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

Comment: publishers@cox.net

Go to Chapter:  
 1    2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25  
26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44  

Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

30.

Part V: Sailor, Pilot, & Spy

San Francisco

Tim inhabited a sensuous twilight-world in which time seemed to stand still, and his relationship Corie and Meg had a logic all its own. This was never more evident one afternoon when he looked up in the living room while reading a book, to check the time on a little military travel alarm clock owned by Corie, and laughingly saw it draped with a woman’s silk stockings drying after the wash—no idea which woman’s.

Tim was quite willing to let time slip out of gear by a few cogs for a while. To him, the past was a violent and murky place, filled with the blast of torpedoes and the red haze of pain, followed by endless hours of drifting amid salt water and seaweed off the African coast before being deposited naked and unarmed on the beach. Then there had been the dread of being picked off by marauding lions that lived on the edge of the desert. He should have died there, he sometimes thought, but some hand of fate, some unseen giant hand, had plucked him out of that purgatory and deposited him back in civilized London where he’d survived German bombings and dated English women and drunk Irish beer. That was the past, if one didn’t go back further to a rather lovely and prosaic childhood growing up in Connecticut, student days at engineering college, and a young manhood launched in the cramped workaday world of a clockmaker and clock repairman in a small New England town with a green and white churches and a Revolutionary War cannon memorial in front of the library.

The future was what? For millions of Americans under arms, pondering a bloody and costly invasion of the Japanese homeland, the dreaded move further into the Pacific and the terminal battle for the Japanese homeland seemed to evaporate in hopeful and wishful thinking that Japan was rapidly slipping the same way Germany had. If there was to be a new push in the Pacific, it looked as if it would pass Tim by—and why not? had he not seen enough of war? And beyond that the future was some unknown black void down the road when he’d be out of this military twilight and back in the civilian world where one had to work harder and smarter...but what did anyone really know of that, given that the normal world if there was one had ended in 1929 followed by years of deprivation, fear, and despair for more than half the population. What would it be like to live in boom times after a great victory like the one that seemed to be shaping up? Tim had no idea—like many Americans, he wasn’t old enough to remember much about the world before Depression and War.

He lived from hour to hour, day to day, wandering to and from work, writing up reports on Japanese, German, Italian, Russian screws and grommets and assemblies and gazintas and all manner of esoteric parts list items. (“Gazinta:” this gazinta that, which gazinta that, and so forth).

The fair fruit of young women in uniform dangled before his eyes, but he was no Adam and they were no Eves, and work was no Eden. Rather, he was satisfied with the care he got from Corie—when she was there.

Corie would disappear about every four days or so, returning as mysteriously as she’d gone, two or three or four days later. She couldn’t say where she’d gone, and he knew better than to ask. She would return and take him to bed, holding his head in her hands and kissing him inch by inch starting with the top of his head and ending with each toe, not missing anything in-between. He would return that same rite inch for inch, with the same devotion, only the truth was they never made either journey in one pass because usually by the time they got down to the nipples, or working the other way, up to the groin, both were moaning with pleasure and desire and they would collapse into each other’s embrace.

Tim hardly ever spent a night at the V/BOQ.

At other times, Meg seemed to be gone most of the time, while Corie was at home, and Tim felt almost like a married man. It was an interesting sensation, since he’d not had the opportunity to settle down—well, one or two girls in London might have liked it if he had, with them, out of a dozen he’d dated, but the passion wasn’t quite there in him, and Uncle Sam had unceremoniously transferred him in any case. Corie had a few days off, and spent them cooking, sewing, walking, reading, listening to radio. She spent every available moment with Tim when he was off, and they made love several times a day, always with an urgency that she might be called away, or worse, might never come back.

Then Corie was gone again, this time for nearly a week, and each night when Tim lay asleep in her bed, inhaling her scent, dreaming of her, he would awaken, not totally, just a tiny bit as a chink of light snapped in, then off; as a door opened with a creak, and shut just as quickly; as bare feet padded on wooden floorboards; as the bed rocked and the springs squeaked; as Meg’s good solid body filled in the void at his back and her arms encircled him.

