Scorpion in the Sea (19 page)

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Authors: P.T. Deutermann

BOOK: Scorpion in the Sea
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“This parrot is a natural born boozer,” Mike said. “But he mostly likes fruity sort of stuff—wine, gin and tonic, rum and tonic.”
“Doesn’t it make him drunk?”
“Absolutely. Once he starts to weave around, I have to put him in his drunk bird box until he sleeps it off.”
She reached out to pet Hooker on the head. Mike held his breath. Hooker was into amputations. But this time the parrot bent his head sideways, looking at Diane first with one eye and then the other, and then, miraculously, bent his neck forward and let her scratch the bright green feathers on his neck.
“He must like you,” said Mike. “Normally you would have been chomped by now.”
“Where did you get him?” she asked, sampling the cognac.
“Bought him in Norfolk two years ago. Always wanted a parrot, but they tend to bond to their humans, and you can’t leave them. When I found out I was coming to a ship that didn’t deploy, I figured it was safe.”
“What happens when you go out to sea for more than a couple of days?”
She sipped her cognac carefully, using one hand to hold the snifter, and the other to run a fingernail lightly through the bright plumage on the parrot’s neck. Hooker kept his head down and made small sounds. Her robe was partially open at the top, revealing the swell of her breasts. Mike was torn between looking at her breasts and watching that fingernail slide up and down the parrot’s neck feathers.
“He goes along.” He smiled down at her. “As Captain, I can get away with that; couldn’t do it before.”
They stood together by the perch, not touching and yet within each other’s personal space, she stroking the bird’s head, he trying to tamp down a sense of building physical excitement, trying hard to pretend that something wasn’t happening between them. A sudden burst of heavy rain drummed on the cabin roof. The boat moved slowly in the wind sweeping off the intracoastal.
She watched the parrot for a long minute, and then stepped away from the perch, walking towards the after end of the lounge, towards the couch. She stood before it for a moment, as if trying to decide something. He watched her carefully, excited by the way the robe clung to her hips. The muted grind of the washing machine in the galley tried to compete with the noise of the rain overhead. She gave
her head a little shake, and then sat down, pulling the robe modestly around her legs. Mike discovered that he had been holding his breath. He relaxed, and moved to join her on the couch.
“Aw, shit,” croaked the parrot.
They both broke up, laughing a little louder than necessary. He sat down and looked at her. She smiled.
“For a moment there …” she said.
“Yeah. Me too. It’s the cognac, I guess.”
She looked at him. Her eyes were almost purple in the dim light of the cabin.
“No, it’s not the cognac. I wanted—I mean, we’re both grownups here. You’ve been very nice to me, and J.W., my husband, is not very nice to me. It’s kind of complicated. I’ve just recently made a discovery: my husband has a girlfriend.” She lowered her eyes in embarrassment.
Mike did not know what to say, so he kept his silence. She looked back up at him.
“You’re an attractive man, and over there, standing next to you, I felt—something. Part of me would very much like to indulge my desires for a while, but the part that’s been married for sixteen years keeps surfacing the usual consequences.”
She looked directly at him for a moment before continuing, her eyes luminous.
“I don’t think I have what it takes to have an affair, to sneak around, to manage the deception. I’m the type who would just come right out with it one morning, admitting all, and I’m not prepared to put up with what would follow. That’s what I meant by consequences; I’ve seen it too often in the Navy.”
She looked away again. He started to say something, but she put a finger to her lips.
“Let me finish, before I lose my nerve. I wanted—I still want, actually—for you to make love to me. When we ran into each other at the O’Club, and again when you gave us the tour of the boat, I felt the attraction. I think you feel the same thing.”
He waited, his mind whirling.
“As you’ve guessed,” she continued, “my marriage is not, I don’t know—working? Is that the word these days? No, that doesn’t quite describe it.”
She tossed her head impatiently, and sipped some cognac. She continued to keep her eyes averted from his face.
“J.W. and I are at the going through the motions stage. When we first got married, he explained to me that his career in the Navy would come first and foremost, that he was determined to make Admiral, and that getting to Flag rank would take a hundred percent effort. I went along with that. I was supposed to have the family, and do what was required to support his career. We tried hard to have kids, but that didn’t work out. Which meant that the career became everything. And even that was pretty interesting, at least for a while. He was on the fast track, and people seemed to think he was a comer.”
“But—?”
“But. I found out that his career didn’t leave much of a role in life for me. I tried a couple of things—real estate in Washington, going back to school, and that filled in the empty space for a while, but J.W. made it clear that I could do anything I wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with my support role.”
“And, of course, everything you tried did just that.”
“Yes. That was made clear, always in a subtle manner, but clear. And now, I find out he’s been seeing some woman on his trips to Norfolk. I realized that I was an important part of the frame but not part of the picture. I should have guessed, of course; the wife’s the last one to figure it out.”
Mike wanted to reach out for her, to hold her. Her discomfort was palpable.
“Is the woman someone you know?” he asked.
“No. I found out quite by accident. I almost wish I hadn’t. She’s in the Navy, of all things. A Commander, on the Fleet Commander’s staff in Norfolk. J.W. goes to Norfolk to meetings all the time because the Admiral hates to go to conferences. She has a condo out in Virginia Beach.
He gets a room at the BOQ, but stays with her. It’s apparently been going on for nearly two years.”
“How did you find all this out?”
She laughed, a short, bitter sound.
“At one of those awful receptions at the O’Club. I was in the ladies room, and two women came in while I was in a stall. They were talking about J.W., how good looking he is, and all about—her.”
