“I rushed to the mirror. I stood there and stared. Oh, how long and hard I stared at my own face, to try to see what there was that was wrong with me. I held my hair pressed down flat and stared deep into my own eyes. I couldn’t see anything different there, anything wrong.”
She turned to him suddenly, her face suffused with emotion. She took him by the shoulders, and pulled at them pleadingly, as if hoping to draw from him the answer she needed so.
“What was it? What is it? What’s the matter with me?”
He placed his hand gently across her trembling mouth, sealing it, keeping it there until the frightened inquiry had left her brilliant dark eyes. “Say this to yourself. There wasn’t anything before tonight. Anything before tonight wasn’t you, wasn’t true, never happened. We begin tonight, you and I.”
“We begin tonight, you and I,” she murmured softly.
After a while she said, “Now tell me about you. What were you like — before? Before me?”
“What’s there to tell? No different from any other young fellow, I guess.”
“I never knew any other young fellow, remember? So to me it’s new.”
“I’ll try. I was born in a town you never heard of.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Pueblo, Colorado. I had no brothers and no sisters. My father was a bus driver there. The bus turned over and burned one day. I was eight. My mother worked then. She passed on when I was sixteen. I got out of school. Then I worked. In a garage, in a grocery store, lots of things like that. Then the war came along and I was drafted. I guess the war was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. The war was my parents, the war was my support, the war was my education. I went to college on the GI bill, took engineering. When I finished, I got a couple of small jobs, nothing much. Then this big one came along, the opportunity of a lifetime, the one I’m heading for now.
“And that’s about all.” He shrugged. “I have no folks. I never had a sweetheart, never had a girl. Each time I’d single one out, somebody else was there ahead of me.”
“How did you know how to make love?” she asked wonderingly.
He laughed a little. “I didn’t say there weren’t any girls. I said I never had one of my own, to keep. In France and Italy, for a bar of chocolate or a pack of cigarettes, there were girls for an hour. It’s not the same.”
She thought about that as though she couldn’t understand what the difference was.
“Well, anyway,” he went on, “here I was, making this trip by car with one of my buddies from the war, both of us working our way by easy stages toward jobs that were waiting for us, and one night near a crossroads we lost our way. I got out and went over to this house, to ask directions. The house you were in.
“I came back and told him about a beautiful face I’d glimpsed in a window, about a tap on the pane, about a note that had landed at my feet.
“He said, ‘Don’t be a sap. This is what comes from waiting too long to get yourself a steady girl. You fall suddenly, in the dark, sight unseen.’
“I said, ‘This is my steady girl — now. From now on.’
“He went on the rest of the way by train. I stuck around. The car was mine, you see. And the rest is — our story. The rest is — tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” she repeated softly. They both turned to look seaward again. One of the velvety gardenia petals in her hair brushed his cheek. “Tomorrow is—?”
“Puerto Santo,” he said.
“Are we going ashore there?”
“Not worth it; nothing to do or see. Just one of these stick-in-the-mud tropical holes, I understand.”
“Then we’ll stay on the ship. I’m satisfied.”
He crooked his finger under her chin, guided her face around toward his. Their faces blended, in the shadow under the deck roof.
Midnight over a tropic sea. Two strangers, getting acquainted with one another. Two strangers: man and wife.
Chapter Five
He woke up, and the motionlessness of the ship told him they were in port. The stillness seemed unreal. He missed the slow fluctuation, the creak of woodwork.
This was Puerto Santo, he remembered. That midway stop, going up the west-coast leg of the trip, the one between Panama and Acapulco. The one they’d decided not to go ashore at.
She wasn’t there. She’d dressed and left the stateroom ahead of him. Probably to go up and take a look from the rail.
During the whole time he was dressing, he expected to see her back any minute, bubbling over with rail-like descriptions of the place, but she failed to appear.
He emerged on deck into a wilting heat. The ship lay becalmed in what felt like an oven. The usual breezes were totally lacking now. Even the water had changed color. The deep blue of other days had changed to the light green of a shallow harbor basin. Across it, in the distance, was a thin crescent of flat tin and tile rooftops, like driftwood or accumulated refuse pushed into the joint between sea and sky by tidal action. Behind these was traced a hazy blue line of mountains, thin as cigarette smoke or azure sky writing, clearer at their tops than at their bottoms, as though they had no bases, hung suspended in mid-sky.
A few native skiffs and rafts were being slowly poled about, close up against the side of the ship, piled with fruit that carried its own flies even this far out, Panama hats, and assorted curios and trinkets.
His first, indifferent look was at all this, broadside to him as he came down the deck, without breaking stride. His second, far more concerned one was for her.
All down the rail ahead of him stood little groups of his fellow passengers looking out over it, some in twos and threes, some singly. Very few seemed to have gone ashore. His eyes kept seeking her out as he passed along behind them. She wasn’t included in any of them. Nor was she in any of the chairs either. Nor was she on the upper deck. Nor was she on the one below. Nor was she by the pool, nor was she in the lounge, nor had she — when he took a quick look back into their cabin — returned there.
“Has anybody here seen my wife?” he finally had to ask one of the railside groups of passengers.
“She went ashore, didn’t she?” a woman answered.
“Without me? No, of course not.” And yet if she were anywhere on the ship, why hadn’t he found her?
He accosted the first officer he caught sight of and put the inquiry to him.
“No, she didn’t,” the man said. “I remember asking her. She was standing by as they were getting into the tender, but she said she wasn’t going, the two of you had decided not to.”
Another passenger had joined them, and he contributed, “I think I did see her go, after the others had already left. She was sitting in one of those little native skiffs. All by herself in it too, just with the boatman and the small boy that most of them seem to carry along for supercargo.”
Jones was thunderstruck. “Why should she go in one of those things, when she turned down an offer to go in the tender? You must be mistaken!”
“I know your wife when I see her, Mr. Jones,” the man insisted. “I stood there by the rail looking right down at her.”
They were both staring at him a little curiously. The shock must have shown quite plainly on his face, he supposed. He didn’t care about that so much; what shook him was that she’d gone off like that without a word of warning.
“They’ll be coming back soon, and then you’ll see for yourself,” the man suggested.
Jones stood there for a while by the rail with him, pretending to talk of other things. He heard hardly a word that his companion said; he couldn’t think of anything but this incalculable defection of hers.
“Here comes the tender now.”