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

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

34.

June-July 1945

The language of gestures and silences sometimes speaks louder than that of words. Tim had effectively begun living with Corie and Meg. For a glorious few days, life was perfect. Corie was home from her travels, Meg seemed quietly upbeat, Tim’s work was quiet and uneventful, and for all of them the continued victories in the Pacific seemed to indicate that the world would soon be able to stop holding its breath. Life would return to normal. For a moment, time and space seemed to hang in suspension.

They went to movies together, arm in arm. They went shopping. The women would leave Tim to guard their paper bags while they strolled among the bright new counters of the trendiest department stores.

One night, they came back together, having had a few cocktails at the Drake. Laughing, they let themselves in, shooshing each other, and locked the door. Within minutes they were all dressed for the night and threw themselves on Corie’s bed. Tim was last, bringing a tray of drinks and pretzels. They laughed and huddled together while the radio played softly.

Outside, the city was a living and breathing entity that seemed to cry out gently in its dreams. The moon hung like a huge melon half-buried in clouds, showing its cratered underbelly to ships passing under the Golden Gate.

Meg lay back, yawning, and turned off the light on that side of the bed. Soon, Corie and Tim did the same, turning off the light on the window side.

They lay quietly, letting a cool night wind wash over them.

Soon, Meg’s slow breathing filled the air as she slept.

Tim reached quietly and ran his hand along Corie’s bare belly, up to her small breasts, down again, and she sighed contentedly, snuggling against him, raising one thigh slightly to invite his hand to further adventures. He crawled close and nuzzled his lips against her cheeks. He smelled faint tinges of lipstick, tobacco, and citrus on her breath. Her breath was heavy and irregular as she turned to him in the silvery moonlight. Her eyes were at one moment open wide with hunger, then closed as passion crept up on her like a drowning fluid. He stretched his body out, feeling hers stretched next to his, knee to knee, buttock to groin as she was slightly twisted, warmth to warmth, moist to moist, trembling to trembling. Their mouths sought each other and drank hungrily, tongues intertwining. His fingers roved over the topography of her slim little body.

Quietly, so as not to disturb Meg, Tim used his hand to part Corie a bit and enter her from behind. She moaned softly, stabbed by pleasure. Together they writhed in slow motion, very subtly, and the loudest sounds were the sighing of their skin on linen and the breath that rasped from their tortured mouths.

In time, Tim became aware of another touch, one that he at first, in the confusion of his passion, thought was Corie’s. Locked in pleasure with Corie, spooning, perfectly joined, he nonetheless felt the different touch of Meg’s heavier, bigger hand, practicing new calligraphies of sensation on his back. Meg pressed against him from behind, so that they three were now spooning. Meg’s breathing was hungry and out of control. Tim stopped in his movement for a few seconds, letting this new tide wash over him. Corie arched her back, still enjoying him in her, and reached back over him. Her fingertips brushed Meg’s fuller, heavier thigh, pulling her closer. Meg needed no urging, but pressed against Tim from behind. Now Tim found himself enclosed between walls of desire and sensation. Corie moaned softly and Tim felt electric waves running through her before she fell back, exhausted. All the while Meg, aware of Corie’s gratification, wrapped her arms tightly around Tim’s belly and pulled him backward toward herself, so that his rear rested in the softness of her belly and her hair tickled him.

Now a shift of ballet occurred. Corie turned, leaving him limp and cold, aching slightly from the friction of her gratification. Gently, as if in a dream out of the Arabian Nights, Tim turned in place so that he faced Meg. Meg held her hands up to touch his face. She looked beseechingly up into his eyes, afraid that he would reject, hoping he would accept. Now Corie wrapped her arms around him from behind, pressing her groin and thighs against his rear so that he nestled in the softness of her belly. Meg groaned, realizing that he wanted her now. Corie held him as if she were giving a gift to Meg. Tim ratified the dance of the three by seeking Meg’s mouth with his own. He felt hands on his key without knowing or caring whose eager but gentle fingers cupped him. Meg pushed him back into Corie while her tongue invaded his mouth with urgent demands. Tentative and exploratory, Corie’s hand reached around Tim’s ribs and her hand fastened on Meg’s breast, taking her nipples between childlike fingers that sought only to hold, as if a daffodil or a daisy.

This way, through the night, various architectures sprang up where there had been only the austere combinatorials of a man or woman lying alone, or a man and woman rustling together in the sheets. New complexities were possible that had not been there before. There was no text book. The movies did not offer guidance. Chocolate boxes were only for a boy and a girl. A thousand and one nights were not enough. The intoxicating richness became an addiction sweeter than any other.

None of them—not Meg, not Tim, not Corie—spoke of this new calculus.

Why should they? The world outside killed and made war. The world had no kind words for this love that was there between the three of them. There were no words, and words were not necessary. With the door locked, their secret was their precious secret, and nobody else’s.

Stan Kehoe, at the office, one day remarked casually: “I saw you with your two wives the other day.” Stan was bent over his engineering drawing board, fixing the shading on a Japanese hex nut done badly by a U.S. Navy civilian who probably didn’t care.

“Oh?” Tim froze and looked up. Cold ice water light poured in through the early morning window. A wrong word, a wrong ear—he could be court martialed, maybe jailed. The women’s’ fates would not be pleasant either.

Stan laughed. “Or is it sisters? Say, are you living with those two chicks?”

“We’ve become good friends,” Tim said carefully. His groin still tingled from the night before. “I grew up with a house full of sisters.”

“If you’re dating the red-head,” Stan said shaking his head as he returned to his drawing board, “maybe you could set me up with the juicy dark one.”

