The Med

by David Poyer

  “Morning, babe,” he said, and smiled.

  “How long have you been out there, Dan?”

  “Not long.”

  “Isn’t it peaceful here? I love to get up early and just stand there, like you, and look out. Are the boys swimming?”

  “Yes,” he said. He ached to go to her, but he stayed by the window. The wind was cool on his back. It was good just to look at her, and let the hunger for her wait, whet itself into pain. It would be all the better to join her, feeling like that.…

  “I know one of them. Erculiano. He waits tables at dinner. I’ll introduce you.”

  “No. Don’t get up yet,” he said, giving in. As he slid in beside her they came together thigh to thigh, breast to breast. She was sleeping-warm and smelled of the night’s love, and her shoulders were small and smooth in his hands.

  “Are you happy?” she said into his shoulder.

  “To be with you? Yes.”

  “And to be in Italy?”

  “Yes. It’s lovely.”

  “I think so, too. I’m glad you made us come.”

  “I didn’t make you come, babe.”

  “That’s true. I wanted to,” she whispered quickly. She glanced around the room, then smiled. “I was looking for Nancy … forgot where she was for a minute.”

  “It was good of Mrs. Hogan to take her. That was above and beyond the call of duty.”

  “Alicia’s all right. And Nan likes her.”

  “How is she, traveling? Hard to handle?”

  “No, she’s good most of the time. For her age.” Susan laughed a little, raising her eyebrows.

  “It’s good for both of you. I think you were right to come out. You can make up your class work. You can’t always come to the Med.”

  “I have to keep studying while I’m here.”

  “I know,” he said, feeling her go away from him somehow, although she did not move at all; he felt he had phrased his remark wrong, about her work, and tried to retrieve it. “You can study here, and between ports. You have your books. I don’t want you to fall behind.”

  “Yes…”

  She snuggled close again and he rubbed her shoulders and back, wondering, as he always did in the all-too-short times they were together, about how delicate and fine and at the same time strong and proud her body was; how close to him and silently wonderful. It seemed so seldom, he was away so much; and yet when she was there, it was all-encompassing; it made him happy. And from it, somehow, they had produced a child.

  He did not understand at all what he had done to be so lucky.

  She muttered something then. Her head was on his chest and he could not hear it. “What?” he said.

  “I said, I don’t like being away from you, Dan.”

  “I know.”

  “I get afraid.”

  “I know.”

  “I said … when you hold me like this, it feels … it feels like nothing bad can happen to us, not ever.”

  He moved to hold her more tightly, feeling salt sting his closed eyelids. A wave of tenderness made him tremble as he caressed her back, from shoulder down the soft curve of thigh. He felt like telling her how much he loved her. But he did not say the words. Instead his hand hesitated, then moved again, downward.

  She stirred. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t want to make love, do you?”

  “Who, me?”

  “You feel like it … down here…”

  “Well, we already did.”

  “But that was last night.”

  “Oh yeah. This is another day, isn’t it.”

  “Wait a sec,” she said, a few minutes later. “Let me up. I’ll be right back.”

  But when she came back she had to smile. She was ready for him, but he was asleep. Sitting beside him, she touched his face lightly, feeling the rough stubble of beard, tracing his mustache. Seeing how tired he looked in the growing light.

  And then the annoyance came, unasked-for, unwelcome. This was good, being together. But it came too seldom. For the last hundred days—she had counted them one by one—she had been alone. Yes, she loved him. But this wasn’t what she’d expected from marriage.

  She frowned, in the light-filled room, and tried to push the thought away. She did not want to spoil Taormina.

  Susan Lenson turned angrily in her bed, and reached for a book.

  * * *

  They’d met at the Academy, at one of the mixers that introduced the midshipmen to “suitable” girls. She had seen the notice on the bulletin board at the student center, and thought the trip might be fun. Some of the other girls had been there, and although they thought the “mids” handsome, they said it was dull. Nowhere to go but the campus, nothing to drink, and they felt like toking would be a federal crime … certainly not in front of all the straight-arrow midshipmen. But they also said Annapolis was a pretty place, especially in spring, and so she had thought to see what there was to see and then go back to the bus and study.

