Gone to Soldiers (84 page)

She checked in with her duffle bag, in uniform. If the news got back she might be in trouble, but she did not expect it to. She kept her gloves on, nervous about the lack of wedding ring, and was shown up to a suite. She ran a hot deep bath, soaked in it, washed her hair, read the papers while eating a room service steak, then turned in early and slept.

She did not even hear Zach arrive. When she wakened he was kneeling on the edge of the bed naked and rosy from the shower, with the light on and a glass of champagne on the bedside table. “Wake up, drink up and let's get to it. Hello, how are you, take off those ridiculous pajamas. Does the government issue you those? I forbid them.” He opened the window to a mild night and threw them out.

“Hello,” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes. “I went to bed at nine. What time is it?”

“What do you care? Time for me. Really, my pussy, you have such nice big tits and such nice big muscles, if you only had even a little prick, I'd never look at another piece. I should have started fucking you years ago instead of wasting my time on your self-serving brother.”

“Do you have any news of Jeff?” She was part anxious for knowledge and part temporizing. He made her feel like prey. Why did he excite her? That there was no courtship, no flattery, no gallantry, why did that make her want? The tension began to gather in her muscles, in her vagina, a sense of congestion, of pressure, an engorging urge. He had lost weight since they had been together last, but he would always be a big beefy large-boned man. It was a tension of physical challenge, as if she were about to take part in a wrestling match.

“Coming back through London I picked up some gossip. He's near Toulouse with some maquis. He's very wicked because he's supposed to be working for SI, that is, strictly intelligence work, but he's got it all messed up. He's sending through intelligence and running around the mountains blowing up trains and lately, I hear, a munitions dump.”

“That sounds plenty dangerous to me.”

“Oh, it's fun and games, believe me. He's flourishing.”

“Where have you been? Can you tell me?”

“I always tell you all, don't I? Talk later, fuck now. I have been so tediously good and responsible and long-winded these four days I am fit to burst, I am ready to dissolve into hot fragments of flak.” He raised himself on his elbow, looked her over and then fell upon her.

Love was not what they made. Fucking, she thought, that spadelike ugly blunt word was better. They grabbed each other and grappled. He was rough with her and often he hurt her, yet once she was excited, she liked that too, for the pain increased her excitement. They bit and twisted and mauled each other. Shortly he thrust into her, hard, driving himself in and in and in, exploding. Then he made her come with his hand. Why should it be more intense than when she touched herself? But it was. She came in deep convulsions that left her weak.

They both fell asleep. In the morning she woke to his weight and he was fucking her again, this time from behind, manipulating her as he pounded in. When they showered together, she saw that she had left bruises and scratches on him too. They ordered up an enormous breakfast and pots of coffee.

“I've been bringing the word, in vain, I'm sure, to Washington. Even Churchill, who will support any peabrained drooling dinosaur bitch who calls herself the King of Transylvania, understands that Tito is fighting the Germans and our man Mihajlović mainly fighting Tito. I've been with both parties, jaunting about the mountains of that misbegotten country where everybody speaks his own language. My dear, I'm something of a linguist, but a country the size of Pennsylvania with five different languages? It reduced your poor battered lover to pointing and grimacing like the duchess who sat on an anthill.”

“Will you go back?”

“Not on your sweet ass. My usefulness there is exhausted. I'd get a bullet in the back of the neck. I'm off to muck about in France.”

“Will you see Jeff?”

“Not right away. I'll be posted farther north. I won't get the particulars till I'm in Londontown. Let me tell you, the days of crossing the old grey A being jolly are vanished, indeed. I remember the Pan Am Clippers, beds, spotless linen, fresh flowers, dinners cooked to order. These are grim days. You sit in those bloody Liberators on bucket seats and for days and days while your life glides in front of your eyes like a movie in slow motion and you reflect on all the things you might be doing instead that would be more fun, like taking over again every exam you ever cheated at from kindergarten on. And the plane stops at every place it can jolt down where there's nothing but barbed wire and boobs getting drunk and trying to take money off each other at cards or craps. Dear heart, if there's anything amusing about little bone cubes or pieces of paper with numbers on them that you can't spend, I never figured it out.”

