John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

She stopped herself and said, with a wan smile, “Sorry. I got off the track. I wanted to say thank you and I want to apologize for being stupid about something, Travis. I never asked, before I left, what sort of... arrangement you had with Mick. I know he had the habit of paying well for special favors. Had he paid you?”

“No.”

“Was an amount agreed upon?”

“For what I had thought I was going to do. Yes.”

“Then did you take it out of the cash before you gave me the rest of it, the cash that had been in the safe?”

“No. I took out five hundred for a special expense and two hundred and fifty for a rental of a boat and some incidental expenses.”

“What was the agreed amount?”

“Five thousand.”

“But you did much much more than what he... asked you to do. I am going to give you twenty thousand, and tell you that it isn’t as much as it should be.”

“No. I did what I did because I wanted to do it. I won’t even take the five.”

She studied me in silence and finally said, “We are not going to have one of those silly squabbles, like over a restaurant check. You will take the five because it is a matter of personal honor to me to take on any obligation Mick made to anyone. I do not think that your appreciation of yourself as terribly sentimental and generous about widows and orphans should take priority over my sense of obligation.”

“When you put it that way—”

“You will take the five thousand.”

“And close the account without any... squabbling.”

She smiled. “And I planned it so carefully.”

“Planned what?”

“You would take the twenty thousand and then I would feel perfectly free to ask you a favor. You see, I have to go to that bank in Nassau. On the transfer of those special accounts there has to be an actual appearance in person, with special identification, as prearranged by the owner of the account. I was going to fly over and see them and fly back, and find someone to help me take the Likely Lady around to Naples, Florida. A man wants her, and the price is right, and he would pick her up here, but... I can’t bear to part with her without... some kind of a sentimental journey. So I thought after you took the money, I could ask you, as a favor, to crew for me while we take her over to the Bahamas. Mick and I planned every inch of her. We watched her take shape. She... seems to know. And she wouldn’t understand if I just turned my back on her. Do you find that grotesque?”

“Not at all.”

“Would—?”

“Of course.”

So we provisioned the Likely Lady and took off in the heat of early July. I had the stateroom Maureen and Bridget had used. We fell into an equitable division of the chores without having to make lists. I made the navigation checks, kept the charts and the log, took responsibility for fuel, engines, radio and electronic gear, minor repairs and maintenance, topside cleaning, booze, anchoring. She took care of the proper set of the sails, meals, laundry, belowdecks housekeeping, ice, water supply, and we shared the helmsman chore equally.

There was enough room aboard to make personal privacy easy to sustain. We decided that because we were on no schedule and had no deadlines, the most agreeable procedure was to move during the daylight hours and lie at anchor at night. If it was going to take too long to find the next decent anchorage, we would settle for an early stop and then take off at first light.

There were several kinds of silence between us. Sometimes it was the comfortable silence of starlight, a night breeze, swinging slowly at anchor, a mutual tasting of a summer night. Sometimes it was that kind of an awkward silence when I knew she was quite bitterly alone, and saying good-bye to the boat and to the husband and to the plans and promises that would not be filled.

We were a man and a woman alone among the sea and the islands, interdependent, sharing the homely chores of cruising and living, and on that basis there had to be a physical awareness of each other, of maleness and femaleness. But there was a gratuitous triteness about the unconventional association that easily stifled any intensification of awareness.

It was five years back, and she was that inevitable cliché, an older woman, a widow, who had invited the husky younger male to voyage alone with her. I knew she had married young, but I did not know how young. I could guess that she was eleven years older than I, give or take two years. At the start her body was pale, too gaunted, and softened by the lethargy of months of mourning. But as the days passed, the sun darkened her, the exertion firmed the slackened muscles, and as she ate with increasing hunger, she began to gain weight. And, as a result of her increasing feeling of physical well-being, I began to hear her humming to herself as she did her chores.

I suspect that it was precisely because any outsider, given the situation and the two actors on the stage, would have assumed that McGee was dutifully and diligently servicing the widow’s physical hungers during the anchored nights that any such relationship became impossible. Not once, by word, gesture, or expression, did she even indicate that she had expected to have to fend me off. She moved youthfully, kept herself tidy and attractive, spent just enough time on her hair so that I knew she was perfectly aware of being a handsome woman and did certainly not require any hard breathing on my part to confirm her opinion. Nor did she play any of those half-innocent, half-contrived games of flirtation that invite misinterpretation.

We had a lot of silences, but we did a lot of talking too. General talk, spiced with old incident, about the shape of the world, the shape of the human heart, good places we had been, good and bad things we had done or had not quite done. We went up around Grand Bahama, down the eastern shore of Abaco, over to the Berry Islands, down to Andros, and at last, after fourteen days, over to New Providence, where we tied up at the Nassau Harbour Club.

She went alone to the bank and when she came back, she was very subdued and thoughtful. When I asked her if anything had gone wrong, she said that it had been quite a good deal more money than she had expected. She said that changed a few things and she would have to think about the future in a different way. We went out to dinner and when I got up the next morning, she was already up, drinking coffee and looking at the Yachtsman’s Guide to the Bahamas .

She closed the book. “I suppose we should think about heading back,” she said. “I hate to.”

“Do you have a date to keep?”

“Not really. Somebody I have to see, eventually. A decision to make.”

“I’m in no hurry. Let’s look at some more places. Exumas. Ragged Islands too, maybe.” I explained to her how I take my retirement in small installments, whenever I can afford it, and if it was late August or early September when we got back, I wouldn’t mind at all. She was overjoyed.

So we sailed to Spanish Wells, then down the western shore of Eleuthera, and then began to work our way very slowly down the lovely empty chain of the Exumas, staying over wherever we wanted to explore the beaches and the technicolor reefs. We did a lot of swimming and walking. I was suddenly aware that her mood was changing. She seemed remote for a few days, lost in thought, almost morose.

The day she suddenly cheered up I realized that she had begun to deliberately heighten my awareness of her. I had the feeling that it was a very conscious decision, something that she had made up her mind to do during those days when she seemed lost in her own thoughts and memories. As she was a tasteful, mature, elegant, and sensitive woman, she was not obvious about it. She merely seemed to focus her physical self at me, enhancing my awareness through her increased awareness of me. Inevitably it would be the male who would make the overt pass. It baffled me. I could not believe she was childish enough or shallow enough to set about enticing a younger man merely to prove that she could. There was more substance to her than that. She had begun something that would have to be finished in bed, because I did not think she would begin it without having recognized its inevitable destination. It was all so unlikely and so deliberate that I had to assume she had some compulsion to prove something or to disprove something. Or maybe it was merely a hunger that came from deprivation. So I stopped worrying myself with wondering about her. She was a desirable and exciting woman.