The Generals (28 page)

“I am practically persona non grata with the DOD,” she said.

He started to say something, but stopped.

“You were about to say?” she said.

“It might sound cold,” he said. “But, whether DOD likes you or not, you’re at least in a position to feel you’re doing something to help your husband. My friend’s wife tells me the worst part is not being able to do a damned thing to help him.”

“I have an ulterior motive,” she said.

He looked at her curiously, and she wondered why she had started this. It would be too easy to blame it on the martinis.

“I want to get my husband back so I can divorce him,” she said.

His eyebrows went up.

“That shocks you,” she challenged.

“You can’t divorce him while he’s gone?”

“No,” she said. “For a number of reasons.”

“There’s a lot of guys over there,” he said. “Statistically, a certain number are bound to be sonofabitches.”

“You’re granting me the benefit of the doubt,” she said.

“Roxy likes you, Sharon likes you. That’s a pretty good recommendation.”

“He’s not a sonofabitch,” she said. “I just don’t like him. I never should have married him. My money came between us. Can you understand that?”

“Sure,” Lowell said. “It has been said that the rich should be kept in enclosures, so they won’t offend the poor people.”

“You don’t seem to trouble to hide yours.”

“I was with friends last night,” he said.

“I was jealous,” she said.

“That’s silly,” he said.

There was a moment’s silence, and then Dorothy blurted, “I was gathering my courage to write him to tell him I wanted a divorce when he got shot down.”

“Somebody else come along?” Lowell asked. “Somebody comfortable?”

“Not until I met you,” she blurted.

“Jesus!” Lowell said.

“I can’t imagine why I said that,” she said, flushing.

He tried to make a joke of it: “I have this Dutch uncle aura,” he said. “All the girls tell me their darkest secrets.”

It was time to change the subject.

“Why didn’t you ever get married again?” she asked.

“Now it’s my turn to confess all?”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“I came close once,” Lowell said. “Somebody else comfortable. My cousin Craig was ecstatic.”

“What happened?”

“You’re looking at a man who was left at the altar. There are not very many of us.”

“Really at the altar? Just before the wedding?”

“Instead of coming to the wedding, she sent the letter,” he said.

“What did it say?”

“She didn’t like the Army, and I am a solider,” he said. “She was right.”

“How did you take it?” Dorothy asked.

“I cried a lot, but I didn’t do anything really foolish.”

“I can’t imagine why I started this whole thing,” she said.

“The martinis,” Lowell said.

“No,” she said.

He stopped, a forkful of shrimp halfway to his mouth, and looked at her. Their eyes met. She fought the temptation to look away.

“You said something before,” she said, softly, “about the impulse occurring simultaneously with the opportunity.”

“Yes, I did,” he replied.

“My husband has been gone two and a half years,” she said.

He felt his heart jump. He wondered where the warning flags were. This was trouble if he ever saw it, and he had seen a lot of it. Jesus Christ, all he had to was get caught screwing a POW’s wife!

He had walked away from a dozen situations like this. Now that he was older and wiser, it was easy. He’d become skilled at it. Most often, he could refuse the offer with tact and kindness, and in the morning congratulate himself on his wisdom.

But he didn’t want to walk away from this. And he wondered why.

Then he understood.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with how long your husband has been gone,” he said. “Don’t cheapen yourself that way.”

“What else could it be?” she asked, faintly. “Or are you trying to turn me down with kindness?”

“I know what we’re getting into,” he said. “And I know what it’s likely to cost. I want to be sure you do.”

“I knew what I was liable to get into when I walked up to you in the store,” she said, averting her eyes once more.

It was all so much easier now that it was in the open. She looked at him again.

“Do you really want any more to eat?”

He pulled his money from his pocket, laid a couple of bills on the table, and led her out of the restaurant.

She did not let herself think as he walked her across the shopping center parking lot and then through an opening in the hurricane fence that separated it from the apartment complex.

The door to an apartment on the third floor was open, and a man from the telephone company was sitting on the floor of the living room screwing something into a socket.

