by A Tan
"Travis, if you are a truly thoughtful and understanding man, you have your toothbrush hidden away on your person."
"I had the idea the party girl would need her eight hours."
"Have a little mercy, dear. There's but one way to settle down from this sort of bash. You shall divert me.
"I can leave and then come back. You know. Like a house call."
"Is its tender little romantical pride bruised because the party girl thinks lovemaking is therapeutic? To say nothing of being a hell of a lot of fun. Just stay on, dear. Stay by me. Smile like a tomcat with a little yellow feather caught in his whiskers, and soon now we can smile them off and sing out our merry farewells."
"Giving Lenore more food for thought?"
"Thought? Christ, that poisonous bitch doesn't think. She slanders, because she has her own terrible hunger she can't ease in any way. She burns in fire, my darling, and hates and hates and hates. Poor thing. Brace yourself, pet. I want you horribly."
Three
I DRIFTED in and out of a placid and amiable doze. Water slapped the triple hulls, whispering lies about how big the seas could really get. I cocked an eye at an upward angle at the battery digital clock fastened to the bulkhead over Jillian's bed. Watched 4:06 turning magically to 4:07. There was a single light on in her stateroom, a rose-colored globe of frosty glass, big as a cantaloupe, standing next to its twin reflection in the dressing table mirror.
It was warm in her stateroom, not unpleasantly so, just enough to leave a humid dew, rosy highlights on our entangled flesh, sprawled and spent, atop a wrinkled dampness of custom sheets in a pattern of green vines with yellow leaves against white.
Jilly lay oddly positioned, her upper torso diagonally across my chest, face in a pillow, cheek against my right shoulder, her slack right arm hooked around my neck. Her long tanned legs were sprawled down there, off to my left. My right arm was pinned, but my left arm was free, my hand resting on the small of her back.
I traced the velvet geographies of that small concave area of the country of Jilly and then made a coin-sized circle of fingernails and thumbnail and made a slow circling motion against her there, a circle as big as a teacup. In time the pattern of her breathing changed. She shifted. She exhaled through slack rubbery lips, making a sound like a small horse.
"Is someone mentioning my name?" she said in a sleepy voice.
"Pure telepathy."
She raised her head, clawed her hair out of the way, and peered up at the clock. "Gawd! What year is it? Don't tell me."
She heaved herself up, tugging her arm out from under my neck. She sat up and combed her hair back with the fingers of both hands, yawning widely as she did so. She shook and snapped her head back, settled her hair, then curled her limber legs under her and smiled down at me. "Been awake long, Travis?"
"Off and on."
"Thinking? About what?"
I hitched myself higher on the pillows. "Random things. This and that."
"Tell me about them."
"Let me think back. Oh, I was wondering how it's possible to make this bed up. It's shaped to fit perfectly into the curves of this middle hull right up at the bow and-"
"There are little lever things on the legs down there, and when you push them down, then you can roll the bed back and make it up. You certainly think about fascinating things."
"Then I heard a motor go on, and I was wondering if it was a bilge pump or a refrigeration compressor or-"
"You are trying to be tiresome. Didn't you think about what I asked you?"
"Maybe I did. A little bit. Like wondering why it has to be me."
"If one could know why a person settles upon a particular person, one would know one of the mysteries, wouldn't one? I think it was because of four years ago. I think it started then."
A friend of a friend had put Sir Henry Brent-Archer in touch with me. A problem of simple extortion. I had gone down to the British Virgins and spent three weeks at their spacious and lovely home and found exactly the right way to pry the two-legged lamprey loose, file its sharp teeth off, and send it unhappily on its way. And during the three weeks I had become ever more sensuously aware of Sir Henry's handsome and lively wife. She made sure of that awareness.
"Because I kept it from starting?"
"Was I all that distasteful to you, my darling?"
"Not you. The situation. I liked Sir Henry. In spite of the fact I was working for him on a special problem, I was still a guest in his home. In a man's home you live by his code. It does not have to be typed out and glued to the guest suite door. He did not want me to kick his dogs, overwork his horses, bribe his servants, read his diary, filch his silverware, borrow his toothbrush, or lay his wife. I accepted the obligation when I moved in."
She snickered. "Would you believe that was the only time in the years I was his wife that I ever tried to be naughty?"
"There's no reason not to believe it."
"I was very grateful to Sir Henry. He came along at just the right time in my life. My whole dreadful family was sliding into the pit, and through him I could save them, so I snatched him up quickly. I liked him well enough for half the marriage, liked him a great deal for the rest of it, and started loving him after he was buried. Anyway, on that stupid night I lay and listened to my heart going bump, bump, bump. Then I got up and drenched myself with that lovely scent and put on the little froth of nightgown and crept through the night like a thief and slipped into your bed. And suddenly got lifted out bodily, carried to the door, given a great whack across my bare behind, and shoved out into the hall. I did not know whether to laugh or cry. I did both."
