Beast (11 page)

The lights didn't go on, of course. "Hmm. That's odd," she said. She shifted her charge up onto her shoulder, then headed toward the gate that led down into the play area. As she disappeared completely, she said, "Oh. to top it all off. Lieutenant Johnston wrote me a note today. He said I was cruel." She laughed suddenly, a titter. "All right I was, but that is part of being insightful, you see: He deserved it. Do you know what else he said in his note?" From the dark below, her voice took on the bombast of ecstatic declamation. "'Miss Vandermeer,' he wrote, 'I am appalled to have offended your fair sensibilities. Blame it on your beauty. I was drunk on the blue wine of your eyes.'" She could barely get the last of this out for laughing with wicked enjoyment. " 'Blue wine,'" she repeated. Then as if the dog had censured her, she argued. "All right, I'm being mean again, but, Lord, what does a woman say to such twaddle?"

From the dark room behind the crates, Charles heard the click of lamp switches, one then another, as she continued her discourse with a dog who seemed used to it, even quieted by it. "It's so funny, Bear.

Men write me notes. People want to talk to me. yet they don't seem to say anything that I have the first inclination to answer. And then there's the ones like that diplomat's wife who downright dislike me. What is there about me? What's wrong? I try to be nice, and then I know perfectly well that I'm not, that I am behaving badly. Yet I can't seem to help myself."

Charles heard her come back up, saw her silhouette reenter the edge of faint illumination, her voice near again. "Well, this is all so peculiar," she said. "What's going on with the lights?"

This time, however, the little dog must have seen or smelled something. He suddenly became a tussling knot of towel and fur in her arms, barking furiously as he tried to leap in Charles's direction.

At first, she upbraided the dog. "Stop that. Bear!" He quieted only so far as a yappy growl. After which, she peered into the shadows and asked tentatively. "Is someone there?"

Charles could not hold it back. He laughed. "We have to stop meeting like this."

She was motionless, in a state of alarm, as she stood there clutching the yelping dog.

He tried to put her at ease. "It's good to know you can be pleasant," he teased, "even if it's just to a dog."

He heard her come to a conclusion—she made an irritable sound, tongue against teeth. "You, again.

Where are you?" Her silhouette stepped closer, looking up into the darkness.

"I'm sitting up here on the crates."

"You did the lights?"

"Yes." He laughed again. "Though I wasn't finished. Don't you think this would be a nice place to meet tonight? I mean, it sways a lot and doesn't smell like jasmine—"

"I'm not meeting you, I told you."

"Yet here you are."

She fell silent. After a moment, she asked, "Can you make the lights work in the visiting area?"

"Visiting area?"

"Down there." Her shadow pointed toward the darkened pen.

"No light, remember?"

She made another little click with her tongue, more exasperation. "I want to play with my dog."

"He doesn't need the light, I assure you."

"Your games are stupid. They don't interest me." She let out a sniff of disdain. "So what have you done?

Where are the lightbulbs?"

She had checked the sockets to know the bulbs were missing. He didn't answer. Instead he responded,

"So why do
you
need the light?" Something occurred to him: "Imagine all those conversations today that so annoyed you. Suppose they had taken place in the dark, without anyone knowing what you looked like, leaving you to rely on your other virtues." He chuckled at her silence. "You do
have
other virtues, don't you?
Are
you wise, Louise?"

She snorted. "Wise enough to know what you're up to."

He laughed again. He didn't know why. but she so amused him.

She said, "Why don't
you
want to be seen? I never got a good look at you this morning for all your ducking and bowing."

"All in good time." he told her. "I would rather get to know you without the influence of"—he paused for a split second—"my handsome mien." He let his voice grow serious as he aligned himself, without conscience, to admission? given to her dog. "I ike you, ! wish I could talk to someone as myself, just myself. To let them know me for something other than how I look, something closer to the heart of me than the way my skin spreads over muscle and bone."

In the dim light, he could not be sure of her face, but something in her posture changed, a shift of her weight. He had her reluctant attention.