  But it turned out to be a military operation. Before the bus could start they had to check names against the sign-up list. Then there was a kind of inspection; one girl had to leave; she was wearing shorts. Susan almost got off right there, and would have except for Moira Lieberman, her roommate. “The Ox” was eager to go, and when Moira wanted something, no one could turn her off. So she stayed, too. When they arrived, a man in uniform—she had no idea what he was—escorted them straight from the bus to the dance. There had been no chance to duck out, so she and Moira had stood in the big hall and waited, smoking.

  When the mids came in she saw immediately that they were all alike. The same hair, the same uniform, the same face. “They’re robots,” she whispered to Moira, who laughed. “Men of steel,” her roommate said out loud. “I hope.”

  She stood in the middle of the room and smoked as they circled in. She hated mixers; you stood and hoped and waited and then drew some goob with bad breath … her friends fell one by one to the robots, and she kept smoking, nervous now at the thought of not being asked to dance at all. She would have left, but the place was so big, she had no idea how to get back to the bus.…

  “Excuse me,” said someone behind her. “You’re here from Trinity?”

  “No. Georgetown.”

  “That’s in D.C., right? Hi. My name’s Dan.”

  “Mine’s Susan—Susan Chan. Some of the girls call me Betts.”

  “Hello, Susan. Want to dance?”

  “I guess so.”

  He was a robot. Tall, as good-looking as most of them, but he scared her a little. They were so different from the boys who came around in jeans and beards to drink beer with them on the steps in front of the library. This man wore a black uniform with gold on the sleeves. His hair was incredibly short. He danced as if unused to it, but after the second he seemed less threatening—or threatened. Later she was willing to go down to “the steerage”—that was the name of the snack bar—and sit waiting for him while he bought (honest) two milk shakes.

  “So what do you do here?” she asked him when he came back, holding the milk shakes carefully away from his suit.

  “Student. Same as you.”

  “Come on. Aren’t you in the Army?”

  He winced. “Navy. Yes. Or sort of. I will be, in a year.”

  She poked his sleeve. “What do these stripes mean?”

  “I’m a segundo. A junior.” He grinned as he said it, at her, and she didn’t like his tone. She decided that he was a prick. They all were; this was a Fascist citadel, and it was stupid for her to have come here when she could have been studying.

  “And what do you do?”

  “I’m in archaeology.”

  “A junior?”

  “Sophomore.”

  “Oh. So, have you dug up any fossils yet?”

  “Archaeologists don’t ‘dig up fossils.’ That’s a paleontologist,” she stated, and started to get up. “I think I’d better—”

  “No, wait. Don’
t go. I’m sorry,” he said, and she saw suddenly that he was uneasy too, shy of her in a different way than she of him, but still shy. “I don’t know the difference. What is it?”

  She hesitated, half to her feet, and then sat down again. She explained, and he asked questions. He didn’t know much about the social sciences, but he was smart. She was warming to him, until she took out her pack and offered him one. “No!” he said, raising his eyebrows. “You don’t actually inhale those things, do you?”

  “Jesus. You make it sound like a moral judgment.”

  “It’s not good for you.”

  “It’s none of your damn business, frankly.”

  “I know, Susan. You asked me.”

  “I didn’t ask you anything!”

  “Okay,” he said, looking puzzled and little-boyish; and again the change was so strange, so sudden, that she found it funny. He looked so serious and regretful. He was a character.

  She decided that he was cute.

  It was all, she thought lying there beside him, very strange how rapidly, how easily, everything had happened after that. A year later she had accepted his miniature, a little Academy ring she never had had the courage to wear at school. When she graduated they lived together for six months. Except for one nasty scene with Mr. Lenson—his father hated anyone, Dan said, who didn’t look just like him, which meant white—it was all right, and one day they were married. Almost offhand, as if she had accepted it without thinking. Then Nan … she had not been planned; nothing was 100 percent effective, but they had never discussed not having her.

