John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

On the way back I stopped at a place as clean as any operating theater and had fresh juice, hot fresh doughnuts, surprisingly good coffee. Then, feeling a little bit ridiculous at being overly prim and fastidious, I walked a half block and bought a toothbrush before driving back to the motel. Yes, there are different degrees of personal privacy, and a toothbrush seems to be on some special level all its own, a notch above a hairbrush.

The room had been made up. Though checkout time was eleven, I was certain they would not clip me for the ensuing night, as they just weren’t that busy.

But I sat and yawned and sighed, feeling too pleasantly wearied to make any decisions. The episode, I told myself, had changed nothing. A dead doctor, no matter how he died, had nothing to do with a damaged young wife who seemed to want to die.

Nothing new had been added except...

Except something she had said in the middle of the night after that time that had been unmistakably the most complete one for her, not any kind of thrashing wildness, or spasmodic yelping, but just very lasting and very strong, fading very slowly for her, slowly and gently. It was one of those fragmented drowsy conversations as we lay in a night tangle of contentment, sheet and blanket shoved down to the foot of the bed, the flesh drying and cooling after the moist of effort. Her deep and slowing breath was humid against the base of my throat. Round knee against my belly, her slow, affectionate fingertips tracing over and over the line of my jaw from earlobe to chin. In down-glance I could see, against the light that lay in a crisp diagonal line across the foot of the bed, a round height of her hip, semiluminous, and a steep descent to the waist where rested, in dark contrast, my large hand with fingers splayed.

“Mmmmm,” she said, “so now I know.”

“Search for guilt?”

“Too soon for that, darling. Feel too delicious for that. Later maybe. But... damn it all anyway.”

“Problem?”

“I don’t know. Girl finds she can get turned way, way on, big as can be, with a nice guy that comes along. So she’s kind of a lousy person.”

“Glandular type, eh?”

“A lousy nympho, maybe.”

“Then, I’d have to be number eight hundred and fifty-six or something.”

She lay in thought for a moment and then giggled. “Counting Rick, you got one figure right. The six. The other four, I was married to one and engaged to two and head over heels with the other. Compared to some of the R.N.’s I work with and was in training with, I’m practically a nun. But my old grandma would faint dead away.”

“Nymphs are concerned only with self, honey. They lose track of who the guy is. Don’t know or care. A robot would suit them fine.”

“I knew you were you, all along. Even more so when it got to the best part. What does that make me?”

“Serendipitous.”

“Is that dirty?”

“No. That’s clean.”

She stretched, yawned, shifted closer. “I keep wanting to say I love you, darling. That’s for my conscience, I guess. Anyway, I like the hell out of you.”

“Same here. It’s the afterglow that proves it worked right.”

She pushed herself up and knee-walked down and sorted out sheet and blanket and pulled them up over us, straightening and tucking and neatening, and then curled again, shivering once, fists and forehead against my chest, knees in my belly, her cheek resting on my underarm, with my other arm around her, palm against her back, fingertips wedged under the relaxed weight of her rib cage against the undersheet.

I moved back and forth across the edge of sleep, thinking of that afterglow, trying to explain it to myself. With the mink, the musk ox, the chimpanzee, and the human, the proper friction at the proper places if continued for x minutes will cause the nerve ends to trigger the small glandular-muscular explosive mechanics of climax. And afterward there is no more urge to caress the causative flesh than there would be to stroke the shaker that contained the pepper that caused a satisfying series of sneezes.

So in the sensual-sexual-emotional areas each man and each woman has, maybe, a series of little flaws and foibles, hang-ups, neural and emotional memory pattern and superstition, and if there is no fit between their complex subjective patterns, then the only product you can expect is the little frictional explosion, but when there is that mysterious fit, then maybe there are bigger and better explosions down in the ancient black meat of the hidden brain, down in the membraned secret rooms of the heart, so that what happens within the rocking clamp of the loins at that same time is only a grace note, and then it is the afterglow of affection and contentment that celebrates the far more significant climax in brain and heart.

Her voice came from far off with an echo chamber quality, pulling me back across the edge of sleep. “... like they say female moths give off some kind of mating signal. Gees, I don’t bat my eyes and wiggle my behind and moisten my lips. But the bed patients make grabs at me. And the deliveryman from the dry cleaner. And Mr. Tom Pike, last spring.”

“Pike?”

“While his wife was in the hospital for a couple of days of observation after she emptied the pill bottle. It was in the office while she was waiting for Dr. Sherman to come back from an emergency. There was nothing crude about the pass, you understand. Tom Pike is a very tasty and very careful guy. And I felt so darn sorry for him, and I respect him so much for the way he’s handling the whole mess with Maureen... I almost got involved just out of pity.”

“When was all that?”

“March, I guess. Maybe April. One thing, I knew he’d be very careful and cautious and secretive and he wouldn’t go around bragging about his loving little nurse friend. I guess he’d have been a good thing, because then I wouldn’t have gotten messed up with Rick.”

“Think he found some other recruit?”

“I sort of hope so. Somebody sweet and nice and loving. But who would know? Somehow Mr. Pike gets to know everything about everybody, and nobody finds out much about him. It’s probably even more important he should have found a friend now that Mrs. Trescott is dead.”

“Why?”

“Now there’s just the three of them, and kid sister has a terrible yen for him, and nobody could really blame him for giving her some very long second looks either. And that would be as messy a triangle as you could find.”

She yawned and sighed. “ ’Night, sweetheart,” she said.

I slid almost back into sleep and stopped on the dreaming edge of it. Little by little I became ever more aware of every single place where flesh touched flesh. She had achieved such a honeyed and luxuriant completion that in some bewitched way it seemed to mark the spent flesh with a kind of sensuous continuity, as though it had not ended at all but was still continuing in some hidden manner. I was increasingly aware of the resting engines of our bodies, our slow thump of hearts, blood pulse, suck and sag of the bellows of four lungs, breathing commingled in the cozy bed, all the incredible complexity of cells and nourishments and energy transformation and secretions and heat balance going on and on. I wondered if she slept, but at my first tentative and stealthy caress she took a deep, quick breath that caught and she arched and stretched herself, made a purr of acceptance and luxurious anticipations.

So into the tempos and climates of it again, bodies familiarized now. Fragments. Like things glimpsed at night from a moving train. Dragging whisper-sound of palm on flesh. Deep, deep, slow-thick into the clench of honey, clovery oils, nipples pebbled, lift-clamp of thigh, arrhythmic flesh-clap fading into tempo reattained, held long and longer and longest, then beginning quivering hesitation at the end of deepening, richening beat, a shifting of her, mouth agape, furnace breath, tongue curl, grit of tooth against tooth, hands then cup and pull the rubberous buttocky pumping, her bellows breath whistling exploding the words against my mouth — “ Love you. Love you. Love you.” Then somehow opening more, taking deeper, pulling, demanding, a final grinding moaning agony of her, requiring me to drive, batter, cleave without mercy. Then slow toppling. The long slope. Hearts trying to leap from chests. Gagging gasps from the long run up the far side. Tumbling into the meadow. Tall grass. Clover and grass. Sag into sleep, still coupled, fall into sleep while still feeling in her depths the gentle residual claspings, small infrequent tightenings like that of a small sleeping hand when the brain dreams.