After a few minutes he put the half-finished figure away and apologized for being so distracted. “No apology required,” she said. “Work is work.” They got up to make their way down the great flight of steps toward the park, and as she rose, a man slipped on the step above her and rolled heavily and painfully down a dozen or more steps, narrowly missing Neela on his way down; his fall was broken by a group of schoolgirls sitting screaming in his way. Professor Solanka recognized the man as the one who had been necking so enthusiastically with the mobile-phone prevaricator. He looked around for Ms. Cell Phone, and after a moment spotted her storming off uptown on foot, hailing off-duty cabs that ignored her angry arm.
Neela was wearing a knee-length mustard-colored scarf dress in silk. Her black hair was twisted up into a tight chignon and her long arms were bare. A cab stopped and expelled its passenger just in case she needed a ride. A hot dog vendor offered her anything she wanted, free of charge: “Just eat it here, lady, so I can watch you do it.” Experiencing for the first time the effect about which Jack Rhinehart had been so vulgarly effusive, Solanka felt as if he were escorting one of the Met’s more important possessions down an awestruck Fifth Avenue. No: the masterpiece he was thinking of was at the Louvre. With a light breeze blowing the dress against her body, she looked like the Winged Victory of Samothraki, only with the head on. “Nike,” he said aloud, puzzling her. “It’s who you remind me of,” he clarified. She frowned. “I make you think of sportswear?”
Sportswear was certainly thinking of her. As they turned into the park, a young man in running clothes approached them, rendered positively humble by the force of Neela’s beauty. Unable to speak directly to her at first, he addressed himself to Solanka instead. “Sir,” he said, “please don’t think I’m trying to hit on your daughter, that is, I’m not asking for a date or anything, it’s just that she is the most, I had to tell her”—and here at last he did turn toward Neela — “to tell you, you’re the most…” A great roaring rose in Malik Solanka’s breast. It would be good now to tear this young man’s tongue out from that vile fleshy mouth. It would be good to see how those muscled arms might look when detached from that highly defined torso. Cut? Ripped? How about if he was cut and ripped into about a million pieces? Howabout if I ate his fucking heart?
He felt Neela Mahendra’s hand come to rest lightly on his arm. The fury abated as quickly as it had risen. The phenomenon, his unpredictable temper’s rise and fall, had been so rapid that Malik Solanka was left feeling giddy and confused. Had it really happened? Had he really been on the verge of tearing this super-fit fellow limb from limb? And if so, then how had Neela dissipated his anger—the anger to combat which Solanka sometimes had to lie in darkened rooms for hours, doing breathing exercises and visualizing red triangles—by the merest touch? Could a woman’s hand really possess such power? And if so (the thought offered itself to him and would not be denied), was this not a woman to keep by his side and cherish for the rest of his haunted life?
He shook his head to clear it of such notions and returned his attention to the unfolding scene. Neela was giving the young runner her most dazzling smile, a smile after receiving which it would be best to die, for the rest of life was sure to be a big letdown. “He isn’t my father,” she told the smile-blinded wearer of sportswear. “He’s my live-in lover.” This information struck the poor fellow like a hammer blow; whereupon, to underscore the point, Neela Mahendra planted on the still-befuddled Solanka’s unprepared but nevertheless grateful mouth a long, explicit kiss. “And, guess what?” she panted, coming up for air to deliver the coup de grace. “He’s absolutely fantastic in bed.”
“What was that?” a flattered, more than somewhat overcome Professor Solanka asked her dizzily after the runner had departed, looking as if he were off to disembowel himself with a blunt bamboo stick. She laughed, a great wicked cackle of a noise that made even Mila’s raucous laughter seem refined. “I could see you were on the edge of losing it,” she said. “And I need you here right now, paying attention, and not in a hospital or jail.” Which explained about eighty percent of it, Solanka thought as his head stopped whirling, but didn’t fully translate the meaning of everything she had been doing with her tongue.