“The door was open,” he said. “So I figured you’d left it open for me.”

“Yes, I did,” Lowell said.

“You’ve got two lines, Colonel,” the installer said. “Two instruments. One in here and one in the bedroom. Both of them are unlisted. I’m supposed to tell you that you have to understand the operator will not give out the numbers, not even in an emergency.”

“Yes, I understand.”

The telephone installer nodded and went back to work. Dorothy looked around the apartment. He had filled it with really ugly furniture, the kind displayed in stores advertising
WE FINANCE ANYBODY
. There were two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a “dining bar”—a divider with two cheap plastic-upholstered wooden stools in front of it. The bathroom had a swan engraved on the sliding door to the shower. A dozen assorted towels (still in their plastic wrapping) lay on the Formica “vanity” top in the bathroom beside a six-pack of toilet paper.

In the “master” bedroom, suitcases, a golf bag, a gun case, and sheets and pillow cases (also still in their plastic wrapping) were all dropped on top of the bed. He had clearly only moved in a few minutes before he’d walked over to Haverty’s to buy the charcoal grill.

Dorothy corrected herself. He had gone to Haverty’s to buy something for the apartment. The charcoal grill had been a combination of impulse and opportunity. She wondered what he had really been after.

She walked back out into the living room: Sears, Roebuck television set with rabbit ears, two armchairs, and a couch. Plastic, woodgrained veneer, and more plastic.

It was horrible.

On the kitchen counters: a wooden box full of whiskey bottles and two other boxes, one containing a twenty-four piece assortment of “household drinking glasses” and the other an electric drip coffeepot and two pounds of coffee. A bag, when she opened it, contained four china mugs.

She opened the refrigerator: two bottles of champagne on their sides.

Had he been expecting somebody else? Could he have been expecting her? How many others were going to come here?
Am I like all of them?

She ripped open the assortment of glasses and rinsed out two that were the most suitable for champagne. The champagne, when she touched it, was still warm. She opened the freezer compartment, took out some ice cubes, put them in the glasses, and then opened one of the champagne bottles. The price tag from the State Liquor Store was still on it. He didn’t use the cheaper Fort Bragg Class VI to buy his booze. He went to the civilian store and paid $8.50 a bottle for Moët.

She unwound the wire, popped the cork, filled the glasses, and went to find him.

“Home, sweet home,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, and tapped her glass.

The telephone installer crawled to his feet. “That’ll do her,” he said. “The line in use lights up that button.”

“Thank you very much,” Colonel Lowell said.

“What do you think?” he asked, turning to her after the other man was gone.

“It’s ghastly,” she said.

“Yes, isn’t it?” Lowell said, with a wide smile. Then the smile tightened a little. “If you haven’t changed your mind, I suppose we had better draw the curtains.”

He crossed over to the sliding glass door in the living area and pulled the curtain shut over what was in fact a really splendid view of the shopping center parking lot.

Dorothy went into the bedroom and set his luggage and the other stuff that he had tossed on the mattress onto the floor. Then she ripped the sheets out of the plastic wrapping and made the bed.

He leaned on the doorjamb.

“This isn’t what you could call really terribly romantic, is it?”

She straightened the top sheet and stood up.

“Does that mean you’ve lost your appetite?”

“I thought perhaps you might have,” he said. “
I’ve
been looking down your dress.”

She flushed.

“I don’t think you’re going to be a casual roll in the hay for me,” he said.

She met his eyes.

“And that may not be good for either of us, is that what you’re saying?” Dorothy replied.

“I don’t have very much to lose,” he said. “You do.”

“Only my virtue and my good name.” She laughed.

Unsteadily, she walked over to him, sorry that the champagne in her glass was gone.

“Would you believe it if I told you you make my heart beat unsteadily?” he asked. He took her hand and placed it flat on his chest so she could feel his heart beating. Then she moved her hand away and rested her head where the hand had been. She felt his hand move to her back, felt him take in his breath. His fingers found the zipper on her dress. He pulled it down and then she felt him fumbling with her brassiere catch. When it came loose, he slipped the straps and the dress over her shoulders. She shrugged her shoulders to help everything fall off. Timidly, but certainly, her hand moved to him, and she felt his stiffness against the back of it. She then turned her hand around and cupped him.

