She had newspapers spread on the grass, under a metal chaise, a piece of lawn furniture originally pale blue. The blue paint had been chipped off by hard use. She was giving it a spray coat of flat black DeRusto from a spray can. She wore very brief and very tight fawn-colored stretch shorts, and a faded green blouse with a sun back, and ragged old blue boat shoes. I stood in the shade within comfortable conversation range. She had a deep tan. She moved swiftly and to good effect, limber as a dancer when she bent and turned, and able to sit comfortable as a Hindu, fawn rear propped on the uptilted backs of the boat shoes. She was sweaty with sun and effort, her back glossy, accenting the play of small hard muscles under her hide as she moved.
She turned, tossing her black hair back, and said, “I ran off at the mouth Sunday night. It isn’t like me. I must have been lonely.”
“Funny. I had the feeling I talked too much. Had the feeling I’d bored you, Janice.”
“Excuse me, but I forgot your first name.”
“Travis.”
“Okay, Travis. So we were a couple of refugees or something. And excuse me for something else. Meg got a glimpse of you and thought you looked very interesting. You know, she has been covering for me, but she doesn’t know who I’ve been seeing. She decided it had to be you, so I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. She thinks it is awfully sophisticated for you to bring my husband home drunk so we can put him to bed and go out together. Hmmm. Have I missed anything?”
“That brace over there on the left, under the seat.”
“Where? Oh, I see it. Thanks.”
She covered the last blue neatly and precisely and straightened up, cocked her head to the side, shook the paint bomb. The marble rattled around inside. “Just about completely gone. I love to have something be just enough instead of too much or too little. Want a drink or a cold beer or anything? I’ve been promising myself a beer.”
She led me into the cool house and the cheerful kitchen. She tried to thrust a glass upon me, then admitted that she too preferred it right from the bottle. She leaned against the sink, elegant ankles crossed, uptilted the bottle, and drank until her eyes watered.
“Hah!” she said. “Meg probably saw you drive up. She’ll think this is terribly soigne too, a little visit just before lunch. She’s probably lurking about in the shrubbery, panting.”
“As long as I’m nominated, don’t you think I ought to know where we’ve kept all these other assignations?”
“Not assignations. Just to be together. And talk. Talk about everything under the sun. Hold hands like school kids. Cry a little sometimes. Hell! Why shouldn’t a man be allowed to cry?”
“They do, from time to time.”
“Not enough. Not nearly enough. Well, we had to meet where there would be absolutely no chance of anyone seeing us together.”
“Pretty good trick.”
“Not terribly difficult, really. We’d arrange a time and both drive to the huge parking lot at the Courtney Plaza and once we had spotted each other, you’d drive out and I would follow you and you would find a place where we could park both cars and then sit together in one of them and not be seen. Out in one of the groves, or on a dark residential street, or out near the airport, someplace he
.. you thought we’d be safe.”
“How would we arrange the date in the first place?”
“You won’t have to know that.”
“Is that what we were going to do last Saturday? Spend the whole day, or most of it, sitting around in some damned automobile holding hands and crying?”
“Please don’t make cheap fun of it.”
“Sorry.”
“Saturday it might have become something else. Second phase of the affair, or something. Maybe it’s just as well Rick spoiled it. I keep yearning for someplace where we could be really alone, really safe. Someplace with walls around us and a roof over us, and a door that will lock. But not a motel, for God’s sake. I don’t think I could stand a motel. And that would be a risk. You see he… he’s in a position where a lot depends upon people having total confidence in him. It would be more than just… the appearance of infidelity.”