The Top Gun's Return

little bit of pride.'

'A little bit?' She wanted to take hold of him and shake him till his teeth rattled. 'You listen to me, Tristan Bauer, there is no room for pride between a husband and wife. Like I told you last night-'For better or worse,' remember? Don't you dare…' Her voice died. All at once she was intensely aware of the fact-of the way-that he was looking at her.

Her T-shirt type nightgown covered her from her neck to her knees and was shapeless as a sack, but from the hunger in his eyes she might just as well have been standing before him stark naked. She felt naked; a cool breeze wafted under her gown and over her skin, shivering it with goose bumps. Her nipples poked against the soft knit fabric. Nerve impulses sang through her body. She remembered her dreams, and fever bloomed in her cheeks.

'Jess, don't fight with me…please.'

Fight with him? Numbly, silently, she searched his face, the dark, unfamiliar hollows, the haunted, hungry eyes. Lord knew, that was the last thing she wanted.

'I don't wanna fight with you,' she mumbled. 'All I wanna do is feed you. Is that so awful?'

He lifted his hands toward her, and her heartbeat thumped an eager welcome. But instead of putting his arms around her, he folded them across his chest and tucked his hands between his ropy biceps and his rib cage as though for safekeeping. He shook his head and looked away into the far corner of the room, squinting as if the sight of her was painful to his eyes.

'Jessie…honey. I just want to get myself back. Okay? To get my life back. Until I can figure out how to do that, I'm not gonna be any use to you or anybody else.'

'I understand that,' Jessie said, although she didn't. 'I do. I just want to help, is all. That's all I'm tryin' to do. If we can just get you well…if we could get you home-' As she spoke the word her voice broke. A wave of homesickness caught her by surprise and she ended in a whisper, 'Tris-can't we go home?'

He turned away from her to pick up the pullover he'd worn the day before. 'We will. I promise you we will do that. I just have one more thing I want to do here first. Okay? I want to go to Dusseldorf-see if I can find where my mother lived.' He frowned distractedly at the sweater before pulling it over his head.

Ignored, left standing there shivering in her nightshirt, Jessie felt isolated and irrelevant. Folding her arms across her breasts to shield her sensitized and betraying nipples, she watched his head burrow through the pullover's turtleneck, the dark, still-damp spikes of his hair emerging tousled, like a small boy's. She remembered how she'd loved to feel the tickle of his hair on her skin, especially like this, fresh from the shower. Like in the dream… Her lips felt swollen as she murmured, 'You want to go today?'

'Thought we would, yeah.' Once again it was a smile that broke free from the sweater's confines, trying hard to be jaunty, though exhaustion and weakness lurked in the purple hollows around his eyes. 'First, though, I've got to see about getting some food-I'm runnin' on empty.' His smile slipped, the way it did so often now. 'I'd say I was starving, but I don't use that word so lightly nowadays.'

She went to the phone, glad for the diversion of something helpful to do. 'I'll call the desk. They've been so nice about bringing us dinner-maybe they'll do breakfast…'

Tristan nodded, briskly combing back his hair with his fingers. 'That'd be great. While you're getting yourself together, I'll see if I can get hold of Al. I'm gonna need him to bring me some clean clothes…my shaving gear, for starters. Then, I think we're probably gonna need his help if we're gonna get away from here without the wolf pack hot on our trail.'

'Are we taking the car?' Jess asked, carefully not looking at him. Carefully keeping her voice neutral.

'We don't have to if you'd rather not, honey,' he said, chuckling. And she knew that was as much of an apology as she was ever going to get.

* * *

They took the train to Dusseldorf. Jessie was secretly delighted, for reasons that had nothing to do with Tristan's behavior the day before. As far as she could remember, except for the subway during trips to New York to visit Joy Lynn, she'd never been on a train; certainly, she'd never traveled cross-country on one. She enjoyed sitting in sleek, modern comfort, watching the German countryside streak past the windows without having to worry about traffic or speed limits or whether somebody was going to be criticizing her driving or scaring the living daylights out of her with his.

They had to change trains in Wiesbaden and again in Frankfurt, where they boarded an express train which stopped only in the major cities-Bonn, Cologne, then Dusseldorf. Jessie would have liked to disembark in Cologne long enough to see the cathedral, which was literally across the street from the Hauptbahnhof, but didn't suggest it. They had no way of knowing how long it might be before the next train to Dusseldorf, but more than that, she knew that for Tristan this wasn't a sight-seeing trip. And so she had to be content with breathtaking glimpses from the railway bridge across the Rhine.

More than once, as the train sped through a countryside just awakening to spring, Jess thought wistfully of how different it might be if this had been a sight-seeing trip, the trip she and Tris had planned, once upon a time. It would be the honeymoon they'd never had, he'd told her then. They'd visit the country of his parents' birth, and then, just for themselves, perhaps…Paris. She tried to imagine herself and Tris poring over maps together, pointing out sights to each other along the way, strolling hand in hand along riverbanks and through the narrow brick-paved streets of ancient cities.

Instead, she sat gazing out the windows of the train while Tristan, isolated in that dark world he retreated to so often now, did the same, his shadowed eyes fixed on faraway things she could never see and barely imagine.

At first she tried to make conversation, comments about the passing sights, telling him about things this or that reminded her of, things she'd seen and done during the years he'd been gone. He listened, polite but strained, and she could tell that behind his fixed and crooked smile his own thoughts were nagging impatiently, like an ill- mannered child demanding his mother's attention. When her words began to sound like chatter to her own ears, she gave up and left him to brood in peace.

Maybe it was because she was feeling isolated and bleak, the way she'd felt that day, but she found herself remembering her lunch with Lieutenant Commander Rees.

Mrs. Bauer, it sounds to me like your husband might be looking for that strength…Looking to find the extra stuff that's gonna get him through this.

Maybe, she thought, he'll find whatever it is he's looking for here. And then we can go home.

It was late afternoon when they arrived in Dusseldorf's Old Town. A cold drizzle was falling, glazing the brick- paved streets, muting the colors of the spring flowers in upstairs windowboxes and keeping most shoppers and sightseers indoors. Jessie had noticed, however, during the taxicab ride from the train station, that the modern downtown shopping streets were crowded, and though she had seen jackets and coats few umbrellas were evident; apparently native Dusseldorfers, like New Yorkers, were stoic and accepting of such minor inconveniences as bad weather.

They'd again packed sandwiches to eat on the train, but Tristan was hungry, as usual, so their first stop in Old Town was at one of its many pubs. Jessie would have loved to sit at one of the tables outside on the street-there was no car traffic allowed in Old Town-but because of the weather they had to settle for the cozy Old World charm of brick and dark wood indoors. Seated at a tiny wooden table set on a rough plank floor, they ate German bratwurst and drank glasses of Altbier, the strong dark beer that Tristan had told her was mother's milk to Dusseldorfers, and the drink of choice for most visitors to Old Town. Jessie, never all that fond of beer and mindful of her recent wine-drinking episode, sipped her one glassful slowly. She noticed that the waitress kept replacing Tris's glass as soon as he'd emptied it, keeping track with a pencil mark on the edge of the cardboard coaster as was apparently the custom.

'When my mom was a little girl,' Tris said, relaxed after the third glass of beer and a huge meal of bratwurst, sauerkraut and dark dry bread, 'she told me-and that was before the war, of course, so she'd have been pretty small-she told me her grandfather used to send her to the pub every morning to fetch his mug of beer. One of those big mugs, you know, with the lid? What do they call 'em…steins? She'd carry the stein down to the pub and knock