Till We Meet Again (44 page)

They were in the dining room as she quietly left the house, putting her door key and the key to Eve’s car on the table by the front door. There was no irresolution as Freddy hitched a ride to the San Fernando Valley. She knew where she was going, and three-quarters of an hour later she found herself walking the last few hundred yards to the small house near the Dry Springs airport where McGuire lived. She’d never been there, but she’d memorized the address.

It was almost dark by now, yet no light showed in the house. However, the garage was brightly lit, and as she approached, Freddy could hear whistling and the sound of a hammer. Mac, his brown hair falling forward until it touched his long lashes, was busy rebuilding one of his latest finds, a rare, twenty-year-old Fokker D.VII with an Iron Cross painted on its tail and another on the long, delicate fuselage. War movies were often shot with Curtiss Hawks and M.B.3’s disguised as Fokkers, but nothing equaled the real thing, and the genuine ships had become more and more valuable since Howard Hughes had used up most of them in
Hell’s Angels
.

Mac’s large collection of planes from the Great War, which had grown steadily in the past six years, was used and reused constantly, for no ship ever had to die, as long as all of its parts weren’t in splinters after a crash. McGuire employed several assistants now, just to care for the planes, but on a difficult job he preferred to do the work himself.

Freddy put down her suitcase and slouched matter-of-factly into the garage, her hands nonchalantly thrust into the pockets of her leather jacket.

“Hi, there, Mac. Need some help?”

He put down his hammer with an astonished bang. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“The alternative was to check into a hotel by myself. That didn’t seem like a swell idea.”

“You’ve left home?” he said incredulously.

“I was asked to leave. Thrown out. ‘Never darken my door again’—that kind of departure.” Freddy spoke with bravado and a grin that would have fooled anyone else.

“Just a minute. What’s going on? Your parents would never throw you out alone at night. What did you
do
to get into this mess?”

“I told them that I’d decided that I wasn’t going to college. I couldn’t cut it, Mac, I really couldn’t. The thought of the whole thing made me feel as if I were buried alive in library dust. It’s just not for me.”

“Christ,” he said disgustedly, “talk about overreaction. I can understand that they’d be disappointed, naturally, but to treat you like it was the end of the world—that’s plain silly.” He put away the hammer and turned off the garage lights. “Come on over to the house, kid, and you can tell me all about it. I’m sure that you can work it out with them without all this melodrama. Do they know where you are?”

“No. They didn’t ask and I didn’t tell them.”

“Well, I’m going to let them know so they don’t worry … but first let’s talk about it.”

He picked up her suitcase, led her to the dark house, and turned on the lights in the living room. “Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Want a Coke? No? Well, I’ll have to drink alone, then.”

“You wouldn’t, by any chance, have a sandwich in this place?” Freddy asked as she watched him pour Scotch into a glass and add water.

“You left home
before
dinner? Bad timing. Come on in the kitchen and I’ll see if I can find a crust of dry bread.”

Freddy looked around with great curiosity. The house was immaculately clean and neat, almost impersonal. Mac’s real life was lived in the air, but she’d expected something like Swede Castelli’s office, a messy, masculine place, full of memorabilia. But there were no photos, nor were there pictures or plants. The bookcases were crowded with well-read books that she had never seen at the airport office, and the room was comfortably furnished, well furnished, actually, except that obviously it was never used. The kitchen was as neat as the living room, but here she could see signs that human life existed: a comfortable old painted kitchen table with a pitcher full of Queen Anne’s lace standing on it; a good-sized stove, with an array of cooking utensils on the counter. A heavy pot stood on the stove, and Mac turned the gas on under it. “Stew. You’re in luck, kid. I’ll reheat it.”

Freddy sat down on one of the four Windsor chairs placed around the table. She hadn’t realized until this minute how tired and hungry she was. She was still so alight with her decision, so determined, so single-minded, that she hadn’t
given herself a chance to do anything but keep moving since the scene with her parents.

“Can I have some of that, please?” she asked, pointing to Mac’s glass.

“Are you out of your mind, Freddy? That’s whiskey. If you’re thirsty, I have plenty of Cokes.”

Freddy felt herself suddenly spark with anger. “I am getting so goddamned good and tired of being asked if I’m out of my mind, if I’ve taken leave of my senses, if I’m crazy. I’m saner than I’ve ever been in my life and I want a drink of whiskey, professor.”

