“Where?” Honey asked.
“Our fifth anniversary,” Sweetie said.
“No, you bought me a coral necklace.”
“This wasn’t a gift. We were just walking along...”
“Paris!”
“The little shop on the L’lle de la Cite.”
“I remember,” she said.
“Do you remember the Christmas Eve mass at Saint Suplice?”
“Yes, sweetie, I remember.”
Not honeymooners then. Nor as young as I’d first surmised. Married for at least five years, perhaps longer. World travelers; from the sound of them. No clue as to what either of them did for a living. No clue as to whether or not there were children in the marriage. The only intimation I had of Honey’s physical appearance was supplied by Sweetie one evening. Again, their voices came from the other side of the thin closet wall, floating into my unintentionally receptive ears. Or perhaps, like an amateur detective on the track of something big, I had became a deliberate listener, fascinated now by this couple who seemed so very much in love.
“Wear the blue,” he suggested. “It’s better with your hair. Especially now.” And a pause. “You look so beautiful in blue.”
Blue was a blonde’s color. I assumed Honey’s hair had turned lighter in the sun, as had Kara’s.
I started watching for blondes.
Years ago, I forget how many, Kara and I used to play a game where we tried to determine whether any given tourist was an American or a foreigner. There were only two rules: we had to guess before we heard a person speak, and dining habits didn’t count; we knew that foreigners cut their meat and forked it into their mouths without changing hands. We learned to look for facial expressions and hand gestures, the manner in which a person walked, hair styles, tailoring, shoes. To our amazement and delight, we were soon able to guess correctly at least eighty percent of the time. We used to play lots of games like that.
Now, while Kara walked the beach searching for shells, I periodically looked up from the biography I was reading to scan the faces of couples strolling past. I looked first for a blonde woman, and next for two people obviously in love with each other. The tropics did things to vacationers. There were smiles on sun-tanned faces. Every couple walking by seemed to be holding hands. Behind my sunglasses, I watched. The sun was strong. The ocean charged the shore repeatedly, retreated, encroached again. The palms swayed easily on the far horizon, there was a boat with blue sails. I dozed.
Kara awakened me some fifteen minutes later to exhibit the shells she’d collected, reddish-brown and cream-colored and stark white.
The hotel band played tunes from the forties.
The crowd here was a bit young for such dated fare, but the dance floor was an outdoor oval fringed with red bougainvillea, yellow hibiscus and purple jacaranda, and it lured dancers as surely as might have the rock and roll we grew up with. Here under the stars, couples clung to each other and swayed to swingless renditions of Glenn Miller arrangements. There were four or five blondes on the dance floor. Each danced with her eyes closed, tight in the circle of her partner’s arms. I wondered if one of them was Honey.
Once, on La Costa Brava, I forget when, it must have been five or six years ago, Kara and I returned to the hotel after a midnight Spanish dinner and swept onto the dance floor like professional flamenco dancers. Everyone applauded.
“Kara?” I said. “Would you care to dance?”
“Thanks, Richard, no,” she said. “The sun really knocked me out today.”
I watched the couples swirling by.
In a little while, we went up to our room.
At two in the morning, I was awakened again by Honey and Sweetie. I lay still and silent in the dark, listening to their whispered words of love and shouted cries of passion.
Our short vacation ended the next day.
We checked out without ever seeing the couple next door.
On the plane home, Kara made tentative sketches for the new book she’d accepted, and I finished reading the biography I’d started. I must have napped. The captain’s voice woke me up. I elevated my seat and turned to where Kara was still asleep. I touched her shoulder.
“Kara?” I said. “We’re approaching Kennedy.”
Her eyes fluttered open. She looked at me blankly.
And suddenly I knew who they were.
The couple next door.
They were us.
Long ago.
The Victim
An afternoon in October, ten years ago.
She was nineteen years old, and a storm broke just as she was leaving the Columbia campus. She tried to cover her head with her notebook, but she was soaked to the marrow within minutes. Standing helplessly in the middle of the sidewalk, not knowing whether to run back for the shelter of one of the buildings or ahead to the subway kiosk, she noticed a red Volkswagen at the curb, its door open. A young man was leaning across the front seat.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Get in before you drown!” Then, seeing the look of hesitation on her face, he immediately added, “I’m not a weirdo, I promise.”
She got into the car.
“My name’s Bobby Hollis,” he said.
“How do you do, Bobby?”
“What’s your name?”
“Laura Pauling.”
“Laura and Bobby.”
“Yes. Laura and Bobby.”
Wide grin, mischievous blue eyes, straight brown hair a bit too carelessly combed, falling onto his forehead, long and lanky Bobby — oh, how the girls on campus went for Bobby! Laura had hooked herself a big one out there in the rain. A young man who’d been on the dean’s list for three successive semesters, wrote a column for the school newspaper, played the lead in the drama group’s presentation of Arsenic and Old Lace, and also played the clarinet. “Would you like to hear the glissando passage at the beginning of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’?” A young man who, most important of all, was absolutely crazy about—
Her.
Wow.
Little Laura Pauling. Five foot four, mousy brown hair that sort of matched her brown eyes. Fairly decent figure but not anything anyone in his right mind would rave about. Except Bobby Hollis, who maybe wasn’t in his right mind.
Wow.
Laura had hooked herself the seventh wonder of the world out there in the rain. When at last he asked her to marry him, she accepted at once. Of course, she accepted! And before she knew it, she had two children who were surely the eighth and ninth wonders, and eventually she forgot what she’d been doing up there on that uptown campus. Forgot she’d been studying to... well, become something. Well, that wasn’t important. Well, yes, it was important, but the hell with it.
Laura had been willing to go along with changing dirty diapers and wiping runny noses so long as she believed Bobby loved her. After all, somebody had to do those things while Bobby was busy making a career for himself. Somebody had to keep those old home fires burning while Bobby was out chasing—
Out chasing.
Period.
She learned about it from a well-meaning associate of his who’d had too many martinis.
“Laura,” he’d said, “forgive me if I’m brutally frank, okay?”
“What is it, Dave?”
“I know a man’s supposed to look the other way and keep his mouth shut when a friend of his is... well... playing around. Supposed to nudge the guy in the ribs, wink at him, gee, you son of a gun. But I like you too much to...”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she’d said.
But he’d told her, anyway.