"This is n-n-nutty" she whispered.
I told her that indeed it was. I made a silent excuse to Big Brother. I told him to give me credit for trying.
And then there was the sweet drugging time of resting, all unwound, all mysteries known, somnolent there in a narrow wedge of light from a bathroom door open a few inches. Time moves slowly then, as in an underwater world. She had hitched herself to rest upon me, so distributed that she seemed to have no weight at all. She had her dark head tucked under the angle of my jaw, her hands under me and hooked back over the tops of my shoulders, her deep breasts flattened against me, used loins resting astraddle my right thigh, a spent mild whiskery weight.
From time to time she would take a deep breath, and let it out with little catchings, little pulsings of heat against my throat. With my eyes closed, I slowly and lightly stroked the smooth contours of her back, from the moist warmth of shoulders, down to the papery coolness of the small of her back, the deep curve where she was as narrow as a child, then on to the swelling fruit of hips, richer to the touch than to the eye. When I brought my hand back, if I flattened it, pressed more strongly against the small of her back, it would bring on a little reflexive pulse of her hips, a small clamping of her fingers, a quicker inhalation-all fading echoes of the way it had been.
I felt a fatuous satisfaction in having done so much for her. In spite of all the physical attraction we had felt for each other, there had been the first-time awkwardness about it, the sense of being with a stranger, of learning and guessing and wondering. And it should all have been like that, all half-measures and falterings, leading to the need for mutual reassurances afterward. But suddenly it had all locked and steadied and deepened for us.
She was no myth-figure of frenzies and clawings. Suddenly we had known all this together for a thousand years, and knew no strangeness in each other, and reached down to a deep, simple, powerful pace that released her time and time again until it became continuous for her, a vast lasting, a spending that seemed like forever.
"Golly, golly, golly," she said in a sighing whisper.
"Yes indeed."
"What hit me?"
"You're asking for a slightly bawdy answer, girl."
She chuckled and stretched against me like a cat. "Mmmm," she said. "I had some stage fright, you know. When you put the lights out and came back to me, I was wondering sort of what in the world was I doing here."
"Don't you know?"
She giggled. Then she said, "This is so nice. For afterward. Just holding and sweet and saying jokes. I can say anything to you. I can mention Howie. You don't mind if I mention Howie?"
"No."
"Afterward, it was kind of anxious with him. You know. Like when you have strangers to dinner, and you have to make sure after dinner that everything was all right. Nothing burned and nothing sour. And I wanted to be held afterward, but he always felt sort of wooden, as if it was something he had to do, and I felt unwelcome. You hold me as if you like holding me, darling. And, my God, I don't have to ask how it was. Not for me and not for you. My God, I don't ever have to wonder about it. If there is any more than that, they better not invent it, because people couldn't stand it."
She hitched up, shoved her black curls back, leaned on my chest and kissed the end of my nose. "Maybe you are too damn smart," she said. "Maybe it's all a bunch of darn technique or something."
"Don't start doubting anything."
She scowled down at me, her face in the reflection of the light that angled across her white shoulder. "Do you understand I'm not a bum? I definitely made up my mind to make you hustle me into bed."
"Stop feeling insecure, Nina. You're losing the glow."
"There were three boys before Howie, and one was that horrid little marriage, but each time it was forever. And with Howie too. You know I always felt it would be cheap and nasty and degrading to just… make love with a man without it being all set up to be forever. I mean a woman makes deals, doesn't she? We want security, so we trade the body for the deal, and the pleasure gets thrown in as a bonus. But the one time in my life I feel… well, lewd and reckless and maybe a little bit selfdestructive, it turns out to be the very most there ever was for me, more than I knew there could be, damn it. But this wasn't just for recreation. It was more than that. I'm not a tramp. But maybe I'm not what I thought I was, either."
She settled back the way she had been, tucking her hands under me. She sighed. "Talk, talk, talk. I just never felt so… so unwound and undone and sweetened. Oh boy, the constant miracle of me. Bores talk endlessly about themselves. Keep patting me. I don't want to lose the glow. I don't want to go back out into the cold world. Darling, am I talking too much?"
