Dead Aim (4 page)

She pursed her lips and stared at the ceiling for a second, then said, “I don’t think I want to say, at least right now. But there are just two of us here, so if you speak, I’ll know I’m the one you mean. We don’t need names for sex, anyway. Come on. I watched you staring at my bare behind, and even now you can’t keep from checking out my breasts every few seconds. The reason you’re leaning on the counter that way is that you think it hides your erection. Let me tell you, it doesn’t, and looking at it is making me crazy. I solemnly swear, the reason I’m doing this is because I feel like it and there’s no reason not to.” She paused. “Besides, I read someplace that old guys are a good experience because they can hold out longer, and they know more about women. So drop the towel and get in.”

She had a sense of humor, he silently conceded. She seemed perfectly calm and in control of herself. What she was saying was not insane.

While he was considering, she sighed and shook her head at him in amusement. She stood up and stepped out of the tub at his end, and embraced him, her wet body pressed against his. “I’m not crazy, and I’m not rewarding you or punishing myself, and I’m not going to be turned down.” She unexpectedly snatched away his towel, took his hand, laughing, and stepped into the tub. She tugged on his hand, to draw him in after her. He stepped over the side into the water so she wouldn’t keep tugging. “What’s wrong now?” she asked.

He said, “I’m trying to be sure I’m not rationalizing this, telling myself that it’s all right for you to do this, just because I want to.”

She sank into the water, still holding his hand so he would go down with her. “Amazing,” she said. “He finally admits he wants to.”

Mallon sat down and she moved to meet him, pulling his legs around her and placing her legs over his. They kissed softly, their lips barely touching at first. The tentative brush of the lips became firmer, more sustained. Mallon became aware of the silence, the only sounds the rippling drips of water from their arms as they embraced, but the silence was pleasant, part of the gentleness of the moment. Then the touches changed, and there were sounds that grew in time. After a few minutes they left the water and dried each other with thick, soft towels on the way into Mallon’s bedroom.

Mallon concentrated on being very attentive, very gentle and patient, but she seemed rapidly to lose all inhibition, all shyness. When Mallon turned or moved his hand, she would be there waiting to meet him, opening to him. If he lingered for a long time in one position, she would wriggle or writhe to move them into another. The positions were clearly experiments for her, and with each new one she would whisper, “Interesting, but not my favorite,” and change immediately, or “Ooh, that’s nice,” and stay at it for a longer time before trying something different. Mallon could sense that she had given herself permission to do anything that entered her mind, to be unfettered, even reckless. For a time, he worried that her attitude might have ominous implications, but then he decided that it could as easily be a promising sign. A few hours ago she had been trying to kill herself, but now what she was doing was grasping for life, gripping it, taking in as much as she could. Maybe she was acting out some magical oscillation between the poles, bounding away from death, leaping from one extreme to the other with the intention of ending somewhere in the middle so she could go on with her existence.

Her urge to have sex now seemed, if not perfectly rational, at least positive, but his selection as partner continued to worry him. She
could not have decided to bestow her favors on Robert Mallon because of some sudden crush. He was simply the nearest unattached male, and he was unthreatening to her. He had been the lone witness to the lowest point in her life, so the big barriers that always stood between two strangers had already come down. But he could not quite surmount the feeling that she must have decided to give him a reward for helping her. For a time he grappled with the thought, feeling injured pride at being given such an offer and guilt for having accepted it. But then he saw it differently. She wanted to forget practicality and self-absorption for one night, and he was allowing her to do that without risk. And if she was trying to get her own sense of value back by doing him the biggest favor she had in her power, he would have been wrong to refuse it. He reminded himself that the decision had been made a half hour ago. The question was not whether he would do it, but how.

Her mood induced in him a strong need to make the experience singular for her. He did his best to sense the direction of each of her whims, then use his knowledge and experience to push her impulse into reality and make it a source of pleasant sensations she had not felt before. He would coax her to excitement, then nurture and feed the excitement like a fire, consciously bringing her to a higher pitch moment by moment. Each time he succeeded she would go limp in his arms for a few seconds, catching her breath and trembling. He would hold her there, giving her the illusion of relaxing the tension, but not enough time to calm down. Then he would slowly begin again, awakening her feelings once more, finding a different way to arouse her. He knew that her sensations were cumulative, so that each time he began, she was still reverberating from the last time, and from the time before that, all the way to the first. It was like climbing to a height, step by step.

Finally, he knew that she was reaching her limit. This time, it took only a touch, a signal to her that he was beginning once more. She gasped, then gave a high, ascending moan. “You can’t,” she whispered,
then said aloud, half-pleading, half in wonder, “You can’t keep doing this to me.” The sound, her own voice unfamiliar to her, and the words—the admission of her complete surrender to his touch—pushed her over the edge once more. “No,” she said, and then more urgently, “Please don’t stop.” He began to bring it to a very consciously gauged end. He knew that the best way to let her know how much he had been enjoying her, how much he liked her, and how glad he was that she was alive was simply to show her—to sincerely abandon himself at last to the sexual excitement.

When it was over, they lay quietly side by side on the bed for a few minutes, then she rolled over onto his chest. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”

“The pleasure was all—or mostly all—mine,” he said. They lay in silence for another few seconds before he added, “I hope it was the right thing to do.”

