Maria; first, because I didn’t want to worry her, and second, because dammit, I still had it in the back of my mind that maybe she was the one doing it.

  “Somebody is slashing my tires,” I said. I expected shock from her or something, some reaction other than what I saw. She rolled her eyes, like she’d been there before, the ‘Here we go again’ eye roll. “Okay,” I said, “What do you know?”

  “Tod does that,” she said.

  “Uh, Honey, who the hell is Tod?” And suddenly I knew. Trench coat guy, from outside the restaurant, the stalker. “What does he do, wait for you at your apartment?”

  “He isn’t there all of the time,” Maria said, as though that somehow improved the situation. “Sweetie,” she said, the ‘Sweetie’ that in time would tell me that she was pissed or uneasy or basically off-center, “Let’s deal with this later, okay? I have a lot of work stuff to take care of this morning. I need time to…tell it to you the right way.”

  Oh, there was a wrong way to tell the story of some trench-coated creep that followed her around and slashed my tires? I told myself, Settle down, Stevie. “Ok,” I said with a lot more control than I felt. “Later.”

  ***

  When I arrived home that evening, I had mail, one of my self-addressed, stamped envelopes, the standard SASE that I sent along with every manuscript. Ninety-five percent of the time, perhaps a higher percentage than that, the envelope held nothing but disappointment.

  Not this time.

  On the letterhead of the Wanda Tyler Literary Agency, it read:

  Mr. Zielinski:

  We are interested in your story entitled 'Madison'. Kindly send the entire manuscript at your earliest convenience.

  Sincerely, etcetera, etcetera.

  Wanda Tyler.

  Omigod.

  And wouldn’t that take my mind off a creepy tire slasher. I scrambled. I put the computer into overdrive, and it spit out two hundred eighty-one pages of drivel, every polished bit of my third novel, and man, it looked professional. Before I could finish the cover letter and ship my future off to cold, cold New York, Maria was at my door.

  Yaaa factor was up to nine, maybe higher, it didn’t matter if the tension was positive, it was still stressful.

  Maria sat there quietly as I buffed and polished a cover letter, the one that might determine if I had to work for a living or not, or if I’d eat steak or hot dogs in my seventies. That’s what it felt like. She sat there much the way I had when she was buffing and polishing the cleaning lady, except she was smarter than me, and she just kept quiet and let me do it.

  After I’d signed the letter and sealed the envelope and could do no more, Maria said, “I think that the cleaning lady should be holding a feather duster.”

  “Right,” I said, and winked. “You know what this is, don’t you?”

  “It’s big, whatever it is. Somebody wants your story, is that it?” She smiled, and it was the excited smile. I had seen that look in the middle of sex. Oh, my.

  “Somebody might want my story,” I said. “Big difference.”

  “Ooo, Bubba, we need to celebrate.”

  I was sitting in front of my computer. Maria came over and faced me, and lifted up her skirt; she straddled my legs. Wow, this was the playful Maria I liked the most. She kissed me, and it was suddenly the hard kiss on my mouth, the kiss that made me hard, all right. And my meat was being squashed oh, so convincingly.

  I stood up, and her legs went around my waist and gripped me; I did the walking, she did the squeezing, all the way to my bed, and do
wn. It was the furious one, this time her panties were torn off, and I’m not so sure that I’m the one doing the tearing. And zip and in and oh, my, she was so warm and tight and we couldn’t get close enough, her legs at their now-familiar place on my ribs, I swear I’m getting a set of indentations right there, the better for her to grip me.

  It was rough sex, and it seemed like Maria was the one guiding the roughness. “Oh!” as she thrust her hips upward to meet me, consuming me, crushing with her arms, “harder!”

  Omigod, she’s telling me what she wants! Harder it is! I reached between us, and pinched a nipple, harder, much harder than I previously had.

  “Ooooooh!” And she came all over me. I continued to pinch and thrust, and again it was “Oooooh!” a second big climax, not more than a minute after the first. Man, we were on to something. I pinched her other nipple, and stroked, and there it was, a third one: “Oooooh!” Maybe a little less intense, but there it was. So I sought a fourth.