He liked the warmth of her breath on the back of his neck. He was tired and this was all a dream. He never turned around but enjoyed what she had come to offer—or take. That was all there was too it, and it had a unique beauty all its own, like a perfect mathematical equation or a hermetic chord that reverberated in its perfection. There was nothing more and nothing less. He was a man with two women. It might have just been a brief story of a sailor on shore leave, who meets two remarkable women and has an unusual fling before being reassigned to his death in some wartime Pacific nightmare. Instead, he was living this dream that sometimes seemed too good to be true. When Meg and Corie were around, he’d go out with both women to a movie or a restaurant or dancing. Hardly anyone ever seemed to notice, except one very drunk sailor in a bar one night, who promptly passed out with his head among a radar array of empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays, whose insight was thus lost forever since he would not remember a thing once he’d slept it off.

Tim and his women went dancing together under reddish lights while big band brass wrapped its long notes sinuously around them and the rhythms made the blood run a bit faster. He took turns dancing with his two women, and sometimes they danced with each other, always laughing and easy. Once in a while some rangy Texas GI in Army uniform with loose tie and hard knuckles would cut in after a long awkward wind-up, and either Corie or Meg would be gracious and give him three dances before skipping out with a high sign to Tim to join them outside. That way there was much less likelihood that some enlisted brawler’s knuckles might connect with Tim’s jaw, and Tim preferred it that way. One black trumpeter gave Tim a knowing look one night, grinning as he wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and told Tim: “You are a lover, boy, not a fighter. That’s all right. That’s all right.” Tim and the women would hop a few bars and take a taxi home. Like tired people everywhere, they must go to work in the early morning.

Every evening, the ritual was the same. He would come to the courtyard and standing waiting in the wooden bower among the hydrangea and frangipani, among the jasmine and the bougainvillea, until either Meg or Corie came to fetch him. The fetching was done silently—a shadow behind the glass door, a flash of white nightgown, a pretend-bored look, a furtive glance—and whoop! Up the stairs they went together, he and his guide woman. Week after week, each day this ritual.

The two women set him up with a little space all his own in their little living room; just a night table with room for a few books, his writing things, a few clothes, toothbrush, that sort of thing. Corie laid out a pile of blankets for him and a pillow, on the premise that he would sleep on the couch like a good chaste fellow, but he never did. Even when Corie was away, he slept alone in her bed.

He protested, saying he really did not want to impose—and he thought, what if Meg wants to entertain a man? But she never seemed to entertain anyone, and Corie put a finger on his lip: “Don’t ask. Don’t speak. Just say yes and make two women happy.” Later over vanilla milkshakes in a late night joint she explained: “Meg can be very lonely, and it makes her feel stronger to know you are there.”

“She has that little bit of an accent,” he said probingly one night.

Corie put a finger over his lips. “Shhh. If she wants you to know something, she’ll tell you.”

Corie and Tim made love when Meg wasn’t there, and stealthily sometimes late at night, hoping not to wake Meg who was asleep in her room nearby. He and Corie made love early afternoons, sneaking home from work and back to work again; or in the late afternoons, before Meg returned from her own mysterious job with the new United Nations Organizational Planning Agency (UNOPA), whose stationery lay around the kitchen with hang-the-man games doodled in ink scribbles surrounded by coffee stains.