"Turn off the rest of the lights," he said quietly. Why not? he thought. She was here. He was here. This was where he'd been heading. He would make the most of this fortuitous meeting.

She just stood there, wooden, the dog more animated than she was.

"Go on." he said.

Then to his surprise, with no more encouragement than this, she did. As she turned her back on him to walk to the wall switch, she said, "I'm taking the Bear with me. You can come down into the visiting area if you want. I'm going to play with him there. If you bother me, he'll bite you. He's very protective."

Charles wasn't much intimidated. He had eight dogs at home, field dogs, house dogs. Hers didn't seem any too ferocious. And dogs, he'd found, were not so unlike young women. If one offered no threat and showed respect for their essential nature, it usually wasn't long before a man had what he wanted out of them.

The last of the lights blinked off. He heard her and the little dog. panting at her feet now. its nails clicking on the floor, as they came back up the corridor. She opened the gate. It had a slight creak.

Once she'd passed. Charles slid himself down along the front of the crates, then followed slowly, being careful to keep the sound of his pace even. His knee hurt, though not so badly that he couldn't overlook the pain by keeping his attention riveted elsewhere.

In the pit, or what she called the visiting area, he could identify exactly where she was by the smell of her. No flowers in her hair today, but she wore again the same scent of perfume as last night, and another smell—her unique and specific odor that Charles was coming to believe he could identify from a roomful of women, could walk right up to her blindfolded. Louise Vandermeer used some sort of soap that mixed with the scent of her body, clean, warm. If one could have distilled an oil from, say, sugar cane—sturdy, grassy, sweet, sunny, green and fluttering, with a sawtooth edge, this, with perhaps a dash of the smell of fresh milk, or, no, the sweet, wholesome smell of a baby's mouth having just drunk fresh milk… well, this began to approximate the initial notes of her body-scent.

When he sat down on the carpet, not a foot from her, she startled. He heard her move back. The dog came over to sniff him, being not nearly so discreet as Charles in the use of his nose. Charles shielded his crotch till the puppy became satisfied with his palm, his fingers. He let the dog have a big, slurpy taste of his thumb before pushing him away.

"You are remarkably persistent," she said.

"Not really. Just decided and relatively confident." Charles stretched out, leaning back onto his elbows—and the dog was back, sniffing, sniffing his elbow, then forearm along the floor, then down the length of his leg.

"And what exactly have you decided?"

"That you are up to no good," he told her, "fairly clever about it, and somehow lonely in a way I don't understand. As I said before, a conundrum."

She thought about this for a few beats, then said, "I don't believe you when you say all you want is to please me. That's pure pigwash."

Charles laughed again as he lay back, an arm under his head. With his free hand, he gave in to playing with the puppy, who wouldn't leave him alone. "Not entirely," he said. He pulled the dog's ears, scratched his belly.

"But partly. Let's discuss that part."

"All right."

"What do you want for yourself?" she asked.

"You."

"More than my company, I take it?"

"Oh, yes."

"I'm promised elsewhere."

"Ooh, not forever, just for the duration of the crossing."

This brought forth from her a single, soft hoot of laughter. She said, "I'm supposed to fall into your arms, then?"

"Oh, no, that wouldn't be any fun. You ask what I wanted for myself. I told you. I didn't say how I intended to get it."

"I want to see your face—I'm sure I'm missing something: You sound so perfectly sure—"

"In that case, you
are
missing something." he said, "because only a fool is perfectly sure of anything.

Besides," he added, "any good poker player can keep things off his face. You have four other senses.

Use them."

He heard her shift. The dark filled for a few seconds with the whispers of muslin and silk, her change of position wafting up another potent dose of grassy, cream-fresh, odoriferous sweetness. Meanwhile the room was so utterly lightless that not so much as a shadow or silhouette stirred. Charles himself rather liked this blind experiment. He could hear her breathing, smell the warm, verdant scent of her. It would have been splendid to feel her. taste her as well, in this black space where only the two of them, along with a rather pleasant little wet-nosed dog, existed.

