Sometime that evening, a letter from Europe appeared on my bed. I didn’t see the culprit. I suspected it was all of them, Pam and the boys giggling, Mom crinkly-eyed at their mischief. Put it on his pillow, one of them no doubt said. Yeah, so he can smooch it and pretend it’s that girl. They would have tiptoed out and waited in the shadows, hoping to watch me.
Annie’s letter was dated June 26. She was on a train from Zurich, scribbling vignettes from Switzerland: a visit to a cathedral, dinner with a pair of beatniks, a chat with students from Vienna. Whoa, she wore a bikini on the beach in Lausanne. She lamented her “chalky paleness” and “overall layer of loose fat.” I remembered her naked at Boulder Creek—not an ounce of fat. As for “chalky”? More like creamy, silky, slender. She’d be smashing in a bikini.
“I don’t know exactly when I’ll be able to get another letter off, so read this one slowly,” she wrote. “Am going to France and Italy for a couple of weeks beginning Tuesday.”
That would have been last Tuesday, June 30, a week ago. And not Annie alone, sightseeing. France and Italy meant Annie with Lieutenant Sigg in his flashy Corvette. By now they’d be strolling arm in arm through the starlit streets of Paris, the world’s mecca for lovers. No doubt right now. This very minute.
I tossed her letter onto my dresser and bolted from the house. I needed some air.
Ann
Monday, July 6, 1964, Saint-Tropez. The sun etched pinpricks of light onto the tent walls and transformed it into an oven. My roasted skin had kept me awake for hours. I’d dozed in snatches, facedown, spread-eagle atop my sleeping bag to minimize skin contact, my head held up on a bunched-up ring of clothes. Naked, save for my panties, and too miserable to care. Every swallow shot lightning bolts down my throat. You are some specimen, Ann: a sniveling, burned-to-a-crisp car wrecker. And not any old car. A Sting Ray wrecker. The sunburn was just deserts.
Once we’d realized the extent of my sunburn and sore throat the afternoon before, Jack had raced off to a pharmacy and bought a couple of tubes of salve and some bitter throat lozenges. My blistered skin shuddered at the icy salve, but it eased the pain.
Jack rolled up onto his elbow. “Ready for your morning round?”
I croaked, “How’d you know I was awake?”
“I’m trained to know what’s going on—even when I’m asleep.” He squirted a thick ribbon across my shoulders. I flinched, then lay stone still. I didn’t want him to miss an inch of skin. He finished, wiped his hands on a towel, and handed me a lozenge. “Here, suck on this. I’ll whip up breakfast. Let me know if you’d like me to do the front.”
Nurse Sigg was out of the tent before I could answer. And, of course, I could doctor my front myself—and preferred to. Besides, he wanted to get on the road. Military to the core: schedule driven even on vacation.
What could I wear? Nothing tight. I settled on my wilted sundress. Without the sash, it would be comfortably baggy and have plenty of breathing space. The button-up front had a high scoop neck, so I went without a bra—no straps to chafe my skin.
Jack had arranged tea, eggs, bread, cheese, and apple slivers on the picnic table. He motioned for me to sit. “How’re you doing?”
“Better than expected,” I rasped. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t swallow. Or that braless felt rather seductive. Apparently he didn’t notice. Or was too polite to comment. “Nice spread.”
He nodded, wolfed down his food, and headed off to pack the car.
Steaming black tea anesthetized my throat. I choked down half a boiled egg. Bread, cheese, and apples were out of the question.
I worried about the unforgiving leather seats on the drive ahead. Jack had already thought of that and spread a couple of beach towels across the seat. “A bit rough, but softer than leather,” he said. “Here, aspirin—to get you through the morning.”
We roared off toward Monaco. Miraculously, I fell asleep not far out of Saint-Tropez and didn’t wake up until we were parked.
“Hey,” Jack said. “We’re in Nice. Hungry?”
“Starving. My throat’s better. I think I can eat a bit now.”
“Good. You didn’t have enough breakfast to keep a bird alive.”
