A Flash of Green (13 page)

After talking with several of the others, Kat found herself with Melissa Jennings. They were standing near a clump of dwarf banana trees, looking out through the screening, across the quiet expanse of Grassy Bay. The shoreline shadows were beginning to lengthen out across the water. Against the distant mainland shore two cabin cruisers were heading north up the marked channel.

“Whether we looked out upon it or not,” Melissa said softly, “I should not want such a lovely bay spoiled. The people who would live out there would think they had waterfront, but the
true waterfront would be gone, with nothing left but little canals for their boats, and a few narrow channels.”

Kat looked surreptitiously at Melissa Soong Mei Wan Jennings, at the classic, luminous, Oriental beauty of her face in profile. She was Colonel Jennings’ second wife. His first wife had died several years before Tom had met Melissa in Chungking during the Second World War. She was almost twenty-five years younger than her husband, but the marriage seemed strong and close. Tom had grown children by his first wife. He and Melissa had three sturdy, popular boys, aged twelve, fourteen and seventeen. All the boys were away at summer camp. Melissa was tall for a Chinese woman, and it was only in these past few years, as she had reached forty, that her figure had lost its willowy, girlish configuration and had begun to thicken.

“If it happens, would you move away?” Kat asked.

Melissa turned toward her, frowning slightly. “I think not. Some years ago, yes. But now it is too late. This is where I brought my boys when they were small, and where the last one was born. We have planted so many things and cared for them so long we love them too much. Those trees of gold there, and the silk oaks. The house suits us too well, Kat.” She smiled. “We’ll have to learn not to look at the bay so much. I’ll miss it. The light is always changing. Maybe all Chinese are peasants. This is my land, and it is more important than what it looks out upon.”

“More talk of defeat,” Dial Sinnat said, joining them. “What’s the matter with all you people?” He stood close to Kat and put his arm around her casually, the hard warm weight of his hand against her waist. As always, his apparently unthinking touch created in her a strange indecision; a small despair. It made her feel like a fool, quite unable to cope with something so obviously innocent.

When Di Sinnat was near her, he touched her. It was that simple.
He did not paw. There was no innuendo. He was fond of her. And he was evidently a man who automatically sought the tactile gestures of affection. But each time it seemed to freeze her. She had never liked being touched in casual ways by casual people. And people seemed aware of this trait, instinctively respecting that apartness in a crowded world. Yet Di seemed oblivious of the tension he created. She never knew exactly how to handle it. When he put his brown paw on her waist, her shoulder or the nape of her neck, she breathed in a constricted way, and mentally rehearsed the moves she could make to get away from him, yet could not move freely or casually. She did not want to be touched, yet she did not want to hurt him or, more importantly, create any special awareness between them by making such a point of moving away. So usually she endured it until there was some plausible excuse, and felt relief when it was over. She had tried to talk herself into paying no attention to it, but she could not accustom herself to it. And she was always aware of how very good Di and Claire had been to her since Van had been killed.

A few times she had even wondered if Di was deliberately sensitizing her to his touch, the way animals are trained by slowly acquainting them with the touch of their handler. But she had dismissed this as a paranoid idea which presupposed too much deviousness on the part of Di Sinnat. It was true that he knew women well, and that all of his wives had been beautiful, and that he was vividly male, but he did not seem to have the requisite subtlety to build toward seduction in such an unanswerable way. Somehow she had let pass her chance to stop him in the very beginning. She wished he would change the casual touch into a caress so that she could then stop him without loss of face.

