“And you? What’s your image, Annie?”
“Annie,” she said. “Nobody calls me Annie. Maybe I like it. I’ll have to let you know.”
They brought us more drinks. She was still cooking with gin and tonic. I stuck to my rye and soda.
“My image,” she said. “That’s easy, Nat Crowley. My image is the little girl who grew up too fast. Little girl burning her candle at both ends because it sheds a wondrous light. Little girl getting dizzy in fast circles. And not giving a damn.”
“How little?” I asked.
A blank look.
“How old, Annie?”
“Twenty-two,” she said.
“You look older.”
“I’m supposed to. Part of the pattern. I’m supposed to look older because I’ve grown up so fast and am so world-weary. That sort of thing.”
“Part of the image?” I asked.
“Part of the image.”
“Uh-huh. And what’s underneath it?”
There was a moment of softness. Then tension tied up the mouth and the eyes hardened slightly.
“Oh, the hell with it,” she said. “Let’s dance, Nat.”
We danced, we drank, we danced. It was easy to lose track of the time and everything else. They didn’t believe in letting you nurse a drink at Noomie’s. They brought you a fresh one as fast as they dared, and they dared once every five or ten minutes. I would have got very drunk if they had put a full ounce in each drink. They didn’t come close.
But I couldn’t resent it. An after-hours spot is a tough operation. You have to grease the local law and the state liquor authority boys at the same time. It’s expensive.
So it was a few minutes after five, maybe later. We were back on the postage-stamp dance floor and we were dancing, if you could call it that. The song was slow and bluesy. Anne was in my arms, dancing close, her head snug against my chest, the perfume of her hair reaching my nostrils. It was good perfume.
“Nat...”
I looked at her.
“Don’t tell me too much, Nat. It’s all a contest, all a test of leverage. All a question of the upper hand. Don’t tell me too much.”
“Too much gin and tonic?”
Her eyes cleared. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. Hold me close, Nat.”
I held her close again. Something made me think of Ellen. Nothing specific, nothing concrete. Vague and patternless thoughts that I pushed from my mind.
The music ended. We found our way back to the table and drank the two fresh drinks that were waiting for us there. I crooked a finger at the waitress and she gave me the tab. It was an impressive one. I put a lot of money into her hand and she didn’t even think about bringing me change.
“Come on,” I said to Anne. “I’ll run you home.”
“I didn’t know you had a car.”
“I don’t. I’m good at getting cabs.”
We left the nightclub and walked out into sunshine. People were getting up to go to work. The neighborhood looked much worse, now that I could see it. Paintless frame houses yawned at the sun and looked ready to collapse. Garbage cluttered the street and the yards. The shirts and underwear on everybody’s clotheslines were ready for the rag barrel.
“God,” Anne said. “It’s bad enough in the dark. We should have left earlier. Let’s get out of here, Nat.”
I caught us a cab and she gave the driver her address. The cab took off and we slid into silence.
Her lipstick had worn off and her makeup was smudged, maybe from dancing with her cheek against my jacket. She looked a little like a whore in church except that there was a strange cloak of innocence that covered her and kept her pure. Maybe Anne was a saint in a whorehouse. So, even though I wanted to touch her, to take her hand, to kiss her, I did none of these things. I waited.
In a little while the cab pulled up in front of a dingy brick building five stories tall. We turned and looked at each other. I wanted to say something clever but nothing occurred to me. Her mouth opened, and she hesitated for several seconds. “All right,” she said finally.
I waited.
“All right,” she said again. “Pay him, Nat. Pay him and come upstairs.”
I paid him and tipped him. We stepped out of the cab onto the sidewalk. We didn’t hold hands or exchange soulful looks. I followed her up the stairs and through the doorway and waited while she opened the inner door with her key. Her apartment was a fourth-floor walk-up and we climbed all those stairs in silence.
Her apartment wasn’t much but it looked livable. Anne had an Oriental rug on the floor and Miró prints in plain black frames on the walls. The living room held a coffee table, a couch, two chairs and a table with a hi-fi on it. There was no television set. There wasn’t room for one.
I waited while she put the latch on the door. When she turned around a part of her mask fell away and I could see more of her. She was frightened.
Not of me, not of what was coming next. It was more a fear of something within herself than a fear of a tangible experience. But she looked so horribly afraid that I had to reach for her — and that did it. She came to me soft and soundless and burrowed her face in my chest.
I spoke her name.
“Hurry,” she whispered. “No words. The bedroom’s right through there in the back. Please hurry.”
I picked her up and carried her there. She was easy to carry. I put her down on the edge of the bed and stood looking at her.
“The light,” she said, pointing.
I couldn’t remember turning it on. But a cord dangled from a bare bulb on the ceiling. I yanked it and the room was darker. There had been no preliminaries. We held each other briefly, then parted. We undressed ourselves in darkness and silence.
When we were naked together I reached for her and the physical contact of our bodies was electric in intensity.
We met in pure blind need. I felt her body beneath me, her small breasts cushioning my chest, her arms locked hard around me, her legs fastened around my hips.
In the silence and darkness our bodies battled together. I felt her nails in my back, her teeth in my shoulder. The union was neither slow nor gentle. It began quickly and rushed forward like a young river plunging for the sea.
It was more animal than human — blind and hungry and desperate. We were caught up in fury and need and love and hate and fear. There was nothing held back. There was nothing but our mutual race to the top.
Once during the race we changed positions. Just once. I think she wanted to feel something like a sacrifice. So, her dark hair hanging over her eyes, she did it so that it looked as if she were impaling herself.
The sensation was something like being sucked in and then expelled. What it was like for Anne I’ll never know, except that she did have that expression on her face of being a sacrifical offering on an altar.
Of being in an agony.
Her face twisted in a grimace each time she sank down on me to the hilt. I worried her swollen nipples each time she went through that act.
Several times she flung her head back, her thigh muscles corded in the extremity of her body’s arching, and a kind of high whine came from her throat.
It was almost too much for me. So I flipped her back to where she had been at the start, with Nat Crowley dictating matters.
Then there was no longer that sacrificial expression on Anne’s face. There was only a look of fierce oblivion, eyes shut tight — and Anne shouting obscenities as I made the plunges through center.
We reached the heights together. For a slice of time everything dissolved and the world went away. Then I rolled free of her and we lay on our backs in the darkness and listened to our ragged breathing.
“I get up at noon,” she said a little later. Her voice was flat, spent, empty. “Be gone before I wake up, Nat.”
I stayed at her side until I was sure she was sleeping. Then I dressed in the darkness and went back to the Malmsly.