“Swimming?” Tolliver called. His blindness-keened ears had picked up and interpreted the sound of the faint splash. “Just Allison,” I said, and watched her surface. She shook her head and treaded water rhythmically with a bicycling motion as Tolliver cut the motor and turned the cruiser back toward her at my directions.
Allison bobbed up and down in the water so that one moment the red-gold hair upswept about her face was only visible and the next wet-sleeked shoulders and chest flashed into view. “It’s delightful, Gideon. Won’t you come in?”
I remembered swimming a few days back with Karen and the way she’d lost the halter of her two-piece bathing suit and what followed. I remembered a lot of fancy resolutions about women in general and Allison in particular. I remembered why I’d come out here to Blind Man’s Bluff and how my questions had gone not only unanswered but most of them unasked. And then Allison crooked her pinky.
Well, she smiled at me and kicked hard in her bicycle tread, clearing the water almost down to her waist, before she surface-dived and disappeared. “Nuts to you, Gideon Frey,”
I mumbled.
“What say?” Tolliver wanted to know, using the guide rail to walk back along the side of the cabin toward the sundeck.
“Nothing,” I said, dropping my trousers near Allison’s terrycloth robe and trying out a jacknife dive as Allison surfaced again. She had me coming and going. She knew I’d always loved the water. And other things.
I broke surface a yard from Allison and blinked the water from my eyes. She was treading water and smiling at me and drove her feet up against my chest, kicking off and back-stroking away from the cruiser. I followed her with a butterfly and we swam a wide circle around the cruiser. I didn’t do a very good job, what with watching Allison’s long legs and arms churn water in gorgeous precision, kicking up foam and spray about her nakedness and turning every now and then to look at Tolliver on the deck of his cruiser, because it seemed uncanny, him standing there and gazing out over the waters while his wife swam naked with a man. in his jockey shorts.
Tolliver had lowered a rope ladder over the side by the time we returned. Allison said, “you first,” and I didn’t feel her weight on the bottom rung of the ladder until I’d placed one foot on the cruiser deck. Tolliver came at me with the terrycloth robe, but I shook my head and then remembered he was blind and said, “It’s me. Allison’s on her way.” Then I called back over my shoulder, “Gregory has your robe for you, Allison.”
Allison climbed aboard dripping wet and shining. She turned her back to Tolliver and let him drape the robe across her shoulders, then skipped away toward the cabin and began rubbing herself dry.
A few minutes later, Allison donned her white tennis shorts again and another halter, also white, but not criss-crossed. She placed a ham sandwich in one of my hands and a glass of beer in the other. “There’s more of everything in the galley, Gideon.”
The cool water had quickened my appetite. Allison was back in the galley in nothing flat, making more sandwiches and uncapping more beer. I called “left” to Tolliver and then added “port” in nautical parlance as a motor launch rocketed by to starboard. Then I had myself another sandwich, a thicker one, and more beer. My appetite had been whetted by the Sound not only for food but for other things. I draped my hand across Allison’s bare shoulder as she sat down and smiled at me without doing any coaxing at all. I looked at Tolliver and felt like a heel, but only mildly. He’d done the marrying. If he were a license-carrying cuckold and wore a thin wedding band to prove it but no horns you could see, that was his worry.
“The sun is hot,” said Allison. “Too hot,” I agreed.
We headed for the cabin which slept eight, a double tier of three-quarter bunks on either side of a narrow companion-way done in red leather. A bas-relief of a bosomy nude hung on one wall and Allison said. “He’s got to see it, you know. His fingers.”
“His fingers,” I said, looking at her. Off came the second halter. Allison unzipped the shorts and stepped out of them as they fell to her ankles. She didn’t come to me. She didn’t want to, not yet. She stood there, neither demurely nor obscenely but in exactly the sort of posture she might have employed had she been fully clothed and showing off a new dress. Her eyes were big and very white and very green as she finally swayed toward me and met me with arms held stiffly at her sides, first contacting my lips with hers, warm and wet, then leaning forward against my chest, then the flat belly cool against me and the loins and the smooth line of thighs and never using her arms but swaying against me and leaning until we fell back on one of the three-quarter bunks without a sound except the gentle yielding creak of the red leather.
Far away I heard frantic shouting and the quick angry splintering of wood. Something shoved me forward and Allison on top of me and there was more shouting, some strange voices and Tolliver’s too. Allison leaped to her feet and secured the halter on her breasts. She climbed into the shorts and zipped them on the run. A moment later she had thrust my gray trousers within the cabin and I put them on and went out on deck.
Allison stood at the rope ladder, completely composed. The bow of a small motor launch was just slipping below the churning white water while Allison helped a middle-aged woman soaking wet and shaking all over, aboard ship. A man stood nearby, hands on hips, face florid, lips trembling so much he couldn’t talk.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Tolliver said. “We’ll pay for your boat.”
“We… might… have been… killed. Why couldn’t… you look… where you were… going?”
“It’s my fault,” Allison told the man quietly. “My husband is blind and I usually direct him. I was making some sandwiches you see.”
“A blind man oughtn’t to pilot….”
“That’s quite enough,” Tolliver said coolly. “We will pay for your boat. If there has been an injury, you may contact my lawyers. Now if you will tell us where we can drop you?”
“Glen Cove Landing,” the man said, still fuming. “I think I’m going to report this.”
“You can do anything you please, sir. But on my cruiser you’ll keep a civil tongue. Allison, see if you can get them something to eat.”
Allison’s eyes sparked hatred at the middle-aged couple. She looked at me and her eyes could talk better than any words. Later, they said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“MORE COFFEE?” Allison demanded, drooping the spout of the sterling silver pot to within inches of my cup. “Huh-uh.” I patted my stomach. “Full.” We had delivered the indignant couple to Glen Cove, then returned to Blind Man’s Bluff in the Allison I. By that time we’d all worked up more than adequate appetites for the shrimp cocktail and rare ribs of beef Allison had prepared. Even Shamus, who got the bones and was growling with them off in a corner of the large, mahogany-panelled dining room, seemed less ornery.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting to catch a train back shortly?” Gregory said. “We have a schedule someplace….”
“I’ve already checked,” Allison told us brightly. “Gideon can take a midnight train to Jamaica and change for the Brooklyn train there.”
“That doesn’t give me much time for sleep.”
“Well,” Gregory chortled, “you’re younger than I am. People always say walk off a big meal, but that’s ridiculous. Do animals walk off their meals? They curl up and go to sleep. That’s what I’m going to do. You wake me at ten, Allison.”
Gregory stood up and Allison kissed him lightly on the cheek before he left the room. Shamus growled but remained in the corner with his bones, gnawing and snuffling.
Allison led me by the hand into a living-room which featured a huge, thirty-foot bay window on one wall overlooking the Sound, a fieldstone fireplace on the opposite wall and delicately wrought furniture which I think they call French Provincial.