apartment window, staring at the pages without reading them, and feeling as if a plug had been pulled and everything drained out of him. Once he went so far as to dial Carol’s unlisted number-he had taken it down, perversely, that last night alone in her flat. There was no answer to his ring, and when he cradled the phone he laughed harshly at himself.
Around eleven o’clock there was a buzz at the door; he went to answer it and found Cynthia MacNee there, grinning, with one shoulder propped against the jamb and her silly hat askew. “Throw me out if I’m intruding. I was feeling a little lonely and kind of randy, and when I found out you’d had lunch with her ladyship, I kind of thought you might want company tonight.”
“Very astute,” he said. “Come on in.”
He watched her sweep into the room with her imperious lunging stride. She was big and tall, and long-faced with evident depression. She said, “Why don’t we get rip-roaring drunk?”
He closed the door. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Everything.” She was at the window, holding the drapery back. “You really have a pointillist’s view through the smog from here, don’t you?” She turned back and sank into a chair with elaborate indications of unhappiness. “My latest pastime, duration one week, busted up last night. He gave me a little exercise and a lot of abuse, and I suddenly said to myself, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing with a motherfucking son of a bitch like him?’ So I gave him his walking papers, and now I’ve got the blues real bad. The deep indigos. Do you mind me crashing in on you? I’d love to exchange sympathetic ears with you, dahling.”
“Sounds like a fine idea,” he said. “What are you drinking?”
“Whatever works fastest.”
He made drinks, and when he brought them she got up from the chair. “Sit here and let me sit at your feet. Are you nonplussed by my sudden appearance, dear Russ? Should I have my drink and depart hence?”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“Then hold my hand, dearest one.” She sat down on the floor with her shoulder against his knee; blindly her hand crept toward his. It felt cool and moist in his palm. She said, “The life of the swinging single can be most trying. I suppose you’ve found that out.”
“I haven’t made much of an effort to swing.”
“You ought to,” she said. “Get the bile out of your system. You’re all uptight, Russ. You’ve still got the look of a one-woman man, and that’s not much good when you haven’t got a woman. Swing a little, try some one-nighters for variety. Loosen up. Hang in there.”
Her hair was fanned out across his knee; he kneaded it with his hand. “It doesn’t come so easy to some of us.”
“You’ve still got her ladyship in your bloodstream? You require a transfusion, dahling.”
“Not her,” he said. “Someone else-just as inaccessible.”
“A married lady? For shame, dahling. I could weep-perhaps I will, given one more of these.” She waved her drink in the air.
He let her go on thinking there was a married woman in his life; it was simpler. After a while he rebuilt her drink, and she said, “Boss lady told me you’d been out to Arizona. It must have been lovely.”
“It was,” he said, and suddenly, for reasons he sensed but could not explain, he blurted a long monologue- how Judd had offered him stewardship of his wilderness trust.
At the end Cynthia said, “And now you have to make up your mind. What are you going to do?”
“I wish I knew. Indecision becomes a habit after a while. Let things ride often enough, and you contract some kind of paralysis. I’ve been chewing on it ever since I came back Sunday night, and I still haven’t made up my mind. When I was out there it seemed like a fine idea. Back here it seems unreal and stupid. It’s not that I don’t approve in principle-Judd’s right about the whole thing, no question of that. The only thing is, am I the man for the job? Realistically, the answer’s got to be no. I grew up in a Connecticut suburb, and my whole adult life has been in politics and law. I don’t know the first thing about maintaining a wilderness. Put me down on Judd’s ranch, and I’d get lost and die of thirst within half a mile of water. I can’t tell a cottonwood from a eucalyptus, I don’t know one cactus from another, I’d probably have trouble telling the difference between cow dung and horse droppings. I can’t tell a sick tree from a well one, and if I came across a brushfire I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to start putting it out.”
“You’re avoiding the point,” she said. “Those things you could learn. The question is, do you want to?”
