Again she drove the little red car. She whirred into the Sultana parking area, cutting off her lights as she did so to keep the front boys from noticing us and whistling her up to the entrance. She unstrung her bead, put her hat on the shelf in back, said, “Um” and splayed her little fingers on the nape of my neck and impacted a kiss with sufficient know-how to leave my knees feeling loose and fragile as I strode to my rental car after she had driven away.
At twenty to midnight, aboard the Busted Flush, after I had washed up after my plate of scrambled eggs and onion, I got the little sheet she had torn out of her notebook. It was oyster-colored parchment, thin and stiff, with tear-out perforations down the left side. And in the bottom right-hand corner was imprinted, in the plainest imaginable type face, in gold: Love, Mary Smith.
I direct-dialed her number.
It rang five times, and then her muffled, silky voice said, “Mmmmm?”
“T. McGee, ma’am.”
I heard a small yowly yawn. “W’time zit, sweetie?”
“Quarter to Cinderella, almost.”
“Mmm. I was having the most interesting dream about you. And I have on this interesting little yellow night garment I bought in Tokyo. And I dumped this and that in the big hot tub, and so I smell interesting, sort of like between sandalwood and old rose petals, and something else mixed in. Some kind of spicy smell that makes me think of Mexico. Do you like Mexico as much as I do? How soon will you be here, my darling?”
“That’s a very good question.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, somehow.”
“That makes two of us.”
“You sound so depressed. Troubles?”
“Out of the blue. Now we’ve ordered up some food and we’re waiting for a third party, and by dawn’s early light my guess is that we’ll be a. hundred miles from here looking at the property in question, on the Tamiami Trail, just this side of Naples.”
“Oh poo!”
“I think I’d use a word with a little more bite to it.”
She gave a long sigh. “Well,” she said, “down, girl. Bear me in mind, will you?”
“Get all the rest you need. And I will phone you precisely at twelve noon tomorrow and we’ll get out the old starting blocks again.”
“The old track shoes. Bang. They’re off. Anyway, as long as you might have some faint idea what you’re missing, dear, drive a very hard bargain. You should be motivated, God knows.”
After I hung up, I packed a pipe and took it topsides and stretched out on a dew-damp sunpad, down out of the bite of the breeze, and looked at the cold stars.
Where is the committee, I thought. They certainly should have made their choice by now. They are going to come aboard and make their speeches and I’m going to blush and scuff and say, “Shucks, fellas.” The National Annual Award for Purity, Character, and Incomprehensible Sexual Continence in the face of an Ultimate Temptation. Heavens to Betsy, any American Boy living in the Age of Heffner would plunge at the chance to bounce that little pumpkin because she fitted the ultimate playmate formula, which is maximized pleasure with minimized responsibility. What a nice build, Charlie. With a lot of class, Charlie, you know what I mean. A broad that really goes for ft, and she had a real hang-up on me, Charlie. You never seen any chick so ready, Charlie buddy, to scramble out of her classy clothes and hop into the sack. Tell you what I did, pal. I walked away. How about that?
There had to be a nice medal to go with the National Annual Award. With the insignia of the society. A shield with a discarded bunny tail, and an empty bed, and a buttock rampant of a field of cobwebs, with the Latin inscription, “Non Futchus.”
A nice pink and white old gentleman would pin the medal to the bare hide of the chest, as recommended by Joe Heller, while a violin would play, “Just Friendship, Friendship.”
The ceremonial kiss on the stalwart, manly, unsullied cheek and…
A huff of wind came and flipped the point of my collar against my throat. It ruffled the canvas laced to the sundeck rail. The collar was the tickle of the brisk red hair of Puss, and the canvas sound was her chuckle, and without warning I had such an aching longing for her it was like long knives in my bowels, and my eyes stung.
You never do anything for no reason at all, and you never refrain from doing something for no reason at all. Sometimes it just takes a little longer for the reason to get unstuck from the bottom of the brew and float to the top where you can see it.
I rapped the pipe out and went below. So it wasn’t righteous denial at all. Or a lofty, supercilious disapproval. It was the monogamous compulsion based on the ancient wisdom of the heart. Puss had made of all of herself an abundant gift, not just the giving of the body or the sating of a physical want. And no matter how skilled the erotic talents of a Mary Smith, sensation would not balance out that privacy of self that she could not give, nor would want to, nor perhaps could ever give even if she wanted to.
And I knew just how it would have been with Mary Smith, because Puss was all too recent and all too sadly missed. All the secret elegancies of Mary Smith would merely have told me of wrong shapes, wrong sizes, wrong textures, wrong sounds from her throat, wrong ways of holding, wrong tempos and tryings and wrong oils of a wrong pungency. So it would have become with her a faked act of memory and mourning, to end in an after-love depression that would make the touch of her, the nearness of her, hugely irritating.
Puss was too recent.
After I was in bed, I went back and forth across the same old paradox: Then if Puss gave of herself so totally, opening up all the girl-cupboards in the back of heart and mind, how could she leave? Why did she leave?
There was a little chill that drifted across the back of my mind and was gone, as before, still unidentified.
There had been one cupboard unopened, all those months.
But at least I could now stop making wistful fantasies about the little garden of delights in its yellow garment from Tokyo.
Hogamus, Higamus. Mary’s polygamous. Higamus, Hogamus. Trav is monogamous.
For a while. It won’t be any good until big Red wears off more. It will be a drag. And when it seems time to begin to expect something of it, and the opportunity comes along, don’t risk it with a Mary Smith, whose involvement would be about on the same order as all other kinds of occupational therapy.
Eleven
ON SATURDAY before noon I looked through the stowage areas for fifteen minutes before I found my gadget. It is called the McGee Electric Alibi. The two D cells had expired, so I replaced them with fresh ones and tested it. Once upon a time it was a doorbell, but I removed the bell and replaced it with a piece of hardwood that has exactly the right timbre and resonance.
I direct-dialed my love and hunched over the desk top so I could listen to the earpiece and hold the mouthpiece at the pretested and precalculated distance from the mouthpiece. It only rang twice before she picked up the phone, but twice was enough to give me the duration and interval of the rings.
“Darling?” she said. It was exactly noon, as promised.
I pressed the button, transmitting the raucous clatter of a phone that keeps trying to ring after you’ve picked it up.
Between the first two imitation rings I heard her say, “… dammit to…” and in the next gap, “… stinking thing… ” I heard the clicking as she rattled the bar. “… n of a bitch…” I gave it eight fake rings and that made ten in all, as they instruct you in the yellow pages, and hung up.