The Havana Special. No husband, no mother, no cousin: She could be anyone. She smoothed her gray skirt and applied her lipstick. She inspected herself in the mirror; one dark lock fell over her left eye. She was about to step into the corridor when she remembered her gloves. As she slipped them on, she smelled her wrist once more before closing the door sharply behind her.
Entering the lounge car, with its curved wooden bar and low-slung, burgundy seats, Nick felt a trickle of sweat begin to pool between her breasts. She ran her gloved hand over her upper lip and instantly regretted the gesture. A waiter approached and showed her to an empty table. She ordered a martini with extra olives, wondering if they would charge her more for them. She pushed back the felt curtain and stared out into the night. Her own reflection stared back. Behind her head she could see a man in a navy blazer looking at her. She tried to make out if he was handsome, but a passing train obliterated his image.
She leaned away from the window and crossed her legs, feeling the shift of her nylons between her thighs. The waiter brought her drink and when Nick offered up her cigarette to be lit he fumbled to locate his lighter. The man across the way stepped in, flicking a silver Zippo. All the young men back from the war carried Zippos, as if they came issued along with the uniform.
“Thank you,” Nick said, keeping her eyes on her cigarette.
“You’re welcome.”
The waiter disappeared behind a partition of frosted glass.
“May I join you?” the man asked. There was nothing hesitant in his request.
Nick motioned to the seat, without looking up. “I’m not staying long,” she said.
“Where are you headed?”
“St. Augustine.”
He had dark hair, slicked back with pomade. He was handsome, she supposed, in a Palm Springs sort of way. Perhaps a little too much cologne.
“I’m going to Miami,” he said. “I’m going to see my parents in Miami.”
“How nice for you,” Nick said.
“Yes, it is.” He smiled at her. “What about you? Why St. Augustine?”
“I have a brother there,” Nick said. “He’s decommissioning his ship. I’m going to see him.”
“How nice for him,” the man said.
“Yes, it is.” This time, Nick smiled back.
“I’m Dennis,” the man said, extending his hand.
“Helena,” said Nick.
“Like the mountain.”
“Like the mountain. How original.”
“I’m an original guy. You just don’t know me very well, yet.”
“If I knew you better, I would feel differently?”
“Who can say?” Dennis finished his drink. “I’m having another drink. Would you like another drink, Helena?”
“I don’t think so,” Nick said.
“I see. Drinking alone. How sad for me.”
“Who knows, if you wait around long enough, maybe you’ll find a companion.” The martini was making her feel brave.
“I don’t want another companion,” Dennis said. He sighed. “Trains make me lonely.”
Nick was aware of the night rushing by, the whine of steel hitting steel.
“Yes,” she said. “They are lonely.” She pulled out a cigarette. “I suppose I will have that drink.”
Dennis signaled to the waiter. This time Nick’s martini had only one olive. For some reason, it made her ashamed.
“What’s your brother like?”
“He’s lovely,” she said. “And very blond.”
“So you don’t look alike.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Well, he’s one lucky guy to have a sister like you.”
“Do you think so? I don’t know how lucky he should feel, really.”
“I’d like a sister like you.” He grinned at her.
Nick didn’t like the way he said it, or the way he grinned, as if there was a complicity between them. Now that he was too close to her, she could see that he had brown hairs protruding from his nostrils.
“I have to go now,” she said, trying to keep her balance as she rose to her feet.
“Oh, come on.”
“Don’t bother getting up.”
“Don’t get all huffy. I was only kidding.”
Nick walked out of the lounge. He could pay for both her damn drinks.
“Any time you want some brotherly love,” she heard him call after her, laughing, before the compartment door cut him off.
