She watched me intently. This was a deadly serious business for Andrea King. There was to be pleasure, yes, and laughter, yes; but I was also a neophyte to be studied, mastered, led, guided. Her concern about my proper initiation poured gasoline on the fires of my desire.
She sighed often, twisting her buried head against my chest and murmuring contentedly.
“You’re wonderful,” she said once.
“Raw novice.”
“Gifted lover.”
I straightened her up and moved her away for a moment. There was a faint smile on her flushed face, her jaw hung lazily, her eyes were wide and content. “Not bored yet?”
“Not even begun.”
She shivered complacently. “Marvelous.”
I thought how wise I had been not to begin with Barbara. Then I peeled the gown from her left shoulder and down to her waist. The top of the white linen and lace garment hung against her lower arms, which were clasped, protectively, at her belly.
“Oh my.” She swallowed again. “The officer is serious.”
I took possession of her other breast. “He sure is.”
“Do you like me?”
“What do you think?”
“Well, you have good taste in wine.…”
“And”—I lifted my lips from the new breast—”and women.”
“And loving.”
I kept one nipple erect and teased the other into the same condition. Her hand glided down my chest, across my flank and to my loins.
“As soon as I saw you in the station,” she whispered, “I knew I wanted you.”
“And, since you read minds,” I responded, now lightly pushing both breasts against her ribs, waiting for my brain to explode, “you knew I wanted you.”
“In clinical detail.” She threw her head back and then gasped. “Don’t stop, that was approval, not protest. Yes, that’s better. But I never thought I’d get you. I was astonished when I heard your voice asking about my husband.”
“Now you think you have me?”
Her fingers tightened on my loins, I moved the gown to her hips.
“I think we both have what we wanted that morning, so long ago.”
“Yesterday.”
“As I said, long, long ago … do you always come into women’s bedrooms stark-naked?”
“When I hear screams. And this is the first time I’ve been in a woman’s bedroom, as you well know.”
I removed the rest of her nightgown. The nude Andrea King was a greater wonder than I had expected in the continuous fantasies that had tormented my imagination since I had first seen her in the railroad station.
Her breasts were fuller than I had imagined them, her waist more slender, her thighs more deftly carved, the dense auburn underbrush between them more luxuriant. She was a miniature odalisque, both timid and determined, both embarrassed and eager, my slave and my master.
Then neither of us said anything for a long time. Love was not mentioned. It didn’t just then seem to be an issue. I explored her body with by hands and my lips, discovering all its fascinating detail.
So I lost my virginity, which had become, in retrospect, an impossible burden, and lost it to a child more than five years younger than I was, a sweet, clever, ingenious, sympathetic child. She initiated me into the mysteries of sex in such a way that our coupling seemed a promise of a vast and exciting and memorable journey that would last the rest of my life. She gave me the kind of first step on that pilgrimage which she had been denied. And she gave it generously and lovingly, holding nothing back.
Does the first act of love shape all subsequent acts of love? My kids, speaking from professional expertise of one sort or another and careful to exclude reflections on their own experience, offer me the typical psychological conclusion: maybe. The first time can be terribly important, but need not be. You can overcome a bad beginning. You can destroy the positive effects of a good beginning. But for me, perhaps because the beginning had been so long delayed, it was decisive. Despite the horror that would assault and destroy our union in just a few hours, the first act itself will always be with me, a paradigm every time I approach the body of a woman.
Without saying a word, she taught me about love—how gentle it must be even when it is most violent. About women—how much they need sensitive affection. And about life—how we must seize its opportunities before they are lost.
We played, we laughed, we teased, we gently tormented, and finally we drove each other over the brink of passion in uninhabited free fall through space that seemed to last for eternity and longer.
Her pedagogy was carefully tuned to the possible vulnerability of my novice’s male ego. She taught by sigh, by gesture, by gentle guidance, so that I felt not a fool, but like a pilot who has just soloed or perhaps just finished flight training. Not only was I initiated, so her response told me, now I was a pro.
Well, I wasn’t a pro, but at least I had made a presentable beginning. And, with considerable satisfaction, I knew that I had.
The religion teachers in my high school and college classrooms would have said that, if the storm returned and lightning struck us on our vast honeymoon bed, we both would have been damned to hell for all eternity.
That’s what the new pastor at our parish preaches, a man who believes that we’ve lost our sense of sin (sexual sin, he doesn’t seem concerned about any other kind). If I am to take seriously the documents emanating from the Holy See, that’s what the Vatican wants us all to think too.
The big difference between now and 1946 is that no one believes them anymore. In my Catholic days before the war, I half believed them; but my hesitancy to immerse myself in the love game was probably based in great part on other motives (not all of them unworthy, such as affectionate respect for women, which I had absorbed from my father).
What would the various members of my family, experts on ethics each in their own way, judge about our romp in Picketpost House, should I provide them with the details?
