by Selena Kitt
The numbers! The idea struck him as both insipid and laughable. The pretentious game of putting a man and woman in proximity to approximate the social arrangement of men and women cohabiting as couples was a civilized remnant of the customs of forgotten tribes in which a stranger was offered a wife for the night. While Billi was not the girl of his dreams, she was attractive enough that he would have appreciated the suggestion that he drag her into the bedroom and take his pleasure with her. That, he would consider a kind gesture. Simply producing a woman to sit beside him through a dinner, while he pretended he wanted to be there, pretended he had the slightest interest in talking to her was something he considered more barbaric.
Being seated next to a person whose only qualification and reason for being there was to preserve the gender balance at the table, while implementing social conventions that did all they could to delay, if not prevent actual intercourse, seemed absurd. Kafka was alive and well and hypocrisy had become the gold standard. Even in this world, a more understanding general, one more in touch with life, who wanted to please a brave warrior, would have taken him to a brothel and told him to pick out a companion. Pleasure made more sense than form.
Automatically taking stock, he noted there was exactly one woman at the table he considered remotely interesting, sexually alluring, and that was Dallas Meredith. He wasn’t sure he liked her, but her sassy mouth and the arrogant swagger of her slim hips suggested that she had all the makings of a good fuck. Even before he’d left the hospital he’d heard her story. She’d been a model and grabbed the general when she reached an age of diminishing returns for that career. Looking at her, he could see her as a model. She mentioned that she was General Meredith’s second wife and that his first wife, the one seen in most of the pictures in the living room, had died two years before. With their age difference came the inevitable rumors that she fooled around on him. Trevor never believed nor disbelieved stories about other people. He’d been stationed at enough bases to know that rumors always circulated wildly, especially about attractive wives of the top brass. Probably some were true. He didn’t care. If the woman wasn’t getting enough at home, then stepping out made sense. He never understood gossip. Why would you care who someone slept with unless you were the one getting laid or being cheated on?
Regardless of the facts, Dallas Meredith proved pleasant to look at and acted friendly, which helped make the dinner go smoothly.
Everyone was polite and tried to make conversation, even Billi. The brass all made nice with him, but there wasn’t much to talk about. He hadn’t gone to the academy; he had never been a unit commander; he didn’t know any important people. They urged him to tell war stories that they didn’t really want to hear and couldn’t understand. The women, except for Dallas and Billi, told him how proud they were of him. Billi didn’t seem to care while Dallas attended to her hostess chores and periodically flashed him an amused smile that told him she sympathized with his plight, but found the situation entertaining.
She didn’t say a word that she shouldn’t. The only reason he had for thinking something interesting might develop with her was a rather smoky look in her eyes. That was vague enough, but suggested that a very hot fire burned in Dallas Meredith. He got the distinct impression that under the right circumstances, which this was a far from as he could imagine, she would want that fire stoked, not put out.
After dinner, when the cars arrived to take them to the reception, Dallas subtly arranged that he rode in their car, suggesting it in a way that made the general insist. So she sat between Trevor and her husband. He felt the pressure of his thigh against hers. The wine from dinner and the smell of her perfume made his head spin in soft circles. She was playing him, but he rather enjoyed it.
The night was warm. Diane Anders longed for summer to end. She couldn’t wait for the cool and invigorating arrival of fall. The shift from summer would start the change, even altering the smell of the air. Each year, the smell in the air was the first sign of fall she noticed. Now she sniffed the air, like a dog trying to catch a scent, but it wasn’t there yet.
Soon.
Diane looked forward to change. She had gotten hungry for change and that night the desire was stronger than usual. She knew herself. She’d let herself fall into a rut. That’s how it happened with her, life moving in a cycle of change and routine. After her divorce she’d gained distance by taking this job. It would never have occurred to her to apply at a military hospital, but she’d stumbled across it. It surprised her to find she liked the work, but like any, it had become routine. The realization had snuck up on her. That’s the way it worked. One day you woke to an itch, a sense that something needed to change.
After two years in this job the routine was entrenched and starting to tell on her. That she worked on an Army base intensified that orderly, routine, sensibility that irritated her, triggered that itch. Sometimes moving her furniture around was enough to assuage the itch. The last time it had taken a divorce, a new job, and moving to the base. So now her only question was how much change was needed and how far she wanted the change to take her.
The party she was headed for was a social obligation of the worst kind—one where work obligated her to attend, a party where her presence wasn’t really wanted. As one of the senior psychologists on base, she and her boss were expected to show their faces, although she always got the impression that the hostesses wished they could get the face count that without having to deal the people who played the roles—single women were especially undesirable.
Yes, events like this one aggravated the itch for change incredibly.
