End of the Tiger
Page 21
He paced and listened to her and then went up behind her as she read and fitted his hands to the deep curves of her swimsuit waist. He stuck his nose into the chestnut hair. She was tall, almost as tall as he. The contact made her voice thin. She lost her place and found it again, and read with less assurance.
He turned her around slowly and brushed the script out of her hands and stared at her. Her smile remained wide and fixed and rubbery, while her eyes tried to run, darting little glances around him and beyond him and across him. She put her hands, awkward and butterfly-light, on his shoulders, and he knew she was scared weak but steeling herself to acceptance.
Scared. Suddenly he found it very touching. All this bounteous and terrified flesh, and this terrible anxiety to please.
The two of us, he thought. And some of his little houses came tumbling down. What if you said it, just once?
“Pussycat, look at me. Listen to me. I want to say something. Pussycat, every goddam minute of every goddam day, unless I’m stoned out of my mind, I’m scared. Believe me, baby. I am scared!”
To his consternation, his voice broke and his throat thickened and his eyes began to sting. He looked at her smooth young uncomprehending face, and before his first sob could erupt from him, he yanked her into his arms. He bawled and snuffled into the sweet and pungent hollow of her neck and shoulder, holding her rigid and alarmed body, and suddenly he knew he could not give this much away to anyone. So he caught at it quickly, and with the skill and force of all the years, he twisted it into the crying bit, the thing he had started way back in the Johnny Ray days, the regression bit that ends with that uncanny and perfect imitations of the mewlings of a newborn child. When he had control of it, he released her and went into it, watching for her reaction. She was dazed and puzzled and then she began the laughter the clown must always have. He adjusted his act to her laughter and brought her along into helplessness, gasping, doubling, laughing until she cried. Then he ended it and held her in his arms again, feeling the little spasms of her hilarity in her big young body. He gave her a hearty and vulgar and painful tweak, and she leaped and hugged him strongly, and then, with her half laughing, half crying in his arms, he began to lead her over to the huge gaudy bed.
“Oh, you funny man,” she gasped. “You funny funny man!”
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.