Pacific Interlude (10 page)

“I'm afraid I only know things I don't want to do,” he said. “I don't want to go back into that house with all that crowd. I don't want to go back to the ship and I don't want to spend another night alone in a hotel.”

“Would you like to take a drive around the city?”

“That's exactly what I'd like to do. Well, at least for starters.”

She led the way toward a boxy little Austin parked on the edge of the lawn. “I shouldn't have come here anyway,” she said. “My roommate, Joanie, talked me into it. My regular chap had to go to Sydney and I was feeling rather moody.”

That seemed to be her favorite word, which was fine with him.

“I've been feeling too moody myself lately,” he said after they had climbed into the car.

“Everybody has to have a laugh or two sometimes,” she said as she started the engine and jerkily pulled into the road. He thought she was driving crazy until he realized that here they were supposed to stay on the left side of the street.

In the cramped little car she smelled so good. Just the slight scent of lilac, probably a soap. When he crossed his legs again he hit his knee against the dashboard.

“I guess you're used to bigger cars,” she said. “It's funny. I bought this one because it uses so little gas, and then some of your chaps gave Joanie about ten cans full of the stuff. It takes up so much room in the garage that we can't get the car in.”

“You better get rid of it,” he said. “It's dangerous stuff. Sell it.”

“Why does everybody keep saying gas is so dangerous? Your chaps seem to talk about nothing else.”

“In the open air it isn't so bad, but in an enclosed space it can be a problem.”

“I hope you don't get shot at,” she said abruptly.

“So do I.”

“Are you scared, or shouldn't I ask that?”

“That's the first sensible question anyone has asked me in a long time. No, not scared, just plain terrified.”

“You're the first one I've heard admit it. Joanie's guy says he's not scared at all … Do you believe in God?” she asked suddenly.

“Well, He arranged things so I finally met you.”

“My my, you're a real smooth toff, aren't you?”

“I really am grateful. I wandered through about a hundred bars last night looking for someone like you.”

“You must have found someone.”

“Girls like you don't sit around bars waiting for a lonely sailor to show up. They have, as you say, a regular chap.”

“He's in Sydney, and maybe
he's
touring the bars. We had a bit of a tiff.”

“Then that's my good luck. I haven't even talked to a decent-looking girl in more than a year.”

“What's your wife like?”

“She looks a lot like you—”

“That's what all you Yanks say.”

“It's also probably often true. Australians and Americans seem pretty much the same—”

“You're a lot different from my chap.”

“I hope you're different from my wife.” He shouldn't have said that …

“You've not been getting on together?”

“We haven't been together much in the past three years. First Greenland, then New Guinea—”

“Did you meet many girls there?”

“Have you ever seen pictures of the girls in Greenland and New Guinea?”

“The New Guinea women in the pictures do look a bit
moody
. Do the Eskimo girls really rub noses?”

“They wash their hair in urine and never take baths. I wasn't up there long enough to find out about the noses.”

There was a short silence which seemed unusually tense.

She laughed. “I don't even know your name.”

“Syl Grant. What's yours?”

“Ann Thompson. Some of my friends call me Angel.”

“In New Guinea all the guys said that Australia was heaven.”

“I've heard that about the States. You Yanks make a lot more money than we do.”

“I never made much. Before the war I was trying to work my way through graduate school.”

“What kind?”

“History.”

“I started out to be a teacher but I dropped out. I'm a typist in an insurance office. It's a terrible bore.”

He was tempted to increase their sense of solidarity by telling her that his wife worked in her father's insurance business but suspected that wife-talk was not the way to seduce a girl thirteen thousand miles from home. What he wanted to do was skip the preliminary moves and say flat out what he felt and wanted, but he didn't dare risk it …

“There's not much to show you in Brisbane this time of night,” she said. “All the museums, cathedrals and stuff will be closed.”

Thank God, he wanted to say, but this was no time for experiments in being himself. “I hear you have a good beach,” he said.

“You want to go swimming this time of night? I should think you'd seen enough of the sea.”

“Enough of the sea, not of beaches. I'd just like to lie out on the sand somewhere, look up at the sky, talk …” (A real smooth toff, old Syl.)

“All you Yanks are the same,” she said.

“Are Aussie men so different?”

“They try to get to know us first.”

“I used to be like that before the war, when there was time enough for everything—”

“You all use the same line. ‘There's so little time. Let's make the most of it.'”

“I'm with you. These must be rough times for you.”

“I keep telling myself that it's tougher on you guys—well, some of you—but even your chaps in supply and your
dentists
keep telling us they are about to die.”

“Those dentists have dangerous jobs, a lot of the GIs bite.”

“They sure do … I'm not even sure a gas tanker is as dangerous as you chaps say. Maybe you're making it all up.”

“If you're annoyed with me, take me back to the ship. We can have a cigarette together in one of the tanks. It wouldn't be dangerous now, she's just been steamed out.”

“Would they really let me into the yard?”

“They don't seem to give a damn what we do, but it probably wouldn't be a good idea. If I bring a girl aboard, then the ship would really be dangerous … Hey, I don't much like playing the part of the typical Yank who's overpaid, oversexed and over here, as some like to say.”

“Then be yourself.”

“I'd jump on you, if I did.”

She laughed. “Well, at least that's refreshing. It's honest.”

“Good to hear it. Mostly I seem to foul up when I try to be myself. For example, you may like honesty but I got a feeling I should be trying to create a romantic mood, not making you laugh.”

“I really don't know much about romance. Or love. I wish I did. Love is what Yanks talk about when they want to go to the beach after dark.”

“That's for sure part of it.”

“How long would you remember me if we went to the beach tonight?”