“She’s seeing someone, I’m afraid.”

Stan shook his head sadly. “Too many boys coming home. I’m having trouble latching up with any good ones anymore. You’d better work fast, bud, or you’ll be a swinging bachelor for the rest of your life.”

Tim laughed quietly. “I won’t lose any sleep over it. Say, what do you think about the Brooklyn Dodgers this season?” He changed the subject, and Stan went for it. Baseball was his passion, and he lit up as he abandoned the more awkward and painful topic of amatory conquest.

Nobody else ever made a remark in the weeks that followed. Tim was careful not to touch either of his women in public, or even to exchange a kiss. They, in turn, seemed like a pair of giggly girls as he watched them at the beach or in a store over a milkshake together, and he supposed someone looking at them for the first time might think they were small-town friends bringing their freshness to the big city.

It dawned on him, one afternoon when the women were away shopping together and he sat on the couch enjoying a hot cup of tea and reading a book, that he would miss them terribly when this ended. Did it have to end? Would they ever talk about things? What did one do in his situation? There was nobody to ask, nobody to talk to. The women did not let on whether they spoke about it between themselves.

Nights came and went with the same uneventfulness as breakfasts and dinners, workdays, trips to the store, rides along the beach with neon winking on and off on a sphinx-like lovely Meg or Corie face thrust against the car window and looking out over boulevards coming to life with America’s power and spending and the happiness of its people.

As he sat on the couch a week later, he reflected: had anyone in history ever been in this situation before? Did one marry both women somehow?

“I love you, Tim,” Meg said to him one night when they were alone. She lay facing him, head propped on her hand, elbow in the pillow. The fingers of her free hand traced through the hairs on his chest.

Corie said it too, one afternoon when they were alone together in the kitchen. He was eating cereal, in underpants and T-shirt, reading the nonsense on the back of a cereal box, when Corie crossed her arms around him from behind, in an X over his chest. She buried her mouth in his ear and whispered: “I love you, Tim.”

He said it to them, too, passionately, at odd moments.

Once they lay together in bed on a sunny Sunday afternoon listening to a baseball game on the radio. The game was right there in Kezar Stadium a mile or two away. Tim lay face down in the middle of the bed. The women lay on their backs, one on either side of him, and he had an arm under each. “I love you both,” he said, and they each reached up silently to stroke his arms in affirmation.

There was some conversation, too, of course.

One afternoon, while Meg was away visiting relatives out of town, Tim met Corie in the tap room at the Drake. In the darkness that smelled of beer and smoke, they sat together at a small table sipping beers and listening to a ball game on the radio behind the bar. “Feels almost like a date,” Corie whispered with a giggle.

“I want to marry both of you,” Tim said lightly.

“You can,” she said with dark humor. “What is this called? Duogamy?”

“Monandry? Doesn’t seem so important.” He stared dreamily into mysterious hieroglyphics made by water circles in the grime on the tabletop. They both knew, at that moment, it was impossible. How would one do such a thing? In some tiny town someplace? But then people knew all your business. He laughed. “You know, the three of us are country mice. We just don’t know how to behave in the city.”

She laughed and wrapped her arm around his, laying her cheek on his shoulder. He pressed his cheek against the top of her head, smelling soap bouquet mingled with sea air and aviation diesel in her fragrant tousle. He could have cried.

Another time, he was strolling arm in arm with Meg on the Embarcadero, enjoying a hot summer afternoon.

The air smelled of cotton candy, fried fish, gun smoke from a little shooting gallery, and kerosene from a Mexican woman fire-eater who awed the largely blond or brunet tourist crowd not only by her antics but by her exotic appearance. Meg always had a veiled something, Tim found, even when he felt close to her. She had a mystery. It was a wounded thing that lay cat-like in the slits of her eyes. She too was exotic. Where Corie’s pleasure was like the sun, Meg was like the moon—alluring, bright, yet full of shadows. By moonlight, a prick of a rose might draw blood but that cut would remain indistinguishable, just another dark tear oozing black liquid like shadows running from shadows.

“Do you feel trapped with us?”

“No. I feel...perfect.”

“Like it was meant to be?” She tightened her arm around his, pulling him closer into the curve of her waist. Her hand lay on his chest, her fingers playing in the sensitive skin under his larynx.

“I’m afraid if we talk about it, it will go away.”

“It will,” she said. “We must never talk about it.” She shook him gently. “You can go out with us one at a time. We won’t mind.”

He stole his hand over her behind under her loose shirt. “I like having you both sometimes.”

“Like a lion with his bitches,” she said in a low, satisfied voice.

“I don’t think lions have bitches. Lionesses, maybe. Or even lionelles.”

“Lady lions. Never forget we are ladies first and lions second,” she said in a loosely, playfully threatening tone. For an instant he thought she did look lioness-like while looking away in some supple body-lingo as the wind ruffled her dark hair.

“How do we do this?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Go on.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do we?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want us to.”

She was silent, considering the squiggles on the sea, the steam around the sun, the innocent screams of little girls with their cotton candy. Her eyes looked gray with uncertainty and some unknowable pain. “It would kill me now, for us not to.”

“How did you and Meg meet?” Tim asked on another day, when he and Corie were having a peanut fight in a Chinese restaurant near Presidio Park.

Corie’s hair bounced and she squealed as she ducked a peanut that sailed over her shoulder and ricocheted off the red plastic seat.

They looked around, noticed eyes on them, and settled down, hand in hand over the table, faces close together.

