“I have no real use for it.”
“Hombre,” the Alcalde Peor said. “Are you feeling all right? Do you feel OK?”
“Quite,” said Thomas Hudson. “I’m quite OK, thank you very much.”
“How was the trip?” Honest Lil asked from her stool at the bar. Thomas Hudson looked at her and saw her again for the first time. She looked considerably darker and much wider.
“It was a nice trip,” he said. “You always meet interesting people when you travel.”
Honest Lil put her hand on his thigh and squeezed it and he was looking down the bar, away from Honest Lil, past the Panama hats, the Cuban faces, and the moving dice cups of the drinkers and out the open door into the bright light of the square, when he saw the car pull up and the doorman opened the rear door, his cap in his hand, and she got out.
It was her. No one else got out of a car that way, practically and easily and beautifully and at the same time as though she were doing the street a great favor when she stepped on it: Everyone had tried to look like her for many years and some came quite close. But when you saw her, all the people that looked like her were only imitations. She was in uniform now and she smiled at the doorman and asked him a question and he answered happily and nodded his head and she started across the sidewalk and into the bar. There was another woman in uniform behind her.
Thomas Hudson stood up and he felt as though his chest was being constricted so that he could not breathe. She had seen him and she was walking down the gap between the people at the bar and the tables toward him. The other woman was following behind her.
“Excuse me,” he said to Honest Lil and to the Alcalde Peor. “I have to see a friend.”
They met halfway down the free corridor between the bar and the tables and he was holding her in his arms. They were both holding hard and tight as people can hold and he was kissing her hard and well and she was kissing him and feeling both his arms with her hands.
“Oh you. You. You,” she said.
“You devil,” he said. “How did you get here?”
“From Camagüey, of course.”
People were looking at them and he picked her off her feet and held her tight against him and kissed her once more then put her down and took her hand and started for a table in the corner.
“We can’t do that here,” he said. “We’ll get arrested.”
“Let’s get arrested,” she said. “This is Ginny. She’s my secretary.”
“Hi, Ginny,” Thomas Hudson said. “Let’s get this mad woman behind that table.”
Ginny was a nice, ugly girl. They were both wearing the same uniform; officers’ blouses without insignia, shirts and ties, skirts, stockings, and brogues. They had overseas caps and a patch on their left shoulders he had not seen before.
“Take your cap off, devil.”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“Take it off.”
“All right.”
She took it off and lifted her face and shook her hair loose and moved her head back and looked at him and he saw the high forehead, the magic rolling line of the hair that was the same silvery ripe-wheat color as always, the high cheekbones with the hollows just below them, the hollows that could always break your heart, the slightly flattened nose, and the mouth he had just left that was disarranged by the kissing, and the lovely chin and throat line.
“How do I look?”
“You know.”
“Did you ever kiss anybody in these clothes before? Or scratch yourself on army buttons?”
“No.”
“Do you love me?”
“I always love you.”
“No. Do you love me right now. This minute.”
“Yes,” he said and his throat ached.
“That’s good,” she said. “It would be pretty awful for you if you didn’t.”
“How long are you here for?”
“Just today.”
“Let me kiss you.”
“You said we’d be arrested.”
“We can wait. What do you want to drink?”
“Do they have good champagne?”