The shyness of translating last night’s intimacy to broad daylight made him approach her with a most curious gait, partially a humble shamble, partially a self-conscious strut.
She took his hands, turned her face upwards, eyes half closed, soft mouth demanding the kiss. He bent hastily and clumsily, got his nose in the way, managed to kiss the corner of her mouth and, in sitting back on the chaise lost his balance, squashed his weight down onto her knees, shifted off them, apologized hoarsely, sat there blushing sweatily and intensely. She noted the way he was dressed, and guessed it had been the result of anguished decisions. He wore sand-colored skinny stretch jeans, and a dark blue sports shirt with the sharp creases of brand-newness still in it, buttoned down the front with small brass buttons. He seemed able to look everywhere except at her.
“Olly, my darling, I have been sitting here waiting for you and trying to believe that what happened really happened. It all seems so fantastic and incredible. It was so—completely unplanned. When you woke up did it seem as unreal to you?”
“Yes. I guess it seemed that way to me too.”
“What is happening to us?”
“It—sort of just happened.”
She gave a sharp tug at his hands. “What’s the matter? Can’t you look at me? Can’t you say my name? Can’t you tell me how you feel?”
She saw him force himself to look into her eyes. His deep tan was suffused with the pink tinge of his blush. With his somewhat indistinct chin, and with those eyes set a little too closely, he looked at her fixedly with an expression of such wondrously enthralled goofiness, she came dangerously close to laughter. His adam’s apple slid up and down his throat as he swallowed. In a huskied and very uncertain voice he said, “I—love you, Crissy. I love you.”
It was what she wanted to hear him say, and it had come sooner than she had expected.
She leaned, lifted his right hand to her lips, kissed the heavy knuckles one by one, feeling him tremble. “I don’t know whether I love you, Olly. Love is a very precious thing. It is a lot more rare than people think. But when you find it, and it’s for real, it is worth the most terrible sacrifices. I don’t know if—if we’re strong enough.”
“Strong enough?” he asked, puzzled.
“If you think I’m going to keep us some kind of a state secret, dear, if I decide I do truly love you, then you are making a mistake about me. I am going to be proud of us. People are going to know about us. And they are going to say very cruel things. Are you strong enough for that? And for the pressure your family will put on you? We have to be so terribly sure, Oliver. After all, I’m twenty-eight years old, and I’ve been married. And widowed.”
“I’ll be twenty in July.”
“The world will say wicked things about us. And a lot of people will even laugh at us. That’s why we have to be so sure.”
She could sense that it alarmed him. Poor bunny. So many things to alarm him and fascinate him all of a sudden. In empathy her memory went all the way back to Phil Kerna, and the strangely dazed, swooning, hypnotic feeling she’d had after that first time with him, when after that night and day and following night in the Reno motel he had left her there alone and gone back to the poker table. Having been married to Johnny for a year had left her as innocent as a child in comparison with what Phil had been able to make her experience. Now it would be just the same with Olly Akard, who had come to her with only the experience of a couple of years of furtive intimacy with his little steady girl, Betty, had come to her with that curious conviction of the male of limited experience that his role was that of sole aggressor, full of determined anxiety to perform properly just as it was written in the books, and with the pitiful belief that the one small pleasure he had always achieved was all his body was capable of.
She knew how deeply he had been confused and frightened, first by her, and finally by the unexpected and wild and savage intensity of his own guided response. Curious guilts and shynesses made him feel very awkward to be with her in daylight, knowing she too remembered all the tumbled deliriums and grotesqueries of the unending night.
Though she knew she had brought him far enough for there to be little danger of his being frightened away now, she laughed softly and fondly, hitched herself closer to him, put one hand on his powerful shoulder, laid her right hand against his cheek and with her thumb stroked the furry sheen of his eyebrow.
“But no need to look so scared already, dear little bunny rabbit boy,” she said. “I won’t want to parade you on display until I am absolutely certain. And meanwhile we will be dreadful sneaky sneaks. Like the page sneaking into the quarters of the sexy old queen. My little maid is discreet. And this home of mine was designed to frustrate nosey people.”
He said with overly casual and clumsy curiosity, “I—I suppose that’s the way the Senator wanted it.”
She looked at him in blank astonishment. “I beg your pardon?”
“I mean—well, I guess he wouldn’t want people to know he was …”
She narrowed her eyes and firmed her lips. Then she got up quickly and strode away, whirled and pointed a finger at him. “See? See what they do? So that’s what they made of it, eh? My God! Really! And you had to find out if those dirty little fibs were true, didn’t you?” She moved closer. “I built this house to suit me! I built it with money from my husband’s estate. Ferris Fontaine was an old and dear friend. When he asked if he could use my home for little political meetings now and then, I was glad to say yes. I was honored! That’s the reward for friendship. My God, it’s really pathetic! What foul little minds people must have to really believe I was dear Fer’s mistress. A man so old! How could you believe it, Olly?”
“I didn’t,” he said earnestly. “Not really. Before I ever even met you, I didn’t believe it.”
