The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything (2 page)

"Charla!" he said. And knew where he was, and why the girl's accent, though less than Charla's, had seemed familiar. Up until that moment he had thought himself in Montevideo. "Uncle Omar is dead," he said.

"Don't waste those sick codes on me, buster. I unjoined Charla's wolf pack ages ago. Little Filiatra changed her name and her outlook and her habits because she got sick up to here of all the cute, dirty, sick little tricks. I'm Betsy Alden now, by choice, and I'm a citizen and a good actress, and she gets me reinstated fast or I'm going to belt her loose from her cunning little brain."

"If you'd back away a little, I could think better."

She went to the foot of the bed and glowered at him. "Where is she?"

"Look. You seem to have the idea I work for her."

"Please don't try to be cute, friend."

"Honest to God, my name is Kirby Winter. I had a terrible day yesterday. I got drunk. I never met Charla until late yesterday some time. I didn't even know the rest of her name. I don't know who you are. I don't know where she is. I don't have the slightest idea of what you're talking about."

The girl stared at him, biting her lip. He saw the suspicion and the anger slowly fade away. And then she looked at him with cold, mocking contempt.

"So terribly, terribly sorry, Mr. Winter. I guess I just wasn't thinking. I should have guessed you wouldn't be on the team. You don't look bright enough. You do look more the fun and games type. Muscled and clean and earnest. But not even knowing her right name? My word! Charla must be getting really hasty and desperate. Isn't she a little elderly for you?"

Contempt was more distressing than her inexplicable anger.

"But I was only—"

"Check the bureau before you leave, Mr. Winter. She tips very generously, I've been told."

The girl whirled and left the room, slamming the door behind her. The slam re-echoed through all the brassy corridors of his hangover, and made his stomach lurch. Suddenly he was covered with icy sweat. He lay back and closed his eyes, wrestling the furry Angel Nausea. He wished the damned girl, in spite of her moral judgments, had had the grace to turn the lights off. He wondered if one could perish of thirst while being wracked with nausea. In a little while—in just a little while—he would get up and turn off the lights . . . .

There was daylight beyond the closed blinds. The room lights were off. He got up and found his way to the bathroom. He looked at his self-winding watch. It had stopped. He felt weak, rested, thirsty and ravenous. He looked into the mirror and saw his own mild and fatuous smile, blurred by a gingery stubble of beard. He wondered if he had merely dreamed the angry girl. And Montevideo. And the funeral. He was certain he hadn't dreamed Charla. He was totally certain of that. He remembered his inheritance and immediately felt chagrined and depressed. But he felt too good to stay depressed.

After the long shower, a shave with the new razor, and a minty scrubbing with an unfamiliar toothpaste, he knotted a big towel around his waist and went back to the bedroom. Someone had opened the blinds. Golden sunlight poured in. There was a huge glass of iced orange juice on the bedside table, and a note written in violet ink in a bold yet feminine hand on heavy blue-gray stationery embossed with the initials C. M. M. O'R. It looked like some odd abbreviation of Commodore, and he knew that the angry girl had not been something dreamt. Charla Maria Markosomething O'Rourke.

"Kirby, dear. I heard the shower and took steps. You must have been at the very end of your rope, poor thing. Little men are hurrying to you with a sort of care package. Your clothes have been bundled off, pockets empty, look on the dressing stand. Packages in the chair. I bought them by guess alone last evening before the lower level shops closed. When the animal has been clothed and fed, you'll find me on the sun balcony. I need not ask you if you slept well. Good morning, darling. Your Charla."

He looked out his windows. They faced east. The sun was more than halfway up the sky. The door to the main part of the suite was ajar. He picked up the phone and asked what time it was. "Twelve minutes after ten on a beautiful Sunday morning in Florida," the girl said pertly.