  “Ooooh!”

  And a fifth. “Oh.”

  And then we were done.

  “Never did that before,” she admitted.

  ***

  Half an hour later, Maria lay next to me in the semi-darkness of my apartment. It was time for The Story of Tod.

  “He’s jealous,” Maria said. “That’s all. Just ignore him.”

  “Jealous? Why? Is there something going on between you and him?”

  “Of course not.” Maria turned to me, and rested on her elbow. I looked at her sweet curves, her bare breasts, that wonderful face. The granny glasses were gone, somewhere between where we lay and where we had started. “Tod was a mistake. I guess he caught me at a pretty vulnerable time. Now I’m going to tell you some things I’m not real proud of, okay?”

  “Babe, what are you afraid of?”

  “That you’ll think I have bad judgment or something, I don’t know.”

  “Of course you have bad judgment, you’re laying here naked with me, right?”

  “Right,” she agreed. “Tod is, well, pretty weird, okay? I just didn’t realize that too quickly.”

  “What kind of weird?”

  “He, uh, he’s real clean.”

  I had to smile at that, considering the piggy way I lived, and the way that she kept her studio and other things. We were extremely compatible in this area, the question there being who would clean the mess if we ever got together? I asked, “What’s so bad about clean?”

  “Okay, I’m gonna tell you the whole story.” Maria got up, and put on one of my shirts, and sat next to me. My god, she was lovely, the way she sat, her legs bent at the knee and out there for me to stare at, so incredibly smooth and feminine. “I met Tod in a coffee house, The Buzz Café, in Oak Park.”

  “I know the Buzz,” I said. “Nice little place.”

  “I was waiting for a girlfriend who never showed up, just sipping a super double minted latte, getting hyper from the caffeine and because my paintings were not going so good. I was doing this girl’s kids for a hundred fifty dollars, and the paintings were awful. I could not get ‘likeness.’ And I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, some proportion problem, maybe I needed a caliper to measure distances between the eyes, the relationship to the nose, the shading, maybe blow up the photo I was drawing from…”

  “Honey, stick to the story.”

  “Hmmm. So this big guy was sitting in a corner, good-looking guy, lap top computer in front of him. I could see the screen, and he seemed to be jumping from the stock report to a movie review to a baseball website, and on and on like he was flipping though channels on a TV. ‘Hello,’ he said, and so I was just being polite, hello back, and he was suddenly sitting next to me. He just struck me as being so intelligent, and he wasn’t difficult to look at, he had this really great jaw and high cheekbone combination. We talked for a while, computer stuff and art; he seemed to understand facial proportion and that was just what I needed at that moment. And my girlfriend didn’t show up, and so I had lunch with Tod. And then I took him home with me, and we…made love.” Maria grimaced, waiting for me to say something. “Are you okay so far?”

  “Maria, Honey, this is before we knew each other, so what?” Man. Everybody had a past.

  “That’s the normal part of the story. Tod’s a big man, but he’s, well, when he has his clothes off, he’s kind of chubby, kind of like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and I had the feeling that he’d never been too active in athletics. He didn’t know a whole lot about sex, either. ‘Can I use your shower?’ he asked me. Sure, I told him, leave a quarter when you’re done. And he disappeared into the bathroom, and I heard water running, and he was in there for forty-five minutes. I’ve already moved on to other things, and I just wanted him to finish and leave so I could go out again. I was thinking of calling him Mr. Clean. Finally Tod was out of the bathroom, and as he was leaving, he said, ‘See you tomorrow.’ And I had no idea what he meant, maybe he’ll run into me if I’m in the Buzz again, or maybe see you around the neighborhood, or whatever. And then he was gone.”

  “But of course this wasn’t the end of Tod,” I said.

