John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

Then in the morning, as I lay watching her get dressed and knowing that soon I had to stir myself too, she looked so frowning-thoughtful, I asked her if she was still working at that lousy-person syndrome of hers.

She put her arms into the sleeves of the white dress after she had stepped into it and pulled it up. “You didn’t get to me all the way, Travis, because you’re some kind of fantastic lover.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I mean, you know, none of that sort of tricky stuff.”

She came over and turned around to be zipped. I sat up and swung my legs out and, before zipping her, kissed the crease of her back about two inches south of her bra strap.

“See?” she said.

“See what?”

“Well, that was just nice, honey. So I’m in love with you, sort of. And I wasn’t in love with you that first time we made it, and so it wasn’t so much, and then when I liked you more, then it got to be something else. So I’ve got a new philosophy about the bed bit.”

“Pray tell,” I had said, zipping her up, giving her a pat on the rear.

She moved away and turned, hitching at the white dress and smoothing it across her hips with the backs of her hands. “It isn’t all set yet. It’s sort of in bits and pieces. I’m going to live as if freckled girls have more fun. And to hell with all the whining and bleeding and gnashing my fool teeth about R. H. Holton, boy attorney. And if I’ve discovered that I just happen to love to make love with men I could fall in love with... people have to put up with a lot worse problems. Darling! Are you going to get up and drive me home? It gets later and later and later.”

So I had taken her home. End of brief affair. You could staple all the wrong tags on it. One-night stand. Pickup. Handy little shack job for the travelin’ man. Hell, Charlie, you know how them nurses are.

So maybe the only adventures that don’t look trivial and tawdry are one’s own.

It had been my impression that while deep in thought I had been packing up to get out of there and go back to Lauderdale. But I discovered I hadn’t packed a thing. I was atop the bedspread, shoes off, practicing deep breathing. And the next I knew it was eight o’clock on that Saturday night, and I wanted two quick drinks and two pounds of rare sirloin.

It was not two pounds of steak, but it was rare enough, and I had it in the Luau Room of the Wahini Lodge at about nine, after a long shower, shave, two long-lasting Plymouths on ice.

The mood was the old yin-yang balance of conflicting emotions. There was the fatuous he-male satisfaction and self-approval after having roundly and soundly tumbled the hot-bodied she-thing, with her approvals registered by the reactive flutterings and choke-throated gasps. Satisfaction in the sense of emptied ease and relaxation, with texture memories of the responsive body imprinted for a time on the touching-parts of the hands and mouth. The other half was the drifting elusive postcoital sadness. Perhaps it comes from the constant buried need for a closeness that will eliminate that loneliness of the spirit we all know. And for just a few moments the need is almost eased, the deeply coupled bodies serving as a sort of symbol of that far greater need to stop being totally alone. But then it is over, the illusion gone, and once again there are two strangers in a rumpled bed who, despite any affectionate embrace, are as essentially unknown to each other as two passengers in the same bus seat who have happened to purchase tickets to the same destination. Maybe that is why there is always sadness mingled with the aftertastes of pleasure, because once again, as so many times before, you have proven that the fleeting closeness only underlines the essential apartness of people, makes it uncomfortably evident for a little while. We had fitted each other’s needs and could have no way of knowing how much of our willingness was honest and how much was the flood of excuses the loins project so brilliantly on the front screen of the mind.

The loins tell you it is always bigger than both of anybody.

Suddenly, I remembered the hundred dollars that Holton had made Penny stuff into her purse, and smiled. I would hear from her sooner than expected, because when she came across it and remembered, she would be in a horrid haste to get it back to me, as it would make a very sordid footnote to the smarmy night.

And so when I went back to my room at ten thirty something and saw the red light on the phone winking, I was certain it would be Penny Woertz. But it was a very agitated Biddy, expressing surprise that I was still in Fort Courtney and asking me if I had seen or heard from Maureen. She had somehow sneaked down the stairs and out through the back of the house while Tom was in the living room working at the desk, and while Bridget had been out picking up odds and ends at one of the Stop ‘n’ Shop outlets. She had been gone since a little before seven. “Tom has been out hunting her ever since. I phoned everyplace I could think of and then I left too, about quarter to eight. Right now I’m at a place out near the airport and I happened to think she might come there to the motel, because she knew you were staying there.”

“Police looking too?”

“Well, not specifically. But they know she is around and if they see her, they’ll take her in. Travis, she’s wearing a pink chambray jumper with big black pockets and she’s probably barefoot.”

“Driving a car?”

“No, thank God. Or maybe it would be better if she did. I don’t know. She probably did the same as last time, walked over to Route Thirty and hitched a ride. She doesn’t have any trouble getting a lift, as you can imagine. But I am so afraid that some... sick person might pick her up.”

“Can I help?”

“I can’t think of anything you could do. If she does show up there, you could call nine-three-four, two-six-six-one. That’s Tom’s answering service. We keep calling in every fifteen minutes or so to see if there’s word of her.”

“Are you with him?”

“No. We can cover more places this way. I usually run across him sooner or later.”

“Will you let me know when you find her?”

“If you wish. Yes. I’ll phone you.”

I hung up wondering why they didn’t think about the bottom of the lake. She’s had a try at about everything else except jumping out a high window. What was the word? Self-defenestration. Out the window I must go, I must go, I must go...

Then some fragment of old knowledge began to nudge at the back of my mind. After I had the eleven o’clock news on the television, I couldn’t pay attention because I was too busy roaming around the room trying to unearth what was trying to attract my attention.

Then a name surfaced, along with a man’s sallow face, bitter mouth, knowing eyes. Harry Simmons. A long talk, long ago, after a friend of a friend had died. He’d added a large chunk onto an existing insurance policy about five months before they found him afloat, facedown, in Biscayne Bay.

I sat on the bed and slowly reconstructed the pattern of part of his conversation. My thought about the lake and the high window had opened a small door to an old memory.

“With the jumpers and the drowners, McGee, you don’t pick up a pattern. That’s because a jumper damned near always makes it the first time, and a drowner is usually almost as successful, about the same rate as hangers. They get cut down maybe as rarely as the drowners get pulled out. So the patterns mostly come from the bleeders and the pill-takers and the shooters. Funny how many people survive a self-shooting. But if they don’t destroy a chunk of their brain, they get a chance at a second try. Like the bleeders cut themselves again, and the pill-takers keep trying. It’s always patterns. Never change. They pick the way that they want to go and keep after it until they make it. A pill-taker doesn’t turn into a jumper, and a drowner won’t shoot himself. Like they’ve got one picture of dying and that’s it and there’s no other way of going.”