She sat by him, smiled, patted his knee. “Thank you, dear. Let’s change the subject. It makes me angry. Are your people curious about why you got home so terribly late?”
“I coasted the last half block and into the driveway with the lights and motor off.”
“That was very clever, dear.”
“Nobody said anything about it today.”
After a silence she leaned her forehead against his shoulder and said in a small voice, “Do you know what you do when something keeps on seeming so unreal? You find out just as soon as you can if it was really real.”
She walked her fingers up his broad hard chest and, starting at the throat, undid the first three brass buttons.
“Right n-now?” he asked hoarsely.
She straightened and looked at him. He had gone pale enough to make his tan look odd. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
“My darling, we’ll try to get along without any rules at all, but there should be one rule. Whenever we want each other as desperately as we do right now, we’ll never let anything stand in the way. Be a dear and go pull those draperies. The cords are over at the right.”
She turned her head and looked at the clock radio near the bed and saw that it was three thirty in the afternoon. She rolled her head back on the pillow and saw that the boy would soon be fast asleep. She bit her lip and debated changing the schedule she had planned for him. He was adapting more swiftly than she had estimated.
Funny, she thought, how often Phil Kerna kept coming back into her mind. All tenderness and cajolerie and sweet words until he had slipped the collar around your neck so deftly you hardly noticed it. Then he could risk the flat hateful stare, give the harsh commands, knowing a humble obedience was your only choice.
“Oliver!”
“Uh?” he said, and opened his eyes, focused on the face so close to his.
She hitched herself up, resting her weight on her elbows so she could look down into his eyes in the half light of the draperied bedroom. She studied him with a flat, bright, questing stare, unsmiling, until he asked her if something was wrong.
“I was wondering about something, Oliver.”
“Wondering what?”
<
br /> “Perhaps I was wondering if you think this is some sort of a game. A little diversion.”
His eyes widened. “Honest, Crissy, I …”
“You must understand that I am a very intense person, darling. As soon as I’m certain that you mean as much to me as—I think you mean right now, there aren’t going to be any half measures for me. For me it is going to be a hundred and ten percent. Or nothing at all.”
“But …”
“Let me tell you the whole thing, dear. I told you we would be dreadful sneaks until I am sure. And that gives you an opportunity to have your cake and eat it too, you know. I was wondering if that is the kind of man you are.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Have you forgotten the long talk we had in the middle of the night? I guess you could call it the confession hour. As I understand it, if you weren’t lying, I’m the second woman in your life, and Betty was the first. Did I say ‘was’? Excuse me. We’re keeping us a secret from the world, for a little while. And from Betty. That gives you quite an interesting life, doesn’t it? Two women saying yes to you. Does it give you a sense of power, Oliver?”
“Crissy, believe me, that wasn’t anything like …”
“Correct me if I read you wrong, dear. You said that you and your dear little Betty have been going steady for three years, and two years ago you—ah—slipped. Wasn’t that the word you used? And you vowed, both of you, it would never happen again, but it did. And you finally, after you’d slipped enough times, decided that as you were to be married eventually anyway, you might as well enjoy each other.”
“But it isn’t …”
“Perhaps I’m jealous, darling. Do you mind terribly? When you aren’t here with me, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t be lifting her little skirts. She’s probably very attractive. And quite a lot younger than I am.”
“It was just kid stuff. I know that now, Crissy. It didn’t mean anything.”
“And you’ll never touch her again?”
“Never. Honest. I swear I won’t.”
“Thank you, dear. But I do think you should put temptation out of your path.”
“What do you mean?”
“Break it up, dear. End it. I don’t care how you manage it, but I think it should be all over within—three days. If you are going to get a hundred and ten percent of me, I demand a hundred and ten percent of you. I don’t share, dear. I don’t believe in sharing. You might be tempted to—find out if she is just the way you remember.”
“That’s—awful fast. What will I say to her?”
“My God, haven’t you two ever quarreled at all? Don’t you know by now what she gets mad at? Get into a brawl with her and walk out. Or just tell her very coldly you’ve out-grown her. There must be dozens of ways.”
“It’s going to hit her pretty hard.”
She thought, picked her words carefully. “I love your gentleness, and your kindness. But I want my man to be strong. If I can’t ask you to do such a small thing as that, how do you think it makes me feel? Secure? Loved? Perhaps—you’re not really ready for the big leagues, dear, where the grown-ups are. Maybe you’d be better off with your little Betty person after all.”
“No! Listen. I’ll do it. I just said it’s going to be hard on her. She thinks we’re—you know. All set. There—there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”
She lowered herself, dug her face into his throat, sighed comfortably and said, “We have to be strong, dear. Both of us. Strong and selfish. We have to remember that there isn’t anybody or anything else in the world that means a damn, not really. We’re all that counts. You and I. Oliver and Cristen. Hold me, darling.”
