she had left hanging in Slote’s bathroom, and new sexy underwear in a bureau drawer. It might take some explaining! But all the stuff was gone — where, she had no idea. She was puzzling over this when Byron appeared in the french window of the bedroom, on the balcony. “This is great out here, all right. Cold as hell, though. Fabulous string of lights along the water. Did you notice the champagne? And the lilies?”
“Lilies?”
“In there.”
In a corner of the living room, beside champagne in a silver cooler on a marble table, stood a bouquet of red and white calla lilies, and beside them Slote’s small white card, with no writing. The doorbell rang. A bellboy gave Natalie a box from the lingerie shop. She hurried into the bedroom and opened it. There lay the underclothes Slote had cleared out, a many-colored froth of silk and lace.
“What’s that?” Byron said from the balcony.
“Oh, some stuff I bought in a lobby shop,” Natalie said airily. “I guess Slote told them I’d be here.” She picked up a peach nightgown, and with mock witchery draped it against her bosom. “Not bad for an academic type, hey?”
Then she saw a note in Slote’s handwriting, lying under the silks. Byron started to come in. She ran for the French door and shut it on him. “Give me a minute. Open the champagne.”
The note read:
The words brought a mist to Natalie’s eyes. She tore the note to bits and dropped them in a wastebasket. In the next room she heard a cork pop. She pulled from the box the gray silk nightdress laced and trimmed in black, and quite forgot Leslie Slote, as she speedily showered and perfumed herself. She emerged from the bedroom brushing her long black hair down on her shoulders. Byron seized her….
…Wine, lilies, and roses; the dark sea rolling beyond the windows under a round moon; young lovers separated for half a year, joined on a knife-edge of geography between war and peace, suddenly married, far from home; isolated, making love on a broad hospitable bed, performing secret rites as old as time, but forever fresh and sweet between young lovers, the best moments human existence offers — such was their wedding night. The human predicament sometimes seems a gloomy tapestry with an indistinct, baffling design that swirls around and inward to brilliant naked lovers. The Bible starts with this centerpiece. Most of the old stories end with the lovers married, retiring to their sacred nakedness. But for Byron and Natalie, their story was just beginning.
The lavish pulses and streams of love died into the warm deep sleep of exhausted lovers: Mr. and Mrs. Byron Henry, Americans, slumbering in wedlock in the Palace Hotel outside Lisbon, on a January night of 1941, one of the more than two thousand nights of the Second World War, when so much of mankind slept so badly.
Chapter 38
Natalie opened her eyes, awakened by the warbling and chirping of birds. Byron sat beside her, smoking. A cool breeze was blowing from an open door to the balcony. In a pink-streaked sky, the wan moon and one star hung low over the choppy sea.
“Hi. Listen to those birds! How long have you been awake, Byron?”
“Not long, but I’m really wide awake. Wide awake and still trying to believe it.”
She sat up. The bedclothes slipped from her breasts as she kissed him softly, sighing with satiated pleasure. “Gosh, that air’s icy, isn’t it?”
“I can close the door.”
“No, no, the sea smell is lovely.” She pulled the blanket to her neck, nestling beside him. After a silence she said, “Byron, how does a submarine work?”
He glanced down at her. His arm was around her. Caressing her shoulder. “Are you kidding?”
“No. Is it hard to explain?”
“Not at all, but why talk about that?”
“Because I want to know.”
“Well, it’s a hell of a topic to take up with a beautiful naked girl, but okay. I’ll tell you how a submarine works. To begin with, it’s built so that it just about floats when ballasted. So when you flood the diving tanks with a few tons of seawater you go right down, and when you blow the water out with compressed air, you pop up again. You begin with marginal buoyancy, and by changing the water ballast you become a rock or a cork as desired. That’s the general idea. The details are numerous and dull.”
“Well, is it safe? How much have I got to worry about?”
“Less than if I were a New York traffic cop.”
“You get hazardous duty pay.”
“That’s because civilians, like congressmen and you, yourself, have the illusion that it’s scary and risky to dive a boat under the water. No submariner will ever argue Congress out of that.”
“But when you go deep, isn’t there quite a risk of being crushed?”
“No. A sub’s just a long watertight steel tube, braced to hold off sea pressure. That’s the inner hull. It’s the real ship. The outside you see is just a skin for tanks, open at the bottom. The water sloshes in and out. The inner hull has a test pressure depth. You never submerge near that. Nobody to this day knows how deep the old
“Submarines have been lost.”
“So have ocean liners and sailing yachts. When men are trapped in a hull on the ocean bottom, tapping out Morse code, it makes a good story, but it’s only happened a couple of time. Even then there are ways of escaping, and we’re all trained in them.”
But when you flood the boat to go down, can’t the flooding get out of hand? Don’t smile darling. It’s all a mystery to somebody like me.”
“I smile because you ask good questions. But as I told you, the main tanks are outside the real hull. They’re just stuck on. When they flood, you’re awash, waterlogged. For diving there’s a small sealed tank inside, the negative tank. It can hold about twelve tons of seawater. Flood negative and down you go fast. When you’re at the depth you want, you blow negative, and there you are, hanging. You spread your bow planes, and you’re sort of like a fat airplane, flying slowly through thick air. Submariners are picked men, and great guys, darling, and all seventy- five of them dearly want nothing to go wrong! There are no slobs on a submarine. That’s the truth about submarines, and this is one peculiar conversation to be having in bed with a new wife.”
Natalie yawned. “You’re making me feel better. That rusty little boat scared me.”
“The new fleet submarines are luxury liners compared to the
She yawned again, as a patch of pink light appeared on the wall. “Bless my soul, is that the sun? Where did the night go? Draw the curtains.”
Byron walked naked to the windows and closed the heavy draperies. As he returned to her in the gloom, she thought with piercing pleasure how handsome he was — a sculpted male figure — alive, warm, and brown.
He settled beside her. She leaned over him and gave him a kiss. When the young husband strongly pulled her close she pretended for a moment to fight him off, but she couldn’t choke down her welling joyous laughter. As the sun rose outside the screening curtains on another day of war, Byron and Natalie Henry went back to lovemaking.
They breakfasted at noon in the sunny sitting room, where the air was heavy with the scent of roses. Their breakfast was oysters, steak, and red wine; Natalie ordered it, saying it was precisely what she wanted, and Byron called it a perfect menu. They ate in dressing gowns, not talking much, looking deep in each other’s eyes, sometimes laughing at a foolish word or at nothing at all. They were radiant with shared, gratified desire.
Then she said, “Byron, exactly how much time do we have?”
“Well, seventy-two hours from the time we came alongside would be half past two. Thursday.”
Some of the pure gladness in her eyes dimmed. “Hm. That soon? Short honeymoon.”
“This isn’t our honeymoon. I’m entitled to twenty days leave. I reported straight to the
