Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  Then the skies will seem more blue,

  Down in Lovers’ Lane, my dearie …”

  “Come on, Freddy, sing!” Jock urged her. “You never stopped before until you’d given us this one.” Some of the men of the Eagle Squadron had clambered up on the stage and she felt their arms around her waist as they swayed from side to side, roaring out the words.

  “Wedding bells will ring so merrily,

  Every tear will be a memory,

  So wait and pray each night for me,

  Till we meet again.”

  They started singing the song over again from the beginning, and Freddy, unable to prevent them, felt the tears rolling down her face. Oh no! I can’t take any more, she thought, and nimbly she slid out of the arms that held her, hopped down to the dance floor, wove her way rapidly through the crowd of singing pilots and their wives, and fled out of the ballroom and down the wide hallway, carpeted in wine and gold, to Wilshire Boulevard, to hail a taxi.

  “Wait up! You forgot your jacket!” Jock skidded to an abrupt halt behind her, and put the fur around her shoulders. He took out his handkerchief and swabbed inexpertly at the tears on her cheeks. “Christ—I’m sorry you’re upset … I just didn’t think.”

  “Well, you certainly thought of everything else,” she accused him. “Those old songs … where’d you dig up that music?”

  “Come on, Freddy, you were fucking sublime! Aren’t you glad I got you to sing?”

  “I have to admit … it wasn’t as awful … as I’d expected. I didn’t even know I remembered all those words,” she said, forgiving him with her glance.

  The doorman brought Jock’s Cadillac convertible around, and he drove her back to her house in silence, echoes of immortal tunes filling the car so loudly that there was no room for words. It was so late that there was no traffic, and he drove, depending entirely on bone-deep reflexes, with a pilot’s usual speed and disdain for rules and regulations, in spite of all he’d had to drink. He parked in the driveway of Freddy’s house, with a wide-flung swish of gravel.

  “So, the reunion’s over. Guess we won’t do that for another ten years,” Jock muttered. He sounded so regretful, she thought, more regretful than the occasion deserved.

  “Maybe you should never do it again,” Freddy suggested. “Maybe there should just be this one night and then … let it go …”

  “But then I’d never hear you sing again … and I’d miss the hell out of that, Freddy, you were just the way you used to be …”

  “Nothing stays the same, Jock, everything changes, and not always for the better,” Freddy said, with a note of finality in her voice, gathering up her bag and gloves and preparing to step out of the car.

  “No. Wait. Stay here for another minute, can’t we just talk? We never just talk, except about business …”

  “Just talk?” Freddy was puzzled.

  “Yeah, about—oh, anything—the way people might talk when they’ve known each other for ten years but don’t really know each other all that well and—maybe they should.”

  “Should we?” Now she was frankly amused. In all the years she’d known him, she’d never seen Jock affected by liquor, and certainly he’d never struck up an aimless conversation between the two of them. “Haven’t you had a little too much to drink, Squadron Leader?”

  “Damn right I have. I’m smashed. In vino veritas, whatever the fuck that means.”

  “Don’t you think you should go home and sleep it off? We can talk another time,” she said, repressing her laughter. He seemed so serious, not like Jock at all.

  “My God, Freddy,” he cried indignantly, “you don’t even know the first thing about me, do you? You don’t even want to know.”

  “Jock,” she chided him, as entertained as if he were Annie’s age and making one of Annie’s elaborately exaggerated statements. “You were Tony’s closest friend, the Longbridges consider you a family member, we’ve been business partners for five years, you’re Annie’s godfather, you were even the best man at my wedding, for heaven’s sake—of course I know you.”

  “The hell you do. To you I’ve always been a member of a group—you just proved that. Don’t you think I have an existence of my own, a life—a whole damn life of hopes and dreams and feelings that doesn’t have anything to do with the Longbridge family or Eagles?” Smashed or not, Freddy thought, she heard an unmistakably honest outrage in his unexpected words that silenced her. And there was truth in what he’d said. He turned to her, and the outline of his head and shoulders suddenly seemed unfamiliar.