“I needed a roommate after I got here from England,” she said. “The Navy housing office fixed us up, and there we are. Almost a year ago.”

“That’s it?” he asked. He had a thousand questions. Had they ever been interested in women, in each other? Were there men? How did it all work? What were the answers to the mysteries?

She shrugged. The waiter brought wontons and steaming egg drop soup in small heavy white china cups. “Should there be more?” They ate silently, playing with each other’s feet under the table. “To answer your question, no, we never slept together before you parked your butt between us.” She nibbled on a wonton, getting soup on her nose. “Neither of us ever thought about being with another woman, and I don’t think either one of us would ever be interested. You are just special, I guess.” She trailed off, eating. After some thought she added: “I don’t think she ever had much in the way of love with men either. She was kind of bruised up from—“

“From?”

Corie looked down, wiping her nose with a napkin. “She will tell you if she wants to. She was married to a man in Turkey. Oh yes, Meg has traveled. She had some kind of big man over there, arranged by her family, and he beat her until she ran away. I shouldn’t tell you all this, but I love you both. She was going to have a baby, and he beat her. She lost the baby, and ran away.”

“Her family is in Armenia?”

“In Turkey. Armenia has been carved up between the Soviets and the Turks and whoever else over in that part of the world. My geography stinks.” She laughed briefly. “Meg lived in Napa most of her life like any nice American girl. Wine country. Northern California. The Armenians have money. They make good wine, her family. Then they sold her off to this Ismet creep.”

“Where is this creep now?”

“Somewhere back in Anatolia, probably figuring out new rackets now that he can’t smuggle guns to the Nazis and the Italians anymore. From what she told me, he’s that kind of guy.”

Tim nodded to himself slowly. He had wondered about that look Meg sometimes got. Mistrustful. That was the word.

“I would never hurt either of you,” he said.

She laughed in his face, as if throwing flowers. “We know!” If they were five years old, she would have run away just then, leaving him standing. Instead, they each fell silent and turned to eating their soup.

Sometimes they argued, too.

At one time or another, either Tim or Meg or Corie stalked silently from the apartment with pink cheeks and outraged eyes over some minor thing, slamming the door and leaving a wounded silence. The funny thing about it, Tim found, was that it was a lot like two people having an argument. No matter who was mad at whom, the three of them would then silently part, leaving each other alone, and only drift back together when the anger or the hurt had dissipated hours later. At worst, they slept in the same bed together without speaking or touching. That only happened two or three times in a matter of several months. How brief the days were. How fast time fled. Never more than a day went by that they were not back together, in the slow opiate of that heavy love between the glowing walls.

Corie or Meg were each away many a night. Then Tim would snuggle with his one woman and they’d fall asleep early.

Meg told him one Sunday morning when they had slept together alone, Corie being off on one of her trips: “Promise me, Tim, if you ever look back that you’ll never be angry at anything that happened.”

He looked up from his comic pages. “Sure.”

“You don’t know everything, and can’t know. It’s not important.” She toyed with her toast. Her fingertips glistened with butter, and crumbs stuck to them. “We are very sincere, Corie and I.”

“I am too.” He put his comic page down. “What?”

“Nothing. There is nothing I can say. Just trust that I love you, Tim. I have never loved a man like I love you.”

He sighed deeply, and sat forward leaning his elbows on the table. He rubbed his eyes with his hands. “Meg, I wish I could make time stop. I wish I could make it forever be like this.”

“I do too, but do you think it can, Tim?” For the first time, she looked more vulnerable than veiled.

“I want it to.” He reached across to take her hands. He always had this feeling there was a deeper secret—something terrible—many terrible things maybe—just under the surface, just out of reach. She started to cry. Big droplets ran down her round cheeks. Droplets pooled on her upper lip and fell among the crumbs in her egg on her plate. He massaged her thick little fingers with his own. “Trust. Now we are in love, the three of us, and we can hurt each other. So we have to trust. I have everything I could ever want with the two of you. Am I enough for you?”

She nodded.

“And for Corie?”

She shrugged and made a not-knowing shake of the head.

It was a terrible moment, because it made him wonder if he would love either one of them alone as much as he loved both, and he knew the answer was no. It was a cold, terrible realization. Then he grew angry and guilty with himself, as he often did. How dare he do this, when it was against all the regulations and dictates of the world he lived in? He remembered that dreadful Moulay or whatever his name had been, who had kept him chained to a wall. Was this the kind of world he and these women were creating for themselves? No, dammit. There must not be justification, explanation, philosophy, guilt, a lot of stupid talk. This was how it had been willed to be, and it was good. He could love either woman for herself, alone, as a man loves his wife or his girlfriend, and it was just different, that was all. Is a large cup any more full than a small cup? This was a very large cup fate had placed before him, and he wanted to drink from it every day as fully as possible, without a lot of dumb questions, in case it ran dry the next day. Or in case it broke, as cups sometimes do.

The cup broke one afternoon when he left work early because the building’s power failed and the boss sent everyone home.

He heard laughter as he walked into the courtyard, and recognized Meg’s voice. He quickened his step to catch the two women—not stopping to wonder why they were home at this hour—and then he froze with ice wrenching his gut. They were with a tall, blond man in a fine suit, who held one of them on each arm as he strode through the courtyard with them. They looked up at him and laughed, much as they did with Tim, and in a flash the three of them were gone through the small passage amid the ivy.

Like a wounded lion, Tim charged after them. Heart pounding in his throat, world collapsing around him, he followed the sound of their laughter, the sound of the man’s seductive voice, and trailed them out onto the next street. There, he emerged just in time to see them climbing the steps of a large building together. They were still arm in arm.

