Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

  She nodded solemnly. “I think I like you. Tell me, is there a real live person who I could get to know under the badinage?”

  “Well,” I said, “let’s take the badinage off and see.” I wiped my hand in front of my face without changing my expression, which I think was a sort of earnest smile. “There. Notice the difference?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Now I see the serious you, all ready to talk about world affairs and the situation in Ethiopia and the French governmental crisis and how it’s all going to affect the stock market.”

  “My favorite topic of conversation,” I said. “How did you know?”

  She bent over and peered closely at my face. I peered up at hers. It was a face that stood up to close peering very well. “I think it’s the amber specks in your otherwise light brown eyes,” she said. “They speak of honesty and earnestness and strength and gentleness.”

  “All that in a few specks?” I asked.

  “And the ability to play the cornet,” she added, “and a tendency toward bilious attacks when you eat fish.”

  “I never eat fish,” I said.

  “And a good thing, too.” She stood up. “My name is Elizabeth.”

  “Mine is Morgan.”

  “Like the pirate? What do you do, Morgan, sink ships, sack whole cities, and carry off the women and children?”

  “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” I told her. “One must remember the proper order: first rape, then pillage, then burn. If you get it wrong, it could ruin your whole day.”

  “I can see where that would be important,” she agreed.

  There was a breathless quality to Elizabeth, as if she were always running even when she was standing still. There was something in her eyes—blue eyes, wide eyes, under long dark lashes—that dared you to see under the banter and take her seriously.

  “I work for Alexander Brass,” I told her.

  “The columnist?”

  “That’s right. I am his amanuensis.”

  “Are you here amanuensing?”

  “No. Off duty. We’re just here as guests of Senator Childers. And you?”

  She pouted. “And me what?”

  “What do you do?”

  “I look decorative. I smile at dull young men and tell them how clever they are. I smile at dull old men and tell them they shouldn’t say such naughty things. I listen attentively while men explain to me things that I understand better than they do, and bite my tongue so as not to say anything when they get it wrong. And I smile. Most of all, I smile.”

  An insight into her character? Possibly a hint at her profession? I didn’t know and I discovered that I didn’t care. “I think I like you too,” I said, “although you are a bit cynical and worldly-wise for one so young.”

  “I’m twenty-two,” she said, “and I didn’t ask to be born.” She said it flatly and without affect, just stating a fact to her new friend. But I felt the chill of truth behind the words. I took her hand and tried to think of something to say that would wipe away the feeling without sounding banal to both of us. The silence stretched on.

  “Damn!” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Neither did I,” I said. “Let’s just—”

  She stood up and pulled me to my feet. “Come with me,” she said. She led the way back into the pool house and closed the door behind us. “This way,” she said.

  To the right were the showers and little cubicles for changing, but she took me to the left. We went through a door and were in a small suite of rooms: bedroom, sitting room, and bath. “What is this?” I asked.

  “A little hidey-hole I found,” she said, closing the door. She pulled me through into the bedroom, kicked that door closed with her foot. The bed was covered with a blue and white bedspread and had twelve pillows and a small teddy bear on it. The wallpaper was white with red flowers and the curtains on the one small window matched the wallpaper. Across from the bed was a bureau that looked too big for the room, and a small table was at the foot of the bed, leaving little floor space.

  She sat on the bed and took both of my hands in hers.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Please!”

  “I don’t think—” I said.

  “No need to,” she told me. She pulled me with a gentle pull until she was lying on the bed and I was leaning on top of her, supported by my hands, which were still in hers. “Can you kiss?” she asked.

  I showed her I could.

  “That’s nice,” she said after a minute. “What else can you do?”

  Ten minutes before I would have said, “Not much, really,” but now, with the sound of her throaty voice in my ears, the fresh smell of her in my nostrils, the feel of her under my hands, I felt that I could do anything. I kissed her again, more thoroughly, and again. I moved beside her on the bed and fumbled at her blouse. She pulled my jacket off and her hands reached for my shirt and began unbuttoning it. My hands circled her and I found the hooks for her brassiere. I could feel my heart beating in my chest. I could feel her heart beating beside mine. My thoughts were befuddled and at the same time miraculously clear.

  For a while neither of us said anything, but we conveyed a wealth of information with our hands, with our lips. And then, unexpectedly, Elizabeth sat up and pushed me away. I lay there for a second to catch my breath, and then rose to a more-or-less sitting position. She stared at me across the pile of pillows and discarded clothing.

  I stared back at her, suddenly concerned that I was naked and visible in the light coming through the window. She was also both naked and visible, and a wonderful sight she was; but I’ve always thought that my best physical feature was the way my clothes hung on me when I was dressed.

  “What?” I asked.

  She leaned forward and cupped my face in her hands. She was crying.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I like you, I really like you,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me!”

  That stopped me. For what seemed an eternity I could say nothing. Then I stammered, “Why on earth—? What makes you think—? How could you possibly believe—? You of all people? Now of all times?” I took her hands in mine and kissed each palm.

