John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

So when she provided the opportunity, I made the expected pass. Her mouth was eager. When she murmured, “We shouldn’t,” it meant, “We shall.” Her trembling was not faked. She was overly nervous about it, for reasons I could not know until later.

The first time was just at dusk in her big wide double bunk in the master stateroom. Her body was lovely in the fading light, her eyes huge, her flesh still hot with the sun-heat of the long beach day, her shoulder tasting of the salt of the sea and the salt of perspiration. Because she was tense and anxious, I took a long gentling time with her, and then when finally, in full darkness, she was readied, I took her, in that ever-new, ever-the-same, long, sliding, startling moment of penetration and joining, which changes, at once and forever, the relationship of two people. Just as it was happening she pushed with all her might at my chest and tried to writhe away from me, calling out, “No! Oh, please! No!” in a harsh, ugly, gasping voice. But she had been a moment late and it was done. She wrenched her head to the side and lay under me, slack and lifeless.

I could guess what had happened to her. She had arrived at her decision to bring this all about through some purely intellectual exercise, some kind of rationalization that had seemed to her to be perfectly sane and sound. But a coupling cannot be carried out in some kind of abstract form. I could guess from knowing her that she had never been unfaithful to Mick Pearson. All pretty little rationalizations and games of conjecture can be wiped out in an instant by the total and immediate and irrevocable fleshy reality. The ultimate intimacy exists on a different plane than do little testings and tryings. When she made a small whimpering sigh, I began to move apart from her, but she quickly caught at me and kept me with her.

Five years ago, but I had the memories in full textural detail of how often and how desperately Helena struggled to achieve climax. She wore herself into exhaustion. It was ritualistic and ridiculous. It was like some kind of idiotic health club: Orgasm is good for you. It was like some dogged kind of therapy. It was completely obvious that she was a healthy, sexually accomplished, passionate woman. But she was so concentrated on what she thought was some sort of severe necessity that she choked up. She would manage to get herself right out to the last grinding panting edge of it and get hung up there and then slowly, slowly fade back and away. And apologize, hopelessly, and plead with me to please be patient with her.

Four or five days later, wooden with fatigue, she confessed what had led her into this grotesque dilemma. Her voice was drab, her sentences short and without color. A man wanted to marry her. A very dear man, she said. The sex part of her marriage to Mick had been very very wonderful, always. During the months since his death, she had felt as if that part of her had died along with him. She did not want to cheat the man who wanted to marry her. She liked him very much. She liked me equally well. So it had seemed reasonable to assume that if she found she could enjoy sex with me, then she could enjoy it with him. Sorry she had used me in such a cynical way. But she had to make up her mind whether or not to marry him. That was one of the factors. Sorry it had turned into such a dismal trying thing. Sorry to be such a dull mess. Sorry. Sorry.

It is no good telling somebody they’re trying too hard. It is very much like ordering a child to go stand in a corner for a half hour and never once think about elephants.

So when she said there was no point in going on with such a stupid performance, I agreed. I let one day, one night, and one day pass. She was embarrassed and depressed. That night I began howling and roaring and thrashing at about one in the morning. She came hurrying in and I made it quite an effort for her to shake me awake. I had made certain that it had been such a physical day that she would be weary.

Woke up. Sagged back, deliberately trembling. Said it was an old nightmare that happened once or twice a year, based upon an exceptionally ugly event I could not ever tell anyone, not ever.

Up until then I had been all too competent. Big, knuckly, pale-eyed, trustworthy McGee, who had taken care of things, first for Mick and then for her. Could handle boats, navigation, emergencies. So I had presented her with a flaw. And a built-in way to help. She told me I had to tell someone and then it would stop haunting me. In a tragic tone I said I couldn’t. She came into my narrower bunk, all sympathy and gentle comfort, motherly arms to cradle the trembling sufferer. “There is nothing you can’t tell me. Please let me help. You’ve been so good to me, so understanding and patient. Please let me help you.”

Five years ago, and back then the scar tissue was still thin and tender over the memories of the lady named Lois. There was enough ugliness in what had happened to her to be suitably persuasive. The world had dimmed a little when she was gone, as if there were a rheostat on the sun and somebody had turned it down, just one notch.

I pretended reluctance and then, with a cynical emotionalism, told her about Lois. It was a cheap way to use an old and lasting grief. I was not very pleased with myself for selecting Lois. It seemed a kind of betrayal. And with one of those ironic and unexpected quirks of the emotions, I suddenly realized that I did not have to pretend to be moved by the telling of it. My voice husked and my eyes burned, and though I tried to control myself, my voice broke. I never had told anyone about it. But where does contrivance end and reality begin? I knew she was greatly moved by the story. And out of her full heart and her concern, and her woman’s need to hold and to mend, she fumbled with her short robe and laid it open and with gentle kisses and little tugs, with caresses and murmurings, brought us sweetly together and began a slow, long, deep surging, earth-warm and simple, then murmured, “Just for you, darling. Don’t think about me. Don’t think about anything. Just let me make it good for you.”

And it happened, because she was taking a warm, dreamy, pleasurable satisfaction in soothing my nightmared nerves, salving the wound of loss, focusing her woman-self, her softnesses and pungencies and opened-taking on me, believing that she had been too wearied by the energies of the day to even think of her own gratification but unaware of the extent to which she had been sexually stimulated by all the times when she had tried so doggedly and failed. So in her deep sleepy hypnotic giving it built without her being especially aware of herself, built until suddenly she groaned, tautened, became swollen, and then came across the edge and into the great blind and lasting part of it, building and bursting, building and bursting, peak and then diminuendo until it had all been spent and she lay slack as butter, breath whistling, heart cantering, secretions a bitter fragrance in the new stillness of the bed.

I remember how she became, for the whole ten days we remained at anchor in the cove at Shroud Cay, like a kid beginning vacation. A drifting guilt, a sadness about Mick — these made her pleasure the sweeter. There was no cloying kittenishness about her, as that was a style that would not have suited her — or me. She was proud of herself and as bold, jaunty, direct, and demanding as a bawdy young boy, chuckling her pleasures, full of a sweet wildness in the afternoon bunk with the heavy rain roaring on the decks over us, so totally unselfconscious about trying this and that and the other, first this way and that way and the other way, so frankly and uncomplicatedly greedy for joy that in arrangements that could easily have made another woman look vulgarly grotesque she never lost her flavor of grace and elegance.