At a seaside café, we people watched while waiting for our food. A striking woman in a white sheath with black accents, matching floppy hat, over-the-shoulder bag, and high-heeled sandals sashayed onto the beach. She spread out a fuchsia towel, kicked off her shoes, put her thumbs on her hips, and did a sexy wiggle dance. A pair of black panties dropped from under her dress. She flipped them into her bag with one toe. Not a shred of embarrassment.
This woman was no beach tart out to bait the young studs. Her bearing was too elegant, her clothes too refined. “Miss Chic” fished a scrap of hot pink cloth from the bag, straightened it out, and stepped into it. Wow, that thing couldn’t possibly cover the basics. In a reverse wiggle dance, the bikini pursued the hem of her dress—up, a millimeter at a time—showcasing tanned legs that went on forever. Jack was ogling. I was mesmerized. Somehow she wriggled the Band-Aid-size bikini into place while keeping her private parts private.
Next, she reached into the left side of her sleeveless dress, pulled out a black bra strap, and slipped it past her elbow. What sleight of hand had she used to unfasten it? And when? She drew the other strap out, and the bra popped free. How could she possibly slither into a bikini top without exposing herself? She took a tangle of hot pink spaghetti from her bag, unbuttoned her dress, slipped the miniature triangles inside, and maneuvered the dress off her shoulders. Somehow, she slid her arms into the waiting straps and fastened the top before the dress fell onto the towel. Her bikini was half the size of mine. And she was no skinny Minnie.
“Now there’s a handy skill,” I said. “So perfectly, ah, French, don’t you think?”
Jack tore his eyes away. “Uh, yes. French for sure. No doubt.”
The lesson for me? Presentation. The woman had turned a simple change of clothes into erotic art without being indecent.
Monday afternoon, July 6, 1964, Monaco. The hotel had an oversized bed and air conditioning. “Figured you’d need the amenities,” Jack said. “Besides, no low-budget options here. Or tent spaces.”
After a simple dinner of leftovers, he said, “Okay, another treatment before I take on Monte Carlo.”
So that was it. How could I have forgotten? He’d written that he planned to test his poker skills at Monaco’s world-famous casino. Maybe what I had seen as impatience was really his laser focus on preparing himself for the professionals. As for me? I’d be on my own for the evening.
“Give me a sec.” I went into the bathroom, eased out of my dress, and wrapped a towel loosely around myself. Back in the room, I lay facedown on the fresh sheets. Jack set to work.
“I’m puzzled why a smart guy like you would take on the experts at a gambling hall,” I said, genuinely curious. “Is it something soldiers do to practice for the next war? Part of living dangerously?” I meant it as a joke, but it fell flat. Why was I tweaking him when he had been so attentive to my sunburn?
“Actually, we practice to deter the next war.” His words were as crisp as tempered steel against flint. “I gamble only when we’re on border duty. It sharpens my wits for battle.”
“I hope you don’t get cleaned out. Casinos don’t give away money willingly, you know.”
“It’s not about cards. The guys who understand people are the ones who win.”
He was rubbing the backs of my thighs so slowly and deliberately that the pain subsided. I forced myself to focus on him, not on my own budding desires. “How so?”
“I read my opponent’s expression and manner. How he holds his cigarette. How deeply he drags. If he’s sweating or not. What he doesn’t say. I study his eyes. How often he looks at his cards. Each one’s a tell. But I’ve never played against the house. This’ll be new.”
“So it’s a science—Psychology 101. Not a game at all.”
“Nope. It’s war. I can se
e how people can get addicted . . . Someday, maybe somebody will settle me out of my single-guy perversions.”
“Sounds like a challenge.”
“Could be. Think about it.” He ran his fingers down my sides, skated temptingly close to my breasts, and jumped up. “I’d better go before I lose my edge. Too many thoughts of—”
He cut that thought short and gave me a peck on the cheek. After a quick shower, he put on a clean shirt and a tie and strode out to battle kings, queens, knights, and card sharks.
A shaft of light pierced the darkness. “That you, Jack? Did you win?”
He peeked out from the bathroom. “Shhhh. Don’t wake the patient.” He was beaming. “Let’s say that some mighty generous strangers anted up for our room.”
“Aha, stories! Tell me your stories.”
“About the German blowhard with an eye patch? Or the yachtsman missing his left pinky? Or the filthy-rich dandy with two gorgeous babes draped around his neck?”
