Those light-blue eyes of hers were peeking up over the edge of the pool at me, from just a few feet away. Her white-blond hair was wet and flat against her head. It made her look young.
I sat down next to the robe and towel and smiled. “I didn’t expect to see you till tomorrow morning.”
“I didn’t expect that, either.”
“What happened?”
“I got the urge to swim.”
“I see.”
“Sometimes you just get the urge, you know.”
“I know. I like to, a couple times a day, if I can.”
“Like to what?”
“Swim.”
The lighting in the room, over the pool especially, was subdued. On either end of the pool was some space for deck chairs, above which were windows in the ceiling (the pool room was on the top floor of the Concort) that during the day let in natural light, and in the summer were opened for purposes of suntanning. But it was winter, now, and nighttime as well, and there wasn’t any sun coming in those ceiling windows. And, as I said, the lighting over the pool itself was subdued.
“We seem to have the room to ourselves again,” she said.
“We seem to.”
“You want to come in for a swim, or you just going to sit there?”
“Come up here a minute.”
“No, you come on in.”
“Please.”
“Well… all right.”
She pushed up out of the pool and emerged shyly, perhaps embarrassed about the brief two-piece suit she had chosen to wear, a white suit clinging wetly to her, in place of the black one-piece she had worn this morning.
“Come here a second,” I said.
“I’ll get you wet,” she said, grinning, dripping.
“Bend down.”
She bent down.
I gave her a nice, soft hello kiss, a little kiss, and then drew back and waited.
She took my hand and tugged and I got to my feet, and she pressed herself to me and gave me an altogether different sort of a kiss.
“You got me wet,” I said.
“I warned you.”
“How did you know I’d come swimming this evening? How long were you prepared to wait for me?”
“I didn’t know, and who says I was waiting for you? Not longer than midnight.”
Then she pushed away from me playfully and dove into the pool. She splashed around in there like a porpoise, and called at me to come on in, taunted me, and I said just a minute and walked over and looked out the door. The hall was empty. It was midevening, and the pool was open for use by Concort guests, but in the middle of winter, middle of the week, I didn’t figure it would be too busy. So maybe nobody would notice and make a stink if I closed the door and flipped the lock.
I did that, and dove in after her.
We swam around and played like kids, splashing, chasing, dunking each other, all of that, in a good twenty-minute romp. Then she paddled over to the side and hugged it, hollering, “Base! Enough! Time out.” She was out of breath, gasping for breath, and yet laughing at the same time. I paddled over to her.
“You…” she said, still trying to catch her wind, “… you locked the door.”
“Just noticed that, did you?”
“Why’d you do that? Lock the door.”
“I thought maybe we could use some privacy.”
“What if somebody complains?”
“I’m a friend of a friend of the manager.”
“Me, you mean.”
“You.”
“Well, I suppose that’s right. Still…”
“Why, you got something against privacy?”
“No…”
“We talked about that this morning, remember?”
“What?”
“How nice it is swimming alone.”
“Alone? There’s two of us.”
“Who’s counting?”
“Who’s swimming?”
Not us. I was holding onto her. I was up against her. She was holding onto the side of the pool with one hand and me with the other.
“Not us,” I admitted. “Do you mind?”
“No.”
“Have you ever done it in the water?”
“Done what? No.”
“Me neither.”
“Why… why do you ask?”
“I was just wondering what it would be like.”
“I, uh… wonder.”
My hand was cupping her ass now.
“I don’t suppose anyone’s ever done it in here,” I said.
“I don’t suppose. You think it’s, uh, possible, here? I mean, this is the deep end.”
“I wonder.”
“But, uh… we’ll never know, if we don’t try, will we?”
“No,” I said, slipping casually out of my trunks, “I guess not.”
“And the door is locked…”
“Yes,” I said, thumbs in the brief bottoms of her bikini, “it is.”
And they slid right off her.
And I slid right into her.
Fucking in the water is a lot like drowning, I suppose, only when you go down for the third time, you don’t give a damn. It’s very noisy, at least the way we did it, thrashing around, clinging to each other or anyway me clinging to her while she hugged me with her thighs, pumping, churning, while trying to hold onto the edge of the pool behind her, but toward the end there she lost hold and we drifted away, locked together, and we were underwater, and we came under there, both of us, and we kicked to the surface and let loose of each other but stayed close, and gulped the air, and when we could, laughed, and then silently stroked over to the side of the pool. The whole thing lasted about three minutes, but they were three of the most enjoyable minutes I ever spent.
This time, I was holding onto the side of the pool, and she touched my shoulder and said, “Thank you.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Not at all. You’ll never know.”
“Maybe I’d like to.”
“Why… why don’t we just, uh… leave it at thank you.”
“Up to you.”
“And I want you to know there’s no obligation. You don’t have to see me again, while you’re in town, Jack. Understand? If you don’t want me to come here to swim tomorrow morning, or if you just don’t want to show up yourself or something, fine, fine.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“It’s hard to take a speech like that seriously, coming from somebody who doesn’t have any pants on.”
She looked down into the water, where her silky white-blond pubic hair was waving like provocative seaweed, and she laughed again. “I see what you mean,” she said, and touched me.
“You know something else?” I said.
“What?”
“I haven’t eaten yet.”
“In the water, you mean?”
I splashed her. “Supper.”
“Oh. Neither have I.”
“Want some? I hear there’s a good restaurant downstairs.”
“Oh… I can’t.”
“Well. Up to you.”
“No, it’s not that… I just can’t go down there, my hair, all wet.”
“We could always go up to my room and call room service.”
“We could do that.”
We did.
First, I had to go deep-diving to retrieve my trunks and her bikini bottoms from the bottom of the pool, where they’d sunk like soggy stones; and then she got her robe, which she’d folded up and laid behind a deck chair, and stopped across the hall at the ladies’ dressing room for her clothes, but went down in the elevator wearing her robe over her swimsuit, like I did.
When we got to the room, I called room service and was told it was too late for anything but drinks. She got on the phone and told them her name and they took her order: chateaubriand for two and a bottle of red wine, which had an elaborate name and a date and all, and to someone like me who knows little or nothing about such things, that’s pretty impressive. So was the service she was getting, at the drop of her name.
We turned on the TV and crawled onto the bed and fooled around awhile, and just when it was getting interesting, supper came. The nine-millimeter was still wrapped in the towel, and I stuck it under my arm as I answered the door, but supper was all it was, so I tipped the guy five and he went away and we ate. We didn’t talk much at all, except to comment now and then on the television show we were pretending to watch. I did learn that she was a widow, a fairly recent one, and that this was a coming-out party of sorts for her.