Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper Read online

  There were several kinds of silence between us. Some-times it was the comfortable silence of starlight, a night breeze, swinging slowly at anchor, a mutual tasting of a summer night. Sometimes it was that kind of an awkward silence when I knew she was quite bitterly alone, and say-ing good-bye to the boat and to the husband and to the plans and promises that would not be filled.

  We were a man and a woman alone among the sea and the islands, interdependent, sharing the homely chores of cruising and living, and on that basis there had to be a physical awareness of each other, of maleness and femaleness. But there was a gratuitous triteness about the unconventional association that easily stifled any intensifi-cation of awareness.

  It was five years back, and she was that inevitable clich‚, an older woman, a widow, who had invited the husky younger male to voyage alone with her. I knew she had married young, but I did not know how young. I could guess that she was eleven years older than I, give or take two years. At the start her body was pale, too gaunted, and softened by the lethargy of months of mourning. But as the days passed, the sun darkened her, the exertion firmed the slackened muscles, and as she ate with increasing hunger, she began to gain weight. And, as a result of her increasing feeling of physical well-being, I began to hear her humming to herself as she did her chores.

  I suspect that it was precisely because any outsider, given the situation and the two actors on the stage, would have assumed that McGee was dutifully and diligently servicing the widow's physical hungers during the an-chored nights that any such relationship became impossi-ble. Not once, by word, gesture, or expression, did she even indicate that she had expected to have to fend me off. She moved youthfully, kept herself tidy and. attrac-tive, spent just enough time on her hair so that I knew she was perfectly aware of being a handsome woman and did certainly not require any hard breathing on my part to confirm her opinion. Nor did she play any of those half-innocent, half-contrived games of flirtation that invite misinterpretation.

  We had a lot of silences, but we did a lot of talking too. General talk, spiced with old incident, about the shape of the world, the shape of the human heart, good places we had been, good and bad things we had done or had not quite done. We went up around Grand Bahama, down the eastern shore of Abaco, over to the Berry Is-lands, down to Andros, and at last, after fourteen days, over to New Providence, where we tied up at the Nassau Harbour Club.

  She went alone to the bank and when she came back, she was very subdued and thoughtful. When I asked her if anything had gone wrong, she said that it had been quite a good deal more money than she had expected. She said that changed a few things and she would have to think about the future in a different way. We went out to dinner and when I got up the next morning, she was al-ready up, drinking coffee and looking at the Yachtsman's Guide to the Bahamas.

  She closed the book. "I suppose we should think about heading back," she said. "I hate to."

  "Do you have a date to keep?" ~

  "Not really. Somebody I have to see, eventually. A de-cision to make."

  "I'm in no hurry. Let's look at some more places. Exumas. Ragged Islands too, maybe." I explained to her how I take my retirement in small installments, whenever I can afford it, and if it was late August or early September when we got back, I wouldn't mind at all. She was over-joyed.

  So we sailed to Spanish Wells, then down the western shore of Eleuthera, and then began to work our way very slowly down the lovely empty chain of the Exumas, stay-ing over wherever we wanted to explore the beaches and the technicolor reefs. We did a lot of swimming and walking. I was suddenly aware that her mood was changing. She seemed remote for a few days, lost in thought, almost morose.

  The day she suddenly cheered up I realized that she had begun to deliberately heighten my awareness of her. I had the feeling that it was a very conscious decision, something that she had made up her mind to during those days when she seemed lost in her own thoughts and memories. As she was a tasteful, mature, elegant, and sensitive woman, she was not obvious about it. She merely seemed to focus her physical self at me, enhancing my awareness through her increased awareness of me. In-evitably it would be the male who would make the overt pass. It baffled me. I could not believe she was childish enough or shallow enough to set about enticing a younger man merely to prove that she could. There was more sub-stance to her than that. She had begun something that would have to be finished in bed, because I did not think she would begin it without having recognized its inevita-ble destination. It was all so unlikely and so deliberate that I had to assume she had some compulsion to prove something or to disprove something. Or maybe it was merely a hunger that came from deprivation. So I stopped worrying myself with wondering about her. She was a de-sirable and exciting woman.

  So when she provided the opportunity, I made the ex-pected pass. Her mouth was eager. When she murmured, "We shouldn't," it meant, "We shall." Her trembling was not faked. She was overly nervous about it, for reasons I could not know until later.

  The first time was just at dusk in her big wide double bunk in the master stateroom. Her body was lovely in the fading light, her eyes huge, her flesh still hot with the sun-heat of the long beach day, her shoulder tasting of the salt of the sea and the salt of perspiration. Because she was tense and anxious, I took a long gentling time with her, and then when finally, in full darkness, she was readied, I took her, in that ever-new, ever-the-same, long, sliding, startling moment of penetration and joining, which changes, at once and forever, the relationship of two people. Just as it was happening she pushed with all her might at my chest and tried to writhe away from me, calling out, "No! Oh, please! No!" in a harsh, ugly, gasp-ing voice. But she had been a moment late and it was done. She wrenched her head to the side and lay under me, slack and lifeless.