“All of them, every one.”
“If you insist, my dear, but let’s tend the wounded first.” He slathered me in ointment and rubbed briskly. It hurt, but a good hurt, like eating hot chilies—the lingering fire reminds you how delicious they were. “First, I didn’t let on I spoke German, so ‘Colonel Patch’—sitting next to me—recited his playbook under his breath . . .”
Jack went on until nearly three in the morning. The happy ending? He won “more than two hundred dollars,” but he wouldn’t say how much.
We fell asleep holding hands, me on my stomach, him on his back. Even loose snuggling set my gooped-up skin afire.
Terry
Tuesday, 7 July 1964, Center. Despite Monday’s nonstop sprint from Silver-ton, I hadn’t slept. The cacophony of two preteen boys on overdrive and the two hours I spent prowling the countryside after midnight conspired to keep me awake. Annie’s letter was a record on perpetual replay: Am going to France and Italy for a couple of weeks . . . a couple of weeks . . . a couple of weeks. She wrote Am. But she was with the stud. She was hiding the truth: It was We. We are. Not I am.
A week before, I asked her to marry me, but I mailed my proposal July 1, the day after they left. She hadn’t gotten any of my letters from Silverton. She didn’t know I was madly in love with her. Worse, that West Pointer was test-driving a honeymoon, chauffeuring her through Europe, romancing her every minute of every hour of every day.
As dawn peeked over the distant Sangre de Cristo Range, I sat at my desk and started a new letter, getting right to the point: “One thing that really bothers me is the thought of him touching you, kissing you. I can’t dwell on that. It’s too unpleasant.”
I tried not to think about it. But I couldn’t stop. Equally excruciating was the likely fact that I wouldn’t see her for two years:
It has only been a month away from you, but with each day seeming like a month, I realize how difficult it would be to be separated from you. Two years is no longer an abstraction. It is real and long and terrifying. We have to be together. That means marriage in August or September, not two or three years from now. We need to get married before the Peace Corps, not after.
But what were the chances of her marrying me when she had Jack in hand? Slim to none. It wasn’t the fact that he was a stud or a military man—or that he drove a fancy car. Annie could see past the accoutrements. What she couldn’t dismiss was my own history, specifically the abortion. It was a stain I couldn’t erase. Or cover up. Or deny.
Still, I had to show her how deeply I loved her, how much I wanted her to marry me, but without scaring her away.
Last spring, she had been as skittish about marriage as I had been—how it would tie us down, how we needed to be free, on and on. Merely speaking the word marriage had left us both in awkward silence. My plea had to be serious, but not pleading or needy. It had to be playful, not threatening. Ever hopeful, I sent her Uncle Bob’s address. “Write me here as soon as you get back to Landshut,” I wrote. “Tell me you have come to the right decision on this marriage bit.”
Ann
Tuesday, July 7, 1964, the Italian Hill Country. After slaloming through impossibly narrow mountain curves along the Riviera, we turned north into Italy. Jack suggested another hotel night while my burn simmered down. I cringed at the expense, but we found a small pensione hanging off a hillside in a tiny village. As we were hauling in our gear, I banged his shin with my overnight bag. “Oops, scusi!”
“I wish you’d can the baby talk.”
What? The word had just popped out, as it had several times in my anticipation of returning to Italy. “Excuse me? You mean scusi, the Italian word for excuse me?”
He looked away, as if embarrassed. We unloaded the rest of our stuff in silence.
Behind the pensione, we found a place in the woods to spread out our blanket. We’d picked up a couple of small pizzas and chocolate biscotti to dip in our tea. My joke that for once the tea was almost tasty didn’t get a rise. Back in the room, I said, “Why don’t you go explore the hills, slay a dragon or two, while I take a nap?”
He dosed me with another lozenge and aspirin and a perfunctory salve treatment. “Sleep as long as you want,” he said.
What I heard: “Don’t expect me back anytime soon.”
The shadows in the room were long when I woke up. No Jack. A bouquet of wildflowers in a water glass sat on the nightstand—with a note. “Like these flowers, you light up my world. Sorry I was such a grump. Your Jack. PS. Come down to the lobby.”
