and the plan could be given up. She’d driven just fine, though, mostly;
she never could discern the switch for the headlights, but the night was
almost bright as day.
It was cooler, truly: a little wind in the oaks, night birds and bugs
he didn’t know. From where they were the great illuminated refinery
didn’t look like an industrial installation close at hand but like a huge
city far away. A flare of orange gas burned in the air, beneath the moon.
Prosper and Diane sat close together, she leaning on him, he against
the door.
“Well,” she said. “Well well well.”
He’d been telling her something about himself, the places he’d gone
(not many) and the people he’d known. Also, because she wanted to
know, about the women who had taken up with him, short time or
longer. She listened with care.
“It almost sounds,” she said, “like they picked you out.”
He shrugged.
330 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“I mean, you. I think you attract a special type.”
“Like some women like soldiers. Or airmen.”
That made her laugh, unashamed. He knew she wanted more, but
he kept mum, suggesting it wouldn’t be chivalrous: she could think
there was nothing to tell if she wanted, or that there was.
Maybe to show she was ready to hear anything, she began to tell
him about the Button Babes, and how they’d go after their prizes, the
things they were willing to do to get them. She put her faintly bobbing
head close to his to tell him: “You wouldn’t bleeve what they did. Some
of them.”
“Well you tell me.”
She considered this invitation. He was now her sole support; if he’d
been able to slip out the door she would have slid down across the seat
like a bag of meal. “Okay,” she said. “Have you ever heard of people
doing this?”
She whispered hotly in his ear, not quite intelligibly, her lashes flick-
ing his brow, laughter distorting her words as much as drink and
embarrassment.
“I’ve never heard of that,” he said. He was lying, and that was
wrong, and he knew it, but he did it anyway. “Never.”
“Never? See?”
“What did they call that?”
“It doesn’t have a name. It has a number.” She drew it on his chest.
“How exactly would you do it?”
“Well see I don’t know because I wasn’t like that, but they said they
did and they even said it was fun.”
“They did.”
She reared back a little, as though he was doubting her. “Wull
yes.”
“I mean I guess, but personally I’d have to see,” he said, and she
seemed just drunk enough not to guess where he was carrying this, or
maybe he was all wet and she knew just where they were headed. His
usual cunning was also a little blunted by those Cuba libres. He turned
to put his arm across her lap.
“They did everything,” she said thoughtfully. “But just to not get a
baby.”
“There’s other ways not to get a baby.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 331
“I know,” she said, as though well of course she did. And for a
moment she regarded him with goofy bliss, and for all he knew he did
the same. He’d put before her a choice between the safe but unlikely
and the regular but risky, and then taken away the risk of the regular,
so it was not a choice but a banquet. Rather, he’d got her to put it
before him: him, poor starveling who’d never partaken, as she was
probably imagining. But he’d only think all that later. Now they kissed,
her mouth tasting of the Coke and the rum and her own flavor. After a
time she put her cheek against his with great tenderness and with one
hand began unbuttoning his pants.
This was a first for him, as it happened, and she somehow seemed
to know it; she was tender and tentative and didn’t have the hang of it,
no surprise, and he was tempted to help, but no, he just lay cheek to
cheek with her as she did her best: she gasped or cried a small cry as
she at length achieved it, maybe surprised. Confused then as to how to
tidy up, the stuff had gone everywhere, like a comic movie where the
more you wipe it the farther it spreads, never mind, they laughed and
then she slept against him as he sat awake and watched clouds eat the
moon and restore it again. She woke, deflated a little, not ashamed he
hoped, and started the car—bad moment when it coughed and humped
once and then failed, but she got it going as he looked on helplessly. At
the dark house on Z Street she parked the car askew and said she was
coming in to wash up, if that was all right.
What was marvelous to him then was that, when they were drawn
to his bedroom by the force of some logic obvious to them both, she
wanted to help him take off his pants and divest him of his braces,
which she unbuckled slowly and unhandily as he sat on the bed. She
raised her eyes to him now and then as she worked, with an angel-of-
mercy smile from which he could not look away; he wondered if she
thought that he needed her helping hand, as he had in the car by the
river, and was willing to give it; this act seemed even more generous,
unnecessary as it was. When that was done, though, he drew her to
him with strong arms that perhaps she didn’t expect, and divested her
with quick skill, which also maybe she didn’t expect.
When she awoke again he was deep asleep. She washed again and
dressed. Now how had that happened, she’d like to know, but gave
herself no answer. At least he’d known the use of the present as the BBs
332 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
used to call it, oh so long ago that was, which was good because she’d
never. She felt a strange trickle down her leg, reminding her of then,
and she stopped, overcome with something like utter weariness. She
guessed she’d drunk a lot. What must he think of her. She walked
around the little dark house, so unlike a house, and found another bed.
She’d have to think about this, and about Danny, and about every-
thing: she’d have to think. She’d have to remember. Remember who he
was; remember—she sort of laughed—who she was.
When Pancho came home after the Bomb Bay closed, he noticed
that the Zephyr had somehow misaligned itself with the curb, odd, and
when he went into his bedroom he found Diane in her blue dress asleep
there like Goldilocks, one white-socked foot hanging off the bed, an
unbuckled shoe falling from the foot, which just at that moment
dropped off and woke her. She rose to see Pancho in the doorway. He
stood aside as she walked past him with a nod and a smile, head lifted,
and went out into the night.
4
This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“I don’t understand. I mean we did everything right.” Dimly
Prosper remembered Larry the shop steward, grinning at him in the
pharmacy: Lucky if they don’t break. “Are you sure?”
“They did that test with the rabbit.”
“Oh.”
“I guess I’m just real fruitful,” Diane said, blowing her wet nose.
“Oh Jesus what’ll we do.”
They sat perfectly still in the Aero office, talking to but facing away
from each other, as though those passing by or working, who could
look in, might discern what they talked about.
“Maybe it’ll just go away, like the other one.”
“I don’t think you can count on that,” Prosper said.