Again there were five minutes left. He looked at Bonny Lee and felt a great galloping rush of desire for her. But electric as the urge was, there was a strange placidity about it, an assured and comforting smugness. In Rome last year he had desired the woman named Andy just as much, but there had been no flavor of happiness to it. And because it had made him wretched, it had distorted desire into too significant a thing. So now something new had been discovered. Frustration bloated the role of sex, kept it in the center of the stage and gave it all the lines. It had stunted the other aspects of his life through its false importance. Release had suddenly put it in proper context. It was dwindled, and could now share the lines with the other actors—essential to the play but not obsessional, suitably dramatic but linked to reality, capable of comedy as well.
I was a legless man, he thought, and watched everyone in the world walking and running and climbing, and the attribute of leglessness colored every reaction to some degree. I pretended I had legs, so no one would notice. Now I have legs, and though walking is a joy, legs are now just a part of living, and the awareness of them comes and goes. I accept the fact of having legs.
He went over to Bonny Lee, bent and put his lips against the rigidity of her mouth and pressed the world back to life. The warmth and softness came in a twinkling and she gave a convulsive leap of fright, a small squeak of dismay. The brown eyes narrowed.
“That’s right sneaky,” she whispered. “Like to jump clean outa my skin, you bassar. It’s not a kind of thing anybody is ever going to get used to, sugar.”
She wiped her fingers on a tissue and went into the other room and closed the heavy plank door and bolted it. She moved casually into his arms, kissing him lightly on the chin, and gave a huge, shuddering yawn. “I’m pooped entire, Kirby.” She trudged over and sat heavily on the bed and yawned again and knuckled her eyes. “Don’t you go near the window so any of those biddies can see you.”
“I’ve got a lot of problems to think about, Bonny Lee.”
She kicked her sandals off and stretched out on the bed. “Can’t think of a thing until I get some sleep. Aren’t you bushed too?”
“Yes, I guess I am.” He went over and sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over her and kissed her with considerable and lengthy emphasis.
She chuckled. “Man, you’re not as sprung as I am.”
“Bonny Lee?”
“No, sugar. It would be a waste of talent for sure. Please let me sleep, sugar, and then we’ll see. You oughta sleep too. Whyn’t you go on out on the couch where you can quieten down nice?”
“I shouldn’t waste time sleeping, with all that—”
She silenced him with a sudden gesture, bit her lip and said, “Gimme the watch, sugar.”
“I really don’t think you ought to—”
“I wanta try something, stupid! I’m not going to get cute. I’m too gawddamn tired to get cute. You gotta trust me, or we are going absolutely no place at no time. Hand it over.”
He hesitated, gave it to her reluctantly. She grasped the stem of the watch. In something that seemed like a flicker of movement just a little too fast to be visible, she was in an entirely different position, the watch on the bed a few inches from her slack hand, her eyes closed, breathing slowly, deeply, audibly through her parted lips. He spoke to her and she did not answer. He shook her and she whined. When he shook her again she reached for the watch. An instant later she had flickered into a slightly different position, and she was completely bare. One instant she was wearing her clothes. The next instant they were in midair beside the bed, falling to the floor. He woke her again and she mumbled and growled and took the watch and flickered into a different position. He touched her shoulder and she came awake quite easily. Her eyes were slightly puffy with sleep. She yawned and stretched luxuriously. With the awakenings, the entire procedure had taken just a couple of minutes.
She smiled at him and said, her voice soft and husky, “Three whole hours. Mmmmm. Now you.” She wriggled over to the wall. “Get comfortable first, sugar, cause the damn bed and pillow get hard as a stone. Better strip on account of clothes feel sorta like cement.”
