Megabride
Merkouros’s intense devotion to only three of Ida’s putatively many dimensions soon became apparent to both, with the result that she suddenly banished him from her bed and restricted even their social intercourse to an exchange of letters—in which he would exhaustively catalog for her the countless delights of her body, hoping thus to mesmerize her back into their steamy bed, whereas she would reproach him for “focussing all your sexuality into one narrow point, like a dagger” and for “a rigidly logical mind out of touch with all tender emotion” and for “a puritanical conscience at peace with lust, terrified of love.” Merkouros refused to believe that he had seen the end of her gleaming thighs. After all, she did continue to write to him. Merkouros could in fact not tolerate the idea that he had been permanently excluded from her gardens. All the more reason, then, to welcome this new assignment whereby Pompas wished to prod him in a direction that might bring him into proximity again with Ida.
Pompas had sent him a photo of the suspect housekeeper, Margie. It showed a blonde in a provocative pose, clad in nothing but a bikini, a snapshot he claimed to have found among papers that Ida had neglected to take with her. Merkouros was soon to discover, to his deepening amazement, the true reason for such an unlikely photo’s presence in Pompas’s apartment.
The subject of the pose, Margie De B., lived on 115th off Broadway, a fashionable street in Plane 1 but here, in spite of its bordering on Columbia University, a seedy strip that successfully resisted the light of learning. Merkouros had chosen a time for entry when Margie was scheduled to work at Pompas’s place and when her six-year-old boy would be at school. Several locks and bolts on the door made it impossible for him, however, to break in the normal way. So he tipped up the little black box on his belt, fingered a request for coordinates for a spot just inside the apartment door, then asked it for the nearest point of safe re-entry into Plane 1.
That turned out rather distressingly to be a ladies’ bathroom in Butler Library of Columbia University. It was early in the day, and there was no problem of access to Butler. He waited near the bathroom until he was sure that no one was inside. That was hardly the problem. It was the occasional surprise that awaited him in the plane to which he transvected that often filled him with apprehension. Thus, when he suddenly reappeared in his native plane, finger still pressed to the button of his belt transvector, he found himself inside a toilet-cubicle knee to startled knee with a seated female of indeterminate age. Frowning sternly, he flashed his badge and fumbled his way out without further pointless apology or explanation.
The spatial coordinates corresponding to those within Plane 7 (inside the housekeeper’s apartment) located him, fortunately, in the hallway of the fifth floor of a ritzy hotel on his native 115th Street. Since, however, the floor-level here in Plane 1 was exactly 7.23 inches higher than that in Plane 7, he readied himself at the intersection of the coordinates with knees bent forward so as to land without breaking his ankles. (The many bruises he had suffered during the course of his transvections, one of the occupational hazards of his rarified sort of policework, flashed through his mind as he resigned himself once more to the unexpected.) Pressing the seventh from the left in a line of buttons across the top of his transvector, Merkouros dropped in, literally, with a thump, onto the rug of the darkened foyer of Margie De B.’s unoccupied apartment.
He finally stumbled upon promising ore in the woman’s bedroom, where papers littered a black enamel desk opposite a king-size bed covered with rumpled satin sheets whose reddish violet hue contrasted sensuously with the delicate black underthings that had been tossed on top of them. The room smelled headily of perfume seductively tinged with woman’s sweat. What a contrast to the simple, demure furnishings of the rest of the apartment! marveled Merkouros. The papers cluttering the desk included letters and pulp magazines. One hand-written letter in particular snagged his attention. It was to “Dearest Margie” and with “Undying Love” from “Ida”! It was one page long, in green ink on pink stationery:
“You won’t return my calls. You won’t answer my letters. You won’t tell me what it is I’ve done wrong. What fault is there in me that has soured your love for me so terribly that I must languish without hope day after day week after week starving for one word from you to tell me that you still care, that I am not a monster. You were so sensitive to my most passing mood. I too to yours. You agreed that we had found in each other what no man had ever given. We had taught each other to cast off shame and to explore each other’s nakedness with the passionate delicacy of fingers, lips, and tongue and words of love. Oh Margie, you have cast me out of your bed, but have you also expelled me from the Eden of your heart? Our lovers all fail us and then we find each other. How could we fail each other and still cling to hope?”
