Moira comes out wound up in a towel, rubbing her short blond hair with another towel.
“Feel me.”
The flesh of her arm is cold-warm, the blood warmth just palpable through her cold smooth skin.
“Let me get up to take a shower.” Moira is sitting in my lap. She won’t get up so I get up with her and walk around holding her in my arms like a child.”
“Don’t,” says Moira.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t take a shower.”
“Why not?”
“I like the way you smell. You smell like Uncle Bud.”
“Who is Uncle Bud?”
“He had a chicken farm out from Parkersburg. I used to go see him Sunday mornings and sit in his lap while he read me the funnies. He always smelled like whiskey and sweat and seersucker.”
“Do I look like Uncle Bud?”
“No, you look like Rod McKuen.”
“He’s rather old.”
“But you both look poetic.”
“I brought along his poems for you.”
“Which ones?”
“The ones about sea gulls.”
“You’ve thought of everything.”
“You’re a lovely girl,” I say, holding and patting her just as I used to pat Samantha when she had growing pains.
“Do you love me?”
“Oh yes.”
“How much?”
“Enough to eat you,” I say and begin to eat her kneecap.
“Enough to marry me?”
“What?”
“Do you love me enough to marry me?”
“Oh yes.”
“Do you know what I’ve always wanted?”
“No.”
“To keep some chickens.”
“All right.”
“Golden banties. You know what?”
“What?”
“That work at the clinic is a lot of bull. I’d love to stay home raising golden banties while you are doing your famous researches.”
“All right.” I suck the cold-warm flesh of her forearm covered by long whorled down. The fine hair rises to my mouth and makes a skein like the tiny ropes that bound Gulliver.
“Could we live in Paradise?”
“Certainly.”
Eating her, I have visions of golden cockerels glittering like topazes in the morning sun in my “enclosed patio.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When will we do that?”
“Whenever you like,” I say, marveling at her big littleness. My arms gauge a secret amplitude in her. She is small and heavy.
“No really. When?”
“When we leave here.”
“When will that be?”
“A week, a month. Perhaps longer.”
“My Lord,” says Moira, straightening in my arms like a child wanting to be put down. “What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid something is going to happen today, in fact is happening now, which will make it impossible for us to leave here for a while. At least until I make sure it’s safe for us either in Paradise or the Center.”
“What do you mean? When I left there this morning, the place was dead as a doornail.”
“For one thing a revolution may have occurred. There is a report that guerrillas from Honey Island are in Paradise. I fear too that there may be disorders today at the political rally near Fedville.”
“You don’t have to go to this much trouble to keep me here, you know.”
“Let me show you something.”
I carry her to the window, where she pulls back the curtain. Five columns of smoke come from the green ridge above the orange tiles of the ice-cream restaurant.
“There was only one fire when I was there earlier.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’re burning the houses on the old 18.”
“O my Lord.”
“But that’s not the worst. I’m afraid my invention has fallen into the wrong hands.”
“What does that mean?”
“Two things. Civil war and a chain reaction in the Heavy Sodium deposits.”
“But I can’t stay here.” Moira straightens in my arms again.
“Why not?”
“I don’t have anything to wear! All I have is the clothes on my back — the clothes in there, that is.”
“Let me show you something else. Open the top drawer.”
She opens it. “What in the world?” The top drawer has underclothes, blouses, slips. The other drawers have skirts, dresses, shorts, etcetera.
“Whose are they?” asks Moira, frowning.
“Yours.”
“Were they your wife’s?”
“No. She’d make two of you.”
“Gollee.” Moira gets down, opens the bottom drawer, sits drumming her fingers on the Gideon. “And what are we going to live on? Love?”
“Let me show you.”
I take her to the closet. She gazes at the crates and cartons stacked to the ceiling, cartons of Campbell’s chicken-and-rice, Underwood ham, Sunmaid raisins, cases of Early Times and Swiss Colony sherry (which Moira likes). And the Great Books stacked alongside.
“That’s enough for a small army.”
“Or for two people for a long time.”
“Who’s going to read all those books?”
“Well read them aloud to each other.”
Think of it: reading Aeschylus, in the early fall, in old Howard Johnson’s, off old I-11, with Moira.
“What about Rod McKuen?”
“He’s over there. Under the Gideon.”
“There’s no pots and pans,” says Moira suddenly.
“The kitchenette’s next door.”
“Good night, nurse.”
“Let me show you something else.” We sit on the bed. “Put this quarter in the slot there.”
The Slepe-Eze starts up and sets the springs gently vibrating.
“Oh no!” Moira’s eyes round. “I guess they had to have this.”
“They?”
“The salesmen.”
“Yes.”
“Those poor lonely men. Think of it.”
“Yes.”
“Making love and dying in a place like this, far from home.”
“Dying?”
“The Death of a Salesman.”
“Right. Come sit in Uncle Bud’s lap.”
“All right. Honey?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s have children.”
“All right.” How odd. The idea of Moira and me having a child is the oddest thing in the world. But why? “First, let’s fix us a drink.”
“All right.”
She sits in my lap and we drink. She insists on whiskey rather than her sherry since that was what the flappers and salesmen drank.
“This beats Knott’s Berry Farm,” she whispers.
“Yes.”
One difference between Moira and my wife, Doris, is that Doris liked motels that were in the middle of nowhere, at the intersection of I-89 and I-23 in the Montana badlands. While Moira likes a motel near a point of interest such as Seven Flags over Texas.
Now we lie in one another’s arms on the humming bed. She is as trim and quick as one of her banty hens. She’s a West Virginia tomboy brown as a berry and strong-armed and — legged from climbing trees.
Cold fogs of air blow over us, Mantovani plays Jerome Kern. “I love classical music,” whispers Moira. The Laughing Cavalier smiles down on us, hundreds of Maryland hunters leap the same fence around the walls.
Locked about one another we go spinning down old Louisiana misty green, slowly revolving and sailing down the summer wind. How prodigal is she with and how little store she sets by her perfectly formed Draw-Me arms and legs.
Now she lies in the crook of my arm, eyes open, tapping her hard little fingernail on her tooth. Her little mind ranges far and wide. She casts ahead, making plans, no doubt, doing my living room over. I took her there once and it was an unhappy business, she keeping her head down and looking up through her eyebrows at Doris’s great abstract enamels that went leaping around the walls like the seven souls of Shiva.