"No."
"If I stopped babbling would you like to have a nap?"
"No."
She laid in thoughtful stillness for a little rime, then pulled her right arm free and rested her curled fist on my chest. "I want to keep on feeling good, but I'm beginning to get scared again. In a different way. Tell me everything is all right."
"I give too many lectures."
"You have to talk to me before you turn into a stranger again, dear."
"Reassurances? What do you want of me? Do you want me to buy back your self-respect by telling you I love you?"
She stiffened. She pushed herself up quickly. She sat, facing me, hugging her legs, her canted head resting on her knees, the round of her hip fitting into my waist. "That was kind of a cruel dirty cold thing to say, Trav."
"Shock treatment."
"What the hell good does it do?"
"By feeling insecure about our making love, Nina, you make the inference we are a pair of cheap people involved in some cheap pleasant friction. Pull on the pants and walk away, adding up the score. I think we're interested in each other, involved with each other, curious about each other. This was a part of exploring and learning. When it's good you learn something about yourself too. If the spirit is involved, if there is tenderness and respect and awareness of need, that's all the morality I care about. Take your choice, honey. It's up to you. You can look at us from the inside, and we can be Nina Gibson and Travis McGee, heightened and brightened and expanded by something close and rare and dear. Or you can look at it from the outside, and then it makes you that silly little broad I banged when I was up in New York. And it turns me into playboy McGee, smirking and winking. It turns an importance into a cruddy diversion."
She closed her eyes. In the path of bathroom light her face looked small and pale and still. Her hands were clasped. Her cheek still rested on her round knees. It is one of the lovely and classic postures of a woman.
She opened her eyes and said, "I think I can accept that, if I keep trying. But be patient. I've got a lot of cruddy old conservative traditional ideas about this kind of thing. I don't even know why I wanted to seduce you. I felt terribly wicked and reckless. If I say something now, will you promise not to take it the wrong way?"
"All right."
"I love you. And I'm not trying to buy back anything. Or claim anything. Or promote anything."
"Thank you, Nina."
She smiled. "That was the only right thing you could have said. You're welcome. Love is a gift, not a bargain. That's something to learn, I guess. But what could you have learned from me?"
"That a nineteen-inch waist is delicious."
"Please don't make jokes."
"I learned that I'm growing older."
"What do you mean by that?"
"There was a very special sweetness about you I couldn't identify Nina. A sad, ceremonial, ritualistic sweetness. It became a kind of a love rite."
"I sensed a little of that, darling."
"And there was a strange feeling of familiarity, a haunted feeling. Now I know what made it so special, an odd little feeling that you might be my very last bitter-sweet girl, the last one I will ever know with such an unused flavor of innocence about her, an almost childish wonder and intensity. It made me feel that so much of your life is ahead of you, and I have used up so much of mine."
"Don't," she whispered. "I want you to be glad about me."
"I am. I don't go hunting for regret. Maybe when joy is a little conditional, it's sharper."
"Darling, I don't feel childish and I don't feel innocent, and God knows I'm a long long way from feeling unused. Don't patronize me. I really think of myself as grown up. I earn a hundred and sixty dollars a week. I've buried the man I was going to marry. I wasn't a whimpering little ninny, was I? I made love like a grown woman. Please don't turn me into the symbolic girl in some sad little self-involved drama of McGee. As you said, I'm Nina Gibson. I'm not typical of anything but me. Ceremony? I guess I'm glad it was ceremonious for us. But no alligator tears, darling Trav. And if this doesn't sound too insane, I think I would like to go to that party. I want to put something in between us and us. I want a thinking time."
"Sure."
She uncurled and leaned and kissed me and then got up. She glanced at me. The shaft of light touched the outside of my right thigh, the ugliness of the long guttered scar-deep, puckered, banded with the white welts of shiny tissue.
