But it didn’t work out that way at all. She was quiet after Jeff and Stella left. I helped clean up the place, waiting every minute for the explosion. It just didn’t come. We went on up to bed.
Right here, in order to tell how that night was, I guess I’ve got to explain a little about the physical side of our marriage.
I’d never been with a woman until we were married. I kind of resented her knowing more about it than I did, but in some ways I was glad she did because it made things a lot easier at first. She was always moody about it. By that I mean that sometimes she’d seem to want to and a lot of the time she wouldn’t. It was generally pretty quick the times she’d want to, and the times she didn’t she acted like she was bored and just wished it would be over.
Anyway, on this night after Jeff and Stella went home and we went up to bed with me waiting for the explosion, it didn’t come. She fooled around and I was in bed first. Finally, she came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway with the light from the bathroom shining right through some sort of filmy thing I’d never seen on her before. I guessed later that she’d bought it for the trip to Florida, after I knew why she bought it.
She stood there for a long time. As I said, I’ve never seen a better figure on a woman in my life. She turned the light off, finally, and I could hear the rustling of her as she came toward me in the darkness, hear the rustling, and then smell a new kind of heavy perfume she had put on, and then feel her strong arms around me as she brought her lips down on mine there in our dark bedroom.
When it was all over, she lay in my arms and she said, “This is the way it should always be, darling. Now you know why I want us to go to Florida. I want a new start for our marriage. I want a second honeymoon, a proper honeymoon this time.”
Well, I knew I wanted it to happen again just that way, and if I had to go to Florida to guarantee it, then I would go to Florida. It was as though I hadn’t even been married before. She was like a stranger, and I fell in love with her all over again.
In the morning she called Stella Jeffries. I told Jeff down at the plant. And it was all set.
Rufus Stick, the director of purchasing, tried to dissuade me. He said that the fall was a bad time to leave. But when he saw that I really wanted that time, he went along with it. We both knew that he owed me a lot. I devised the new spot check control of our perpetual inventory system and installed it. It works like a charm. And I set up the statistical control of inspection of incoming materials and revamped our point-of-reorder control system so that production hasn’t been on our necks in over a year. Besides, Rufus Stick knew that I didn’t want his job. I couldn’t handle the contacts with the top brass of other sections. I also owed Rufus a lot. He let me do my work in my own way, and raised me when he could. It was a good working relationship. He knew he had a loyal man under him who knew his job, and I knew that Rufus would protect me in every way he could.
We settled on Friday, October 22, as my final working day and I would report back on Monday, November 15. As soon as that was arranged. I phoned Jeff from my office and he said he would get to work on it. He phoned me that evening at home and said he’d gotten approval to start his vacation on Wednesday, October 27, and he would have to be back at work on Thursday, November 17. It gave him only twenty-two days to my twenty-three, but that was because of starting in the middle of the week.
I guess that he didn’t have much trouble arranging it because, from what I could hear, he was the fair-haired boy in sales. They were using him more and more on contacts with the advertising agency in addition to his regular job, and the new campaign he had worked on was turning out to be very successful. Contact work like that demands a talent I just don’t have. I find it very hard to talk to strangers. Once when I was in grammar school I tried to sell soap from door to door in my own neighborhood. I would press my finger against the door frame beside the bell rather than press the bell.
It was about a week after that when Linda had the Jeffries and the Carbonellis over one night. Stu brought his 35 millimeter slides and a portable projector and we took down a picture so Stu could flash the slides on the wall. Stu kept moaning because he had to take his vacation in July this year, and kept telling us how he envied us. The slides were fine. He gave me a lot of information on the fishing and said he’d even bring some good snook plugs to the office and leave them with me. Betty gave the girls the pitch on the marketing and so on. They gave us the name of the man who owned the beach cottages and rented them himself. Jeff said he would write on a company letterhead and make the arrangements. The man’s name was Dooley. Stu said he was a retired construction worker who had built the two beach cottages himself. Stu said the only bad thing about their vacation had been that during the last week of it the other cottage had been rented to some South Carolina people with four noisy children, but if we wrote early enough and sewed up both cottages, we could avoid that.
Stu and Betty had to leave early because of their sitter. We sat around and talked about the pictures and what we would take. We had a mild argument about which car we would take. It was mild because I certainly didn’t want to subject Jeff and Stella to driving back in our six-year-old sedan, not after the cars he was used to driving. Jeff was perceptive about it. He said, “Look, kids, I’ve got a new one on order for delivery next month. By October it will be nicely broken in, and there’ll be plenty of room in it for all our junk.” So we left it at that.
Jeff heard from Dooley ten days later, saying that we could rent both cottages for the full month of November, and he would let us take occupancy the last week in October. He wanted a hundred and fifty apiece for the cottages, plus four fifty for the Florida tax. It was twenty-five more than Stu and Betty had paid, but still reasonable, I gave Jeff my check for my share, and he mailed the full rental to Dooley. Dooley wrote back and said he would be away when we arrived, but we could pick up the keys to both places at Jethro’s Market in Hooker, and he said that before he left he’d make certain that everything was shipshape at the two cottages. He said he hoped we’d have a good vacation, and if there was any trouble about anything, any repairs to be made, we should please see Lottie Jethro at the market.
We had one of the hottest, stickiest summers on record. Even the baking city couldn’t subdue Linda’s enthusiasm for the trip. It seemed to mean an awful lot to her. It puzzled me a bit. I could understand how she could reach such a peak of enthusiasm if we were going to Paris or Rome or something, but she was brittle and nervous and quick, as though she expected the sandy expanses of Verano Key to contain the glamor and excitement of a royal court. I can see now how, in a special sense, that is what Linda went there to find.
Jeff’s car came and I drove it a couple of times that summer when the four of us went out together. It was low, long, pale gray and powerful. It had power brakes, power steering, power seats, power windows and startling acceleration. It rode so smoothly that it would be up to seventy before you were aware that you were speeding. When I went back to my own car after driving that monster I had the feeling that I was sitting nine feet off the ground and all the fenders were chattering. I must say that I looked forward to driving that thing all the way to Florida.
Actually, we did not see as much of the Jeffries that summer as I had thought we would. They belonged to the country club and we didn’t. On the hot days Jeff would go right to the club from the office, and Stella would be there by the pool waiting for him. I expected Linda to start her annual campaign to get me to join, but she didn’t. She was very easy to get along with that summer. She sang when she worked. She took sunbaths in our small back yard. I had made a frame for her and tacked striped canvas on it so she could have privacy. She sunbathed in the nude, oiling herself heavily so as not to harshen her skin, until she was the same even golden tan from head to toe.