  “Jock …” She put out her hand as if to touch his arm in tentative apology. He saw her gesture and, with a groan, reached out and pulled her toward him. “Damn it, Freddy, has it ever for one second occurred to you that I’m so much in love with you I can’t take it anymore?”

  “Jock.” Astonished, disbelieving, laughing at his absurdity, she pushed him away. “Come on! It’s the liquor talking—that and tonight, the old friends, the music, the memories, the … glory days … not love. Look at all the ladies in your life.” Freddy’s voice grew droll, just thinking of them. “How can you even be sure that you’ve ever been in love?”

  “God damn it to hell, will you listen to me! And stop snickering in that repulsively superior way. I had the bad luck to fall in love once in my life—in a church in England, five seconds after you went and got married, when you pushed back your wedding veil and I saw your face. Stupid bastard that I am, I fell in love for keeps and I’ve spent the years in between trying to get out of it—trying to make it go away, disappear, change, fade—but, just my luck, it won’t. I don’t want to be in love with you! Do you think it’s fun to be in love with someone who treats you like wallpaper—funny wallpaper at that—someone who thinks of you as something that came along with the wedding presents?”

  “But … but …” Freddy floundered. She’d never heard Jock talk with this kind of blundering, unstoppable intensity, all his cool, tough-guy attitudes abandoned.

  “Don’t ‘but’ me, I know all that shit by heart. I got there too late in your life, you were taken, your love’s been elsewhere, I’m just a pal, I’m part of your history and nobody can rewrite history, it’s too late to think of me this way—spare me the no hearts and no flowers, and no thanks—there isn’t a single ‘but’ you can pull out that I haven’t thought of a thousand times. But listen, Freddy, listen to me, I know what’s over is over, but we can rewrite the future. Do you know how many times I’ve rewritten the past—what if we had really met when we should have met? No, don’t try to stop me. Sure, I’m a little plastered—that’s how I finally dug up enough courage to tell you this, you’ve got to listen! Oh, Freddy, what if we’d gone to high school together, or college, it could so easily have happened that way, we grew up only a hundred miles apart, we were born in the same year, the same month, for Pete’s sake! I would have taken one look at you and asked you to go with me to the class prom and we would have talked about nothing but planes and forgotten to dance, and by the time I took you home, you would have known that I was meant for you. Maybe you would even have let me kiss you good night. We would never have looked at anyone else again for the rest of our lives. We just missed each other by inches, Freddy! Damn it, can’t you even imagine how happy we would have been?”

  “I suppose … it wouldn’t have been … utterly impossible … if you believe in time travel,” she admitted, unable to quite put her finger on a flaw in his reasoning. Her mind wasn’t working as logically as usual.

  “I was just about to ask you something real stupid,” Jock said, his eager heart seesawing as he heard the first unaccustomed note of conjecture in her voice.

  “Ask me what?”

  “Only a jerk ever asks a girl’s permission,” he said. “Don’t you remember that from school?” He slid toward her and took her in his arms, and before she had a chance to protest, he kissed her on the lips, respectfully, tenderly, sweetly, but with the unmistakable dignity of a man who knows that his
kiss will not be entirely unwelcome.

  “Stop it,” Freddy squeaked in surprise. It had been so long since she’d been kissed that she stiffened in alarm.

  “Put your arms around me, Freddy,” he said. “Go on, just try it, if you don’t like it, I’ll stop.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Jock Hampton?”

  “Kissing. That’s all, just kissing,” he said, and kissed her again.

  “You said you wanted to talk,” she protested wildly, utterly unnerved by the warmth and completeness of his lips and the inadmissible beginnings of a delicious comfort that came from the strong, sure hug of his arms around her. He was so big, he smelled so good, like roasting chestnuts, his arms were so safe. Who could have guessed he’d have such lovely lips?

  “Later. Kiss me back, Freddy, darling Freddy, please try to kiss me back when I kiss you. Yeah, that’s better, much better, don’t be bashful, you’re so beautiful, I love you, I’ve always loved you, you don’t have to love me right away but please let me try to make you love me, promise me you will, it’s been so long, and I’ve been so lonely for you—I’ve been lonely for you all my life—I’ve wondered forever what it would feel like to kiss you but I never thought it would be this good.” He buried his face in her hair and both of their confounded hearts reeled as they clutched each other for balance in a world that had suddenly slipped its moorings with no more reason than the touch of lips upon lips.

