Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

26.

April 1945

Adolf Hitler shot himself to death in his bunker on April 30, 1945, just 18 days after FDR’s death on April 12.

As Hitler’s charred corpse lay in a hole near the Reich Chancellery, Soviet troops swarmed over the hellish ruins of the gutted city in a macabre dance of victory and revenge. Across the civilized world, particularly in San Francisco, a delicious sigh of relief rose up, and a party started that showed no signs of letting up. A United States wearied by a decade of bleak depression followed by half a decade of unsought war was beginning to feel the balmy springtime of wealth, power, and victory.

As the savage fighting close to the Japanese islands attested, the war was still far from over, but the cards were utterly stacked against those whose savage doctrines had started the war. It seemed like just a matter of time now—and how many more lost American lives? How many more lives of Asian civilians, not to mention hordes of imprisoned Americans and Europeans, before Tojo’s war machine collapsed.

Tim and Corie were an item, but there was some odd, almost surreal undercurrent Tim could not put his finger on yet, but he shrugged like a swimmer grown tired of fighting a rip current. He let himself spin away into a whirlpool of sweet cloying warm love too delicious to deny.

As he lay beside her on a sunny, warm summer afternoon, with the window open and the scent of blossoms filling the air, he regarded the long slender curves of her pale body as she slept. He felt utterly at ease, imprisoned and happy in this little bubble of time on a Sunday afternoon. For the first time, he was free of that vague and ominous danger that he might be shipped out to some dangerous new front if the war went sour again. There just didn’t seem to be any need now. It was just a matter of waiting, of letting the clock run out. It was a wonderful capsule of time to be in. He did not worry about what he would do once he returned to Connecticut—or why go home at all? Maybe he would relocate to Vancouver, where he had enjoyed a few brief visits to the provincial capital of Victoria. Maybe he’d stay here in Frisco. Maybe he’d move back to London and start some kind of import-export business. Anything was possible, and the future was like a giant candy jar of opportunities, but one just did not yet need to exert any energy on it yet. And what better place to be than in a passionate love affair that was as fleeting and sweet as the scent of blossoms on a balmy day on the cusp between spring and summer?

Corie stirred in her sleep, groaned happily, and reached for him. She put her hands around his neck and pulled him down for a long, energetic Momsen Lung kiss. Like a diver, he plunged into the dark green sea and wrapped himself around her anemones. They writhed and bubbled happily together until they felt spent and lay side by side breathing hard.

There was a knock on the door. “Anyone alive in there?” It was Meg.

Corie pulled the sheets up to cover herself and Tim. “Come on in.”

Meg knew better. She opened the door just a crack, without looking directly in, and said: “I just stopped by for my book. Thought I’d say hello.” Then she pressed the door open a bit wider and looked in. “You heard the news, right?”

“No?” Corie said holding the sheet up with both hands.

“Hitler shot himself.”

“What? No!” Both Tim and Corie sat up, the sheet spilling off. Meg came in, her eyes made up with mascara, her lips red, so that she looked Mediterranean or something. She poured out the story, and while Tim felt a wave of joy—almost like a reprieve, given that he’d already almost lost his life once in the war, and knew plenty of others who had—he also detected an odd wavelength of communication going on between Corie and Meg. Was there a faint edge of competition or jealousy? There was something edgy under the surface, and he couldn’t put his finger quite on it. Meg finished her breathless recitation and pulled away, shutting the door.

“Why don’t you go out and celebrate with us?” Corie called after her.

Meg responded in a mellifluous, almost musical voice.

“Relax,” Corie said with a laugh, pushing Tim lightly so he lay back and accepted whatever was in the air. Couldn’t be anything bad, not on a perfect day like this. Corie draped the sheet around herself, and left the room to chase after Meg. She left Tim to enjoy the sunny quiet of her bed, and he felt very much at home there. She had made the threat of impermanence about this situation clear more than once, and now as he lay here enjoying her intimacy he kept coming back to a Zen-like state of acceptance. Meanwhile, a distant but ocean-like chorus of shouts and whistles and cheers was rising over the city. Cars, trucks, buses were honking their horns in a constant wave of celebration.

Corie burst back into the room. “Okay, it’s settled, the three of us are going to go out on the town.”

Tim strode down the streets with a girl on each arm—Corie on one side, Meg on the other. It was an exhilarating time, and a lot was going on—people having sex in taxi cabs, people riding around packed into convertibles and waving liquor bottles while toasting anything that moved.

