“Dearest,” she breathed, holding her hand to his cheek with a tenderness that struck dismay to his heart.
The puzzle is: where does love pitch its tent? in the fine fervor of a summer night, in a jolly dark wood wherein one has a bit o’ fun as the English say? or in this dread tenderness of hers?
“Don’t go away, darling,” she whispered. “I’ll be right back.”
“All right.”
She moved away. As he traced a finger in the dust, drawing the old Northern Pacific yin-yang symbol, he heard the rustling of clothes and the singing of zippers. She returned without a sound. He embraced her and was enveloped in turn by the warm epithelial smell of her nakedness. What a treasure, he thought, his heart beating as rapidly and shallowly as a child’s. What suppleness.
“Hold me,” whispered Kitty with her dismaying tenderness. “My precious.”
“Right.” Now holding her charms in his arms at last, he wondered if he had ever really calculated the terrific immediacy of it.
“Why don’t you—” she said.
“What? Oh. Pardon,” said the courtly but forgetful engineer and blushed for his own modesty, clad as he was from head to toe in Brooks Brothers’ finest. Making haste to sit up, he began unbutton his shirt.
“Now. Oh, my darling, do you love me?”
“Oh yes,” said the engineer, swinging her forty-five degrees in the dust so that he could look past her toward the opening of the covert. The sky was redder. From the same direction there came a faint crepitant sound like crumpled newspaper. The cops and the Negros were shooting it out in Harlem.
“Will you cherish me?”
“Yes, certainly,” said the engineer.
“I don’t mean just now. I want to be protected always. I want to be cherished.”
“I will,” he assured her.
“Do you know what matters most of all?”
“What?”
“Love.”
“Right.”
“Love is everything.”
“Yes.”
“Rita asked me what I believed in. I said I believed in love.”
“Me too.”
“Besides which I want to prove something to myself,” said the girl, almost to herself.
“Prove what?”
“A little experiment by Kitty for the benefit of Kitty.”
“What experiment is that?”
“Let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with Kitty,” she said.
“I didn’t say there was.”
Holding her, he couldn’t help thinking of Perlmutter, his young fresh-eyed colleague at Macy’s. Though he was from Brooklyn, Perlmutter looked like an Indiana farm boy. Perlmutter spoke of his wife with a lack of reserve, though not of respect, which was startling. Making love to his wife, Perlmutter said, was like “being in heaven.” Now he understood. Kitty too, he would have to say, was an armful of heaven. The astounding immediacy of her. She was more present, more here, than he could ever have calculated. She was six times bigger and closer than life. He scarcely knew whether to take alarm or to shout for joy, hurrah!
“Never mind. What about you, you big geezer?”
Geezer, thought the engineer. “What about me?”
“You were the one who was always sweeping Kitty off her feet before! What happened?” She even socked him, jokingly but also irritably. The poor girl could not get the straight of it: the engineer’s alternating fits of passion and depression.
He was wondering: had the language of women, “love” and “sweeping one off one’s feet,” and such, meant this all along, the astounding and terrific melon immediacy of nakedness. Do women know everything?
“What about it, friend?” asked Kitty, heaving up, her pale face swimming above him. “Kitty wants to know.”
“Know what?”
“Is this the same Will Barrett who swept Kitty off her feet in the automat?”
“No, but it’s just as well,” he said dryly.
“Tell Kitty why.”
“Kitty might be too attractive,” said the chivalrous but wry engineer. “So attractive that it is just as well I don’t feel too well — for one thing, my sinuses are blocked—”
“Oh that’s sweet,” said Kitty in as guttural, as ancient and risible and unbuttoned an Alabama voice as Tallulah Bankhead. Did he know anything about women?
“Do you feel bad,” she asked suddenly and touched his face. “If it is not possible now to—” she broke off.
He felt just bad enough — his head was caulked, the pressure turning him ever away into a dizzy middle distance — and so it was just possible.
“Lover,” said Kitty as they hugged and kissed.
“Darling,” said the engineer, not to be surpassed — was this it at last, the august secret of the Western world?
“My sweet,” said Kitty, patting his cheek at the corner of his mouth.
But is love a sweetnesse or a wantonnesse, he wondered.
Yet when at last the hard-pressed but courteous and puisant engineer did see the way clear to sustaining the two of them, her in passing her test, him lest he be demoralized by Perlmutter’s heaven, too much heaven too soon, and fail them both — well, I do love her, he saw clearly, and therefore I shall — it was too late.
“Dear God,” said the girl to herself, even as he embraced her tenderly and strongly — and fell away from him.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m so sick,” she whispered.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said, shaking his head dolefully. Even their sicknesses alternated and were out of phase.
She went to the farthest corner of the sniper’s den and began to retch. The engineer held her head. After a moment she asked in a dazed voice. “What happened?”
“I think it was that tea you were drinking.”
“You are so smart,” she said faintly.
What with her swaying against him, he was having a hard time finding her clothes. It was too much for a man to follow, he mused, these lightning hikuli-transformations from Kitty as great epithelial-warm pelvic-upcurving-melon-immediate Maja to Kitty as waif, huddled under his arm all ashiver and sour with gastric acid. But when they were dressed, they felt better. Now trousered, collared, buttoned up, he at least was himself again. There is a great deal to be said for clothes. He touched Kitty to place her, like a blind man. To his relief she sat hugging her decent skirted knees like a proper Georgia coed.
“Do you feel better?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said, hardly audible. “But talk to me.”
“What about?”
“Anything. Anything that comes into your head.”
“All right.” After all, this was one thing he was good at. “I was thinking about the summer of 1864,” said the engineer, who always told the truth. “My kinsman took part in the siege of Richmond and later of Petersburg. We have a letter he wrote his mother. He was exactly my age and a colonel in the infantry. Petersburg was a rats’ war, as bad as Stalingrad. But do you know that even at the worst the officers would go to balls and cotillions? In the letter he thanks his mother for the buttermilk cookies and says: ‘Met Miss Sally Trumbull last night. She said I danced tolerably well. She gave me her handkerchief.’ He was killed later on in the Crater.”
“Would you take me to a dance?” asked Kitty, her head turned away.
“Sure. But what is curious is that—”
“I’ve been dancing five hours a day for years and I can’t remember the last dance I went to.”
“—he did not feel himself under the necessity, almost moral, of making love—”
“I love to dance.”
“—in order that later things be easy and justified between him and Miss Trumbull, that—”
“My grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer,” said Kitty.
“—that even under the conditions of siege he did not feel himself under the necessity, or was it because it was under the conditions of siege that—”