Blue Eyes by Jerome Charyn Read Free Book Online

sneaked behind the lieutenant without signing the attendance sheet, she smiled at the security man, motioned to one of her girlfriends typing near the musterroom, and took an early lunch break. She missed the israelita. Brown and DeFalco were rough with her. The israelita had soft hands. And he knew how hard to bite into a nipple. She was having less fun at the stationhouse without Coen. She was tired of being scratched by house bulls. She didn’t care for the whiskers on Brown. Flirting with a Puerto Rican cabby (Isobel didn’t encourage his leers or the clicks he made with his tongue), she was on Coen’s stoop in under nine minutes.
    She caught the israelita in his coat. He was leaving for Arnold’s hotel. She wished the Spic had been able to hold on to his shoe. Coen hesitated removing his coat but he welcomed her in.
    â€œIsobel, they’ve been running me uptown and downtown,” he said. She liked the nasal touches to his voice. DeFalco couldn’t speak without forming bubbles on his lip. And Brown had his orgasms too close to her ear; his growls could make you deaf.
    â€œI’m not complaining, Manfred. You want to see Arnold? I can visit another time.”
    But they were on Coen’s day bed beginning to thrash although Coen didn’t leave spit on her arm like DeFalco or scar her buttocks with a yellow toenail like Brown. He wasn’t a hungry man. He didn’t own a Long Island wife, come to Isobel straight from his marriage bed. He had no baby pictures and candid shots of a lawn or a family sofa to hurt her with, remind her that she was only a portorriqueña , an auxiliary at the mercy of the bulls. And he wouldn’t single out her sexual parts, inventing praises about the folds of skin on her clitoris until she felt like a police lady with kinky genitals. The israelita didn’t pry. He never peeked at her from the corners of the day bed. He eased her into nakedness, accepting the holes in her underpants and the milky stains on her strapless cocktail bra. But she couldn’t get below the nicks in his eyebrows. The israelita told her nothing about himself (she learned from Brown and the Spic that he lost his wife to a tooth doctor and had been orphaned at the age of twenty-three). She wanted to reassure him, tell him her own losses, a husband who raped her sister and rode cross-country to the Great Salt Lake, a father who died of tuberculosis, a brother who chased a pigeon too far and fell off a Brooklyn roof, but she could sense the israelita had Arnold in his head, and she would prevent him from concentrating on the boot. So she stayed quiet and did nothing but remind him of the hour.
    â€œManfred, you don’t have to run the tub. I’m on call at one o’clock.”
    But he made her soak. She hadn’t met another cop who could be so gentle in a tub of water. He washed her breasts without measuring them or reading her beauty marks. He wasn’t squeamish about the sweat under her arm. He didn’t count the creases in her belly (Isobel attributed these to the abortions she’d undergone). She was late, and she had to shake her hair on Coen’s rug and fit the bra over wet skin. Coen tried to dissuade her.
    â€œIsobel, the captain’s man will wait. He’s got all afternoon to collect his Coke bottles.”
    â€œManfred, you live upstairs in the squadroom. You solve your mysteries. You come and go. You don’t appreciate the boys in uniform. They’ll piss inside my bloomers if I’m not there to nurse their precious switchboard and fetch coffee for them.”
    â€œI wore the bag once, Isobel. At the academy. Grays instead of blues. I wouldn’t mind giving up my detective shield. I can survive in a bag.”
    Rushing, she could no longer argue. She flattered him instead. “You’re cuter in pinstripe.” But she would have liked this one, this israelita , even in a blue bag. She kissed him on the side of