The Girl With the Jade Green Eyes (23 page)

At breakfast Breedlove said to Kyra, “Slade’s down by the pool alone, sulking like Achilles in his tent.”

“I’ll dive down and cheer him up, but I want you to stay here. I hope this weather holds for tonight. I can literally taste a pas de deux. I read this book on ballet, and I just love its expressions.”

“Treat me nice, and I might treat you to a pirouette.”

“I’ve never mistreated anyone in my life, and I’m five thousand years old. But I fear I’m breaking my record this morning. I’ve got to be brutal with Ben to get him off the premises while we’re making our escape.”

“How do you propose to do that?”

“Mentally emasculate him. Crush him. Then give him a framework on which to rebuild his manhood. You see, Ben cares for me, but he cares more for himself as a daring, do-anything guy.”

“And you’re doing a good job of not telling me what you’re going to tell him.”

“You’re too honest and law-abiding. You’d want me to stop and consider. Ben won’t. He’s a frustrated two-gun man straight out of the old West. He gave me autographed copies of his books and I read them. By his fantasies ye shall know him. Pass the toast. I need an excuse for more honey.”

A few minutes after breakfast, lithe but voluptuous in her bikini, Kyra emerged from the bedroom and walked onto the balcony. Nodding to her guards stationed there, she leaned over and called down to Slade: “Good morning, Ben. Isn’t the world bright and beautiful?”

“It’s beginning to look a little better now.”

“It’s the beginning of such a joyous weekend, I’d like to share it with you. May I come down and join you?”

“You’re what my doctor ordered.”

“No, Ben, not me.” The tenor of her voice changed. “What you need is a bandage for your busted gut. Remember the gut you were going to bust if I weren’t off this planet by—when was it? Ah, yes. Yesterday. But, don’t despair, you two-dollar pistol with a defective firing pin. I’ll come down and mend you.”

It was the most gratuitous act of public humiliation Breedlove had ever witnessed, and then she was plunging into the pool to slither toward him with the undulations she had learned from the dolphins. Breedlove looked out the window to see her emerge dripping from the pool to squat beside Slade and begin talking with an intent look on her face. Slowly Slade regained his composure as she talked. The lines of his jaw set. His face hardened, and he began to nod slowly, agreeing with the arcane argument that Breedlove had not been permitted to hear.

Suddenly Slade smiled, a smile of joy and release, nodded emphatically, and Kyra rose and kissed him on the forehead. Hand in hand they dove into the pool together to swim its length and back, and Breedlove drew back from the window amazed. As quickly as she had crushed Slade, Kyra had revitalized him.

That afternoon Slade left the motel shortly after Fawn arrived with the escape gear and word that she had reserved a window table at Pierre’s for nine o’clock that evening.

“Talk with an English accent, Tommy, when you get there. To be sure you got good seats, I pretended I was your social secretary and reserved the table for you in the name of Lord and Lady Greystoke.”

“But, Fawn, that’s Tarzan and Jane.”

“I thought the name sounded too aristocratic for me to invent. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a French restaurant.”

It was a balmy evening. Stars glittered in a cloudless sky. A breeze lapped the waters of the sound and rustled the pines which scented the point on which Pierre’s stood. Walking beside Kyra from the valet parking station to the rustic entrance of the restaurant, Breedlove felt joy swelling within him. “Your hair shimmers in the starlight.”

“Wait’ll you see it by candlelight.”

They entered to be greeted by a headwaiter whose eyes blew kisses at the beautifully gowned, beautifully coiffured, beautifully poised, and beautiful Kyra. He did not ask for their name, but merely bowed and said, “This way, m’lady.”

He led them across the empty dance floor through suddenly hushed voices that resumed as they passed. He caught comments on Kyra’s dress from the women and comments on her figure from the men, and he knew that Kyra with her acute hearing heard more. He could tell from the sway of her hips, for he had grown good at reading her movements, that she was delighted to be in this environment.

They were seated at a corner table with view windows opening on the sound and its wooded shoreline. Gazing around her enchanted, Kyra settled into the chair, and the waiter handed them menus. Breedlove ordered martinis, and the waiter bowed out with a “Merci, m’lord.”

