Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  “Dance with me?”

  She danced tight against him, with her forehead against his cheek. She was smaller than Alaine and more finely made. Her body was warm and sinuous. She sang softly. “‘You are always in my heart—’ That’s a fine song, isn’t it, Mike?”

  He nodded, holding her dreamily against him, feeling the easy, slow rhythm of the music.

  “They were playing it the night we first met,” she said. “At the Mark. Do you remember?”

  He didn’t answer, thinking vaguely that she should have remembered that day because it was her wedding day, but instead she remembered it as the first time they met. He was touched and a little guilty and he felt a tremendous awareness of the woman in his arms. He stopped dancing abruptly and moved away from her.

  Tom clattered into the kitchen with a braying call. “Hey, what’s going on in here with you two?” He laughed and punched Miguel lightly on the arm. “I’ve got eyes like a hawk, you flyboy.”

  Tina Cavell and one of the nurses appeared in the doorway asking for refills. Alaine stood behind them, looking tired.

  “Hi, Mike—isn’t it getting late?”

  He didn’t want to leave, but he said yes, it was late.

  “The evening’s a pup,” Tom said. “I want another rum and Coca Cola—“ He sang the last four words doing a little dance step and kissing Nora on the back of the neck at the end of it.

  “We have to go,” Miguel said.

  “I’m sorry, Mike,” Alaine said. Nora said nothing and she didn’t look at him.

  He heard Pete Wallace roar, “That goddam aydie-camp has all the women cornered in the kitchen again!”

  “I’ll get my coat,” Alaine said.

  Nora and Tom and Major and Tina Cavell walked out to the car with them. The night was cool and bright. From where they stood on a Sausalito hillside, they could see a last quarter moon riding over the dimmed-out lights on the bay.

  “I meant what I said about that trip to the coast, Spicko,” Tom said. “Call me before you decide to take off.”

  He was carrying a rum Coke and he spilled a little on his pink bedfords.

  “You’d better get that,” Nora said. “It will stain.”

  Major Cavell said, “Let me give you a hand.”

  Tina’s voice was a little thick. “I’ve got some carbon whatcha-callit in the house. It’s in the kitchen cupboard over the refrigerator.”

  Tom and the major went inside and Tina walked around the car to say good-by to Alaine. Nora glanced up at Miguel and he could see that secret half-smile on her lips again. “I meant what I said about the trip to the coast, too,” she said. “Good night.” He watched her walk swiftly back into the house.

  “Mike?”

  “What?”

  “We’re ready to go,” Alaine said.

  “Of course,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m sorry, Allie.”

  Driving back across the Golden Gate Bridge, he considered • the party. Nothing ever really changed. In uniform or out, suburban parties were suburban parties. The same clever drunkenness, the sentimental songs, the mild flirtations. And looking down at Alaine, sleeping with her head on his shoulder, he felt suddenly depressed. What, in God’s name, had he been thinking of?

  That tune kept running through his mind. Strange how you dated and catalogued things by the current popular times. “Where or When” and “Thanks for the Memory” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” and that marvelous Larry Clinton arrangement of “I Get Along without You Very Well” with Bea Wain on the vocal all reminded him of Allie Wylie and the Midwinter Assemblies. Any of those songs could still bring a stab of nostalgia. Now it was “You Are Always in My Heart” and Alaine, Billy, and Tom that night two years ago at the Mark. And Nora.

  He only half realized that he was dodging the fact that Nora had taken the tune and made it exclusively her own.

  On Thursday, after a day of restless pacing around the apartment, Miguel called Tom’s place. Nora took the message. He told her to tell Tom when he came in that Friday was the day and that he would pick him up early in the morning.

  But when he arrived at their apartment on Friday, it was Nora who was waiting, just as Miguel knew it would be. He wondered if he had not subconsciously chosen a day on which it would be unlikely Tom would be home.

  Nora had packed a lunch and a thermos of cold martinis and she was wearing shorts and a halter under her polo coat.

  “Tom didn’t get back from Tonopah,” she said.