  Jock took Freddy’s face in his hands and kissed her, with slow, exploratory kisses along the edge of her hairline, down the side of her hot cheek to the lower corner of her ear, and then, tilting her head upward, he started to kiss the delicate skin of her neck, pushing aside the fur collar that still wrapped her closely. Freddy made herself draw back, although she was quivering with pleasure at the delicacy and lightness of his questing mouth, although she wanted to sink into the marvelous security she felt in his arms. She tried unsuccessfully to search out his eyes in the dimness of the car.

  “Jock, wait! You’re going so fast, I don’t know how I feel, back up, give me a chance to sort it out, pretend it’s after the school prom, go slowly, Jock.” Freddy’s damaged self-confidence, wounded and sore, warned her that she was too vulnerable, too needy, that she must cling to whatever reality she had fashioned in long, self-questioning nights and not be carried along by the confusion of unexpected feelings his words and kisses had released in her.

  He let her go, and drew her head down on his chest, against his uniform. With one arm he held her lightly and with the other he smoothed her hair as if she were a child. “It’s after the school prom, Freddy, and all I want is to hold you here next to me for a long, long time. I can’t believe my luck. I can’t believe that there’s a beautiful, redheaded, blue-eyed girl who wants to fly as much as I do. I’m wondering if there’s a chance that one day we’ll go flyin’ together. That’s about as far as my imagination will let me go, because I’m only sixteen.” He laughed joyously. “I’m much too young to think that I could ever dream of doing anything else with a girl as perfect as you.”

  Freddy relaxed against him, feeling a willingness to let him talk on and on as if every word were a tiny assurance that she still had her whole unblemished life in front of her, as if enough of his words could be added together and they would somehow make it true. Jock was so beautifully, unexpectedly sweet, she thought dreamily, so earnest in his clumsy way, as straightforward as a little boy. She’d thought he looked like a chivalrous Viking when shed first laid eyes on him … perhaps she hadn’t been wrong. There was such naked longing in his voice—if he’d loved her forever, it would explain why he’d always seemed a little angry at her—anger that would have armored him against showing his love. If he’d loved her. Suddenly every doubt vanished. She recognized the voice of love when she heard it again after so many years without it. Freddy reached up and twined her arms around Jock’s strong neck, lifting herself up so that she could press her willing lips on his, giving him the first kiss he hadn’t taken on his own, an impetuous, wholehearted, passionate kiss in which, for the first time, she held nothing back.

  “Jesus!” Jock gasped. “How could any man be fool enough to leave you? I told Tony he was out of his mind! Every time I saw him with that girl, I warned him he was nuts—thank God he didn’t listen to me.”

  Freddy felt as if he’d jammed a fistful of pointed pins into her eyes. “You … saw Tony with her—you told him!” Her arms fell rigid to her sides.

  “Well … you know … guys, friends, naturally they—uh—communicate.”

  “My God, the two of you sat around and talked about me!” Freddy choked with horror. “You conspired with him—you went out and sat around with my husband and his mistress, and when you were having your sniggering little heart-to-heart chats, no doubt he confided in you, didn’t he, all the ugly, sad, private details of what was going on between us—you knew everything all along and I never dreamed—never dreamed—” Violently she wrenched open the door of the car. Before Jock could move, Freddy had scrambled out of the front seat, run up the pathway, unlocked her front door, vanished inside and slammed the door behind her with a sound whose finality he could not doubt.

  During the few hours that were left of that night, Freddy sat, sunk in an easy chair in her bedroom, locked into a circle of fury and hatred. At one point she grew cold enough to get up to strip off her dress and put on a warm robe and socks, but otherwise she didn’t move from the chair except to run into the bathroom and vomit until there was nothing left in her stomach but bile.

