Pigeons are monogamous.
      Or is it wombats? ... Monarch butterflies?
      What’s the difference? thinks Noah Bitterman, I don’t stand a chance with Chloe anyway.
      This blond-haired, porcelain-skinned daughter of Christ stands six foot one --a bona fide international fashion model, the complete package--and just now, she happens to be sitting only fourteen inches away from Bitterman in the front seat of his rented Volvo as it races toward Milwaukee International and the last flights of the night to La Guardia. Her voice chatters at a hearty, all-American clip: “And you wouldn’t believe the piles of coke some of the girls were doing.”
      Her lips tighten into a faint smile. Headlamps from an oncoming tractor trailer coat her perfect features like a paint brush dipped in triple-filtered lust--and not just because she’s beautiful, but because she’s a shiksa.
      The supreme shiksa.
      And in his whole thirty seven years Bitterman has never tasted such forbidden fruit. The photo shoot he had art directed earlier that afternoon had been the stuff of fantasy: Chloe draped over the angular, Zen-Lutheran furniture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, her blonde body posed against the knobby, psuedo-Kyoto planks of Taliesin -- and no one else in sight, even the security cameras had been turned off. (The client had made a large donation to secure unfettered access to the studio/museum for their day of image-building.)
      Another semi flashes by and Chloe cross winks at Bitterman in the glare. “Well, who could blame us, I mean, if you carried a pound on your thighs and Donatella caught you, I mean, you were, like, so over.”
      “A waste,” he says, squinting through the icy windshield, “In Milan and everything ... not that I’ve ever been, but I’ve heard, uh, you know, about the food.”
      “You get used to it,” Chloe pouts.
      Oh Christ! He tugs his seatbelt into his gut. She’s a wisp, and he’s jabbering about stuffing his too-full face? No, no. At this stage of affairs, he still wants to impress her. He must. And anyway, there’s no risk here. He wipes his nose and takes a perverse comfort in the fact that he’s already blown it--just as he expected, predicted, prophesied. On his best day, you might count him a seven, while Chloe was pushing eleven in anyone’s book.
      Well, that’s OK, he thinks. Family was his choice: stability, maturity, Decembers in Boca. And they’d be at the airport soon, and Bitterman would be heading back to Rachel, and the boys, and colicky little Sarah, shrieking the night away. Back in plenty of time for niece Mindy’s Bat Mitzvah in South Orange.
      Chloe’s been looking him up and down While talking, but she’s not seeing him, she’s picturing her Croat boyfriend Goran and how he would be waiting for her in their townhouse in Darien, still sweaty from his last lesson of the day and scratching his flat, hairy stomach, a Pilsner Urquel in his hand, impatiently waiting to soap her and shower her and yell at her in that crazy backward Croatian while coming inside her.
      Bitterman sucks in his gut, smoothes his hair forward, and wishes he’d worn his contact lenses, low humidity on the airlines be damned. Hadn’t girlfriends, before Rachel and the kids, always said he had ‘bedroom eyes’?
      “You know, I really like your glasses,” Chloe says, her lithe fingers feeling around the dashboard. “I bet you like books, right?”
      “I do like reading,” Bitterman says, carefully, “my wife, she sometimes accuses me of reading too much but I've just got this thing, you know, I just bought a signed first edition of "The Horse's Mouth" by Joyce Carey, it was only chipped on the...” he mutes himself before he says something else stupid.
      Chloe trips a switch and waves of soothing warmth tingle his tailbone. “Heated seatwarmers,” she says. Then she starts fiddling with the radio, into farm reports, talk radio, down, down the dial, finally landing on thumping guitar and adenoidal howls, “oh, the Violent Femmes, I love them, you know, they’re from Wisconsin. One of them’s really into Olympic diving.” Bitterman’s lips are sealed tight, a painted clown. An RV blazes past and a sheet of ice shatters on the windshield in perfect synch with the crash of a tinny snare drum. Chloe unbuckles her seatbelt and squirms in rhythm. Not only would Bitterman’s wife Rachel never unbuckle her seatbelt in a moving car, she would never listen to the Violent Femmes. Elton John’s more her speed.