  I could guess what had happened to her. She had ar-rived at her decision to bring this all about through some purely intellectual exercise, some kind of rationalization that had seemed to her to be perfectly sane and sound. But a coupling cannot be carried out in some kind of ab-stract form. I could guess from knowing her that she had never been unfaithful to Mick Pearson. All pretty little rationalizations and games of conjecture can be wiped out in an instant by the total and immediate and irrevocable fleshy reality. The ultimate intimacy exists on a different plane than do little testings and tryings. When she made a small whimpering sigh, I began to move apart from her, but she quickly caught at me and kept me with her.

  Five years ago, but I had the memories in full textural detail of how often and how desperately Helena struggled to achieve climax. She wore herself into exhaustion. It was ritualistic and ridiculous. It was like some kind of idi-otic health club: Orgasm is good for you. It was like some dogged kind of therapy. It was completely obvious that she was a healthy, sexually accomplished, passionate woman. But she was so concentrated on what she thought was some sort of severe necessity that she choked up. She would manage to get herself right out to the last grinding panting edge of it and get hung up there and then slowly, slowly fade back and away. And apologize, hopelessly, and plead with me to please be patient with her.

  Four or five days later, wooden with fatigue, she con-fessed what had led her into this grotesque dilemma. Her voice was drab, her sentences short and without color. A man wanted to marry her. A very dear man, she said. The sex part of her marriage to Mick had been very very wonderful, always. During the months since his death, she had felt as if that part of her had died along with him. She did not want to cheat the man who wanted to marry her. She liked him very much. She liked me equally well. So it had seemed reasonable to assume that if she found she could enjoy sex with me, then she could enjoy it with him. Sorry she had used me in such a cyni-cal way. But she had to make up her mind whether or not to marry him. That was one of the factors. Sorry it had turned into such a dismal trying thing. Sorry to be such a dull mess. Sorry. Sorry.

  It is no good telling somebody they're trying too hard. It is very much like ordering a child to
go stand in a cor-ner for a half hour and never once think about elephants.

  So when she said there was no point in going on with such a stupid performance, I agreed. I let one day, one night, and one day pass. She was embarrassed and de-pressed. That night I began howling and roaring and thrashing at about one in the morning. She came hurrying in and I made it quite an effort for her to shake me awake. I had made certain that it had been such a physi-cal day that she would be weary.

  Woke up. Sagged back, deliberately trembling. Said it was an old nightmare that happened once or twice a year, based upon an exceptionally ugly event I could not ever tell anyone, not ever.

  Up until then I had been all too competent. Big, knuckly, pale-eyed, trustworthy McGee, who had taken care of things, first for Mick and then for her. Could han-dle boats, navigation, emergencies. So I had presented her with a flaw. And a built-in way to help. She told me I had to tell someone and then it would stop haunting me. In a tragic tone I said I couldn't. She came into my narrower bunk, all sympathy and gentle comfort, motherly arms to cradle the trembling sufferer. "There is nothing you can't tell me. Please let me help. You've been so good to me, so understanding and patient. Please let me help you."

  Five years ago, and back then the scar tissue was still thin and tender over the memories of the lady named Lois. There was enough ugliness in what had happened to her to be suitably persuasive. The world had dimmed a little when she was gone, as if there were a rheostat on the sun and somebody had turned it down, just one notch.

  I pretended reluctance and then, with a cynical emo-tionalism, told her about Lois. It was a cheap way to use an old and lasting grief. I was not very pleased with my-self for selecting Lois. It seemed a kind of betrayal. And with one of those ironic and unexpected quirks of the emotions, I suddenly realized that I did not have to pre-tend to be moved by the telling of it. My voice husked and my eyes burned, and though I tried to control myself, my voice broke. I never had told anyone about it. But where does contrivance end and reality begin? I knew she was greatly moved by the story. And out of her full heart and her concern, and her woman's need to hold and to mend, she fumbled with her short robe and laid it open and with gentle kisses and little tugs, with caresses and murmurings, brought us sweetly together and began a slow, long, deep surging, earth-warm and simple, then murmured, "Just for you, darling. Don't think about me. Don't think about anything. Just let me make it good for you."

  And it happened, because she was taking a warm, dreamy, pleasurable satisfaction in soothing my nightmared nerves, salving the wound of loss, focusing her woman-self, her softnesses and pungencies and opened-taking on me, believing that she had been too wearied by the energies of the day to even think of her own gratifica-tion but unaware of the extent to which she had been sex-ually stimulated by all the times when she had tried so doggedly and failed. So in her deep sleepy hypnotic giving it built without her being especially aware of herself, built until suddenly she groaned, tautened, became swollen, and then came across the edge and into the great blind and lasting part of it, building and bursting, building and bursting, peak and then diminuendo until it had all been spent and she lay slack as butter, breath whistling, heart cantering, secretions a bitter fragrance in the new stillness of the bed.

