I brushed my lips against her hair, thinking that everyone should know such peace and happiness. Wondering why they didn’t when it was so easily managed. The ingredients were to be found in everyone’s cupboard, or the cupboard which everyone is, and you could put them together as easily as you could button your britches. All that was necessary was to combine any good brand of kindness and any standard type of goodwill, plus a generous dab of love; then, shake well and serve. There you had peace and happiness — beautifully personified by this sleeping angel in my arms.
Without disturbing her, I shifted my position ever so slightly, and I took another look at her.
And I thought: I have seen Manny sleep like this, too. Manny, who thus far has done everything but kill me and doubtless plans to do just that.
Then, I thought: Connie looked thus also, for God’s sake! The homeliest, scrawniest broad in the world has at least a moment of surpassing beauty, else a majority of the world’s female population would go unscrewed and unmarried. And I thought that Connie would probably like to kill me, and quite likely would do so if she knew how to safely wangle it.
And I thought: And how about Kay, this lovely child? For all I know about her — or DON’T know about her — she, too, could have my murder on her mind. Yea, verily, even while screwing me, she could be plotting my slaughter. Perhaps she would see my death as atonement for her misuse by guys who had used her. Guys who thought she was awful and not a nice girl just because she did it.
Finally, in that prescient moment preceding sleep, I thought: Congratulations, Rainstar. You have done it again. A very small puddle was in your path, one that you could have walked through without dampening your shoe soles. Yet you shrank — you chronic shrinker! — from even that small hazard. You must spring over the literal wet spot in your walkway, and that mess you came down in on the other side was definitely not a beehive.
Manny came out to the house the next day.
She looked very beautiful. Her illness has left her even lovelier than she had been, and… But I believe we’ve already covered that. So let us move on.
I was naturally pretty wary, and she also was on guard. We exchanged greetings stiffishly, and moved on to a stilted exchange of conversational banalities. With that behind us, I think we were on the point of breaking the ice when Kay popped in with the coffee service. She declared brightly that she just knew that we two convalescents would feel better after a good cup of coffee, and she poured and passed a cup to each of us.
Manny barely tasted hers, and said it was very good.
I tasted mine, and also lied about it.
Kay said she would just wait until we finished it, by which time doubtless, since I was not feeling very well, Miss Aloe would want to leave. Manny promptly put her cup down, and stood up.
“I’ll leave right now, Britt. It was thoughtless of me to come out so soon, so—”
“Sit down,” I said. “I am quite well, and I’m sure that neither of us wants any more of this coffee. So please remove it, Miss Nolton, and leave Miss Aloe and me to conduct our business in private.”
Manny said timidly that she would be glad to come back another time. But I told her again to sit down, and she sat. Kay snatched up the coffee things and dumped to the door. She turned around there, addressing me with sorrowful reproach.
“I was just doing my job, Mr. Rainstar. I’m responsible for your health, you know.”
“I know,” I said, “and I’m grateful.”
“It would be easier for me if I wasn’t so conscientious. My salary would be the same, and it would be a lot easier for me, if I didn’t do—”
“I’d better leave,” said Manny, picking up her purse.
“And I think you’d better not!” I said. “I think Miss Nolton had better leave — right this minute!”
Kay left, slamming the door behind her. I smiled apologetically at Manny.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She’s a very nice young woman, and she’s very good at her job. But sometimes…”
“Mmm. I’ll just bet she is!” Manny said, and then, with a small diffident gesture, “I want to tell you something, and it’s, well, not easy for me. Could you come a little closer, please?”
“Of course,” I said, and I moved over to her side on the love seat. I waited, and her lips parted, then closed again. And she looked at me helplessly, apparently unable to find the words for what she wanted to say.
I told her gently to take her time, we had all the time in the world; and then, by way of easing her tenseness, I asked her if she remembered the last time we had been in this room together.
“It was months ago, and I thought I’d lost the pamphlet-writing job before I even had it. So I was sitting here with my head in my hands, feeling sorry as hell for myself. And I wasn’t aware that you’d come into the room until—”
“Of course, I remember!” She clapped her hands delightedly. “You looked like this—” She puffed her cheeks out and rolled her eyes inward in a hilarious caricature of despair. “That’s just the way you looked, darling. And then I said…”
“Lo, the poor Indian.”
“Lo, the poor Indian,” she chimed in unison.
We laughed and smiled at each other. She took my month’s retainer from her purse and gave it to me, and we went on smiling at one another. And she spoke to me in a voice as soft and tender as her smile.
“Poor Lo. How are you, my dearest darling?”
“Well, you know” — I shrugged — “for a guy who’s been shot out of the saddle a few times, not bad, not bad at all.”
“I’m sorry, Britt. Terribly, terribly sorry. That’s what I was trying to tell you. I haven’t been myself. At least, I hope the self I’ve been showing wasn’t the real Manuela Aloe, but I’m going to be all right now. I–I—”
“Of course, you’re going to be all right,” I said. “I pulled a lousy trick on you, and you paid me off for it. So now we’re all even Stephen.”
“Nothing more will happen to you, Britt! I swear it won’t!”
“Didn’t I just say so?” I said. “Now, be a nice girl and say no more about it, and start reading these beautiful words I’ve written for you.”
She said, “All right, Britt,” swallowing heavily, eyes shining too brightly. Then the tears brimmed over, and she began to weep silently, and I hastily looked away. Because I’d never known what to do when a woman started crying, and I particularly didn’t know what to do when the woman was Manny.
“Aah, Britt,” she said tremulously. “How could I ever have been mean to anyone as nice as you?”
“Doggone it, everyone keeps asking me that!” I said. “And what the heck can I tell them?”
She laughed tearily. She said, “Britt, oh, Britt, my darling!” and then she broke down completely, great sobs tearing through her body.
I held her and patted her head, and that sort of thing. I took out my breast-pocket handkerchief and dabbed her eyes, and honked her nose in it. Conscious that there was something a little nutty about performing such chores for a girl who had almost killed me, even though she hadn’t meant to. Conscious that I again might be playing the chump, and, at the moment, not really caring if I was.
I crossed to my desk, and began putting the pages I had written into an envelope. I took my time about it, giving her time to pull herself together. Rattling on with some backhanded kidding to brighten things up.
“Now, hear me,” I said. “I don’t want you looking like this — bawling and honking your schnozzle and being so disgustingly messy. Us Noble Redmen don’t put up with such white-eye tricks, get me, you silly squaw?”
“G-gotcha…” A small and shaky snicker. “Silly squaw always gets Noble Redman.”