Ducking out of the way, he eased back under his hat. “Small world. Had I known she was in there, we could have sat together and split a popcorn. It’s godawful long, Kate, and kinda violent for a kid.”
The gang of teenagers pressed closer to the conversation, and Katie hastened to defend herself. “I’m not a kid, Phil.”
“She’s all grown up,” Bunny said. “You’re certainly old enough to see a movie about a bridge. Why don’t you be a gentleman and treat your sister-in-law?”
“That’s all right,” Kate said. “We can pay our own way.”
“Tell Claire that Bunny says hello, would you? Nice bumping into you, Phil. Good to see you, Kate.” She raised her hand to hail a cab. “Happy New Year’s.”
Everyone wished everyone the same, Phil walked off whistling “The Colonel Bogey March,” and the crisis was averted.
The old man tugged on my sleeve and motioned for me to engage in an aside. I could not take him entirely seriously on account of that ridiculous fez. “I’m having trouble,” he said in a low voice, “knowing who to root for in this one. Bunny is Bunny, of course, but who is the male lead of the drama—the cuckold or the cad?”
I shrugged my shoulders, sloshing my scotch, uncertain as to the significance of his question.
“That is to say, do you remember, do we root for Phil or Jerry here? And what do you make of the gun?”
Glistening atop the medicine cabinet, the gun seemed harmless for the moment, so I shrugged once more, indicating my general ignorance.
“Anton Chekhov asserted that if you put a revolver on the mantel in Act One, it must be fired by Act Three. A principle of dramaturgy that seems eminently sensible.”
The woman in the black dress stared straight at us, hearing his every word, impatient for our interruption to conclude.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the gun,” the old man said.
In one fluid motion, Bunny lifted the hem of her skirt at her right hip and extracted, from a bespoke leather holster strapped just above her stocking, a derringer. Raising her arm in a straight line, she fired a single shot into the ceiling. The small explosion startled everyone in the room and reoriented our attention to the narrator. Bunny continued.
The morning after she groped Phil Ketchum at the Stork Club, Bunny waited for his arrival in a state of mild agitation. Her husband had left earlier that morning bundled like an Eskimo against the January cold, even though it was just under the freezing mark. His precautions she found nearly unbearable; the coat and mittens and stocking cap and scarf were emblematic of the problems inherent in his general character. Jerry was a very sensible man. Got it from his mother, probably, who had babied him through childhood, hovering over his every cough and sniffle. The zealous hen had raised him to be afraid of life. No baseball, you could put an eye out. Wait two hours between eating and a swim, you can’t be too careful. No wonder her son was such a closet nebbish, not like Phil, who did not give a damn about anything and would do anything, try anything she asked of him.
He banged on the door at half past nine, careless of the neighbors, and was upon her the moment she closed the door. Bunny ran into the bedroom and he chased her, tearing off his tie, kicking off his shoes, and leaping beside her on the bed. Breathless, she undid his belt and unzipped his fly, astonished that he was already erect after little more than a kiss from her. He nuzzled her neck, fondled and licked her breasts, and kissed her on the flat of her stomach. In no time, his face was between her legs, the smooth-shaved chin brushing against her thighs, his tongue flickering like a snake’s. She lost herself in such moments, abandoned her mind to the lust that radiated from his mouth and hands. He would do anything she asked, she thought, there is nothing he would not do to please me. His hands slid beneath her bottom and he pulled her whole body toward his mouth, and she grabbed his hair and held him to her, thinking how nice it felt in her hands, soft and thick and not the bald spot like Jerry’s, growing wider day by day while the rest of him seemed hairier, his skin slick and waxy. But Phil, he filled her, and she moaned and pulled him up so that his fat dingus could go in, and she loved him and wished he could be hers.
Later in the rumpled soiled sheets, they rested in a languid stupor. She loved him more, if possible, afterward and took possession of his skin, his arms, the power in his hands. For his part, Phil waited to begin again, gauging the energy necessary to stir himself to arousal. She knew he was allowing her to work him up.
Bunny spoke across the pillow. “Don’t you ever wish we could be together always?”