  “So I go about my business, and the next morning I went downstairs to go to work, and Tod was double-parked right out front. Hi, Tod, I tell him, wondering what he was doing there. ‘I can take you to work now,’ he told me. No thanks, I said, and I drove off. When I came home, there he was, parked outside, but in a better parking place, like he’d waited for somebody to leave. He was probably there all day, waiting for me.”

  “Okay, now this is getting weird,” I agreed.

  Maria continued. “So I went over to him and said, Tod, no offense, but this isn’t the way to get me interested in you. And he says, ‘You are interested, you wouldn’t have made love to me if you weren’t.’ And ya know what? There was some irrefutable logic going on there. So I said, okay, come on upstairs, and let’s talk.”

  “Didn’t you think that might be a little…dangerous?” I asked.

  “Tod, dangerous? Naaah!”

  I thought of two slashed tires, and knew that there was a little violence somewhere in his makeup.

  “So we’re upstairs,” Maria said, “and we’re sitting in the living room, and having a great discussion on portrait painting, and he is as normal as can be. Sorry, Baby, but he’s not bad looking, just a little heavy. So we’re suddenly fooling around again. You know how I can get.”

  “Yes, I do,” I agreed. And it was great when she was doing it with me, with all of her incredible passion, but this story was becoming a bit less fun as time went on.

  “And after the fooling around part, there goes Mr. Clean, right back into the shower,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “For an hour this time. When he got out, I said to him, you know, that seems just a little excessive, you’re using up all of my hot water, and don’t you just look like a wet raisin when you’re done? ‘I just like to be clean,’ he said. And then he told me a little about himself. Turns out that this was ritual to him, he must wash himself about four, five times a day. Started with his mother. They were part of this religious group, I thought they were kind of like Baptists with a vengeance; if a baptism would save his soul, just think what being in water four or five times a day would do for him, go straight to heaven, do not pass ‘Go.’ His mother had washed him every day until he was, like, hitting puberty.”

  I shuddered; that was just a bit creepy.

  “The woman finally stopped washing him when he had gotten an erection, and she told him how wrong that was, how bad he was, and that they had to pray for hours afterward. She stopped washing him, and from then on, he had to wash himself several times a day. Tod told me that as much as he tried, he just couldn’t be clean enough after that, he’d discovered girls, and had all manner of unclean thoughts. He told me that Satan took care of that for him.”

  “Sounds like Old Tod had discovered the relationship between his penis and his hand,” I said.

  “Then he told me the punch li
ne to this whole story. He was a virgin when he met me. I was his first, and of course, his only love. Now that we had exchanged fluids, as he put it, that we must get married, and live together. He’d drive me to work every day, and wait for me, and on and on. And that’s when I said, Tod, I’m really sorry, I think you’re a nice guy and all, but you have to go now. And so he left.”

  Thus we had the Story of Tod. “And every guy you’ve dated since then has come up with a slashed tire,” I said.

  “No, sometimes he puts a rock through a car window.”

  “I can see how that would be better.” I looked Maria directly in her blue eyes. “And that’s when you called the cops, right?”

  “The police aren’t the answer to everything, you know.”

  “Well, Honey, if I see him, I’m telling him face to face to get lost, and if he bothers you again, or does anything more to my car, I’m calling the cops.”

  “Aw, jeez,” she said. “Just leave him alone. He’ll get the message.”

  “How long has Mr. Clean been doing this?”

  “About six months.” She looked at me, and I had this incredulous look on my face. “Sweetie, I can handle him. He’s a big teddy bear.”

  I just wanted to go find Old Tod and reason with him, mano-a-doughboy, face to face. But okay, let’s do it Maria’s way. I hoped that I was wrong about this, but I thought that he was dangerous.

  ***

  Well, thank God for the Chicago Cubs.

  Four in a row. Seven of their first ten. Yes, those were wins. The Cubs started out in first place, from Day One of the baseball season. I usually had them on one or two of my three televisions. Sometimes I had the sound on as I wrote, which was less of a distraction than it might seem.

  For all of the month of April, it was me and Maria and her painting and my books, past and present, and the Cubs. And no more Tod, for a while.