  “I have been with many men,” she said. “Since I was—much younger. It has nothing to do with love, or probably even sex, although it ends up as sex. I can’t help it. I can’t explain it. When the men I’m with find out what I am… this need I have… often they become cruel and hateful. I’m sorry.”

  I stared at her and thought over what she’d said. She sat, her hands in mine, watching my face like a supplicant, or a dog waiting to be kicked.

  “You like sex,” I said cleverly.

  “I need something,” she said. “It isn’t sex, but sex will have to do until I figure out what it is.”

  “You mean you really don’t want to go to bed with me?”

  “We are in bed,” she pointed out. “I really do want to go to bed with you. Really.”

  “And you like me?”

  “I really do like you,” she said. “But if I hadn’t met you I would have found somebody else. Not necessarily somebody I like.”

  I had pictured many scenarios in my head of what it would be like, the first time. This was not one of them. “I like you,” I said. “Whatever happens, I like you. I would like to get to know you better. I would like to make love to you. I want more than anything else not to hurt you. I should warn you that I am amazingly inexperienced and I may not be very good at it.”

  She sighed. “You’ll be wonderful,” she said. She kissed me. “I promise.”

  18

  I shall, as the Victorian novelists say, draw a curtain over this tender scene to save the delicate sensibilities of my readers.

  Or maybe it’s my delicate sensibilities I need to save. I will say that, as far as I could tell, each of us behaved in a manner befitting the occasion. I had never befat such an occasion before, but Elizabeth assured me that my befitting was as good as
anyone else’s and better than most.

  An hour later and Elizabeth and I were lying under the covers talking about unimportant things like life and death and love and beauty and wars and breadlines. We touched lightly on our recent coupling and what seemed to both of us to be an important newfound relationship. I discovered that I honestly did not mind all the men she had had in the past, but I could not predict how I would feel about each and every man she would have in the future who was not me. She told me that she did not mind my being a journalist, that we all make mistakes in our youth.

  “My mother, that sweet little old lady back in Ohio, does not know that I work for a New York newspaper,” I told Elizabeth. “She thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.”

  Elizabeth considered this. “I didn’t know you could play the piano,” she said, rolling over on her side and staring at me. “There is much about you that I must learn.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like who you are and where you came from and where you’re going and if you’ll take me with you.”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the boys,” I said. It was flippant and thoughtless and I could have bit my tongue. She looked as though I’d just slapped her in the face.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “If you think that—”

  “No, no,” I said, grabbing her and holding her in my arms. “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry!”

  “You’re different,” she said. “It’s true. I don’t know why, or how. I want to be with you, stay with you. Most of the time, with most guys, I feel—dirty afterward. I want to go and take a real hot shower and scrub myself clean and hope the guy is gone when I get back. But you… I don’t want to leave you. And I don’t feel dirty. I feel happy.”

  She snuggled into my arms and I pulled the blanket back up over both of us. She didn’t seem to expect me to say anything, which was a good thing as I had no idea of what I could say. I was happy and content and pleased and maybe a little smug. I felt warm and protective toward this strange little girl. Somehow, despite my lack of experience and her excess of it, she had made me feel like I knew what I was doing and was even good at it. And not just about making love, but about life itself. I seldom feel that I know much about life or how it should be lived. Perhaps that’s why I want to be a novelist—an unconscious conviction that since I can’t do it very well, I might, as well write about it.

  I stared at the ceiling without seeing the ceiling and thought deep thoughts about nothing at all, or perhaps about too many things at once for any of them to make sense.

  There were footsteps in the room outside and, as I pulled, the blanket up to my nose and tried to become invisible, the door opened and a large man in a plaid suit stood in the doorway. I had time to notice that it was Senator Childers, and that his hair was slightly messed, before I pulled the blanket over my head.

  “Bitsy!” the senator said in a calm and reasonable voice. “There you are.”

  Elizabeth sat up, covering herself with the blanket, which pulled it away from me down to the knees. “Yes, Daddy,” she said.

  I scrunched deeper into the blanket, trying desperately to disappear. It didn’t work. Large parts of me remained all too evident. I tried to think of something clever to say. Given the situation, “hello” seemed inept. Perhaps a literary allusion. Our revels now are over, I thought. Oh, that this too, too solid flesh could melt, I thought. Go not naked into the world, I thought. Everybody’s got to be somewhere, I thought. I crammed a corner of the blanket into my mouth to keep from giggling.

  “You must come out and entertain our other guests,” the senator said. Except for his use of the word “other,” he showed by neither word nor deed that he was aware that I was there.

  “Yes, Daddy,” Elizabeth said.

  He turned and left the room, but a second later he reappeared in the doorway. “Don’t marry this one,” he said, and left again, slamming the door behind him with what I considered unnecessary violence.

  Silence ensued.

  I redistributed the blanket more equitably between us. “Senator Childers is your father,” I said cleverly.

  She nodded. “I know,” she said.

  “You didn’t tell me,” I said.

  “Does it matter?” she asked.

