“Not now, Mr. Larzar,” she called to a broad-shouldered man dressed like the rest of the ship’s officers in the somehow disreputable white uniform, and waving, “I have an engagement with Mr. Vanderveenan.” And then, to me: “He wants his trousers pressed.”
“But you are joking,” I said as we descended to the dark corridor, “only joking.”
“Whenever I am on a cruise I press the trousers of the ship’s officers. I am not joking at all.”
“I see,” I answered. “But at least I would not want you to press my trousers.”
“But of course you are not one of the ship’s officers,” she said in the darkness of the corridor below and laughed, shifted the things in her arms, unhooked the brass hook, stood aside so as to allow me to enter first, then closed the door.
Blue jeans flung on the bed in the attitude of some invisible female wearer suffering rape, underclothes ravaged from an invisible clothesline and flung about the room, a second two-piece bathing costume exactly like the first but hanging from one of the ringbolts loose and protruding from the porthole, and cosmetics and pieces of crumpled tissue and a single stocking that might have fit the small shape of her naked leg, and magazines and sheets of writing paper and mismatched pieces of underclothing — in a glance I saw that the context in which her personal trimness nested, so to speak, was extreme girlish chaos of which she herself was apparently unaware.
“You may sit on the bed,” she said, noting the antique typewriter in the upholstered chair, and without hesitation dropping towel and robe and slippers and so forth into the plump impersonal chair with the old machine. “Just clear a place for yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re a little wet. Do you like my cabin? Is it as nice as yours?”
“Tell me,” I said then, deliberately and gently, “why are we here?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, kneeling on the unmade bed where I was propped, “but I like this cabin because the porthole opens directly in the side of the ship. Whenever I wish to, I simply kneel on my bed and lean in my open porthole and smell the night or watch the sunlight in the waves. Do you see?”
While talking she had knelt on a pillow and pushed wide open the porthole and now was leaning out head and shoulders with sunlight falling on her little narrow back and tension concentrated in her nearly naked buttocks made firm by the bending of her legs.
“That’s a very agreeable demonstration,” I said, “but for me it produces a certain anxiety.”
“Why is that?” she asked, drawing in her head from the wind, the spray, “are you afraid I’ll fall?”
“You are not very large, whereas in comparison to you the porthole is big and round. So I do not like you to lean out of it. My feelings are simple.”
She knelt beside me, she studied my eyes, with both hands she better situated one of her small breasts in the little flesh-colored latex halter, the sun was a bright ball of light on the opposite wall.
“Mr. Vanderveenan,” she said, “you are an old maid. I would not have believed it.”
“I am not a man generally teased by women,” I said slowly, filling the sentence with the white cadences of my native speech, and extending my hand which for a moment she lightly held, “and I do not enjoy the prospect of open portholes.”
She was sitting on her heels, her knees were spread, I could see the outline of a label sewn inside her bikini pants as well as a little pubic darkness protruding like natural lace at the edges of the crotch. The sensation of her two hands on my extended hand was light and natural.
“Very well,” she said, “I don’t wish to cause you anxiety.”
She smiled, I noted just below her navel a small scar in the nasty shape of a fishhook, for a moment she raised my hand and touched it with her two dry lips. And then she drew back from me, got off the bed, rummaged about in an open drawer from which whole fistfuls of cheap underthings had already been half pulled, as if by some aggressive fetishist, until she found what she wanted and rose from where she had squatted, displaying to best advantage the roundness and symmetry of her little backside, and returned to me with the battered oblong ease clutched to her chest. I rolled up from my slouching position. I sat on the edge of the bed. She sat beside me with the ease on her knees and her shining skin smelling of talcum powder.
“So,” I said as she opened the ease, “so you play the flute.”
She nodded, she smiled into the ease at the sections of the silver instrument tarnished, I saw, with the myriad sentimental stains of a poor childhood focused at least in part on music. Then slowly and expertly she began to fit together the sections of the aged instrument which already reminded me of a silver snake suffering paralysis. It could not have been more clear to me that the poverty of her childhood had been forced to make way, finally, for the flute, as if the musical instrument, like a fancy name, would prove to be one of the avenues away from broken fences and a poor home. It was typical, it seemed to me, and the assembled anomalous instrument was proportionately much longer than I had thought.
“But this is a surprise,” I said. “I did not know you were musical. Did you learn as a child?”
She nodded, she tapped the little metallic keys, she arranged her arms and elbows in the contorted position all flutists assume when they commence to play. She tested the broad silver lip of the flute against her own small lip that was smooth and dry.
“I learned as a girl,’ she said, without lowering the old and battered flute from her childish mouth. “I was one of those fortunate schoolgirls to play in the local orchestra.” “And since that time,’ I said, and laughed, “you have continued to play your flute. It’s a surprising accomplishment. It’s quite wonderful.”
“I think it is. And I want to play for you right now.”
“By all means,” I exclaimed, filling my words with whitewash and ducks and potato soup, “a little concert. Excellent, excellent.”
“I know what you’re thinking. But you’ll see that my flute playing is not what you expect.”
“Come, come, I’m listening,” I said, laughing and attempting to strike the condescension from my heavy voice. “Let me hear what you can do with your flute.”
“Very well,” she answered then. “But it may not be as easy as you think. You see, I play in the nude.”
And there in the little pathetic chaotic stateroom she did just that. With the door locked and the porthole wide to the menacing trident of the god of holidays, and standing within easy reach of my two clasped hands, slowly she removed her latex halter, stripped down the little latex bikini bottom, seated herself cross-legged on the end of the bed, picked up the instrument, puckered her lips, stared directly at me with soft eyes, and began to play. The first several notes moved me and surprised me even more than her nudity, since the notes were deep prolongd contralto notes, sustained with a throaty power and intention that suggested some mournful Pan rather than a small and ordinary young woman on a pleasure cruise.
“Forgive my banter,” I whispered, allowing myself to slouch back again on the unmade bed and listen and to stare into the eyes of the naked flutist. “Your talent is serious.”
From lonely little girl among stupid old men lewdly picking their strings and blowing their dented horns, from school orchestra composed of indifferent unskilled children, from days of practicing in an empty room smelling of beer and damp plaster, from all that to nudity and self-confidence and the ability to set into motion sinuous low notes loud enough and plaintive enough to calm the waves. And I had expected none of it, none of it. So I lay there propped on a heavy elbow. I was sexually aroused in the depths of my damp swimming trunks as I had not been since long before the disappearance of the ship’s home port, and yet at the same time I was thoroughly absorbed in the shocking contralto sounds and the body bared as if for the music itself. I listened, I heard the reedy undulations, I noted the hair like a little dense furry tongue in the fork of her canted thighs, I saw the flickering of the little pallid scar and realized that she was taking no breaths, that the sound of the flute was continuous.