The Scarlet Ruse (17 page)

"Is there anything wrong with that?"

"These two new people are going to have a long and intimate relationship."

"From the samples, you haven't anything against that, have you? As any fool can plainly see, / like the idea. A crazy man has run my life for the past five years, and now he'll never find me again. He'll never have a chance to kill us, will he?"

"When we run out of funds, we'll seek honest work?"

"You're getting stuffy, you know that? What you should do now is just live. Right? It's a big adventure, and we're together, lover. We'll be in love and have fun and swim and eat and laugh and all that. You're the captain. You can marry us. Let's think up a new last name for the happy couple."

"McWorry?"

"Mister, I am really going to cure you of that."

I found my little parking lot, circled on three sides with mangrove. I checked the time and the tide chart and laid her just where I wanted her, cross-hooked so she would swing properly on the tide change. I pulled the Muсequita up onto the starboard quarter and made her fast there against fenders so she would not nudge us all night. I started the generator and checked the bilges and put Mary Alice in charge of the galley. I sat in the lounge with my drink, moving those square pieces around atop the game table in my mind, finding damned little to please me.

I kept it on automatic pilot most of the time, taking it out now and again to make a correction for tide drift. She sat in the white copilot seat in a salmon-colored bikini, slumped, with her heels propped atop the instrument panel, her legs apart, her fanny on the edge of the seat, the nape of her neck against the top of the back. She had piled her black hair into a half-knotted wad on the top of her head. Sweat trickled down between her breasts, down her belly, and into the top edge of the bikini bottom, darkening the fabric. She had exposed almost every optional inch of skin area to the breeze that never happened.

The heat made her cross. "Jesus, McGee, is it always like this?"

"This is very unusual weather we're having."

"Ha,ha,ha. Can we stop and swim or something?"

"Not through here. Have another cold beer."

"I don't want another cold beer. Heat makes me feel sick."

"When we change direction, we'll get some breeze."

"Like how soon?"

"Hour. Hour and a half."

"Dear Jesus. I just can't take much of this."

"Complain, complain, complain."

She snapped her head around and stared at me, her eyes narrow and furious. "Do you want me to make a list of everything I want to complain about?"

"If it would make you feel better, go ahead."

"Maybe my nerves are on edge for a lot of reasons."

"Could be," I said. No argument. I let the discussion die. It wasn't going to do either of us any good to talk about it.

Last night she had decided we would have a very busy bed, and she began to do a lot of flapping and roaming and rambling, changing from here to there, and changing back, apparently trying to express a special gratitude with a lot of extra-strenuous work. I stayed with her for a time, and suddenly it was all rubbery fakery, smack and slap, grunt and huff, like a pair of third-rate wrestlers in some lunch-bucket town practicing for the evening's performance for the nitwits who think it quite real.

As soon as I got that image of it, both the spirit and the flesh became weak. She settled down, still breathing hard.

"Did I do something wrong, darling?" she asked. "Did I move wrong and hurt you or anything?"

"No. No, it wasn't that."

"What then?"

"I don't know. It just happened."

"Does it happen often like this with you?"

"I wouldn't say so."

"You want I should help you? Here, let me help you."

"No, honey. Let's just wait."

"Wait for what? Violins?"

"Let's just take it easy. That's all."

"That's easy for you to say. What about me? You don't give a damn how I feel, do you?"

"Sorry about all this."

"It was going to be really great."

"Next time."

She made a sound of exasperation and moved away from all contact with me. From time to time she sighed. Then she got up and went across to the smaller stateroom and slammed the door, leaving behind a faint effluvium of perfume, exertion, and secretions, leaving behind some bedding for me to untangle, leaving behind that strange male guilt and shame impotence creates. The female and the male are both victims of the male sexual mythology. If I do not achieve, or if I prematurely lose that engorgement which creates the stiffness required for penetration, then my manhood is suspect. My virility is a fiction. I have been unable to give or receive satisfaction. The act has not been carried to its compulsory conclusion. Once any element of doubt enters the equation, then the male erection, that font of aggression and mastery, becomes as vulnerable, as delicate, as easily lost as a snowflake over a campfire.