  And so Susan Chan, who was once going to be the Margaret Mead of archaeology, was in Italy at last. But not for field work. Instead she was a Navy wife, a mother, following the gray ships from port to port.…

  “Come on,” she said, shaking him. “It’s eight o’clock, sleepy. I want some breakfast.”

  He came awake like a tiger, and she gasped once and then reached to guide him as his long body moved over her. And the miles were no more; the long parting was forgotten, almost, and they were together.

  * * *

  After breakfast they walked together through the hilly town. He wore civilian slacks, a jacket, a short-sleeved shirt. Susan left her traveling jeans and pack for a navy skirt and tweed coat. The tables were already set out in front of street cafés. Trellised roses arched above the tables; the heating sky arched above all. She matched her stride to his long legs, glancing up at him. It was always like this, she thought, when they met again. Joy, but with a sense of strain. As if they had grown out of step during the months apart, and needed to rematch their pace. It takes awhile, she thought, to feel close to someone again.

  And then, as usual, it would be time for him to leave.…

  “So how was the trip?” he asked her. “Did you mind traveling with Mrs. Hogan?”

  Susan made a face. “Alicia’s okay, but I can’t take that bunch long. All through France, don’t do this, don’t drink that, I got sick in this hotel once, why don’t you wear something more ladylike … oh, I’m sure they’re real people, Dan. But I had to get away. I left them at Nice.”

  “You came here from the Riviera alone?”

  “It wasn’t hard. Nan was good. We met a lot of people on the train.” She told him an amusing story of going through customs at the Franco-Italian border between Menton and Ventimiglia, of Italian paratroopers in the second-class car smuggling wine under the skirts of fat peasant women. “And then I stopped in Genoa, and saw the city, and spent most of the next week in Rome. That was tremendous, the Museo Vaticano, the digs in the subway. I went down to see Dr. Biccari’s team at work. Then Alicia and the others came through and I came down here with them.”

  “Where are they staying? Here?”

  “No, no. They’re down in Giardini, closer to the fleet landing.” She laughed. “But I came up here on the bus, I couldn’t resist it. The view! And it gets you away from the ship, doesn’t it?”

  “It sure does.” He grinned down at her. “You know what I need, all right. So you’ve had a week to see the town?”

  “I haven’t seen squat. We stayed in our room and I read François Bordes and Nan watched ‘The Three Stooges’ in Italian and we waited for you.”

  He reached out to her in the middle of the street, and looked down into her dark eyes; laughing, slightly hard for everyone but him. She was so vibrant, so alive, that she made him feel stiff and dull. But in spite of that he loved her more intensely than he had ever thought he could love a human being.

  “Give me a kiss.”

  “I thought you Navy types didn’t like affection in public.”

  “Pretend I’m a civilian, just for today, all right?” He joked. She put her face up then. But her remark had spoiled something, and he lagged behind as she roamed through the high town.

  In the afternoon they became suddenly purposeful, and went sightseeing. Susan dragged him around San Pancrazio, telling him the walls dated from the third century B.C.; the Greek theater; the Naumachia, which reminded him of a model-towing tank. He trailed along with his jacket slung over his shoulder, sweat soaking his shirt, and took pictures. He wanted to put together, at the end of this cruise, an album of all the ports Comphibron Six had visited, along with a few paragraphs of description in his own and Susan’s hands. He imagined that someday, when they were old, they would look through it together. At four the sun grew too much for them, and they went back to the hotel and took a shower together and made love again and then napped.

  When they woke they had a short but surprisingly bitter argument over where to go for dinner. He wanted to try the hotel dining room. She was sick of it and wanted to go out. In the end they compromised. Dinner at the hotel, and the night out in Giardini, at the base of the hill.