“I've never been big on games either.”

“Not even in high school? Didn't you ever go mad for your gym teacher or get lewd hanging out in the locker room?”

“I hated it. I was so much bigger than the other girls, I hated to take off my clothes in front of them. I was ashamed.”

“Oh, pussy, that was silly. You're ravishing, and I'm sure some crooked soul there would have noticed ta beauté and done it justice. But the less for them, the more for me. Let's go stroll along Fifth and ogle the competition and work off breakfast, eh?”

As they walked, Zach would nudge her and direct her gaze to a sailor idling along with a wistful air. “Do you like him? Nice ass. But what a doggy air. No sauce.”

Bernice enjoyed the license to stare, but she was unmoved by the men he was eyeing. She strolled at his side, looking in shop windows and enjoying their reflection side by side. Walking with him, she did not have to adjust her gait. Her uniform was a perfect weight for the day, overcast, fifties, a hint of fog in the air and the buds prizing open on the little caged trees on the side streets. She felt reeking with sex, on vacation, at the peak of her powers. This is it, she thought, I must remember this as long as I live, striding along Fifth Avenue with Zach, both of us dashing with our bodies like good horses well ridden, and I arrived in a Mustang fighter and I live in the sky as much as anyone can.

It was as if she stood on a mountain looking down on Bentham Center and on the house where she had spent so many lonely and boring years and could see herself typing away on professors' articles and students' papers, carting the baskets of laundry out to the yard to hang, making her father's meals and carrying her fantasies with her like a carpetbag of knitting, to be picked up moment to moment.

She stopped to glance into a bookstore window when, faintly aware that a woman was standing there also reading the titles, she turned to face her and found herself staring, her heart clutching and skipping in the astonishment of beauty that did move her and of a sort she had never considered.

The woman was even taller than she was, touching six feet in high-heeled boots, but leaner built, in an Army nurse's uniform, with skin of a deep ruddy satin black. Her features were a series of delicate but large ovals: long eyes with the white glittering almost blue around the mahogany iris, long mouth. Her hair was cropped to her skull and her neck was lean and elegant, like the hands. The face caught Bernice somewhere deep, the flare of the nostrils proud and haughty, the high brow, the mouth wide and shapely as a trumpet.

She was staring, when the woman gave her a quick hard look, not at all apologetic or demure. Normally, Bernice would have been deeply embarrassed and turned away, but she was wide open this morning to her feelings, to the world. Instead of turning away, she smiled at the woman. The woman looked at her again, looked her over openly and tipped her a wink. Then she swirled haughtily and strode off.

Zach did not notice and Bernice, still jolted, said nothing. “I wouldn't half mind going back to Greece,” Zach was saying. “I was shunting about the Aegean in early forty-one for the limeys on caiques in the Dodekanisa. I get positively drunk on Mediterranean light. Sexually for a woman it must be the pits, but for a man it's sumptuous.”

Perhaps it was the both of them being in uniform: that for a woman felt like a bit of disguise, cross dressing. A uniform held you in. It was a kind of bondage but also a kind of power. The uniform was a license to do things that people out of uniform were not permitted. It said you were part of a large powerful armed group. It spoke of obedience to that group and immunity from punishment for doing what you were told. A true woman would not be in uniform but in frills and ruffles and flowery chiffon. Bernice was at once shaken and passionately intrigued. She had a set of liberal sentences in her head about Negroes, but never had she met one in any real way, face-to-face and honestly. The WASPs were all white, something she had thus far so taken for granted as not to have noticed.

“Sometimes, dear heart, I indulge in fantasies of retiring there for a life of healthy vice on an island where like the local British milord I would be a petty king, disregarded in important decisions but pandered to nicely. A lifetime supply of eager twelve-year-olds. The trouble is, I get bored on that diet. There's no edge. Not that I crave companions who may slit my throat, but if I was turned on by soft weakness, I'd be all for the ladies, right?”