For hours, days it seemed, Tim prowled the streets in rage and pain.

He did not go back to the apartment. The V/BOQ awaited him with its cold and noise nocturnal charms. Its mop-wielding, singing black men sang in sublime voices that echoed like those of monks in some cathedral. The V/BOQ awaited with its communal toilets and silent shaving men and small snarling arguments over a soap dish or a too-loud radio. It was a monastery of shared cigarettes, a dirty joke filled with empty desire, or contempt for the unreachable. He did not return to the apartment that night, but came to gather his shaving gear and leave a note saying he was working a lot of overtime and would be in touch. Any other woman, he would have said goodbye with a short bitter speech. This thing, he wanted to leave open a door to his pain, not close it all off forever yet, the amputation was too severe, the shock would kill the corpus.

He had time now, and began to skip an hour or two at work. Nobody cared much since it was all under control and he was now section chief. His boss didn’t ask questions as long as he showed up for the daily and weekly briefings and Admiral Lemney was happy. So Tim was free to roam, and roam he did. He reverted to his London skullduggery. He became almost feral in spirit. He could not rest.

He researched the history of the Hotel Auger. No surprises. Government contract, bought out by the United Nations commission in early 1945 to house diplomats. Other housing for diplomats: every spare hotel room, every spare apartment in San Francisco. The Charter foundation was holding its meetings here beginning in April, with the declarations to be made in late June. The city was filled with men in turbans, men and women of all colors speaking all languages, even men who looked like the recent goose-stepping enemy. Tim recognized the Moorish and Almavodar rulers of North Africa, men from the past who continued to recklessly hunt rare predators on the beach and trade in human slaves, while making hollow pledges in this city of the future.

Meg and Corie left messages at the V/BOQ desk for Tim, and he did not return them. Instead, he made contacts, phone calls, visits. He kept bumping up against secrecy and security connected with the gathering union of the world’s nations, particularly since the President himself was due to participate in the launch a few weeks off. Slowly, carefully, he probed, and found there was indeed a Hasmig Saghome Varkidjian who worked as a receptionist with the Armenian consulate, but she was never there when he phoned, pretending to be with a delivery shop. He offered a vague description of her, and was told yes, that sounded like Miss Varkidjian. Young, attractive, dark-haired, shapely in a solid way. Likewise, there was an Eyne Fatima Usluk attached to the Turkish delegation as a receptionist. Young, attractive, dark-haired, shapely in a solid way.

He trusted nobody by now, and checked everything he could. He found out that there was indeed a Captain Corinthia Johnson, WAFS, assigned to the Presidio Naval Station, but attached for duty to some outfit in Oakland, and he got lost in a maze of acronyms, numbers, and gobbledygook, as he expected he would. He could not track down pay, billeting, or other allowances information through the Bureau of Personnel or the pay office.

He hated himself for doing so, but he began to shadow them. More than once, he thought he wasn’t the only one. Once it was a dark glance from some guy in a slowly passing car, looking him over as if eyes were knives that could carve flesh. Once it was an attractive, tall black woman with both hands in the pockets of her long brown coat and her chin tucked down so that he couldn’t make out her features under a tightly-wrapped yellow kerchief. Once it was a policeman keeping pace on the opposite side of the street. Another time, a rainy afternoon, he recognized Corie and the blond man on a street downtown, speaking with a tall, thin, urbane looking man in a suit whose face looked familiar. It took Tim a few moments to place the face, from newspaper accounts—the Acting Secretary General, the first leader, of the United Nations. Was this affair of such great consequence? Tears and rain blinded Tim as he stood watching.

At one point, he followed Meg from a United Nations office building to a long black car with Bulgarian insignia on its diplomatic license plates. He took a taxi and followed—right back to Nob Hill, around the corner from the Hotel Auger. He watched Meg emerge from the car in the company of that same blond haired man. The car, driven by a chunky dark-haired man with heavy beard shadow, sped off. The blond man put his arm around Meg, hand on her buttocks, nearing the stairs to that building on the other street.

Tim got a cup of coffee in a large cup and waited on a bench in a small park halfway up the street for hours. Fog rolled in—a light fog that coated everything with tear drops and made him shiver in his damp clothing. He waited, stepping from foot to foot, while wisps of fog drifted silently around the street lamps and etched gargoyle horrors in darkened windows.

He saw Corie emerge from the ivy tunnel. He saw her blondish hair and quick gait. She wore white high heeled shoes, a right flowery dress whose hem crossed her mid calf, a hat with a feather, white gloves, a matching little purse. She strode to that doorway, rang a bell, and was buzzed in.

Tim waited. And waited. By one a.m., after he’d spent five hours standing around, it became clear that both women were spending the night.

He stood in the street alone and wretched. What had he done to get himself into this hell? Was it even possible that he was hallucinating and none of this was happening? He’d been betrayed somehow, but unless he could figure out why, nothing else made sense. Maybe he’d been used; but that too didn’t seem possible.

As he left work the next day, he heard a woman call out his name. “Tim!”

Standing across the street among throngs of pedestrians was Anna Stokowska in a dark uniform.

Tim crossed over. “Hey, what a surprise.”

She glowed. “Tim, I couldn’t believe you would be so easy to find.”

They embraced, and he felt the familiar long curve of her back, the tight spirals of her rear. She smelled good. He inhaled the scent of a light milled soap and a touch of floral perfume full of mystery and enticement. He buried his nose in her neck, inhaling deeply in her linen blouse collar.

