Judith Krantz (24 page)

Finally Gabe sat back on his heels, consumed with a need so savage that he spent no time on her voluptuous, abandoned nakedness but reached one masterful hand straight toward the curly, abundant tangle of her pubic hair and pushed forward with a questing finger. She was ready, oh yes, very ready, more than ready for him. He held the weighty heft of his penis and steadily, relentlessly pushed it deep and deeper into her body, so harshly inflamed that he didn’t listen to the indrawn breaths that now broke her silence. “Ah, ah, ah!” Jazz cried out, on a wild and rising note, but he didn’t hear, for he had become finally deaf in his intention to have her. He might have attempted the inhuman task of holding back so that she could catch up with him, but he knew that he would take her many times this night, oh, she would get it, she would get it, but now he could wait no longer. He gave himself entirely to the burning, imperative flood that forced itself upward, swelling, growing, tightening, hardening, until he burst inside of her in long, excruciatingly good spasms of fire that brought a great animal scream of ravening triumph to his lips.

Gabe still penetrated Jazz when he finally fell on his side, holding her tightly against him. He gradually became aware of sound and sight. Jazz, her breath heaving, was weeping in loud gulps. “Oh God, I’m sorry,” he said, deeply contrite, “but I couldn’t stop. Christ, that hasn’t happened since I was a kid.”

She gasped, sobbing, inconsolable.

“Jazz, Jazz, darling Jazz, don’t cry! It’s not a tragedy. I’m going to love you again, just for you, and then again and again, all just for you. Don’t cry!”

Gabe hugged her and caressed her hair and kissed her all over her wet face, but still tears spurted out of her eyes. Finally she yielded to his pleas and little by
little she wept less and less until she sniffed and complained in a tiny voice. “I didn’t expect it to hurt so much.”

“Oh shit! I hurt you! Shit!
How could I?
Will you ever forgive me?”

“Of course I will … don’t feel bad … it’s supposed to hurt, isn’t it … the first time?”

“The
what
?”

“The first time.”

A vast astonishment whirled into his brain like the twister of a tornado, and everything fell together in one click. Her fright, her cold lips, her prim posture on the sofa, her clumsy attempts to pull him down on top of her, her combination of shyness and boldness.

“Why didn’t you tell me!” he demanded, torn between rapture and guilt.

“Don’t know,” Jazz muttered, trying to bury her head in his shoulder. He held her off.

“Why? Why?”

“I was … afraid … that you wouldn’t want to … that you’d make too big a deal out of it … oh, you know.”

“You’re damn right I would! I’m so much in love with you—I sure as hell wouldn’t have hurt you. Oh, my darling baby, I would have been so gentle. And now it’s too late. Too fucking late,” he mourned.

“Don’t feel bad,” she comforted him. “It’s stopped hurting.”

“Oh yeah, sure, just like that, I’ll bet it has, poor love, poor sweet dumbbell.”

“I wish you’d stop blaming yourself and do something useful,” Jazz said with a return to cheer that told Gabe that he might have missed one train but another one was steaming into the station.

“So I’m going to have to kiss it and kiss it and make it well. That what you had in mind?”

“Something like that. Yes … definitely. That.”

Together, forgetting any other reality, Jazz and Gabe lived through the next week without asking questions
of the future or directing a thought to the past. Only the uncomplicated completeness of the lavish present existed, perfect days and perfect nights, which would mark all days and all nights to come in their memories; days and nights in which detail flowed into detail to make a seamless, splendid whole; days and nights that are granted to a few fortunate people once in a lifetime, but rarely twice. They shared one consciousness; they woke at the same minute and slept at the same minute and grew hungry together and thirsty together and needed to touch each other, even if it was only to hold hands, at all times.

After a week the world refused to stand still for them any longer. Gabe had to leave for Nicaragua and the new assignment for which he was already several days late. There was no question of his giving it up; there was no doubt that Jazz would go with him; there was no reason for her to remain in school. Even if there had been a compelling reason, she would have ignored it. The only person who had to be told about their plans was Mike Kilkullen.

“We’ll drive down and see him,” Jazz said. “Today.”

“Can’t we phone?” Gabe asked hopefully.

“Coward.”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“I can’t go away without telling him everything and saying good-bye to him, you know that,” Jazz replied. “He won’t bite. I hope.”