Twenty-seven hours in the sack, he estimated. He went to the chair where the packages were stacked. White nylon tricot boxer shorts, waist thirty-two. Correct. Rope sandals, marked L. Comfortable. Gray dacron slacks, cuffed. Perfect at the waist. Possibly one-half inch shorter in the inseam than he usually wore them. Close enough. One short-sleeved sports shirt with a button-down collar. Fine for size and styling. But the colors—narrow vertical stripes in gray, pale blue, coral and light yellow, each narrow stripe divided from the next one by a narrow black line, and the fabric was a lightweight silk. As he was buttoning the shirt there was a knock at the corridor door. Two uniformed waiters, deft, smiling, courteous, came in with a large clinking cart and quickly set up his vast breakfast, hot in the tureens, on the snowy linen. They had a Sunday paper for him. He tried to hide the fact he was salivating like a wolf. Everything has been taken care of, sir. Thank you, sir. If you need anything else, sir. He wanted them to go before he grabbed the eggs barehanded.

"Shall I open the champagne now, sir?"

"The what!"

"The champagne, sir."

"Oh. Of course. The champagne. Just leave it the way it is."

Not until he had nothing left but a second cup of coffee was he able to even pretend to look at the newspaper. And then he could not keep his mind on it. Too many other mysteries were unsolved. He turned and lifted the champagne out of the crushed ice. It was not a split. It was a full and elegant bottle. He was wrapping it in a fresh napkin when he noticed the two champagne glasses on the nearby tray-table.

How big a hint does a man need, he thought. He took the bottle and the glasses, and, feeling incomparably elegant, went off in search of Charla O'Rourke. He found one empty bedroom without a sun balcony. He found a second and much larger bedroom with open French doors facing the east. He walked, smiling, squinting, trying to think of some suave opening statement, into the hot bright glare. Charla was stretched out on her back on a wide long sun-cot of aluminum and white plastic webbing, her arms over her head. Sun had reddened the gold of her body. She was agleam with oil and perspiration. He stood and boggled at her, all suave statements forgotten. He tightened his grip on the champagne bottle just in time. She seemed to be asleep. At least she was breathing deeply and slowly. She wore three items—a ridiculous wisp of white G string, white plastic cups on her eyes, and a blue towel worn as a turban. He stood in an awed, oafish silence, aware of the sound of the ocean surf far below, of a drone of traffic on Collins Avenue, of faint music from somewhere. Not plump at all, he thought. Where did I get that impression? Firm as an acrobat, but just with more curves than there's room for. More than anybody should have.

She plucked the plastic cups from her eyes and sat up. She smiled at him. "Poor dear, you must have been exhausted!"

"Gahr," he said in a wispy voice.

"And you brought the champagne. How dear of you! Is something the matter? Oh, of course. The puritan syndrome." She reached for a short white terry jacket and put it on without haste. He found himself wishing she would button it and wishing she wouldn't. She didn't. "We spend so much time at Cannes, I forget your odd taboos. Now you may stop boggling at me, dear boy. Do you think I've had enough?"

"Gahr?"

She pressed a firm thumb into the honey-pink round top of her thigh. They both watched the white mark fade slowly. They watched it intently. "Quite enough, I would say," she said. "Some people find a dark tan quite attractive, but it does change the texture of the skin, you know. It becomes quite rough, comparatively." She rose lithely and walked by him and into the relative gloom of the big bedroom, saying, "Come on in, dear." He followed her, carrying the bottle and the glasses, his mind absolutely blank.

He did not see her stop abruptly when she was three steps inside the room. He did not see her stop and turn. His eyes had not compensated. He walked into her, and in the instantaneous impression of heat and oil and perfume of that impact, he dropped the bottle onto his foot. He saw her floundering backward, grabbed at her with the hand which had held the bottle, misjudged his distance, struck her rather solidly on a terried shoulder and knocked her over a footstool. She lit solidly and said something in a language he did not understand. Somehow he was glad he did not understand it.

She crawled over and retrieved the unbroken bottle and stood up. "If you'll stop hopping up and down on one foot, Mr. Winter, you can pour me a glass of champagne."

"I'm sorry."

"Thank God you didn't get playful until we got off that balcony, Kirby."

"Charla, I just—"

"I know, dear." She worked the wire loose, deftly popped the cork. The champagne, after the thump, foamed abundantly as she filled the two glasses. She put down the bottle, took one glass from him, looked speculatively at him as she sipped. "Instead of perfume, dear, bring me liniment, instead of jewels, bandages. Now fill my glass again and be patient while I tub this oil away. Could I trust you to scrub my back?"

"Gahr."