Back in her roomette, she practically ripped her blouse trying to get it off. Her head was pounding. She pulled off her skirt and, standing in only her brassiere and underpants, she bent over the small sink and splashed water over her breasts and around her neck. She switched off the overhead light and pushed the window down to let in some fresh air. The porter had turned down her bed while she had been in the lounge. She sat on it and lit a cigarette. When she was finished with that one, she lit another and pressed her head against the pane. The darkness went by. After a while, she lay down, the smell of the smoke lingering around her.
It was five o’clock in the morning when they pulled into Richmond. The sound of people moving in and out of the train had woken her up. She hadn’t closed the curtains and the window was still open.
“Goddamn it,” Nick said. She tried to inch herself up the bed, aware that she was still wearing only her underwear, for all the boarding passengers to see. The far curtain was just out of reach, so she tugged at the one nearest and got behind it. Standing there, covered only in green felt, she peered out. Nick thought she could detect the earthy traces of the James River. The air was more gentle here in the South. Not like at Tiger House, where the sea took it by force. There was also the smell of pine, cleaning away the last vestiges of the martinis. She pulled the other curtain shut, slipped into her robe, opened the door and called to the porter for coffee.
She would be in St. Augustine by eleven tonight. And with Hughes. Had she dreamt of him? She tried to remember. The porter came with the steaming coffee. She drank it, watching the sleepy passengers boarding for Florida. Helena would be arriving in Hollywood soon. She wondered what Avery Lewis’s house looked like. Poor Helena. Word had come early on in the fighting that Fen was dead—it had taken him all of two months to get himself married and killed. Who knows what their life would have been like if he had survived? They were both a couple of children and neither one had any money.
Helena’s mother, her aunt Frances, had not made a brilliant marriage either. Still, she had never seemed unhappy that she was forced to make do with less. Nick had never heard her complain about the fact that her older sister had been the one to inherit Tiger House, or marry a man who made oodles in bobbins and spools, while she had virtually nothing. It hadn’t occurred to Nick that her aunt might have wanted things to be different. But thinking now of Helena’s strange, mad dash to get married again, her need to have someone of her own, as she had put it, made Nick wonder if Aunt Frances had ever wished she’d been the one in the big house.
Perhaps it didn’t really matter. After all, Nick couldn’t remember a summer that Aunt Frances and her mother weren’t in each other’s pockets. Even after Helena’s father died, when the Depression came. And even when her own father died and her mother was so unwell. Nick stopped herself. She didn’t want to think about that right now.
She pulled two of the eggs out of their brown paper bag and cracked them on the windowsill, revealing the shiny, white skin. No, everything was new now, just waiting to be discovered. And she would. She and Hughes would do it together. She was hungry for it, she would stuff the world whole into her mouth and bite down.
1945: DECEMBER
Nick was lying on the floating dock when she heard Hughes pull up in the old Buick. She tried to concentrate on the music coming from the porch across the yard, so she wouldn’t hear the coughing engine or the slap of the screen door as her husband entered the bungalow.
Count Basie’s piano. The worn wood from the dock shed tiny spli
nters into the back of her yellow bathing suit. Her big toe skimmed the top of the canal. She waited.
When Hughes didn’t come outside, Nick felt relieved. She heard the shower start inside the house as he washed away the dust and paint from mothballing the warship in Green Cove Springs. She imagined his body, the blond hairs on his arms covered in a fine layer of what was once the shell of the U.S.S. Jacob Jones. She could picture him slicking his hair back under the water, turning his face up to the spray, his eyelashes like cobwebs catching fine beads. Would he be thinking of her? She wondered this only briefly. She knew he would not.
The cottage was giving off its evening song: the sound of water rushing through the cheap pipes, and scratchy jazz. Nick hated that cottage, hated its sameness. A rented prefab, it was just like all the others surrounding it: boxy, with a kitchen and bedroom at the front, and a large living room and dining area to the rear, with windows onto a back porch.
