by Sloan Wilson
“Well, He arranged things so I finally met you.”
“My my, you’re a real smooth toff, aren’t you?”
“I really am grateful. I wandered through about a hundred bars last night looking for someone like you.”
“You must have found someone.”
“Girls like you don’t sit around bars waiting for a lonely sailor to show up. They have, as you say, a regular chap.”
“He’s in Sydney, and maybe he’s touring the bars. We had a bit of a tiff.”
“Then that’s my good luck. I haven’t even talked to a decent-looking girl in more than a year.”
“What’s your wife like?”
“She looks a lot like you—”
“That’s what all you Yanks say.”
“It’s also probably often true. Australians and Americans seem pretty much the same—”
“You’re a lot different from my chap.”
“I hope you’re different from my wife.” He shouldn’t have said that …
“You’ve not been getting on together?”
“We haven’t been together much in the past three years. First Greenland, then New Guinea—”
“Did you meet many girls there?”
“Have you ever seen pictures of the girls in Greenland and New Guinea?”
“The New Guinea women in the pictures do look a bit moody. Do the Eskimo girls really rub noses?”
“They wash their hair in urine and never take baths. I wasn’t up there long enough to find out about the noses.”
There was a short silence which seemed unusually tense.
She laughed. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Syl Grant. What’s yours?”
“Ann Thompson. Some of my friends call me Angel.”
“In New Guinea all the guys said that Australia was heaven.”
“I’ve heard that about the States. You Yanks make a lot more money than we do.”
“I never made much. Before the war I was trying to work my way through graduate school.”
“What kind?”
“History.”
“I started out to be a teacher but I dropped out. I’m a typist in an insurance office. It’s a terrible bore.”
He was tempted to increase their sense of solidarity by telling her that his wife worked in her father’s insurance business but suspected that wife-talk was not the way to seduce a girl thirteen thousand miles from home. What he wanted to do was skip the preliminary moves and say flat out what he felt and wanted, but he didn’t dare risk it …
“There’s not much to show you in Brisbane this time of night,” she said. “All the museums, cathedrals and stuff will be closed.”
Thank God, he wanted to say, but this was no time for experiments in being himself. “I hear you have a good beach,” he said.
“You want to go swimming this time of night? I should think you’d seen enough of the sea.”
“Enough of the sea, not of beaches. I’d just like to lie out on the sand somewhere, look up at the sky, talk …” (A real smooth toff, old Syl.)
“All you Yanks are the same,” she said.
“Are Aussie men so different?”
“They try to get to know us first.”
“I used to be like that before the war, when there was time enough for everything—”
“You all use the same line. ‘There’s so little time. Let’s make the most of it.’”
“I’m with you. These must be rough times for you.”
“I keep telling myself that it’s tougher on you guys—well, some of you—but even your chaps in supply and your dentists keep telling us they are about to die.”
“Those dentists have dangerous jobs, a lot of the GIs bite.”
“They sure do … I’m not even sure a gas tanker is as dangerous as you chaps say. Maybe you’re making it all up.”
“If you’re annoyed with me, take me back to the ship. We can have a cigarette together in one of the tanks. It wouldn’t be dangerous now, she’s just been steamed out.”
“Would they really let me into the yard?”
“They don’t seem to give a damn what we do, but it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. If I bring a girl aboard, then the ship would really be dangerous … Hey, I don’t much like playing the part of the typical Yank who’s overpaid, oversexed and over here, as some like to say.”
“Then be yourself.”
“I’d jump on you, if I did.”
She laughed. “Well, at least that’s refreshing. It’s honest.”
“Good to hear it. Mostly I seem to foul up when I try to be myself. For example, you may like honesty but I got a feeling I should be trying to create a romantic mood, not making you laugh.”
“I really don’t know much about romance. Or love. I wish I did. Love is what Yanks talk about when they want to go to the beach after dark.”
“That’s for sure part of it.”
“How long would you remember me if we went to the beach tonight?”
Long enough to be grateful, he thought, but said, “I’ve asked only a few girls to go to the beach after dark, and I remember every one of them vividly, including the ones who said no.”
“Are you angry at them?”
“Mostly at myself. I meet few girls who I even want to take to the beach. I guess I’m too choosy.”
“I somehow doubt you’ve spent all that many nights alone, except maybe in Greenland and New Guinea.”
“It’s true, though. I read a lot. I end up with a book a lot more often than I end up with a girl. Fantasies instead of the real thing.”
She reached over to touch his knee in a way that sent shock waves up his thigh.
“You’re real enough,” she said. “My, I have made you moody! Cheer up! Here we are at the beach. At least you’re going to get your chance to lie on the sand and look up at the sky.”
Leaving the car parked by a row of bathhouses, they walked over a dune to a narrow strip of sand. Here the light from a half-moon overhead seemed bright. White breakers gleamed as they rolled toward their feet.
They took off their shoes and socks, walked at the lip of the tide with occasional high-reaching waves curling around their ankles. There was the smell of seaweed and of dead fish, all swept clean by the wind from the sea. Up nearer the dunes lovers lay sprawled in moon shadows, almost as motionless as corpses after an invasion, he thought and then drove the thought from his head.