Packy would say pretty much what he said in 1946. Under the circumstances, the power of passion was so great that I don’t see how the issue of serious sin could arise.
My daughter the clinician would say that it was a statistically probable event and, so long as no one was hurt, it might well have been beneficial for both. Still, there is always the risk in such hastily consummated liaisons of considerable dysfunction later on.
My son the young priest would perhaps find it hard to understand why the question would come up; we were on an exploration toward a sacramental union (for which we both hoped, despite our respective reservations and fears). In general, the more chaste such explorations are, the better for both parties. But who can say what is appropriate in an individual case? Finally it is between the couple and God.
“The same thing, I’m saying,” Packy would insist. “Only the vocabulary has changed, not the pastoral insight.”
His namesake would agree.
And my wife, listening to this imaginary seminar with twinkling eyes, would comment, terminating the discussion, “If he hadn’t started then, I would have had to teach him a lot later on. That dreadful girl obviously had some skills at seduction.”
None of this debate occurred to me as the two of us, spent but happy, napped for a little while in each other’s arms. My complaisant woman seemed utterly blissful. And I reveled in that self-satisfied sense of conquest that rewards the male of the species after every reasonably successful exercise in love.
Barbara would never have been like that, I reasoned, nor any of the girls or women I knew. My sister and my mother would be shocked at the suggestion of abandonment so complete.
Looking back on it, I may have underestimated my mother. In fact, I’m sure I did. The nighttime sounds in the next room during the vacations my wife and I took with my parents in later years suggested to me what ought to have been obvious—wantonness comes in a wide variety of packages.
I think most adult men of my generation would be shocked by that discove
ry. After what happened to me that night of July 23, 1946, barely trustworthy Jerry was pretty hard to shock.
We made love again that night, our hormones keeping up (in my case with some help) with our imaginations and our desires. We frolicked and experimented, explored and trifled with each other, lost our minds with turbulent passion and caressed one another with sweet reassurance. She knew my every fantasy and cheerfully indulged them almost before I knew which one came next.
Early in the morning, when light was breaking in the sky, Andrea stood at the window, her gown clutched at her breasts. I had slipped away when she was sleeping and brought the Kodak into our bedroom. I snapped the shot quickly and hid the camera.
I still have the picture, next to the Compaq as I type these words—head and shoulders, piquant thoughtful face, auburn halo in attractive disarray, lips slightly open, eyes staring into the far distance. A pretty child, chaste and yet, with her delicate and smooth bare shoulders, miraculously erotic.
For all her earthy charm, there is something ever so slightly wrong about the picture. She looks misty and ethereal in the dim dawn, almost ectoplasmic, as if her image had been imposed on the chemicals by a cosmic ray instead of by ordinary light. She’s not quite there, you see.
Yet she was there that morning. As solid as the keyboard on which I’m typing. I slipped up behind her and pried the gown away and let it drop to the floor.
“People will see me naked,” she protested, covering her breasts with her hands. I bent over her and kissed her.
“Who? The voyeur in Phoenix with a telescope?” I removed her hands and replaced them with my own. I kept my lips against hers.
Like a well-satisfied cat, she arched her back against me, stirring me to even greater arousal.
“I think there’s a strong streak of exhibitionist in me.”
“In everyone.” I allowed one of my hands to wander down her body, tickling her on its way.
She giggled and squirmed. “Stop it.”
I didn’t stop it but drew her even closer as my hand continued its journey to the russet forest of her loins, where it amused itself for a time and then journeyed back to her breast.
“You’re driving me out of my mind.” She tried to talk even though her lips were as much my prisoners as her bosom.
I dragged her back to the bed. “That’s the general idea.”
“You never have enough, do you?” She allowed me to place her face down on the bed, her toes touching the floor. “Now you’re going to try another fantasy, aren’t you?”
I certainly was. “I’m running out of fantasies.”
“That will be the day.”
When I showed my wife the picture before we were married, she considered it thoughtfully.
“I can see why you were spooked. The poor little thing does look otherworldly.”
The recklessness of the damned.
CHAPTER 12
AT TEN O‘CLOCK I ORDERED BREAKFAST SENT UP BECAUSE my bride insisted that there would be no more lovemaking until her other appetites were satisfied. She had convinced herself that I was correct in my analysis of the scale. Her net gain, minus the towel, which was no longer necessary, though it was wrapped around her waist some of the time as a token concession to modesty, was a pound and a half.
“I’m not planning to eat this way for the rest of my life. Besides, I was hungry.”
“And thirsty.”
“Can we have cognac for breakfast?”
“We certainly cannot. The people here probably think we’re crazy anyway.”
“It’s a shame you needed it for lovemaking.”
“I needed it? You were the only one who drank cognac since …”
“Since we began”—she tossed aside the towel and threw herself on top of me—”to play.”
The bellman—a silent Indian who looked as if he might be an Apache or a Kiowa—brought our breakfast. I had to persuade my modest bride by brute force that she couldn’t answer the door clad only in her towel.