  “No. I see he didn’t.”

  She gave a short, rather self-conscious laugh. “You don’t mind, really, do you? I have to get out of this rabbit hutch or I’ll go stark, staring mad.”

  Miguel thought of Alaine. He had left her sleeping. The right thing to do, the smart thing, would be to tell Nora he was sorry and go on back. He considered it only for a moment.

  “Mike,” Nora said quietly. “Please?”

  The great blank face of the apartment building seemed to press down on them. The morning was foggy and cold in the city, but there would be warm sun and a wind from the sea across the Golden Gate. He could see Nora shivering a bit in her light clothing as she stood with her bundles and that deliciously ridiculous thermos of liquor on the sidewalk. Her sandaled feet were small and delicate and somehow touchingly vulnerable on the thick gray concrete.

  “You’re cold,” he said. “Get in the car.”

  She did as she was told without saying a word. Miguel packed the lunch in the trunk and slid behind the wheel.

  “You know this will have every swivel-tongued biddy in headquarters gasping for breath, don’t you?”

  “I know,” Nora said in a small voice. “But do they have to find out?”

  He put the car in gear and drove toward the 19th Avenue bridge approach. “I’ve lived half my life in a small town,” he said. “I understand about things like gossip.” But already, her question and his own reply had served a purpose. Now it was the two of them against the bluenoses and talkers. “How are you going to keep it quiet that Lieutenant Rinehart and Lieutenant Eubanks’ wife took off together for a day in marvelous Marin County? Someone will see us, or something will come up. It always does, Nora.”

  Nora laughed with sudden gaiety. Her mood had changed swiftly and she seemed as excited as a child with a new toy. “Will it really go through the whole headquarters? Like an

  “Through channels and by the numbers.” Some of her sudden good humor was infectious. It was a quality about Nora he had noted before. She made you want to share her moods.

  “Then we’ll just have to be very discreet,” Nora said. “There is really no reason at all to tell—anyone. Is there?”

  Now, Miguel thought. We’re conspirators now. And Tom and Alaine are on the outside. He had the feeling of having been neatly maneuvered. But no one was ever maneuvered like this against his will. Not really.

  Nora put a lighted cigarette between his lips and sat, neither close to him nor far from him, her feet tucked in under her.

  Miguel drove onto the bridge ramp and through the toll gate.

  “I’ve never seen you out of uniform before,” Nora said. “I like you as a civilian.” He was wearing an old set of khakis without insignia and for the first time since 1942 he almost felt like a civilian again.

  He took the Mill Valley turnoff and headed onto Highway One. The fog was thinning out.

  “Look,” Nora said. “The sun. Can we put the top down?”

  “Simple. This is the age of machines.” He pulled over and stopped the car. He unlatched the clamps, leaning over Nora to reach the righthand corner of the windshield. He could smell her perfume, a heavy, erotic scent.

  “What’s that you’re wearing?” he asked.

  “Something called My Sin.”

  “Aphrodisiac,” he muttered, pushing the top off the windshield frame.

  Nora laughed. “They all have such bedroomy names,” she said.

  He pressed the button on the dashboard and the el
ectric mechanism grumbled and worried the top into the well behind the seat. He put the car in gear again and moved out onto the empty highway.

  Nora ran her hand over the soft leather of the seat. “This is a nice car,” she said. “I like Chryslers.”

  “It’s Alaine’s,” Miguel said shortly.

  “Oh,” Nora said. “You don’t use it much, do you?”

  “No,” Miguel said.

  She ran her fingers through her hair and looked out the rolled-up window on her side at the yellow-green fields passing by. “What time is it?”

  “About nine.”

  Nora drew a deep breath. “We’ve got the whole day,” she said with the air of a miser counting coins.

  “Tom isn’t due in until tomorrow,” Miguel said watching the road.

  “That doesn’t surprise you.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said slowly. “It doesn’t at all.”

  “We don’t need to have secrets from each other,” she said with disarming candor.

