Gone to Soldiers (53 page)

ABRA 5

What Women Want

The wife was in town. Why did Abra think of Louise that way? She was the ex-wife but somehow still reigned. Bringing the daughter, Kay, Louise had come on OWI business rather than to connect with Oscar. Kay was installed in Oscar's flat, while Louise was staying with some bureaucrat from OWI. At first Abra was banished for the duration. Then she was summoned for supper, on Louise's instigation. Louise must be curious about her. She was certainly curious back, but she felt powerless.

The four of them went out for seafood. They had to wait an hour for a table, making disjointed conversation. Only Oscar seemed at ease. She suspected he found nothing unusual in being surrounded by ex-wife, girlfriend and daughter. He has the mentality of an Oriental potentate, she told her crab. Abra was used to feeling on top of awkward situations, but this time she felt outclassed, barely older than Kay, sulking across the table. She almost liked Kay tonight, because at least she also wished to be elsewhere.

Louise was extremely well preserved, Abra thought, much more attractive than her daughter, who had a sullen inturned expression and slumped over her food, picking at it. Louise's hair was shoulder length and shining auburn, her skin rosy, her eyes a light luminous grey above high marked cheekbones, like Oscar's. Her features were fine, set in chiseled bones, but she gave no impression of delicacy. Her voice was throaty and carrying. Before she said something she considered amusing, her mouth would give an odd little quirky contraction, as if bidding herself not to laugh. Often her laugh when it did bark out bordered on the vulgar, surprising in a woman who kept herself so well turned out. Any daughter of the two of them should have been gorgeous. She had to think that Kay screwed up perfectly decent features by pouting ninety percent of the time.

Louise was wearing a jade voile dress artfully draped. As Oscar and Louise discussed the follies of various acquaintances unknown to Abra and uninteresting to Kay, Louise grew animated. She began to use her hands, causing a green ring to flash.

“Where did that come from?” Oscar caught Louise's hand.

“A present.” Louise freed her hand none too smoothly. She turned at once to Abra. “It's dull for you, all these ancient people. What do you think of Washington?”

Abra did wonder who had given that to Louise; Oscar had glowered as he permitted the subject to be changed.

Abra could not satisfactorily complain about her relationship with Oscar to her roommate Susannah, because Susannah's immediate comment was that she should not have got involved with a man so much older. Susannah thought every young woman should marry, or at least sport an engagement ring as big as Louise's emerald.

Abra found one person who would listen to her dissatisfactions, and that was curly-headed Daniel upstairs. He was involved with a woman in his office too. She found his apartment amusing. At first it had almost shocked her, a mattress on the floor, a bookcase full of Japanese and Chinese books, a strong Oriental motif in the decorating: a Chinese vase, a scroll, a carved box. “I'm a translator for the government,” he explained. “They need translators now who can read and write Japanese and Chinese.” Sometimes he worked as long hours as she did. She felt sorry for him, as translating technical material, as he explained he did, sounded crashingly dull.

He was attractive, but compared to Oscar, terribly young. She was relieved that he had a girlfriend, because she felt that she could talk to him without leading him on unfairly. “I feel as if
he
absolutely controls the relationship,” she complained to Daniel, sitting on his mat with her knees drawn up, drinking cheap rum. “He chooses when we see each other and when we don't. He defines what we do and what we don't do and when. He sets the boundaries.”

“What are they?” He had already told her that he felt that Ann, his friend, did the same to him.

“No possessiveness at all. Be ready to clear out of the way when any of his old girlfriends or his ex-wife hits town. Ask no questions about tomorrow or the next day.”

“Do you think he loves you?”

“He says so often enough. He's warm and affectionate, Daniel, he really is, or I wouldn't put up with his games. But I feel as if somehow he has me classified as inessential—not in his work life, but in his emotional life. I'm disgustingly convenient.”

“Maybe because he's so much older, he can't take you seriously.”