She left me there alone, full of self-pity and yet with a sense of relief. There was just too damned bouncing rubbery much of her, and nothing anywhere that one mere hand could cup. I had all the self-derision of the suddenly gelded stud. I would auction off the Flush to some Burt Reynolds type and pursue the quiet life. Some gardening. Gourmet cooking. And a little philately. Or some numismatics, for a change of pace.

I thought of paying a call upon her, but instead I went to sleep. I was more apprehensive than curious.

Now, forced to recall how miserably I had disappointed the lady, I wondered if I might find a clue to a repetition of failure if I were to look upon her and try to summon erotic dreams of glory and see if I could detect the promise of some small physiological response.

Now, in the blazing shimmer and the white needles that came sparking up off every ripple, I looked sidelong and quickly at her sitting there and felt awe and a little stirring of alarm. There was so bloody much of her, all so firm and fit. A yard and a half of great legs, boobs like two halves of a prize honeydew, a mouth from here over to there, hands and feet almost as big as mine, a powerful-looking neck full of strings and cables and muscles which moved into a different and visible pattern each time she changed the position of her head. I was aware of all her hidden engines, all working away, from the slow hard kuh-dup of her heart to all the other hidden things, absorbing, nourishing, fractionating, eliminating.

"If you don't mind too much," she said. She made a nimble reaching flexing motion and dropped a damp wad of salmon-colored fabric onto the deck. "This is a monokini," she said. She stood up, peeled the rest of it down her hips and down her legs and stepped out of it. "And this is a nokini at all. And automatic pilot or no automatic pilot, this is not invitational. It's to keep from dying."

I pointed to the thunderhead building in the southeast, lifting into the sky. "With any luck," I said.

"Can you drive over that way and get under it?"

"If you look over in that direction, like two hundred yards, you will see some birds walking. Never drive the boat toward where the birds are walking. First rule of navigation."

"Oh, great!"

"Whether we get it or not, it'll change the wind."

"How soon?"

"Maybe an hour."

"Why do I bother to ask anything at all? Why can't you use the air conditioning while you're running?"

"It has to run off the generator. There's something wrong with the wiring. There's some kind of crossfeed somewhere. If I start the generator, everything will be fine until I cut in the air conditioning. Then it blows about seven fuses, and we're dead in the water until I replace them. On every boat everywhere, dear, something is always wrong with the wiring."

"Why does it have to be the air conditioning?"

"Because God hates us both."

"Don't say that!"

"Offends you?"

"Just don't say it. Okay? It isn't something to be funny about. That's all. It doesn't offend me. It just makes me feel strange. Crawly."

The Flush waddled along, the long V of her wash fad-tag into the hot ripply dance of the big bay. The lady stood up between the pilot seats, brace legged, letting her black hair down and rewinding it to bind up the strands which had escaped. Sweat made oiled highlights on the long curves of her body.

My concealed amusement at myself had a very acid flavor. Here was the libertine's dream of glory, the realization of all the night thoughts of adolescence: a handsome, lithe, healthy superabundance of naked lady in her prime, alone with our hero aboard his crafty craft, stocked for weeks of cruising about, a lady as infinitely available as the very next breath or the very next cold beer or hot coffee, and our hero was wishing she had stood on the other side of her chair because he found her overheated towering closeness oppressive, yea even approaching the vulgar. It made me remember the time I went to the performance of a Spanish dance troupe, hoping there was a ticket left at the box office. There was, way way down front. It was so close I could smell the dust they banged up out of the stage. I could see soiled places on the costumes. I could smell the fresh sweat of effort mingled with the stale sweat of prior engagements, trapped in gaudy fabric, released by heat. I could hear the dancing girls grunt and pant. I could see dirty knuckles, grubby ankles, and soiled throats. They were very very good. Ten rows back the illusion must have been perfect. But I was too damned close to the machinery, and it killed the magic.