He stretched out and turned the world red. He made the full twist, turning it back the maximum of one hour. She was sculptured of smooth dark red wood, propped on one elbow, smiling at him. He was in the rigid hollow in the bed his weight had made. He tried to go to sleep, but the clothing was oppressive. He got up and tried to take it off, but it was as stubborn as thick lead foil, so he clicked back into the world and stripped rapidly, his back to her, his face hot with the confusion of modesty, of a daylight intimacy he had never known before. In haste and an awkward confusion he stretched out again and flipped into redness and soon drifted into sleep. Suddenly he was awakened and her head was on the pillow, facing him, a few inches away.
“Take another hour, sugar,” she whispered. “Take two. I can wait.”
He went back into redness and into sleep, and was awakened with her smiling at him as before. “Doesn’t it work good?” she whispered.
He yawned, marveling at her quick instinct for the utility of the device. It was something he would never have thought of—or at least not for a long time.
“That was one strange thing about Uncle Omar. Sometimes he seemed to be able to get along on no sleep at all. We wondered about it sometimes.”
“That old man had it made, Kirby. It’s like only a couple of minutes since I woke up for the last time. You want a little more sleep?”
“N-Not at the moment.”
“You know, I din think so, somehow,” she whispered. “This must be my day for breaking all the rules there are.” She moved closer. She hooked a warm firm silky leg over his. She was so close all he could see was the single huge brown eye, moist and bright, feel the heat and weight of her breath. “It’s so nice to love you,” she sighed. “Because you’re sorta shaky and scared, kinda. And sweet. What you do, you make it important, Kirby. And that makes me go all funny, like marshmallows and warm soup, and my heart is way up here going chunk chunk chunk, and I almost wanta cry, and let’s make this time all slow and sweet and dreamy and gentle and closer than anybody ever got to either one of us, and be talking to me. Be saying the nice things, and I shall say them back, ever’ one.”
Ten
KIRBY WINTER and Bonny Lee Beaumont made love, took naps in the red world, showered together with a playfulness, with small mischiefs and burlesques, bawdy comedies over soap and shared towels—a playtime so alien to his own estimates of himself that he felt as if he had become another person. He had strode in lonesome severity past all the fiestas, thinking them flavored with evil and depravity to be righteously condemned. But suddenly he had been invited in, where all the warmth and the music was, and had found himself caught up—not in depravity, not in decadence, not in wickedness—but in a holiday flavor of a curious innocence, a wholesome and forthright and friendly pursuit of quite evident pleasures.
In any plausible use of aesthetic theorizings, she had contours, textures and colorings which made her, as an object at rest or in motion, highly pleasing to sight, touch, taste, and hearing. Through the very process of appraising her as not only an individual, but also an object of aesthetic value, pleasing to him, he was able to achieve an inversion of that logic and assume that he, in kind, was also, to her, an individual as well as an object which pleased her. And this brought him to an objectivity which altered his prior attitude toward his body, changing it from something ludicrous, something so grotesque as to merit concealment, to an object meriting that pride which was a reflection of her pleasure.
He was pleased to be tall, grateful for a muscularity in part inherited and in part developed, perhaps, as a byproduct of many sublimations, distressed at a roll of softness around his middle, particularly after Bonny Lee’s soapy, derisive, painful pinch, and was resolved to become as taut as she, knowing it would please her. Though at first the physiological mechanisms of desire had a distressing obviousness, ta
rgeting him for saucy jokes, he achieved acceptance of the inevitable and then progressed to a degree of self-satisfaction bordering upon the fatuous.
Yet throughout the whispered soapy games, in spite of his years of inadvertent continence, he could guess she was a rare one, precisely suited to bring him back into the race of men with minimal delay. He sensed that had there been any trace or trick of self-consciousness about her, any contrived modesties or measured reservations, had she in fact struck any other attitude other than that of a happy, exuberant, exhibitionistic, inventive, gamboling, young, coltish creature, he would have tumbled back into ackwardness, irrational shame, dismay and the puritan persuasion that anything so delicious must, of necessity, be evil.
There was a pattern in the love play, little times of promising to stop all this nonsense, and then an instinctive awareness of whose turn it was to become the aggressor, to be repulsed playfully, or with mock solemnity, or with wicked reprisals, and sometimes the sweet and momentary acceptance, abandoned quickly by one or the other before it went on beyond any chance of stopping it.
