Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  I awakened slowly to the morning sound of her shower and drifted off again, and was awakened a little later by sun-brightness shining into the darkened room, and saw her naked by the double draperies, holding the edge away from the window while she peered out at the day. With her other hand she was foamily scrubbing away at her teeth with my toothbrush and toothpaste.

  She turned away from the window and, seeing that my eyes were open, she roamed over to the bed, still scrubbing. "... ood oring, arley."

  "And good morning to you too, tiger."

  "O you O eye."

  "What?"

  Removed brush. "I said I hope you don't mind. Me using your toothbrush. I mean invasions of privacy are sort of relative, huh?"

  "Like the old joke, it's been the equivalent of a social introduction."

  When she started brushing again, I reached and caught her by the free wrist, pulled her closer. She removed brush, stared thoughtfully at me. "Really? You're serious?" She smiled. "Well sure! Let me go rench." She went into the bathroom. The water ran. The sound of spitting was p-too, p-tooey, like a small child. She came trotting back, beaming, launched herself into the bed, landing solidly, reaching greedily, and saying an anticipatory "Yum" with utmost comfortable satisfaction. In her own special field of expertise she was the least clumsy thing in probably the entire county.

  After we were dressed, she began to be increasingly nervous about leaving a motel room at high noon on Saturday. She was almost certain Rick was out there, waiting in murderous patience. Or that a group of her friends would be strolling by the room, for some unknown reason. She put the wig on as a partial disguise. She had me go out and start the motor in the rental, open the door on her side, and tap the horn ring when I was certain the coast was clear.

  She came out at a hunched-over half gallop and while scrambling into the car she gave her knee such a hell of a whack on the edge of the door that she spent the first three blocks all scrooched down, hugging her knee and moaning. Then from time to time she would stick her head up just far enough to see where we were and give me directions. She had an apartment in a little garden apartment development called Ridge Lane. After she insisted I drive around two blocks twice to make certain Rick's red convertible wasn't parked in the area, I drove into her short, narrow drive behind the redwood privacy fence and stopped a few inches behind the rear bumper of her faded blue Volkswagen in the carport. She spelled Woertz for me and said she was in the book. But I had the feeling she did not want me to call her. I had performed the required service. She did not want to trade one entanglement for another.

  I remembered a question I had forgotten to ask. "By the way, what were you people hoping to find on my person, Penny?"

  She shrugged. "We didn't know, really. Anything that would tie you in somehow. Papers or money or letters or notes or something. When you come to a blind alley, you're ready to try almost anything."

  We sat there and suddenly both yawned at once, great luxurious shuddering jaw-creakers. Then laughed at ourselves. She kissed me, got out, and gave a squeak of pain when she put her weight on her leg. She bent and rubbed her sore knee, then limped to her door. When she had unlocked it and opened it, she smiled and waved and I backed out.

  On the way back I stopped at a place as clean as any operating theater and had fresh juice, hot fresh doughnuts, surprisingly good coffee. Then, feeling a little bit ridiculous at being overly prim and fastidious, I walked a half block and bought a toothbrush before driving back to the motel. Yes, there are different degrees of personal privacy, and a toothbrush seems to be on some special level all its own, a notch above a hairbrush.

  The room had been made up. Though checkout time was eleven, I was certain they would not clip me for the ensuing night, as they just weren't that busy.

  But I sat and yawned and sighed, feeling too pleasantly wearied to make any decisions. The episode, I told myself, had changed nothing. A dead doctor, no matter how he died, had nothing to do with a damaged young wife who seemed to want to die.

  Nothing new had been added except...

  Except something she had said in the middle of the night after that time that had been unmistakably the most complete one for her, not any kind of thrashing wildness, or spasmodic yelping, but just very lasting and very strong, fading very slowly for her, slowly and gently. It was one of those fragmented drowsy conversations as we lay in a night tangle of contentment, sheet and blanket shoved down to the foot of the bed, the flesh drying and cooling after the moist of effort. Her deep and slowing breath was humid against the base of my throat. Round knee against my belly, her slow, affectionate fingertips tracing over and over the line of my jaw from earlobe to chin. In down-glance I could see, against the light that lay in a crisp diagonal line across the foot of the bed, a round height of her hip, semiluminous, and a steep descent to the waist where rested, in dark contrast, my large hand with fingers splayed.

  "Mmmmm," she said, "so now I know."

  "Search for guilt?"

  "Too soon for that, darling. Feel too delicious for that. Later maybe. But... damn it all anyway."

  "Problem?"

  "I don't know. Girl finds she can get turned way, way on, big as can be, with a nice guy that comes along. So she's kind of a lousy person."

  "Glandular type, eh?"

  "A lousy nympho, maybe."

  "Then, I'd have to be number eight hundred and fifty-six or something."

