John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

For that brief time we were totally, compulsively involved with the flesh, pagans whose only clock was that of our revived desires, learning each other so completely that, in consort, we could direct ourselves, joined or unjoined, as though we were a single octopoidal creature with four eyes, twenty fingers, and three famished mouths. When we raised anchor and moved on, the tempo diminished, and the affair became a more sedate and comfortable and cozy arrangement, with ritual supplanting invention, with morning kisses that could be affection without any overtone of demand, with waking in the broad bunk to feel the heated length of her asleep, spoon style, against my back, and be content she was there, and be content to drowse off again.

The last day of August was our last day in the islands and we spent the night anchored wide of the Cat Cay channel, and would cross the Stream the next day. She was solemn and thoughtful at dinner. We made love most gently and tenderly, and afterward when I held her in my arms, both of us on the edge of sleep, she said, “You understood that it was our last time, dear?”

“A way to say good-bye. A good way.”

She sighed. “I had twenty-one years with Mick. I’ll never be... a whole person without him. But you did some mending, Travis. I know that... I can stumble through the rest of my life and accept what I’ve got left, live with less. Make do. I wish I could be in love with you. I would never let you go. I would be your old, old wife. I think I would dye your hair gray and have my face lifted and lie about my age. I’d never let you get away, you know.”

I began to tell her a lot of things, very significant and important and memorable things, and when I stopped, waiting for applause, I discovered she was asleep.

When the Likely Lady was back in a slip at Bahia Mar, she took one wistful walk around the deck and made a sour little smile and said, “Good-bye to this too. I’ll let the man who wants her pick her up here. Will you show him through her and explain everything?”

“Sure. Send him to me.”

When I had put her luggage in the trunk of the rental car, and kissed her good-bye, and she had gotten behind the wheel, she looked out at me, frowning, and said, “If you ever need anything , darling, anything I can give you, even if I have to steal to get it...”

“And if you start coming unglued, lady...”

“Let’s keep in touch,” she said, blinked her eyes very rapidly, grinned, gunned the engine, and scratched off with a reckless shriek of rubber, lady in total command of the car, hands high on the wheel, chin up, and I never saw her again.

Forget the lady Helena and get some sleep. Stop damning Meyer for bringing up that trip to Bimini and thus opening up that particular little corner of the attic in the back of my head.

She had married the sweet guy, had invited me, but I had been away when the invitation came. Then postcards from the Greek Islands, or Spain, or some such honeymoon place. Then nothing until a letter three years ago, a dozen pages at least, apologizing for using me once again as a foil, clarifying her own thoughts by writing to me.

She was divorcing Teddy. He was a sweet, nice, thoughtful man who, quite weak to begin with, had been literally overwhelmed and devoured by her strength. He had diminished, she said, almost to the point of invisibility. All you could see was his pleasant uncertain smile. She admitted that she kept prodding him, pushing at him, hoping for that ultimate masculine reaction that would suddenly fight back and take over the chore of running a marriage. Maybe, she wrote, living with a dutiful creature on an invisible leash was preferable to being alone but not for her. Not when she could see herself becoming more domineering, unpleasant, and more shrill — week by week, month by month. So she was cutting him loose while he could still feed and bathe himself. She was getting the divorce in Nevada. When she had married, she had closed the house on Casey Key, had considered selling it many times, but something had kept her from making a final decision. Now she was glad. She would go back there and see if she could recover what some people had once thought a pleasant disposition.

She said that her elder daughter, Maurie, had been married for six months to a very bright and personable young man in the brokerage business, and seemed deliciously happy. She said they were living in the city of Fort Courtney, Florida, about a hundred miles northeast of Casey Key, and it seemed a workable distance for a mother-in-law to be. She reported that Bridget, known as Biddy — and nineteen at the time she wrote to me three years ago — had transferred from Bryn Mawr to the University of Iowa so she could study with a painter she admired extravagantly, and had changed her major to Fine Arts.

Though it had dealt with personal, family matters, it had not been a particularly intimate letter. No one reading it could have ever guessed at the relationship we’d had on that lazy long cruise of the Likely Lady through the Bahamas.

She asked me to stop and see her the next time I was over in the Sarasota area. I never did.

I had thought of her a few times. Something would remind me of her, the look of a boat under sail, or the sound of hard rain, or a scent like that of the small pink flowers that grew out of the stony soil of the Exumas, and she would be in and out of my thoughts for a week or so. Now it had happened again, thanks to Meyer, and I would be remembering Helena Pearson for a few days or a few weeks. It had been one of those relationships you cannot really pin down. To the average outsider it would have been something to smirk about. The older woman, half a year widowed, who sends her daughters away so that she can go cruising with a man young enough to be the son of her dead husband, a new consort of considerable size, obviously fit and durable and competent and discreet, and obviously uninterested in any kind of permanent relationship.

Yet I was quite certain that it had not been a situation she had planned. It had arisen through two sets of rationalizations, hers and mine, and the truth of it was perhaps something quite different from what we suspected. For her perhaps it was the affirmation of being still alive after the intense emotional focus of her life was gone forever. Maybe it had been something the body had created in the mind, just for its own survival, because with her perhaps a sexual continence would have been a progressive thing, parching and drying her, month by month, until all need would have been prematurely ended. My own supercilious little rationalization had been, in the beginning of it, that it would have been both cruel and stuffy to have failed to respond when she began her tentative invitations, to have let her know through my lack of response that the age differential did indeed put me off, and that I felt both clumsy and self-conscious in the role of the available younger man in a kind of floating bedroom farce. The least I could do would be to respond with as much forced enthusiasm as I could manage. But a sweet and immediate reality of the flesh had erased the reasons and the rationalizations. She was all limber girl in the half-light, slenderly, elegantly voluptuous, so consistently determined to never take more pleasure than she was able to give that she made a few intervening women seem dreary indeed.

At last I was able to dim the vivid qualities of the memory and slide away into the earned sleep...

Sunday, October sixth, was still and gray and breathlessly muggy. Bobby Guthrie’s wife came for him at ten in the morning and they gave Joe Palacio a ride back into Miami. Monday they would get the Merrill-Stevens appraisals and estimates, based on detailed inspections. Meyer and I got the Flush out into the channel and headed north for Lauderdale at about eleven, with the Muñequita in tow and a pale sun beginning to burn through the overcast. The Busted Flush was still burdened with the gear and goop of Floatation Associates. Meyer assured me that as soon as the partnership had turned the ’Bama Gal into money, they would move their stuff over onto the work boat Bobby had located, which they could buy at the right price.