The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

me right away? Cut the fucking poetry!
    I can’t believe she’s dead. My girl, Munita. And such a shameless, tasteless violent death. All according to family tradition. They took the head off her body…That holy body…Last night she was the hottest girl on the planet, today she’s in the fridge.
    As am I.
    I guess this is my punishment, being locked inside this icy land. I guess I deserve it. I cheated on her. But at least my head is still connected to my body. She must have cheated ten times harder, ten times more often. Gave up her head for the head she gave. I knew it. I fucking knew it. The Hindu-Hispanic wonder was not to be trusted. I know they say that no human is to be trusted completely, except for Jesus Christ and Laura Bush, but you can always hope that your partner has at least applied for a trial membership of their holy club.
    I remember once when we were coming from a dinner at a classy restaurant on the Upper East Side and the soft breeze was as warm as the air from an exhaust pipe. She walked slowly out on to the pavement, rearranging the strap of her purse on her shoulder, and I could feel her great thighs rubbing against each other beneath her noisy red satin dress. (Munita was one of those rare women who wear dresses half the time.) It had this triangular opening at the back (one of those things I don’t know the English word for), going almost all the way down to her butt. And as the yellow cabs rushed by her great voluptuous body wrapped in red, my sick mind was hiding in the darkness inside her dress, right there up in the triangular opening, on the border of butt and thighs, contemplating whether she’d had another man that week, that day, that year…
    Inside the restaurant we’d been talking about relationships in general and making fun of the square SWAP or WASP (or whatever you call it) couple three tables away. “She must have a zipper cunt,” Munita whispered over her spoon full of Thai soup. I’d never heard that one before. A zipper cunt? The two words instantly unzipped my hard love for her. This woman was the girl of all my difficult dreams. I paid the bill with a hard-on and decided to tell her that I loved her once we were outside.
    It would have been the first time I’d have told her.
    But as we came out on the street, and my mind was hiding in her private shadows, I suddenly saw this hand between her thighs, a grown man’s hand with hair on its back, fingering its way up her leg. One of the fingers wore a thick golden wedding ring. It was just a vision, quick as a flash of light.
    She turned her royal sweetness around, flipping my eyes from rear to front, and smiled her sweet smile, with closed juicy lips: that sexy grin of hers.
    “Thanks for dinner, honey. It was great.”
    A kiss. And the sound of a fire engine some ten blocks down.
    “Is he married?”
    “Who?”
    “The guy.”
    “What guy? In the restaurant? Yeah. They must be married.”
    “No, the guy you’re…”
    Her sweet exotic face, like a sunflower set against the busy twilight traffic. And her sudden expression of pain, as if someone just pinched her in the back.
    “The guy I’m what?”
    “They guy you’re seeing.”
    “The guy I’m seeing? I’m seeing a guy?”
    “Yeah. Is he married?”
    “No. No, why do you say that?”
    Her voice full of innocence. But then the wrong words:
    “Tod, you know I’d never do a married man…”
    Eyes blinking from blunder. Lips full of regret. And then a hurried monologue full of don’t get me wrongs.
    I replayed that fucking sentence seven times a day for the next few months. I fucking studied that sentence like an archeologist studies the brim of a broken glass found deep inside the hills of Mount Ararat. What the hell did it mean? “I’d never do a married man.” I checked the dictionaries, searched the Internet, listened in on countless conversations in the subway, watched a lot of daytime TV, and yet I couldn’t quite figure it out. My English wasn’t up to the task. Not then. I wasn’t familiar with all the nuances of this mother of languages. And yet I had come here a year earlier than she. But of course she was “doing” all those men, learning English through pillow talk and taking lessons well into the weenie hours of the morning, while all my dates went straight to the bathroom after the main course and flushed themselves down the toilet, kamikaze style.
    In the end, when this-all-too-casual sentence had flown across my Manhattan