“I don’t think he’ll be thrilled.” Gabe looked at Jazz. She was so vivid in the directness of her happiness that she flew where other people walked, blazed where other people breathed. What father in his right mind would want to see that?

“He’ll be happy for me. I hope.”

“So let’s go.”

“Maybe tomorrow?” Jazz suggested, suddenly feeling a twinge of anxiety about her father’s reaction.

“Today,” Gabe responded. One of them had to be the grown-up. “But first we’ll both take a shower.
You smell like me and I smell like you. Then fresh clothes all around. Don’t dare touch me again unti we’re on the way home. No reason to flaunt it.”

Beirut, Belfast, the Gaza Strip—they hadn’t turned out to be so dangerous after all, Gabe reminded himself as they drove through the wide avenue of giant figs leading to the Hacienda Valencia. This should be a breeze. After all, what conservative Orange County rancher wouldn’t be tickled pink to send his adored eighteen-year-old daughter off to the trouble spots of the planet with an imperfect stranger?

God in heaven, had they no common ordinary decency, Mike Kilkullen raged to himself. To show up here, obviously just out of bed, with that unmistakable fucked-out look and that smell clinging to them like a cloud of gunpowder, practically unable to keep their hands to themselves, and announce that they were going off together? Did they think he didn’t remember and recognize that look, that smell, that he’d never experienced it himself?

Jazz didn’t even look like herself anymore. He didn’t want to think about the new way she looked or the way she couldn’t take her eyes off that big-nosed bag of bones she called Gabe—what kind of name was that, anyway? Why did men have to have daughters when this was what always happened sooner or later and in this case much, much too soon? And when there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that you could do to stop it in 1979? If he could, he’d brick her up in a tower and lower the portcullis, or send her to a convent for a few years or take her on a long, slow trip around the world or, better yet, get out his hunting rifle and blow this daughter-stealing shitass bastard Gabe straight to hell for which no jury in the world would convict him. Christ, why did the sixties ever have to happen? That was what was wrong with the world. The fucking sixties. Now every eighteen-year-old believed that she was in charge of herself and her destiny and even when it was your own daughter
you had to go along with it because you had no choice.

“Do you have everything you need, Juanita Isabella?” Mike Kilkullen asked, sounding thoughtfully polite but not concerned. “Plenty of money and a return ticket and stuff like that?”

“Don’t worry about any of that, Dad. I don’t need much. Gabe’s taking care of everything. And I have traveler’s checks, just in case.”

“You’re not going without your camera?” Mike asked.

“Of course not. Gabe’s going to teach me everything there is to know about photojournalism.”

“Well that’s just fine, kid. Fine and dandy. Do you have a telephone credit card? No? Well, just call collect whenever you happen to feel like it, don’t worry about the time difference. I’d like to hear from you when you get a chance.”

“I’ll make sure she calls, Mr. Kilkullen.”

“You do that, Gabe. You do that.”

Or I’ll come over there, no matter where you are, and I’ll find you and put a pistol to your head and pull the trigger, or take a knife and gut you up the stomach like a fish. What the hell Jazz sees in you I can’t begin to imagine. That fat-assed Billy Carter is a damn sight better looking, and for sure the Ayatollah Khomeini has more charm. Nobody will ever miss you or even notice that you’re gone, you thief, you villain, you filthy son of a bitch.

“Oh, Daddy, we’ve got to be going back to L.A.,” Jazz cried, looking at her watch. “There’s so much traffic on the road and I still have to organize a couple of things and pack and catch a plane first thing the day after tomorrow.”

“Did you remember to tell the school you were dropping out?” he asked evenly.

“I called the registrar. They said they’d send back your deposit for next year. I’d learned everything they had to teach me, Daddy, the rest was just trimming. You know, most real photographers say
that you should never stay in photo school too long or you lose your originality.”

“It’s lucky you found that out before it was too late.”

“I’d really like to look at Jazz’s work,” Gabe said. “She’s told me about the archives. Don’t we have enough time, Jazz?”

“I suppose,” she answered reluctantly. What if he didn’t like it? What if it wasn’t as good as she thought it was?

“I’ve lost my key,” Mike Kilkullen lied. “Do you have yours, kid?”

“No, I left it back in L.A.,” she said, relieved.

“Tell you what, Gabe, I’ll show you something you ought to see.” Mike got up and left the living room abruptly, returning in seconds holding the framed enlargement of the snapshot of Sylvie that never left his bedside. He gave it to Gabe.

