Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

She was smoking, which at least gave her something to do with her hands. I just sat with a pillow propped behind me, sneaking looks at her, a beautiful dark-skinned woman with short punky black hair and cornflower blue eyes given a dreamy unreality by the half-light of the scented candle glowing atop the pale blond matching chest of drawers at my left. She was on my right. Smoking. Or did I say that?

“I’m very embarrassed,” I said. Admitting it.

She smiled a little. “Me, too.”

“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

She cocked her head, curiously, the smile fading just a bit. “Are you sorry?”

“No! No. It was terrific.”

And it had been terrific. She’d dropped by for a late supper around nine, after a city council meeting at which she’d announced a projected rate hike for the cable system, looking a little weary from the battle that followed, but sultry, alluring, in a clingy blue dress the color of her eyes and a lot of makeup and no hose. I’d cooked pasta for her, dazzled her with my homemade sauce, wooed her with red wine, garlic bread (not much garlic, though, mostly bread) and spumoni ice cream. (This is one of three dinners I taught myself to prepare for company, preferably female; otherwise, as a chef, I know everything there is to know about frozen food and a microwave.)

I’d showed her around my little house. She’d been amused by my eccentricities — the Seeburg 200 jukebox stocked mostly with Bobby Darin records, the Bally pinball machine with its garish lit-up illustrations of Chicago gangsters and their bosomy molls — both machines out in the entryway area near my fireplace; the living room where a stereo, its speakers, a TV, and several video recorders were dwarfed by a wall of books — Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Spillane; the tiny green lights on several walls, indicating that key windows and doors in the house were closed, the remnants of a burglar alarm system the former owners had installed, a service I’d let lapse as far as having the alarms tied by phone line to the police was concerned (I explained to her) ever since I’d set them off accidentally three times and was charged fifty bucks per visit by the city; my small cluttered office where my word processor sat on a desk, printer and typewriter on a table, and manuscripts in progress scattered everywhere, the original cover painting for Roscoe Kane’s Murder Me Again, Doll hanging on the wall facing my work seat.

“You must like those fifties babes,” she said wryly, nodding toward the vintage paperback cover painting. Her smile, like the girl in the painting, reminded me of somebody else.

“I guess. But I seem to be living in the eighties.”

“Nobody in Port City’s living in the eighties.”

“Stuck in a time warp, are we?”

“Rod Serling meets you at the city limits,” she said, and I led her out of my office, back into the living room, to a sofa that faced the TV/stereo area.

She lit a filtered cigarette, crossed her dark, sleek, unnyloned legs. “Coming back to the Midwest after five years out east was a shock to my system.”

“I bet.”

She gestured with her cigarette. “It’s not so much that Port City’s stuck in the fifties or anything. Rather, it’s... timeless, in a creepy midwestern sort of way.”

“Now that you’ve brought the modern wonder called cable to the community, that all should change.”

Little laugh. “Have you checked out what’s playing on most of the cable channels? Old movies and TV shows. Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Sgt. Bilko.”

And here she hadn’t even seen my T-shirt.

“Sure,” I said, nodding toward the tube, “and it’s the best stuff on.”

“True. But when I see those old shows while I’m in Port City, I wonder what year it is. I feel like I could look out the window and Eisenhower would still be president.”

“Maybe he is.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry I came back.”

“Why did you come back?”

Her mouth twitched a smile. “To show people.” She looked at me. “Like I said this morning... to show you.”

I smiled, shrugged. “Consider me shown. I’ve been kicking myself all day that I didn’t take you more seriously back in high school.”

She was shaking her head again. “That’s the weird thing about it. If you had paid attention to me, if you had gone with me, if all my dreams had come true, and I’d married you and we’d settled down, I wouldn’t be who I am.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t be this smart, modern woman you’re so impressed with. I’d probably be a frumpy housewife with five of your kids. You’d probably have left me by now. We’d probably be divorced.”

“I’m surprised we’re even speaking.”

That got a laugh out of her, and broke the slightly depressing spell she was weaving for herself.

“You know what I mean, though,” she said.

“Sure. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone to Vietnam. Maybe I wouldn’t have traveled around like I did, getting the experience that allowed me to be a writer. And I can’t imagine me doing anything else but writing.”

She put her cigarette out in the one ashtray I keep on hand for smokers; she kept it with her after that. “So what we’re both saying is, we don’t really have any regrets.”

“I think that’s what we’re saying. I think we’re both glad we are who we are.”

Nodding, she said, “We agree it’s a good thing we were never an ‘item,’ back in school.”

Nodding, I said, “Best thing that never happened to us.”

And she said, “Kiss me...”

“You fool,” I said.

And we both laughed.

And both kissed.

And I’ll be damned if half an hour later we weren’t both embarrassed to be sitting naked next to each other in my bed, having made sweet, tender, enjoyable, and, ultimately, passionate love, more about which I decline to say, only to point out that despite its sweetness, tenderness, enjoyability and passion, we both were incredibly embarrassed about the whole thing, and neither one of us really understood why. Or did I say that already?

“If it was terrific,” she said, “why are we both embarrassed?”

“What do you mean, ‘if’ it was terrific? Didn’t you think it was terrific? I thought it was pretty terrific.”

“Mal, you were terrific. The earth moved, okay? So why do I feel like shit?”

I touched her arm. “I can’t agree.”

With a one-handed swing, she hit me with her pillow, in a fairly friendly way, a few embers off the cigarette in her other hand landing on the sheet.

“Okay, okay,” I said, flicking away the ashes. “Watch the cigarette, will ya; you’ll burn the place down.”

“You don’t smoke, do you?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’d rather die some natural way.”

“Like getting hit by a bus, you mean?”

“I’m holding out for a heart attack during orgasm at age one hundred five.”

“You’ve always been a wise guy, Mal.”

“Are you complaining?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Jill. This is very confusing. We’re almost fighting now.”

“Almost,” she said.

I gestured toward the bed and us in it. “If we’d met today, and had tumbled into bed — and I’m not saying either one of us is of loose enough moral character to do such a thing, mind you — but if we had, it wouldn’t feel so awkward now. There’s four of us in bed, tonight. You and me yesterday, kids; and you and me today, grown-ups.”

She put her cigarette out in my one and only ashtray, currently on the nightstand beside her, and rested her head in the hollow of my shoulder.

“There’s really five of us in bed,” she said.