Her voice came from a slightly different location, a few inches lower, a few inches farther away, as if she'd leaned back onto her arms. She asked, "Are you really Arab? You don't sound it."

"Oxford. Class of eighty-nine." Nearly true; Charles had learned his English at the Other British School.

Moreover, wealthy North Africans and Mid-Easterners were often educated at European universities.

In French she asked, "And
are
you a good poker player?" Her French was unexpectedly clean, without a trace of the usual American accent.

But Charles surprised himself by replying pointedly in English. He said. "I don't speak French very well."

He didn't know why he lied to her.

"I thought all educated Arabs spoke French."

"Reluctantly, I assure you. It is the language of our oppressors. Besides, there are parts of the Arab world where French is unnecessary."

"For instance?"

He had to think a moment. He came up with, "Egypt."

"Are you Egyptian?"

"No." Of course, it didn't matter what he told her, whether he lied or told the truth. He was up to his eyeballs in pretense already.

Yet this gratuitous tangle he had just put into the thread of their conversation made him frown deeply—for this linguistic deception had come out of nowhere and had nothing to do with his original purpose. He pondered this a moment, mystified, then let it go.

His answers went down much better with the lovely Louise. A quiet settled between them that said: She had challenged; he had passed his first round of tests. His dead ends and blind alleys were accepted as part of the mystery of him, which she had decided tentatively to embrace.

She was uncommunicative for a time, attentive to the dog who had lain down somewhere beside her.

Then out of the blue she said, "I don't want you to misunderstand something. A while ago, when I was complaining to the dog: Well, I like being who I am. I like being beautiful. I like it a lot."

"I know."

She asked suddenly, "Do you know what it's like—" She rephrased, "Do you think there is any hope for people who are vain of their own looks?"

"Well, I certainly hope so," he said, letting out a soft laugh.

She paused then asked. "Are you handsome?"

"You just can't get away from it. can you?"

"From what?"

"How people look."

"But you are. I could hear in your laughter: You know what it is like to be overly proud of your appearance."

He sighed then admitted, "I can be vain."

"Can you control it?"

"What?"

"Your vanity."

"No. But neither does it control me."

"Explain this."

In these two words, spoken abruptly, she nonetheless seemed to have come to something she earnestly wanted to talk about. There was a neediness in her demand—
Explain this
—to the point of impoverishment. A huge lack in her became obvious, crystal clear; it said she was not good at human connection, yet she longed for it as the poor hunger for bread. And more disturbing, Charles realized that he had somehow become a source of fulfillment. It was more than his simply capturing her trust; she was, awkwardly and peremptorily, venturing into friendship.

He tried to measure up (and
make
up perhaps for all his otherwise, past, present, and future, dishonesty). "Well," he began, "I don't control my feelings. No one can. But I control my responses to them. I—" He changed grammatical person to redirect attention where he wanted it. "You," he said, "can choose to behave badly, indulging your vanity for instance, if you think it is safe or fun or satisfying, whatever. Or you can deny yourself vain gratification when you know it is dangerous to your well being or perhaps unjust to someone else. You feel what you feel and more or less accept it. Then to the extent that you can, you act in accordance with what is healthy."

She seemed to think about this for a few moments, then she said. "My parents tell me I should be happy,
feel
happy, when sometimes I can't."

"Perhaps they are just asking that you
act
happy and not cause any trouble."

To this, the rustling, sweet-smelling creature uttered a snort as loud and derisive as any sailor could emit.

Then she cursed emphatically. "Well, damnation," she said, "they may as well ask me to eat rocks."

"Well, yes, parents can be quite impossible." he agreed. "Mine certainly were."

"Really?" she asked, but there was no chance to reply. She descended into pure, delighted—delightful—laughter. It was the first genuine amusement he had ever heard out of her, a clear, ringing, rippling sound that came from deep inside her. It sent goose bumps down Charles's arms. It made the hair on his neck rise on end.