She took the bankbook back to the drawer, and then, on her slow and thoughtful way back toward the daybed, paused, turned, looked at me in a strange, still way. A rumble of trucks shook the room. She touched the center of her upper lip with the sharp pink tip of her tongue, nervous, speculative.
She took one slow step toward me, then came the rest of the way with a tumbling haste that seemed a product of shyness. She scrambled onto my lap, thudding with an unexpected force and heaviness against me, then quickly curling and fitting herself against me, her fingers cold at the nape of my neck, bare knees hooked over the arm of the chair, drawing small lines on the side of my throat with the edges of her teeth.
“You could help,” she whispered. “You could help Wally and me so much! You can have anything you want, if you’ll just help us.”
With her free hand, with great deftness, she caught my right hand and lifted it, turned it, cupped it strongly against a breast of astonishing abundance in comparison to all the rest of her. There was an odor of fried meat caught in her hair, mixed with some flower scent. I did not want her. Her scrambling assault had been such a surprise to me; my mind was working too slowly as I sought some kind of rejection that would not wound her pride. It was a tawdry little sacrifice, but it had meaning to her.
As I sought some gentle gambit that would end it, I found myself becoming ever more conscious of the female warmth and weight of her against me. She made an intent series of practiced little motions and adjustments, a click of snap fastenings and a slither of fabric just as her mouth — surprisingly fresh and sweet — came up to meet mine, so that in the beginning of the kiss, fabric pulled aside and the bare warm roundness of her breast seemed to burst into my hand, which no longer required the pressure of hers to hold it there. There were other tuggings and graspings and adjustings, such an agile and continuous shedding of what she wore that it left the long kiss uninterrupted.
It was in some way that defied explanation, more of an innocence than a sexuality. She was a gamine child, playing some involved game at which she excelled. There was an intentness about her, which must have paralleled the same humorless energy she had brought to her games of hopscotch and jacks too few years ago.
Sexual rationalizations and excuses are sick, sly and agonizingly strong. I had begun to tell myself that no one need ever know about this, that it was a simple and meaningless way to ease all the tensions Niki had aroused. This spindly busy animal I held did not have to have a name or an identity.
“You’ll help Wally,” she murmured, her mouth against mine.
Without breaking the kiss, she turned in a limber way, knelt astride me in the chair and murmured, “Carry me over there,” knowing of my readiness. As I ran my hands up the bare, spare, smooth lines of her back, they touched the jutting bony wings of her shoulderblades, and she was suddenly a pathetic starveling, and, in self-derision, my hungers collapsed and I knew it could not happen.
I put my hands on her narrow waist and lifted her up and out and away from me, and sat her out there on my knees, facing me. She had stripped to a pair of threadbare peach panties. She was so thin the insides of her thighs were concave. The light glowed red through the shade onto washboard ribs and the unlikely breasts, high, round and plump. A sheaf of dark hair screened one eye. She palmed it back and stared at me, alert as a bird. Here were no sultried paintings, no race of breath and heart, no tumid lollings.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” she demanded.
“This isn’t a very good idea,” I said.
“It’s been pretty popular lately.”
“I don’t want to... complicate matters, Lita.”
She gave me a lewd, angelic smile, half seen in the ruby light as she perched there, shameless as a child. “Complicate? I had the idea it was going to be real easy.” Her eyes narrowed. “You make me look real good, don’t you? You make me feel like I was some kind of tramp.”
“Hush now, Lita. Look at me. Was Wally really here that night? Tell me the truth.”
As I held her balanced there, my hands on her waist, she straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin. Slowly and solemnly she crossed herself. “I swear he was. I swear to Jesus and his Holy Mother that Wally was here with me while your brother was being shot, right here in this room, Mr. Dean, and may I burn forever in hell if I’m lying.”
In that moment we were no longer strangers. I believed her. I was certain Portugal was wrong. Somebody else had killed my brother. Not Walter Shennary. Somebody far more clever.”
“I believe you,” I told her, “and I’ll help all I can.”
Tears stood in her eyes, shiny in the red of the light. “Now,” she said in an uncertain voice, “where were we when you interrupted us?”
“Let’s skip it, Lita. It’s a gesture you don’t have to make.”
Tears spilled. “The way it was before, Mr. Dean. I was conning you. Now it’s a way to say thanks. What else do I have I could give you anyhow? And now... it’ll be more like with love, you know?”
Beauty can emerge in the most grotesque and unexpected places. Beauty is involved with dignity. With this cheap girl in this drab room, perched so ludicrously at my arm’s length, there should have been no dignity — but there was. Far more, in fact, than I had encountered with any of the random beach girls of the four lost years, even the ones who spilled Neiman-Marcus beach wear onto my rush rug and murmured their lust-talk with that precision and word choice refined during the Smith and Wellesley years, and sweetened their bodies at an outlay of forty dollars an ounce, while they co-operated with me in my futile campaign to bury all the nerve-end memories of Niki under so many layers of sensation that no sudden memory of her could bring back the pain.
Lita tilted her head with a simian shrewdness. “But you don’t wanna anyhow,” she said, and sighed, and slid back away from me and walked to a cardboard closet and took out a lavender rayon robe and put it on, and zipped it from hem to throat. I stood up, when she picked up a cigarette and went to her and held the light.
“I should get the idea I’m such a big prize bonus deal,” she said with a weary irony. “You can do better, hey?”
“It isn’t that. You see what I mean by things getting too complicated. We’ll have to work together on your problem. And mine. Let’s just stick to that.”
She looked at me with that special hostility of class antagonism. “People like you do too goddamn much thinking.”
“Lita, I like you. I like you very much. So let’s see what we can do to help Wally. I’m certain he didn’t kill my brother.”
We moved to the door. When I took the knob to open it, she stayed me by putting her hand on my wrist. She looked up at me, tiny and intense, the dark hair unkempt. In spite of the $9.98 sophistication of the robe, she looked about twelve years old.
“Either way, Mr. Dean,” she said, “I’m going to be without him. If you try and it doesn’t work, I’m without him forever. If you help him, he still does time for the supermarket thing. Either way it goes, I owe you. After it’s settled, I’ll be right here, except when I’m working or visiting him. I lived it up maybe too much before I met him. That’s over. I told him so, and I mean it. I’m going to be lonely. I know how guys figure. There’d be no claims on you. No fuss and no trouble, and I wouldn’t con you for nothing. And the way it is, I wouldn’t feel trampy. I’ll fix this place up so it’s a better place to come to. I think you’d like that. So when it’s over, anytime you want a place and a girl, with nobody pressuring you or able to find you, and nothing you have to do or say unless you feel like it, you got a permanent rain check good any time.”
I clasped her fragile shoulder and bent and kissed her lightly on the mouth. We smiled at each other. There was nothing else we had to say to each other.