Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “Yes,” she whispered softly. “Yes. I know exactly what you mean.”

  “Well, goddammit. I don’t want to win any more. I’m giving up. I surrender. You got that?”

  “Yes, I …”

  “I just want you to drink every goddamn minute we’ve got together, Irit. I want to feed you. I want to nourish you. I want to love you so goddamn much … Jesus, Irit. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Don’t say anything.” She pulled Slaight over, her arms wrapped around the small of his back, nails dug into his flesh.

  “Just love me. I do need you, Ry. I need you.”

  Slaight unfolded, and he was on top of her, his penis between her legs, he was inside her, and it was sticky wet warm squishy. A fetid compost of sweat and the juices of the genitalia settled over them like a soft sheet. He moved his buttocks slowly, back and forth, back and forth, feeling his way in her vagina. She looped her arms beneath his, holding him close to her, their heads touched, and each could hear the quick breathing of the other.

  Beneath him, she moved from side to side, up and down, up and down, writhing, tightening and loosening her legs, raising her knees, then thrusting both down against the bed with a soft thump. They stayed like that for a long time, then rolled over, and she was on top of him. He looked up. She was bolt upright on her knees, rising and falling with her breaths, regular, deep, penetrating the air between them, her breathing almost … visible. He took her breasts in his hands and kneaded her nipples gently, squeezing them between his thumb and forefinger, tighter, tighter, rolling the nipples back and forth, pinching and kneading, holding the weight of her body with her breasts as she leaned forward eagerly. He let go. She fell against his chest, grabbing the back of his head, holding tightly.

  A moist sucking noise, like the sound of water against the pilings of a pier, could be heard between their wet, sweaty stomachs. The noise quickened the pace. He moved faster, more boldly against her pelvis. She released her grip on his head and flopped to the side, pulling him over on top of her with her knees. He stiffened his arms on the pillow, looking down at her face. It was wide, and her cheekbones were highlighted in the shadows from the open door.

  “Ry,” she said softly. “Love me.” A tiny gasp of passion separated each word. He closed his eyes. An image formed. He could see her face, she was mouthing the words, Ry … love me … soundlessly, in a vacuum. In his mind, it was as if she were yelling the words at him, screaming. But there was no sound, only her breathing, regular and deep and fast. He opened his eyes, working with the motions of her pelvis.

  The head of his penis found the top of her vagina and stayed there, moving against a small, uneven area, the size of a half dollar. It was a membrane just beneath her pubic bone, where her hymen had once been. He knew. He’d gone down there and looked around, studying her vaginal area. It was beautiful, and he had told her so, embarrassing her in the shower one morning. The water was beating down on them, and he was on his knees, splitting her labia, peering … inside. He hated the word clitoris, so he called hers “boodle,” an affectionate nickname she thought hilarious when she learned that it was cadet slang for candy. The membrane in her vagina was ultra-sensitive, and he moved back and forth against it with inch-long thrusts. Again he heard her:

  “Ry … my … love … I …” She stuttered now, her accent thickened, her voice finding a frantic pitch. Her breath came fast against his cheek, and he moved deeper within her, sliding slowly until his pubis reached hers, the fleshy area just above his penis beating against the folds of skin covering her boodle. He clutched her, pounding his body against hers, letting go. She bucked, throwing him forward, her face contorted, wrinkled vertically, tiny folds of skin in a curtain across her forehead, her eyes tightly closed. It flashed through his mind that whatever it was, love, it was happening, sex, love, whatever … the word love stuck in his mind stubbornly as he came in several brief, almost painful bursts of pleasure, driving heat to the base of his neck, tightening the muscles in his calves, rattling his toes. She clutched his balls with one hand and pushed her entire torso upward, a back bend from shoulders to feet, shaking, quivering, as they were joined, hinged at the hips. He raised his head. He looked at her. Then he realized. She hadn’t held her breath. Always before, she’d grimaced and hold her breath. Now her breathing came as it had for the past … how many minutes … for how long had they been at it?