“It will be less crowded farther on,” she said.
They walked nearly a mile. The roar of the surf quieted to a whisper.
“There’s a big sandbar out there,” she said. “At low tide we can walk out to it.”
“And let there be no moaning at the bar when I put out to sea” came to his mind, and he devoutly wished he would stop this thinking about death. Here at least no more corpselike lovers were in sight. Turning toward the dunes, they sat down on dry sand and he flopped down full length on his back. There was a faint ring around the moon, a harbinger of disaster, he had read, but in his experience at sea it had very little meaning. The Southern Cross was bright tonight. He missed the North Star and the Big Dipper out of which it seemed to fall.
“You really did want to look at the stars, didn’t you?” she said, running her fingertips gently over his forehead.
He caught her hand and kissed her palm, tasting the salt of it, so much like the salt of the sea, it occurred to him. Turning toward her, he kissed her lips. Her mouth tasted salty too and he caught his breath, as though he might drown in the sea of her. As she took away her lips from his to get air her intake of breath was sharp enough to be an exclamation and then they were kissing again and rolling over in the sand.
“This is silly,” she gasped as he undid the buttons of her dress.
“Why?”
“I have a perfectly good room.”
“I like it here.”
“People might come—”
“No one will bother us.”
�
��Please, I’ll like it much better at home.”
He let her go. She sat up, abruptly demure as she buttoned her dress. He lay on his back again, looking at her retroussß nose silhouetted against the Southern Cross.
“You really are beautiful,” he said.
“I’m glad you think that.”
“It’s the God’s truth.”
At that moment he really felt quite pious.
“You’re so horny you’d think a gorilla was beautiful,” she said with a short laugh. “Come on, beat you to the car!”
She was off, zigzagging down to the lip of the sea, where her ankles kicked up small wings of spray. She was so fast he had difficulty keeping up with her. His heart pounded so hard that he thought briefly of his father’s heart attack. Well, if he had to die he would rather it happened here with her than in a fire at sea.
“Joanie’s not coming home tonight,” Angel said as she turned the car around. “You can stay over if you want.”
Her apartment was on the third floor of an old house about a mile from the beach. She skipped up the flights of steep stairs, her round buttocks dancing under her damp pink skirt. He pounded after her, his breath coming hard after the second landing. Her hand trembled as she fitted her key to the lock.
They stepped into a room so small that it was almost filled by a big double bed. Moonlight from the window glinted on its brass head and foot. There was a refrigerator in a corner with a shelf of groceries near a sink and a gas ring.
“I’m going to take a quick shower,” she said. “There’s a beer in the fridge if you want it.”
She disappeared through a curtained door and almost immediately he heard the rush of water. The cold Australian beer was strong, dry and tangy. He had not yet finished when she came back wearing nothing but a towel which she held around her waist, her shoulders and breasts still beaded with diamondlike drops of water.
“I really must be in heaven,” he said as he stepped toward her. “The ship has exploded and here I am.”
“Take a shower!” she said. “I’ll be ready when you come out.”
He squeezed into the metal shower stall and took what must have been the quickest shower in history. She was lying on her back on the bed when he returned, a perfect odalisque, he thought. He lay down beside her, gently, then began kissing her.
He had forgotten the incredible softness of a woman’s breasts. He was afraid that he would cry out with his pleasure. He couldn’t hold on much longer. Thank God she was ready for him. Their bodies fitted together with a precision that seemed remarkable for strangers. “Oh, please,” he gasped, “don’t move like that; I won’t be able to last—”
“Don’t worry about me!”
But he did worry about disappointing her. He squeezed his fists so tight that his fingers hurt. He clenched his teeth, held his breath, thought of swimming in cold water with ice and sharks, and he exploded anyway.
“I’m sorry,” he groaned.
“I’m all right,” she said, smiling, and seemed to mean it. “Want to finish your beer?”
“Thirty seconds, for God’s sake …”
“I bet that was just an appetizer. Hand me a cold beer.”
She never got a chance to finish it. She did not complain. For half an hour they made love so hard that at times they almost seemed to be in a kind of combat. When they were finally exhausted, they slept for an hour and he had no idea what time it was when he woke up in darkness. She was not in the bed … had he dreamed the whole thing? Then he heard the water running in the shower. When she stepped through the curtain a few minutes later, she was naked with her arms upraised, drying her hair.
“Somebody said a man really knows a woman is beautiful when she looks as good after as she did before,” he said.
“I pass the test?”
“Come back to bed and I’ll try to show you.”
“Later! I’m hungry.”
“What time is it? I left my watch somewhere.”
“Over the sink. It’s almost nine-thirty.”
He could not get over the fact that they had spent so little time together, three hours at most. He felt as though they had been together for a year. His perception of time had changed. He had always believed that in retrospect, pleasure seemed short, pain long, but this was the reverse.
“Any restaurants around here still open?”
“No good ones. I thought I’d bring something in.”