  She lay in thought for a moment and then giggled. "Counting Rick, you got one figure right. The six. The other four, I was married to one and engaged to two and head over heels with the other. Compared to some of the R.N.'s I work with and was in training with, I'm practically a nun. But my old grandma would fault dead away."

  "Nymphs are concerned only with self, honey. They lose track of who the guy is. Don't know or care. A robot would suit them fine."

  "I knew you were you, all along. Even more so when it got to the best part. What does that make me?"

  "Serendipitous."

  "Is that dirty?"

  "No. That's a clean."

  She stretched, yawned, shifted closer. "I keep wanting to say I love you, darling. That's for my conscience, I guess. Anyway, I like the hell out of you."

  "Same here. It's the afterglow that proves it worked right."

  She pushed herself up and knee-walked down and sorted out sheet and blanket and pulled them up over us, straightening and tucking and neatening, and then curled again, shivering once, fists and forehead against my chest, knees in my belly, her cheek resting on my underarm, with my other arm around her, palm against her back, fingertips wedged under the relaxed weight of her rib cage against the undersheet.

  I moved back and forth across the edge of sleep, thinking of that afterglow, trying to explain it to myself. With the mink, the musk ox, the chimpanzee, and the human, the proper friction at the proper places if continued for x minutes will cause the nerve ends to trigger the small glandular-muscular explosive mechanics of climax. And afterward there is no more urge to caress the causative flesh than there would be to stroke the shaker that contained the pepper that caused a satisfying series of sneezes.

  So in the sensual-sexual-emotional areas each man and each woman has, maybe, a series of little flaws and foibles, hang-ups, neural and emotional memory pattern and superstition, and if there is no fit between their complex subjective patterns, then the only product you can expect is the little frictional explosion, but when there is that mysterious fit, then maybe there are bigger and better explosions down in the ancient black meat of the bidden brain, down in the membraned secret rooms of the heart, so that what happens within the rocking clamp of the loins at that same time is only a grace note, and then it is the afterglow of affection and contentment that celebrates the far more significant climax in brain and heart.

  Her voice came from far off with an echo chamber quality, pulling me back across the edge of sleep. "... like they say female moths give off some kind of mating signal. Gees, I don't bat
my eyes and wiggle my behind and moisten my lips. But the bed patients make grabs at me. And the deliveryman from the dry cleaner. And Mr. Tom Pike, last spring."

  "Pike?"

  "While his wife was in the hospital for a couple of days of observation after she emptied the pill bottle. It was in the office while she was waiting for Dr. Sherman to come back from an emergency. There was nothing crude about the pass, you understand. Tom Pike is a very tasty and very careful guy. And I felt so darn sorry for him, and I respect him so much for the way he's handling the whole mess with Maureen... I almost got involved just out of pity."

  "When was all that?"

  "March, I guess. Maybe April. One thing, I knew he'd be very careful and cautious and secretive and he wouldn't go around bragging about his loving little nurse friend. I guess he'd have been a good thing, because then I wouldn't have gotten messed up with Rick."

  "Think he found some other recruit?"

  "I sort of hope so. Somebody sweet and nice and loving. But who would know? Somehow Mr. Pike gets to know everything about everybody, and nobody finds out much about him. It's probably even more important he should have found a friend now that Mrs. Trescot is dead."

  "Why?"

  "Now there's just the three of them, and kid sister has a terrible yen for him, and nobody could really blame him for giving her some very long second looks, either. And that would be as messy a triangle as you could find."

  She yawned and sighed. " `Night, sweetheart," she said.

  I slid almost back into sleep and stopped on the dreaming edge of it. Little by little I became ever more aware of every single place where flesh touched flesh. She had achieved such a honeyed and luxuriant completion that in some bewitched way it seemed to mark the spent flesh with a kind of sensuous continuity, as though it had not ended at all but was still continuing in some hidden manner. I was increasingly aware of the resting engines of our bodies, our slow thump of hearts, blood pulse, suck and sag of the bellows of four lungs, breathing commingled in the cozy bed, all the incredible complexity of cells and nourishments and energy transformation and secretions and heat balance going on and on. I wondered if she slept, but at my first tentative and stealthy caress she took a deep, quick breath that caught and she arched and stretched herself, made a purr of acceptance and luxurious anticipations.

  So into the tempos and climates of it again, bodies familiarized now. Fragments. Like things glimpsed at night from a moving train, Dragging whisper-sound of palm on flesh. Deep, deep, slow-thick into the clench of honey, clovery oils, nipples pebbled, lift-clamp of thigh, arythmic flesh-clap fading into tempo reattained, held long and longer and longest, then beginning quivorous hesitation at the end of deepening, richening beat, a shifting of her, mouth agape, furnace breath, tongue curl, grit of tooth against tooth, hands then cup and pull the rubberous buttocky pumping, her bellows breath whistling exploding the words against my mouth-"Love you. Love you. Love you." Then somehow opening more, taking deeper, pulling, demanding, a final grinding moaning agony of her, requiring me to drive, batter, cleave without mercy. Then slow toppling. The long slope. Hearts trying to leap from chests. Gagging gasps from the long run up the far side. Tumbling into the meadow. Tall grass. Clover and grass. Sag into sleep, still coupled, fall into sleep while still feeling in her depths the gentle residual claspings, small infrequent tightenings like that of a small sleeping hand when the brain dreams.