She made a little whistling suck of air through her teeth, then reached and traced the length of the scar with her healing fingertips. That is the test of a total woman. The squeamish ones shy away with sick face. They are the half women, the cringing delicate ones, who are never worth a damn in bed. A complete woman, more than any man could ever be, is involved in the realities, the elemental dynamics of life, the blood and pain and mess of it, cleaning and healing. In this is all the enduring lustiness of their purposes and their needs.
"They hurt you," she said. This, too, is one of the elemental statements of life.
"I used to have a romantic limp."
"I shouldn't wonder."
"It got infected, and I wasn't in a situation where I could get it treated."
"Why not?"
"Some people were looking for me."
"You could have lost your leg."
"They told me that, too."
Nothing had changed since I had last attended a party in that area, some four years before. I could identify the types-the fierce, sad, bearded young men and their braless girls in ballet shoes, the Petulant Fairy, the Orgiastic Dancer, the Symbolic Negro, the Brave Couples, the Jealous Dike, Next Year's Playwright, the Girl who would Throw-Up-Later-On, the Symbolic Communist, the Traditional Nymphomaniac, the Eager Tourist, and the Wise Old Sculptor with Bad Breath.
I kept seeing my Nina, always on the far side of the room, in a dark green fuzzy-soft dress, a necklace of gold coins. I had zippered her into that dress, and made of that small ceremony a delaying game that nearly canceled our attendance. Whenever I met her blue glance across the room, we were as alone as if none of the others existed.
People kept drifting up and digging at me to see what manner of animal this might be. A bone-thin blonde with a big bite mark on her sallow neck came arid leaned loosely upon me and said, "Cruddy bottles and tubes and pots. She had a teenyweeny lil talent, but it was honest. Right? Where do you fit in, buster boy? You square as that other one, that investment type?"
"I'm in marine hardware," I said earnestly.
"You're in what, buster?"
"Leisure-time America has taken to the waterways. A boating America is a healthy America."
She unhooked herself and peered at me. "Oh dear Jesus," she said.
"We're launching a new line of nylon cleats in decorator colors."
She worked thin lips as though considering spitting, and then drifted away, scratching herself.
A round young man with blond bangs explained how he and a darling friend of his would each write exactly five pages of description of the same sexual experience, using the same typewriter and the same spacing, and then they would cut the pages in half, vertically, and paste them together, so that the left half of each page was written by a different person than the one who wrote the right half. Then a third darling friend would retype the ten-page manuscript, sticking in any bridge words that struck his fancy.
"It's the duality of it that makes it so magical," he said. "It's truly a complex of our images. Charles thinks we should publish, now that we have fifteen of them. We're selling shares at fifty dollars."
"I'm in marine hardware," I said.
"Oh?"
"Maybe you could try that system to write us some copy on our new imitation-teak decking."
"Surely you jest."
"You could check it out with the agency. They use some way-out stuff sometimes. You know. Like Picasso. Those guys."
"Like Picasso," he said faintly. "Those guys." He tottered off, fingering his bangs.
I met a few nice ones, Nina's special friends, a girl with good and steady eyes, and a wry and likeable man who worked for a publishing house. They were properly protective of her, looking me over with great care, giving a dubious approval. I stalked Nina into a corner and said, "Had enough of this?"
"Let's see if we can last ten more horrible minutes."
"Five," I said, looking into blue, down into blue, teetering on the edge of blue depths. She bit her lips and eyes widened. "Three," she said.
"Minutes or seconds?"
"Find my coat and I'll go say goodby for us."
So we rolled home in taxi-laughter and climbed the stairs, and with slow and loving care and myriad interruptions, I undressed her into the rowdy bed. We gamboled and romped like love-struck kids until we sobered into our ultimate ceremony and this time she called to me. "Trav, Tray, Trav isssss!" It was a night of small entangled sleeps and awakenings. Our uses seemed to deepen the hunger rather than blunt or diminish it. We became more violently sensitized to each other, more skilled and knowing in the plunder.