She scarcely listened, her mind still on the woman and her wink. She had shared for a moment something new, something almost unimaginable. “Women have a great deal of unused physical strength and stamina.”

“Do you feel unused, dear heart? Wait till we get back to the hotel. I have a horniness on me like the great unicorn himself. I never fuck in Washington.”

“Why? Aren't there the same opportunities as elsewhere?” Opportunities, she thought. I have sex only when I am with him, common as eclipses of the moon.

“But I always have the feeling the FBI is taking notes. They keep sexual dossiers on everybody. No thanks. It isn't that you can't get away with the same things, it's that you'll get pegged and everybody knows. I prefer to be officially hetero in Washington, lest I bung up my chances.”

This time he took her in the ass, but as he assaulted her clitoris at the same time, she liked it. It was a new way to be sore, anyhow. Then they ordered up a huge lunch. “I am sadly undernourished,” he said. “Accompanying partisans is a healthy life if you don't get shot. Then it becomes rapidly unhealthy. When my divorce comes through, I am contemplating marrying a British female—I'm reliably informed that's the sex you have to marry, though I've never been able to figure out just why—eldest daughter of a viscount with no male heirs. White elephant of a country place dating back to the dark ages of nasty baronial architecture and no doubt costing as much to run as the duchy of Luxembourg, but also some nice factories in Birmingham which are doing quite well in the war. A widow. Husband bought it on the
Prince of Wales
off Singapore.”

She realized he was watching her while eating heartily. Why? Then she realized he was checking her reaction to his announcement that he was contemplating marriage to another woman. Did he imagine she would mind? “Why are you in such a hurry to get married? I'd hate marriage, myself. I wouldn't do it for anything.”

“It rolls the family off my back. It provides that veneer of respectability society demands. Now a British girl, she expects her husband to be buggering the butler and the footman. So much better training than my first wife. She didn't like sex all that much, but she was deeply offended by my little habits.” He stood, abruptly. “So, you don't care if I marry the lady? Actually her name is Sylvia. She looks like a horse and she even whinnies, but she's not stupid. She likes plants. I think she fucks trees, actually, and her true emotional relationship is with the gardening staff. The war did not so much deprive her of her husband as of her head gardener. You won't get jealous?”

Bernice only smiled. She was mildly offended that he felt the need to check her out. “Zach, what earthly difference could it make to me whether you're married to your present wife or another one?”

“Quite so. Pass the wine. I have to take off at midnight tonight, but I have a ticket for you to California. The old boys network is intact, and I pulled a few strings. Unless they want you in Newark.” He raised his glass to her. “To the best lay in the U.S. of A. I brought you a present.” He pointed with his glass toward a chair in the corner.

She got up and wandered over to investigate. She found on the chair a coarsely woven woolen bag. In it was a black leather sheaf. From inside that, she drew out a steel dagger, about eight inches long and finely worked with intaglio decoration around the hilt. The hilt itself was fashioned of some hard wood bound over with leather and set with two stones on each side. “It's gorgeous. It looks old.”

“I think it's Turkish, eighteenth century. Those are opals. Not first quality, but real. It's quite lethal, to defend your honor with, dear heart. I thought you'd enjoy it. One of Tito's chappies had it. I traded a BAR.”

“You're right, I like it immensely.” It felt ancient, decadent, powerful in her hand. It felt like eight inches of commandable death. She did like it. It seemed such an unlikely thing to have. My lover gave me a dagger. Very cautiously she fingered the edge and drew blood. She licked the blood from her finger and slid the knife into its sheath.

“If you ever have to use it, remember not to strike down but up. It's harder to defend against and it hits vital organs more easily,” he said in a conversational tone, demonstrating with a butter knife against her belly. “Tonight I have procured us tickets to
La Traviata
with Licia Albanese. I adore opera. It's in such immensely bad taste and yet it's so thrilling—like life, pussy. Now let's go cruise the Village and sip some espresso and see if there's any decent cannoli left.”