  They found a noisy knot of the bachelor officers at the Hotel Naxos bar. He ordered gin and tonics. That was the only drink Susan really liked. The bachelors welcomed them, but Dan felt the conversation become awkward. Once you were married, in the Service, you moved out of their circle and into that of the married officers. After one drink he nudged her and they went out into the night again. They found a bench at the seawall, overlooking the water. It was cool, welcome after the heat of the day, and the wind came in sweet and heavy off the sea, smelling of salt and faraway storm.

  “You didn’t like them?”

  “They were all right. Just … I’d rather be with you.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said, looking away toward the sea, and his eyes followed hers, out into the dark.

  Dark, but blazing and twinkling with lights. The evening was clear. Across the Strait of Messina, only twenty miles wide here at the meeting of Italy and Sicily, Reggio and Pellaro and Porto Salvo glowed like heaps of fallen fireflies. He made out four ships, moving slowly against the fixed lamps of the far shore; a green sidelight, red; two bound south, two north. The traffic would get even thicker as they neared the neck of the strait, a few miles north. He remembered taking the squadron through there a few weeks before. It had been a hairy evolution.

  Closer in, swinging a mile or so out beyond the breakwater, Guam had dressed ship. The electricians had been climbing about when he left the night before, and now the ship was a pyramid of lights. They stretched white from bow to truck, truck to stern, and multicolored lamps glittered along the edge of the helo deck. It was beautiful to see, a twinkling palace suspended in the darkness; beautiful to see.…

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered, leaning on his arm.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes there is. You’re quiet. When you get quiet … come on, talk to me. Is it the Ryan? Is that still bothering you?”

  “No. I mean, it still bothers me, yes. But that’s not all of it.”

  “Is it this ship? Is it old Crazy Ike?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice so soft she could hardly hear it above the sigh of wind.

  “He’s giving you a rough time?”

  “Not me, so much … I think he li
kes me. Red was his fair-haired boy on the way across, but now—”

  “Red? Which one is he?”

  “The chubby guy—he was the one juggling apples at Stan’s party.”

  “Oh, him. Lieutenant Flasher, right? He’s so silly! I liked him.”

  “Anyway, all of a sudden Sundstrom turned against him. I have no idea why, but since then I’ve moved up to favorite.”

  “That can’t be so bad. Isn’t that what you wanted? Isn’t that why you volunteered for sea duty again, after the court-martial?”

  “You don’t know what it’s like.” His voice hardened, and she felt afraid, a little. He never spoke to her like that; it was another side of him, the Navy side.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Forget it. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “Dan … don’t clam up on me. Don’t pull that Academy bullshit. It wasn’t your fault! There’s nothing to prove! The Board said—”

  “I don’t care what they said! I keep thinking—damn it, I knew the maneuver was risky. I was only an ensign, but if I’d spoken up, argued with the captain, it might, it might not have happened.”

  “Dan. Don’t, please. They cleared you and the man above you.”

  “The Board hung it on Captain Packer because he was dead and it was neater that way. But none of us on the bridge came off clean, Susan. With that letter of reprimand in my jacket my career is shot unless I pull four-ohs from here on out.”

  “Then why are you worried, if he likes you?”

  “It’s nothing I can pin down. He just lets things get on his nerves; he worries, all alone there in his sea cabin … then he gives these crazy orders. He ridicules the officers on the bridge, in front of everybody. He treats the chief staff officer like a plebe. I’ve never served with a guy like this before. Commodore MacInroe would tear your ass off if you screwed up, but at least you knew where you stood. He wanted a tight squadron, good performance, and he knew what he was doing. I try to give Sundstrom the benefit of the doubt. He’s only had the job three, four months. But he seems to be getting worse, not better.” He fell silent, still looking out to sea, toward the ship that was swinging now into the wind. “Don’t worry. I can take him all right. But sometimes I wonder … if something happens while we’re here in the Med, I hate to think what it’ll be like with him in charge.”