Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

Jimmy Wing had talked about that arrangement with Frannie Boushant a little over two years ago. Frannie Vernon, her name was at that time. It had come about in an unplanned way. He had known her in high school — she was two classes behind him — but had never dated her. He ran into her by accident in Miami. Borklund had sent him over to cover a Citrus Commission hearing. He had driven over, and when the hearing had been adjourned at four, he had phoned his story in and had been advised by Borklund that he might as well stay over and cover the session scheduled for the following day.

As he was walking toward his car he met Frannie on the sidewalk. It was a cool day. She wore a short cloth coat over a dark wool skirt and white angora sweater. There was such a family resemblance between the sisters, he did not know if she was Ceil, Belle or Frannie when she smiled warmly at him and greeted him by name. She detected his slight hesitation and said, “I’m Frannie, Jim.”

They moved out of the pedestrian traffic, over toward the store fronts to talk. Like all the Boushant girls, she was dark, with high cheekbones, a long oval face, pretty eyes of deep brown, a heavy mouth which smiled readily, prominent teeth, an immature chin.

“What are you doing over here, Frannie?”

“Working. Living. God, it’s a brute town, Jim. But I had to go somewhere. The Social Security was enough to get along on. It’s pretty good when you’ve got little kids. But I was just sort of dragging through every day, and so a couple of months ago I parked the kids on Ceil, bless her, and came over here.”

Suddenly he had remembered Dick Vernon had been killed six months previously. He had worked for General Telephone as a lineman. He’d gone out after tarpon with two friends on a Sunday morning in the small cabin cruiser one of them owned, and it had blown up in the Gulf a mile off Sanibel Island. The other two, with bad flesh burns, had made it to the beach. The boat had burned to the water line and sunk. Dick’s body had been recovered the following day.

“That was a terrible thing, about Dick,” he said.

Tears stood in her eyes and she laughed in a mirthless way. “Look at me. One kind word and I’m off. It’s taking a long time to really believe it, Jim. So here I am, in Miami, which I guess is as good as any other place would be at the moment. I’m waiting tables at that restaurant down the block there, on the other side. Gee, it’s good to see somebody from home.”

“I’m covering a meeting. I have to stay over, and I was about to find a place. Can I buy you a drink, Frannie? Dinner, maybe?”

She looked thoughtful, glanced at her watch. “Sure. I guess so. But I’d like a chance to get a bath and get fixed up. You work in that place, you smell like grease all over. How about you pick me up at six-thirty?”

She told him where it was and how to get there. He went over and checked into a motel on the north end of the beach. On the off chance, he rented better and larger accommodations than he had planned to, feeling sly and semiguilty as he did so. She was ready when he stopped for her, and she did not ask him in. She looked very good to him. She wore a sleeveless dress in a fuzzy pumpkin wool, and a beige wool coat and a pillbox hat in a paisley pattern. He took her to one of the big, quiet, shadowy restaurants on the beach, a place for food and talk. They spent a long time in the cocktail lounge. She was obviously pleased to be taken out and happy to be with him. After three drinks they talked about Dick and she wept. And after that, he told her about Gloria, about this last nightmare visit, and how, after he had taken her back, they had told him it was unlikely they would ever be able to give her visiting privileges again. He told Frannie he was looking for a buyer for their house, the home she would never see again, and did not know he was weeping until his voice clotted and he felt the tickle of tears on his face. Frannie reached out to him and closed her hand around his wrist with great strength.

“Please don’t, Jim, honey.”

He looked at her with a great earnestness. “But don’t you see, the terrible thing about it is the way it’s all so phony. I’m not crying about her, Frannie. I can’t seem to cry about it as a great loss. I’m... crying about me. I’m crying at the great phony tragic figure I’m making of myself. And I think I’m crying because I want to touch your heart.”

“Let’s eat now, Jimmy. We’ve had enough drinks. Let’s get a menu and order from here, please, and let them tell us when it’s ready, and not have any more drinks.”

At dinner they had talked of trivial things which would not trigger either of them. Over coffee, awkward as a schoolboy, he said, elaborately, “I... uh... found a pretty nice place to stay. We could have a nightcap there and I could show you my view of the pool.”

When she didn’t answer, he looked directly at her and saw her looking at him with an expression he could not read. Her head was tilted slightly. She looked sad, rueful, slightly ironic, but with an undertone of tenderness.

“Yes, Jimmy. Yes, I suppose we have to go look at the pool. There’s really nothing else we can do, is there?”

She was very quiet on the way out to the motel. They went in. He turned two subdued lights on. She threw her coat and purse on a chair, and they stood by the sliding doors and looked out at the pool. He put his hand on her waist and, after a little while, he turned her into his arms. After they had kissed with an increasing hunger, she backed away from him, sighed, smiled, took her purse and shut herself in the bathroom. He knew it would happen, and he knew it would not be very important or very good. He drew the draperies, turned out one of the lights, opened up one of the two double beds. The long fiasco of Gloria had made him jittery about all emotional relationships. He heard water running. He felt very tired. He wished he had not started it. He wished she had said no. He felt almost certain he would either be impotent, or it would all be over for him in a humiliatingly brief time. That was what had been happening to him lately.

She came out of the bathroom with her dress over her arm. She gave him a broad, friendly almost casual smile and said, “Hello, there!” and went to the closet and hung her dress and coat on hangers. She was constructed like her sisters. Their long oval faces and the long slender necks, the narrow sloping shoulders, gave them a look of slenderness. Yet their legs were long and heavy, their hips wide, their lower torso fleshy. Frannie had a slightly sway-backed stance which made her buttocks look the more round, thrusting and muscular, yet her upper torso seemed almost too frail and narrow for the size and weight of the wide-spaced conical breasts.

She came to the bed in such a matter-of-fact way, he was more convinced that it would not be anything worth remembering for either of them.

But her skin had a silkier texture than he would have guessed, and, more importantly, she quickly proved that she was frankly and enthusiastically concerned with the pleasure she could get from it, enjoying her own sensations without pretense or artifice or coyness. She gasped her small instructions, and she gave little throaty chuckles of pleasure, and she made a running commentary on just how good everything was. Paradoxically, her apparent complete unconcern for him made it possible for him to lose all his anxiety about himself, and soon find himself sharing the same pleasures he was giving her, tasting them in ways he had not known for a long time. So when it had ended, and they lay in a sighing contentment, sharing a cigarette, their hearts slowing, their bodies worn and leaden, he felt both gratitude and a quiet pride bordering on smugness. Each time she sighed, there would be a little catch of her breath at the end of it, like a hiccup.