The Edge of Honor

by P. T. Deutermann

  He looked at her for a long moment. “These are interesting times.

  Everybody says you do your own thing, let it all hang out—you know the words. So the answer to your question is, Because you are a very beautiful woman and I’m very much attracted to you.”

  Well, that was pretty straightforward. She felt all her aspirations to control fraying around the edges a bit.

  Suddenly, she wanted to tell him, had to tell him. She wanted the truth out on the table, almost as if it would protect her from herself.

  “Look,” she said. “You’re a very attractive man, and I’m … I’m at somewhat of a disadvantage here. I’m married.” She looked sideways at him, to see if this was news. “Perhaps you knew that.”

  “Yes, I think I knew that,” he said. He steepled his fingers hi front of his face, obscuring all but his eyes.

  She looked back down at the table, her hands flat in front of her, uncertain of how to proceed. “My being at MCRD was an accident, a sudden whim of a friend whom I went along with. It was a dumb idea. I should never have done that, but I was curious, and bored, and depressed at the thought of my husband’s being gone on a ship for seven months. And going to dinner with you … well, I thought I owed you something for saving me from … well, you know.” He nodded deliberately. “And tonight?” he asked.

  “Tonight. Tonight because I wanted to see you again.”

  She lofted his words back to him. “Because you are a very attractive man and I’m attracted to you, too. But, in my heart, in my head, I just can’t. I mean—”

  “I understand, Maddy Holcomb. And if that’s how you feel, that’s okay.”

  He touched the back of her right hand with his left; his fingers were warm. “Look,” he said. “We’ve become aware of each other, as a man and a woman. You must know I want you. But put your mind at ease, because I will settle for your company.” He withdrew his hand.

  She nodded once, felt relieved, and then, perversely, let down. She felt like saying, You give up pretty easy, Just Autrey. He was watching her face, trying to read her thoughts. Afraid that he might see her reaction, she hid her eyes behind her hair and began to stir the ice cubes again.

  “You think I have been trying to seduce you, don’t you?” he said after a few minutes.

  She shook her head but did not answer.

  “Even if I knew how, I wouldn’t do that. See, I know a secret.”

  “What secret is that?”

  “Men don’t seduce women, not beautiful women with brains, women who are aware of themselves. If women are seduced at all—and I often wonder about that—they seduce themselves. The woman chooses. The best we men can do is to put ourselves in the way of love and hope that we get lucky. You tell me that you cannot bring our acquaintance to love. I accept that. You have either chosen not to or you have not made up your mind, but either way, I accept it, because that’s how it works. If I try to force something, the result is probably going to be ugly and barren.

  If you choose, it is passion and love.”

  She did not know-what to say. You wanted to be in charge, in control.

  Well, there it is, she thought. He’s telling you that it’s up to you.

  Just like you wanted, right?

  Then he was smiling.

  “And besides,” he said, “there are some things that are exciting not to know.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. It is exciting not to know whether you’ve made up your mind or if you are still thinking about it.” His eyes were alight with humor, and, despite herself, she found herself smiling back. Devil.

  “I thought I made that clear, Autrey. I—”

  “Yes, or at least you started to. But now I’ve told you what I do not want to know, so the least you can do is to have a little pity and keep the news to yourself—at least until we’ve heard the second set. Here comes the group.”

  She studied her glass, uncertain of what to say or do.

  They sat somewhat more at ease to listen to the second set, but inside, Maddy experienced a kaleidoscope of emotions: relief, disappointment, gratitude, and even tenderness toward this man who was gently willing to be rebuffed for the privilege of her company. She almost wanted to reach over and take his hand, but she knew, suddenly knew, that there was fire in that direction.

  Damn it. Here I go again. The man is just … there, and he has me spinning. She blanked out her mind and focused on the music.