“Certainly he's mostly been involved with women his age. But I think of myself as unusually mature and experienced for my age—”

Daniel grinned, waggling a long forefinger. “Have you ever, ever heard any of our contemporaries say, ‘I consider myself unusually immature and callow for my age?'”

“Point for you.… You don't think I am?” She was just thinking how they were both almost exactly the same age, born within two weeks of each other, and she thought of herself as far more mature.

“To tell you the truth, no.” Daniel beamed cherubically, pouring them more rum. “Tastes like hair tonic, doesn't it?”

Abra was stingingly insulted, yet to show it would be to prove him right. She wished he would make a pass at her so that she could reject him coldly, but he had not done that in months. He was much too smart, unfortunately, to bother as long as she was crazy about Oscar. She probably needed Daniel more than he needed her, because while he enjoyed chewing over his relationship with Ann, he was not obsessed with Ann. She lay awake at night analyzing Oscar. Daniel was the only sharer of all that cogitating.

“When I think how simple my life used to be!” she burst out. “What we call love in this society can expand to fill any amount of time and brain cells. It's a cancer! When I was wanting him and not having him yet, I thought when I had leapt that hurdle, life would be straightforward again.”

“Sometimes it works that way,” Daniel said. “If what you want is just a body or some entity you've invented to fit that face or body. But if you come to know the person and then you want them, I don't think going to bed does more than increase the fascination. Or so I would suppose.”

“You've never really been in love.” Now it was her turn to attack. “Do you think you're capable?”

“I think I was in love once, back in Shanghai. Mostly I've been a virtuoso of infatuation. I've fallen in love with a scent, a way of wearing a scarf. I've fallen for characters in novels or in films. Sometimes I think I could become infatuated with a bowl of ripe fruit.”

“Isn't it fascinating how discussion of one's faults can be a vehicle for flirtation and self-aggrandizement, Daniel dear.”

“That was the old days. Then I used to have a problem focusing on anything. Now that I have work I find passionately involving, I believe I can focus my mind and energy when I locate the right woman.”

“Translation is that interesting?”

His gaze broke away. He tugged at his hair. “Well, the kind of translating I'm doing is demanding. Oriental languages are so foreign in their construction, they cause you to organize the world quite differently.”

“I'm surprised. At one time I did a fair amount of translation from German speech …” She stopped. She had to give some explanation. “I was doing some interviews for my thesis in New York. I had to interview a few refugees in German.” She hoped that had not sounded lame. She must watch such references. She had recently had her clearance raised, but she imagined that someone like Daniel had probably never been vetted at all. She must watch what she talked about more cunningly; lately R & A had been madly stamping documents
SECRET, TOP SECRET
.

The next evening she had a conversation with Oscar about the new security measures in R & A. “Do you really think it's necessary?”

“No, but I think it's irresistible.” He was sitting propped up in bed. The daughter and the ex-wife had finally left town, and she was spending the first night that week with him.

“Irresistible to whom?” She brooded on his strongly cut profile.

His eyes, facing ahead as he thought about his answer, were chips of anthracite. “Irresistible because, A, we cannot resist it because such messages come de haut en bas and overwhelm us academic peasants. B, Irresistible to those on high because security measures make them feel important, that they're playing poker with the big boys.”

She liked about Oscar that if he said “A” there was always a “B.” If he said there were three things wrong, he would not forget after two or go on to four. She liked that orderliness. She was more intuitive herself. She might say she loved three things, but then she would always think of a fourth to add to the list. He finished his survey before he spoke.

He was saying almost dreamily, hands crossed on his belly, “Most of our research is based on facts out there for anyone to use. Only putting them together and analyzing them makes us unique. Most of the so-called secret intelligence we get down the pipeline from SI is bullshit, just rumor mongering, social, political and ethnic prejudices passing for hard data.”

“Oscar, what did Langer want with you today?” William Langer was the head of R & A. “Can you tell me?”