  Miguel said nothing. He was thinking that this was a day that shouldn’t be happening at all, and yet it was happening and it seemed inevitable. He thought of the times he had seen Nora during the last year and a half and he knew that almost from the beginning he had wanted to be alone with her—for a day, for an hour. Tom’s wife. Tom’s wife. He emphasized the word deliberately, punishing himself with it. There was no remorse, only a vast willingness to temporize, to claim that nothing was wrong, that everything was exactly as it should be. He found himself remembering the time he and Tom had fought behind the store at Del Rio. If he felt anything at all right now it was only that same desperate defiance.

  There was, he realized, a vast difference between candor and honesty. This day was candid. He and Nora hid nothing, would hide nothing of themselves from one another. That was implicit in their being here, alone, this minute. But was it honest? Would Alaine think it honest? Or Tom?

  Nora had opened her polo coat to bare her legs to the sun. The skin of her thighs was pale and smooth with a tracery of fine veins and a halo of golden down.

  She saw him watching her and her lips parted slightly as though she would speak. But she said nothing, and only ran the tip of her tongue lightly over her lips, making them glisten in the morning light. Miguel could feel the change that was taking place as their entire relationship shifted. It was a fatally fascinating thing to experience. He felt like a climber watching his rope part, strand by strand.

  It should have been enough to make him tum back, but he drove on, guiding the car around the increasingly sharp curves with a concentrated effort. It took that kind of effort to keep his eyes from Nora.

  They left the Chrysler on a high bluff by the ocean and walked down a steep trail cut through the tundra to the beach. The sun in the east cast their shadows ahead of them, long and sinuous on the smooth, unmarked sand. As far as the eye could see in either direction, the beach lay empty.

  “What will we do, Mike?” Nora asked. “Swim or fish?”

  “It’s probably too cold to swim. Ill heave a line into the surf and see what happens. People have landed twenty-pound stripers on this beach.”

  Nora shivered. “What an awful thought.”

  Miguel smiled at her and said, “You wanted to come.”

  “Yes, I wanted to come.”

  He shifted the picnic basket to the side away from Nora and thrust the surf rod through the straps.

  “Is that a book in your pocket?” Nora asked.

  “The Oxford Book of English Verse.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, indeed. When I lie in the sun I like to read poetry.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it.”

  “If you mention it to anyone in the Section I’ll deny it. But I’ve a taste for verse. I like it.”

  Nora looked at him curiously.

  “An acquired taste, I’ll admit,” Miguel said. “When Tom and I were at Roslyn, there was a teacher—”

  “Karl Olinder.”

  “Tom told you about him.”

  “Tom also told me you used to do most of his homework for him, too.” Nora laughed scornfully, swinging her arms as she walked through the sand. “Isn’t that just like Tom.”

  “It wasn’t quite like that.”

  “No, of course you’d say that.”

  The sea was a brilliant cobalt color in the morning sunlight. High overhead, a flight of four Kingcobras wheeled and slanted out toward the Farallones on their morning patrol. Miguel squinted at them, automatically reading their markings.

  “From the training squadron at Santa Rosa,” he said.

  They reached the high water mark and Miguel studied the deserted beach curving back to the north. “Let’s head up that way. There’s a cove just past that headland. I’ve seen it from the air.

  Nora walked beside him in silence, the sea wind blowing at her open polo coat and tangling her hair. Hair the color of rose gold now, Miguel thought, soft and warm-looking and no longer dyed brassy bright. Nora was learning.

  “How long have you been Tom’s personal god, Mike?” Nora asked suddenly. “And doesn’t it get tiring being an idol?”

  “For chrissake, Nora,” Miguel said, with quick annoyance.

  “I m truly curious. How long?” She laughed. “You notice I’m not asking why. I told you the other night I already knew why. I’d just like to know when it began with you and Tom. And how important it is. To you.”

  “I think you’ve got something wrong, Nora.”

  She smiled at him knowingly. “You don’t want the responsibility, do you, Mike—only you don’t know what to do about it. Tom’s such a weakling, really. I don’t think I blame you.”