“Whoa!” she said jauntily, under her WAVE cap. “You’ve been doing without! Kind of hard to believe.”

He shrugged, looking upward. “War is unbelievable. What have you been up to? How did you get into the U.S. Navy?”

“I’m getting U.S. citizenship,” she said holding her purse before her as they walked slowly. “I have to confess, I met a fellow after you left, an American Navy type who reminded me a bit of you, and that started the wheels rolling. But, you know how it is with sailors.”

“I can imagine.”

“Oh, you sailors are all alike.” She pushed his shoulder lightly.

He winced, remembering his own departure. “Let me guess. He broke your heart.”

“Oh that was already broken, Tim. But I’m pretty game. I knit, sew, darn, whatever it is, and put it all together. His name is Harry, and he is a very senior Captain.”

“Still in England?”

“Yes. He didn’t want to leave his wife, it turned out. I didn’t know there was a wife, but darn it, I should have known. He’s a sailor. So, anyway, I already had the papers in, the Navy was happy to get me.” She pointed to the gold bars and the coil on her epaulet. “Made me a Lieutenant right off the bat, because I have a strong background in treating burns, and there are so, so, so many terrible burns in modern war.”

“Yeah.”

She winked. “Yeah?” she imitated him in a deep voice. “Is that all you can say?” She did the deep voice again: “Yeah, baby.”

He laughed. “I’d forgotten you have that dry humor.” He offered his arm and she took it. “Can I invite you to dinner?”

“I’d be delighted.”

“I promise never to hurt you again.”

“Oh, it’s okay. You weren’t in love with me, and that’s okay. I had no right to tie you down with my silly dreams and all. Silly, that’s all it was. I think I’m a lot more worldly now.”

“I’m sorry, Anna.”

“Don’t fret about it. Buy me a nice hamburger or something.”

He did. Then they rented a hotel room down the coast, south of Half Moon Bay, and he felt an odd sense of moving on as they walked on the same beach where he’d walked with Corie several months ago—or was it weeks? Funny how time slipped by in different quanta for different purposes. Long wavelengths for bad times, short wavelengths for good times, and all gone before you had time to register.

They talked about her hopes and dreams in the United States, while he stayed noticeably quiet about his. “I might settle out here,” he confided. The thought had been boiling up for a long time, and he wondered how he would manage the longing for his family back in New Haven.

“I hope you’ll call me,” she said as they walked together holding hands and picking seashells on the beach. Gulls cried and whirled. Surf scrolled in.

“Of course, Anna. I can’t stay away from Navy nurses.”

“There is one thing,” she said.

Of course, he thought, there is always one thing.

“My friend. The guy I almost married? He’s been assigned here too. I don’t know what I’m going to do if he calls me.”

“You’re still in love with him? And he’s still married?”

“I don’t know. If he’s still married, I’ll never speak with him again.”

In a way, Tim felt relieved. He wasn’t about to fall in love with Anna. He felt comfortable with her, and the idea of her sleeping with or waiting for another man did not bother him so violently, now that he’d been through this thing with the Auger twins, as he'd begun calling his former harem.

They left the rest of her thought unspoken, and ran together, chasing each other in the cold wet brown-sugar sand, laughing.

They spent Friday night and Saturday night in a motel park, then went for a long drive further south toward Santa Cruz. There, they ate lunch at a seafood shack on Almar Avenue, with outdoor tables, and went for a long walk along West Cliff Drive and out onto the ocean view point before heading back into San Francisco. It was about all Tim could take, in his present state of mind. She did not press him. They did not make love, but promised to call one another sometime soon.

Monday morning, late, the phone at the office rang and he picked up. “Nordhall.”

“Tim.” It was Meg, breathless.

He hung up.

At noon, Meg waited for him across the street. She wore a plain white dress and carried a brown purse. Her dark frizzy hair was brushed pack into a rouge fan, Asian style, and her mouth had a bitter touch of red lipstick, like blood, like violence. Her face was lovely but inscrutable. He wanted to turn and walk the other way, but some magnet pulled him toward her. He wanted to shake her and yell: Why have you done this to me? But instead he walked beside her on the crowded sidewalk in the noon heat.

“We have to talk,” she said.

“I don’t know why.”

“It’s important. I could have people come and make you listen to me, Tim, but this isn’t like that.”

“I believe you could do anything,” he said bitterly.

“You said you loved me,” she said, sighing in pain and resignation.

“I said that. So did you.”

“Please. Let’s go where we can talk.”

“Oh what the hell!” he said, kicking a crumpled paper bag aside.

Without touching her, he followed alongside as she led him up the street, around a corner, down an alley, and into a dark back apartment overlooking an Asian style garden.

Two Chinese women carrying large ceramic pots nodded to her, and she spoke briefly with them in a language Tim could not fathom. They were in the back of a Chinese restaurant, and he saw sweating men, cheap labor, hefting huge noodle pots while sweating in a back kitchen. The place smelled of Asian food and cooking oils.

Meg led him into a small gloomy room containing a bamboo table, two chairs, and a little table with a potted rubber plant on it. The décor was Mandarin. A window overlooked a tiny courtyard that could have been in Shanghai or Mongolia, for all that Tim knew.

They took seats opposite each other. Meg laid her purse aside and lit a Pall Mall. She offered, and he accepted. They smoked silently together, Tim feeling light-headed from the unaccustomed tobacco.

A young Chinese woman with a beautiful face came, with a veiled look and averted eyes, bearing a stack of bamboo wicker plates, covered. One by one she removed the lids, revealing dishes with rice, marinated ginger, a dozen exotic treats. A man brought steaming green tea. A child laid white linen napkins and chopsticks before Tim and Meg, and then they all withdrew, leaving Tim alone with Meg.