  When the set was over, he escorted her to the front of the bar, where they both said good night to Buddy, the manager, who tried manfully to keep his eyes on her face. She wanted to say her own good-bye right there and flee to the car, but she realized that this might embarrass him in front of his friend, so she asked him to walk her back to her car. The chill of the fall air was in marked contrast to the general fug in the bar, and she tried not to shiver, despite the sweater, which was made for purposes other than warmth. There was almost no traffic on the street, as most of the clubs were still going.

  As she unlocked the door, he once again stood patiently by her side, not too close, not pressing her. She managed to unlock the door, open it, and slip into the seat, not trusting herself to get through another counting experience. She pulled the door to but did not close it.

  Only then did she turn to look up at him. A line from a movie occurred to her.

  “Well, Just Autrey,” she said. “In another time and place …”

  He smiled down at her as if he recognized the line.

  Despite the heavy black brows, the hooked nose, and what looked like small muscles in his face, he was a very handsome man, she thought. From her vantage point, his chest blocked out the whole street. She wanted to reach out and put him through the count test. Damn. I may regret this—a lot.

  “Yes, Maddy Holcomb,” he said. “Stay away from unwholesome places from now on. You never know what kind of people you might meet.” Then he closed the door shut and stepped back, keeping one eye out for cars. She started the engine, turned to wave at him, and then drove off down the street.

  She looked in the rearview mirror and could see him standing there, that impossible white shirt remaining visible in the mirror long after she could no longer see the rest of him. Damn. Damn. Damn!

  Brian was a man with a plan as he walked along the palm-lined waterfront sidewalk on his way to the Subic Officers’ Club. He could feel his freshly laundered whites beginning to wilt in the tropical humidity, even though the sun was already sinking behind the hills of Cubi Point.

  To his left were the oily waters of Subic Bay itself, or what could be glimpsed of it between the nested bows and sterns of assorted Seventh Fleet warships. Ahead was the Subic Officers’ Club, a low, flat-roofed building perched on a point of landfill at the end of the bulkhead pier.

  Brian walked faster to reach the next oasis of air conditioning before he melted completely.

  Following the turnover with Long Beach, the air side of Combat had virtually shut down and Brian had reverted to his job as the Weapons Department’s head. He had spent the first day of the two-day transit back to Subic catching up on the piles of routine paperwork that had been faithfully saved for him by his division officers over the past six weeks. He was blissfully unaware that there would be twice that amount of paperwork waiting on the pier in Subic. He had also experienced the seeming luxury of two full nights of sleep.

  To everyone’s great relief, Hood had arrived for her two-week stay at a time when there was no carrier in port, which meant that the main Exchange would still have things to sell and there would be a chance to get a table in the O Club dining room. As he walked to the club, Brian’s mind was barely recovering from the mass confusion of arrival day, when it seemed that everyone had headed off in thirty different directions at once. They had tied up a few minutes after 0800 alongside the main bulkhead pier, pushed sideways into the berth by two tugs accompanied by much hooting of tug horns. Their berth was marked by a crowd of flatbed trucks and pallets and the first of what w
ould turn out to be an all-day parade of the yellow-gear trains coming from the supply center. And despite the fact that there were dry stores, fresh food supplies, new people, fuel, mail, spare parts, and general supplies to be loaded, most of the crew and half the junior officers had seemed hell-bent on getting ashore and into the various clubs for that first ice-cold San Miguel beer, and perhaps a quick shuttle bus out to the exchanges for their first shot at WESTPAC loot. All of the department heads spent the morning trying to cope with the avalanche of things and people coming aboard and saying no to what seemed like a hundred special request chits for early liberty, special liberty, a day’s leave, and several other artful dodges. Just before lunch, Brian had summoned his division officers for some shared thinking on the subject, losing his temper when his senior lieutenant, Fox Hudson, had made light of the first day’s madhouse. Reiterating the exec’s instructions, Brian explained that ships had been pulled out of Subic on the second day of a port visit for operational or weather emergencies and that the objective of day one was to get everything that was waiting for them on the pier safely on board.