She sat on the edge of the blue tub and he scoured her hair dry with a big maroon towel and watched it spring back to damp tight ringlets. Suddenly the games were over, with no need to explain it to each other, with only the need to carry her to the bed and, with all the accumulated tensions, quickly, strongly, boisterously, strenuously, joyously take it so quickly over the edge that in her completion she made sounds like a slow, strange laughter while, with an astonishing strength, she held him absolutely motionless.
They listened to the two o’clock news with astonishment and incredulity. After the fifteen minutes ended, there was a special fifteen-minute bulletin on Kirby Winter—the adventures of.
When the final commercial came, she turned off the little transistor radio and placed it on the night stand beside the bed.
“Even crazier than the news, sugar, is it being the two o’clock news. My head is out of joint. All these naps. It should be tomorrow, almost. No more naps, Kirby, because you know what’ll happen for sure. Get all rested and want each other again and take more naps and—hell, we keep this up the only way you’ll leave is on a stretcher, or float out the window.”
“I can’t understand how Betsy Alden—”
She sat up and frowned at him. “Say, did your Uncle Omar look a lot older than he was?”
“What?”
“A day is got to have twenny-four hours, sugar. Lemme see. You know I stuck maybe an extra eleven onto this one? Time and a half, like. I bet if I had the same kinda day every day for ten years, I’d all of a sudden be thirty-five insteada thirty. Was he old-lookin’?”
“I guess he was. I guess he looked older than his age.”
She lifted a long brown leg and flexed it. “Hefting them people around on the beach and all, I wore myself down. So there’s wear and tear, but now there’s just a little sore, like the day after you do too much.”
“Didn’t you hear the broadcast?”
“What kind of a smart-ass question is that? Surely I heard it. They’ve all gone nuttier than ever.”
“So they made a positive identification and so then I overpowered two policemen, disarmed them, handcuffed them and lost myself in the crowd. So now I’m armed and considered dangerous.”
She giggled at him. “Eliot Ness’ll be coming after you, sugar. Anyways, what could those cops say? You know, I’m about to starve, sugar. I got some steaks. How you want yours?”
“Medium.”
“You want it medium, but you get it rare, sugar. I’m to be taken care of you, hear?”
He remembered the money, the confusion on the beach, the pipe, the ring and the roses, and asked her what she’d done. She put the steaks on and came back and told him some of it, went and turned them over and came back and told him more, then went and brought in a tray, with the steaks and glasses of milk and a big stack of French bread and a bowl of sweet butter. As they ate she told him all the rest of it.
He went and got the wad of money and the ring out of the borrowed slacks. She watched him silently as he counted the money. He stared at her and said, “Sixty-six hundred and twenty dollars, Bonny Lee!”
She shrugged. “Geezel, sugar, it din seem like stealing it, but I guess it was. Nothing I did seemed real. You know. But you heard what the radio said. Twenny thousand. Hell, they’re all adding it all on for the insurance.”
“How about the ring?”
“Oh, that. Over near the bathhouses I see a fat ugly bassar with two of his buddies, got a guy backed against a wall looking for some way to run. I din like three against one, so I froze them still and wrapped the belt off one of them round his ankles, tied a necktie on the ankles of another one and gave the littlest one a big push. I guess I only tilted him over an inch. I worked the ring off the pinkie on the fat one, and I went fifty feet off, sorta behind a bush. The little one went ass over teacup into a cactus patch and the fat one went down backwards and the other one went down sideways, and the little guy against the wall took off like he was a deer.” She took the ring from him and scratched her empty milk glass with it. “Diamond, all right,” she said. “Big sonuvabitch, huh?”
She glanced at him quickly enough to catch his fleeting grimace.
“Don’t talk so sweet and pretty, do I?”
Her perception startled him. “I don’t mind, Bonny Lee.”