  I remember how she became, for the whole ten days we remained at anchor in the cove at Shroud Cay, like a kid beginning vacation. A drifting guilt, a sadness about Mick-these made her pleasure the sweeter. There was no cloying kittenishness about her, as that was a style that would not have suited her-or me. She was proud of her-self and as bold, jaunty, direct, and demanding as a bawdy young boy, chuckling her pleasures, full of a sweet wildness in the afternoon bunk with the heavy rain roar-ing on the decks over us, so totally unselfconscious about trying this and that and the other, first this way and that way and the other way, so frankly and uncomplicatedly greedy for joy that in arrangements that could easily have made another woman look vulgarly grotesque she never lost her flavor of grace and elegance.

  For that brief time we were totally, compulsively in-volved with the flesh, pagans whose only clock was that of our revived desires, learning each other so completely that, in consort, we could direct ourselves, joined or un-joined, as though we were a single octopoidal creature with four eyes, twenty fingers, and three famished mouths. When we raised anchor and moved on, the tempo diminished, and the affair became a more sedate and comfortable and cozy arrangement, with ritual sup-planting invention, with morning kisses that could be affection without any overtone of demand, with waking in the broad bunk to feel the heated length of her asleep, spoon style, against my back, and be content she was there, and be content to drowse off again.

  The last day of August was our last day in the islands and we spent the night anchored wide of the Cat Cay channel, and would cross the Stream the next day. She was solemn and thoughtful at dinner. We made love most gently and tenderly, and afterward when I held her in my arms, both of us on the edge of sleep, she said, "You un-derstood that it was our last time, dear?"

  "A way to say good-bye. A good way."

  She sighed. "I had twenty-one years with Mick. I'll never be... a whole person without him. But you did some mending, Travis. I know that... I can stumble through the rest of my life and accept what I've got left, live with less. Make do. I wish I could be in love with you. I would never let you go. I would be your old, old wife. I think I would dye your hair gray and have my face lifted and lie about my age. I'd never let you get away, you know."

  I began to tell her a lot of things, very significant and important and memorable things, and when I stopped, waiting for applause, I discovered she was asleep.

  When the Likely Lady was back in a slip at Bahia Mar, she took one wistful walk around the deck and made a sour little smile and said, "Good-bye to this too. I'll let the man who wants her pick her up here. Will you show him through her and explain everything?"

  "Sure. Send him to me."

  When I had put her luggage in the trunk of the rental car, and kissed her good-bye, and she had gotten behind the wheel, she looked out at me, frowning, and said, "If you ever need anything, darling, anything I can give you, even if I have to steal to get it..."

  "And if you start coming unglued, lady..."

  "Let's keep in touch," she said, blinked her eyes very rapidly, grinned, gunned the engine, and scratched off with a reckless shriek of rubber, lady in total command of the car, hands high on the wheel, chin up, and I never saw her again.

  4

  FORGET THE Lady Helena and get some sleep. Stop damning Meyer for bringing up that trip to Bimini and thus opening up that particular little corner of the attic in the back of my head.

  She had married the sweet guy, had invited me, but I had been away when the invitation came. Then postcards from the Greek Islands, or Spain, or some such honey-moon place. Then nothing until a letter three years ago, a dozen pages at least, apologizing for using me once again as a foil, clarifying her own thoughts by writing to me.

  She was divorcing Teddy. He was a sweet, nice, thoughtful man who, quite weak to begin with, had been literally overwhelmed and devoured by her strength. He had diminished, she said, almost to the point of invisibil-ity. All you could see was his pleasant uncertain smile. She admitted that she kept prodding him, pushing at him, hoping for that ultimate masculine reaction that would suddenly fight back and take over the chore of running a marriage. Maybe, she wrote, living with a dutiful creature on an invisible leash was preferable to being alone but not for her. Not when she could see herself becoming more domineering, unpleasant, and more shrill-week by week, month by month. So she was cutting him loose while he could still feed and bathe himself. She was get-ting the divorce in Nevada. When she had married, she had closed the house on Casey Key, had considered sell-ing it many times, but something had kept her from mak-ing a final decision. Now she was glad. She would go back there and see if she could recover what some people had once thought a pleasant disposition.

>   She said that her elder daughter, Maurie, had been married for six months to a very bright and personable young man in the brokerage business, and seemed deli-riously happy. She said they were living in the city of Fort Courtney, Florida, about a hundred miles northeast of Casey Key, and it seemed a workable distance for a mother-in-law to be. She reported that Bridget, known as Biddy-and nineteen at the time she wrote to me three years ago-had transferred from Bryn Mawr to the Uni-versity of Iowa so she could study with a painter she ad-mired extravagantly, and had changed her major to Fine Arts.