As we ate breakfast, the folks who watched everything I do from the various corners in the attic of my brain were busy worrying, which is what they’re paid to do.
Not only was she impetuously wanton, she was also skillfully wanton. Could she have learned that from the barracks braggart who had been her husband? I rather doubted it. But from whom then? And how come so quickly? How do you make in a little more than two years the transition from innocent Irish Catholic virgin in a Catholic high school in the “East” to a playful temptress in an inn in the West?
I had a good time, a wonderful time. But I also wondered.
I learned through the years that some people are spontaneously good at sex, if given half a chance and half a dose of encouragement (and, heaven knows, I was given more than that in July of 1946). Others never learn, no matter how hard they work at it and how much experience they collect and how many techniques they master or think they master.
Respect and obsession, judiciously blended like vermouth and vodka; that’s the secret.
“You know, it’s funny,” she mused as we were lying side by side, after breakfast, tranquilly holding hands, both of us too spent to act yet on her suggestion that we go down and look at that pretty arboretum place. “I am lying here wondering if I was a good lover for you and you’re lying next to me wondering how come I am so outrageously good.”
“Doesn’t mind reading become a burden after a while?”
She nodded vigorously. “Neither of us are asking about you. The commander takes it for granted that he was outstanding—which he was—and I practically pass out when I think of all the things you did to me. But we both worry about me.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You’re not to say anything.” She slapped my arm in a symbolic reprimand. “You’re supposed to listen.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So listen.” Suddenly she was very stern. “You’re my second man, Jerry, just as surely as I’m your first woman. Whatever happens, remember that.”
“I will, but I wasn’t doubting—”
“I said, you’re supposed to listen.… I’ve never been that way before, not even in my imagination—well, not in imaginations that I would admit to, anyway. Something inside me cracked and came apart when I saw you, so strong and good-looking and kind, in the station. Maybe the nuns were right after all about my being an immoral hussy. John … well, I’m afraid the poor boy was a little … kind of a puritan, if you know what I mean. After we were married I had to take the lead and I did all right … I mean, he was certainly satisfied and so was I, more or less. It was”—she sighed complacently—”never like last night.”
“We should get up now if we’re going to visit the arboretum.”
“Why get up?” She stretched luxuriously.
“So we can go back to bed.”
“That’s wonderful.” She jumped out of bed. “I’ll beat you to the shower.”
In fact, it was a tie. Which was just fine.
The Boyce Thompson Arboretum had once been the personal garden of the copper tycoon who had lived in Picketpost House. Unhappy with the desert view in the little canyon beneath his front window—the place where I had taken my bootleg photo of my “bride”—he had imported trees and flowers from all over the world. His heirs had expanded it by adding many desert plants too. I gather that the University of Arizona has taken it over and that now it’s quite a distinguished botanical garden. Even forty years ago it was a fascinating mixture of desert and the rest of the world.
My companion was enthusiastic. She bounded around from plant to plant and tree to tree like a little kid at the zoo or a rabbit in a lettuce garden. My reputation for omniscience was irrevocably lost.
“You mean you don’t know how they make those prickly-pear trees?”
“I was in pre-law, not botany.”
“But you know everything.”
“Not about desert plants.”
“Especially when you don’t have
a chance to read the guidebook the night before.”
“I was busy last night.”
“I noticed.”
“A woman in my suite, I don’t know how she got in, was screaming. I had to calm her down.”
“Were you successful?”
“No.”
She laughed and gamboled over to an Australian pine tree. It didn’t look any different from a Wisconsin pine tree to me.
She stopped abruptly, hesitated, and then walked back to me diffidently.
“Was that how it started? Did I really wake you up screaming?”
“That’s why I came into the bedroom in the first place. Other processes started after I wakened you and told you that you were having bad dreams. Don’t you remember?”
“I’m not sure. I remember being frightened and then you kissing me. Why was I frightened?”
“ ‘Hysterical’ would be a better word. I think someone was trying to kill you or punish you horribly. Someone named Andrew. I kind of figured it was your uncle.”
She was chalk-white, terrified again.
“No, not my uncle,” she replied automatically. “… Are you sure?”
“I’m sure that was the name and that you thought you were in some terrible danger. You were sitting straight up, rigid, your eyes glued shut, and screaming your lungs out.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t remember my dreams usually. A lot of times when I wake up I feel like someone has tried to kill me.”
“Has anyone ever tried to kill you?”
She looked at me with an expression of great misery. “Not exactly. My uncle beat me a lot, especially when I was a little girl. He stopped a couple of years ago—then began again after … after he found out I was pregnant.”
“Why did he stop?”
“I told him I’d cut his throat with a butcher knife if he touched me again.… I think there was something sexual about the way he beat me. He enjoyed it too much.”
“You threatened to cut his throat … did you mean it?”
“Course not, but he wasn’t sure.”
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 13