Ed McBain - Goldilocks

“Yes.”

“Can I come there?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

She hesitated. Then she said, “All right. Park at the public beach, and come up on the ocean side.”

“I’ll be there by three,” I said.

“I’ll be waiting.”

We both knew it was reckless; we didn’t give a damn. Calusa in season is not designed for lovers. Aggie and I had first begun seeing each other in May, almost a year ago. The tourists had left shortly after Easter, and we’d had no difficulty finding places where we could be alone together. But just before Christmas the shrill cry of the snowbird was heard upon the air again — and from Tampa south to Fort Myers the neon NO VACANCY signs crackled and sputtered like a single unbroken electrified fence. In January, we stole a weekend together in Tarpon Springs, and then returned to a city still overrun with tourists; everytime I saw a CALUSA LOVES TOURISTS bumper sticker, I wanted to honk for Jesus. I went to Aggie’s house for the first time that month, and I’d been going there at least once a week since, sometimes more often. It was at the beginning of February that we decided we would ask for separate divorces. We made the decision because we weren’t true adulterers. We were, instead, people who’d happened to fall in love with each other while we were married to...

Ah, yes, the judge would say, you’re just a pair of decent souls, poor innocent babes in the woods who’ve been humping your brains out for the past ten months in this or that motel and even in the lady’s own house , lying and cheating and stealing, yes, stealing! That’s exactly what you’ve been doing, you cannot look me in the eye and pretend you’ve not been stealing. And I’m not referring only to the time you steal in this or that trysting place, those steamy hours you spend together in embrace, oh no. I’m referring as well to the intangibles you swipe from your separate spouses: the trust, the love, the honor you granted them by contract and which you now burglarize as unconscionably as thieves in the night. You are all those things, the both of you; you are liars, cheats, and thieves.

And I would say, Yes, your Honor, you’re right.

But you see, that’s exactly the point.

I folded my jacket on the back seat of the Ghia and then took off my tie and unbuttoned the two top buttons of my shirt. I left my shoes and socks on the passenger seat up front, locked the car, and crossed the parking lot to the beach. There were bathers in the water despite the shark scare on the east coast. Sandpipers skirted the shoreline, gulls shrieked overhead. Out on the Gulf, a Hobie cat with a red-and-white striped sail glided soundlessly over the waves.

Aggie’s house on Whisper Key was built some two hundred yards back from the water’s edge, powdery white sand turning coarser as the beach vaguely became the western approach, tall grass springing out of the sand, palm trees in clusters, a path of round irregularly spaced stepping stones leading to the rear wall of the house. The house stood on stilts, a contemporary two-story structure of weathered gray cypress and large glass areas that now reflected the midafternoon sun. An old lady in a flowered housedress was shelling just at the shoreline. Her head was bent, she did not look up as I veered off the beach, and walked through the palms toward the screened pool area on the lower level.

I was always glad to see her. I told her once that this was how I knew I loved her; I was always very glad to see her. An almost boyish gladness. A grin I could not suppress. An irresistible desire to hug her. I did that now, the moment I stepped into the tiled and shaded corridor where she waited for me. Grinning, I hugged her, and kissed her closed eyes and kissed her mouth briefly and held her away from me and looked at her.

She was wearing a white bikini, her skin tan against it, except for a narrow line of paler flesh just above the bra top. Long black hair combed as sleekly straight as Cleopatra’s, gray eyes, a mouth perhaps too generous for her face, an almost perfect nose, tiny white scar above the bridge. Sometimes, away from her, I conjured images I thought were surely false — her hair couldn’t possibly be as black as I imagined it, her eyes so pale, her smile so radiant. And then I’d be with her again, and my pleasure at simply seeing her would give way in an instant to the shock of recognizing once again how extraordinarily beautiful she truly was.

I put my arm around her waist, resting my spread hand on her hip, and we walked together through the familiar tiled hallway, past tall potted ferns in white tubs, and up a circular staircase set with dark wooden pie-shaped steps in black wrought iron. A window here leaped vertically tall and narrow to the west, ablaze with orange now as the sun hovered midway between ocean and universe. The guest room was on the topmost level of the house, one windowed wall angled somewhat less than due west to catch the sunset and at the same time lessen the glare. The other wall faced an inland lagoon crowded with marsh grass, a sandy beach coming to the eastern side of the house where sea grape fanned out over a slatted wooden wall.

We had come long past examining what we did here in this house together while her husband and children were away from it. Aggie took off her bikini the moment we were in the room, and I undressed swiftly and then we lay side by side on the bed and shamelessly made love. The orange glow on the vertical stairwell window carried through the open doorway where we’d left the door purposely ajar in order to hear any unexpected sounds from below. Her mouth tasted of salt.

We talked afterwards in whispers, exchanging at first bedroom banalities, assuring and reassuring, the universal clichés — Was it good? Yes, was it good for you, too? Aggie lit a cigarette and sat in the middle of the bed cross-legged, smoking, a small ashtray cupped in her left hand. I do not smoke; I haven’t smoked for seven years. I watched her. The pink flush of sex was fading across the wings of her collarbones and the sloping tops of her breasts. A fine sheen of perspiration was on her face, the hair at her temples was damp. She asked me if the tennis elbow was giving me trouble again and I told her it was, and asked how she knew. She immediately described in detail an acrobatic maneuver we’d performed not three minutes before, and mimicked the way I’d winced while shifting my weight. I began to chuckle. She told me she loved the way I laughed, and then bent from the waist and impulsively kissed me. The clock on the dresser was ticking away the afternoon.

We were acutely aware of the time. There was so much to say to each other, but the clock read 3:47 and each tick brought us closer to that dangerous uncertain area of surprise discovery. Monday was Julie’s day for guitar. Her father would be picking her up at four-thirty, by which time I would have left his house and his wife. Gerald Jr. was on his school’s basketball team, and would be driven home from practice by one of the mothers in the car pool. He was not expected till just before dusk. We seemed to be safe. But there was a knife-edged tension in the air.

Aggie was thirty-four years old. She complained constantly about the waste of her education and her training — she’d graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe and was doing psychiatric social work in Boston when she met her husband. She was twenty-three at the time. She married him a year later and quit working when she was six months pregnant with Julie. So now she railed against dishwashers and car pools, dealing with three-day-a-week help, the long empty hours of wife and mother. But at the same time, she was cruel in examining her own hedonistic life, and was the first to admit that she adored the luxury of being able to play tennis when the kids were at school, or take long walks on the beach, or simply sit in the sun and read. Yes, Aggie loved the laziness and the freedom, she admitted that, yes. But if I tried to suggest that she enjoyed it, she immediately accused me of holding sexist views.