The two women clung to him, as if they both were his girlfriends. He took it lightly, holding them around the waist, and trying to treat them with equal respect and consideration. Now and then, during a brief moment, he might feel some distant, nagging little tweak, that something was a bit unusual, but he felt lulled by Corie’s attentions. She was, for all intentions, his girlfriend. He wasn’t even sure if she had another man someplace, and maybe that was why she was at times distant, cold, stand-offish. At the same time, those insights were, like so much from day to day, just brief flashes that went as fast as they came.

For example, when Corie and Meg left him at a café and went to shop for hats. As he sat sipping coffee over a newspaper, he watched them coming back from a brief excursion to a shop in Union Square. For a moment, they seemed linked in some manner, almost like sisters or conspirators. The two women took him in arm between them and they strode again as a threesome by the Chinatown Gate.

Another time that evening, as they sat together in a small booth in a bar that was jammed with both men and women, Tim found himself feeling a bit tipsy and aroused. He had Corie on his left and Meg on his right, and their thighs pre against his under the table. Meg’s hand wandered briefly down and rested on her left thigh, then moved to his right thigh, convulsively clenching—hard—on his muscles while she reached around with her head and kissed him on the mouth. He tasted her tongue, her lips, and was too dazed to react, because it was so unexpected. She seemed suddenly exposed and needy. If Corie noticed, Corie never let on. Tim was sure Corie had noticed. Or had she? Meg’s tongue had briefly flicked into his mouth, pressing hot moist spittle against his tongue, tasting of beer and lipstick, and since he already had his arm around both women’s waists, he automatically pressed her against him with his right palm. And she yielded—he wasn’t sure if she was drunk or aroused—but it was just a lightning brief moment. It passed as someone took Corie by the hand and pulled her onto the dance floor, and she in turn pulled Tim along. He reached in vain for Meg’s hand, because she was leaning across the table to answer someone’s almanac question like how many people lived in San Francisco in peacetime.

Later that night, they three drifted through one or two last nightclubs, and Tim slow danced with each woman. Corie blended against him with her self-assured coolness, her flushed face and gray eyes a cipher. Her hands alone seemed to have voice, roving over his shoulders, the neat square tips of her fingers exploring in the hollows of his collarbones and up his neck, behind his ears, across his eyebrows. She seemed so happy-go-lucky, wiry, slim, cool, a joy; and he danced fast dances with her until they were both out of breath and laughing. She kept softly urging: “Pay more attention to Meg. Dance with Meg. Pay her a compliment now and then.”

Meg was a little bigger, more solid, than Corie. Meg’s youth and smooth skin rode well on her thicker legs and waist. As Tim slow danced with her, she was a bit stiffer and slower and just had a different feel. She was more delicate than he’d expected, and now he began to think she was more sensitive, maybe a bit less self-reliant, than Corie who could fly bombers with that radiant look on her face. Yet, Meg had a hard edge, Tim thought, as he held her and guided her gently around a dimly lit dance floor. Amber and red lights twirled while the soft, full big band sound of a 15-piece orchestra wafted sensuously around them. It scared, almost dismayed, him a bit that he got the feeling he could have really held Meg close and kissed her again, full on the mouth, and where would that leave him and Corie? There was something Meg said, too—because she did have a temperament that showed itself in little flashes now and then—like: “We’re not competing over Corie if you understand what it means to play in both courts,” or something like that; he wasn’t sure what words she had actually used, or what they meant, but some vaguely dark meaning came across. She said this during a short walk between night clubs, while they waited for Corie outside a restaurant where she’d run in to use the ladies’ room.

At one point, too, late in the evening when they were tipsy and tired, they danced together, the three of them. An old fashioned ball of mirrors twirled slowly above, and the band members were all sitting down, some with their chairs reversed and cigarettes burning near them, as Tim and Meg and Corie danced slowly with their arms around each other. It was innocent fun, with nobody feeling left out. Afterward, they walked to the cable car stop together, not holding hands, just each to personal thoughts, each tired, and that was how they rode up the hill. The two women sneaked Tim into the Hotel Auger for the night, and he slept on the couch alone in the living room. He didn’t mind—he was so tired he fell asleep as his head touched the pillow that Corie slipped on the armrest just in time, and Meg fluffed out a blanket for him with a big poof of cool fresh air and the blanket descended on him like sleep itself.