      Chloe’s singing along, her voice a shimmering growl of adolescent lust and ennui. She’s decided that while you could definitely call Bitterman paunchy, he’s certainly sweet, sweet in that way Jewish boys with glasses can be. Why couldn’t Goran be like that, or Armando? Or that glib gigolo in Antibes? This guy, she’s thinking, he’s easy to talk to, and at least he listens. She pulls a cigarette out of her straw basket and punches the lighter. Pop. She puts her smoldering cigarette in the ashtray, takes another one out and clasps it in her mouth, lights it and hands it to Bitterman.
      Bitterman fights back a cough as if his life depends on it. “You look cool smoking,” Chloe says. And he has to agree, he does look cool, maybe even cool enough to--dare he think it? The miles disappear under Chloe’s voice, “My mom, since they rescued me from Milan, well, she and my stepdad, their natural juice business has really taken off. All I did for the first three months after they got me, I laid in the room watching Jerry Springer, they tried to forcefeed me Twinkies®, and on Sunday’s we’d go to their church, all day, and pray.”
      “Rescued you?”
      “Oh, man, I was a mess. Modeling, the shows, Milano, the men, the women, the drugs. They did like this commando thing, my dad and my stepdad together -- imagine that -- busted in one night, actually pulled me off a guy, a Dutch boy ... I kinda liked him too.”
      Chloe lets the smoke snake out her nose and watches it tickle Bitterman. Had he noticed the bump on her nose like the Dutch boy noticed it? Of course. She imagines a Warner Bros. angel sitting on one of Bitterman’s shoulders and a little cartoon devil on the other. And the Devil’s winning. She can be sure.
      But a question keeps biting at Bitterman: Where the hell is Milwaukee? They’d been driving for plenty of time and the turn off should have landed them at the Hertz counter by now. Instead, they’re getting signs for Kenosha this, Kenosha that. Errant exits just keep flying by, a strange progression of numbers where Exit A23 follows Exit 74 follows Exit Hwy Bypass 22 follows Exit 199, formerly Exit C 101.
      “My best friend, Tamiqya,” Chloe says, “she was another one of the girls in Milan, pretty, red-headed light-skinned black girl. I don’t know what happened to her, I never heard from her again. I guess Jesus didn’t love her so much.”
      “I guess not,” says Bitterman.
      “But that Frank Wright Lloyd house, what a place.”
      “Frank Lloyd Wright,” he corrects in as gentle and self-esteem enhancing way as he would have corrected Leah, his stern seven year old. Bitterman’s picturing the impending Bat Mitzvah, the rap dancer coaching the pimpled set in grinding moves, then the soggy fish, the steely coffee, the gamey rugalach. He’s thinking of Rachel’s father and the hateful looks he always gets from him - as if to say, you fucked my daughter, you fucked her. How dare you? Then the devil whispers hard in his ear, “Hadn’t Wright been something of a swordsman in his day? Didn’t he steal off with a client’s wife, or something like that? And what about those architecture students he had under his spell at Taliesin? What was their tutorial? Hauling rocks, making dinner, sharpening pencils. What else?”
      Bitterman casts a glance at Chloe and dives into her blue irises only to reemerge in a place where all possibilities are in reach, where there’s no such thing as bad weather, root canals,taxes, or lawyers, where fried chicken has no calories.
      But the Milwaukee conundrum again explodes into his consciousness, “God fucking damn it! Sorry.”
      “What is it?”
      “I can’t believe it, I, we, I mean, Jesus, I’m so used to driving on streets with numbers and directions. How the hell can I-94 not go East-West? Don’t all the even number Interstates run East-West and the odd ones run North-South? Aren’t we on I-94? Crap. Sorry.”
