The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything

by John D. MacDonald

  “And you brought the champagne. How dear of you! Is something the matter? Oh, of course. The puritan syndrome.” She reached for a short white terry jacket and put it on without haste. He found himself wishing she would button it and wishing she wouldn’t. She didn’t. “We spend so much time at Cannes, I forget your odd taboos. Now you may stop boggling at me, dear boy. Do you think I’ve had enough?”

  “Gahr?”

  She pressed a firm thumb into the honey-pink round top of her thigh. They both watched the white mark fade slowly. They watched it intently. “Quite enough, I would say,” she said. “Some people find a dark tan quite attractive, but it does change the texture of the skin, you know. It becomes quite rough, comparatively.” She rose lithely and walked by him and into the relative gloom of the big bedroom, saying, “Come on in, dear.” He followed her, carrying the bottle and the glasses, his mind absolutely blank.

  He did not see her stop abruptly when she was three steps inside the room. He did not see her stop and turn. His eyes had not compensated. He walked into her, and in the instantaneous impression of heat and oil and perfume of that impact, he dropped the bottle onto his foot. He saw her floundering backward, grabbed at her with the hand which had held the bottle, misjudged his distance, struck her rather solidly on a terried shoulder and knocked her over a footstool. She lit solidly and said something in a language he did not understand. Somehow he was glad he did not understand it.

  She crawled over and retrieved the unbroken bottle and stood up. “If you’ll stop hopping up and down on one foot, Mr. Winter, you can pour me a glass of champagne.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank God you didn’t get playful until we got off that balcony, Kirby.”

  “Charla, I just—”

  “I know, dear.” She worked the wire loose, deftly popped the cork. The champagne, after the thump, foamed abundantly as she filled the two glasses. She put down the bottle, took one glass from him, looked speculatively at him as she sipped. “Instead of perfume, dear, bring me liniment, instead of jewels, bandages. Now fill my glass again and be patient while I tub this oil away. Could I trust you to scrub my back?”

  “Gahr.”

  “No, we had best not risk that. Here’s to caution, Kirby dear. Champagne is dripping off your chin. Wait for me in the next room, please.”

  He carried the bottle and his glass into the large sitting room of the suite, walking on knees as reliable as wet yarn. He sat down with care, emptied his glass and filled it again. He felt as if he had a permanent double exposure on the sensitive retinas. No matter where he looked, he saw Charla supine, foreshortened, in deathless Kodachrome, in an incomparable clarity of focus, a vividness of the great, round, firm, self-sustaining weight of breasts, with their buttery tan, the skin without grain or sag or flaw, the nipples a darker hue, large but not gross, aimed, slightly divergent, at the tropic-blue morning sky.

  When he shook his head violently, the pervasive image blurred. When he shook his head again, the image slipped back and down into the cluttered warehouse of memory. It lay atop the rest of the debris, instantaneously available.

  He heard the end of the metallic thunder of the water roaring into her tub, and as he fancied her stepping into it, he groaned aloud. O thank you, Uncle Omar. Thank you for instilling a helpless youth with such grave suspicions of women and all their works, that here and now, in my maturity, in my thirty-second year, I cannot confront a lovely and half-naked lady without getting cramps in my toes and saying gahr.

  But he had the dim suspicion that such were the obvious riches of Charla that even a far more worldly man might have experienced a visceral tremor or two.

  Considering the wretched paucity of his experience and the extent of his carefully concealed shyness, he marveled that when he had come upon her there, he had not merely given a mad cackle of laughter and vaulted the cement railing a hundred feet above the gaudy roofs of the beach cabanas.

  He knew well the forlorn pattern of his increasingly compulsive search for sexual self-confidence. In this world that Hugh Hefner had made, he alone seemed forever bunny-less. And it was becoming less a matter of hunger than of pride.

  He knew that women found him reasonably attractive. And he had laboriously developed that brand of semi-insinuating small talk which gave women the impression he was as accustomed to the casual diversion as the next fellow. But there was the damnable shyness to contend with. Where do you start? How to start? In situations where unattached women were abundant, he had developed into a fine art the knack of making each of them believe he was intimately concerned with one of the others.