  Only after that had been accomplished could liberty be considered. He had characterized the division officers’ eagerness to get ashore as bordering on negligence and threatened to put every one of them in hack if they didn’t get their enlisted people under control.

  Walking back to his stateroom from the boat decks, he had realized after his shouting session that he was still desperately tired. The sheer physical fatigue of six weeks of evaluator watches, most of it on a port-and-starboard basis, the tension of learning his way around technically and politically, and the growing realization that he had been checkmated over the drug bust had all stretched his personal mooring lines to the point of breaking. Seeing his stone face at lunch, the exec pulled him aside afterward and recommended that he take a long nap and let his people manage the rest of arrival day on their own.

  “Crap out for a few hours—you need it. Tell your chiefs you’ll take a tour topside with them at around sixteen hundred, just before liberty call. They’ll get it done; you’ll see.”

  He had taken the exec’s advice and ended up sleeping right through until 1800. The chiefs had come knocking on his door at 1600, but apparently not too emphatically.

  He had awakened feeling much better, and now, as he walked toward the O Club, he knew instinctively that any sojourn into the boozy warrens of Olongapo would probably be a disaster. Besides, he had the command duty officer duty starting at 0800 in the morning; there was time enough to see the fabled fleshpots of Olongapo the day after. So the plan was to go to the club, have one of their famous, five-dollar steak dinners and a glass of wine, and then back to the ship for some more rack time.

  Packed into his back pocket were three letters from Maddy. For reasons he could not identify, he wanted a drink in him before attending to the mail from home.

  He stepped through the club’s front doors into a wave of icy air conditioning. To the right were the double glass doors of the entrance to the main bar and the slot machine rooms. Straight ahead was the dining room. He hesitated as other officers streamed by on either side.

  He knew that the rest of the wardroom would probably be in the bar, crowded around a couple of tables and well on their way toward the third or fourth round of drinks. But after the scene with his JO’s earlier in the day, he really did not feel like going in there for some noisy alcoholic male bonding that would precede a night on the town.

  He headed for the expansive dining room, where he was met by a diminutive Filipina hostess dressed in a full-length sequined gown. He asked for a table out of view of the dining room’s entrance, feeling a little guilty as he followed her to a back corner of the bustling dining room. Real WESTPAC sailors did not spend their first night in port having a quiet dinner and avoiding the rest of the wardroom. Too bad, he thought, with a small flare of irritation. He had felt more than a little isolated since coming on board this ship, a feeling accentuated by all the derogatory talk about Atlantic Fleet sailors and the insider knowledge of the old WESTPAC hands. He realized suddenly that he had been in this ship for nearly five months and still had no real friends, no shipmates to whom he could really talk. Compared with his days in the destroyer force, Hood had been a foreign experience so far.

  The Filipina cocktail hostess seemed to know he was from Hood and that this was his first time in Subic. She recommended a Subic Special and he agreed, wondering how she knew all that. She returned with the drink, and he sipped on the tall concoction and wondered why everyone grinned when they talked about Subic Specials.

  It tasted like mostly fruit juice, lightly flavored with rum.

  While he waited for a waitress, the lights at the bandstand came up and a quintet of Asian musicians all dressed like Elvis Presley launched into a Peter, Paul, and Mary song about a magic dragon. The female lead was a curvaceous Filipina with improbably large breasts. Her eyes had been surgically altered to sort of round and then painted with enough mascara to give her a panda bearish look.

  The rest of the group were all razor-thin, young Japanese men, some of whom were barely tall enough to swing their electric guitars. Brian decided that they weren’t half bad if one closed one’s eyes and didn’t listen too hard to the words with r in them. As he drained his fruit juice concoction, the cocktail hostess appeared with a refill.

  He had finished that and started in on a third before the waitress found him in his darkened corner and took his dinner order, which he had to shout over the noise of the amps on the stage. He ordered a half a bottle of wine with his dinner and began nursing the third Subic Special.