“I not only can, I must. Langer is sending me to London to head up a little project in the Labor Branch there.”

“Oh …” She thought her heart had stopped. She thought she could not speak out of fear of the answer. She must keep her voice light, if she had any strength and any dignity remaining. “Will I be going also?”

“I put in for you.”

“We work so well together,” Abra said sweetly, curling up against his side. “Wouldn't you miss me a little?” Now keep it light, she ordered herself. He asked for me. He is trying to take me along. If I show any violence of feelings, it simply will not go as well for me.

Oscar turned to face her. “I missed your soft self this week. However, that was not one of the arguments I used to Langer.”

“You can't just say to him, See here, old boy, she's my bedmate, don't you see? Work much better that way, don't you know.”

“One always suspects that in the true old boys' network, they can get away with that. But while R and A is a lot looser than the ruling class Ivy League network that began it—for one thing, there are Jews like me in it—I can't presume. They're always sticky about moving women overseas, but I think I'll succeed. I'm one of his favorites since we rang so many bells with that last report.”

“What did you say on my behalf?” Did you argue hard and effectively enough? Or are your feelings mixed about taking me? How could what went on in one man's head be so important to her?

“I called his attention to your sections in our last two reports. I described you as highly efficient and most objective in your analyses. They eat that up. I made yard-wide promises about the wonders we would perform in London for R and A Washington and how we would never, as some have been reputed to do, allow trying to help with the war effort to deflect us from our primary duty to feed R and A Washington useful goodies. I depicted us as loyal to the end to our bread and butter.” He took her chin in his large hot hand. “Trust me, Abra. I'll get you over … one way or the other. Now remind me why I want to.” He guided her head down toward his prick.

Oscar had taught her oral sex. Most of her sexual encounters had occurred with graduate students, suitors from her own background or New York politicos, the best of whom had been rough and ready fuckers. Oscar liked oral sex as a prologue to intercourse. Sometimes she had a preliminary orgasm with his mouth on her; sometimes she just grew very excited. She felt connected with his body in a more intimate and compelling way than she had to any of her previous bedfellows. Not infrequently she had multiple orgasms, sometimes of an intensity that came close to frightening her.

She did not see him after work the next night. They worked late and then he got tied up in a consultation with two other researchers. Since he had tipped her no sign, she gave up and left with Susannah at eleven. She was exhausted but could not sleep, worrying about London. What would she do with herself if he could not take her along? She felt as if she had been grafted into Oscar; she could not conceive of her life without him.

The next days were gutted by her inability to think about anything else. She was afraid to bring it up again with him, yet she was convinced he knew exactly what was on her mind, and even to what extent it obliterated logic. They worked all day Saturday. Traditionally Saturday night was OSS party night and Sunday they took off. Sunday it rained, hot and rusty. Oscar was at home working. She went for a walk in the rain with Daniel.

“Disgusting leakage,” she snarled at the thick dirty dripping air.

“‘
With my eyes looking skyward

I wait for heaven's water

Eager as a baby hungry for milk
…'

As they always say, it's good for the gardens
.”

“Is that poem yours?”

“Otomo Yakamochi. My translation. It's good practice.”

“For what?” She kicked a cardboard container lying in the street. “I'd write about the sky as a big grey stallion pissing all over Washington.”

“What a charming image. I perceive you're in a fine uplifted mood and will prove great company today.”

“Up yours, Balaban, up yours with a flowering cherry bough.”

“By the way, did you notice this spring those poor trees had become known as Korean cherries?”

“Be glad they didn't ax them. I'll ax you something. My lover is going off to a posting overseas, and I still don't know whether or not he can take me along. If he doesn't, the mood I'm in today is sweet Nesselrode pudding compared to how I'm going to be feeling if he goes and I stay. What am I going to do with myself?”

“London, Stockholm, Algiers, Lisbon, Madrid or Istanbul?”