Mac whirled around from tending the pot of stew and looked at her narrowly. “Yeah, well, I’m getting tired of being called ‘professor.’ ”

“I’ve never called you that before!”

“Once is too often. Cut it out.”

“O. K.—old-timer.”

“Oh. Looking for trouble, are we?” he asked mildly. “No wonder your father kicked you out. Did you call him ‘old-timer’ too?”

“No, not that it’s any of your business.”

“You’ve made it my business, showing up here. Now eat this stew and shut up. You’re just hungry.”

Ravenously, Freddy finished two helpings of one of the best beef stews she’d ever had in her life. Mac sat opposite her, sipping his whiskey and watching the top of her bright head bent over her plate. After she was fed, he thought, he’d talk some sense into her and get on the phone to her parents.

She had to go to college, he supposed, dumb as he personally thought it was, and a shocking waste of a great pilot. But even a great pilot had to fly constantly to maintain all the necessary skills—it wasn’t like learning how to drive a car. Once Freddy was sucked into the life of the university, between her studies and her dates, she’d never have enough time. She’d turn into a weekend pilot, the kind he dealt with every day, and eventually she might stop flying altogether, as had the few other women he’d known who’d won their wings. She’d go to football games instead of chasing the clouds, chances were. Life would do that … a husband and, someday, children …

It was an obvious story, with an obvious ending. He didn’t know why he felt such a personal sense of loss, of injury almost, even of something curiously like fear. It was
for the best, after all. She had been born a flying animal, just as he had, but she was a female animal too, and there was simply no future in it for her. It was hard enough for a man to stick to it, to keep current, as he well knew. Them’s the jokes, he told himself, and felt such a stab of total misery at the prospect of Freddy’s inevitable future, that he had to hold his breath to keep from betraying his attack of emotion. This was the time, if ever there had been one, to sound avuncular and firm. And impersonal.

“Better?” Mac asked as she polished off her plate.

“Much. Where’d you learn to cook?”

“Starvation is the only other alternative for a man who lives alone. Like going to college for you, I had no option but to learn.”

“Neat, very well put, but no cigar, Mac.”

“Look, I know how you feel, Freddy, I really do, but you’re in a bind, a serious bind, and being stubborn isn’t going to make it disappear. How much money do you have in the world?”

“Three bucks fifty. In the world. And the clothes on my back and in my suitcase. Oh, and my toothbrush. I remembered to bring it.”

“I don’t know why you seem to think that’s funny.”

“I like the feeling of traveling light.”

“How far can you travel on three bucks fifty?”

“We’ll find that out, won’t we?” She lifted her hands to her nape, under the weight of her hair, and pulled it back away from her neck in a lovely, proud gesture, thinking, Constance Bennett, Alice Faye, ready or not, here I come.

“Look, kid, you’re just a little high on yourself tonight. I know the feeling. But tomorrow it’ll be different. Tomorrow I’ll go off flying and you’ll be home making up with your parents and hammering out some kind of agreement … If you go to school, maybe they’ll give you enough money to let you fly weekends. It’s the only way and it’s a damn sight better than nothing. You know it as well as I do.”

“They’ve already offered that,” Freddy said softly. “And I turned it down.”

“The hell you did! After all these years of scratching for dough for lessons, you turned down some help from them?”

“Right.” She got up and took the plate and the silver to the sink and rinsed them off. “Do you have a dishtowel, Mac?
Or do you just let them drip? What’s the option here? What’s the bind?”

“Freddy, you’re such a smartass tonight that I’m not going to waste my time trying to talk sense to you. You won’t listen, no matter what I say. What’s your home phone number? I’m calling your folks right now and put them out of their misery. No? O.K., I’ll ask the operator.” He picked up the receiver of the phone on the kitchen wall.

“Wait! Don’t call them. Please, Mac?”

“Sorry, Freddy, no can do.” He dialed
O
for Operator and she snatched the receiver out of his hand and hung it up.

“There’s more … stuff … that I didn’t tell you. Not just college.”

“I should have guessed,” he said, utterly without humor. “What kind of stuff?”

“I have a job. I can support myself.”

“You’re going to waste your life in a bakery or something like that? Oh no, you’re not.”

“A flying job.”

“What do you mean, a flying job? There aren’t any jobs in flying for a girl.”