Jack! Jack! he reproved himself The subject for this afternoon wa Rhinehart, his pal, his best buddy, and not his friend’s girlfriend tongue, no matter how long and gymnastic it was. They sat on a bench near the pond, and all around them dog walkers were colliding wit trees, Tai Chi practitioners lost their balance, roller-bladers smashed into one another, and people out strolling just walked right into th pond as if they’d forgotten it was there. Neela Mahendra gave no sign o noticing any of this. A man walked past with an ice cream cone, which owing to his sudden but comprehensive loss of hand-to-mouth coordination, completely missed his tongue and instead made contact, messily, with his ear. Another young fellow began, with every appearance of genuine emotion, to weep copiously as he jogged by. Only the middle-aged African-American woman sitting on the next bench (who am I calling middle-aged? She’s probably younger than I am, Solanka thought disappointedly) seemed impervious to the Neela factor as she ate her way through a long egg salad hero, advertising her enjoyment of every mouthful with loud mmms and uh-huhs. Neela, meanwhile, had eyes only for Professor Malik Solanka. “Surprisingly good kiss, by the way,” she said. “Really. First class.”
She looked away from him, across the shining water. “It’s over between Jack and me,” she went on quickly. “Maybe he already told you. It’s been over for a while. I know he’s your good friend, and you should be a good friend to him at this time, but I can’t stay with a man once I lose respect for him.” A pause. Solanka said nothing. He was replaying Rhinehart’s last phone call and hearing what he had missed: the elegiac note beneath the sexual boasting. The use of the past tense. The loss. He didn’t push Neela for the story. Let it come, he thought. It’ll be here soon enough. “What do you think about the election?” she asked, making one of the dramatic conversational tacks to which Solanka would soon enough become accustomed. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think the American voters owe it to the rest of the world not to vote for Bush. It’s their duty. I’ll tell you what I hate,” she added. “I hate when people say there’s no difference between the candidates. That Gush-and-Bore stuff is getting so old. It makes me hopping mad.” Not the moment, Solanka thought, to confess his own guilty secrets. Neela wasn’t really expecting a reply, however. “No difference?” she cried. “How about, for example, geography? How about, for example, knowing where my poor little homeland is on the damn map of the world?” Malik Solanka remembered that George W. Bush had been ambushed by a journalist’s crafty question during a foreign policy Qand—A one month before the Republican convention: “Given the growing instability of the ethnic situation in Lilliput-Blefuscu, could you just indicate that nation to us on the map? And what was the name of its capital city again?” Two curve balls, two strikes.
“I’ll tell you what Jack thinks about the election.” Neela swerved back to the subject, the color rising in her face along with her voice. “New Jack, A-list Black-and-White-Ball Truman Capote Rhinehart, he thinks whatever his ‘Caesars’ in their ‘Palaces’ want him to think. Jump, Jack, and he’ll jump sky-high. Dance for us, Jack, you’re such a great dancer, and he’ll show them all the obsolete thirty-year-old moves old white people like, he’ll swim and hitchhike and walk the dog, he’ll do the mash, the funky chicken and the locomotion all night long. Make us laugh, Jack, and he’ll tell them jokes like some court jester. You probably know his favorites. After the FBI tested Monica’s dress, they announced they couldn’t make a positive I.D. from the stain, because everybody in Arkansas has the same DNA.’ Yeah, they like that one, the Caesars. Vote Republican, Jack, be pro-life, Jack, read the Bible on homosexuals, Jack, and guns don’t kill people, ain’t that right, Jack, and he goes, yes, ma’am, people kill people. Good dog, Jack. Roll over. Fetch. Sit up and fucking beg. Beg for it, Jack, you ain’t gonna get it, but we do like to see a black boy on his knees. Good dog, Jack, run off now and sleep in the kennel out the back. Oh, darling, would you throw Jack a bone, please? He’s been so sweet. Yes, she’ll do, she’s from the South.” Oh, so Rhinehart had been a bad boy, Solanka thought, and he guessed that Neela wasn’t used to being cheated on at all. She was used to being the Pied Piper, with lines of boys following wherever she was pleased to lead.