“I know you have been investigating,” Meg said. “I was afraid to involve you in my business, but you have left no choice.”

Tim picked without appetite at a shrimp lacquered with sweet and sour sauce.

She said: “I don’t expect you to believe me, but I love you very much.”

“Maybe we mean different things when we say love.”

“I know you are deeply hurt, Tim. I am too, though maybe you will never believe me. And I cannot tell you what I am doing, no matter even if it means losing you, and that would be very painful for me. I have suffered some very painful things in life, but losing you would be a new one.”

“Okay.” He slapped his chopsticks down. “I’m not going to be petty and childish and say hurtful things. I’ll listen.” He looked at his watch. “I have half an hour to be back at work.”

“You have all the time you need,” she said. “You have time to wander around and make phone calls, Tim.” Her voice broke. “I’m not going to say childish things either. You deserve to be angry. You deserve to be hurt. I deserve to be the object of your anger and pain. I make no excuses.”

They sat silently smoking over their untouched food. Once in a while, they sipped tea. Out in the garden, a frog chirruped. It was like letting your eyes get used to the dark. This was a matter of letting your ears get used to the silence. You heard the whisper of wind in grass, the splash of water in a tiny fountain, the flutter of a bird’s wing in a tree—all very chilly in this shade, despite the hot day.

“Tim, my name is really Naomi Meged, and I am a Jew from Iraq.”

Nothing would have surprised him, even if she’d said she was from Venus.

“I am all the things I’ve said. I am also Armenian, I have a Turkish name, and I am in love with you.”

“I’m in love with you too, but that doesn’t stop me from seeing you, over and over again, walking up the stairs with Herr Heil Hitler or whatever his name is, to stick his—“

She picked a shred of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. Her eyes glittered with tears and humiliation. “Yes, Tim, I want to be honest with you, just as I am honest in saying I have never loved a man as I love you. That man is a Soviet agent, and I let him stick his thing in me. It’s not that I want him or care about his ugly implement. It makes me sick to lie there and let him do it. I could be killed for telling you this, but he is a very high ranking agent, and the Soviets are screwing the United States night and day while we go about eating hamburgers and having a good time thinking we have won the war and we are so great. I’m a spy, Tim. I am spying for the United States, sleeping with our enemy, now trying desperately to help save China from falling to the Communists.”

Tim was still reeling from her admission that Herr Commie had been putting his implement in her, and he barely registered that she wanted to save the world. At the same time, there floated a memory to the surface, of England, of a beautiful young aristocratic woman who had sacrificed her personal honor and dignity to save her nation. It had seemed to theoretical, so abstract, so unreal at the time.

“Tim, the United Nations conference will be over in a few weeks and this guy will go back where he belongs. If it makes you feel any better, he doesn’t even know my name. He doesn’t really care, because he thinks I am a simple secretary making some extra cash on the side as a call girl.”

Along with my ditzy little red-headed girlfriend, Tim thought for her.

She laughed bitterly, continuing her thoughts. “I prefer it that way. I wouldn’t want him to think he is laying Naomi Meged. Or any fine Turkish or Armenian girl.”

“And Corie?” Tim asked.

“I recruited her.”

Tim felt a blow. The full dirty reality was becoming plain. She looked seedy but honest, desperate but brave, hard but wounded, as she confessed that part of the truth he needed to hear. “This man likes duets. It’s the least of my concerns. We had another one in Ankara who liked to maim girls, and I personally shot him to death when he hurt one of my friends.” She picked a speck of tobacco from the tip of her tongue, the way she had plucked the man’s life out of his body. Her eyes watered, but it was from cigarette smoke. “I came up the stairs to check on her, in this place where he was renting a room while on garrison duty. I found her on the floor in a pool of blood. She later died. He was still going at it, stark naked, when I came in the room from behind and put the gun by his head. He thought I was joking and he actually laughed, tried to brush the gun aside while holding his thing with the other hand. That’s when I fired for the first time. It was an old French 8 mm. Lebel revolver. It wrecked his shoulder and he staggered back in shock, holding the shoulder with his good hand, and shielding his privates with the other, dangling hand. I was going to blow his privates off as he stood there facing me, and he could see I was deadly serious. He wasn’t laughing anymore at all, but I didn’t want to stoop to his level. I remember slipping on the girl’s blood. He had used a kitchen knife on her down below. He backed up to the window yammering hysterically. I can still see his black hair hanging down into his forehead. He had a nice cleft chin with lots of blue beard on his jaws on and in his chin. His eyes were dark brown or olive green with a flat bluish haze in them. He had one brown tooth and a few missing teeth. I saw by his uniform he was an infantry captain, and his partial denture lay on his medals. I had a clean shot through the head and put him right out the window head-first. He landed in the alley below. There was blood and brains on the wall of the opposite house. I threw his dentures after him as well as the gun, and then I ran like the wind to a Kurdish safe house where they knew me and took me in.” She lit another cigarette, and sipped tea in quick nervous gestures. “It’s clear you must never think about these things. If you can do that, I will finish with the spy business and become your woman.”

“And Corie?”

“She loves you also.” She shrugged lightly. “So, it’s simple. We solve this problem the only logical way. You take us both. We give ourselves to you.”

Tim felt breathless and graced. He knew he wanted them back. He understood that Claire Denby had sacrificed part of her soul, and so had Meg and Corie, so maybe he could too.

