Where Is Janice Gantry? (5 page)

“A for Amour. B for Bed. How is the bed part?”

“Always fundamental, aren’t you, Brice? There’s been none. I don’t know how it will be. This is very conventional guy, and he is protecting me from his base desires so I can be a girl-type bride. I think I know what I’m getting into, Sam. The male-female thing isn’t something I’d have to look up in the
World Book Encyclopedia
, exactly. He’ll always miss his first wife a little, and I won’t resent that. I get along fine with those two college kids of his. Should I do it, Sam? Should I try to make it work? I want babies, as fast as I can have them.”

“And you’re asking me?”

“Because you know me. And because I trust you.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m being coarse or trivial when I tell you how I think, Sis.”

“You have your own kind of sense. You can say anything to me, Sam. You know that.” She giggled. “Come to think of it, I guess you’ve said everything to me there is to say.”

“Hush a minute. You are a very lusty, vital, hot-blooded, demanding wench.”

“Oh, thank you, sir!”

“You are going to be, to put it mildly, a sexual responsibility to this guy if you marry him.”

“So?”

“So, as of now, you don’t love him. But if he can … discharge the responsibilities of his office and set you up in the motherhood department, and if you like him already, you are going to end up loving him and it is going to be fine.”

“If, if. You keep saying
if.
”

“But if the bed part is bad, the whole thing is going to be a trap you’ll be too stubborn to try to get out of, and it will be a hell on earth, because the physical part of it is going to be a lot more essential a part of marriage to you than it might be to a lot of other women.”

“I can see it coming, you scoundrel. I should seduce the gentleman.”

“It makes sense, Sis.”

“My little schemes have failed thus far. Got any ideas?”

“Have you told him yes yet?”

“No.”

“Then do so, and drive to some motel outside the county and celebrate the coming marriage, and if it doesn’t work out, change your mind.”

“And hurt him?”

“If it doesn’t work out, you won’t be squeamish about hurting him.”

She beamed and said, “Maybe you are a wise man.”

“I can only be wise about other people. Take care, Sis.”

I reached the door and put my hand on the latch and then turned and frowned at her and said, “There’s one other thing that should be done.”

“Yes?”

“But it might not be too smart. Skip it.”

She came quickly to me and hooked two fingers in my shirt pocket and gave an irritable tug and said, “What, Sam? What other thing?”

“Well, it sort of relates to the fact that knowledge is power.”

She stamped her foot. “Stop being so damn shifty!”

“I just had the idea that before you get this motel deal all set up, you could send Cal to me for detailed information on the best way to attack this special problem he’ll be facing … uh … what to do and what not to do …”

She tried a hard right and I caught that wrist, and I just barely caught the left wrist in time to jump out of the way of some very sincere kicks. Her face was bright red and she was grunting with effort and trying to keep from laughing at the same time.

“Oh, you dirty stinking thing!” she groaned.

When I felt the tension go out of her muscles I cautiously released her. We were standing close, and smiling at each other.

“You
are
a monster,” she said gently.

“I bet you can lick that lawyer man in a fair fight, lady.”

Her breasts lifted and fell with a mighty sigh as she looked up at me, and I saw the way her eyes and her mouth changed.

“Sam, my darling, you’ll always be a part of my life,” she whispered.

“It was a good part, wasn’t it?”

She dropped her eyes and said, “This is … shameless and disloyal and … and sick, I guess. But could we … what was that word you used?… celebrate once more what it all used to be? Sam?”

Right at the edge of an eager agreement, no matter how unwise, I remembered Charlie. “Could you … drive out about nine o’clock, or could I pick you up?”

She took another deep shuddering breath and then squared her shoulders and said, “No, dear. That would be too cold-blooded, and it would give me too much time to think and … too much guilt afterward. If it could have happened right now … if you could have broken speed laws taking me down to the cottage … The hell with it, Sam. At very best it was a very bad idea.”

“I hope you’ll be happy, Sis.”

