The Axeman's Jazz

time.
    Who in the hell was this Di—a gypsy fortuneteller or Scarlett O’Hara? Sonny had actually found the courage to ask when he saw the place—the weird living room and the bedroom like something out of Tara.
    Di had laughed.
    Her silky, velvety, satiny, silvery, golden laugh had come to haunt him; it came to him in dreams and sometimes he thought he heard it in the street, on the wind, perhaps. It was the oddest, loveliest laugh he’d ever heard; an elf laugh, a fairy laugh, the mirth sound of a butterfly.
    She had laughed and said she’d been a gypsy in another life, but not a Southern belle, never for a moment; she didn’t have a submissive bone in her body.
    The bed was hung with mosquito netting, he supposed, though he’d never seen any; at any rate something like gauze was wound around the four-poster bed, almost casually, yet he knew it had probably been done with the greatest of guile. The whole room was white—white and airy, like something in a dream. A full-length mirror, instead of being bolted to the wall, had been placed at a slant, a strategic slant so that you could see what was happening in the bed, you could watch yourself undress your lady love. It was the bedroom of a queen, perhaps a goddess. He wanted to worship her.
    In his church you knelt to worship and he knelt before her now. Unzipped her shorts. Pulled them off. Worshipped until she nearly lost her balance, till he had to pull her even closer into his face, digging his fingers into her soft buttocks. So soft; so amazingly soft after Missy’s young hard ones. He loved digging his fingers in, loved her silky feel, loved the look of her thighs, not smooth—no cellulite, of course, but dozens of tiny little wrinkles. He wanted to lick each one.
    He picked her up finally, and laid her gently on the bed. She crossed her hands over her stomach till he pulled his T-shirt over his head and, while he was doing it, pulled off her own, took off her bra as he got out of his jeans.
    Gently, the ceiling fan ruffled the mosquito netting. Everything was so peaceful, so incredibly beautiful.
    As he leaned over to kiss her, he saw that her abdomen was scarred. She had lovely breasts, perfectly sculptured, but he knew what he had to find under them. He took one in his mouth, sucked, licked the nipple that he knew was tattooed. It was pink; she had chosen pink like the nipples of a teenager, though the originals had undoubtedly been brown (he knew she had grown children, she talked about them in the group). Gingerly he caressed the other breast, reaching underneath, and felt the diamond-shaped scar.
    He felt a sudden wave of nausea, swallowed. What was wrong with him? He was a doctor. Or he was almost one. Plenty of women had mastectomies, had reconstructions, and this one was quite sophisticated, beautifully done. In a few years he’d be learning to do it himself, he’d do hundreds of them in his career. He turned away from her.
    “What is it? It’s my scars, isn’t it? You find me repulsive.”
    “No—” He looked back and saw that she’d covered her stomach, had left her breasts outside the sheet. How could he tell her it wasn’t the scars, it was the cancer? It was that she’d come close to death. Maybe not very close, but close enough to make him think about it. He felt tears well in his eyes. “I was thinking of you sick—I can’t stand to think of you sick.” He buried his face in her neck.
    She said, “I feel so mutilated.”
    “You’re not mutilated. You’re beautiful. Your breasts are beautiful.”
    “That’s what he said.” Her voice was hard and ugly, unlike her voice, nothing like the voice of Diamara, the nymph (or possibly the goddess Diamara). It wasn’t only her voice. He couldn’t take in the fact that she’d spoken of another man while she was in bed with him.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. They are, aren’t they?” She cupped them in her hands. “They’re beautiful.”
    She kissed him, her breath like all the spices of the East. She rolled over on him and felt for his penis. It was limp. She took it in her hand, rolled it between her fingers as expertly as if she’d been taught in a harim. It was delicious, a rain of sweet fruits and exotic perfumes, everything strange and heavenly, even the frustration, the hideous frustration of it.
    She took him in her mouth and it only got better, and a thousand times worse.
    When she finally gave up, she was on the verge of tears. “I’ll bet you’ve never been