  They settled easily into one another’s arms and lay silently. With her left hand, Irit reached over and pulled the linen pillow between her breasts, closing her eyes. The bed was a total mess. He straightened the sheet, folding the quilt across their shoulders. He rested, watching Irit Dov, breasts engorged with blood, reddish, nipples still partially erect.

  Jesus.

  Her breathing sloped into even distant quiescence, and he leaned against the pillow. They would nap for an hour. When they awoke, she’d tease him for “neating up” the bed, straightening it. He’d grab her by her black hair and kiss her on the mouth to shut her up. That was what they did: teasing and jiving and tossing, riding the tension. He glanced over at the clock radio, glowing in the dim light. It was 12:30. They’d been at each other for just over three hours, not unusual, except for the weird rap he blurted. Slaight crossed his hands behind his head. Already asleep beneath the gray canopy of satin, Irit seemed delicate, vulnerable. He watched her. For the first time he was afraid to drop off, afraid he’d roll over, swing an arm, and break her.

  Christ! 150 pounds, dripping wet! What fuckin’ nonsense is this?

  But he sensed things would be different now between him and Irit Dov. He smelled it … didn’t have the slightest notion how things’d change … wha’s gonna happen … he slept.

  12

  By the summer of 1968, Irit Dov had achieved a measure of success unusual for a woman twice her age. She was a Madison Avenue boutique owner with a growing sideline in fashion design. She was part-owner of a factory in Israel producing two seasons—fall and spring—of ready-to-wear sports clothes for women. The best of her fall line, full skirts and blouse-over tops for evening in desert beiges and Mediterranean pale blues, had recently been featured in a six-page color spread in the American fashion magazine Vogue, in a section called “Around the World with Vogue.” The French magazine Elle had in December of 1967 named Irit Dov one of the year’s “top new designers on the international scene.” The boutique page in Women’s Wear called her “one of this year’s exciting young things—a girl with verve, a girl to watch!” She sold most of her designs through two boutiques in Tel Aviv and in her tiny shop on New York’s Madison Avenue, but as she picked up publicity, she was beginning to get small orders from stores like Saks, Blooming-dale’s, and Neiman-Marcus. Irit Dove was doing a million dollars’ gross business in 1968, of which she would personally realize about $100,000. Irit Dov, at twenty-four, was a woman of means.

  It figured. It was in her blood … and in her bank account. She had been financed four years previously—enough to open her first shop in Tel Aviv—by her grandfather, Shlomo Dov, an Israeli diamond merchant who was one of the Two Hundred, a select group of men who once every month received from the Johannesburg-based De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. a small black leather case containing maybe $1 million, maybe $5 million—maybe more, depending on the year—in uncut diamonds. Shlomo Dov had a business on Forty-seventh Street in New York, in a second-floor loft above a block teeming with men in black suits carrying black satchels from one side of the street to the other, an endless stream buying and selling an endless stream of the world’s hardest, most secure currency, the diamond. Shlomo Dov bought his diamonds from De Beers at the price asked, without even opening the black leather case. It was the way of the diamond trade. De Beers owned the diamonds, and De Beers owned their pricing.

  He dealt some of the diamonds he bought from De Beers in Antwerp, Belgium, on the diamond exchange, uncut. Others he kept for his own business. In Tel Aviv the diamonds were broken down, graded by experts in hi
s employ, and Shlomo Dov always had the last word about a stone, no matter how small. The diamonds were cut in a large loft in a warehouse district of Tel Aviv. From Israel, Shlomo Dov’s diamonds were hand-carried in black satchels to London, Antwerp, New York. Some ended up on West Forty-seventh Street, where they were sold without the haggling and bickering characteristic of the diamond business. Shlomo Dov’s diamonds were purchased at the price asked, because everyone knew he was one of the Two Hundred. He dealt first-quality merchandise, no matter where his diamonds were “pointed” on the grading scale, whether they were “melees,” small stones of a carat or less, or “sizes,” larger, expensive gems. Shlomo Dov was a man of respect.

  His son, Avi, short for Abraham, was a general in the Israeli army, commander of a tank ugda (task force) stationed along the north-south border between Israel and Jordan. As a young man, in 1946, he had joined the Palmach, the guerrilla strike force of the Haganah, the illegal Jewish militia in British-occupied Palestine. After British withdrawal in 1948, Avi Dov had been a platoon commander in the Palmach, which became the commando arm of the Jewish army.