Mike leaned back in the couch, unsure of what to say. He was sorry for her pain, but at the same time aware that the fact of her husband’s infidelity somehow changed the equation. He remembered the aviator’s comments that she was scouting. He wondered if she was, behind all the protestations, ready to have an affair of her own. She looked across at him and smiled a bittersweet smile, as if reading his thoughts. He felt himself beginning to blush.
“Does he know you know?” he asked, trying to divert his own thoughts.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I was very hurt for a while, but I’m not sure what a confrontation would prove. He has his career, his nice office, the staff at his beck and call, a mistress, and a presentable wife. I have my volunteer work at the hospital and at the Navy Relief Office, the nightly round of receptions, a very nice set of quarters on the beach, and a presentable husband. Most women in America would think I was pretty well off. But lately it’s gotten pretty lonely inside; I keep thinking that there’s something else—you know the song, is that all there is?”
She smiled ruefully and sipped her cognac again.
“And then I say to myself that I’m being stupid, that there are thousands of women who have not one tenth of what I have and to grow up and shut up. Maybe even he will grow up one day.”
She shook her head again, as if to clear away the complexity of what she was trying to say.
“I think that what I desperately need is to be, well, wanted. As a woman, as a wife, as even a friend. And now, here I am, on a bachelor’s boat, with nothing on under this robe, and a very attractive and considerate man a few feet
away, and part of me is saying, Diane, he wants you, you want him, do it for God’s sake, let go, and the other part is saying, don’t be an ass—married women who fool around always, but always, get nothing but pain out of it, even when their husbands are cheating on them.”
She shook her head again, slowly.
“I’m not doing this very well. Maybe I better just get the hell out of here.”
He moved closer to her on the couch. He leaned across the space between them, reached out and brushed her cheek with the back of his fingers. She turned her face slightly.
“You must live right,” he said, softly.
She looked at him, a question forming in her eyes. He cupped her face in his hand for a moment, and then leaned back.
“My turn. I was married briefly to a girl I thought I knew; came back from a deployment to find out she’d left me for a lawyer, for God’s sake, and that I didn’t know anything, not anything, about her, and probably not about women in general. I’ve been single now for, what, almost as long as you’ve been married, sixteen years; in all that time, I’ve made it a hard and fast rule never to go after another man’s wife. I have this superstition, see: if I take up with another man’s wife, it will come back to haunt me. One day, maybe, I’ll fall in love, and get married, and then some evil bastard will come along and seduce my wife, and I’ll find out, and there won’t be shit I can do about it, because I will have been guilty of the same crime. It’s silly, probably, but there it is. And it’s a bitch, lady, because when an attractive, married woman sends out that ‘I want’ signal, all the sweet young single things get blown right out of the room. I don’t know what it is, exactly—basic biology, I guess.”
He threw up his hands in a gesture of exasperation.
“So, yes,” he continued. “I would dearly love to take that robe off, but, right now my stupid conscience would get in the way. But not for lack of inspiration.”
They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment. She made a small sound, deep in her throat as tears welled
up in her eyes. He slid over then and held her while she wept, great wracking sobs, punctuated after a few minutes by the beginnings of hyperventilation. He patted her on the back and calmed her, telling her that it would be all right, to breathe slower, until she quieted. He left her on the couch and went to the bathroom, returning with a cold cloth. He wiped her face gently, erasing the smudged remains of mascara, and reducing the blotches of color on her cheeks. She kept her eyes closed while he did this; he was glad that she did, because he did not think he could restrain himself from loving this woman whose need was so strong. He Continued to smooth the skin of her face with the cloth, tracing her features, marvelling at the folly of a man who could ignore this woman. He suddenly found himself to be ravenously hungry.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
She opened her eyes and looked at him blankly for an instant, as if she were trying to fathom the question. He tried again.
“I’m not a bad cook, and I’ve just decided that I’m starving. Let me fix something, and then we’ll get you home.”
She nodded quickly.
“Yes. That would be nice. And thank you—for everything.”
Her voice wavered, as she understood what he was doing —breaking the tension. They were both very close to being overwhelmed by their separate desires. He looked down at her face for a moment.
“I think I might be kicking myself in the tailfeathers when you’re gone,” he admitted, smiling. “I’m pure hell on what might have been’s.”
She looked back at him, the beginnings of a smile playing across her face.
“Sex without intimacy is usually a disaster, Captain,” she said. “I read that in a book somewhere, so it must be true. The fact that you did not take advantage of me inclines me to think that I don’t—I don’t want to just drop things, if you can understand that. I’d like to build, well, intimacy. Yes. That’s the right word. I think that’s my basic problem, the
absence of intimacy. I desperately need a—someone. Can you put up with that idea?”
He paused for a moment, his face serious.
“Yes, I think so, but you have to understand that I don’t believe in adult men and women being just friends when there’s sexual desire between them. That’s just an exercise in mutual frustration. I’m all for the intimacy, but only because that makes the loving that much more profound.”
She nodded her understanding.
“Yes. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing just now. But I’m going to do something. I can’t just let things keep drifting, now that J.W. has stepped over the line.”
“Well, you probably already know that I don’t stand very high on your husband’s hit parade, and professionally I don’t think very much of him or his tactics. I hope to hell he doesn’t make Admiral, although I’m finding out that he’s more likely to make flag than I am to make Captain. I guess you’re going to have to decide whether or not you’re a free agent. If you are, I’d love to take up your option.”
“The ironic thing,” she said with a sigh, “is that I suspect he’s taken up with her as much for her access to the Fleet Commander’s inner sanctum as for any other reason. But maybe I’m just rationalizing. He may actually find her more attractive.”

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