"It was closer than you'll ever know, Jilly."
"So it's you, dear man. The chosen. Relax and enjoy it. Why not?- Am I trying to nail you down permanently? Of course, but through your own choice and decision. I give you full disclosure, dear. I have something over eight hundred thousand pounds, carefully managed by nice little Swiss elves. The income is about a hundred and fifty thousand of your dollars a year, and taxes take hardly any. There is the lovely house with the beach, the bay, and the view, and the boats and cars and horses. I am not exactly a junior miss, but I work very hard at myself, and I come from healthy stock. I suspect I shall go on about the same for years and years and years and suddenly one morning wake up as a shriveled, cackling little old witch. All I ask of you is that you come back home with me, darling. Be my houseguest. Be my love. We laugh at the same things. We enjoy the same things. Last trip and this trip we've certainly established... physical compatibility. Darling, please! We'll travel when you want to and go where you want to go. We'll be with people when you want to, and they will be the people you want to be with. Please!"
"Jilly, you are a dear and lovely lady-"
"But! I know, dammit. But! Why not? Do you even know?"
I knew but did not want to tell her. You see many such couples around the yacht clubs and bath clubs and tennis clubs of the western world. The man, a little younger or a lot younger that the moneyed widow or divorcee he has either married or is traveling with. The man is usually brown and good at games, dresses youthfully and talks amusingly. But he drinks a little too much. And completely trained and conditioned, he is ever alert for his cues. If his lady unsnaps her purse and frowns down into it, he at once presents his cigarettes, and they are always her brand. If she has her own cigarettes, he can cross twenty feet in a twelfth of a second to snap the unwavering flame to life, properly and conveniently positioned for her. It takes but the smallest sidelong look of query to send him in search of an ashtray to place close to her elbow. If at sundown she raises her elegant shoulders a half inch, he trots into the house or onto the boat or up to the suite, to bring back her wrap. He knows just how to apply her suntan oil, knows which of her dresses have to be zipped up and snapped for her. He can draw her bath to the precise depth and temperature which please her. He can give her an acceptable massage, brew a decent pot of coffee, take her phone messages accurately, keep her pers
onal checkbook in balance, and remind her when to take her medications. Her litany is: Thank you, dearest. How nice, darling. You are so thoughtful, sweetheart
It does not happen quickly, of course. It is an easy life. Other choices, once so numerous, disappear. Time is the random wind that blows down the long corridor, slamming all the doors. And finally, of course, it comes down to a very simple equation. Life is endurable when she is contented and difficult when she is displeased. It is a training process. Conditioned response.
"I'm used to the way I live," I told her.
"The way you live," she said. With brooding face she reached and ran gentle fingertips along the deep, gullied scar in my thigh, then leaned, and touched the symmetrical dimple of the entrance wound of a bullet. She hunched closer to me, bent, and kissed the white welt of scar tissue that is nearly hidden by the scruffy, sun-faded hair at my temple. "The way you live, Travis. Trying to trick the tricky ones. Trying to make do with bluff and smiles and strange lies. Filching fresh meat right out of the jaws of the sharks. For how long, dear, before finally the odds go bad and the luck goes bad once and for all?"
"I'm sly."
"Not sly enough. Maybe not quick enough anymore. I think you've been doing it for too long, darling. Too many years of getting things back for silly, careless people who should not have lost them in the first place. One day some dim little chap will come upon you suddenly and take out a gun and shoot you quite dead."
"Are you a witch? Do you so prophesy?"
She fell upon me, hugged me tight. "Ah no, dear. No. You had all the years when that was the thing you had to do. Now the years belong to me. Is it such a sickening fate you can't endure the thought of it?"
"No, Jilly. No, honey. It's just that..."
"Give us a month. No. One week. One insignificant little week. Or else."
"Or else?"
She burrowed a bit, gently closed her teeth onto the upper third of my left ear, then released it. "I have splendid teeth and very strong jaw muscles. If you say no, I shall set my teeth into your ear and do my best to tear it right off your head, darling."
You just might at that."
You love to bluff people. Try me."
"No, thank you. One week."
She took a deep breath and let it out. "Lovely! Time in transit doesn't count, of course.. Can we leave... day after tomorrow?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you know?"
"I just found out that an old friend might be in trouble. It just seems to me that if she was in trouble, she'd come to me."
Ally wiggled and thrust away from me and sat up. "She?"
"Frowning makes wrinkles."
"So it does. She?"
"A respectable married lady."
"If she's so respectable, how is it she knows you?"
"Before she was married."
"And I suppose you had an affair with her."
"Gee, honey. I'd have to look it up."
I caught her fist about five inches from my eye. "You bahstid," she said.
"Okay. An affair. A mad, wild, glorious liaison which kept us in an absolute frenzy of passion."
Her look was enigmatic. "You are perfectly right, of course, darling. It is none of my business. What's she like? I mean, what physical type?"