This aspect of working for the military had surprised her. At the best of times the military was a closed society with its own mores and conventions and she didn’t even know most of them. She knew they existed, but working on the base for two years wasn’t enough for her to assimilate all of them. Of course she hadn’t tried all that hard. Most had nothing to do with her life, and nearly all were things she thought petty. A party such as this one, where attendance was practically mandatory, was rare, and the wives didn’t invite her to other events. Learning that had been a relief. She had little interest in banal chatter about children and schools, or fund raisers, or the cocktails parties that appeared, at least from her outsider position, to be the mainstay of social life.
As an outsider with no entrée to the inner circles and no real desire to penetrate them, her social status was one thing that wouldn’t change. She didn’t mind. At the most, there were moments when she wished for women her own age, professional women, she could talk to. The society of officer’s wives wasn’t the place to look, and she had little time or opportunity to get to know anyone not associated with the base or her work.
Officer’s wives had clubs, and the older woman usually mentored the younger ones, those confused and uncertain young brides of junior officers who were trying to make sense of the chain of command and the whys and wherefores that went with so much about military life. The wives of the senior officers would dutifully take them under their wing and mentor them, grooming them to be exactly like the wives who went before them.
To a large extent, it was the wives who set and enforced the social protocols. Although there were more women on active duty now, they were soldiers whose role and status was defined by their rank and job. Soldiers, men or women, fell under the discipline of the military. The wives set the tone for social activities.
Being neither a wife nor a soldier, Diane didn’t fit neatly into any of the categories. From a social perspective, civilian contractors were hired help, not part of the community. As a single woman, a divorced woman, she was suspect and dangerous and the wives closed ranks to protect themselves, thinking that their men were out of their control far too much as it was. They had no interest in allowing them to socialize with dangerous outsiders any more than they could help, and they had a fair amount of control.
Acknowledging the delicacy of the situation, Diane had worn a simple dress. It fla
ttered her—she wouldn’t wear anything that didn’t—but it wasn’t revealing or particularly sexy. Not that her effort would be appreciated, but it might allow her to escape censure. For this evening her goal was simply to appear in the reception line and have her attendance noted, then slink into invisibility and the earliest possible exit. In preparation, before leaving home she’d opened a bottle of a nice Merlot to breath. Sitting next to it on her coffee table was an unopened copy of Journey to the End of the Night by Celine. She’d ordered it online and it had arrived in the mail that afternoon. As soon as she could make her escape she looked forward to exploring the darker side of Paris in the 30s.
This party, to honor a returning war hero, was held at the Officers’ Club—the O Club, for short. It was well attended, too well attended to suit Diane. She preferred to avoid crowds, finding little appeal in the press of bodies. She arrived to find officers, spouses, and key civilian employees crowding the lounge and the two bars. A rock band crowded on a small stage in the corner played songs that must’ve been hits in an era Diane had slept through. If so, she was glad of it and it pained her to endure someone’s nostalgic attraction to it.
Thankfully, the organizers had opted to make the reception a post-dinner function, which minimized her involvement. The honored guest had dined with the General and a few key people and she only needed to attend the general reception, held so that the lesser mortals could rub shoulders with him.
A tight knot of people drew her attention. As this had to be the focus of the reception (she recognized one of the taller gray-haired men as General Meredith, the base commander) she looked to see if she could get a glimpse of the honored guest without entering the fray. Both personally and professionally she felt more comfortable observing with a bit of distance. Automatically, she noted that the group clustered around him was primarily, but not exclusively, women. The sight made her think of an anthropology class she’d taken that discussed the way tribal women would present themselves to returning heroes. It seemed to be part of natural selection for them to consider heroes as the best possible mates and for the heroes to consider that their triumphs in battle earned them the right to choose among the available females.
With the females close to the hero, the curious males of this tribe stood uncertainly at the edge of the fray, holding back, attempting to showing a bit of reserve. Of course, they wanted to meet him too, but their motivation was so that later they could claim to know him while the women, single and married, young and old, were interested in getting proximity and his attention. At some level, and for the most part unconsciously, they each attempted to seduce him. Consciously, they sought a smile, a touch, some personal contact that would make them feel that he’d singled them out, found them to be special. His celebrity made that important.
From a distance she could only imagine, with distaste, the collective warmth radiated by their bodies. Competitive cuddling, she called it.
Without even having seen him, Di felt a twinge of pity for the man they’d gathered to honor, whoever he really was. For two years she’d spent her days dealing with the damage war did to men. That was her line of work, and she’d seen enough of them that she knew being forced to retell the story of an unpleasant experience a million times to people who couldn’t possibly understand it in any context made any unresolved issues worse. Working with many men who had returned from combat, both heroes and cowards, she’d found more commonalities than differences among them, and similar challenges in finding and teaching them to use tools that let them deal with the damage trauma inflicted. Regardless of their response under fire, the ones that sat in her office had all been put in extreme situations not of their doing, and survived. Then they came home to find the experience had changed them in ways they didn’t understand. Some were able to recover—they’d take a little time and apparently shake it off. But some never came back from wherever the changes took them.