  Obsessively she repeated every word of the conversation with Jock in his car. A target of opportunity, that’s what he’d taken her for, she told herself over and over again. A disabled plane, out of ammunition, separated from its companions, left behind to straggle back alone over enemy territory, the pilot praying only to get home before he was spotted and shot down—a helpless, pathetic, defenseless target of opportunity, the kind of kill that even the greenest pilot wouldn’t boast about, a target that a boy on the ground with a rifle could shoot at and hope to hit. Nothing better. Nothing finer. Nothing easier.

  How could she have allowed herself to believe him for even a few minutes? Freddy raged at herself in such impotent humiliation that she welcomed the bouts of nausea as a relief. She couldn’t even fool herself. She had believed him. She had actually believed him when he told her that crap about loving her and she had, oh God, how often could a woman be as pig-stupid, she had liked it. Oh yes, she had liked it so very, very much that she would never stop hating herself for those minutes. Yet she knew Jock Hampton, that foul-mouthed bastard, she knew the kind of women he went for, she’d seen enough of them come and go, right back from the first days of her marriage to Tony. British Brendas and American Brendas, they’d all been the same girl, but one minute of sweet talk—drunken sweet talk, at that—and she was ready to fall for his line.

  She must be so desperate that it was branded on her forehead. “Please, mister, throw me a mercy fuck”—that was what a man must see when he looked at her. Even a hug was enough to make her melt. Just one lousy hug. He was the only person in the world, except Tony, who knew that she hadn’t been made love to in far longer than a year. He knew how vulnerable she was, and he had taken advantage of it the first minute he could.

  Or—wait a minute—was Jock the only one who knew? Had Tony told Swede? Had he told anyone else? Maybe everyone knew! Maybe it was common gossip, Tony Longbridge and his mistress, Tony who’d dumped her, Tony who’d wanted out so badly that he couldn’t stand to touch poor old Freddy.

  Nobody had said a single word to her about Tony tonight. There she was, all dressed up like an idiot, parading her wings, no less, and miracle of miracles, everyone had had the supreme tact not even to look the least bit curious or embarrassed. Yet they must all know about the divorce, she didn’t kid herself that in a small world like that of the Eagle Squadron, such news wouldn’t have spread quickly, particularly since they all had had so
much publicity. Obviously everyone—certainly every man—must have been sure that she was Jock’s girl. Otherwise there would have had to be some sort of recognition—a gesture, a word of sympathy—something. Tony had gone back to England right after they’d signed the divorce papers … it would have been only natural if even one person had said something, but nobody had. Jock’s girl. Oh God, they all thought she’d fallen right into Jock’s bed … a bed that would still be warm from the last girl who’d been in it. Easy pickings.

  When would it be dawn? When? Even in California, in winter the dawn came late. Before the sun rose, Freddy was dressed in her warmest flying clothes, leaving a note for Helga and Annie in the kitchen, and as it rose she was at Burbank, pulling her Bonanza out of the hangar. She had rarely flown it since the day she’d shown Tony the house. It was the top of the line, the plane she had thought that they would all go out in, she and Annie and Tony … the family plane that had never had a family in it.

  During the last year Freddy had made several attempts to gentle her heart out of the whiplash of misery her divorce had aroused, by taking the Bonanza up for an afternoon’s spin, but, disappointingly, she hadn’t been able to recapture the bliss of flight that healed More and more often she’d found temporary forgetfulness only in burying herself in work at the Eagles office, where her loneliness was peopled with fellow workers and a constant stream of problems that needed solving. She’d needed the sound of human voices, the contact with secretaries and accountants and marketing managers and all the other human beings she dealt with in the course of a day, to balance the roiling solitude of her evenings after Annie was asleep.

  But this winter morning there could be no question of going to the office, of risking an encounter with Jock or Swede. Jock had robbed her of Eagles too, she thought, as she started to check out the plane. She’d sell her stock and get out of the air cargo business. She couldn’t remain in a partnership with him. It was unthinkable. But she’d deal with ways and means to put Eagles behind her later, when she came back from her flight, for if ever there had been a time, since she’d returned to California from England, when she had to drink the solace of sky, it was today.