“Oh, Craig,” she cried out softly. “Do please come inside me!”

He picked her up and carried her to the bed. As he stood over her and unbuttoned his shirt, she worked her half-slip and panties down off her hips, kicked them away, raised one leg, and looked at him.

He lay down beside her, bending to kiss her nipple. Shameless now, she reached down and grabbed him. He moved between her legs. She guided him into her.

Afterward—after their climax and a long, tender, quiet embrace—he sat up and looked down at her.

“I don’t know what you feel,” he said, not quite matter-of-factly, “but I feel extraordinary.”

“I do, too,” she said softly.

He looked at her but said nothing.

“I hate to run away from a moment like this,” he said, “but I have to play soldier this afternoon.”

“Really?” she said, and laughed. “I thought colonels always quit for the day at noon.”

Not this one,” he said. Lifting himself up, he went into the shower. She didn’t want to get up, so she just pulled the sheet over herself and smiled. After he finished his shower, Craig came out and took clean boxer shorts and a T-shirt from one of his suitcases. When he pulled them on, his back to her, she saw faint scars on his back. One of them looked like a flesh zipper. After that he tore open a brown-paper package on the dresser and took out ripstops. There were also a green beret and a pair of jungle boots in the package.

“I didn’t know you were a Green Beret,” she said.

He laughed. “Technically,” he said. “Legally. Once I served with foreign troops. That’s half the on-the-job equivalency. And then Hanrahan and MacMillan conspired against me several years ago and had me thrown out of an airplane. That was the other half of the on-the-job equivalency. I’m not a
real
snake-eater, but would you believe I’m going to slide down a rope from a helicopter this afternoon?”

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You’re not the type.”

“I know,” he said with a chuckle. He was apparently serious, however, for he put on the ripstops, and pulled the trouser tops around the new jungle boots. Then he put on the green beret and looked at himself in the mirror.

“John Wayne,” he said, “eat your heart out!”

She laughed. “What’s this all about?”

“I guess MacMillan doesn’t want me to look out of place,” he said.

“The infantry thing,” she said, meaning the Combat Infantry Badge he wore. It had two stars on it, meaning the third award. “Is that real?”

“Two of them are,” he said. “The third one’s kind of questionable.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“Oh, when some of Mac’s people were down in the jungle, I went after them, and I went down, too. It was two weeks before they finally got us out; and Mac, who then had First Special Forces Group, heard about it, and said that since I was senior guy there, I was in command, which meant I qualified for it again.”

“What was a colonel doing flying a mission like that in the first place?”

“The colonel had the mistaken notion he was a better flier through the soup than turned out to be the case. I flew into the trees.”

“What are you doing down here, anyway?”

“It’s
up
here from Rucker, where I’m stationed,” he said. “We conducted some troop tests.”

“You’re a little old to be sliding down a rope from a helicopter,” she said.

“Right now I feel like I’m twenty-one,” he said. He looked at her again. “Nineteen. Eighteen.”

She smiled, but said nothing.

He turned to the dresser, and when he turned around, he was snapping his expensive gold-cased Rolex chronometer around his wrist.

“Dorothy,” he said, not looking at her. “This place comes with two sets of keys. My sole virtue is that I never lose keys. The second set of keys is on that counter in the kitchen. Either way. Whatever you think is best for you.”

And then he walked out of the bedroom. The boots made creaking noises on the linoleum. She heard the door shut.

Dorothy got up and took a shower, and then cleaned up after him. He had thrown his towel into a corner of the bath, and his underwear and tropical worsteds were casually tossed onto the miniature plastic-covered armchair in the bedroom.

Dressed, she examined herself in the mirror.

She liked what she saw.

After she straightened the bed, she walked into the living room. The keys were where he said they would be. She looked down at them for a moment, then picked them up and put them in her purse. Then she went to the telephone and wrote down both numbers.