So she found herself wondering if this hero enjoyed these accolades, if he felt he deserved them. She hoped not. Reveling in the transient celebrity worship would delay his adjustment to a real world, where his role would inevitably be far less significant and over time the appreciation for what he’d done would fade. One day he’d wake to find his exploits were forgotten—people would no longer compete to buy him a drink; women would no longer throw themselves at him. Eventually, if he was strong, this wound would heal as the ones from the battlefield had—until some well-meaning group asked him to address their VFW group or Elk’s Lodge or some such, when he’d taste the limelight again for a brief moment. In her experience, the returned heroes often found that taste bitter.
The crowd parted for a moment as someone, Dallas Meredith, brought a drink to the man who had to be the hero they’d all come to meet. He was attractive—looking exactly like the kind of actor a producer should pick to play a war hero. An alpha male, suitably tall, she guessed over six feet, and broad of shoulder, with a flat belly and a crisp smile that said he might be enjoying himself.
Across the short space of the room, through the narrow opening the people made to allow Dallas to bring his drink, he looked in her direction. Their eyes met, locking together for an electrifying moment that sent a tremble of something awkward, uncomfortable and powerful coursing through her body. It took seconds of her brain ticking over before she recognized the feeling for what it was—a sharp and piercing sense of a deep and powerful attraction to a man she didn’t know, had never even spoken to. It embarrassed her, this foolish, probably unrequited, and entirely fanciful attraction. She didn’t even believe in love at first sight in the conventional sense, much less from across a crowded room. How could it be love if you didn’t even know the person, had never heard their voice, couldn’t even see them clearly?
Telling herself that it wasn’t real, that he’d only been looking in her direction, and probably at Dallas, not her, didn’t help. That his gaze seemed to cross Dallas’s bare shoulder and connect with her own eyes was nothing but a ridiculous illusion that she forced out of her mind. The idea of the hero and the fuss everyone was making over him teased her fancies. She couldn’t form an attachment, a desire, for someone she hadn’t even met. That was absurd. Yet, her pulse pounded.
The man suddenly looked puzzled. He said something to Dallas and nodded in her direction. The woman turned that elegant profile to look at Diane, and then shook her head. Before she could see more, they disappeared from sight, the hero reabsorbed by the press of admirers, enveloped by his eclectic group of women and Dallas merely one of their number.
“This is intolerable.” She turned to see Colonel Paul Hastings smiling and holding out a drink. “I can’t possibly allow the reputation of the Army to be tainted by having a beautiful woman standing alone at a party without even a drink in her hand. That is an unredeemable failing.”
She took it and gave him a welcoming smile. Paul was her boss. He was in his late forties and although he was good looking, not the ruggedly masculine type the hero seemed to be. More her type, now that she thought about it. Alpha males were overbearing at times. Paul was likable and she enjoyed working for him. He was a good administrator and a nice man. He was a terrible flirt, but never pressed too hard or flirted in a way that she considered harassing. In fact, she found him charming and acknowledged that his overtures flattered her. As she tried to center herself after the encounter of a moment before, she wasn’t too proud to admit that she needed a little ego boosting that came from someone who actually knew her, even if he was just being kind. “That is good of you, taking pity on a poor civilian.”
“Well, we try to be egalitarian here. It’s damn hard, of course, treating civilians as if they were worth a damn, but we consider the effort worth it.”
“I do notice you seem to have restricted your aggressive public relations outreach effort to female civilians, and I seem to be the only one present.”
He laughed. “That’s simple military pragmatism, Diane. We deal with one front at a time. Napoleon and Hitle
r taught us that. One man can’t be everywhere at once, be all things to all people. Therefore, it’s vitally important to prioritize, to start somewhere. As it is volunteer work, I feel comfortable setting whatever priorities as I see fit.” He looked over at the crowd and sighed. “Our returning hero.”
“You don’t seemed impressed.”
“Then I apologize, for I am impressed and reluctantly rather grateful to him for what he did and what he represents. It’s just that every time this shrink who hides his white coat under a uniform encounters another Og the barbarian returning from breaking the heads of our enemy, he knows that damage was done to more than the enemy. I can’t help but anticipate that when he comes into our office, his experience will have made rather a mess of him, with his id and ego and all those shrinky things tangled up, making him quite a nasty Medusean hairdo of conflicting emotions and values.” Then he grinned. “Fortunately for me, this one will be your mess.”
