“You’re a funny guy, Gid… Excuse me!” Treading water, she bicycled up and down. I had a glimpse of bronzed skin and yellow suit and something flashing white. What was inside the halter had won the battle on our long swim. Karen rose up and I saw what there was to see and then she plunged under the surface headfirst and became a faint shadow and was gone. So I caught my breath and followed her down.
Out this far the water was briny and buoyant and clear. Karen tried to refasten the halter and tried to stay down at the same time. I stared and stared and wished the water would go away until she shook her fist at me, then started to surface. In her excitement she lost the halter completely. I swam after it and saw Karen’s legs kicking up frantically because she needed air. I retrieved the strip of yellow iridescence and wondered how it could cover anything. Then I surfaced and gulped in oxygen and there was Karen still shaking her fist.
Up over my head I held the halter, grinning and taking a mouthful of water. The nearest swimmer was a good fifty yards closer to the beach and there’s something as private as a hermit’s cave about a lot of cool, deep ocean water. “Come and get it,” I said.
A sober Karen might have stood her ground or yelled for help or cussed me out until I relented. A high Karen disappeared under the water’s surface with an I’ll-fix-you look on her face. Well, she tried.
She grabbed my ankles and tugged. She gave a man-sized yank and I floated down below her, then her long legs had scissored my neck from behind and she was sitting there, underwater on my shoulders and trying to reach my outstretched hand and grab the halter. She knew her way around in the water, all right, but she was monkeying with an ex-lifeguard. When we surfaced I had Karen in tow, dragging her out deeper until we couldn’t even see any other swimmers. Then I put the halter back on her while she yelped and raved and splashed and half-drowned herself.
We swam back toward the distant beach without a word. We went back to Tolliver’s still without speaking and changed back to street clothing and met on the far side of the pool.
“Darn you, Gideon Frey,” Karen said. “I’m beginning to get sober. What did you want to ask me?”
“Ask you? I can’t remember.” Like hell I couldn’t. I remembered and so did Karen but if I broke this spell now it would never come back quite this way again. Karen and I were good for each other, like a kind of tonic the doctors haven’t invented yet, like spinach for Popeye. There was an urgency about it all, as if we’d have to hurry and keep moving and keep doing things if we didn’t want to lose this thing we’d so suddenly found. The questions could wait. I said. “I’m hungry. I’d like some chow.”
“Restaurant variety?”
“Hell, no. How commercial can you get, woman? Where do you live?”
“Out in Queens,” she said, leading me toward Surf Avenue. The kid in the lot was still reading his comic book. Karen gave me the keys to her ’47 Mercury. I kissed the tip of her nose and took them. I hugged her until it hurt me and I can imagine what it was doing to her. She said, “Hurry, Gideon.” Out along the Belt Parkway and the Van Wyck Expressway we did sixty in a thirty-five mile an hour zone. We passed everything on the highway except our own racing hearts. I looked at Karen so much she had to remind me to glue my eyes to the road. It’s a miracle we reached the garden apartments where she lived.
The baby carriage brigade stared at Karen and me with quiet distaste. The lips said nothing. The eyes said she was single and bringing a man to her apartment in the afternoon. In the night was bad enough, but in the afternoon all decent people should be working.
Karen must have seen it all but she didn’t care. She said hello Mrs. Ardello and hello Mrs. Greengrass and how’s Marvin and my doesn’t little Stevie look cute with that new hat and it certainly is a lovely day and no, I’m sorry I couldn’t baby-sit tonight Mrs. McGarity in a way that made Mrs. McGarity’s eyes follow us up to the apartment door on long, invisible stalks.
We closed the door behind us. We slanted the blind slats up and drew the draw-string drapes and Karen lit a small lamp on a corner table between two sections of a low, modern sofa. “They’re as bad as that Army of yours, Gid. Hup, two, three, faw. Hup, two, three, faw — you know.”
“Cut the chit-chat and give me a drink,” I said. Karen went into the kitchen and I heard ice-cubes clinking in glasses. She came out in a while with two highballs and the fixings for more on a wooden tray. She spun us some music on one of those open Webster jobs. Beethoven’s Eroica.
We refilled then re-refilled our highball glasses. We talked about everything and nothing. I flipped the LP record over and said, “I’m still hungry. How about those culinary tricks, now, Karen? Want to show them off?”
“I’m no Escoffier, but you’d better like it. Mrs. McGarity was looking that way because you’re the first man I’ve had out here for dinner or anything.”
“Truth?”
“Truth. Why don’t you make yourself presentable while I whip up some supper? There’s a little razor in the medicine cabinet I use for…”
“I know where you use it.” I fingered the stubble on my chin. “Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea.”
“That settles it. You are trying to impress me. Yonder lies the bathroom.” Karen pointed and I weaved my way through the living room and a hallway. “Make some cocktails before dinner,” I called back over my shoulder.
I heard Karen’s “yes, master,” and closed the bathroom door behind me. I peeled off my shirt and used a cake of bath soap and plenty of hot water to work up a sparse lather on my face. Finding a gold-plated razor in the medicine cabinet, I began singing up a storm and scraping the whiskers from my left cheek when the bathroom door opened.
“Cocktails are served,” said Karen. She held a cocktail glass in each hand and had broken all speed records changing into a wheat-colored hostess gown which stayed in place by virtue of a sash belted at her waist. “You know, I always wanted to shave a man,” she told me cheerfully, giggling. All those drinks had finally had their effect, but I was so busy trying to figure out what, if anything, lay between the wheat-colored robe and Karen’s skin that I let her pluck the tiny razor from my hand.
Probably, she’d seen it done in the movies. She yanked up my skin with her left hand and brought the razor down across it with her right. It was a quick slash, but not deft. My face began to sting and Karen mumbled, “uh-oh,” then wadded some toilet paper and patted my nicked cheek with it.
Karen hid the razor behind her back and leered at me. She’d had more than just the kiss of the hops, as the ads say. She had the heart of the grain, thrice distilled.
She had deposited the cocktail glasses on the edge of the bathtub for safe-keeping. Her gown swirled out from her legs as she whirled away from me with the razor, brushing the cocktails into the bathtub with a tinkling of glass.
“Talk about your bathtub brew,” she said. But her eyes were big and somehow solemn when she backed away as far as she could go and I still kept coming. We bumped hard and laughed and I didn’t retreat. The hostess gown did the job all alone.