12. The Evil Love Nurse

When I got back to the city, I was glad, alarmingly glad, to see Phlox again. At dinnertime that Monday, she met me on the hot pavement in front of Boardwalk Books, and without pausing to think, I lifted her and swung her and kissed her, through all three hundred and sixty degrees, like a soldier and his girl. We got some applause. I gathered in my fists the thin, rough cotton at the waist of her sundress, and squeezed, pressing her hips to mine. We talked a lot of nonsense and headed for the Wok Inn, heads together, feet apart, leaning into each other like the summit of a house of cards. I asked about the new auburn streaks in her hair.

"Sun and lemons," she said. "You wear a loose-weave straw hat and draw some strands of hair through the holes. Then you juice the strands. I spent a lonely weekend juicing myself."

"Same here. That's from Cosmo, that thing with the lemons," I said. "I read about it in your bathroom the other morning."

"You read my Cosmo?"

"I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions."

"How did I do?"

"You cheated," I said.

We passed a thrift shop, its window full of battered no-head mannequins wearing sequined gowns, of old toasters, and of lamps whose bases were little Spanish galleons. In one corner of the window was a flat, multicolored box.

"Twister!" said Phlox. "Oh, Art, let's buy it. Just imagine."

She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the store. The saleswoman retrieved the game from the window for us, and showed us that it was intact; the spinner still spun and the game mat was fairly clean. At dinner it lay under the table, tilted against my foot and hers, and, first as we continued our happy, empty conversation, then as I summarized the weekend at the summer house, the Twister box stirred and tickled me with each kick of her restless ankle.

In the living room of her apartment, we shoved aside chairs and the coffee table and spread the plastic mat across her rug. Its primary-colored spots, and the off-kilter, go-go red letters that spelled out the word "Twister!" at its ends, brought back a flood of memories of I960s birthday parties on rainy Saturdays in finished basements. Phlox hopped off to her bedroom, to "peel away the confining raiment of civilization," as she put it, and I sat down on the floor and unlaced my sneakers. An odd contentment came over me. Although the used Sears furniture, the fake Renoir, the cat statue, et cetera, still seemed kind of ugly and in bad taste, I discovered I had made one of those common aesthetic efforts that consists of just swallowing an entire system of bad taste-Las Vegas, or a bowling alley, or Jerry Lewis movies-and then finding it beautiful and fun.

In a way, I thought, I had done the same thing with Phlox herself. Everything about her that was like a B-girl or a gun moll, a courtesan in a bad novel, or an actrice in a French art movie about alienation and ennui; her overdone endearments and makeup; all that was in questionable taste and might have embarrassed me or made me snicker, I had come to accept entirely, to look for and even to encourage. She delighted me as did bouffant hairdos and Elvis Presley art. When she came out of her bedroom dressed in a nylon kimono and huge slippers of turqouise fur, I was almost dizzy with appreciation, and the gaudy plastic Twister mat at my feet seemed to be the very matrix, the printed plan, of everything I liked about her.

"Who's going to spin?" I said. "Is Annette home?" This was Phlox's roommate, a big, loud, attractive nurse, the vagaries of whose complicated work schedule I was never able to master.

"Nope. We'll have to keep the spinner here beside us and trade off."

I crawled around to the other side of the game and sat on my haunches, as did Phlox. We faced each other across the mat for one ceremonial moment. Then she flicked the black plastic arm of the spinner.

"Right hand blue," she said.

I leaned in and put my right hand in the center of a blue spot. She did the same, and as she fell slightly forward, the folds of her kimono parted, and her hair tumbled down over her bowed head. I peered into the shadows of her robe, through the spaces in her swaying two-tone hair. She spun again.

"Right foot green."

This put us both half on the mat and half off. The blue and green rows were closer to me than to her; I sat in a kind of elongated crouch, my right hand and foot on the mat, one behind the other, but Phlox had to come all the way across, her right foot in its furry slipper placed in front of her right hand. She lifted her shiny left leg a few inches into the air to help complete her reach, and wobbled for a few moments, before falling onto her side.

"You lose," I said, laughing, but she said it didn't count, and slid the spinner over to me before hoisting herself forward again, the soft skin of her lifted thigh shaking with effort. I spun.

"Left foot blue."

Since her right hand lay upon the blue spot where it would have been most convenient for me to place my left foot, and since she beat me to the second-best spot, beside my right hand, I was forced to run my left leg through the triangle formed by her right leg and arm, and I felt the muted contact of my left thigh in blue jeans against her bare ankle. We were on three points now, tilted forward, and our heads drew alongside each other, ears kissing. Her deep and Italian laugh, close to my ear, seemed to issue from that darkness within the parting of her warm kimono, and I felt the summit and base of my spine begin to trade anxious messages. I shifted my hips and spun again.

"Right hand yellow."

The balance moved to her side of the mat; she dropped backward, right hand behind her, and I found myself almost atop her, laughing now too, her swinging hair so near my mouth that I opened up and chewed on the nearest stray ends, which crunched strangely, then fell from my lips and hung moistened and clinging to one another like the tips of little paintbrushes.

"Spin," she said.

"I'm spinning."

She watched me, her mouth pursed but her eyes ready to start laughing again, and then, with a sweet flex of the muscles of her face, she bit her lower lip and looked worried, as though she thought she might collapse. I spun again, with my left hand, which remained free for just one more second.

"Left hand green."

I went for the best spot, but she, going out of her way, wrenched her body into my path and forced me to go under both of her thighs with my left arm, and I had to bend my upper body around backward. I found myself looking up into the fragrant crook of her underarm, my head cradled between her hip and ribs. My fingers strained to touch the green spot, and my thighs trembled. I felt pain in my knees and shoulders. Somehow she had managed to remain upright. She laughed at my shaking, four-way struggle to keep from falling, but suddenly I was giving it everything I had.

"You spin," I said, teeth clenched.

"I can't."

"Spin, damn it, spin, spin it, come on." The contorted hold on my right foot on that green spot began to give.

"I can't."

"Phlox!" I let my head drop against the smooth nylon along her thigh. The Opium and sweat hurried out from her shaking breast. I had an erection-pardon me for once again mentioning the condition of my penis-and it labored against the cotton walls of its lonely cell. I felt my fingers begin to slide.

The telephone rang, once, twice, three times.

"Fall," she said. She leaned down, arching like a bird's her long neck, and kissed my lips.

"No." My slippery feet and hands jerked across the plastic, making quick and telltale squeaks. She bit the tip of my nose.

"Fall!"

I fell, at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second.