The bungalows sat in rows on either side of a dusty drive, each separated by its own plot of land. All the kitchens looked out onto the drive and at any time, any number of the servicemen’s busybody wives could be seen peering out. Nick had made it a habit to walk out to the drive in her bathing suit at least once a day, just to watch the kerchiefed heads quickly disappear, one by one, as she stared them down. It had become something of a game, to see if she could catch one polka-dotted head frozen in the beam of her racy bathing suit, cut higher at the thighs in the French style. This brightened her day.
Each bungalow on her side also had a good-sized backyard stretching all the way down to the salty canal, which served as a byway for St. Augustine’s fishermen and, from time to time, kids fooling around in rowboats.
But theirs had one thing all the others didn’t have: a dock, tethered into the silty bank, which swayed with the movement of the water. Unlike the rest of the development, it didn’t have the look of better times to come, of new lives being started over in cheap boxes. The wood was gray and perfectly weathered, perhaps rescued from an old piece of siding or a fisherman’s ramp. Nick loved the dock, like nothing else in that Florida town. Sometimes when she was lying there with her eyes closed, she was almost sure the hammered planks had come free from their soft purchase and that she was floating away, down the canal and out to sea, back home to her island up north. Then she would open her eyes and see the ungainly house at the other end of the lawn, and realize it had only been a passing fishing boat causing the dock to pitch from side to side.
Nick passed her days stretched out there in the Florida sun, listening to the records that had arrived from Cambridge in a trunk lined with old newspaper, and trying to shock her neighbors. Sometimes, she tried out new recipes from a book she had bought in town, The Prudence Penny Regional Cook Book. It was divided into chapters: Pennsylvania Dutch, Creole, Mississippi Valley, Minnesota Scandinavian and Cosmopolitan, and called for ingredients whose presence on the page continued to startle her.
Before they left Elm Street, Nick and Helena had made a small bonfire and burned their expired ration books. Helena had always had a hard time figuring out which stamp went with what food, and would sometimes return with a can of spinach instead of chicken because she had mixed up the days. And while Nick had liked the challenge of rationing for a while, it had eventually grown tedious, like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle that was missing a piece. Now, she could cook whatever she liked, without having to figure out a substitute. But she found it difficult to concentrate on the recipes, and sometimes would give up halfway through the honeyed ham or oysters Rockefeller, and go lie on the dock in the sun. Later, she would throw the remaining ingredients together into some kind of casserole.
Hughes never said anything, but she knew he was dismayed by her uneven cooking. Listening to the shower, she tried not to think of dinner, once again left undone. She also tried not to think about her husband, who had himself become something rationed.
The orchestra’s horn section broke in and she slapped her foot in time against the coming tide, making little splashes of canal water fly up onto her calf. Her eyes were shut and her yellow bathing suit was losing the heat it had absorbed from the afternoon’s sunbathing. A breeze was whispering up from the water and she could hear a small rowboat passing.
In the house, the water stopped running. Silence, except for the sound of the music and the children a few houses down, complaining about being called to dinner. Nick turned her face to the west to catch the last heat of the day on her cheek.
“Hello.”
Startled, she lifted her head. Shading her eyes, she saw Hughes standing on the lawn, freshly showered and wearing the white shirt she had ironed earlier in the day.
“Do you want me to make you a drink?” she asked, not moving.
“No, I’ll make it myself.” Hughes walked over to the tiki bar and, pulling a bottle of no-name gin out of the cupboard, poured two fingers full into a tumbler.
“There’s no ice out here,” Nick said. “Too hot.” She laid her head back on the warm planks and shut her eyes again.
“You haven’t forgotten that Charlie and Elise are coming for dinner?” There was a note of resignation in his voice, as if he knew she had forgotten, as if she couldn’t but have forgotten. As if all she did was forget and not remember.
Nick stiffened, but kept her eyes closed.
“Who? Oh yes, your friends,” she said. “No, I haven’t forgotten.” She had. “I bought shrimp from the shrimp boat.”
She heard Hughes sigh into his drink.
