Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

When she emerged from the bathroom, the lipstick had been wiped from her mouth, her face was clean-scrubbed, the skin glowing, the brown eyes searchingly alert.

She still wore her dress and earrings, but he knew she had removed her stockings and undergarments, knew the back of her dress would be parted in a wide V where she had left the zipper lowered. There was a cool precision with which she approached the act of love each time, a methodical female skill to the way she torturously aroused him and then allowed him to possess her wildly and completely. She had, over the months, changed radically from the person he’d known that first night. He sometimes wondered about her reversal of seeming inexperience. Had her ignorance been only a pose, or had he truly released an untapped passion in this woman? He did not know. He knew only that each time they were together now, her eyes patiently refused to acknowledge her own overwhelming demands; cruelly womanlike, she seemed to savor his agony, scientifically manipulating touch and tongue, urging, beckoning, pressing assault, withdrawing only to counterattack — and then succumbing in warmly limp surrender, the absolute female again, sufferingly impaled, supple beneath a mercilessly battering rigidity, grasping at, locking in immensity, mounting in spasm after spasm of aching dissolution.

He watched her with tireless delight as she approached him now.

Anticipation arched in him like a suddenly drawn bow. His eyes coveted the fluid motion of her body, hip against thigh, the nuance of her hands, the veiled uncertainty of her face. Her dress, loosened by the lowered zipper, clung tenuously low to the high swell of her breasts. She sat beside him to remove her pumps, crossing her legs and pulling back the skirt of her dress so that it draped in carelessly loose concealment over the mound where her thighs joined.

He reached for her, but she smiled and playfully pulled away. She rose and walked to the dresser. He saw the expected V of white flesh against the black dress, swooping to the base of her spine. Casually unconcerned with his presence, she took a cigarette from the package and coolly lighted it. She shook out the match and put it in an ash tray. Then, barefooted, she padded back to the bed. She smiled gently, standing beside the bed, the cigarette in one hand.

“Tell me about Eve,” she said.

He was sure she was joking. He pulled her to him, his head cushioned against her breasts. But she caught his hair with her free hand and gently drew his face from her body. Then she sat beside him on the edge of the bed. Drawing on the cigarette, she said again, “Tell me about Eve.”

“Maggie...”

“I want to hear about her. I want to know how you met.”

“Later.”

“Now.”

“I’ve been waiting all week for—”

“So have I,” she said, and her eyes smoldered for just an instant and then turned strong with purpose. “Tell me about her.”

“Maggie, don’t—”

“How did you meet? Was it romantic?”

“How the hell do I know?” he said angrily, squashing out his cigarette in the ashtray beside the bed.

She handed him her cigarette. “Put this out, too,” she said, and then immediately said again, “How did you meet Eve?”

She knew he thought the question strange. But their own meeting had been unreal, and she sought to bring reality to it now by comparing it with one of supposed substance. It was important to her that she know about his wife and how he’d met her. She knew her thus far only as the attractive brunette who’d brought Chris to the bus stop. Mrs. Cole. She knew her as the woman whose eyes she had avoided. She had given nothing of herself to this woman, and she hoped this woman would in turn give nothing to her. She had taken enough from her already, and she did not want more.

But even while feeling a perverse compassion for Eve, she could not dismiss from her mind the idea that Larry went home to this other woman each time he left her, and the thought stabbed deep with jealousy. Whether she enjoyed it or not, a competition was upon her. The claims of previous and prior ownership were now invalid, and in her own mind she ceased being the intruder: Eve was the other woman.

Stubbing out the second cigarette, Larry said, “I met her in a subway car. Is that what you want to know? The B.M.T. I was going to school.”

“Pratt,” she said. It was not a question. “She wears your school sweatshirt. She was wearing it at the bus stop yesterday.”

“So that’s what this is all about. You ran into Eve.”

“With Pratt Institute across the front. Like a brand.” It angered her that their relationship went so far back, that Eve had known him when he was still a student, that Time had so conspired to cheat Margaret Gault. He looked at her curiously and again reached for her. Bu she drew away and said, “No. How long ago was this... this subway romance?”

“Nineteen forty-three,” he said.

“You remember the year very easily.”

“Don’t you remember when you first met Don?”

“Of course I remember. Tell me what happened.”

“She slapped me,” he said, grinning.

“You must have liked the slap,” she said, annoyed by his grin.

“Not particularly. It was very embarrassing.”

“She just slapped you? For no reason?”

“Oh, she had a reason, all right. She thought I was getting fresh with her.”

“Were you?”

“No, but it was a crowded car, and somebody was, and when she turned around I was the first guy she saw. So I got it.”

“Hard?”

“Damn hard. And shocking too. I didn’t even know she was there until she slapped me. I hate crowded subway cars and all I was thinking of was fresh air. No, that’s not true. I had an exam that day. I was also thinking about that.”

“How old were you?”

“In nineteen forty-three? I must have been about eighteen.”

“And Eve?”

“Just a kid.”

“How old?”

“No more than fifteen. But a very developed—”

“You molested a fifteen year-old girl?”

“Wait a minute! I never touched her! Who said I—?”

“You know her that long?” The idea was becoming more and more painful. She tried to twist away from its painfulness, but she could not. He looked at her face and again tried to take her into his arms, but she sat erect and unmoving. He lay back against the pillow and sighed heavily.

“Well, she slapped me,” he said, “and then she huffed out of the car and that was that.”

“When did you see her again?”

“In nineteen forty-six.”

“And you remembered her?” she asked, astonished.

“Sure. How often do you get slapped in the subway?”

“I suppose so,” she said dubiously. “Where was this?”

“At the Officers’ Club.”

“Did they have one in New York?”

“Not an official one; this was a thing sponsored by some women’s organization. I think the Morgans donated the place to the Army and Navy. It was on East Thirty-seventh or Thirty-eighth. I’m not sure which. Right near Park Avenue, though, in the Murray Hill section.”

“Isn’t New York your home? Didn’t you have anything better to do than go to the Officers’ Club?”

“I was getting discharged at the time,” Larry said. “Waiting at Dix. I came in for a weekend, and it occurred to me I’d never been down there. So I went. Just on impulse, that’s all.”

She smiled. “Do you do a lot of things on impulse?” she asked.

He took her hand and said, “I used to then. I was just a kid.”

“How old, Larry?”

He wagged his head. “Twenty-one. And all decked out with my battle ribbons and my lieutenant’s bar.” He kissed her fingers. “You have nice hands. Did I ever tell you?”