“There are now. I’m working for Swede Castelli. He hired me to double Alice Faye and Constance Bennett and Nancy Kelly in
Tail Spin.”

“Stunt
-double?”

“Well you turned it down—”

“Stunts!”

“Nothing I can’t do. If anybody knows that, it’s you—”

“I read the script, Freddy.
You are not going to do it
—a spin to earth! A blow-up in the air with a bail-out—A BAILOUT—the fuck you are!”

“The hell I won’t!” she screamed at him, her face a mask of absolute determination.

McGuire hauled off and smacked her as hard as he could across her cheek.
“Not while I’m alive!”
he shouted. Freddy rushed him, kicking his legs viciously with her shoes, and beating him furiously around his head with her strong hands. Finally he managed to pin her arms to her sides and held her in his grip, paying no attention to her kicks of fury until she stopped. Still he held her tightly, frozen, unable to let go. They stood for a minute, locked together, immobile, gasping, looking at each other with shocked, questioning eyes. Then Freddy, puzzled no longer, leaned forward and planted her
mouth squarely on his lips. “I will
not
do this,” he groaned, and kissed her with all the hungry, yearning, insane love he had tried not to face for so long.

They couldn’t stop kissing each other. Each time they drew breath, the sight of the beloved face, the lips they had both refused to admit they had dreamed of, longed for, during more time than either of them guessed, brought them together again in a tempest of wildly aching kisses, so needy that it was the sweetest and most piercing pain. They couldn’t get close enough to each other, they wanted to weld their skin together, to possess each other’s lips, to be locked to each other, to own the other in a way no two humans can. They reeled and stumbled about, so dizzy with kisses that they could barely stand upright, in the middle of the kitchen floor, until Freddy moaned, “Please, make love to me,” and he answered, “I can’t, you know I can’t.”

“But I love you so much … I’ve always loved you … it’s too late to say no … we can’t stop now …”

“I couldn’t … it’s not right …”

“It’s the rightest thing in the world. You love me as much as I love you.”

“More, more than you can imagine, more than I thought it was possible to love. You’re the love of my life. I’d die for you.”

“Then how can it not be right?” she asked with such a look of implacable tenderness, with such exalted, insistent joy that he knew he didn’t have the strength to resist her. Worse, he didn’t want to. They were irrevocable.

In his bed he found himself clumsy, awkward, suddenly hesitant, until she led the way, her perfect innocence like the low note of a cello that played a melody only the two of them could hear. The rage to fuse into each other that had consumed them in the kitchen grew calmer now that they had confessed to each other the love that had been there for years.

It seemed, suddenly, as if they had all the time in the world, time to make, one by one, the discoveries they had panted and strained for only minutes before. There was time to touch each other with delicate wonder. Each hair on Mac’s head was wonderful to Freddy, each bristle on his cheeks was precious. The shape of each of his ears had to be learned by her mouth, his eyebrows brushed in the wrong direction by her fingertips. She knew nothing about how a man’s face was
supposed to feel, and she was seized by a vast, yet unhurried curiosity. She was profligate with her untutored caresses, and Mac lay back and accepted her explorations, too happy to think beyond the miraculous moment. He looked up at her, leaning so intently over him, and willed himself to be patient, even as she ran her long, sensitive fingers up and down his neck and shoulders, until, almost shyly, she kissed his neck.

“Don’t,” he whispered. “Not yet.” Her naked body was so exquisite that he could not risk looking at it for long. Her nipples, he saw in amazement, were already standing up, deeply pink and pointed on her magnificent white breasts, and he hadn’t even touched them. Ah, but he had to now, didn’t he? They were asking for it, he thought confusedly, and he turned and put Freddy down on the sheet and lowered his head over her.

Freddy froze with shock. She closed her eyes tightly. Nothing in her life had ever been this good. No intimation, no hint had ever reached her and made her wonder if a feeling so madly good was possible. She lay back, almost unable to draw breath, and willed him to continue, feeling, as he reverently caressed her, an electric current, as clear-cut and fiery as a bolt of lightning, shoot from her breasts downward until it informed her of things she had never guessed. How long could she lie still and endure this delight before she went mad, she asked herself, and then, as she felt his fingers move lightly and tentatively along her hips, she understood that there was no law that said she had to lie still. She pressed upward to meet him.