If Meg heard anything or was disturbed, she never said anything. She seemed to loosen up, come out of her shell, stop seeming imperious and actually become affectionate. It was all part of the odd ask no questions, it’s war—c’est la guerre—atmosphere and as long as it felt good, Tim was going to go along with it. Meg seemed to enjoy his presence around the apartment, though she was gone a lot and gave them plenty of leeway. She never complained about his presence and in fact once or twice, when the three of them were drinking late in the evening, came to sit beside him and once actually kissed him behind the ear, stroking his hair, before abruptly rising and walking away, not to leave her room that night. Those little moments were rare—and Tim remembered one or two, like a sunny afternoon when the wind chimes lightly tinkled outside in the orange trees, and a plane droned distantly over a picture-pretty blue bay. Corie was home, reading a book in the plush chair by the living room window. Tim was there, doing mundane things like washing his socks in the bathroom sink and laying them side by side on the window sill hundreds of feet above Octavia and Lafayette Square. Meg was joking with Corie, laughing about something, and walked by, stopping to look over Tim’s shoulder. For a second she laid her chin on his shoulder. For a second she touched his rear end, just long and lingering enough not to be an accident. Then she had a book and a cigarette and plopped on the couch opposite Corie with her feet up so their wool-stockinged toes wriggled together. That lasted a second and ended with a laugh and a long silence of reading and Meg’s smoking while Tim wandered off bemused.

Then one morning Corie said over breakfast at a nearby hamburger joint: “I’m going to be gone for a few days, Tim.” She sucked on her yogurt spoon, then waved it in the air as she said it, and her hair stuck out in several directions at once.

“Aw Jeez,” he said. “I’m going to miss you.”

“Me too,” she said rubbing her ankles against his under the table. She leaned forward: “Stay at the apartment and take care of Meg, okay?”

He shrugged. “Sure.” No big deal.

“No, I mean, she feels alone, Tim.”

“I keep thinking I’m in the way.”

“No, no, you’re not in the way. We’d tell you if you were.” She laughed.

“Is it the war?”

“Is what the war?” She spooned blueberry yogurt, and had a white mustache. Her eyes were wide and frank.

He touched a little scar on her butterscotch skin in the middle of one cheek, were there was a speck of blueberry. “I mean, do two women really live with one man?”

“People do what they have to.”

He felt awkward at having voiced an inner question. “Never mind. I just want to make sure—“

She stared at him with innocent eyes.

“—want to make sure that it’s all okay.”

She set her spoon down, pushed her cup away, and licked her fingertips one by one. “It’s what we make of it, Tim. Yes, it’s the war. It’s a lot of things. I could crash a plane and never come back.”

“Is that one of your secrets—why you are the way you are?” He leaned for ward and extended his palms.

She placed her square little hands in his. “Yes, I think so. When you fly a lot, in the military, sometimes planes that have been repaired or planes with radical new designs, things do go wrong. A lot. And then people die.” He tried to trap her hands in his, but she pulled them away. “It’s part of how I live, Tim. I can’t live any other way.”

They both put their hands under the table, each between their own knees, and looked away pained. “Come on, walk me to the trolley,” she said.

When they were walking on Sutter, she slipped her hand through his arm. “You and I are just like any other couple, Tim, except that I sometimes go away and do secret test pilot work.” She stomped her foot lightly. “I wasn’t supposed to say that.”

“Secret kept,” he said, glad to have had a peek at her secret life.

“You don’t know the half of it, poor guy.”

“Just tell me it’s the Government.”

“Is what the Government?” She appeared genuinely puzzled.

“Why you go away when you do and come back when you do. All of it. Whatever the secret is.”

She slipped her arm more tightly around his and tugged, several times. “It’s the Government, Tim. Yes. And you must never ask again.”

“I won’t.” It was really all he wanted to know, whether it was true or not. What did he care if she was flying some chunk of steel with a weird acronym in circles over some desert air strip?

As he waved goodbye to her, and she waved with a secret little grin from the packed window of the trolley, he reflected that he’d always supposed he’d marry an attractive young woman in an apron who’d have children by him and stay in the kitchen, waving as he went off to work in his car. This was all a dream. Supposedly people were going to live like this when all the fascist dragons were slain. He shrugged and started on a long healthful walk down the hill to work. It was good this way, to enjoy what offered itself each day, in this impermanent and fantastic twilight world. If nothing else, one day he would have interesting memories.

