She was there. A thread of light shone out under her cabana door. When I knocked the light went out, and she came out onto the porch, shaded from the starlight, carrying two glasses and the ice bucket, and a towel with which to twist out the champagne cork. She wore dark slacks and a white turtleneck against the night-breeze off the Gulf. She said, in too merry a voice, “Champagne for you too, pal, so you shouldn’t feel everything is a total loss.”
“Second thoughts, eh?”
“Definitely. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking of. I mean I do know what I was thinking of, and it wasn’t my very best idea. I was wondering a little while ago, what if you arrived all eager and steamy? Would she or wouldn’t she?”
“You’ll never know. I guessed you’d have second thoughts.”
“Thank you. Any friend of Meyer is a friend of mine. Meyer has pretty good taste in friends. Open that good stuff.”
I unwound the wire and stood the glasses on the rail, where the starlit sand beyond gave enough light for me to fill them properly. Poured. We clinked glasses.
“To all the dumb dreams that never happen,” she said. “And the dumb women who dream them.”
“To all the dumb dreams that shouldn’t happen, and don’t,” I said.
She sipped. “You are probably right. Ellis was dying. Prescott Mullen was an authority figure. He was comforting. When you lean on strength, I think you can get to read too much into it.”
“I thought you seemed very very happy with your job here.”
“Oh, I am! I wouldn’t think of giving it up. He was going to come down and go into practice here. Another segment of the dumb dream.”
We drank chairs close together. Silences were comfortable. I told her portions of my life, listened to parts of hers. We had some weepy chapters and some glad ones. About five minutes after she had snugged her hand into mine, I leaned over into her chair and kissed lips ripe and hot as country plums, and when that was over she got up, tugged at my wrist, and said in a small voice, “I think I, have been talked into it somehow.”
We lay sprawled in the soft peach glow of a pink towel draped around the shade of her bedside lamp, sated and peaceful and somnolent. Big wooden blades of a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, and I could smell the sea. A passel of marsh frogs were all yelling gronk in a garden pond, voices in contrapuntal chorus.
She propped herself on an elbow and ran her fingertips along the six-inch seam of scar tissue along my right side, halfway between armpit and waist.
“How many wars did you say you were in?”
“Only one, and that wasn’t done there. That was an angry fellow with a sharp knife, and if I could have had it stitched right away, there wouldn’t be hardly any scar.”
“You should put out a pocket guidebook.”
“Some day I’ll arrange a guided tour. Meyer says there isn’t enough unblemished hide left to make a decent lampshade.”
“Are you accident-prone, darling?”
“I guess you could say that. I am prone to be where accidents are prone to happen.”
“Why do you want to ask Prescott about Ellis?”
“I haven’t really got anything specific to go on. It’s what I do, the way I go about things. If I can get enough people talking, sooner or later something comes up that might fit with something somebody else has said. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. Like finding out last night that whoever beat Esterland to death might have been a motorcyclist, a biker.”
“Why would you think that? I don’t understand.” So I went through it for her, editing it just enough to take out things that were obviously meaningless. Her arm got tired and she snugged her face into the corner of my throat, her breath warm against my chest. I slowly stroked her smooth and splendid back as I talked, all the way from coccyx to nape and back again.
When I finished, she said, “Well, I guess it is interesting, but I don’t see what a motorcycle would have to do with anything, really. The only person I ever met who knew anything at all about motorcycles is Josie’s weird friend Peter Kesner.”
It startled me. “He rides them?”
“Oh, no! He’s what they call out there a genius. He’s a double hyphenate.”
“A what?”
“No, darling, it is not some form of perversion. He made a couple of motion pictures where he was the writer-director-producer. He made them years ago on a very small budget, and they were what is called sleepers. They made a lot of money, considering what they cost. Maybe you heard of them. One was called Chopper Heaven and the other was Bike Park Ramble. It was all a kind of realism, you know. He used real tough bike people and handheld cameras. And they were sort of tragic movies. The critics raved. I saw one of them, I can’t really remember which. It was too loud and there were too many people getting hurt.”
She sat straight up and combed her dark hair back with her fingers and smiled down at me. “Dear, I’m getting chilled. Can you reach the fan switch?” I turned it off. She reached down and got the end of the sheet and pulled it up over us when she stretched out again.
“You said Kesner is Josephine’s weird friend.”
“He came to Stamford with her when Ellis was in the hospital the first time. That’s when I met him. He’s big, maybe about your size, and from what I could gather from Josie, he’s been on every kind of pill and powder and shot ever invented. He was treating Josie like dirt, and she didn’t seem to mind a bit. It’s hard to carry on a conversation with him. I can’t describe it. It’s just… frustrating. And he’s weird-acting. Really weird.”
She kicked at something, then ducked under the sheet and came up with her discarded briefs. She held them to the light and said, “One of my romantic little plans for the good doctor.” They were white, with a regular pattern of bright red hearts the size of dimes.
“Glad he didn’t get a chance to appreciate them.”
“You didn’t appreciate them. I got shuffled out of them too quickly.”
“Protesting all the way?”
“Well-not really. Did you notice how fat her face is?”
“What?”
“The bride. A fat face and piggy little eyes.”
“I didn’t particularly notice because I was watching you, Annie. I lay there in my trundle bed in the Groveway Motel last night and thought about your pretty legs hiked up on that porch railing until I had to get up and take a cold shower. And then I came dashing down here in my domesticated Mitsubishi. Meyer had told me you had eyes for the doctor, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
“Come on! Really?”
“Cross my heart. Hope to spit.”
“You know, that makes me feel a lot better about this whole-uh-happenstance.”
“I’ve really enjoyed happenstancing with you, Miz Renzetti.”
“Always before I felt squeamish about big tall men.”
“And little dark women have not exactly figured large in my erotic fantasies, kid.”
“They might from now on?”
“Front and center.”
“You said enjoyed?”
“I did.”
“Past tense?”
“My dear lady, it is quarter past three in the morning.”
“So?”
“My ramparts are breached, my legions scattered, my empire burned to the ground, my fleet at the bottom of the sea. And you would-”
“Hush,” she said softly.
And so in time the impossible became at first probable and finally inevitable. As before, I found that through her response she led us into the way she most enjoyed. She was not, as I would have guessed, one of the twitchy ones with tricky swiveling, kinky little tricks and games, contortionist experimentations. What she wanted, and got, was to be settled into the unlauded missionary position, legs well braced, arms hanging on tight, and there exercise a deep, strong, steady, elliptical rhythm.
She lay sweat-drenched and spent, small face bloated and blurred, mouth puffed and smiling. “There!” she said. She pulled my mouth down for a sisterly kiss. “Everybody to his own bed, darling. Be sneaky, huh?”