Long enough to be grateful, he thought, but said, “I've asked only a few girls to go to the beach after dark, and I remember every one of them vividly, including the ones who said no.”

“Are you angry at them?”

“Mostly at myself. I meet few girls who I even want to take to the beach. I guess I'm too choosy.”

“I somehow doubt you've spent all that many nights alone, except maybe in Greenland and New Guinea.”

“It's true, though. I read a lot. I end up with a book a lot more often than I end up with a girl. Fantasies instead of the real thing.”

She reached over to touch his knee in a way that sent shock waves up his thigh.

“You're real enough,” she said. “My, I have made you moody! Cheer up! Here we are at the beach. At least you're going to get your chance to lie on the sand and look up at the sky.”

Leaving the car parked by a row of bathhouses, they walked over a dune to a narrow strip of sand. Here the light from a half-moon overhead seemed bright. White breakers gleamed as they rolled toward their feet.

They took off their shoes and socks, walked at the lip of the tide with occasional high-reaching waves curling around their ankles. There was the smell of seaweed and of dead fish, all swept clean by the wind from the sea. Up nearer the dunes lovers lay sprawled in moon shadows, almost as motionless as corpses after an invasion, he thought and then drove the thought from his head.

“It will be less crowded farther on,” she said.

They walked nearly a mile. The roar of the surf quieted to a whisper.

“There's a big sandbar out there,” she said. “At low tide we can walk out to it.”

“And let there be no moaning at the bar when I put out to sea” came to his mind, and he devoutly wished he would stop this thinking about death. Here at least no more corpselike lovers were in sight. Turning toward the dunes, they sat down on dry sand and he flopped down full length on his back. There was a faint ring around the moon, a harbinger of disaster, he had read, but in his experience at sea it had very little meaning. The Southern Cross was bright tonight. He missed the North Star and the Big Dipper out of which it seemed to fall.

“You really did want to look at the stars, didn't you?” she said, running her fingertips gently over his forehead.

He caught her hand and kissed her palm, tasting the salt of it, so much like the salt of the sea, it occurred to him. Turning toward her, he kissed her lips. Her mouth tasted salty too and he caught his breath, as though he might drown in the sea of her. As she took away her lips from his to get air her intake of breath was sharp enough to be an exclamation and then they were kissing again and rolling over in the sand.

“This is silly,” she gasped as he undid the buttons of her dress.

“Why?”

“I have a perfectly good room.”

“I like it here.”

“People might come—”

“No one will bother us.”

“Please, I'll like it much better at home.”

He let her go. She sat up, abruptly demure as she buttoned her dress. He lay on his back again, looking at her retroussß nose silhouetted against the Southern Cross.

“You really are beautiful,” he said.

“I'm glad you think that.”

“It's the God's truth.”

At that moment he really felt quite pious.

“You're so horny you'd think a gorilla was beautiful,” she said with a short laugh. “Come on, beat you to the car!”

She was off, zigzagging down to the lip of the sea, where her ankles kicked up small wings of spray. She was so fast he had difficulty keeping up with her. His heart pounded so hard that he thought briefly of his father's heart attack. Well, if he had to die he would rather it happened here with her than in a fire at sea.

“Joanie's not coming home tonight,” Angel said as she turned the car around. “You can stay over if you want.”

Her apartment was on the third floor of an old house about a mile from the beach. She skipped up the flights of steep stairs, her round buttocks dancing under her damp pink skirt. He pounded after her, his breath coming hard after the second landing. Her hand trembled as she fitted her key to the lock.

They stepped into a room so small that it was almost filled by a big double bed. Moonlight from the window glinted on its brass head and foot. There was a refrigerator in a corner with a shelf of groceries near a sink and a gas ring.

“I'm going to take a quick shower,” she said. “There's a beer in the fridge if you want it.”

She disappeared through a curtained door and almost immediately he heard the rush of water. The cold Australian beer was strong, dry and tangy. He had not yet finished when she came back wearing nothing but a towel which she held around her waist, her shoulders and breasts still beaded with diamondlike drops of water.

“I really must be in heaven,” he said as he stepped toward her. “The ship has exploded and here I am.”

“Take a shower!” she said. “I'll be ready when you come out.”

He squeezed into the metal shower stall and took what must have been the quickest shower in history. She was lying on her back on the bed when he returned, a perfect odalisque, he thought. He lay down beside her, gently, then began kissing her.

He had forgotten the incredible softness of a woman's breasts. He was afraid that he would cry out with his pleasure. He couldn't hold on much longer. Thank God she was ready for him. Their bodies fitted together with a precision that seemed remarkable for strangers. “Oh, please,” he gasped, “don't move like that; I won't be able to last—”

“Don't worry about me!”

But he did worry about disappointing her. He squeezed his fists so tight that his fingers hurt. He clenched his teeth, held his breath, thought of swimming in cold water with ice and sharks, and he exploded anyway.

“I'm
sorry
,” he groaned.

“I'm all right,” she said, smiling, and seemed to mean it. “Want to finish your beer?”

“Thirty seconds, for God's sake …”

“I bet that was just an appetizer. Hand me a cold beer.”

She never got a chance to finish it. She did not complain. For half an hour they made love so hard that at times they almost seemed to be in a kind of combat. When they were finally exhausted, they slept for an hour and he had no idea what time it was when he woke up in darkness. She was not in the bed … had he
dreamed
the whole thing? Then he heard the water running in the shower. When she stepped through the curtain a few minutes later, she was naked with her arms upraised, drying her hair.

“Somebody said a man really knows a woman is beautiful when she looks as good after as she did before,” he said.

“I pass the test?”

“Come back to bed and I'll try to show you.”

“Later! I'm hungry.”

“What time is it? I left my watch somewhere.”

“Over the sink. It's almost nine-thirty.”