382
DAVID ZANE MAIROWITZ
despising, as he did, the hair on women's bodies. She needed groom–
ing, an overhaul. She had let herself run down. He would change
all that. With
his
razor he would carve out the New Woman.
His
legs had wrapped round her head, holding her fast, while he lathered
her brows, softened them with his fingers and finally danced over
them with several turns of
his
wrist. She bled, but never screamed.
She had summoned this pain and devoured it at the roots.
After which he commanded she lose weight and she starved for
weeks to no avail.
His name was Zimmerman, but these were clandestine desperate
days. He had pinned her beneath him like a butterfly, his meat
hands wrapped round her wrists, ankles chaining legs. And boxed
under glass she could look up through the surface at
his
man's face,
thick and bearded, and wonder, in the paste of her dilemma, how she
had managed to will it. In the night he would come and go, this,
her first lover, pressing at her corners with
his
massive demands, leav–
ing her stretched and disfigured to the secret mirrors inside her.
Five years on, his steel has welded to the iron terror of her
migraine, a permanent fixture in her eyebrows. The hair has never
grown back and she is marked as a fifteenth-century concubine. The
old concentrate of blood leaves her puffed and swollen and,
in
her
newer mirrors, she sees the corpse of her worn pride and bends in the
accepting.
"Now we start with a steel pipe, maybe four inches in diameter
and eight inches long and we cap it at one end. We fill it three–
quarters full with ammonium nitrate, then equal layers of potassium
chlorate and confectionery sugar on top of that."
His hand runs under her blouse and massages her nipples as he
talks. She takes in five years of him in one breath, his hand has
changed, roughed over with gunpowder. She feels the sting of
his
assassinations in his triggerfinger. He
is
roving in the zone now and
encounters the switchblade knife strapped to her belly. He intuits five
years in that touch. He
is
amused. In her depths she contemplates
drawing the blade across his eyes. Yet she hasn't the simple words to
stop
his
fingers which have now found her out. She is stretched, they
note, widened beyond contempt.
"You aren't listening," he says.
"I
jim,"