      “I don’t know,” she says, “I’m from California.”
      And then it goes off like a bell, of course, as Freud would have said, there are no accidents. The little cartoon devil’s jumping up and down, really whooping it up! Yes, they’re lost. And yes, Bitterman missed the I-290 cut off on purpose. He understands it clearly now, of course, he wanted to be lost in Wisconsin with Chloe all along. He wanted to drive forever with her, smoking, singing, telling tales. The Warner Brother’s angel has turned into a little Hasidic rabbi, and he’s pissed. Bitterman remembers the pebbly dirge of Aunt Estelle’s grating voice and decides to try his luck, feeble as it is, even though he’s wishing he’d started the Rogaine treatments a couple of years earlier. Nevertheless, he hurls himself over the platform.
      “Chloe, listen, uh, it’s late, and, well, we’re, well, their aren’t a lot of flights out of Milwaukee to New York. What I’m saying is, Chloe, how would you feel about catching the first flight out tomorrow morning, we could, uh, you know, find a hotel at the airport I’m sure and…” The road whirrs. There, I said it, he thinks.
      It’s getting very warm between his legs. Say yes, he prays, picturing the tall, curving hotel tucked into the airport parking lot.
      “We don’t have any choice, we’ve really missed all the flights tonite?” Chloe asks.
      “I’m really sorry. I fucked up.”
      “You sure there’s a hotel at the airport, that I can get the first flight out? The very first flight.”
      “Sure.”
      “Well, I guess we don’t have any choice then.”
      No choice! Bingo! Bitterman floors it. The moon emerges from its cloud and looks down, not disinterested. Bitterman turns the radio on, loud, bass and drum music pulsating. You as much feel it as you hear it. Chloe’s shaking her head back and forth, her glorious mop of hair swaying over her eyes like those gigantic felt strips at Al’s Essex County Car Wash. Sure, calls had to be made, excuses had to be proffered, but they were hotel-bound and the first flight of the morning would get him to the Shul on time. Now he unbuckles his belt and squirms too. She pulls out a Ho-Ho ® and chews it. Her tongue snakes out of the corner of her mouth, snatches a crumb and a dollop of cream filling. And just then, like a miracle, there’s a sign for ‘Milwaukee Motor Speedway 30 miles ahead.’ Lights are multiplying. Signs and cars are cloning themselves before his eyes. Roads are forking off right and left. The lanes double and double again. There’s the airport. If they could see him now at Alan Shepard High School, Bitterman reflects, if they could see him at that shiny red-bricked building where he snarled for four awful years not being able to climb the rope in gym class and fighting acne, him, Bitterman Bitterman, just inches from a woman who probably shtupped Mick Jagger, a woman with a lethal, world-class bump in the middle of her shimmering nose, a real woman who is pouting in serious interest over him. And he’s got her to a hotel. Just the thought of signing in as Mr. And Mrs. Wright and Bitterman feels the ridges of his zipper pressing against his rapidly firming erection.

      But at the registration desk, she insists on getting two rooms. He’s in 1202. She’s in 507. He’s not going to let himself get stranded in 1202. The elevator rises…Two. Three. He hadn’t noticed her perfume – or was that just her natural musk. Four. Think, think! Five. The elevator pings open and Bitterman starts sneezing, wildly, emphatically, spasmodically - his eyes are pools. “Allergies,” he croaks, his foot wedged in the jaws of Otis.
      “Listen, can I check out your room. If my room has, well, I’ll, I could die.” “OK,” she says and slinging her basket over her shoulder blade, strides out. He follows her down a cold-carpeted hallway that seems to grow longer with each step, past sleeping businessmen and bleary-eyed captains into her room. In the wan light, everything seems to be burgundy, the floor, the carpet, the drapes, the bedspread, the dressers, the towels. It is ‘World o’ Burgundy’ high atop Milwaukee, the Burgundy Brick Road to Oz. Bitterman heads straight to the mini-bar and pulls out two munchkin-sized bottles of Absolut.