  Once in a great while he would finally overcome the shyness, turn into the final pattern for the attack on target, and then have the situation blow up in his face. He knew he was not a clownish man. It depressed him to look back on too many slapstick situations. One would think it possible for a man of dignity to approach a woman like Charla without suddenly, inadvertently, peeling her like a grape and hurling her over a bed. His face grew hot as he remembered.

  It was, he suspected, because he tightened up in the clutch. With the bases loaded, two out, and a three-nothing count on the clean-up hitter, the rookie comes in, steps on the rubber, glares sternly at the batter—and drops the ball.

  Sometimes nature intervened. As in the case of the earthquake. A man could begin to believe he was hexed.

  Sometimes, as with Andrea last year in Rome, it seemed pure accident. He had rescued her from a yelping throng which had confused her with Elizabeth Taylor. The talk had been amusing. They were staying in the same hotel, on the same floor. She was alone, trying to recover her morale after a bad marriage and a messy divorce. It was understood, without words, that he would walk a dozen feet down the corridor and tap at her door and she would let him in.

  The prospect terrified him. He had presented too glib and sophisticated a front. She would expect a suave continental competence, a complete and masterful experience. And it was rather much to expect of a fellow whose most recent—in fact, whose only affair—had taken place twelve years earlier in the back seat of a 1947 Hudson in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in a public park during a rainstorm with a noisy, pockmarked girl named Hazel Broochuk, and had lasted for about twelve incomparably clumsy minutes.

  Though these were hardly the experience factors one would bring to an assignation with a woman who could be mistaken for Liz, he steeled himself to carry out the impersonation to the best of his ability. After a scalding bath, he donned his wool robe and marched up and down his room, fists clenched, jaw set. To the sound of trumpets, he turned toward his door, marched out into the corridor and firmly yanked the door shut. He yanked the door shut on a substantial hunk of the hem of the robe. The door locked itself. The keys were inside, on the bureau. Maybe in the world there were men of sufficient aplomb to go tap on the door sans robe. It certainly would reduce any areas of confusion as to the purpose of the small-hours’ visit. But Kirby Winter was not one of them.

  And the worst time of all, perhaps, was when, emboldened by brandy, hand in hand with a sweet laughing little darling of a girl, they had run like the wind from the big house in Nassau down toward the beach cabana in the moonlight. And halfway there the wire clothesline had caught him just under the chin.

  But for each opportunity denied him by the fates, there had been twice that number he had run away from, in sweaty terror. He sneered at himself and sipped the champagne. You are a clown and a coward, Kirby Winter—a lousy, neurotic, mixed-up coward, and yet you go around making women believe you’re a gay dog. Gahr, indeed.

  Charla came into the room. She planted herself in the corner of the couch near him before he could begin to stand up. She was barefoot. She wore short pink shorts and a candy-striped halter and a pink ribbon in her hair. He realized that if he focused beyond her instead of right at her, she looked about fifteen. Startlingly precocious perhaps, but no more than fifteen. Only the direct gaze detected the webbed flesh under her eyes, the l
ines bracketing the mouth, the slight sag of tissue under her chin.

  “Again, dear,” she said, holding her empty glass toward him. He filled it and his own and put the bottle back on the ice. “That shirt is really handsome.”

  “Thank you. It’s very nice. The other things are nice too. But I really can’t accept—”

  She made a face at him. “So grim and stuffy all of a sudden? Are you cross when you wake up? I am. That’s why I left you alone, Kirby dear.”

  “No. Not cross, I guess. It’s just—”

  “Pressing wasn’t enough for your suit. It’ll be back this afternoon. With your tie and socks and so on, dear. Really, I threw your shirt away. I hope it didn’t have some sort of sentimental value. It was actually shabby. Please tell me you do feel better. I mean, when one makes a special effort to—”

  “I feel a lot better, Charla.”

