Authors: Fletcher Flora

Wake Up With a Stranger (23 page)

BOOK: Wake Up With a Stranger

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She hadn’t eaten much of the Italian food, however marvelous, but she had, as she recalled, drunk two or three more Martinis, and afterward they had gone to another place where she had drunk two or three more than that, and still afterward to still another place where there had been a comedian who told dirty jokes that weren’t very funny and several very tall girls in G-strings. She must have switched parties at this place, for she distinctly remembered for the first time riding in the front seat of a white Mark II, and this must mean that she had met and gone away with Milton Crawford, for Milton was the only man she could think of among her fairly close associates who drove a white Mark II.

Yes, it had been Milton. She was certain now. Going from the place they had met to the next place, he had kept patting her thigh, and she had let him, not considering it very important, and at the next place, which was noisy and uninhibited and very crowded, he had asked her if she would stay with him in his apartment, and she had said that she didn’t really feel much like it but might feel more like it later. She didn’t like Milton very much, although she didn’t make a cardinal issue of it, and it was more difficult to feel like it with him than with some others. Anyhow, after making it indefinite about staying with him, she had excused herself and gone to the ladies’ room, and it had been very hot in there and a long way from clean, and she remembered thinking that she wouldn’t use the toilet even
if she were saturated with penicillin, and this thought had made her feel even less like staying for what would be left of the night with Milton. She had gone out of the room and out of the larger room with all the noise and people and had stood outside leaning against the building and had taken several deep breaths of air.

There. There, there, there. That was when and where she’d become a dark hiatus. The precise place and time. There was no telling how long exactly the hiatus had lasted, but probably not very long, and it would be an absolute waste of time and effort to try to remember what had been done in it, for she knew from experience that it was no use. Besides, at that moment, the drum and the piano began to talk to each other, and she quit remembering and began listening. She listened for a while without turning, and she thought that it was good dialogue, very clever. Whoever was making the drum talk was doing it lightly with a brush, and whoever was making the piano talk was doing it also lightly with a brush of fingers, and the effect was a delicacy, an intimacy, like lovers whispering. Pretty soon, in the first pause in the dialogue, she revolved half around on the stool and looked over tables and chairs and heads to the platform beyond the small area for dancing.

The young man who was brushing the drum had a round, absorbed face and round, bewitched eyes and little brown curls coiled so tightly all over his head that she was immediately inclined to discount them as being very unlikely.

The young man who was playing the piano was about medium height with slightly stooped shoulders, and if he had been naked she could have counted far too many of his bones, and he had black hair and an ugly, thin, dark face with a slightly twisted nose and twisted mouth. She thought with a kind of strange despair that he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen in all her life.

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