      “Don’t worry, you can put in for the mini-bar,” he says.
      “I can’t drink without rocks,” Chloe says, taking the burgundy bucket and its protective plastic lining to the ice machine next to 505. Bitterman hears the crash of ice on plastic, a crash like his inhibitions, like his fears. He pinches his thumb and forefinger and snaps the tiny necks of the two bottles, his nose wrinkles from the fumes. Chloe puts the bucket down next to him, sits on the bed and lights up another cigarette. Bitterman decides to ignore the fact that they’re on a no-smoking floor. He splashes the clear spirit over cracked ice and heads right toward Chloe, he’s staring at her open-mouthed, like a Botticelli.
      She takes a glass. They drink in silence. He savors the burn on the back of his throat, feels the vodka kiss the insides of his tired eyeballs.
      Chloe puts her straw bag on a burgundy countertop and leans her legs toward Bitterman, legs that start in Buffalo and end on Grand Street in lower Manhattan, legs that cause something inside Bitterman to snap, unlatching his whole being like Zachary’s Curious George Jack in the Box and springing him on her. He lands on the bedspread and attacks the pout with his lips and before he knows it, he’s chopped liver in her long, Scandinavian fingers, being shaped and molded and stripped into a boxer-short clad version of himself, knobby knees and all. Who cares if she’s still fully clothed?, soon enough, he thinks. He’s convinced that burgundy is his favorite color in the whole wide world.
      She grabs his arm and looks him in the eyes, “Not so fast. Before we do anything else, there’s something I really wanted to show you.”
      Bitterman’s thinking tattoo.
      She picks up her bulky straw bag and pulls a book out of it. A big, red, leather-bound book. He didn’t really have her pegged as a reader but this newly exposed combination of brains and beauty is a real turn on. She splays open the pages of the volume puts it right in front of his face. The inscription is as large as the Hollywood sign: ‘To FLW, the greatest architect in the world from GBS, the greatest playwright in the world.’
      Bitterman’s erection deflates like a punctured air mattress.
      “Where did you get that?” he says.
      “I got it.”
      “Got it? Got it?”
      “OK, I took it. So. There were so many of them there. Who’s GBS?” she says.
      “George Bernard Shaw.”
      “No ego problems there,” she says. “You think it’s worth anything on Ebay?”
      Bitterman grabs the prize with two hands. It weighs more than it appears, but less than it should. His nubby nail, what’s left of it, scrapes at the gooey dust caking the ochre calfskin. The embossed title, in a classic serif font - Caxton he suspects - “Candida.” He knows more than a little about antiquarian books like he knows more than a little about everything. His mind is flypaper for trivia, from the early design experiments for the safety pin to serial numbers on Gibson mandolins. This book is worth a bundle. He opens the heavy cover, and there, scrawled, scratched with blue black ink, squeezed from squid guts, forced through laquered Parisian pens, were the signatures, the human traces of Shaw and Wright. He knows its pages desire to be food for termites and bugs, to return to earth, but he can feel the sensibly stern craft of the Northumbrian papermakers and Cheapside bookbinders fighting the entropy.
      Bitterman peels back the frontspiece. It creaks like an unoiled hinge. A swirling universe of marbled paper sucks him in, the fingers of Chloe’s smoke seeping into the purple and red orbits between the cover and his eyes; and the pages are creamy like the little patch behind her left ear. And on the facing page, stamped in hot leaded type, depressing the rag paper are the words, London, Constable 1931. Then he flips back, and yes, there, over the title, in a broad, nervous scrawl, scarred fibres peeled back from its blue black ink, the inscription: a paean from the mad Irishman to the mad Midwesterner--two dandies who believed their ideas would change the world.
      Even though a six month old could shred its pages in minutes, the talisman still packs its incantory punch. It doesn’t glow or flash or give p.r. interviews; it doesn’t endorse anything, but it still reeks of pleasure, of breaking chains and violated commandments.
