Pete Hamill - Loving Women

“To him? The husband?”

She smiled in a knowing way. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you all about that. Not tonight. Not now. It’s just too damned beautiful out here for that.”

She stood up and looked at the moon and the stars, and then said, “Don’t look now. Don’t watch me.”

I stared at the sea and heard her moving behind me. And then she came up beside me and handed me her stockings.

“Couldn’t stand them one more minute,” she said.

The stockings were silky and feminine in my hands and I rubbed them slightly as we walked, thinking that they’d been where I’d never been. For a second, I wanted to put them in my mouth. And then rolled them and slipped them in my pocket.

“Look, you can see the sea oats, up on the dune. See? The dark stuff? That’s what holds the dune together. They got deep wide roots, and they move under the sand, like steel in concrete, you know?” She led me over to look at the dark clusters in the light of the moon. “You ever see anyone pullin’ them up, you give ’em a good quick hop in the butt, hear? Lose them sea oats, you lose the whole damned beach.”

“I’ve never seen them before.”

“You have a beach in New York, don’t you?”

“Yeah, a bunch of them. Coney Island and Rockaway and Jones Beach, a bunch of others.”

“Well, if they don’t have sea oats, you’re gonna lose them.”

We climbed the dune. The island was all dark, the nearest lights a mere glow across the bay in the town, and the wind was rising and she looked up at the stars.

“There’s something I’m gonna do. Something I wanted to do all my life,” she said out loud, as much to the night or the wind as to me. “Gonna do it.”

She turned her back and reached up under the dress and peeled off her panties. She looked at me as she stepped out of them, then smiled faintly, and handed them to me.

“I want to feel the wind,” she whispered.

And faced the sea, lifting her dress, her legs spread and planted to the ankles in the sand. She threw her head back and closed her eyes and shivered. The wind moved between her thighs and I could see her dark roundness and then she shivered again. And then again. The wind was sighing and a buoy was ting-tinging away off and a moaning sound rose from her throat.

I held her panties to my face. They smelled of salt and the dark sea.

She drove me back to Ellyson Field.

“I’d rather go home with you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to fool you.”

“I don’t think you’d do that.”

“I might.”

“Just tell me the truth,” I said. “Even if it hurts.”

“That’s a deal. If I can’t tell you the truth, I won’t say anything at all.”

“Deal.”

We moved past bars and car lots and churches. I felt the lump of her rolled stockings in my pocket and slipped them out and laid them on the seat.

“You get awful quiet sometimes, child.”

“Maybe I can’t tell you the truth either.”

“You better not bottle too much up. Lots of people do that, and it drives em crazy …”

The lazy drawl rose at the end, as if she had more to say. But she just shook her head in a rueful way. She was driving slowly now behind a fat squat truck. She looked out at the side, trying to see ahead, started to move once, suddenly darted back in lane as a car roared by in a blaze of light. “Gah- damn .” Then she looked again and gave it the gas, biting her lower lip, and roared past the truck, honking her horn, half in anger, the rest a tease. Then another car was in front of us, lights very bright. She whipped into the right-hand lane, missing the other car by a foot. She laughed like a teenager and shook her head and then slowed again. I was beginning to love the way she did things: she was confident, sure, enjoying risk and escape. Who was she anyway? I turned to her.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Why did Red Cannon get you so upset last week? You know, about seeing you in the San Carlos bar with that Mexican pilot? That Tony Mercado?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

She took a deep breath.

“Okay … I went over there with a woman from work. A friend of mine, Roberta Stone. Just to have a drink. After work. That’s all. Real innocent. Not to pick up men, hear? Just a drink on payday. I hadn’t had a drink since I got to Pensacola, savin’ my money for this car … We sat at a corner table. That fella Tony Mercado was standing at the bar and he saw us, and sent over a drink, and smiled at us. Roberta thought he was cute. She thought more than that, the truth be told … Well, maybe he saw it in her eyes. Anyway, he came over. The trouble was, he started makin’ moves on me, not Roberta. And she got all upset and drank too much and though she was comin’ on strong, this Tony Mercado backed away. Anyway, he had a key on him. A room key. For upstairs there in the San Carlos. And he slipped me the key. Well, I hadn’t been with a man … It’s been a long time. For good reasons …” She lit a cigarette with a small Zippo lighter, let the smoke drift out the window into the cool air. “But I didn’t want him. I didn’t like the idea, guy comin’ over, slippin’ you a room key. And besides, Roberta more or less staked her claim. I wasn’t gonna do that to her . I mean, the guy was handsome, and was charming. But just like that ? Picked up in a bar ? No thanks. There were a lot of sailors and Marines in there, including, I guess, your Mister Cannon. So I gave Tony Mercado back his key and said, No thanks. You know, slipped it to him under the table. Well, he smiled in that charming way, real polite, and then turned to Roberta.” She took a deep drag, let it out slowly. “Roberta took the key and then he left and then she left to go upstairs and then I left.”

She flipped the cigarette out onto the highway. The locker club was less than a mile away.

“So that’s the whole story. Pretty damned long-winded answer to your question, wasn’t it? Why’d I get so upset? Cause that red-headed sailor with the dead face — he acted like I was some whore who works the bars. And I’m not.”

“You don’t even have to say that.”

“But Roberta isn’t either. Some women do for loneliness what they’d never do for money.”

“Is she a blonde?”

“Why, yes … A real bright blonde.”

“He’s still seeing her.”

“You’d make a good cop, child.”

“I wasn’t looking for her or for him, Eden. It was sheer luck.”

“Well, here’s the locker club.”

She pulled into the lot. I gazed around, hoping Buster and his friends weren’t waiting in ambush. There was nobody in sight.

“I want to see you again,” I said.

She looked away, out at the highway and the traffic.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Can’t tomorrow.”

“The next day.”

A pause.

“Okay.”

“Maybe we’ll go to another movie.”

“No. I want you to draw me.”

“Serious?”

“Like artists do in the movies. I never done that before.”

When I reached my locker, I had her panties in my pocket. Once more I held them to my face.

I feel that time of my life in fragments now; then I stand back and glibly impose narrative upon it to give it sense. I am driving tentatively through side streets off the highway, feeling as if the next left turn might lead me deep into the past, the right into some scary bleak future. If I can remember that time without the gauzy editing of memory, maybe I can make sense of all the years that followed, the stupid deaths I later saw and recorded, the friends I lost, the women I loved too carelessly or too well. But memory does not exist in any orderly progression, following the clean planes of logic. That’s the scary part: If there is no logic, no sense, what meaning could it possibly have?