Yet she was wise enough about herself to know that even though it might be the furthest thing from Di’s mind, he was sensitizing her in a way that worried her. He was an attractive
man. When he rested his hand upon her, it seemed at the time to have no sensual significance to her, yet twice in the last few months she had awakened abruptly from odd erotic dreams about him. In the last dream she had been alone on the beach down near the Pavilion, sunning herself, yet the beach had become so enormous that she was a tiny figure in a sandy waste, the Pavilion a tiny dot on one horizon, the Gulf a blue distant line opposite it. She saw an insect figure walking toward her from the Pavilion, taking a long time to approach across the sand. At last she recognized Di and was glad to see him because she had something important to say to him, but she could not remember what it was. He sat beside her on the blanket and began talking about Claire’s plans for a studio over the big carport for his daughter, Natalie. Then, still talking, smiling, nodding, he put his hands on her breasts. In the dream it was the same as when he touched her casually, affectionately, at a party. She did not feel she could move or protest. She felt she had to say the right things about the studio for Nat as he described it to her, pretending she did not notice that he had pushed her back, loosened her swimsuit, and was working it down off her hips, pulling it off entirely. Still talking, chuckling, he forced her thighs apart and his face was huge over hers, blotting out all the blue of the sky. She knew that if she could only remember what she was supposed to tell him, then she would be able to scream and make him stop and he would understand. She awoke, shuddering and sweaty, hearing the echo of her own night cry.

Now the warmth and shape of his hand came through the frail material of her blouse, and though it gave her no pleasure, it seemed to muffle the sounds of the conversation on the Jennings patio and make the colors of the early evening less bright, as though all other senses had become subordinate to her complete awareness of that unwelcome weight.

After the emptiness and the desolation of the first few months without Van, she had begun to wonder about herself and the need for sex, if need there was. Van was the only man who had ever known her. For the first year of marriage she had thought herself to be so cool as to be able to find only meager pleasures in the act, but in order not to be a disappointment to Van she had pretended the eagerness she thought would please him, and had doggedly and strenuously acted out the completions as she had read of them in various novels. But in time it became only half false, and at last it became entirely true, and like nothing she could have guessed—a gloriously sweet madness, inexhaustible.

The world seemed to believe that a woman so conditioned by a good marriage would be either unwilling or unable to accept a young-widow continence. She examined her own reactions with somber concern. Sometimes, in the empty night, her body would so yearn for Van’s embrace it was as though ten thousand minute arrows pierced her flesh, poisoning her and sickening her. But it would always go away. She thought of all the men she knew, and imagined them, one by one, giving and receiving the pleasures she and Van had known, but instead of any fragment of curiosity, any crumb of desire, she felt a rising, curdling nausea.

On a previous February evening, Sammy Deegan had confirmed her suspicion. Other men had made oily little hintings, dropping little clues as to how well they could keep any secret, but Sammy, full of vodka confidence, had made the direct approach. His wife and his sister were out of town. He claimed he had seen her light. The kids were in bed. Thirty seconds after he was inside the house, he was fumbling at her, nuzzling her, murmuring to her, frightening her with his clumsy drunken strength. When she had wrestled loose and he had chased her into the kitchen, she had snatched a tack hammer from the countertop where she had left it after fixing a nail in her sandal, spun and
chopped him squarely in the middle of the forehead with it. It made a deep gash and burst a vein. The alarming jet of blood sobered him and terrified her. He had lowered himself to the kitchen floor in a gingerly way, stared wall-eyed at her through the running mask of blood and said in a hushed voice, “Good Christ, Kat, where is there to put a tourniquet? Around my neck?” By some miracle she had managed to avoid hysterics. She took him to the bathroom. She found a place where she could press with her thumb and stop the regular pulsing. She made him hold his thumb on the place while she cleaned the gash, cut small strips of tape and crisscrossed them to pull it together. It stopped the bleeding. He was so full of guilt and shame he cried, but he tried to cry without moving his face very much, so it would not start up again. He walked off into the night with extraordinary care, as if he had a wineglass balanced on his head. After she had cleaned up the blood she went to the bathroom and vomited again and again. It was not the blood which had sickened her, or the fright. It was the memory of his wet wanting grin, and the rough fumbling of his hands, and the blunt, questing bulge of his sex against her when he had held her close. Sammy had answered the next-to-the-last question for her.

The last question was still there. Would another man ever have her? It would have to be with love. It would have to be like the way she had felt toward Van. But there might be no man in the world who could awaken that.

Wallace Lime had come over to talk to the three of them. Di took his hand away to light a cigarette. She smiled at them and murmured something about having to talk to Jackie, and went across the patio to where Jackie stood talking to Morton Dermond.