  She pulled her knees onto the couch and sat crosswise, wrinkling her eyes at him as she sipped her drink. She was long-waisted, he saw. The weight of hips and breasts made her waist look smaller than it was. Her glossy legs were short and rather heavy, but seemed exactly suitable for her.

  “Mad with me?” she asked.

  “Should I be?”

  “Oh, because I teased you a little. Do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Such a cruel thing a woman can do, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I may tease some more, you know.”

  He shifted uneasily. “I guess you might.”

  “But some time I might not be teasing at all.” She stared at him, her eyes wide and innocent. “Poor little man. How will you be able to tell when the time comes when I don’t tease?”

  He cast about for a change of subject. “That girl.”

  “Oh, yes. She disturbed you. My niece. Now she calls herself Betsy Alden. I was very cross with her, Kirby. I still am.”

  “She made quite a fuss.”

  Charla shrugged. “I seem to have done some horrible, damaging thing to her career. I didn’t realize. I wanted her to come here to see me. After all, I am her only aunt. She wouldn’t come. She had some silly idea of her play-acting being more important. So—I remembered an old friend and called him up. He called a good friend of his. Suddenly they didn’t need her. Is this so terrible?”

  “Only if she can’t find another job.”

  “She says she’ll have trouble. She cursed me. She was very noisy and vulgar. Once upon a time she was a very sweet child. It’s hard to believe.”

  “Did she leave?”

  “Oh, no! She has to stay here. Because she will now have to beg me to undo the terrible damage she thinks I’ve done. After she becomes sweet enough to me, then I shall phone my friend again, and then she will be in demand again for those idiotic television things. It’s what she seems to want, poor child.”

  “At first she thought I worked for you. And then she got another idea about me, and that wasn’t right either.”

  Charla’s smile was curiously unpleasant. “She mentioned that. I admit it is not accurate. But it could have been, so easily, don’t you think?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You seem so solemn today, Kirby. Even, forgive me, a little bit stuffy. You talked so much on Friday night, and were so charming and hurt.”

  “I must have been a nuisance. I want to thank you for—giving me a chance to sleep it off. And I really must be going.”

  “Oh, not until Joseph comes and we tell you our idea.”

  “Idea?”

  “Come, dear. We know you have no specific plans. You told us that.”

  “Did I? I’ll have to find something—”

  “Maybe you’ve found it, Kirby. You have certain attributes Joseph and I could use, you know. You make a good impression, dear. You look very decent and earnest and reliable and trustworthy. Many people look like that, but it is a false front. You are what you seem to be, dear.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “And you have such a great capacity for loyalty. I’m certain your Uncle Omar was pleased with you, and made wonderful use of you. He trained you. And really good people are so hard to find these days. And you’re at home in so many countries. We have little problems you could help us with.”

  “What sort of problems?”

  She shrugged. “Here’s one at random. We have one nice little ship. The Princess Markopoulo, Panamanian registry. We think the captain and the agent are conspiring against us. The profits are so tiny. You could go aboard as my special representative and find out what is wrong. There are always problems. And we don’t want to give up the way we live and handle them ourselves. It would be too dull. You would be busy. It would be amusing. And we would pay you well. Between assignments you could be with us. We would pay you twice what your Uncle Omar paid you.”

  “Do you know what he paid me?”

  “You told us, dear. And you’ve saved a veritable fortune! Eight thousand dollars. Dear Kirby, that would last me perhaps one month. And you will have to find work.”

  “I must have done a lot of talking.”

  “You told us your inheritance from your dear dead uncle. A pocket watch and a letter.”

  “And I don’t even get the letter until a year from now,” he said, and divided the small amount of champagne left.

  She hitched closer to him, touched her glass against his, looked into his eyes. “So why not have the amusing life? It is good fortune for all of us we met the other night. We are very good friends, no? Here is what we shall do, Kirby Winter. You settle what must be settled here. By then the Glorianna will be here. And we shall have a cruise.”