  Then in the morning, as I lay watching her get dressed and knowing that soon I had to stir myself too, she looked so frowning-thoughtful, I asked her if she was still working at that lousy-person syndrome of hers.

  She put her arms into the sleeves of the white dress after she had stepped into it and pulled it up. "You didn't get to me all the way, Travis, because you're some kind of fantastic lover."

  "Thanks a lot."

  "I mean, you know, none of that sort of tricky stuff."

  She came over and turned around to be zipped. I sat up and swung my legs out and, before zipping her, kissed the crease of her back about two inches south of her bra strap.

  "See?" she said.

  "See what?"

  "Well, that was just nice, honey. So I'm in love with you, sort of. And I wasn't in love with you that first time we made it, and so it wasn't so much, and then when I liked you more, then it got to be something else. So I've got a new philosophy about the bed bit."

  "Pray tell," I had said, zipping her up, giving her a pat on the rear.

  She moved away and turned, hitching at the white dress and smoothing it across her hips with the backs of her hands. "It isn't all set yet. It's sort of in bits and pieces. I'm going to live as if freckled girls have more fun. And to hell with all the whining and bleeding and gnashing my fool teeth about R. H. Holton, boy attorney. And if I've discovered that I just happen to love to make love with men I could fall in love with... people have to put up with a lot worse problems. Darling! Are you going to get up and drive me home? It gets later and later and later."

  So I had taken her home. End of brief affair. You could staple all the wrong tags on it. One-night stand. Pickup. Handy little shack job for the travelin' man. Hell, Charlie, you know how them nurses are.

  So maybe the only adventures that don't look trivial and tawdry are one's own.

  It had been my impression that while deep in thought I had been packing up to get out of there and go back to Lauderdale. But I discovered I hadn't packed a thing. I was atop the bedspread, shoes off, practicing deep breathing. And the next I knew it was eight o'clock on that Saturday night, and I wanted two quick drinks and two pounds of rare sirloin.

  9

  IT WAS NOT two pounds of steak, but it was rare enough, and I had it in the Luau Room of the Wahini Lodge at about nine, after a long shower, shave, two long-lasting Plymouths on ice.

  The mood was the old yin-yang balance of conflicting emotions. There was the fatuous he-male satisfaction and self-approval after having roundly and soundly tumbled the hot-bodied she-thing, with her approvals registered by the reactive flutterings and choke-throated gasps. Satisfaction in the sense of emptied ease and relaxation, with texture memories of the responsive body imprinted for a time on the touching-parts of the hands and mouth. The other half was the drifting elusive postcoital sadness. Perhaps it comes from the constant buried need for a closeness that will eliminate that loneliness of the spirit we all know. And for just a few moments the need is almost eased, the deeply coupled bodies serving as a sort of symbol of that far greater need to stop being totally alone. But then it is over, the illusion gone, and once again there are two strangers in a rumpled bed who, despite any affectionate embrace, are as essentially unknown to each other as two passengers in the same bus seat who have happened to purchase tickets to the same destination. Maybe that is why there is always sadness mingled with the aftertastes of pleasure, because once again, as so many times before, you have proven that the fleeting closeness only underlines the essential apartness of people, makes it uncomfortably evident for a little while. We had fitted each other's needs and could have no way of knowing how much of our willingness was honest and how much was the flood of excuses the loins project so brilliantly on the front screen of the mind.

  The loins tell you it is always bigger than both of anybody.

  Suddenly, I remembered the hundred dollars that Hoi-ton had made Penny stuff into her purse, and smiled. I would hear from her sooner than expected, because when she came across it and remembered, she would be in a horrid haste to get it back to me, as it would make a very sordid footnote to the swarmy night.

  And so when I went back to my room at ten thirty something and saw the red light on the phone winking, I was certain it would be Penny Woertz. But it was a very agitated Biddy, expressing surprise that I was still in Fort Courtney and asking me if I had seen or heard from Maureen. She had somehow sneaked down the stairs and out through the back of the house while Tom was in the living room working at the desk, and while Bridget had been out picking up odds
and ends at one of the Stop `n' Shop outlets. She had been gone since a little before seven. "Tom has been out hunting her ever since. I phoned everyplace I could think of and then I left too, about quarter to eight. Right now I'm at a place out near the airport and I happened to think she might come there to the motel, because she knew you were staying there."