So he thought, lying in his bed, waiting for a moment to slip away.
As he walked the streets Jerome would have happily affirmed Welles’s vision. Perhaps he, of all men, was most eager to welcome the Age of Desire. He saw its portents everywhere: on advertising billboards and cinema marquees, in shop windows, on television screens-everywhere, the body as merchandise. Where flesh was not being used to market artifacts of steel and stone, those artifacts were taking on its properties. Automobiles passed him by with every voluptuous attribute but breath-their sinuous bodywork gleamed, their interiors invited plushy. The buildings beleaguered him with sexual puns: spires, passageways, shadowed plazas with white-water fountains. Beneath the raptures of the shallow-the thousand trivial distractions he encountered in street and square-he sensed the ripe life of the body informing every particular.
The spectacle kept the fire in him well stoked. It was all that will power could do to keep him from pressing his attentions on every creature that he met eyes with. A few seemed to sense the heat in him and gave him wide berth. Dogs sensed it too. Several followed him, aroused by his arousal. Flies orbited his head in squadrons. But his growing ease with his condition gave him some rudimentary control over it. He knew that to make a public display of his ardor would bring the law down upon him, and that in turn would hinder his adventures. Soon enough, the fire that he had begun would spread. Then he would emerge from hiding and bathe in it freely. Until then, discretion was best.
He had on occasion bought the company of a young woman in Soho; he went to find her now. The afternoon was stiflingly hot, but he felt no weariness. He had not eaten since the previous evening, but he felt no hunger. Indeed, as he climbed the narrow stairway up to the room on the first floor which Angela had once occupied, he felt as primed as an athlete, glowing with health. The immaculately dressed and wall-eyed pimp who usually occupied a place at the top of the stairs was absent. Jerome simply went to the girl’s room and knocked. There was no reply. He rapped again, more urgently. The noise brought an early middle-aged woman to the door at the end of the landing.
“What do you want?”
“The woman,” he replied simply.
“Angela’s gone. And you’d better get out of here too in that state. This isn’t a flophouse.”
“When will she be back?” he asked, keeping as tight a leash as he could on his appetite.
The woman, who was as tall as Jerome and half as heavy again as his wasted frame, advanced toward him. “The girl won’t be back,” she said, “so you get the hell out of here, before I call Isaiah.”
Jerome looked at the woman. She shared Angela’s profession, no doubt, if not her youth or prettiness. He smiled at her. “I can hear your heart,” he said.
“I told you-
Before she could finish the words Jerome moved down the landing toward her. She wasn’t intimidated by his approach, merely repulsed.
“If I call Isaiah, you’ll be sorry,” she informed him. The pace of her heartbeat had risen, he could hear it.
“I’m burning,” he said.
She frowned. She was clearly losing this battle of wits. “Stay away from me,” she told. “I’m warning you.”
The heartbeat was getting more rapid still. Tile rhythm, buried in her substance, drew him on. From that source: all life, all heat.
“Give me your heart,” he said.
“Isaiah!”
Nobody came running at her shout, however. Jerome gave her no opportunity to cry out a second time. He reached to embrace her, clamping a hand over her mouth. She let fly a volley of blows against him, but the pain only fanned the flames. He was brighter by the moment. His every orifice let onto the furnace in belly and loins and head. Her superior bulk was of no advantage against such fervor. He pushed her against the wall-the beat of her heart loud in his ears-and began to apply kisses to her neck, tearing her dress open to free her breasts.