“French again,” Kyra said, glancing at her menu. “We should have brought Gravy along to translate.”

“Please, Kyra. Let me enjoy my dinner.”

So the evening began in banter, and Breedlove planned to keep it thus for a while, to ease gradually into more serious matters. Over the drink he spoke in generalities of the radiance of her smile, of the lights in her eyes, and how her simplest movements were imbued with a grace unknown in earth women.

“Breedlove, I’ve smote the living liar! Oh, look…”

Lights glittering, the night boat for Victoria glided by, casting its lambency on the waters. In silence they watched the receding ship until Kyra, with a tremor in her voice, said, “How fleeting and beautiful the varied sights of earth.”

The longing in her voice threw him off his timing. Impulsively he grasped her hand and said, “Stay here, Kyra, with me.”

The orchestra was filing toward the bandstand as she said, “If I were a woman of earth, nothing would please me more than to stay with you to the end of my days.”

“Would you be willing to marry me?”

“If I were of earth and feeling as I feel now, if you asked, we would leave tonight for your cabin, and after you were able to walk again, we’d hurry to the preacher and I’d make an honest man of you. But for now, let’s dance.”

He led her onto the floor. While jitterbugging in the family’s living room, he had discovered her lightness. In these more measured steps he learned of her rhythm. Her body flowed with the music and almost pulsated with the percussion instruments. Through the entire set her head nestled on his shoulder,—they danced in silence. Apotheosized by her grace, he feared words might break the spell.

After the swirling finale they returned to the table to find a plate of hors d’oeuvres. Even here they ate in silence until he finally said, “You do dance divinely.”

“For all your mass, Breedlove, you’re good too.”

They ordered the meal and he ordered wine, but the conversation went slowly in the euphoria that followed their dance. But his euphoria helped ease him into the areas of conversation he wanted to explore.

“When I first saw you, I wanted very much to help you in what seemed an impossible task. You captured my heart as a charming, bright, but dependent little girl. In the past week my feelings toward you have been changing. They seem to be broadening… deepening…”

He struggled for the most accurate and least offensive word.

“ ‘Ripening’?” she suggested.

“ ‘Maturing.’ I’ve begun to look at you, well, less as a girl and more as a woman.”

“I’ve known of the feelings growing in your heart, and they please me. I love the way you peek at me when you think I’m not looking, the way your eyes follow me when I pass, and the way the swish of my slacks sends you.”

“There’s no need telling you anything. You know it all already.”

“But I like to hear you say it. Besides, I’m not guiltless. I’ve been showering with my door open, hoping you’d peek.”

“Have you been tempting me, you Jezebel?”

“My season’s coming on. If I can’t get any uranium out of this planet, I want to get something.”

“If you’re stranded here you have a prime piece of merchandise right on your counter. Every man who lays eyes on you falls in love with you after his fashion, but I think I can offer you a quality of desire no other man can offer. I would make no demands on you. I’d only want to be with you, to nurse you when you’re sick, to provide for you, to protect you when you’re threatened. I told you I’m no great lover, but I—”

“Methinks you protest too much about loving.” She held a palm to him for silence. “Who are you to judge whether you’re a lover or not? Leave that to your loved one. I’m your loved one, and I say you’re the greatest lover on earth for me.”

“How can you say that when I’ve never made love to you?”

“Are you talking about love, or about copulation, earth style?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it so bluntly, but I suppose I am talking about copulation, in a way. After all, it’s a function of love.”

“Well, I declare. If you’re worried about your ability to give me pleasure as compared with some sex hero as you imagine Gravy to be, forget it. In the art of fornication as practiced on Kanab, probably neither of you could do as well as Crick, and he can’t function yet. As far as your capacity to manufacture sperm is concerned, I’m sure you’re adequate. You haven’t been castrated, have you?”

“I wouldn’t be talking like this if I were,” he protested. “I’m talking about my love for you as a woman, and on earth sex is a part of the relationship. It gives a man and woman in love a way to express tenderness toward each other on a continuing basis.”

“But it’s a rather brief pleasure, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but it has symbolic value. It testifies to the union of a man with a woman and excludes others from their union.”