“We’ll keep you warm at night and give you pleasure.” She saw his pensive, distraught look and darkened with concern. “Tim, she and I were just friends until we met you. She was just a tool at first, but I grew to like her, to love her as a friend, not as a lover. You came along and it all fell into place. Now we’ll finish with this Alger Hiss and his American and European friends, to say nothing of this randy Ferenc we’ve been depleting of information, and then it’s over forever.” She bit her lip. “Not many men could accept it, which is why I didn’t want to tell you.” She puffed hungrily on her cigarette, filling the air around her with smoke.

He wondered how much of her soul Meg still retained, and then reproved himself, thinking probably she had more soul than most people to begin with and could thus afford to lose a few square yards of it.

“Can you understand it, Tim?” She stared beseechingly at him through smoke-teary eyes. “This is war, my love. We are soldiers.” Her face looked swollen and her lips trembled. “Can you forgive?”

His tongue felt thick and wouldn’t let him say anything, but he nodded. She put her hands over his and looked devoutly into his eyes. He stared at her hands, deciding if he could go back to her after this, and started rubbing her hands because they looked plump and sweet.

They settled into a stunned, painful silence. Meg sipped tea, stubbed her cigarette out, and lit a new one. “Corie flies her planes and hardly has a second thought about what she does.” She leaned close. “Tim, she loves you. She is crazy about you, and she cries at night. Won’t you come back to us?” Tears dribbled down her cheeks. “I just want you back, Tim. I would have liked to explain everything to you. I would have preferred not to have to do what I am doing, but my life was ruined by my dirty old husband when I was still very young.” She sniffled, and rubbed her palm down her cheek, trailing mascara and tears. “In a way, what I do is an act of revenge. For a long time I hated these men and used them while they used me. One man, Hofmann, an SS captain, actually fell in love with me and left his wife; I kept toying with him, rejecting him and taking him back, taunting him by telling him I was Jewish—recklessly, because he might have turned me in—but I hurt him more; I drove him to commit suicide in Aix-en-Provence and then turned all his secrets over to the Free French. The maquis wiped out his entire section using some of that knowledge. Then...” She wiped her eyes. “...I had my revenge and I no longer hated these men. I just use them, the way a pocket knife slices cheese at a picnic. Until I realized how I have hurt you, it meant nothing to me.” She gripped his hands and sobbed: “We must finish our business here. It will be over soon, Tim. We could go away after it’s over, Tim, you and I and Corie...”

“You have to tell me everything,” he said.

“I can’t, Tim.”

“Why?”

She shook her head.

“Is it worth it?”

She nodded. “Yes.” She imprisoned his hands in hers. “There really is a shining star at the end of the road, called Israel. I will probably never see it, but hope was enough for Moses so it must be enough for me.” She swallowed hard, stroked his hand. “But enough now. That’s all you need to know. It could be dangerous otherwise.”

Weakening, knowing he would not win this round, he said: “I just want to know what I’m stepping into if I even set foot in that apartment again.”

“You just need to know that we both love you.” Her hands felt warm around his, and he closed his eyes, remembering suddenly how good it had felt to be loved by them. “You need to know nothing more.”

“What a fool I am,” he whispered out loud. He was going back to them, and she knew it.

She pressed his hands between hers. “Just believe this when I tell you. I would do anything in this world for you. I would go anywhere. Believe this when you hear it from Naomi Meged: I would die for you.”

That evening, he sat in the tiny crow’s-nest living room of the familiar Hotel Auger, listening to the city breathing and laughing under its eaves.

Corie was away on some secret flight. The apartment was semi-dark, except for a candle flickering orange in a corner. Fresh air blew in, stirring the curtain and the candle.

Meg wore a silk Middle Eastern dress, and served him a tray of sweets and hot tea. She knelt on the floor and took off his shoes and socks. She brought a bowl of hot water with salts, and massaged his feet in it until he almost peed his pants. She wiped his feet dry with a clean washcloth. She put the washcloth, the bowl, and the tray aside. “Words tomorrow,” she said softly. “Explanations will follow. First, the important things to catch up on.”

He started to rise toward her, to embrace her, because he'd missed her.

She pushed him back firmly, and he fell back against the cushion. She unbuttoned his pants, took him out, and put him in her mouth. Then, with her moist warmth wrapped around him, her teeth like tiny soft octopus suckers around it, she pushed his shirt open, fumbled with the buttons, opened it, and teased his nipples with her fingers. He moaned, resting his hands on her head, enjoying the feeling of her frizzy hair on his fingertips. His fingertips read the bony contours of her cheeks, her temples, her motile jaws like Braille as she worked noisily on him. When he was about to come, she held him away from her and licked underneath. She looked pale, Oriental, the Asian that she was, from that massive continent whose eastern mouthful she wanted to save for the Kuomintang.

When he moaned and thought he could not take any more, she hiked up her dress and straddled him on the couch. Knees against the wall, she pressed her fur against his chin and let him find with his tongue the cleft that ran down the side of her peach. With her index fingers she held the stem of her apple for him to find, while with her other fingers she held apart the slices so he could taste the mother bed of its seeds. His tongue found the architecture of her deep offering, under the stem the tiny lubricated openings of what flows out and the tight doorway offering entry to that which wants to go in. She used one hand, palm splayed against the wall beside her transfigured face, to support herself and the other hand to help him find what he needed. Finally, he pushed her down, and it went in one movement, she landing on him offering no resistance or sound as he penetrated her gate whose threshold she had washed with welcomes.