Morton said, “I was just telling Jackie she really does have the figure for one of those little sleeveless dresses, high at the throat,
not fitted, no belt. I’d love to see you in one, Jackie. One of those fabrics that look like raw silk. They’re truly horrid on meaty women, dear, but you have a nice colty look.”

“He doesn’t know Ross,” Jackie said. “I dress for Ross, Morty. He doesn’t like the merchandise hidden under the counter. I’ve got to make the most of what I’ve got. Stretch pants and plenty of uplift.”

Dermond looked pained. “But it’s so obvious, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes indeed!” Jackie said, with a broad dirty grin.

Dermond looked at his watch and said, “I do have to run. I’ll send you our current membership list so you can check it against your files, Jackie.” He walked away from them, taking curiously short steps for a man of his size.

Jackie giggled. “I shouldn’t tease the poor brute. He yearns for pretty dresses, but he hasn’t got the build. He always wants to dress me, and it gives me the horrid feeling his taste is better than mine, so I strike back. He’s really one of the nicer ones. He’s not too obvious, and he has the good sense not to try to mix up the two worlds he lives in. When can we have our own little organization meeting, Katty?”

“No banking hours tomorrow. Do you want to come over?”

“You come to our house, honey. Two birds with one stone. I didn’t get a chance to tell you before, but Ross wants to use you again. Now, don’t look at me like that. It’s a stinky little six bucks for an hour or any part thereof, and the sketch has been okayed, so he knows exactly what the pose will be. There’s a swirly skirt of mine he wants you in, and it won’t take more than fifteen minutes. How about right after lunch? Bring your kids.”

“It always makes me feel like such an idiot.”

“Don’t be so self-conscious, honey. Ross loves your good bones, and he says you’ve got the best color values of any redhead
he’s ever used. And he says you’re as easy to work with as a pro. And I’m so horrible at it. Poor guy. I freeze every time. I hunch my shoulders and the pictures come out looking as if I had one of those iron things holding my head steady like they used in the olden days. And I haven’t got good arms, he says.”

The group was breaking up. Kat said goodbye to Melissa and the colonel and went out to her brick-colored Volkswagen parked in the sandy shade next to the Jennings’ semicircular driveway. As she drove a mile south on Mangrove Road toward Sandy Key Estates, she thought of the meeting and how it had disappointed her. Probably, from an organizational point of view, they were better organized than they had been the last time, but there was a quality of indignation and enthusiasm which was lacking. At the first meeting two years ago, everybody had tried to talk at the same time, presenting all kinds of ideas. Perhaps now they were better qualified to combat the Grassy Bay fill, but there did not seem to be as much spirit, as much righteous anger.

The side door key was under the mat, and she was glad Roy and Alicia were becoming so reliable about replacing it. She went into the empty house and felt a familiar twinge of guilt as she snapped the big air conditioner on. She took off her blouse and skirt in the bedroom and went back and stood in the cool wind of the noisy unit until she felt chilled by the evaporation of the mist of sweat on her body.

She phoned the Sinnat home. The cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Riggs, answered. She asked her to tell Esperanza to shoo the kids on home. Mrs. Riggs asked her to hold the phone. Claire came on the line and said, “I knew you’d be late on account of the meeting, Kat. So we asked the kids to stay for a hamburger cook-out, and Gus is over here fogging us down. Here’s the deal, dear. You come on up whenever you feel like it, and the upper classes
will have steak later on. Then when my pair are sacked out, either Nat or Esperanza can take yours home and sit with them until you’re damn well ready to call it a night.”

“Claire, I just can’t keep imposing on—”

“You’ve never imposed on anybody, Kat. Di wants you around tonight. As soon as he got home a few minutes ago he phoned Martin and Eloise, and they’re coming over too, later on, but without the little Cable heirs, thank the good Lord. We were talking about it when you phoned. Di wants to nail Martin about why he’s optioned that land to the developers. You know Di, so it ought to be something to hear. He thinks it would be a good thing if you were here.”