  The full-time Israeli army was small, only about twelve thousand men, not including draftees. By 1968, most of the men who called the army a career had fought together in four major wars: the guerrilla campaigns against the British and Arabs during the years 1946, 1947, and 1948; Israel’s War of Independence; the Suez Campaign of 1956; and the Six-Day War of 1967. The Israeli generals knew each other well. Avi Dov was perhaps better known than most. He had been among the founders of the famed “101 Battalion,” which during the early 1950s had made antiterrorist raids across the Israel-Jordan border in response to Arab terrorist activities within Israel. There were those among Israel’s enemies—and some among Israel’s friends—who had accused the 101 Battalion of terrorism. Some of its raids had resulted in documented deaths of Jordanian women and children.

  But the 101 Battalion’s daring raids had helped to make Avi Dov’s reputation. When he transferred in 1956 to Israel’s armor branch, he turned himself into an overnight legend when he devised an eerie—some said cruel—initiation rite for young Israeli armor lieutenants. The lieutenant would stand atop an old discarded tank body. The tank would be doused with diesel fuel and set ablaze. The lieutenant would be required to recite his oath of allegiance atop the burning tank before he was allowed to jump through the flames to the ground.

  Irit Dov was among those who thought her father cruel. Though she had served her requisite duty as a teenager in the Israeli army, she was one of a growing number of young Israeli citizens who had problems with Israel’s reputation in the world as a mini-superpower, obsessed with military might, competing—or so it seemed—with the Great Powers themselves for domination of the Middle East. Although Irit comfortably embraced the socialism of Israel’s ruling Labor party, she had accused her father of “imperialism” once or twice when she heard him talking with army friends of their designs on the Jordanian west bank of the Jordan River, and on the Sinai, the great expanse of desert which separated the southern border of Israel from the strategic Suez Canal. Then came June 1967, and all her doubts became academic. The West Bank and the Sinai were now part of Israel.

  It came as no surprise to either Avi Dov or his wife, Daphna, when their daughter at age nineteen used money borrowed from her grandfather to open her first boutique on Tel Aviv’s busy Deitzengof Street. Nor was it much of a surprise, four years later, when Irit was named in the influential Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz as “one of Israel’s jet-setters, one of our citizens who has made the world her market place.”

  Their daughter was a citizen, but as she paid the eight hundred dollars for an exit visa from Israel and boarded planes at Lod Airport a dozen times a year, it was clear to the Dovs that their daughter had become a citizen of the world. She spent more time outside Israel—specifically, in the United States—than she did in the country of her birth. She was sabra, but by 1968, it seemed as if a new Jewish history, a new two thousand years, was beginning for people like their daughter. It made them sad. Though General Dov agreed with Moshe Dayan’s military doctrine—"to exorcise Jewish cleverness from Israeli strategy and tactics"—he longed for an Israel in which there were no political disputes as he had with his daughter, as he had occasionally with fellow army officers. It was part of General Dov’s gut conservatism that he often ended speeches to his troops with the words: “We must not forget that first, we are Jews. Second, we are soldiers.”

  Irit Dov had two penthouses—the one on Madison and East Eighty-second Street, in New York, and a small studio apartment atop a building on Hayarkon Street, overlooking a stretch of beach between two large Tel Aviv hotels. She called them “my bird nests,” because they were both located high above surrounding buildings, and because she thought of herself as a “bird,” the slang word from Britain used to describe a new breed of fast-moving international woman, the model Jean Shrimpton, the actress Julie Christie, the singer Marianne Faithful. She liked to think she designed clothes for “birds.” They clung loosely to the body, flowing easily as one walked. Her clothes were unlike the tight, tailored, body armor of other contemporary designers. Irit’s clothes were soft, feminine, vulnerable like a second skin. Even her fabrics had a birdlike quality. They were featherlight tight-weave cottons and smooth challis wools. It took a special, hip woman to wear Irit’s clothes. It took a “bird.”