  I thought about it. “I guess not,” I told her. “I just feel kind of silly, thinking you were one of those chorus girls.”

  She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Unfortunately I’m not,” she said. “And now you’re going to be awed by Daddy or used by Daddy or want something from Daddy; and if we ever make love again you’re going to be making love to Senator Childers’s daughter, and not to me. Or he’s going to want something from you, and then we’ll never get it sorted out.”

  I didn’t understand the last part of that sentence, but I decided that now was not the time to question her semantics. She reached for her stockings on the bureau and slid one over her right foot. I searched around for my socks on the floor. A silence stretched between us, and I figured it was my turn to break it. I took a deep breath. “Listen,” I said. “This may blow our relationship to hell, which is a place I do not want it to go, but here it is. I am not a Republican. Usually I’m not even a Democrat. Perhaps I’m a Whig. I want nothing from your father. I don’t support your father’s policies. I don’t even like your father; I think he’s a stuffed shirt and a prig. And not only that, but every time I see him it reminds me of—ah—something I can’t tell you about, and it makes me want to giggle. To me he’s essentially a silly man.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Really.”

  “Good,” she said. “But he isn’t silly. Trust me. Daddy is manipulative and narcissistic and self-important and wants to be president, and would happily walk right over you if you stood between him and the door. But he is not silly.” She fastened on her garter belt. I watched. An endlessly fascinating contraption, the garter belt.

  I gathered my own clothing from various places about the room and dressed. “When will I see you again?” I asked her.

  She pulled her skirt up about her waist, and tucked the blouse in. “I’ll call you,” she said. “At the World. When I get to the city sometime next week. I’ll ask for the piano player.”

  I bent over to tie my shoes. “I’ll play an arpeggio just for you,” I told her, “whatever that is.” I stood up and wrapped my arms around her shoulders. “You will call?” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to whisper, it just came out that way.

  She kissed me. “I will,” she said.

  I left first, trotting toward the pavilion by instinct, my mind too busy to notice where my feet were taking me. My thoughts came fast, the new ones pushing out the ones that had arrived but a moment before. My emotions flipped from ecstasy to despair every few seconds. I was in love with Elizabeth the senator’s daughter. The senator’s beautiful, burnt sienna-haired daughter. The senator’s neurotic, nymphomaniac daughter. I remembered some of the stories I had heard about “Bitsy,” my Elizabeth. She went through men like a scythe through butter. She raised men up to the heights of passion, just to hear them bounce. She’d been married more times than the Isle de France.

  My thoughts were not making sense, even to me. I stopped at the edge of the tennis courts and took several deep breaths. It didn’t help. I sat down on the grass and took several more. You may think this confusion of thoughts and emotions I describe is literary license, I being a fledgling novelist and all. But it is as accurate as I can reconstruct my feelings.

  A pair of legs encased in white flannels approached from the near court. “You look like you need a touch of liquid succor,” a nasal voice drawled.

  I looked up. W.C. Fields stood over me, white flannels, blue blazer, and a glass in each hand. “I happen to have acquired a spare glass of scotch whiskey,” he said, extending one of the glasses to me. “They seem to have an endless supply of quite excellent booze here, a theory I intend to put to the experiment.”

  “Thank
you,” I said, taking the glass.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Always glad to do a service to my fellow man.” He gave me a semiformal salute and wandered off toward the pavilion.

  I took a gulp of scotch and realized that scotch was not what I wanted. What I wanted was to know for sure that Elizabeth Childers, Bitsy, the senator’s daughter, was going to call me, was going to see me again. I put the glass down and stood up and brushed myself off. I was behaving, or at least thinking, like a lovesick adolescent, and for no good reason. She had said she would call, and why should I not believe her? We had been interrupted by her father, a not unheard of episode in the lives of young lovers. I would stop worrying. I would just go off somewhere and sit down and remember in detail the past two hours. There would be a silly smile on my face, and passersby would say…

  My wallet was missing. I patted the pants pocket where it should have been, and reached in and felt nothing. I patted all my other pockets just in case. It wasn’t there.

  Had Bitsy stolen my wallet? While we were in bed, with my pants draped over the corner of the dresser, had her hand snuck away from its task of love to reach into my pants pocket? I felt guilty for thinking such a thing even as I reviewed our mutual activities in my mind. It seemed improbable. What must have happened was that the wallet had fallen from the pocket, and even now awaited me at the foot of the bed.

  I turned around and started back toward the pool cottage. My mind circled about the prickly hedge of thoughts about Elizabeth and her father and her habits and her professed feelings for me and my evident feelings for her and refused to settle. But I’d have to settle my mind, and probably my stomach, later. For now I would just retrieve my wallet.

  As I reached the cottage door, I could hear voices inside. It was Elizabeth and her father, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. The senator’s voice sounded very positive and had the bark of command, as though he were planning to lead his daughter into battle. I paused. Entering at that moment did not seem like a good idea. I circled around to the side of the building to be out of sight when they left. Now I was beside the bedroom window and I could hear the voices more clearly.