"It'll never be quite as good again," said Dave. "In another sense. When the mystery is gone out of a thing —"
"I was terrified of being shot," Bat interrupted. "Then I was hit. I got hit twice, you know. It's not the biggest thing in my life. It would have been if I'd been killed. It would have been if I'd been crippled."
"You had a punctured lung, didn't you? I saw the blood running out of your mouth."
"Lung was full of rib fragments," said Bat. "The Germans made good ammunition. The slugs went through cleanly. But not the bone fragments. Let's talk about something else."
"You looking for a roommate?" asked Dave.
"Sure."
"You have a car. So have I. That means we can look for a place outside Cambridge. Maybe Lexington. We can get more space for less money, and it'll only be a five- or six-mile drive."
"Deal," said Bat.
"Before we can live together, though, I've got to have the answer to a question. The story in the outfit used to be that you were a mysterious guy. We weren't even sure what your name is."
Bat faced Dave with a wry smile. "My name is Jonas Enrique Raúl Cord y Batista."
"Cord! Jonas ... Jonas Cord!"
"My father. And my great-uncle is Fulgencio Batista."
"And you use the name Batista, not Cord?"
"Accident. Batista is the last name on the string, so people tend to call me Batista."
"Which would you rather?"
"I don't care."
"What does your father think?"
"I've never met him."
"Good enough. That was the last question."
They agreed to drive to Lexington the next day. That afternoon they rented the second floor of a big old white frame house. It was furnished, but they told the landlady they would rather store her furniture and buy new. They furnished their apartment — living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, and bath — and moved in.
4
Bat thought about contacting his father. Jonas Cord was constantly in the news. In the hospital in Antwerp, Bat had read newspaper stories about how his father had crashed a huge flying boat in the Pacific off San Diego and lost seventeen million dollars. Then, when Bat was in the hospital in Paris, a story appeared saying his father had remarried. Odd, he had remarried his ex-wife. Another news account said he was going to manufacture television sets, devices that would receive pictures the way radio received voices and music; and he was quoted as saying that millions of American families would own television sets within the next ten years. A busy man. He might not want to meet a son he didn't know he had.
In any case. Bat didn't want to meet him while he was a student. When he was somebody — doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief — maybe he would confront this peripatetic tycoon. He would confront him when he was established, and his father could not suppose he had come to beg for something. Putting the matter more simply, Bat didn't want to meet his father until he could, if he chose to, tell him to go to hell.
11
1
"TONI, TONI, TONI, TONI ... I LOVE YOU, Antonia Maxim. Will you marry me?"
Antonia Maxim — she pronounced her name Ahn-toe-NEE-a — glanced up into his eyes, a playful expression on her face. "You didn't even have to ask, Bat. You know I'll marry you. You know I love you. I've proved it, haven't I? It's been a whirlwind courtship, but you have to know I love you."
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, in the fall, when many Harvardians and Radcliffe girls had gone to the football game. Dave had gone to the stadium — more as an accommodation to his friends than because he was interested in the game — so Bat and Toni were alone in the bright, spacious, comfortable living room of the second-floor apartment in the house at Lexington.
He was naked. She had learned not to stare at the ugly purplish scar where a German bullet had crashed through his lower right ribs and nearly killed him — or at the lesser white scar in his left armpit, the mark of a flesh wound. She knew she was welcome to stare at what hung between his legs: oversized, at least in her experience, and straight and powerful. He was tanned. He had spent the summer before — that is, the summer of 1947 — at home in Mexico and had spent a great deal of time in the sun, playing tennis and lounging around a pool. He was a trim, sleekly muscled man, not lacking in self-confidence.
She was naked, too, except for a pair of white rayon panties. Antonia was exquisitely beautiful. Her hair was dark-brown, her eyes big and brown, her mouth narrow but her lips fleshy, and her face was stretched over well-defined cheekbones and a firm jawline. She carried no extra flesh, except perhaps for her breasts, which were large and firm and tipped with big rosy nipples. Her panties covered a commodious shiny-pink cleft, with which he had become profoundly intimate.
He had learned of Toni that she was comfortable exposing to him her legs and hips and belly and breasts and was never in any hurry to cover them but that she was not comfortable exposing her crotch and would not pull down her panties until absolutely necessary.
Right now she did not need to have her panties down.
She ran her tongue around his scrotum, then up the length of his penis to the tip. He drew a deep breath and let it out in a low moan.
"You really like that, don't you?" she asked, grinning.
"I had to teach you how," he said, squeezing her shoulder affectionately.
"Well ... if somebody had asked me two months ago if I'd ever do it, I'd have told them hell no, and you're crazy if you think I will."
"That's about what you said when I suggested it."
He had suggested it because they were in bed together and had just discovered they had no condoms; the package was empty. She had shaken her head indignantly. "You mean you want me to fellate you?" she had sneered. "What do you think I am?" Even so, she had lowered her head and impulsively, also a little sullenly, kissed his penis. The next afternoon, after they had coupled, she had pulled off his condom, wiped him with Kleenex, and kissed him again. Then very tentatively she had licked him — including his foreskin which again gleamed with his fluid. She had looked up at him, frowned, then quickly and decisively opened her mouth and shoved half his length into her mouth. She had held it there for ten seconds or so before she pulled away. "Just what you always wanted," she had said. "Your own personal fellatrix."
A week had passed before she actually brought him to an orgasm in her mouth.
Now — comfortable with it, and practiced — she worked rhythmically with her tongue and lips. She had her own way of doing it: without vigor, without bobbing her head up and down, without using her hands, using only her mouth, expertly finding his most sensitive nerves and flicking her tongue over them, drawing the shaft in and sucking on it to tighten her wet caressing lips. "Don't you dare come," she said. "It's too soon."
"I'll try not to spoil your fun," he said.
She murmured a small laugh. "It is fun ... sort of," she said. "But you — you love it, don't you?"
Bat put both hands on her head, gently caressing. "What I love is you, Toni," he said solemnly.
She pulled her head back and held his penis between her hands. "I love you too, Bat. You know how much I love you."
She was in her senior year at Radcliffe, he in his junior year at Harvard. They had met in a psychology class about six weeks ago. She was the same age as Bat, but she was a mature woman with mature ideas about what she liked and what she wanted.
2
Antonia did not remember when there hadn't been a boat. Her memories of the 1930s were of days of sunshine, many of them spent on the blue water. She remembered nothing of the Depression, but she remembered that there had always been a boat hanging from the davits or tied at the canalside dock behind their home in Fort Lauderdale. The first one she remembered was a nineteen-foot utility fisherman, powered by a gasoline engine. She remembered always wanting to go fishing, insisting she must not be left behind, then growing bored and a little sick and sometimes frightened as her father and mother fished. They would not let her take off her life jacket, ever. She remembered the humiliation of having to squat over a jar to pee, since the boat had no head.