The Confession Read Online Free PDF

off. I searched out the girl. We drank our drinks and danced some more. Grazzioni didn’t leave right away. He hung around at the back of the bar watching us dance. There was another man beside him, a small-time dealer who was somewhat of a fixture around here. I’d seen him a number of times. A pale wallflower in a black nylon shirt and dark khakis who peddled his wares from club to club, and liked to lean back and watch his clients out on the floor.
    He and Grazzioni started to talk, and I saw Grazzioni gesture at me, and the dealer said something else.
    I didn’t like this.
    I’d been here before in this same club, dancing, and I didn’t like the way the guy was leaning over, talking to Tony, and I didn’t like that grin on Tony’s face.
    It began to feel like one of those fateful moves, my decision to come here, one of those wrong turns you didn’t think anything about at the time but later came back to haunt you.
    I steered the girl away from them and out the door. I tried to put Grazzioni out of my mind. The girl and I ended up in a loft apartment nearby, thumping hard against one another’s glistening bodies. I was pretty high by this time, and felt as if we were on the edge of some precipice, myself and the girl together, with the darkness way down below. We went after it long and hard, and for an instant I was outside myself, watching, looking into the girls face and watching myself from above at the same time, or so it felt, waiting for the moment when I would fall through my reflection, through the blackness at the center of her eyes. Then I remembered Grazzioni, peering at me from across the room. The girl went over the edge, moaning and panting, but I stayed where I was. I tried to follow her but it was no good. Grazzioni had ruined my evening.
4.
    What can I say to redeem myself? Should I tell you how I rolled over in bed next to that girl and yearned for my wife? How just looking at her filled me with a loneliness I can’t describe? I felt locked out. Filled with disappointment, self-disgust. I gave the girl a lass—a tender lass, sweet and full of self-loathing—but she was all but asleep now and none of it meant anything. I drove over the bridge to my empty house and slid into the hot tub, all alone, trying to wash those emotions clean. I sipped a glass of wine there in the swirling waters, staring meanwhile at the prison across the bay, but the feelings didn’t wash off.
    I settled deeper into the water, the jets lapping against me. For a minute I was a man within a man within the void, and it was the void that imagined me, I told myself.
    But when I opened my eyes, I was still there, flesh and blood, locked in the moment, tormented by unacceptable passions. The mountain loomed over me in the dark. The Sleeping Maiden, the Indians had called Mt. Tamalpais. A child of the heavens, they said, who dreamed the world into existence as she slept. I raised my glass to her looming shadow. Then I finished my wine and went to bed.
5.
    Two days later, Elizabeth came home. She was a lean woman, elegant, with a pale complexion and very blue eyes. When I first met her, not much more than three years ago now, her hair had still been black, with undertones of gray, platinum really, that she made no effort to hide. She’d worn it mussed, and the effect was that of sophisticated, reckless descent into age. Now the balance had changed, and the platinum was dominant. The black and the gray were undertones, carefully controlled by her colorist, of course, but the effect overall was striking. She had the look of blue smoke, of white ice so cold it was hot to the touch. She had just turned forty-four but in a room with other women, a lot of eyes, even those of the younger men, were drawn to her.
    She stood looking through the mail. She wore, as almost always, the pearl necklace her father had given her.
    I went up behind her now, encircled her waist with my arms. I felt her resistance but also the give in her body,