“On a planet with the variety earth offers, doesn’t that exclusion get tedious?”

“In some marriages, yes. But if a man and woman truly love each other, the act of love becomes an expression of their intimacy, a sharing and an exploration.”

“How much exploring can you do in such a limited area?” she asked, rhetorically, he hoped. “From the way your psychologists explained the mechanics to me, it’s less a sharing than a borrowing and lending or a transfer.”

“But the sensation is shared,” he said, beginning to feel like a swimmer going under for the third time.

“Breedlove, are you telling me you’d take on all my problems for a tremor in the loins?”

“Kyra, you’ve got to be kidding. I know from the charge you put in your readings of Shakespeare you understand the concept.”

“Yes.” She nodded, sipping her wine meditatively. “Shakespeare got explicit on the subject. ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action,’ and ‘Shun the heaven that leads men to this hell’ I’d say he covered the subject pretty damned thoroughly.”

Breedlove went under. “Then, I take it your answer is No.”

“What was your question?”

He remembered then he had not asked the question, and he said, “Oh, hell. Forget it.”

The waiter had brought their salad, and he turned his attention to the plate. But she would not let him be.

“Ben Bolt, you’re frowning at sweet Alice. You know I’d do anything for you. If it’s fornication you want, ask the waiter to clear the table.”

“It isn’t being done on tables. Not this year. With you I’d want a relationship that’s dignified and permanent.”

“If it’s mating you’re after, wait a few days, but it’s not very dignified and never permanent Kanabian style. The consummation annuls the ceremony, and we she-things from Kanab don’t go in for multiple small tremors. We hold back and let go with one big sensation to end all sensations, until the next summer.”

She was laughing openly now, and the music was beginning. Smiling at her glee, he led her onto the floor, where all misunderstandings were forgotten in the keen aesthetic joy of movement. Dinner was served when they returned, and he hoped the meal would take the alcoholic glow from her mind. In the next conversational session he wanted to move straight to the subject.

Their main dish was a ragout prepared from a secret recipe handed down from Louis XIV, but for all the attention Breedlove paid it, it could have been corned beef hash. When he dabbed the last bit of sauce from his lips and laid his napkin aside, he assumed the mind-set of a businessman proposing a deal.

“I want to pose a hypothetical situation in detail, and I want you to listen carefully. Assume that you’re grounded on earth and have to live among humans. Assume you choose the United States as your country of residence. Your easiest route to citizenship is through marriage. Suppose we married under the conditions you lay down, valid intimacies once a year, invalid intimacies whenever the table is cleared. Assume you had children by me as you say you can. You’d need a husband. Genetically, not all of our children would be capable of living off sunlight and vegetation. They would have to be housed, fed and clothed, educated and cared for. The function of the husband on earth is to provide for the family. Obviously our green-haired children would be different from other children, but all great men are different. Our children would stride the earth as princes of the realm, their green hair marking them as the sons of Kyra. As their mother you could be proud of their accomplishments, but as their father I would love them for themselves, even the ones who couldn’t get their names in a telephone book.”

He had her attention now, and he did not wish to lose it. “But above all, there is you. You’ve been too long a-roaming. It’s time you quit playing the stray hound of heaven, sniffing the spoors of space for an oxygen planet, because you’ve found one, Kyra. You’ve come home, to me.”

He lost the mind-set of a businessman when he saw the tears threatening her eyes. With a feeling of inner urgency he shifted to a more humorous tone. “I know you’re responsible for the people on the meadow, but they too could find a home on earth. Flurea could easily get a job as a women’s track coach in college. The big-breasted girls could make good money as topless waitresses in San Francisco, and they’d all find mates.”

“Even Myra?” she asked.

“She’d make an ideal wife for some Yankee farmer who’s trying to protect his acres from summer campers. You and I could raise Crick. There’s enough ground around the cabin to grow his vegetables.”

“A quarter acre of prime alfalfa ought to do it.” She laughed, recovering now.

“After Crick’s grown, if he’s as potent as you say he is, we’ll send him to Hollywood, where such things are appreciated, or to Texas, where they wouldn’t be noticed.”