Ed McBain - Goldilocks

He could not understand how he had once again become involved with another woman. Catherine — he named her at last, and seemed relieved to have her name in the open, and in fact expanded upon it at once. Catherine Brenet, the wife of a Calusa surgeon, Dr. Eugene Brenet, a very good man, he said, evaluating Brenet on the basis of his medical skill and not his aptitude for cuckoldry. He’d met her at one of the charity balls, she was his dinner partner, he chatted with her, he danced with her. She was startlingly beautiful. But more than that, she was available. It was this aura of certain availability that first attracted him to her.

He was, after all, experienced at this sort of thing.

He had met this woman before; in the beginning she was only every woman he’d ever transported to clandestine assignations in countless unremembered motels. She was Goldilocks. The bitterly sarcastic name, first applied to Maureen by his former wife, now seemed to be appropriate. Goldilocks — stealing into someone else’s house, testing the chairs and the porridge and especially the beds. Goldilocks, the other woman. She did not have to be blonde, though Maureen was and so was Catherine. She could just as easily have had hair as black as midnight, eyes as pale as alabaster...

We were in the garden of the Leslie Harper Municipal Theater. Frank and his wife Leona, Susan and I. Statues of dwarfs surrounded us, palm fronds fluttered on the languid breeze. There was the scent of mimosa on the air. Leona had just introduced Agatha to the rest of us. Leona described her as a new “Harper Helper.” Frank despised the term. His wife, however, was proud of her fund-raising activities for the theater, and staunchly maintained that the Harper was a very real part of Calusa’s cultural scene. Frank immediately and unequivocally said there was no real culture in Calusa, there was only an attempt to create an ersatz cultural climate . The Harper, he insisted, came close to being vanity theater. He said this within earshot of seven or eight fluttering dowagers who were themselves heavy financial supporters of what was, despite Frank’s biased New York view, a good repertory theater. One of the old ladies sniffed the air as though smelling something recently deceased in the immediate vicinity. Agatha noticed this — and smiled.

I had held her hand an instant too long while being introduced, I had caught my breath too visibly at the radiance of her beauty, and now I basked too obviously in her smile. I was certain I was blushing, and I looked away at once. The warning bells chimed, signaling the end of the intermission. I looked into her pale gray eyes, she nodded almost imperceptibly, and then turned to go, black hair flailing the air. I watched as she crossed the garden to join a tall blond man whose back was to me. There was a lithe, slender, cat-like look about her; she took long strides over the garden stones and climbed the steps to the lobby. A sudden exciting glimpse of leg flashed in the slit of her long green gown, I held my breath and listened to the clicking chatter of her heels on the lobby terrazzo. The warning chimes sounded again. “Matthew?” Susan said, and the four of us went back into the theater. Throughout the second act I tried to locate Agatha Hemmings; the theater was small, but I could not find where she was sitting. Nor did I see her in the lobby afterward. As we walked toward where I’d parked the car, Frank pronounced the play sophomoric.

I called her on Monday morning.

Her husband’s name was Gerald Hemmings, he was a building contractor. I’d learned this from Frank in a supposed rehash of our evening at the Harper together. It was good information to have. There were at least six Hemmingses in the Calusa directory, and I did not have the courage to call each and every one of them to ask if I might please speak to Agatha please. Even then, as the phone rang on the other end, I was ready to hang up if anyone other than Agatha herself answered. She answered on the fifth ring, I had been nervously counting them.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello... is this Agatha Hemmings?”

“Yes?”

“Matthew Hope.”

Silence.

“We met at the Harper Saturday night. Leona Summerville intro—”

“Yes, Matthew, how are you?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

Silence.

“Agatha, I... look, I’m about to make a complete fool of myself, I know, but... I’d like to see you if that’s possible, for lunch if that’s possible, alone, I mean, if that’s possible. For lunch, I mean.”

There was another silence. I was suffocating in my own air-conditioned office.

“Do we have to have lunch?” she asked.

Jamie was telling us about the first time he met Catherine alone — why had the clock stopped ticking? I did not want to hear about his sordid affair with the surgeon’s promiscuous wife, I did not want this description of their first rendezvous. It was raining, he said. This was February a year ago, it was unusual for it to be raining in Calusa at this time of year. Catherine was waiting where they’d arranged. She was wearing a black raincoat and a floppy green hat that partially hid her face. He pulled the car to the curb and threw open the door, and she stepped inside at once. The black raincoat rode back to expose her leg. He put his hand on her thigh; the touch was electric. There was the aroma of wet and steamy garments in that small contained space. Daringly, he kissed her. The windshield wipers snicked at the rain...

We kissed, Agatha and I, the moment we entered the motel. I had driven her seventeen miles south to the next town, but I was terrified of discovery nonetheless. When we kissed I could think only that I was a fool to be jeopardizing my marriage for an afternoon in the hay. I had convinced myself it was nothing more than that. I had not spoken to Agatha since I’d made the phone call Monday morning. This was now Thursday. I had picked her up in the parking lot behind the Calusa Bank Building at twelve sharp, and it was now a quarter to one on a Thursday in May, three weeks before my thirteenth wedding anniversary. We were kissing in a motel room, and I was scared to death. She gently took her lips from mine.

“We don’t have to stay,” she whispered.

“I want to stay.”

“Just be sure.”

“I’m sure.”

She was wearing tight white slacks, a long-sleeved lavender blouse buttoned down the front. Sandals. She had rather large feet. Toenails painted a bright red. Fingernails the same color. Scarlet lipstick on her mouth, somewhat garish against the pale oval face. Her hair was the color of midnight, it shimmered with blues in the light of the single lamp. She took off her clothes without ceremony or pretense. She was dressed one moment and naked the next. Her breasts were rather smaller than I might have hoped. The black triangle of her crotch was elongated, a sexual isosceles. She came to me again and put her arms around me and kissed me on the mouth.

“I am going to love you, Matthew,” she said.

Jamie was telling virtually the same story. I could have killed him for it. In this timeless chamber, soundless but for the drone of his voice, the clock silenced, time reduced to a geometrically multiplying present, I listened to him telling of his paramour, his doxie, his bimbo, his whore... yes, damn him, he was robbing Agatha and me of the uniqueness of our love, he was reducing our relationship to the level of his own, inadvertently making them both sound like garden-variety affairs. He now loved Catherine more than anyone in his life — she was his second-chance girl, he said. I remembered him saying last night, “Figure it out, how much time have I got left? I’m forty-six, what have I got left, another thirty years?” Forty-six was his age now, his age today, his age last night when he said, “This was my second chance, supposed to be my second chance.” What he’d meant was his second second chance, two to the second power, not Maureen, but the round-heels surgeon’s wife he’d been in bed with while Maureen was being slaughtered.