  “If you think that,” Miguel said harshly, “why did you marry him?”

  Nora said, “He wanted me to.” Then she shrugged and asked, “Why did you marry Alaine? She’s wrong for you, you know.”

  “I married her because I loved her.”

  “Past tense, I notice. And so soon.”

  “You mistook my meaning.”

  “I don’t think so, Mike. Past or present, it doesn’t matter. You married her because you were in love with someone else. You aren’t the first man to have made that sort of double mistake. You won’t be the last, either.”

  “Tom talks a great deal, I see,” Miguel said, suddenly angry.

  “Tom didn’t tell me anything. He didn’t have to. Oh, I’ve watched you. Certain songs, certain places. Did she die? Did she get fat or marry someone else or move away?”

  The realization that he could not defend his memories without diminishing Alaine was galling.

  “How does all this concern you, Nora?” he asked coldly.

  Stung by his tone, she turned her face away quickly. She said tentatively, “I’m sorry. I honestly am.” She looked up at him and took his arm and laid her head against his shoulder. “It’s just that I’ve made a study of you.”

  “It isn’t worth the effort,” he said.

  “I think it is.”

  He said nothing and they walked in silence.

  “Mike?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please.”

  He sighed heavily, knowing he could deny her nothing just now. “All right, Nora. It’s all right.”

  They found the cove and a sunny declivity in the bluffs behind the headland. Miguel dropped the basket near the rocks and took off his shirt and rolled up his khakis and took the fishing gear down to the water. He baited a hook with a strip of pork and cast the line into the surf, setting the long bamboo pole into a holder. Then he walked back to where Nora sat in her shorts and halter watching him.

  “Hell of a sportsman, I,” he said. “Set lines and bait.”

  “You’re not still angry? I should learn to stop talking so much. I will, I promise.”

  “All forgotten, Nora. Let’s relax and enjoy the sun.”

  She spread her coat on the sand and lay face down on it, untying the strap of her halter. Miguel f
ound himself a place nearby, lit a cigarette and took out his book.

  The sun rose higher, burning down on the beach and the sea. It seemed to Miguel that they were a million miles from the beat of airplane engines and the hot sweaty smell of cockpits and the bitter tang of aviation fuel. It seemed too that they were as far from Alaine, asleep in the dingy, fog-shrouded apartment and from Tom, far off across the mountains to the east.

  “What’s that over there, Mike?”

  “The Point Reyes light.”

  “And those way off in the sea are the Farallones? I’ve never seen them so clearly.”

  Miguel sat watching her over the edge of his book. Her body was slim, almost thin, but her breasts were full and her hips rounded. Her hair brushed her shoulders, shimmering in the brilliant sunlight.

  She caught him watching her and smiled at him. “Read something to me.”

  “All right. What shall it be?”

  “I don’t know anything about poetry. They didn’t specialize in it where I went to school.”

  Miguel leafed through the book. “This is Matthew Arnold,” he said. “‘It irk’d him to be here, he could not rest. He loved each simple joy the country yields, He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep, For that a shadow lower’d on the fields, Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep—’”

  He stopped abruptly, closed the book and put it aside. “I think that’s about enough of that,” he said.

  Nora laughed at him, pressing her cheek against the lining of her coat. “Oh, Mike, you’re wonderful. You had such a look on your face.”

  “Did I?” He leaned back against the rocks and closed his eyes. The slow, tide-driven sound of the sea filled his ears and the sun felt bright and hot on his skin.

  “Is it too early to have a martini, Mike?”

  “It’s never too early when you feel this way,” he said. Then he laughed. “Martinis and My Sin at eleven in the morning.” Nora sat up suddenly, holding her halter. “Is there something wrong with my perfume, Mike? I thought you liked it.”

  Miguel was embarrassed and he cursed himself for an idiot. “There’s nothing wrong with it, Nora. Nothing.”

  “Only it isn’t generally worn in the morning—is that it?”

  Miguel was unaccountably touched by her sudden vulnerability. She looked as solemn and anxious as a child.