Her hands were well trained, maybe from years of describing things while dancing. Now, they described me. Was my back really my back, before Jessica swept one hand from the top of my head to the hinge of my knees? No, it had been a jumble of parts, the nape of my neck to keep my necktie up, a pair of chummy shoulders, a length of spine, a prat for pratfalls, legs for hightailing it out of there, all certainly previously kissed and bitten and even spanked, but not this: all me. I felt like I could think great thoughts with my skin. She curled her fists into my armpits, then ran her hands (opening) down the underside of my arms past my elbows, till we were chest to chest and her fingers were around my faulty wrists and I wished I could bend them, to take her hands, maybe if I just tried, and then she stretched her arms a little wider, and suddenly we were palm to palm, palm to palm. She had quite a wingspan, my wife. She nudged my nose with her nose, she fluttered her lashes on my eyelids. Eskimo kiss, butterfly kiss, soul kiss, when I was a young man I collected these kisses the way some daft old women amass spoons from every state in the union, acquiring, until they run out of holes in the collection, dozens of miniature spoons with symbols on the end to pledge their allegiances, a beehive for the beehive state, a keystone for Pennsylvania, a full set and nothing to eat dinner with. Jessica rubbed her forehead against mine, as though she were a patient foreign-language instructor: how would I know what a chin was, unless I felt another chin upon it? Repeat after me: cheekbone, temple, left ear, right ear, toes. I hadn’t known. Really she was three inches shorter than me, but in bed she could make herself my height. In vaudeville I’d seen an act like this, a guy who stood beside a taller man — the short guy slowly elongated himself, put a fraction of an inch between each vertebra, a fraction of an inch at the top of his kneecap and another at the bottom, until he stood next to a shorter man, the same one. The audience blinked, then applauded. That was the whole trick, and it didn’t seem much till Jessica did it: she rubbed her instep over my ankle, then my instep, then the bottom of my foot, never losing track of our kiss, the pulses in our wrists against each other.
She signed up at the Hollywood Canteen as a hostess, of course — we all had to do our part, and Jessica’s specialty was dancing. We went together: I served drinks and dinner, and Jessica danced with soldiers and sailors and flyers: you could see guys walk away from her, delighted by the dance and confused by the conversation. Did she have a boyfriend? they’d ask. Married, she’d answer. Pretend you’re my girl, they’d say, and she’d smile and say she couldn’t. Sure you can, they’d say, but she couldn’t, she was incapable. In some ways she had nearly no imagination, but I can’t say it bothered me much in this instance.
“You let your wife dance with anybody,” Rocky said, on one of the nights he showed up at the Canteen; we’d performed earlier in the evening.
“Only with guys in uniform,” I told him. Well, if the most valuable thing I had to give to the war effort was my wife, I’d do it, as long as she came home with me at night. And danced in sight of me at all times. And never, ever got talked into a game of make-believe, not with the suavist officer or the most innocent about-to-be-shipped-out sailor boy.
Still, soon enough she got pregnant and even the sailor and soldier boys had a hard time pretending she wasn’t another guy’s girl.
At one elbow, excessive Rocky; at the other, my abstemious wife. When Jessica and I settled into married bliss, it was all I could do not to compare her to Rocky, and not always favorably. She had plenty of rules. She didn’t drink; she hated rich foods; she could deliver a lecture against gravy that made it sound as though gravy had invaded Poland. She couldn’t bear to hear people rhapsodize about food. She strictly forbade indoor smoking.
“This is just a little cigar,” Rocky told her one night, when he’d come over and demanded an old-fashioned midwestern meal; Jess cooked him a cheese omelette, oeufs Des Moines. She’d sent home the cook, an Irish nineteen-year-old named Nora who specialized in rich cream sauces — liquid gout, said Rocky — and mashed turnips. Jess barely tolerated her, torn between hating hired help and despising housework.
“Nevertheless,” Jess said.
“This cigar is next to nothing,” said Rock. But he was already genially sliding it into his jacket pocket. He’d brought over three bottles of champagne and two of wine, all for the three of us, and kept pouring glasses for Jess that she never touched. He emptied his water glass and tried again, as though if he booby-trapped the table with enough vessels she’d eventually fall in.
“Mr. Carter,” Jessica said. From the very start that was their joke, a cheerful and annoyed formality. “I don’t drink wine.”
“A whiskey woman, then. No? Martinis. Gimlets?”
“Coffee,” said Jessica.
“I’m just curious,” he said. “If you wanted to have a drink, what would you have? I’ll buy you the best. Vodka? Or kirsch: I bet kirsch. I once knew a ballerina—”
“I haven’t the slightest,” said Jess. “I’ve never tasted alcohol.”
“Really?” I said. I mean, I knew she didn’t drink, I just didn’t know she never had. I snagged the bottom of one of the glasses Rocky had poured her and sloshed some wine onto the tablecloth, a gift from my sister Ida. Jess got up and went to the bar for some club soda to sop up the stain.
“You married this guy sober?” Rocky said.
“Drunk with love,” Jess said wryly, which even so delighted me.
“You’ve been to Paris,” said Rocky. “You lived in New York. Sometime, somewhere, a toast, a prayer—”
“Never,” Jess said.
“Grounds for divorce,” Rocky told me, but of course I loved it: I loved any new thing I learned about her.
I stood up from the table. “We’ll smoke outside.”
“Oh, goody,” he said, “that’s allowed?”
From the lanai, he surveyed my grounds, as if he couldn’t quite figure out what the place was missing. “She’s something. Is she ever something.”
“She’s got ideas,” I offered.
“I noticed.”
I crossed my legs on my chaise longe. “I was hoping the two of you would hit it off.”
He laughed then. “We are. Can’t you tell? We adore each other.”
“Good,” I said dubiously.
“No! Ask her. Jess—” he called.
“Don’t do that. She’ll lie. She’s very polite. . ”
“No she isn’t,” he said.
“No she isn’t,” I agreed.
“But okay. You ask her. Later tonight.” He pulled out the cigar and looked at it. “Oh,” he said, “if only someone would make me straighten up and fly right.”
“Penny’s not the girl for that,” I told him.
“She’s not the girl for anything.” He twirled the cigar with the tips of his fingers, let it slide down the back of his hand, caught it, twirled it again. “She’s gone for good, this time.”
“She’ll be back.”
“Not this time. I told her not to. Penny can take anything except a lack of admiration. I told her”—he sighed—“told her I wasn’t attracted to her. Not after that Sukey business.”
“That Sukey business.”
“Well, really. It’s not that she slept with a girl. It’s that it was Sukey. If Penny was looking, I would have found her a nice date. No, I would have! Some dancer. But Sukey Decker? Who hates me?”