      It is now warm in his hands, a pillow, a brick, a key. Everything tumbles in Bitterman’s mind. He swallows, “This book is worth more than money. We’ve got to return it. I tell you what, I’ll call the police. We’ll just say we found it, then we’ll be done with it.”
      “That doesn’t sound like such a good idea,” Chloe says, taking the book back and beginning to pout again.
      “Good idea?” he says. “Was it a good idea to disrupt, to violate, to, I’ll say it, to rape that, that sacred place? I mean, did you see the way the light came in over those rocks, the way the vistas became part of the interior, the way...”
      “The way the chairs wobbled and the way everything was made of plywood.”
      “Look, we were privileged, nobody, I mean nobody is allowed into to that place like we were. And we might go to jail.”
      “Oh, that’s what’s scaring you, jail.”
      “No, it’s just wrong.”
      “Listen, I’ve posed bra-less in the Sistine Chapel, I’ve laid naked on the marble floor of the Taj Mahal, literally freezing my ass off. I’ve been inside Buckingham Palace - deep inside it.” “Yes, I’m sure, but not with me.” And he knows she’s right, he is afraid of going to jail, of having a record, of being fined, of all those things that non-Jews do. The cops, yes, he thinks, that is a really stupid idea. Again. And the old strangling voices are clamoring. Idiot! Why not shut up? The cartoon devil scowls. “I tell you what, Chloe, we’ve got time. We’ll just drive back. I’ll get dressed, we’ll get in, we’ll put it back. Then, we can really enjoy ourselves. And feel good because we did the right thing.” She just looks at him like he’s out of his mind, and sure enough, he realizes that that suggestion is even dumber than the last one. “Chloe, who knows what kind of laws they have here regarding national treasures, I mean, they had Fighting Bob La Follette as governor once. They’re maniacs here.”
      “Your allergies OK?”
      He knows she’s not understanding a word he’s saying. He lashes out and grabs at the book. She pulls it to her breast, it snuggles so nicely there. “Just give me the book, give me the god-damn book, or, I swear, I’ll, I’ll take it from you. It’s just a book. Just…”
      “You mean that?” she asks.
      “Give me the…” he grabs the book and a clump of pages rip off in his hands. He’s frozen.
      “What do you want more, me or the book?”
      “Look at this.”
      “Wrong answer,” she says and taking a step throws the book at him, a forehand Frisbee flip, obviously schooled in hours of Santa Barbara ultimate games. Bitterman’s amazed at how the ancient tome whirrs – rigid, proud. He ducks and it ricochets off the Mark Rothko reproduction onto the stiff bedspread. Then she walks over and quite methodically empties the contents of the ice bucket on his head, “Oh, and I’m a lesbian.”
      “So?”
      But she’s already out the door. The heater growls on. Chloe’s gone, but he’s got Candida – in pieces. He’s got her.
      He aligns the two pieces of the cover page, the fibres snuggling into the shreds so comfortably he can almost hear them sigh. He’s thinking there’s got to be some kind of tape that can mend this. He’s thinking, hell, if they can invisibly mend suits, they can certainly do it for priceless books. He slides the other pages into place. Yeah, sure, he’s thinking, he’ll drop the remains of the book at the airport FedEx, and despite dozens of small space paragraphs of firm legal prohibitions, he’ll stuff cash in the envelope too. He figures five hundred dollars ought to be enough to get the book mended. As an eyebrow of rusty dawn announces itself through the purple sky, Noel Bitterman leans back on the bed and starts reading:
      "A fine October morning in the north east suburbs of London, a vast district many miles away from the London of Mayfair and St. James's ..."

Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in The New Yorker, Punch, National Lampoon, and The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. His writing has appeared on Pindeldyboz, McSweeneys, The Morning News, Yankee Pot Roast and he has read as part of Trumpet Fiction at KGB bar in New York City.