When he was alone in the apartment with Meg, they rarely spoke.

Sometimes he thought it was because they felt so utterly comfortable together, and yet at other times he wondered if something was bothering her under that opaque, attractive surface. Meg was a lousy cook, but she tried hard. Usually she’d make some variation on slightly scorched macaroni and cheese, sometimes with a few flecks of pastrami mixed in from her sandwich at noontime. She’d always make enough for two, and they would sit quietly at the table. He’d read the paper and she’d read some fat 19th Century novel. When she read, she wore light blue plastic framed glasses that kept sliding down and she’d absently point her index finger at herself, right between the eyes, and push them back up. It made her look momentarily cross-eyed. The bridge of her nose was wrong for the glasses.

She looked up suddenly one day and said “What, Tim?”

“Your nose.” He’d been staring across the top of his newspaper and noticed that she had a wide bridge, and the tip of her nose had an interesting almost middle-eastern downturn. She feigned annoyance but looked pleased at the attention. She returned to her book. “Different glasses, maybe, you wouldn’t have to push them up all the time.”

She had a melodious voice from somewhere deep in her throat. “Honestly, Tim, so I spend a second pushing them up. It's a big circus getting an exam, getting fitted, going back several times...who has time?”

He nodded at her logic, and she returned to her reading. She had bigger hands than Corie, he saw, and her skin was less fair, even counting Corie’s caramel tan. He was tired that evening and sat up listening to the radio in the dark of the living room. Meg went into her room and closed the door. After a while, the bar of light at the bottom of the door turned off as she must have gone to sleep.

Tim read a while, until he dozed off sitting in the plush chair by the window. He awoke to some noise from outside, found that the air had grown chill and damp. He rose, pushed down the window, and staggered off to Corie’s bedroom. He shut the door, felt his way through the darkness, and descended into the familiar world of her smell, her sheets, her perfume, the faint something that she brought with her—machine oil, cockpit leather, something. He felt a pang as he thought of her, and wished she were here with him. Was he falling in love with her? He hoped not. But he longed for her. So he fell asleep, with one arm sticking out into the air.

Sometime during the night he had a dream. He dreamt that Meg came in quietly, glowing in the moonlight, her gown like a lantern, very faintly, and the solid planes of her body like bluish shadows underneath. Her footstep was inaudible, made with solid feet with painted burgundy toenails cut straight across and chipped in a few places. She came in with her thick wrists and long fingers with their matching burgundy nail polish. She came in with her black hair hanging straight on both sides, slightly brunette at the edges. She slid in behind him, warming his back with her belly while her feet were cold against his legs and he curled up tighter. He felt her arms interlock around him, felt the pressure of her palms against the flat of her stomach, and heard her sigh of contentment. He smelled something vanilla on her breath, something stale also, something flat like old smoke, and smelled fresh shampoo in her fluffy still vaguely damp hair. She pulled up the sheets over them so it got warm, and he drifted off in her warmth as though he were drunk. This was what Corie must have meant. Meg held him to her like a stuffed animal and he slept soundly. And when he woke in the morning she was gone. But he knew it was not a dream because she had tucked him in a way that he never did, with the blankets and sheets doubled over under the edge of the mattress and on the spring.

He felt well rested and sat on the edge of the bed rubbing his beard stubble, and wondered if the bed’s warmth smelled more of Meg or of Corie. Shrugging, he shuffled off to the bathroom to brush his teeth and shave and shower. Along the way he saw that her door was a few inches ajar and her bed was tightly made and she was gone to work for the day.

A bad thing happened just when Tim was beginning to feel perfectly comfortable with Corie and Meg.

