“Use me to solve your problem?”
“I thought you’d jump at the chance. Not because I’m so astonishingly lovely, something that turns all the heads when I walk by. But I’ve had to learn that there is some damn thing about me that seems to work pretty good. I mean if I was in some saloon with Miss International Asparagus Patch, and a man moved in on us because he drew a bead on her, a lot of the time he’d switch targets, and I’ve never known why it happens, but it does. That’s why I was so sure I could pick you up in the bar.”
“You do project a message.”
“Wish I knew what the message reads.”
“I think it says, `Here I am!’ ”
“Darn it. I like men. As men. Six brothers. I was the only girl. I’ve never been able to really be a girl-girl, luncheons and girl talk and all that. But I don’t go shacking around. I love to make love, sure. But it never seemed to be any kind of real necessity, you know? Except now I’m hung up that way with Rick, and I don’t even like him very much. I don’t even know if… it would be any good at all with another man nowadays. I thought you’d be a good way to find out. I thought, once I’d pumped up the nerve, one little opening and Pow. Easier to play drunk. Hardly know you. Won’t see you again. So you come on with these scruples. Or maybe my mysterious whatzit isn’t on your wavelength, dear. Oh, Christ! I feel so awkward and timid and dumb. I never tried to promote a stranger before, honest.”
“So if nothing much happened, wouldn’t you be hung up worse than ever?”
“No. Because it would keep me from having the guts to phone him. After sleeping with you-win, lose, or draw-I’d feel too guilty. And that would give me the time to finally get over it. You see, I always have to go crawling to him. If when he doesn’t hear from me, he comes after me, I don’t know if I can stay in the clear. But… it would give me a pretty good chance.”
She gave that deep long sigh once more. Strange little freckled lady, radiating something indefinable, something lusty and gutsy. Something playtime. So the world is a wide shadowy place, with just a few times, a few corners, where strangers touch. And she could be a partial cure for the random restlessness of the past weeks. OP Doctor McGee. Home therapy. The laying on of hands. Therapeutic manipulation. The hunger that isn’t a damned bit interested in names or faces is always there, needing only a proper fragment of rationalization to emerge. So I drifted my fingertips along the sad curl of her back and found the same old zipper tab and slowly pulled it from nape to stern. She pushed up, swarmy-eyed, hair-tousled, to make the opening gift of her mouth in her acceptance.
But stopped and focused, frowned. “It’s a sad story, okay. But it isn’t that sad! It shouldn’t make a strong man cry.”
“I’m not. You got me in the eye with your elbow a while back.”
Hers was a good laugh, belly laugh, total surrender to laughter, enough for tears, but with no edge of hysteria. While I got the lights, she hung her dress on a hanger and turned the bed down. We left the bathroom door ajar, a strip of light angling across the foot of the bed. She was constricted and muscle-taut and nervous for a time but not for long. And after more unmeasured tune had gone by, I found out just what that mysterious aura was. It was clean, solid, healthy, joyous, inexhaustible girl, all clovery oils and pungencies, long limber waist and torso sophisticating the rhythmic counterpoint of solid, heated, thirsty hips, creating somehow along with release the small awarenesses of new hunger soon to rebuild.
I awakened slowly to the morning sound of her shower and drifted off again, and was awakened a little later by sun-brightness shining into the darkened room, and saw her naked by the double draperies, holding the edge away from the window while she peered out at the day. With her other hand she was foamily scrubbing away at her teeth with my toothbrush and toothpaste.