Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Is that what brought it to an end?’

‘In part. One night he got drunk and I saw the darker side. He’d had an argument with his father over money, and took it out on me. Slapped me around until I got the car keys. And that was that,’ she says. ‘I never went back.’

‘You left him?’

‘Quickest divorce in history. Still like how the other half lives?’ she says.

‘I suppose the grass is always greener,’ I tell her. I’m nodding, swaying in the cool breeze, listening to the rollers as they crash on the beach below, white foam glistening in the moonlight.

Three fingers of her right hand are through the buttons on the front of my shirt, twirling through the hairs on my chest, the tip of one foraging over a nipple, like searing heat.

I wonder for a moment if I should move, but there is nothing uncomfortable in this. It feels so natural. A woman’s hand on my chest, something I have not felt in months.

The soft whisper of her lips caresses the nape of my neck. I turn, and I am looking into her eyes, dazed, wondering what is happening.

Shattering glass and death, the explosion at the post office, seem something from another decade, another century.

I am mesmerized by the glow in her face. My hands, clasped at the small of her back, take on a life of their own. She is soft and warm, her hands at my shirt, suddenly inside, buttons undone, the soft slide of silk as her blouse driven by points of ecstasy grazes my chest.

The throbbing in my ears is no longer from pain. My fingers at the buttons on the back of her blouse. A trail of fabric in our wake as we grasp and grope each other, moving through the room. My knee gripped by silken thighs. Her hungry mouth pressed on my own, the whisper of her tongue.

There is the slickness of nylon against my naked leg as I ease her onto the bed. I am captured by the reality of her near nakedness. She lies, her hair cascading on the pillow, stripped to the waist, the soft tenderness of her breasts like two beacons, her thin waist encircled by the lacy gauze of a black garterbelt. The tender bare flesh of thighs, above nylon.

She looks at me, her eyes glazed by lust, a mirror image of my own.

She beckons, her flesh moist with the scent of the tropics.

I sink, our bodies two melding pools of pleasure.

She is in my ear, hot whispers of passion laced with my name. Lower regions pressing, the slick wet heat of desire moving, roiling, undulating ancient rhythms of bliss, her fingers everywhere. My mind a sea of confusion, lust, or love. My lips, the edge of teeth jagged at her nipple. She arches her back, and between quick breaths of passion, grinding bone to pelvic bone, she pleads for the pleasure of release.

Shafts of light pierce the louvered shutters of the room like golden arrows. The songs of exotic birds erupt from the verdant bush outside my room, along with the rush of water over rocks in the gardens. There are random voices, people walking on the path beneath the balcony.

My senses, dulled by half-sleep, detect a shadow moving in the distant reaches of the room. I am wrapped in rumpled sheets, sprawled on the bed, feeling the warm humid air of morning in the tropics.

As I open my eyes and focus, she’s sitting in a chair, her eyes locked on me, smiling. Dana is wrapped in two bath towels, her hair wet from a washing.

‘Did anybody ever tell you that you make these little noises when you sleep?’ she says. ‘Little mewing sounds.’ She mimics something like a kitten complaining to get out of a box.

‘Lovely,’ I say. The bright daylight outside the window finally registers.

I roll over and sit up, a sheet wrapped around me.

‘What time is it?’

‘Almost ten,’ she says.

‘What! Why didn’t you get me up?’

‘Oh, I did,’ she says. ‘Last night. At least three times.’

‘Cute,’ I say. I can still feel the yen for Dana climb in my groin, a frolic on the edge of hedonism, and wonder what God-made substance can possibly flood the brain to produce such pleasure.

‘You were tired. I thought I’d let you sleep.’

I feel the scratches on my face from the flying glass of yesterday. Two of the bandages have come off during the night. I wonder how much of the soreness that racks my body is from the explosion and how much derives from our antics of the night.

‘We oughta be halfway to Hana by now,’ I tell her.

‘I’ll be ready in ten minutes,’ she says.

I’m up, sheets of modesty dragging on the floor, tripping, grousing through the trail of discarded clothing, looking for my pants. I have distant memories of someone taking a shower in the middle of the night. I feel my body. Sticky. It wasn’t me.

‘They’re on the other chair,’ she says. My pants.

I grab them and start to put a leg through, then discover that I have nothing on underneath.

She’s laughing, out loud.

‘Your suitcase is over there,’ she says. ‘By the table.’

First things first. I rummage and find a clean pair of Jockeys.

She’s out of the chair and into the bathroom in her room. I can hear the sound of the hair dryer.

‘There’s croissants and coffee on the table in here,’ she shouts over the drone of the dryer. ‘I ordered from room service.’

In two seconds I’m hovering over the table in her room, scarfing with both hands.

‘Hungry?’

‘Famished like a bear,’ I tell her.

‘And just as fuzzy,’ she says.

I am hairy chested and without a shirt.

‘How long will it take to get to Hana?’

‘Depends how dangerously you want to live,’ she says.

The way to Hana seems its own form of paradise, verdant sugarcane fields and plantation villages, a rocky coastline, the many surfaces of the sea, cresting emerald waves crowned by white froth. Lava ridges rise from white-sand beaches, forming a dark tawny color to match the tanned brown thighs of girls in thong bikinis as we whisk along the highway.

Then forty miles in heaven turns to hell. Single-lane bridges on hairpin turns, white concrete walls, and plummeting waterfalls that drop a thousand feet out of virgin jungle; switchbacks so severe that half the time we are going in the wrong direction.

The locals drive like someone has loaded their java with testosterone. Life on the road to Hana, it seems, is a perpetual game of chicken.

The road begins to narrow until at one point I have to back up a hundred feet, to a soft spot on the shoulder over a vertical cliff, to let a cement truck pass in the other direction. The driver, a big Hawaiian, beams me a grin like some sumo wrestler who’s bounced my ass out of the circle. Like what’s amatter, hauole? No balls? Even Dana gives me a look, like if I’d pressed it I could have slid between his tires and under the axle.

I offer her the wheel but she declines.

It is after two o’clock by the time I see the dark basalt landing strip of the Hana airport. It lies on a flat point of land over the sea, chopped out of the jungle and carved lava stone. A couple of miles on is the town of Hana. Two churches, the post office, a couple of grocery stores, and a gas station.

‘The road gets worse on the other side of town,’ she tells me.

‘How can it?’

‘I’ve been there,’ she says. ‘Trust me.’

There’s a single hotel. Dana points me in the direction, and a couple of minutes later we roll into the circular drive of the Hotel Hana-Maui, single-story bungalows with plantation roofs of tile and tin, old Hawaii before American and Japanese megabucks tried to marble it over like ancient Rome.

But one thing is certain. Hana would be the place of choice for anyone wanting to get lost from the prying eyes of this world.

A woman directs us to the registration desk. We are already registered, adjoining rooms in a bungalow on the grass. I figure Dana was busy on the phone from the plane last night.