Once or twice he saw Corie around town when she was in one of her absences, and some instinct told him not to contact her. Perhaps she would not want him to. Then one day Tim became paralyzed with grief and fear when he saw her with a man who held her hand. They sat in a restaurant having coffee and pie. Tim happened to be walking near the Ferry Depot during this lunch hour, and just happened to see her blonde head through grayish gauzy lace curtains. She had that same sunny smile he knew so well, and he stepped close happily to greet her. Then his smile crashed away and his stomach lurched, for he saw her and a man inside—they had their heads together in some humorous affectionate conversation. The man, who was of medium height, slender build, foreign-looking by the cut of his suit and the length of his blond hair, put his hand over hers and whispered something intimate, to which she pealed with laughter—silently, from Tim’s perspective where he stood across the street almost urinating in his pants. Tearing himself away, Tim strode the whole distance back to work without stopping to eat at the lasagna shop where he’d planned to have lunch. He composed sermons in his head and pictured himself berating her angrily for deceiving him, but she had not deceived him, and when he saw her again two days later she seemed no different. She devoured him with greetings and kisses, and he melted back into her world feeling sick and beaten, but a prisoner of desire much as he’d been a physical slave of Nasr Tandileh in Mauritania. Rather than confront her, rather than ruin everything, he kept his wound hidden from her. He took his hurt inside someplace where he stored it with the other hurts of his life, like on a shelf in an antiquarian shop, but he became snippy and suspicious and followed her secretly sometimes, even when he wished he wouldn’t. He resolved to live minute by minute if necessary until the war was over and he had to leave from here when life got back to normal. He sought each other all the more passionately in bed, and she seemed both puzzled and pleased by his new attention. As he rocked in her breakers he felt it was all okay. For some reason, it was all just fine. She might not come back alive one day and he must swim in her bay, he must sun himself in her cove, he must play in her sand while he could. She stayed for a week this time, while Meg left them alone to the apartment—had Meg found a man of her own, finally?

He found out quite accidentally that Meg’s name was Naomi Meged. One of her names. Apparently she had several. Now that was strange. Both these women must be crazy. I must be crazy, he thought as he found Meg’s passport on the floor under her powder-blue blazer, which hung on a kitchen chair one day while she scrubbed the soiled collar of her blouse in the bathroom. Tim absently picked it up—a dark blue Canadian Commonwealth passport with her name on it and the insignia and regalia of the British Crown. It lay face down and he glimpsed its inside before laying it on the table. Her picture was inside, looking dim and pained like all passport snapshots. The name read Hasmig Saghome Varkidjian. He stared at it as she came out of the bathroom. No wonder she had an accent, however faint. What the hell am I doing here in this crazy situation?

“Staring at my secret life?” she said, startling him. She took the passport from him, grabbed his belt, and shook him in gentle admonition, without anger.

“Sorry,” he said. “Armenian?”

“How did you know?”

“I knew a watchmaker named Vasserian once. He told me most Armenian names end in that way. I’m sorry, it’s none of my business.”

“Just don’t talk to anyone about this, okay?” she said and walked away, leaving him wondering ever more.

Corie came from her bedroom just then and sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and the crossword puzzle. “What’s a bitter vetch?” she asked.

“Some kind of turnip,” Tim said. “From Armenia.”

Meg came back from her own bedroom, carrying a small greenish passport. “Tim, darling, if anyone ever asks, you do not know about the other passport. Look here, sweetie.” She waved the document. It had a gold-embossed half moon in front along with a star and a sword. “Turkiye, you understand? My name is Eyne Fatima Usluk, do you understand?”

He backed away slightly. “So which is it? Which are you?”

She made a sphinx face. “Neither.”

“I don’t understand, but it’s okay, right? One of those things we’re not supposed to know.”

Meg flipped the passport in her pocket. “Honey, don’t worry about it, please. I wasn’t born here, but I love this country, and I’m now as American as you are.”

Corie hardly looked up. “It’s okay, Tim. Just accept that we’re a little different, honey, okay?”

“As long as we don’t wind up in jail.”

“We won’t wind up in jail,” Meg said with a small grin to reassure him. The certitude did make him feel a bit better. “Guaranteed by Uncle Sam.”

“Promise!” Corie added, assuredly folding her hands together on the table. She looked pained.