It is a rare thing, that infatuation which grows with each sating, so that those caresses which are merely affection and the gratitude of release and sleepy habit turn in their own slow time into the next overture, the next threshold, the next unwearied increment of heat and need, using and knowing, learning and giving, new signs and signals in a private and special language, freshened heats and scents and tastes, sweetened gasps of fitting thus, knowing this, learning of that, rediscovering the inexhaustible here, the remorseless now.
In an early sunlight of Sunday I dressed slowly. She lay foundered and pungent in the turmoiled bed, deep in her honeyed sleep. when I was ready to go, I sat on the edge of the bed and kissed her salty temple and a smudged eyelid. She murmured and slowly raised a hundredweight of head and peered at me from a small sleep-sodden face. Then she lunged and hung soft arms around my neck, sagging heavily against me, and mumbled, "Doan go way."
"I'll be back."
"Um."
"You get some sleep, darling."
"Uh huh."
I kissed her and caressed her, and she began to stir at once into her sensitized response. I laughed and unlocked her arms and laid her back down. I covered her up, tucked her in, patted the high round mound of her hip. She murmured and was immediately asleep. I fixed the blinds to darken the room, and left her there.
I decided to walk until I found a cruising cab, but after two blocks decided to walk all the way. There was a rasp of beard on my jaws and my eyes felt sandy. There is an odd feeling some would call the post-coital depression. I felt drab, as if my muscles were no longer firmly affixed to the bone, as if the bone itself had become leaden and weighty. Such a hunger, such a using-up, seemed part of a pattern of betrayal. Betrayal of the blinded brother, and of a dead man I had never known, and of the girl herself. Perhaps that was the reason for sadness, the awareness of a merciless using. I had been strongly attracted by the strange freshness of her, her flavor of being unused, a kind of clear-eyed innocence. Virginity is a very relative term.
Walking the empty streets I convinced myself that I had thoroughly eroded the very thing which had attracted me. It was a mournful and romantic concept. She had the look of a girl who had never spent such a night as the one just past. And her body had all the tastes and flavors of discovery. Every weary lover can, with just a little trouble, turn himself into an insufferable horse's ass. I had the impertinence to mourn my Nina's loss of innocence. Conventional McGee, guilty debaucher of girls. I fancied that when she awoke, when she remembered all, she might feel appalled and stricken by too many rude and undignified uses, efforts which by light of day she would think grotesque. The wearied lover becomes very stately and very indignant at himself. He is a Tory, despising his own bacchanal.
When I got up to my room the red light on my phone was blinking. The operator told me that Mrs. Drummond had called me several times, and that her last message was to return her call whenever I got back. It was twenty after eight.
The same maid I had talked to before answered the phone. A Gabor accent. I wondered if that was some kind of type casting. She had me wait. I waited five minutes.
Terry Drummond barked into the phone. "Tomcatting, were you? Are you sober, sweetie?"
"Completely."
"The office pig is joining me for brunch, here at the hotel."
"What about Connecticut?"
"This is more interesting. Is there any chance she might know you or know anything about you?"
"No."
"Good. She is meeting me at one. I want you to arrive at two-thirty. To meet me. I'll tell her I'm expecting you. Then I shall make a horrible scene after you get there. Just follow my lead, sweetie. I am going to be a sickening bitch. It's a character bit I'm used to. Then I shall sweep out and leave you with the pig. I'll give her a bit of a going-over too, so then you'll be fellow victims."
"What good does that do?"
"Are you certain you aren't drunk, sweetie? When we talked, you seemed like quite a clever shifty fellow. And terribly attractive in a sort of brown brutal way. You must be enormously successful with shop girls and such. Why should the office pig be less vulnerable? Cozy up to her, sweetie. You would be a nice change for her, after poor Charlie. And we do want to find out what the hell is going on, don't we? Just bat those terrible pale gray eyes at her, and show your white teeth and bulge your muscles a little. She'll go all weak in the knees."
"Oh, naturally."
"Well… didn't I?"
"You have notoriously weak knees, Terry."
"You're such a bastard. See you here at two-thirty."
I undressed. I showered long, rinsing away any subtle pungencies of love, hung out my do-not-disturb sign, left a call and toppled into bed.