Soon, in an automatic and almost absent-minded way she began the little trickeries of arousing him, thinking as she did so that he would get rid of Betty just as he had promised. It was the first small test of how strong his infatuation was becoming. It was astonishing how compulsive the flesh could become when it was their first affair with a mature woman, rich, ripe and skilled, and so startlingly without shame or reserve, so unexpectedly frank in the giving and taking of pleasure, so impatient when her cues were misunderstood or overlooked. Then, as their clumsiness and timidity diminished, they were made ever more blind by sensation until, finally, it was such a necessary thing for them to keep experiencing, they would sacrifice everything else in the world to sustain it, and, finally, would reach that stage wherein all of life outside the bedroom walls was a vagueness, a dream-walking hallucination, a place of those shifting shadows which had once been real people, real objects, real goals and ambitions.
The practices demanded only a portion of her attention, and her thoughts ranged far as she pleasured the boy. There was one daydream that was becoming more real to her each time she experienced it. It happened a long time from now. It happened after everything had gone just as she had planned it, and after she was safe, and far away. There would be the years of heats and wanting, and at long last that too would be all burned away, and peace would come to her.
It will be a faraway place, she thought, a house above a lagoon, and I shall be old. I shall be wise. I will have young servants, brown and beautiful and smiling people who love me. There will be legends about me, none of them true. When the fires are burned out, then what is left will be goodness and kindness, and I will be able to forgive them all.…
The boy slid into the heaviness of spent sleep, and she got up and freshened herself, went back and set her alarm for six thirty and was soon napping comfortably beside him.
Nine
BY NOON OF THAT SAME FRIDAY, Samuel Boylston had been in Nassau forty-eight hours. He had not been able to get away as quickly as planned, hoping each hour would bring word of the fate of the Muñeca, and had arrived Wednesday noon by Pan Am from Miami.
Before he left he had received a wire from Jonathan Dye saying that he was staying at something called the Harbour Central House on Victoria Avenue. Sam had arranged to have a rental car reserved for him and waiting at the airport. It was a small Triumph sedan, weakly air conditioned. The rental clerk gave him a Nassau map and he studied it for a little while before driving off. He had been in Nassau at other times for both business and pleasure, and it did not take long for him to refresh his memory of the layout of streets, and it took no longer than the trip from Windsor Field to the city for him to adjust his alarm system to driving on the wrong side of the street.
He found the Harbour Central House two blocks up the hill above Bay Street and parked in front just as Jonathan came with long loose lanky strides up from Bay Street. He was a big knuckly young man with coarse black hair and that variety of tough, underprivileged-looking skin which remains pale despite all exposure. He had a calm dignity which Sam interpreted as an infuriating kind of self-approval.
Sam got out for the awkward measure of the handshake and said, “Any word yet?”
“No sir. It’s sort of—slacking off.”
“How?”
“There’s only about so much area to cover. I can show you on the chart I’ve got, sir. It’s not they’re not anxious to do everything. There’s the Aircraft Crash and Rescue people, a lot of them volunteers. And the commercial aircraft people. And the Marine Operator telling all the pleasure boats to be on the lookout. The people at the Ministry of Maritime Affairs have been wonderful. But the weather has been perfect, and they know exactly when the Muñeca left Nassau last Friday morning, just 5 days ago today, heading for Little Harbour in the Berry Islands. They didn’t take off until maybe ten thirty in the morning, and Mr. Kayd didn’t call in at nine on Saturday morning. They cruised at sixteen miles an hour and usually got where they were going before dark. So the search area wouldn’t be more than a hundred and twenty or thirty miles across. But they’ve covered three times that much area, sir. The wind has been out of the east and the northeast just about every day, and they’ve allowed for drift. They haven’t said it to me, and they won’t say it to you, but you get the feeling�
��they think that somehow it sunk in deep water. They’re going through some motions still, but …”
Sam saw the pure misery in the boy’s eyes as he turned away and stared down the slope of the street toward the harbor.
“What kind of a place is this where you’re staying?”
“Simple. Clean enough. Sixteen shillings.”
“You could get your gear and come along with me as my guest. I’ve got a reservation at the Nassau Harbour Club.”
“I guess I’d just as soon stay right here, sir.”
“Then get that chart of yours and ride on out with me while I register. We’ll talk some more and I’ll bring you back.”
The room they gave him was on the second floor with a small balcony overlooking that part of the harbor. Sailboats with blue sails were racing around a marked course in a windy chop.
From the side windows there was a view of the free-form swimming pool below, of tidy tanned girls swimming, of waiters bringing drinks to round metal tables. At the long docks with their finger piers were the pleasure boats, clean and colorful, bright work winking in sunlight, moving and lifting against the mooring lines to the push of wind, tide and chop.
Jonathan spread the chart out on one of the twin beds. There were patterns marked on it in different colors of crayon.
Jonathan said, “One of the Aircraft Crash and Rescue people marked it up to explain how a search pattern works. This is a square pattern here. It’s a spiral with square corners. They know how far they can see from the altitude they fly at, and on each leg they overlap about a third of the area they could see the last time past. When they go down to check something, they use loran to get back to the point where they broke off from the pattern. Anything they see floating, they check it to make sure it isn’t debris from the Muñeca.”
“How would they explain two seaworthy boats disappearing with no trace at all?”
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