“I want enough of them so I can name one of them Sam without anybody getting any cute ideas about it.”

“If they’re all girls?”

“Sam is still a good name.”

As I walked by the front of the building toward my car I looked in and saw her covering her typewriter, her face thoughtful. She looked up and smiled and gave me a final bawdy wink.

After I had crawled into the bread-baking heat of the wagon I remembered too late, the tailored red leather couch in Tom Earle’s small private office. She was right—I was a monster, a hopeless lecher. It made me feel guilty to realize it had even entered my mind. I knew Sis well enough to know she would have taken the offer of the random bounce on her employer’s red couch in one of two ways. She would have become savagely angry or semi-hysterical with laughter. With all her potential of eagerness, she yet required that dignity which is a product of total privacy and ample time.

As I drove over toward town to check a claim that could be looked at only after working hours, I improved my morale by telling myself no hopeless lecher could long endure without a girl. And I was enduring quite well, and was convinced that the months of girlishness were not corroding my masculinity in any way. And how many months was it? Five and
a bit, since that turbulent weekend in March with that miraculous tourist lady down in Fort Myers. A policy holder with one of my client companies had stove in the front of her husband’s blue Buick and, for business reasons, he had to fly back to Philadelphia, leaving her to wait for the repairs and then drive the car north. I came onto the scene after the husband had departed, and she had described him for me, saying, “This is the first time in our entire married life that I have had one minute of freedom from that tubby, arrogant, possessive, jealous little man, and I certainly do not intend to spend the rest of my life daydreaming wistfully what I might have done the only damned time I was ever given a chance, Mr. Brice. So might we carry these drinks into the bedroom?”

She had been a tall carroty redhead, so uncompromisingly scrawny that I would have never considered making a pass at her. But her approach had been so shockingly abrupt, I couldn’t think of any simple way to evade it, and there didn’t seem to be time for any complicated way. So I found myself, drink in hand, trailing her stupidly into the bedroom of the motel suite. I soon found that the look of scrawniness disappeared completely when the clothing was gone. I was the instrument by which she was determined to avenge herself on life for dealing her sixteen years of very dreary marriage, and she was almost frighteningly determined not to waste a single moment. I went to look at the Buick on Friday afternoon and finally got to look at it on Monday morning, and I had to work fifteen straight twelve-hour days to catch up on my work after that redheaded weekend.

Aside from such unexpected, unsought interludes, I was learning that a man can live without a woman. Sometimes the house is too empty. Sometimes the restlessness is like sickness. But I guess I wasn’t learning to live without any woman. I was still learning to live without Judy.

I met Judy Caldwell during the tail end of the season of
my last year of college ball. I was two months away from twenty-two, and she was a nineteen-year-old import from a girls’ college in the east, flown in for the football weekend by a fraternity brother who was so serious about her and had talked so much about her that we were prepared for a letdown. But when Judy entered a room and when she smiled and looked around, before saying a word, she turned all other females in the room to wax and ashes. With that careful, casual ruff of blonde amorous hair, the mobile mouth, those bottomless violet eyes, and her trim, taut look of tension under control, I thought her the most alive thing I had ever seen in my life. Before I ever heard her voice, I wanted to own her forever.

She was, in the most comprehensive meaning of the phrase, a status symbol. In any given year there are not many nineteen-year-old girls of that wondrous breed. In a generation there are pitifully few—in any age bracket.

If you acquire one of them, you can walk them into any public place in the civilized world and be marked at once as a man of rare luck, and special talent.

Some of them move inevitably into the entertainment world. Liz Taylor and Julie Newmar are in that special pattern.

They are beautiful and animated and they live deeply, wildly, constantly on some far out edge of emotional tension. They are incomparably feminine. They need and seek all the symbols of male strength, despising weak men. When they have decided exactly what they want, they go after it with a ruthlessness that would confound any pirate. No one can predict their next mood, especially themselves.