She raised her head so she could look into his eyes. “It was absolutely right. I did it with the wrong man for the wrong reasons, and it was the very best ever.” She rolled over onto her back. “Another bit of hard evidence that most of what they say is nonsense. As if anybody needed more evidence.”

“You know what I meant,” he said. “Long-term.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. What you’re forgetting is that long-term and short-term are the same. There were any number of ways we could have spent the time, and I picked the right one for us: the winning choice. Most of the time, people pick wrong.” She sat up abruptly.

“You know, I’m starting to get hungry.”

“Now that you mention it, so am I,” said Mallon. “Let’s go to a restaurant. I know just the place.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. Nothing to wear.”

“I can drive you to your hotel and you can change.”

She lay back down. “No. I didn’t bring any good clothes. Just a change and a makeup bag.”

“Nobody left anything in my guest room that will do?”

“I’m not going anywhere in a thong and a sunshade.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll get us something and bring it back. Do you like Italian food? If you don’t like Italian, there’s also—”

“I do. I like Italian,” she interrupted. “Thanks.”

As Mallon drove to La Cucina, he reflected on the sheer peculiarity of the universe. The day had begun without even the subtlest sign that a change was about to take place. Now it was seven in the evening, and he had lived through a series of cataclysms, a succession of vivid sights and sounds and emotions that seemed to him enough to fill years. He began to allow himself to hear other thoughts waiting in the back of his mind. It was still true that he was probably twenty, maybe even twenty-five years older than she was. But she had said … what had she said? “That’s always been a great deterrent to men in the past.” What she had been saying was that an age difference had never kept women from getting into relationships, either. It wasn’t a quirk of male behavior; it was a quirk of human behavior.

It bothered him that she still had not told him her name. After the first refusal, he had determined to let her bring it up again, but she had not. He consoled himself with the thought that not telling him her name could only be a way of protecting herself from future embarrassment. At least she was planning for a future. The important issue was not her relations with a forty-eight-year-old stranger, but her determination to go on at all. That was all he asked: that she not end it, the way Nancy had. He had been what? Fifteen when she had died, and Nancy had been twenty-one. She would have been in her fifties now, probably a mother with kids as old as this girl.

He saw an empty space on the street less than a block from La Cucina, so he decided he had better take it. He pulled in and walked. They certainly weren’t sexually incompatible, he thought. That had been another possible obstacle that she had not given time to develop. But he had to admit that he was congratulating himself on nothing: the one thing that even the most monstrously mismatched pairs seemed perfectly capable of doing was having sex. It was only after
they’d had enough time to talk and get to know each other that they wondered what they were doing together. Then he was at the deceptively plain front entrance, just a varnished wooden door with
La Cucina
over the lintel and a few windows with white curtains. He pushed his cogitations about the girl’s intentions out of his mind so he could concentrate on feeding her.

Mallon stepped inside, sat at the bar, and picked out five different dinners. He knew nothing about the girl’s tastes. He did know that all women ate salads and were more likely to want seafood than meat, and the fresh, clear memory of this one’s body told him she watched her weight. Some people were allergic to shellfish, so he got some fish and chicken too, but then decided she might even be a strict vegetarian, so he got some pastas, stuffed and unstuffed. He stopped at a liquor store on Carrillo Street to buy both red wine and white. He reflected that it would have been best to take her to La Cucina, where there were happy people and a pretty garden, lights and music. But he knew that it would have been impossible to win the struggle about her clothes.

Mallon came to the front of the house, carrying two of the big white bags full of boxes and the brown paper bag with the wine bottles, and knew instantly that he had been wrong to go to the restaurant. The door had been opened and then pushed shut carelessly, so the latch had not caught. He pushed the door open with his foot, walked into the kitchen, and set the bags down. He called, “Are you here?” He saw the empty water bottle on the counter. He listened, but there was no sound. He walked up the stairs and looked past the open bedroom door. She had hastily and clumsily straightened the bed before she had left.

He hurried outside, got back into the car, and drove around the neighborhood in ever-widening rectangles. After twenty minutes, he drove back to the house to see if she had returned. He went upstairs, then back down to the kitchen to put the food into the refrigerator, moved to the living room, sat on the stairway, and looked out the front
window, waiting for her. After a few minutes, he felt the panicky worry coming back, so he left the door unlocked, went out, and drove along the ocean. He went out to the cliffs where he had found her, surveyed the beach until it was too dark to see, then drove home the way they had walked together.

When he got home, he turned on the porch light and the desk lamp, climbed the stairs again, went to his bedroom, lay on his bed, and closed his eyes. The physical strain of saving her and the mental stress of negotiating with her afterward, then making love to her and being abandoned so quickly had left him feeling drained of energy. He had not been this tired in years. If she had just gone out for a walk and wanted to return, he would hear her come in. The door was unlocked.

He slept for three hours, awoke, turned on all of the lights, and examined the house and yard, but saw no sign that she had tried to come back. He went to the kitchen, but decided he had no desire to heat up the food he had bought. He ate a peanut butter sandwich, then stayed up until two o’clock waiting for her.

The next day he studied the newspaper, and was relieved to see that there was no mention of trouble coming to a young girl from out of town. The
Santa Barbara News-Press
had never been a paper that spent much space on troubles brought here from out in the world, but it would have mentioned a body. But on the day after that, he did see something, a brief article he had almost missed on the fourth page. “Apparent Suicide Found in Field,” it said. The description was too close to be anybody else.