"In general, a lot like you, Jilly. Tall, slender brunette. Dark hair, takes a good tan. Long legs, short waisted. She would be... twenty-eight or -nine by now. Back when I knew her, she didn't race her motor the way you do. More of a placid, contented person. She really enjoyed cooking and scrubbing and bed-making. She could sleep ten or twelve hours a night."
"You damned well remember every detail, don't you?"
I smiled up into her leaning, earnest face-a small face but strong of feature in the black, bedsnarled dangle of hair. I looked at her limber, brown body in the rose glow of the lamp ten feet away, noting the way the deep tan above and below her breasts decreased in ever more pallid horizontal stripes and shadings down to that final band of pale and pure white which denoted her narrowest bikini top.
"Why are you laughing at me, you dull sod?"
"Not at you, Lady Jillian."
"I am not Lady Jillian. That usage is improper. If you are not laughing at, then you are laughing with. And if you are laughing with, why is that I am not amused?"
"But you are, darling."
She tried to keep her mouth severe but lost the battle, gave a rusty honk of laughter, and flung herself upon me.
"I can't stay angry with you, Travis. You promised me a week. But I'll punish you for that dark-haired lady."
"How?"
"On our way to St. Kitts there will be at least one day or night when we'll spend hour after hour quartering into an ugly, irregular chop."
"I don't get seasick."
"Nor do I, my love. It would spoil it if either of us became ill."
"Spoil what?"
"Dear man, when the chop is effective, one cannot stay on this bed. You are lifted up, and then the bed and the hull drop away from you, and when you are on your way down, the bed comes up and smacks you and boosts you into the air again. It is like trying to post on a very bad horse. When that happens, dear, you and I are going to be right here, making love. We'll see how well you satisfy a lady in mid-air. I shall have you tottering about, wishing you'd never met Mrs. Whatever."
"Mrs. Broll. Mary Broll. Mary Dillon Broll."
"You think she should have come to you if she's in trouble? Isn't that a little patronizing and arrogant?"
"Possibly."
"What sort of trouble?"
"Marriage trouble. Her husband cheated, and she caught him at it and left him back in January."
"Good Lord, why should she come galloping to you?"
"It's an emotional problem, and when she had one sort of like it years ago, we got together, and she worked her way out of it."
"And fell in love with you?"
"I think that with Mary there would have to be some affection before there could be anything."
"You poor dumb beast. You're so obvious."
"What do you mean?"
"You can't for the life of you comprehend why she doesn't come scuttling back to Dr. McGee's free and famous clinic. Your pride is hurt, dear. I suspect she's found some other therapist."
"Even if she had, I think she'd have let me know the marriage had soured. I get the feeling something happened to her."
She yawned and stretched. "Let me make one thing abundantly clear, as one of your grubby little political types says or used to say. Once we have our design for living, if we have any doleful visits from one of your previous patients, my dear, I shall take a broom to them and beat them through the garden gate and down the drive."
"Don't you think you ought to type all these rules up and give me three copies?"
"You're so damned defensive! Good Christ, am I some sort of dog's dinner?"
"You are a lively, sexy, lovely, sexy, well-dressed, sexy, amusing, sexy, wealthy, sexy widow lady."
"And some very tidy and considerate men come flocking around. Men with all the social graces and very good at games. Not knuckly, scabrous, lazy, knobbly old ruins like you, McGee."
"So grab one of those tidy and considerate ones."
"Oh, sure. They are lovely men, and they are so anxious to please me. There's the money, and it makes them very jumpy and nervous. Their hands get cold and damp. If I frown, they look terrified. Couldn't you be more anxious to please me, dear? Just a little bit?"
"Like this, you mean?"
"Well... I didn't exactly mean that.... I meant in a more general sense... but... now that you bring it up... God, I can't remember now what I did mean... I guess I meant this. Yes, darling. This."
The narrow horizontal ports above the custom bed let a cold and milky morning light into the stateroom at the bow of the center hull of the Jilly III. As I looked up, 6:31 became 6:32. Jillian's small round rump, her flesh warmer than mine, was thrust with a domestic coziness into
my belly. My chin rested against the crown of her head. Her tidy heft had turned my left arm numb. My right h d lay upon the sweet inward curve of her waist.
Worse fates, I thought. A life with Ally BrentArcher wouldn't be dull. Maybe it is time for the 0lands. In spite of all good intentions, all nervo s concern, all political bombast, my dirty two-legged species is turning the lovely southeast coast into a sewer. On still days the stinking sky is bourbon brown, and in the sea there are only the dwindling runty fish that can survive in that poisoned brew.
It happens slowly, so you try not to notice it. You tell yourself it happens to be a bad day, that's all. The tides and the winds will scrub it all clean. But not clean enough anymore. One life to live, so pop through the escape hatch, McGee. Try the islands. Damned few people can escape the smudge and sludge, the acids and stenches, the choking and weeping. You have to take care of yourself, man.