They are tidy as panthers, and as blandly vain. Physically, they are like a blow at the heart. The skin texture is so flawless as to be unreal. Their bodies, in repose, or in movement, have an intricacy of curvings, lines, textures and hollows that make other women look curiously unfinished. They eat like
wolves, laugh with the throat open wide, and wear the face of a child when they sleep. They sense that they are placed here for the purpose of living—and there will never be enough time for all of it.

In any ten-minute span they can take you through fifty emotions, which will include a great many you never heard of and can never describe.

In the bleakness of the jealousy of the men who cannot have them and the women who cannot match them, petty words are spoken: shallow, silly, arrogant, spoiled, wild, untrustworthy …

But to the few men in each generation who can possess one of these, to the extent that any of them can be truly possessed, they are the incomparable reward. They love with a savage, surpassing joy. They have passion without limit. They are so far beyond any restraint that it becomes a special innocence, touching and beyond price.

Judy was one of that unique sisterhood and she was, of course, a status symbol. And she could not avoid or prevent those things that weigh so heavily on the other end of the scale.

You find yourself so unashamedly adored that the bright hot light of that adoration constantly illuminates your own unworthiness.

And the status symbol works both ways. You must be her symbol also. Defeat is unforgivable, because she equates defeat with weakness. She who is destined to belong to kings can never scrub cottages. She goes with success, and she leaves with it also.

And once you have been showered by that special bounty, you can never fit yourself comfortably back into that world from which all magic has fled. She is in your nerves and your blood and your flesh forever.

All you can do is try to avoid comparison, because it can be a knife in your heart. I kept her out of my mind when I
was with Sis. But there was one time when she slipped past my defenses, and suddenly I was in the midst of a coarse, meaningless, doughy frolic with some strange dull girl, and it all stopped within a single heavy beat of my heart. I had to plead a sudden illness—wondering aloud about food poisoning, knowing I could not speak of the poisoned heart. I went alone into the night and stood on my dock and looked at the stars and told all the smiling ghosts of Judy that it wasn’t fair to take everything away. She must have relented, because it was once more the way it should be with Sis when we were together again.

I checked the freshly battered junker in town, and so it was a little after seven on that August evening when I got back to the cottage. Charlie had just finished off a fried slab of the morning snook. He said he had slept until six, when the alarm had awakened him. He did not think the phone had rung again, or that anybody had knocked at my door. He said he was ready to go as soon as it was dark enough.

“You certainly seem calm, Charlie.”

“When you know what you’re going to do, there’s no point in worrying any more. You can start worrying again if it doesn’t work.”

“About the gun, I hope you’re not going to ask me if you can please borrow the gun.”

“I won’t need a gun. Sam, are you trying to find out what I’m going to do?”

“I don’t think I want to know what you’re going to do. I have the feeling that already I know more than I want to know. You were picked up when you were working on the safe out at the Weber house on the Key. You got pretty bitter about Charity Weber. I can think of all kinds of things that could have been going on, and I don’t want any more clues.”

He opened a fresh pack of cigarettes I had brought him
and said, “I guess you don’t want to get mixed up in anything, Sam.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “You got it the way you want it, I guess. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s like you got a hole and you pulled it in after you. That’s another reason I came here. I knew you’d live quiet and keep your head down. I guessed you wouldn’t turn me in, and I guessed you wouldn’t try to help me, either. I don’t want any help. I can tell right now how anxious you are to be rid of me, so you can forget you had anything to do with it.”

“It sounds as if you—”

“I’m not criticizing you, Sam. It’s your life and your choice, and maybe a hell of a lot of people would be better off if they just stepped aside the way you have. You’ve got the books and the records and that little boat tied up to your dock down there, and a job that doesn’t get you too involved. I guess I envy you.”

He stepped over to the sink and began to scrub the frying pan.

“I’ll do that later on, Charlie.”

“No trouble. That’s a damn fine fish.”

“I can let you have twenty bucks to take along with you if it would help out.”