  “The Glorianna?”

  “My dear toy yacht, dearest. Holland built. Lovely staterooms and a crew of five. We always have charming guests aboard. Much fun, much wine, maybe a little love. My crew is bringing her down from Bermuda now. The best food in the world, my dear. We insist on that. Spend a month as our guest and then we shall decide your future. Why do you look so troubled?”

  He shrugged. “Superstitious, maybe. Things like this just don’t fall into my lap, Charla.”

  She put her empty glass aside and moved closer to him. She took his hand and lifted it to her lips. It made him feel curiously girlish and awkward. She looked at him with a sweet gravity. “You do make me like you—too much, perhaps. We should have met another time. When there were no jobs to offer, when you were not troubled and disappointed. When we could both be honest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I meant nothing. A woman’s chatter.” There was a knock at the door and she asked him to let in Joseph. With great enthusiasm Charla told Joseph that Kirby had agreed to come cruising on the Glorianna and then he would take the job they had decided to offer him. Kirby found himself shaking Joseph’s hand and being effusively congratulated. Things seemed to be moving too fast. He tried to find the right opening to tell Joseph it was not that definite, and suddenly realized he was being instructed to move out of his own hotel and move here, to the Hotel Elise.

  “But I—but I—”

  Joseph put a fatherly hand on Kirby’s shoulder. Charla was on Kirby’s other side. She slid her arm around his waist, hugged herself close to him. In the arctic reaches of his mind, walls of ice toppled into the sea.

  “Nonsense, my boy,” Joseph said. “The hotel is not full. I happen to own a certain percentage of it. When you return with your luggage you will be all registered. Because I am busy on small matters, Charla is often lonesome. We would be grateful, both of us. You will be doing us a favor.”

  “Well, I guess I could—”

  “Splendid!” they cried simultaneously, and Charla gave him a heartier little hug, full of rounded dizzying pleasures. Her glowing face was upturned toward his, her eyes full of warm promise. Joseph had taken a gold cigarette case from his pocket. It slipped from his hand. Both men stooped simultaneously and cracked skulls. Kirby straightened up, off balance, half-blinded by the white burst
of shock and pain. He swung his arm up to catch his balance and caught Charla smartly under the point of the chin with his elbow. Her teeth made a chopping sound and her eyes glazed and she wobbled momentarily.

  She looked at him fearfully and made a curious gesture and spoke in a foreign language. It sounded like an incantation, and in the middle of it he thought he heard her say, “Omar Krepps.”

  “Shut up!” Joseph said to her in a deadly tone. He was holding a palm against his brow.

  “I’m sorry,” Kirby said miserably. “I just seem to—”

  “It was an accident,” Charla said. “Are you hurt, dear Kirby?”

  “I—I’d better be on my way, I guess.”

  Three

  AS KIRBY OPENED the rear door of the cab to get in, a girl eeled by him and took the cab.

  “Hey!” he said indignantly.

  Betsy Alden glowered at him. “Just shut up and get in, stupid!”

  He hesitated, got in beside her and said, “But what are—”

  “Driver! Go north on Collins, please. I’ll tell you where.”

  “But I want to go—”

  “Will you shut up!”

  They rode a dozen blocks in silence. He looked at her rigid profile, thinking she would be quite a pretty girl if she wasn’t always mad. The taxi was caught by a light. “Right here,” she said and quickly handed the money to the driver and got out. When Kirby caught up with her, she was walking south, carefully examining the oncoming traffic.

  “Will you kindly tell me—”

  “In here, I guess,” she said, caught at his arm and swung him along with her into a narrow walkway leading to the side entrance of one of the smaller beach hotels. Once in the lobby she looked around like a questing cat, then headed for a short flight of stairs to the mezzanine. He followed her up the stairs. She wore a green skirt and a white blouse. She had changed to a smaller purse. Her toffee hair was more orderly. Following her up the stairs he realized she was singularly expressive. Even in the flex of lean haunches under the swing of the skirt she seemed to project both stealth and indignation.