Then, when the sun sliced through the place where the drapes hadn’t been closed all the way, I roused, aroused, drowsily rolled over and up against something or somebody and suddenly more or less realized a beautiful woman was in bed with me. Half asleep, not knowing who this woman was exactly, not remembering who I was exactly, I began cuddling, bumping, generally making trouble, and the beautiful woman responded, seeming pleasantly surprised to find a man in her bed, and, tangled in blankets and sheets, the musky smell of slumber on us both, we made love in that sweet, spontaneous, half-asleep, am-I-dreaming, quite wonderful way, and fell back asleep again, in each other’s arms this time.
But we were up and about by nine-thirty, despite the late night before, and found a breakfast buffet and (taking Charlie Stone up on yet another offer of kindness) signed for our food, so that it would be attached to a bill we weren’t being asked to pay.
We’d spent the rest of the morning around the pool; we’d both been in swimming, but mostly she sunned, I swam and (I suspect) we both stewed.
Because we hadn’t yet mentioned Ginnie Mullens, or Charlie Stone’s disclosures about her.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well what?” she replied, barely moving her lips.
“Have you ever been married?”
She took the sunglasses off, turned her head, looked right at me. The cornflower blue eyes in that dark face were a continual surprise. She shook her head ever so slightly, lovely face expressionless, and said, “No.”
Then, just another shrewd Vegas gambler waiting for the other guy to make his mistake, she left the sunglasses off, looked at me; smiled a tiny, tiny smile, daring my response.
Which was, “Why not?”
“Because you broke my heart when I was a child.” She said this straight-faced, with just a hint of humor.
“Oh, I did, did I?”
“You most certainly did.”
“So, then, you probably never ever lived with anybody, either?”
Smiling more openly, she turned her head skyward, putting the sunglasses back on.
“Sure I did,” she said. “Several times, over the years.”
“This, after I broke your heart?”
Now her smile was wicked. “I’m a fast healer.”
“Why didn’t you marry any of the guys?”
The smile faded. “It just wasn’t... right.”
“As in ‘Mr. Right’?”
She looked over at me; my reflection was in her sunglasses — my hair was wet from swimming, I noticed. “If,” she said, “you’re implying I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Mallory, lo these many years, then your ego is even sicker than I think it is.”
I didn’t want to banter anymore; the tone of what I said next established that.
“Look,” I said. “We’re both the same age... well, I’m a little older. And I just wondered if...” I tried to think of a way to say this without insulting her; the best way seemed to be to leave her out of it, and stick to me. “... I wonder sometimes if life isn’t slipping through my fingers. I’m at, or nearing, the probable halfway point of my life... assuming a truck or, as we say in Las Vegas, the ‘big casino’ or something doesn’t knock me down first. And what do I have to show for my years on this planet?”
“You’ve written books,” she offered.
“I’ve accomplished some things, I’ll grant you. But I’ve been selfish. I spent my youth bumming around, doing this, doing that, building experience as a pool from which to write my stories. Fine — now I’m writing them and getting paid for the privilege, I’ve come up in the world, I have a house, a car, and the mortgage and payments that go with it. I’ve arrived. But where am I?”
“In the midst of the American dream, I’d say.”
“Yeah, and sometimes I wish I could wake up. I’m like so many of my generation — all of us baby boomers, us selfish brats who were going to change the world and didn’t. Haven’t I ended up with the same values, the same materialistic trappings as my parents? Do you ever feel that way? Has that ever occurred to you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“But our parents had something we don’t, you and I. They had each other. They had a family. Have you ever had a child, Jill?”
She could’ve taken offense, but she didn’t. “No,” she said.
“Our generation put that off, you know. Women are waiting till they’re in their late thirties now before having a kid, if at all. Careers. Self. That’s us. But where’s next year’s model going to come from, Jill?”
“Are you... asking me to...?”
“No. I’m not asking you to marry me, not yet anyway. I’m not even suggesting we live together. Not yet. But I want to go on record: if we’re going to build some kind of... relationship — and Christ how I hate that word — I want it to be for real. I can’t handle any more one-night stands, and if I ever find myself in a singles bar again I may climb a tower with a rifle and start shooting.”
She was sitting on the edge of the lounge chair now. “What brought this on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do,” she said wisely. “And so do I.”
“Ginnie, I guess,” I admitted reluctantly.
“Ginnie. Talented, brilliant, funny, pretty Ginnie. Gone. A life wasted.”
“It wasn’t a waste,” I said. “There were good things in her life. And she left a sweet little child behind her, and that’s something anyway.”
Jill looked toward the shallow end of the pool where an attractive blonde mommy ten years younger than either of us romped with her three-year-old. “I’ve felt these things you’re feeling, Mal. Maybe I’ve felt them more sharply than you. You don’t have a biological clock ticking away in your tummy, do you? I’m thirty-three and if I want to have any children, maybe I better get cracking.”
“Do you want to have children?”
“For a long, long time, I didn’t think I did. These last couple years... I’m not so sure.” She looked at me, studying me, then bent down and gave me a kiss; not a sexy kiss, but a very affectionate one. “Let’s not be a one-night stand, Mal. Or a two-night or anything less than giving ourselves a real chance.”
“Agreed.”
We shook hands.
My watch was on a towel on the other side of her; I asked her to check the time.
“Half-past noon,” she said.
“We don’t have to leave for the airport till four. Plenty of time to do some things. We could do some sight-seeing, some shopping...”
“How about a few hours in our hotel room?” The wicked smile again.
“I could be talked into that,” I said, my smile a little on the wicked side itself.
“Unless you’d rather gamble...”
“Coming here was all the gamble I care to take.”
“It paid off, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” I granted, “but I can’t make sense out of what I’ve learned; not yet, anyway.”
“You’re thinking that Ginnie is starting to look like a real suicide.”
I rubbed some sweat off my forehead; sighed. “She sure seems to’ve been at the end of her string. Her personal relationships were a shambles. ETC.’s had been pulled out from under her. You know, I asked her at the reunion how business was, and she said ‘good’ — but that was after the ETC.’s sale. Her only business at that point was dope. She was really at a dead end... the only thing she still had going for her was playing mule for Sturms — and there could hardly have been much satisfaction in that for someone of Ginnie’s abilities and ambitions.”