"Yes."
"Did you come all the way over here just to get laid? There must be somebody available closer to home."
"You know that's not the way I feel about you."
"No, I don't. I don't know anything of the sort, Dave. But you're a friend, and I wouldn't turn away from you. I just don't want you to lie about it."
She turned off the light and undressed. Her breasts were round and soft against me, her skin tan and smooth in the dark. She hooked one leg in mine, ran her hands over my back, kissed my cheek and breathed in my ear and made love to me as she might to an emotional child. But I didn't care. I was used up, finished, as dead inside as I was the day they slid Annie's casket inside the crypt. The street light made shadows on the banyan and banana trees outside the window. Inside my head was a sound like the roar of the ocean in a conch shell.
The next morning the early light was gray in the streets, then the sun came up red on the eastern horizon, and the banana leaves clicking against the screen window were beaded with humidity. I filled a quart jar with tap water, drank it down, then threw up in the toilet. My hands shook, the backs of my legs quivered, flashes of color popped like lesions behind my eyes. I stood in my underwear in front of the washbasin, cupped water into my face, brushed my teeth with toothpaste and my finger, then threw up again and went into a series of stomach spasms so severe that finally my saliva was pink with blood in the bottom of the basin. My eyes were watering uncontrollably, my face cold and twitching; there was a pressure band across one side of my head as though I had been slapped with a thick book, and my breath was sour and trembled in my throat each time I tried to breathe.
I wiped the sweat and water off my face with a towel and headed for the icebox.
"No help there, hon," Robin said from the stove, where she was soft-boiling eggs. "I poured the beer out at four this morning."
"Have you got any ups?"
"I told you mommy's clean." She was barefoot and wearing a pair of black shorts and a denim shirt that was unbuttoned over her bra.
"Some of those PMS pills. Come on, Robin. I'm not a junkie. I've just got a hangover."
"You shouldn't try to run a shuck on another juicer. I took your wallet, too. You got rolled, Lieutenant."
It was going to be a long morning. And she was right about trying to con a pro. Normally an alcoholic can jerk just about anybody around except another drunk. And Robin knew every ploy that I might use to get another drink.
"Get in the shower, Dave," she said. "I'll have breakfast ready when you come out. You like bacon with soft-boiled eggs?"
I turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, pointed my face with my mouth open into the shower head, washed the cigarette smoke from the bar out of my hair, scrubbed my skin until it was red. Then I turned on the cold water full blast, propped my arms against the tin walls of the stall, and held on while I counted slowly to sixty.
"The bacon's kind of crisp, I guess," she said after I had dressed and we were sitting at the table.
The bacon looked like strips torn out of a rubber tire. And she had hard-boiled the eggs and mashed them up with a spoon.
"You don't have to eat it," she said.
"No, it's really good, Robin."
"Do you feel a lot of remorse this morning? That's what your AA buddies call it, don't they?"
"No, I don't feel remorse." But my eyes went away from her face.
"I was turning tricks when I was seventeen. So you got a free one. Deal me out of your guilt, Dave."
"Don't talk about yourself like that."
"I don't like morning-after bullshit."
"You listen to me, Robin. I came to you last night because I felt more alone than I've ever felt in my life."
She drank from her coffee and set the cup in her saucer.
"You're a sweet guy, but I've got too much experience at it. It's all right."
"Why don't you give yourself some credit? I don't know another person in the world who would have taken me in the way you did last night."
She put the dishes in the sink, then walked up behind me and kissed my hair.
"Just get through your hangover, Streak. Mommy's been fighting her own dragons for a long time," she said.