  She often visited museums—in Paris, the Louvre; in New York, the Metropolitan—to find inspiration for her designs. She collected lines, the movement of color in a painting, the way a musician collects riffs from old, perhaps forgotten recordings. From sketches made in Paris—the surrealists, cubists, impressionists—and in New York, the Metropolitan’s growing collection of Egyptian art, she gathered the notions behind her designs. She watched American television, especially “American Bandstand,” and went to rock-and-roll concerts at the Fillmore East, to capture a feel for what had become known as “funk.”

  It was an arduous process. She would sometimes spend hours standing before a single painting, a single expanse of temple wall transplanted from Egypt and erected within the walls of the Metropolitan, its paintings of prehistoric scenes intact … she’d just stand there, staring. Once a director of the Metropolitan interrupted her as she stared at an Egyptian piece late one afternoon, just before closing. He was a tall distinguished man, and he had watched her in the museum before. This day, he asked her if she wanted to have a drink with him across the street at the bar of the Stanhope Hotel, and she accepted. Through him, Irit Dov would gain access to collections of the museum which were not yet open to the public. And on his arm in 1966 and 1967, she would become acquainted with an exciting, glamorous crowd in New York City. The museum director was one of those men who stood atop a unique intersection where the worlds of money, art, and politics met. One night, Irit Dov attended a party, to which she had been invited by the museum director. Ry Slaight read about the party in the New York Times and crashed. They met. It happened casually, quickly, and things seemed to happen in those days.

  Slaight felt at loose ends in the swirling laughter and bubble and swell of the party until he found a pool table in a room just off the study. It was a large house on East Seventy-second Street, overlooking the East River. The pool table, scuffed and beat-up looking, seemed as out of place as Slaight. A guy from Brooklyn in a gray fedora was playing all comers and beating them. Slaight, who had spent more than his share of hours in the Snooker Poolhall in downtown Leavenworth, played the man for twenty dollars and won. He played again. Won another twenty. He played double-or-nothing and lost. Then the man said, “Let’s play for a yard, kid.” Slaight recognized the term from Mickey Spillane novels. It meant a hundred dollars. He didn’t have the money, but by now, he knew he could take the man from Brooklyn, and he did. He was counting the tens and twenties, wandering away from the pool table, when he heard a voice.

  “Ry Slaight?” the voice asked. He couldn’t place the accent
.

  “Ry Slaight?” the voice asked again. “Is that your name, Ry Slaight? That’s a funny name. Is it Jewish?” Slaight turned. The woman with the voice was dressed in black pants, black blouse, black suede heels. Around her neck hung a thin gold chain. It hung over her bosom and dangled at waist level. It was a long, elegant chain, meant to catch the eye. It did. Slaight looked at her face. It was dark, swarthy, beautiful, shrouded in long black hair.

  “No. It’s not Jewish. It’s Kansas,” said Slaight. She laughed, unblinking, her eyes not leaving his.

  “You’re a funny guy,” the woman said, placing her arm through his. Slaight’s right hand was stuck in his pants pocket. His left hand was covered with baby powder, from shooting pool. He was looking for the bathroom, to wash up. The woman pointed.

  “Over there. When you come out, get me a drink. I will have what you are drinking, Ry Slaight.” He closed the door and washed up.

  How the fuck does she know my name? He ran hot water. Must have been watching the pool game. She’s a weird one. Foreign. Smells … musky … like the woods. It was a strange odor. Dark, like the woman. When he opened the bathroom door, she was standing where he’d left her. She slipped her hand around his arm. He pulled two beers from a bucket of ice at the bar, opened them, and reached for glasses.

  “I will drink mine from the bottle,” said the woman. Slaight handed her the beer. It was one of the expensive brands, from Holland. They sipped the beers.

  “This place is hot. Or is it just me?” he asked, searching for something to talk about. The woman laughed, a rough, attractive chuckle. He felt wetness at his underarms, sweat running in a slow river down his back. A hundred-dollar game of pool was like … well, it was just a bit over his head, when it came right down to it, especially since he didn’t have the scratch to cover, if he’d lost. He wondered if the woman could smell him. He probably stank to high heaven.