In the dawn light, they lay together on Corie’s bed, and he had already made up his mind not to go to work today. It would be the first time he’d called in sick, and he was not worried that anything would be left undone.

“There is a lot going on,” she told him. “The whole world is being made over. I only know a very tiny part of it. I do know that there are deals being made about how the world will be put back in order after the war, and I happen to wish that there will be a state for the Jews where we sprang up thousands of years ago. That’s just a tiny part of it. The Soviets and the British and everyone else have spies throughout town, but nobody as many as Stalin. He wants everything, and someone has to stand in the way, even if Truman and his people are too naïve to fight now before it’s too late later.” She rubbed his eyebrows, his cheeks, kissing each spot that her fingers brushed. “This man, whose name you do not need to know, is a very high person with the Bulgarian delegation, and they are in Stalin’s pocket. This man thinks we are just fancy bimbos, and he thinks he is in a safe, private place. The truth is that there are microphones and taps every inch in every room, and he keeps making phone calls that our people are listening in on.” She nursed him gently, kissing the thoughts on his forehead. “If this were the Arabian Nights, you would not think twice about running away with two lovely courtesans, would you? If this were Topkapi, you would love to steal away two of the Sultan’s finest houris, wouldn’t you?” She pinched his nipples gently, twisting them in mock cruelty.

He pulled her face close to kiss her cheeks. “I can’t bear the thought.”

“I know, darling, but I will make it up to you for as long as you want me. This is just a droplet of time in an ocean we can spend together. I was married once. Oh yes, I know, I am tainted. I am divorced. I am a fallen woman. I was brought up in fine boarding schools with nuns, thinking I was Christian, and then married off to a slime in Istanbul who had three other wives and needed a fine Armenian virgin. I was 18 years old and wanted to go to college to study a thousand intelligent things, but my father was from the old school and made me go to Istanbul. To top it off, we’re Jewish, and the other women always wanted to humiliate me because they were Muslims and they weren’t sure if they disliked me more for being Christian or Jewish. Then...” her voice took on a dreamy quality...”I was going to have a child, and he beat me so badly that I lost it in the sixth month. It broke my heart, I cannot tell you...”

He put his hand over her mouth. “Shh.”

They looked at each other, she a poor houri whose tears welled up over the prison of his hand and then fell down the bars of his fingers.

He felt as though he must be crazy, but he said: “I will stay with you if that is what you want.”

She went to the bathroom to wash her face and came back to snuggle beside him an American girl suddenly. “Thanks, Tim.”

“Where is our other lover?”

“Corie.”

“Yeah.”

“She is flying a crate into Montana. That’s what she said.”

“She talks like a man sometimes.”

They both laughed.

“She’s such a pilot,” Meg said.

“How did you ever talk her into this Bulgarian adventure?” The thought of it made him sick, but he remembered floating in the ocean after Sturmer went down. Everyone but he had died. Now seemed again a time to go along with the tide, and hope it would put him on a solid shore.

Meg said: “Corie comes from a straight laced little Protestant town in the middle of Kansas someplace, like Toto and the Tin Man. I found her, befriended her, developed her as material, and got her involved in this trade. She thought it sounded like a grand adventure, though it’s caused her many tears by now. In the end, we became true friends, and now that you are here, we are something much more. You came along, we all found each other, and she told me that it seems natural. Neither of us was ever interested in a woman. Without you in bed, we stay in our separate places like any two normal girls. With you, it feels good so she’ll do it. Not when we are alone; just when you are between us. That is the flight plan.”

“That sounds like Corie,” he said.

“She’s a pilot.”

“She’ll fly any crate if it’s the right one.”

They laughed and fell asleep.

Tim awakened in the late afternoon to the sound of something: screams, sunshine, a puppy?

Confused, he struggled for balance as the bed jumped up and down and something pink flashed. “Tim! Our Tim! You came back to us!”

Corie.

He took her in his arms and pulled her to him. She wrapped herself around him and flooded him with kisses. He was surprised how strong and wiry she was for a small woman. She stayed on top, naked to begin with, and wrapped herself around him, enveloping him in her flower. He felt like a bee, trapped in the nectar inside an orchid or some exotic jungle blossom. But it was only her pink Protestant Kansas waterfall, wrapped around his trunk of life, and together they rocked up and down making their own storm and taking comfort from it.

Meg meanwhile stood in the kitchen in a filmy shift, a cigarette dangling from a corner of her mouth and making her eyes water while she made crepes with an orange-mushroom-chicken sauce. As Corie and Tim whispered in the living room, the house filled with the smells of sautéed onions and garlic as well as batter and smoke. And coffee. As evening fell, the windows stood open to the damp breeze, the radio poured out toothpaste swirls of rich band tunes, and it was all the way it should never have stopped being.

Except that the two women still had their mission. Houris. He might start drinking heavily if this didn’t stop soon.

Meg slept soundly in her own room with the door closed.

Tim and Corie danced together in the living room and then sat on the pillow and drank martinis.

“I would never think of sleeping with a woman,” Corie said.

Tim cradled his martini, sitting opposite her. “Uh...”

“Meg told you about our adventure with that slimy Ferenc.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t wait to be done with it.” She paled in her outburst and slammed her hand down. “Never again!”

“I made up my mind to...” Tim sought the right way to say it, and she waited. “...To wait for you two, no matter. Just get the affair over with as quickly as possible.”

“Then you’ll stay with us.” She seemed relieved. “We are perfect together, we three. I hope it always stays like this. Tim, you won’t leave us again, will you?”

He shook his head. “I’m going to learn not to ask questions.”

“It’s one of those war things,” she said earnestly.