"No, we had best not risk that. Here's to caution, Kirby dear. Champagne is dripping off your chin. Wait for me in the next room, please."

He carried the bottle and his glass into the large sitting room of the suite, walking on knees as reliable as wet yarn. He sat down with care, emptied his glass and filled it again. He felt as if he had a permanent double exposure on the sensitive retinas. No matter where he looked, he saw Charla supine, foreshortened, in deathless Kodachrome, in an incomparable clarity of focus, a vividness of the great, round, firm, self-sustaining weight of breasts, with their buttery tan, the skin without grain or sag or flaw, the nipples a darker hue, large but not gross, aimed, slightly divergent, at the tropic-blue morning sky.

When he shook his head violently, the pervasive image blurred. When he shook his head again, the image slipped back and down into the cluttered warehouse of memory. It lay atop the rest of the debris, instantaneously available.

He heard the end of the metallic thunder of the water roaring into her tub, and as he fancied her stepping into it, he groaned aloud. O thank you, Uncle Omar. Thank you for instilling a helpless youth with such grave suspicions of women and all their works, that here and now, in my maturity, in my thirty-second year, I cannot confront a lovely and half-naked lady without getting cramps in my toes and saying gahr.

But he had the dim suspicion that such were the obvious riches of Charla that even a far more worldly man might have experienced a visceral tremor or two.

Considering the wretched paucity of his experience and the extent of his carefully concealed shyness, he marveled that when he had come upon her there, he had not merely given a mad cackle of laughter and vaulted the cement railing a hundred feet above the gaudy roofs of the beach cabanas.

He knew well the forlorn pattern of his increasingly compulsive search for sexual self-confidence. In this world that Hugh Hefner had made, he alone seemed forever bunnyless. And it was becoming less a matter of hunger than of pride.

He knew that women found him reasonably attractive. And he had laboriously developed that brand of semi-insinuating small talk which gave women the impression he was as accustomed to the casual diversion as the next fellow. But there was the damnable shyness to contend with. Where do you start? How to start? In situations where unattached women were abundant, he had developed into a fine art the knack of making each of them believe he was intimately concerned with one of the others.

Once in a great while he would finally overcome the shyness, turn into the final pattern for the attack on target, and then have the situation blow up in his face. He knew he was not a clownish man. It depressed him to look back on too many slapstick situations. One would think it possible for a man of dignity to approach a woman like Charla without suddenly, inadvertently, peeling her like a grape and hurling her over a bed. His face grew hot as he remembered.

It was, he suspected, because he tightened up in the clutch. With the bases loaded, two out, and a three-nothing count on the clean-up hitter, the rookie comes in, steps on the rubber, glares sternly at the batter—and drops the ball.

Sometimes nature intervened. As in the case of the earthquake. A man could begin to believe he was hexed.

Sometimes, as with Andrea last year in Rome, it seemed pure accident. He had rescued her from a yelping throng which had confused her with Elizabeth Taylor. The talk had been amusing. They were staying in the same hotel, on the same floor. She was alone, trying to recover her morale after a bad marriage and a messy divorce. It was understood, without words, that he would walk a dozen feet down the corridor and tap at her door and she would let him in.

The prospect terrified him. He had presented too glib and sophisticated a front. She would expect a suave continental competence, a complete and masterful experience. And it was rather much to expect of a fellow whose most recent—in fact, whose only affair—had taken place twelve years earlier in the back seat of a 1947 Hudson in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in a public park during a rainstorm with a noisy, pockmarked girl named Hazel Broochuk, and had lasted for about twelve incomparably clumsy minutes.

Though these were hardly the experience factors one would bring to an assignation with a woman who could be mistaken for Liz, he steeled himself to carry out the impersonation to the best of his ability. After a scalding bath, he donned his wool robe and marched up and down his room, fists clenched, jaw set. To the sound of trumpets, he turned toward his door, marched out into the corridor and firmly yanked the door shut. He yanked the door shut on a substantial hunk of the hem of the robe. The door locked itself. The keys were inside, on the bureau. Maybe in the world there were men of sufficient aplomb to go tap on the door sans robe. It certainly would reduce any areas of confusion as to the purpose of the small-hours' visit. But Kirby Winter was not one of them.