“I feel like taking you somewhere and celebrating. Do any of the nightclubs serve good food?”
“There’s a fancy supper club, but it’s awfully expensive. It’s called the Queen’s Taste. All the real toffs go there.”
“Sounds exactly right for us. Tonight money’s no object.”
“You mean you’re not one of those Americans who has all his money sent to his wife?”
As a matter of fact he had allotted most of his pay to Sally, but when she made a good insurance deal, she sometimes sent some back. His mother also sent money even though she really couldn’t afford it and he tried to send it back. No use … she’d just send it again. Anyway, at the moment his wallet was loaded, which was the way he felt … loaded with a renewal, thanks to this girl.
“I saved some of the millions I made teaching history,” he said. “Put on your best dress.”
“If we just want to eat and drink, we could go back to your Lucky Eighteen’s house—”
“And spend the rest of the night with Mr. Buller?”
“He is a blow-hard, I must say. He seems awfully stuck on himself.”
Syl was not unhappy to hear that she did not like Buller. “He is a problem, but we’re working on it. He hasn’t been in the service long. Still thinks it’s sort of a game.”
“I wouldn’t want the job of whipping a big one like that into shape,” she said, stepping into a new pair of panties, and slipping into a black lace brassiere.
“Do me a favor, will you?” he said.
“What?”
“Take that black thing off again for a minute. I want to see you take it off, not put it on.”
She laughed.
“You’ll have to feed me first.”
While he got back into his uniform, she wriggled into a tight black cocktail dress, not, he thought, as becoming as her simple pink frock. It had buttons and bows in an odd assortment of places, but he was in no mood to be critical, for God’s sake. As eager now for dinner as he had been for bed, she hurried down the steep flights of stairs ahead of him.
The Queen’s Taste seemed familiar to him, as though he had visited it in some other life, but then he thought how expensive restaurants were pretty much the same all over the world. This was pretty much like the Ritz in Boston or the Algonquin in New York. A stocky middle-aged woman sitting on an antique chair by a round Queen Anne table in a lobby could have been his mother, waiting to take him to a play during school vacation. Somehow the memory was not happy. He was filled with an abrupt feeling of loneliness, which was how he tended to feel as a child. He felt considerably better, though, as he followed Angel into the dining room. By somebody’s conventional standards, the back of her dress was probably cut too low, but not for his or him …
A headwaiter in tails seated them in a corner near a table where a woman who looked like an old duchess and a handsome thin society type who might be her daughter were eating. Both were tall, tweedy and stylish. They looked bored when Syl first noticed them, but a moment later he realized that the younger one was staring at him and Angel as much as “good manners” would allow. She looked somewhat sardonically amused at the young American lieutenant and his little Australian girl friend. He glared back at her. She picked up a wine list and began studying it.
“I’m always afraid they’re going to throw me out of this place,” Angel said. “They don’t even let the ratings in here.”
“I thought you Aussies were more democratic than that.”
“They make a big thing about having to have a coat and a tie. That leaves th
e swabbies out of it, and they won’t make exceptions.”
“I don’t think I like it here.”
“The food’s good, almost your money’s worth, I hear. I’ve been here for drinks but never dinner.”
She asked him to translate the menu, which was not easy, considering it was in a sort of Australian French. He ordered the house specialty, a rack of lamb, a bottle of Bordeaux and two dry martinis because Angel said she’d like to try one. While they were waiting, a string trio began to play Chopin. He never had liked that kind of music.
The martinis arrived, and as she sipped hers he remembered the signal these drinks had been when Sally took them. Angel didn’t need martinis to shed inhibitions. She didn’t make love for money or to get anything except pleasure.
“Ugh,” Angel said, “it tastes like medicine. You can finish mine.”
“Glad to oblige. Let me order you a Pink Lady.”
“What’s that?”
“Wait and see. It’s terrible but maybe you’ll like it.”
She did like the Pink Lady and after finishing two began to giggle at everything he said. His two martinis made him sound wittier, at least to himself and his Angel, and they began laughing out loud without saying much of anything. Pretty soon they began playing footsie under the table, and Angel slipped off her shoes and began working her way up his legs. Driving him crazy. Glancing at the two women at the nearby table he saw that the older one was staring at her plate, but the attractive younger one was looking right at them, her high cheek-boned face clearly more full of envy than disdain. When their eyes met, she looked away, and picking up her check, called for the waiter. Soon the two women left, the older one hobbling on two canes.
Finishing her meal, Angel said, “It takes a real toff to buy a girl a dinner like this afterward.”
“This is before too, I hope,” he said. She giggled and pressed her big toe into his crotch. He had never enjoyed a meal so much.
After driving home as best he could after all the booze he’d consumed, not to mention the confusion of keeping on the left side of the road, he didn’t know whether he feared or hoped that Angel would be too sleepy to make love. He was both exhausted and eager. The exhaustion disappeared when she reminded him that he had asked to see her take off the black bra. Although still a little unsteady on her feet, she found some music on the radio and did a little striptease. It had a powerful effect. That night’s lovemaking topped even what they’d had earlier that evening.