“Well, I know you’re bored of it, but for a dollar a bucket, it’s really all we can afford until the next paycheck.” Nick got up and dusted herself off. “Especially if we’re entertaining.”
“I thought you said you missed having dinner parties,” Hughes said quietly.
He stood facing her, holding his glass. His blond hair had turned dark from the shower, and the setting sun lit him from behind. To Nick, it seemed as if his shoulders were almost squared against her, like a fighter.
“I do,” Nick said. “I mean, I did say that. Darling, it’s just that I don’t know them and you …” She broke off when she saw Hughes staring at her like she was some kind of slow child.
She felt the strange juxtaposition of emotions, so familiar now. She wanted to take his drink out of his hand and smash it into his face, grind the glass against his skin. She also wanted to beg for forgiveness, and then be forgiven, the way she had been when she was a child and her mother’s cold punishment would pass into clemency.
“Never mind,” Nick said. “I’ll go in and fix the supper. What time did you tell them?”
“Eight sharp,” Hughes said.
Nick didn’t go in and fix the supper. Instead, she stood smoking in the kitchen, letting cold air leak out of the icebox as she studied the vegetables. Cucumber salad, she decided. It would go well with seafood. She shut the door, leaning against it. She looked down at her legs, which were getting brown from her daily doses of sun. She’d had to buy the bathing suit in town, for a small fortune. She hadn’t realized the heat would still be strong in winter. On her island up north, the sun would already be a muddy, washed-out color, her bathing suit long packed in a cedar trunk to hibernate.
She heard Hughes turn off the record player and head toward the kitchen. Nick began busying herself with the shrimp, peeling and deveining the pink moons. She used to love them. Now, they ate them almost every other day.
“Why don’t you turn on the radio?” Hughes asked.
She held up her slippery hands. “You do it, I don’t want to hurt it.”
Hughes had bought her the radio the week before and Nick had a vague feeling of animosity toward it. He had taken a Saturday-afternoon drive alone and returned with a box. She didn’t ask why he drove without her on the weekends, or where he went. He would just stare at the sky through the screen door and then pick up his keys. The first time, she hadn’t even realized he was going until she heard the engine start. She walked to the
door and looked up at the cloudless expanse, the dusty drive, the road beyond, to see what in it had made her husband want to drive away. But as far as she could see, there was nothing. Only the old green Buick flatlining down the straight Florida road.
Then one day, the radio had appeared, like a spy, from wherever it was he went to get away.
“I thought you’d want to hear something other than your records,” he had said by way of explanation. “You may even be able to hear programs from London.”
“London?” she had asked, wondering why he thought that was important to her. But he was already on his way to the shower, her voice echoing in the empty kitchen.
Nick looked up from the shrimp. Hughes hadn’t switched the radio on, but he was fingering the silver knobs. He had elegant fingers with neat, square nails. Everything about him was like his hands, tailored and clean, the color of pine. Nick watched him gaze at the dials, run the tips of his fingers over the brown covering of the speaker. She wanted to eat him, he was so beautiful. She wanted to cry or melt or gnash her teeth. Instead, she peeled the skin off another shrimp.
“They look good,” Hughes said, coming up behind her and putting his hand on the small of her back.
Nick had to grip the counter with one hand to keep herself still. She smelled him, Ivory soap and bay rum, so close to her skin, but not touching it. Touching it through the fabric of the bathing suit. She wanted his hand on her neck, or her arm or between her legs.
“I’m sure it will be delicious,” he said.
She knew he was sorry he’d been nasty about the shrimp. “Oh well,” she said, suddenly feeling lighter again. “I know it’s awfully repetitive. I suppose it’s partly because I sleep so late and can’t seem to get up in time for that early market. Are you sorry you have such a lazy wife?”
“I have a lovely wife,” he said.
She was about to turn to him when he took his hand off her back. She would have caught it, pulled him to her, maybe even begged him, but he was already moving away.
Tigers in Red Weather Page 2