The apology and the signature swept away the gloom of the afternoon. Once we fell in love by letter, he had started signing off with “Your Jack.” No comma. His note affirmed that he was still “My Jack.”
On the last flight of stairs, I heard his voice—speaking German. And laughing. A woman crooned—also in German. Jack boomed, “Ja, ja!” I peeked around the corner. Jack and a young couple sat at a tiny table in the pocket-size foyer. Each had a glass of wine. The girl switched to English the moment I appeared.
They were on their honeymoon. He was an American second lieutenant stationed in Stuttgart, and she was a German, a translator at the American Army base there. Her belly spoke volumes, at least five months pregnant, maybe six. I thought of Gretchen and winced. I hadn’t written her since my last-minute missive on the plane. I had no idea what she had decided to do with the baby, and I didn’t have a follow-up address. Some friend I’d been.
After dinner with the honeymooners, I coaxed Jack into a hillside walk, despite the light rain. We talked about Gretchen. I worried that she had been abandoned by us both, her two would-be supporters. She and Bonner contrasted sharply with our cheerful dinner companions. “So our new friend married the German girl he got pregnant. Do you suppose his military career is over?” I asked.
“Not him. He isn’t a career man.”
“Do you think Bonner would have married Gretchen if she weren’t German?”
Jack paused while a car splashed by on the wet street. “Germany has a long history of war, and the US Army never forgets. The lifers equate marrying a German to colluding with the enemy. To the brass, I’m tainted because I mix with locals. Too bad. I’ve learned a lot from Germans. Yeah, nationality was a factor for Bonner. Damn Cold War!”
Jack’s rare damn surprised me. He so embraced military courtesy that he seldom said anything harsher than darn. His vitriol betrayed a frustration with the army he’d only hinted at.
“But the Germans are our allies now, at least the West Germans. Isn’t it time to make peace—instead of war?”
“It’s not that simple.” He sighed, and I didn’t pursue it. We walked on silently through streets so narrow we could have held hands and touched the houses on opposite sides.
Soon he stopped and turned to me. “Let me apologize, again, for this afternoon. I was feeling sorry for myself—you were so close but off-limits. I needed a good run.”
Nodding, I took his hand. The rain began to drip down my neck. I sidestepped a puddle, and a Ter
ry moment flooded my mind: April 1961. I was in my dorm room one evening, hard at my studies. Terry phoned. “Look out the window. Tell me what you see.”
“Rain?”
“Look again. It’s a warm spring rain. It’s saying, ‘Terry. Annie. Come out and play.’”
He and I walked for hours that night, reveling in the soft tapping of rain on tree leaves, the fragrance of newly washed lawns, the slithery hiss of tires on wet pavement, the sheen of interlocking circles of streetlights reflected in mini-puddles. I returned to the dorm tingly, water dripping from my ringlets.
Now here in this Italian village with Jack, I was that tingly. Was it the rain? Jack? Or was it Terry? Which was worse—the pain I would cause either man by telling him the full truth about the other or the pain I chose to swallow daily by holding back? I shuddered at the forces wrenching me in opposite directions.
“Cold?” Jack slipped his arm around my waist.
It was more complicated than that, but I couldn’t tell him. “A bit chilly. I’m soaked.”
“Here. Take this.” He draped his jacket over my shoulders. “When we get back to the room, I’ll give you another dose of the magic ointment. Tomorrow we hit Verona. We won’t get more moments like these for a few days.”
For sure. Dad had arranged for us to stay with longtime army friends in Verona, Colonel Ed Kirtley and his wife, Edna Mae. Over the years, Ed, a chaplain, had been stationed in almost every place Dad had been. Edna Mae had been my surrogate mother when Mom went to New Mexico after Grandma had her stroke. “You’re right. Edna Mae will be guarding my virtue with bayonet fixed. Too bad. I’m enjoying your medicinal treatments. A lot.”
Back in the room, my dress witlessly clung to my body like a wet T-shirt. A smile played at the corners of Jack’s mouth. “What?” I demanded.
“Nothing. Just admiring how the rain makes you so . . . so lovely.”
“Really? Not that I’m not wearing a bra? Because of my burn, by the way.”
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 18