Okay, hero. You are a sentimentalist, a romanticist. A throwback. You want all those tricks of a bygone culture -the shy and flirtatious female, the obligation for pursuit, retreat, and ultimate capture. Pretty chauvinistic, buddy. This is the new casual world of equality. You are both made of the same order of meat. Should she have a yen for a beer, she can go get it and open it. Should she have a yen for an interlude of fricative pleasure, she can turn and swing astride you as you sit, and you can keep an eye on the channel ahead over her shoulder. Contact and excitation create a natural physical release. It is no big wondrous emotional complicated thing. The new message is that sexual mystery causes terrible hangups which create neuroses which destroy lives.

It all made me want to move to a small town in Indiana and start a little factory where I could make buggy whips, stereopticons, and hoop skirts, and sit in the glider on the porch on the summer evenings and hear the children at play and finally go inside and, by gas light, read that Admiral Dewey had been placed in command of the fleet.

A world I never knew. Maybe the worlds you never knew are always better than the ones you do.

She sat again and swung her feet up. "Won't this thing go any faster than this?"

"Not enough to matter. It's a displacement hull. It has to push the water out of the way. I could get three more knots out of her and use twice the fuel I'm using now."

"It's a real crock."

"But it's my real crock."

She shrugged and was silent. I tried to put my finger on what it was about her that was battling me and irritating me. It seemed excessively childish for her to complain so constantly about being mildly uncomfortable aboard a houseboat taking her away from something that really terrified her.

Children lack empathy about how the adults around them feel. Children have a tendency toward self-involvement which makes them give too much weight to trivia, too little weight to significant things. If the house burns down, the charred sister and the charred kitten are equally mourned.

I had believed her empathetic, sensitive, responsive. I had enjoyed being with her. This female person did not seem at all responsive in the same way. I went back over the relationship. A cartoon light bulb went on in the air over my head. At all prior times, up to last night and now, my involvement had been in exactly the same track as her self-involvement. So of course she had been responsive, in the way a mirror is responsive.

If you go to a play which is concerned with a dramatic relationship you have experienced, you are deeply moved. The actress will speak the lines in a way best designed to move you. But take the lovely, talented thing to dinner, and she will bury you in the debris of her tepid little mind, rotten reviews in London, the inferior dressing room on the Coast, the pansy hairdresser's revenge, her manager's idiot wife, the trouble with talk shows, and who has stopped or started, sleeping with whom or with what.

I had listened to drama and believed it. And now I could not believe that this was the actress.

I saw the squall riffle approaching way off the port bow, making a busier calligraphy on the water. It covered so large an area it could not miss us. I told her to prepare for sudden comfort. While she was looking at me with blank incomprehension, the rain breeze swept us, a coolness with a smell of rain and ozone. She made a glad cry and stood to face it, arms out in pleasurable crucifixion. It died away, and she said "Nooooooo" in a long descending mournful minor.

"More on the way and rain behind it."

It was more than I expected. The strong gusts threatened to whip the tarp away, and I took it down, folding it with difficulty, stowing it under the instrument panel. Electricity winked and bammed around us as the rain came in silvery, wind-whipped sheets, heeling us to starboard, obscuring the far markers. The rain was unseasonably cold, and abruptly it turned to hail, the size of puffed rice, whipping and stinging us, so that she yelped with pain and surprise and ducked down below the rail on the port side, behind me, for shelter. Then more rain came, heavier but with less wind. I had backed the Flush off to almost dead slow, so that if we wandered from the channel we would nudge the shallows instead of sticking fast. Mary Alice gloried in the rain, upturning her face to it, laughing at the pleasure of it streaming down her body. Her hair was soaked and flattened. The deck ran with water. She picked up her bikini parts, wrung them momentarily dry and put them back on. But we had both started to shiver. I was going to switch to the pilot house controls when suddenly the rain ceased, and I could hear it steaming on across the bay toward the mainland. The depth finder was reading eleven feet, and I had to move easterly about fifty feet to get the distant markers lined up.