She tossed the ring onto the tray. “Maybe you do. Maybe I do, too. But maybe there isn’t a gawddamn thing neither of us can do about it, sugar. I got to be a woman entire afore I learned up on being a lady. I had four year of schooling, all told. You want you a tea party lady, you just go get yourself one, hear? Go grab one offa the P.T. and A. You and she can talk up a storm on art and culture and such, Kirby, then you try taking a shower with her and hustling her into the sack and see how things work out, see if you don’t have to sign contract papers forever with a guarantee income afore she’ll even step down offa her high heels.”
“Bonny Lee!”
“Oh, don’t look at me so gawddamn pitiful, you sonovabitch! I get along fine and I don’t need you nor anybody.” She hurled herself face down on the bed and began to sob, making sounds like a small boy punished. He patted her and soothed her and held her.
Finally she got up and went in and bathed her face and came out, grinning somewhat shamefacedly, snuffling from time to time. “All a damn lie,” she said, “and you know it. You being schooled makes me feel funny. I want to do better, but what the hell chance have I got? Shees marie, I work six nights a week and that’s when they got night schools, even if I could get in. Sorry, sugar. I don’t crack up so much. It’s on account of this being such a goofed up day, maybe. I’m just a share-cropper girl outa Carolina, cheap, ignorant and fun-lovin’.”
“You low rate yourself too much. You’re bright and quick.”
“So is a she-fox. Let’s drop the whole thing.”
“You’re the same age as a college kid.”
“Compared to a college kid, I’m a hunnerd n’ten.”
He picked up the wad of money and dropped it beside her. “You took it. So use it, if you mean what you say. Use it until it runs out, then go back to work.”
She looked thoughtful for a few moments, then looked sidelong at him. “Say, didn’t you hear that broadcast? First things first, Kirby.”
The news had been peculiarly distressing. The Glorianna had been intercepted down near Dinner Key and had put in there and tied up while the Metro police had made an investigation. On the yacht had been a skeleton crew of three, Mr. Joseph Locordolos, a Spanish national and a developer and speculator in hotel and resort properties, his sister, Mrs. Charla O’Rourke, a Greek national and member of the international set, and Miss Betsy Alden, Mrs. O’Rourke’s niece, a nationalized citizen of the United States who had worked in New York and Hollywood as a bit-part actress on television. The yacht was registered in Panama. Mr. Locordolos was very agitated at being halted in such a pre-emptory fa
shion. All the papers were in order. He explained that they were taking a short shake-down cruise of several hours to see whether the newly installed radar was working properly. Both he and his sister explained that, while staying at the Hotel Elise, an establishment partially owned by Mr. Locordolos, they had made the acquaintance of Mr. Kirby Winter, nephew of Omar Krepps whom they had known slightly over the years. They said Mr. Winter seemed quite depressed and, because the boat was roomy enough, they had suggested he come along with them to Nassau, and he could then fly back from there. Mr. Winter had said he would think about it, and they had assumed he would not be joining them until the trunk and the crate arrived aboard. They had been unable to contact Mr. Winter to ask him about it, but they assumed it was his intention to go with them to Nassau, perhaps for a longer stay than he had indicated would be possible. Perhaps, as soon as they heard of the huge embezzlement, Mr. Locordolos admitted, they should have contacted the police. Instead, as he explained, he investigated the contents of the two containers and found nothing of any importance in them. He had given up, of course, any idea of permitting Mr. Winter to accompany them, and had merely been waiting until Mr. Winter put in an appearance, at which time he was going to have the containers moved onto the dock at the Biscayne Marina and wash his hands of the whole matter. Though the police had a search warrant, Mr. Locordolos felt that it might not be properly applicable to a vessel of foreign registry, however he volunteered to overlook the legal considerations and asked for a complete search on a voluntary basis. The police impounded the items Mr. Winter had shipped to the yacht, and found nothing else of any pertinence to the Winter case. They had previously impounded the suitcases discovered in Winter’s temporary quarters at the Hotel Elise.
The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything Page 15