  By the time his steak arrived, the group was sounding really good and the singer was definitely beginning to turn him on. He found himself wishing he could trade places with the microphone stand, given the liberties it was taking with her ample bosom. He managed to knock over his empty Special glass when dinner arrived, an event the waitress seemed to take in stride. She poured his Paul Masson red wine and then went through the tasting ritual, which Brian found vastly amusing. All these Oriental people trying so hard to act and look like Americans. At about that time, the group took a break and he concentrated on dinner.

  He was surprised at exactly how much concentration the familiar maneuvers of knife and fork were taking. He thought absently about the three Subic Specials, then dismissed them as he reached for his wine, being very careful to wait for the waves in the glass to subside before picking it up. He spilled only a little bit onto his baked potato; probably improve it. Then he became dimly aware that someone was standing next to his table. He looked up and found the smiling, if slightly out-of-focus, countenance of the exec beaming down at him.

  “Mr. Holcomb, I presume?” The beam expanded to a broad smile. “Mind if I join you? They’re out of single tables.”

  “By all means, XO. Please do,” Brian said, not sure whether he should or even could stand up. The exec was a full commander, and Brian was, after all, only a lieutenant. A senior lieutenant, but still. The exec was down and settled in while Brian was still grappling with this complex question of etiquette, a fact not entirely lost on the exec, who eyed the empty Special glass.

  “I see you’ve discovered the Subic Special. What’d you think?”

  “Well, sir, it’s awfully sweet, but, well, I kind of liked it. Them.

  What’s in it—them?”

  “Seven jiggers of rum, all different kinds and brands, a jigger of vodka, some pineapple and orange juice, and grenadine for color. Oh, and a cherry.”

  “Shev-uh … seven kinds of rum? I see.”

  “But not that well, I do suspect. And how many did we have?”

  “We had just two. No, three. No problem, really, although this wine is going to my head.”

  “I’m surprised there’s any room. But what the hell, that’s what the club is for.” He gestured at a passing waitress and ordered a steak with the works. He looked back at Brian, who was trying to decide how to
switch his fork from the left to the right hand now that he had managed to cut a piece of steak. What to do with the steak knife was the tough part.

  The exec tried not to laugh.

  “We missed you in the bar,” he said finally.

  Brian managed to swap his knife and his fork and then focused on what the XO was saying. “I overslept, XO.

  By the time I got here, I figured the wardroom would be way ahead of me, so—”

  “Yeah, I can understand that. So you’re not thinking of going over tonight, I take it.”

  “No, sir. I’m still pretty tired. Everybody tells me I have to go see it. Olongapo, I mean. But not tonight. And there’s another reason. What was it? Oh yeah, I’ve got duty tomorrow.”

  “Good thinking. And when you do go over, make sure you go with somebody.

  Olongapo is interesting but not necessarily safe for officers on their first safari.”

  “Why’s that, sir? Do they pick on officers? If everybody’s in civvies, how do they know we’re officers?”

  “Believe me, Brian, they do. They not only will know you’re an officer but they’ll know you’re from Hood and that you’ve never been to Olongapo before.”

  Brian thought about this news for a few minutes while he figured out the movements to get another bite of steak.

  It seemed to take a long time. Then he remembered the chief.

  “Chief Martinez offered to show me around,” he said.

  “I wasn’t too sure about the uh, propriety of going on the beach. You know, with one of the enlisted. On the other hand, Mr. Hudson said, uh … Damn, I can’t remember.” The knife problem was back.

  The exec managed to keep his face composed as his dinner arrived. “I suspect he said something along the lines that the chief boats was big enough to keep you out of trouble. And don’t worry about the propriety.

  Like you said, you’ll be in civvies, and everyone in the ship, including me, would think you were very wise to go ashore the first time with Louie Jesus. Very wise indeed.

  But here, let me pour you some more wine.”