“That’s one of the first pictures my daughter, Juanita Isabella Kilkullen, ever took. With the first roll of film I gave her. With the first camera I gave her. That’s her mother, of course. My daughter was eight at the time, only ten years ago. It was the last summer of my wife’s life. She went off to Europe. Only she went off alone. But, of course, you know that story.”

“Daddy!”

“What’s wrong? I thought Gabe should see at least one picture you took. Before you go away too.”

“That’s not fair!” Jazz shouted. “How can you say such an awful thing to me?”

“Because it’s true. Going away is going away,” Mike Kilkullen said, standing as immovable as a boulder.

“I get your point, Mr. Kilkullen.” Gabe was standing. “I won’t presume to say I understand how you feel, but I know I’d feel the same way too if I had a daughter. I’ll take good care of Jazz. I promise you that on my life. And she’ll call home every week.”

“Yeah, you do that, Gabe, you do that. I understand that the phone service from Nicaragua is top-notch, especially during a civil war.”

G
abe and Jazz were there when the Sandinistas hoisted their red and black flag over the National Palace of Managua in July of 1979. A month later they were among the first journalists to reach Ireland the day after Earl Mountbatten of Burma was killed by Irish Nationalists; within two weeks they flew into Afghanistan as Premier Amin took over after President Taraki had been killed in a coup.

Later, Jazz was to look at her rookie summer of ’79 as her personal boot camp and almost her Waterloo. She learned that photojournalism wasn’t a superior form of photographic con game, but a job that demanded more guts and stamina than she believed she could possess; a job for the perpetually jet-lagged, the eternally footsore, the utterly focused and, particularly, a job for people to whom fear, sensible, rational, normal, life-saving fear, was nonexistent.

At first she thought her feeling of being overwhelmed was caused by the sheer size of the celebrating Nicaraguan crowds who had overthrown
Somoza’s forty-six-year-old dynasty. In the bitter aftermath of the Mountbatten killing, she attributed her storm of emotion to the cruelty of the death of a wartime hero on board his fishing boat in an explosion that also took the life of his grandson. By the time they reached Afghanistan, Jazz had decided that her anxieties were based on the fact that she wasn’t entirely sure who was who, what was what, or why. A month later, in October, back in the United States, as Gabe covered racial violence in Boston high schools, a subject on which she could get a clear grip, Jazz was finally forced to admit to herself that she was in far over her head.

She had never imagined that she would come quickly to expect danger everywhere, no less in Boston than in Managua. She felt as if she had sprouted antennae on the alert for danger, not just in the back of her head but on the soles of her feet, on the points of her elbows, and at the back of her shoulders.

Anywhere, in any of the emotion-swept, often violent mobs that Gabe moved through so purposefully, there could be someone with a gun or a bomb who would choose a man and a girl with cameras as a target. Or else someone might throw a bomb for an entirely different reason, and they would find themselves in its deadly path. Mobs of people were dangerous in and of themselves; Gabe’s style of photojournalism meant getting as deeply into the crowds as possible.

So far, Jazz had managed to hide the nature of her feelings from Gabe.

She told herself that either she must learn to live with fear or go home; get her shit together or get out.

Jazz decided to stay, because she was more afraid of being without Gabe than she was of some as-yet-unthrown bomb. The way to stay was to keep so busy that she didn’t have time to think; staying meant shooting almost as much film almost as fast as Gabe, even if she didn’t know or care what side the people she was shooting were on, or why they were intent on demonstrating. Shooting meant concentration on getting a powerful image, no matter the circumstances.

Her work improved, in her opinion anyway, and the antennae on the soles of her feet, which warned her that the next step might be fatal, bothered her less. Perhaps it might be coincidence, she thought, or it might be due to the fact that she was wearing filthy socks inside of even more filthy boots, with no hope of doing her laundry for days. Dirty hair, unwashed clothes, blisters on her feet—Gabe didn’t care what she looked or smelled like so long as she kept up with him but never got in his way, and that was all that mattered. She carried his spare camera bodies and lenses in their foam-rubber-padded case, she loaded film for him, and she kept a watch out for portable food and drink when he would have forgotten about both. He wasn’t used to having an assistant, and she had to fight to do anything for him, but eventually he gave in and let her take over in these areas.