Michigan.
“You know what he used to say?” she asked.
“Something about Christmas?”
“No. He used to say that in France coming is called the little death.”
“That’s a little over my head, Nancy.”
“Well, he was an intellectual. The lousy prick. But I think what it means is when you come, it’s like dying for a second, you’re going out of this life into some place different. You’re not thinking about money or your problems or anything. All you can think of is coming. And you aren’t thinking about that, either. You’re just coming.”
Down by the pool, the girl I’d come here to watch was sitting along the edge, kicking at the water, while her blond boyfriend tried to kid her out of her mood.
Nancy’s hand was on my shoulder. I looked at her and she was lifting her mouth up to me, which meant I was supposed to kiss her, and I did. I put my hand between her legs and nudged her with a finger.
“Bang,” I said.
She took my arm and pulled me into the bedroom.
2
We went down for a swim afterwards. I let Nancy do the swimming. I like to swim, but I don’t like crowds. You can’t swim in a crowd. All you can do is wade around bumping into people. So Nancy swam and I watched.
I didn’t watch Nancy, though. I just pretended to. What my eyes were really on was the young woman with the big breasts and oriental eyes and muscle-bound boyfriend. The boyfriend had the look of a Hollywood glamour boy gone slightly to seed. Thinning hair; puffy face; on the road to a paunch.
She was bored with him. He’d given up trying to talk her out of her indifference to him and was sitting in a beach chair with a drink in his hands, watching a blonde in a yellow bikini who sat across the way looking as bored with her companion as the big-breasted oriental-eyed girl was bored with him.
I was bored, too. I hadn’t been here a week and I was suffocating. I live in Wisconsin, near the Lake Geneva vacation center, and the summer months around those parts are cherished and enjoyed and, in the freezing cold winter months, looked forward to. I’d come here expecting a similar attitude. Instead I found the year-round summer was not so much taken for granted as squandered. Made meaningless.
I never imagined yards of beautiful exposed flesh under sunny skies could get dull. I never thought cool evenings full of cool drinks and warm glances could grow monotonous. I never dreamed sex could become so tedious.
Nancy wanted it every time I turned around. Three or four times a day, and the first couple days I was glad to accommodate. I’d gone for months without getting laid, and was more than ready. But after close to a week of it, I was just plain tired. The crazy part was what Nancy told me about the breakup of her marriage: “The son of a bitch was a sex maniac… He didn’t respect me as a person at all.” She told me this while we were taking a shower together.
All of this was new to me. I had never had to maintain a relationship with one woman while watching another woman I would most likely have to kill. I was used to keeping those two particular compartments of my life separate. I led a relatively normal social life in Wisconsin, including an occasional Nancy. But the life away from home was something else again. The business part of my life, I mean. The killing.
Of course I was in a different business now; slightly different, anyway. A new, self-created business that would require an intermixing, now and then, of the social me and the other one.
And I was finding out now, in my first time out, that playing both roles at once could prove to be a little disturbing.
Or anyway, irritating.
Though considering the boredom of this would-be paradise, a touch of irritation was maybe a good thing. At least I was awake. Aware, always, I was here on business. Perhaps I should’ve been thankful I hadn’t been seduced by the sex-and-sun, flesh-and-fun atmosphere of the place.
Only I was finding something else irritating. Or disturbing, anyway. I had developed a nagging fascination with the woman I was watching, that oriental-eyed woman with the big breasts, a woman who didn’t seem to quite fit in here, and that fascination was unhealthy as hell, especially since this was my first outing in my new (make that revised) line of work.
How much longer was I going to have to watch her? Another week? A month? Longer? I never have liked stakeout work, and this swinging singles lifestyle, with its fringe “benefit” of constant sex, seemed likely to kill me before I had a chance to kill anybody myself.
Maybe tonight would be different. After all, the afternoon had been different. The tall, busty woman I’d been watching these past few days had acted a little strange this afternoon. All week she’d been giddy, just another bubble-headed fun-seeker playing footsy and everything-elsey with her blond boyfriend. But this afternoon she’d gotten moody. Her face had taken on an almost grim look. Her efforts at having fun seemed just that: efforts. Efforts that had failed and lapsed into… what? Depression? No. More like seriousness. A serious mood, rather than a black or bitchy one.
Something was up, maybe.
Not me, certainly: I was wilted. Nancy was going to have to learn to respect me as a person-for the rest of the night, anyway.
Meanwhile the crowd in and around the pool was beginning to thin. Nancy begged off around two-thirty and by that time there was only half a dozen of us left. My dragon lady was one. Her blond hunk of manhood was another, only now he was in the water with a blond hunk of womanhood whose own hunk she had managed to lose, along with the top of her bikini, and two small but perfectly shaped boobs bobbled in the water like apples, pink apples, if there is such a thing, or even if there isn’t. I didn’t much care either way. I was too wrung out to care. Not so the two blonds: they climbed out of the pool giggling and one chased the other into the shadows.
That left me alone with her.
Which was not good. A harmless conversation, idly struck… and the ballgame was over. Of course there was a whole pool between us; better an ocean. I needed to stay just some anonymous bearded guy who she had never really looked at close, otherwise the entire deal was blown.
But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the water. Staring at it, the surface rippling with the slight breeze, the torch lights shimmering eerily in reflection.
And then she got up and went up the open stairway to the second level, where her apartment was.
I stayed behind. I was, to say the least, relieved. And now that I had the pool to myself, I could have a nice, private swim, which is a daily ritual of mine, whenever possible, anyway.
I dove in.
I’d just swum my sixth easy lap when she came down wearing a dark, mannish pants suit, suitcase in either hand, and headed into the parking lot, from which, moments later, came the sound of squealing tires.
3
I could have followed her. I had my car keys in the pocket of my robe, which was with my towel, under the beach chair where I’d been sitting before I started my swim.
But I might have looked just a shade conspicuous jumping into the Opel GT soaking wet, in nothing but a pair of swim trunks, and considering I was already afraid she might have taken some notice of me, following her, at this moment, in my present condition, didn’t seem, well, prudent.
The next best thing to following her was to find out where she was going.
So that’s what I decided to do. Try to do, anyway.
I hadn’t ever gotten in her apartment to look around, despite the number of days I’d been there. She hadn’t