“I’m a card-carrying romantic. When I didn’t really have the choice, I liked to play a little game to convince myself all I really wanted was to get away from the big bad city and settle down in the woods somewhere away from all the cares and woes of the civilization I inhabit.”
“But?”
“But when you come right down to it and offer me what I kept asking for, I’m not sure it’s what I really want anymore. Right now I’m up to my ears in a job that depresses hell out of me because we’ve got to deal with human garbage, we’ve always got to be looking out for the worst in people. I feel like a cop working a beat in Harlem- there’s got to be all kinds of warm human reality all around you, but you just haven’t got time to look for it, you’re too busy watching the muggers and dope peddlers, and after a while you become convinced the human race is no damn good because everybody you see is peddling dope or mugging old ladies. It’s what you see because it’s what you look for.”
“But,” she said adamantly.
He had to laugh. “The job keeps me alive,” he confessed. “It keeps the adrenalin pumping. Right now we’re getting hot on the track of what may turn out to be the biggest stock-market conspiracy of the decade. It’s slimy and depressing to know there are creatures out there doing their damnedest to swindle thousands of people out of billions of dollars-but it’s exciting as hell to track them. I can’t deny I enjoy the chase. And stuck away in the woods somewhere I’d never have that stimulation. I see myself vegetating. Maybe it’s just too late for me to embrace the joys of pastoral solitude. Once you’re conditioned to action, you can’t live without it.”
“But you’re still not sure?”
“I hate this city so much,” he said vehemently.
After a while Cynthia said, “A couple of years ago I had a wild affair with a character who got mustered out of the Air Force because the only thing he was much good at was flying jet fighters, and the service decided he was too old to keep it up. He’d been an ace in France at the end of the war, and he’d flown all over Korea, and he’d done three tours in Vietnam, and they retired him, so he went into business here on his retirement pay-some kind of air- freight operation-and the poor son of a bitch was miserable. Finally he signed up to fly antique fighter planes for some belligerent African country. The last I saw of him he was getting on the ship to Africa, happy as a clam. Maybe the poor bastard’s crashed by now, but he never had any choice, really. He always hated airplanes, you know?”
He got up and went to mix drinks. He felt a little dizzy and drunk; he came back into the room with a glass in each hand and saw that she was on her feet. She took both glasses from him and set them down, turned, and drew him close; her face broke into a quiet smile. Inside, he felt a visceral quiver, the slow coil and press of wanting her. She breathed, “Don’t talk. Let’s just get laid.” Her voice was thick and sweet in his ear; her nails dug into him. She made a small, warm, contented sound. He tasted her breath in his mouth; her kiss went deep into him.
She slipped away, went around the room turning out lights until only one was left burning; she stripped off her clothes as she moved. He caught her by the bed. She stood taut in tawny underwear, panties and a strapless little half-cup bra that supported her breasts from underneath, almost exposing the dark nipples. A fine pale down was faint along her lovely back by the spinal furrow. She unfastened the bra and held it against her breasts with one hand. He unbuttoned his shirt, all the while staring, as if his vision were tactile, at the soft, curved lines of her big body. She was turned half away; he drew her back, her buttocks hard against him, nibbled at her neck, rubbed his palms along her lithe waist until she shuddered and lifted her hands to the back of his head, tipping her head back and around for his kiss. The bra fell away; he shaped his hands over the soft-sheathed hipbones, the flat strong belly, up over the rib cage and the rubbery-resilient breasts. She turned within the circle of his arms, writhing, and gasped against his mouth, her hungry tongue questing the roof of his mouth, her hands plucking at his belt and zipper, tugging his trousers and underwear away until his penis sprang into her hand, pulsed, stretched, grew, swiveled upward hard and shiny, burning with sensation. She pushed him back onto the bed and sat astride him and played with him until he pulled her down, feeling the resilient weight of her breast in his hand. They did not speak; it was as if it were the most natural thing in the world, wholly right, requiring no reasoning. He probed her mouth
