After Malcolm and the doctor had gone off together, Frances and the captain also continued drinking; and when the captain asked Frances to visit his quarters she agreed, following him down long corridors. He had unhooked his clip-on tie; he held a bottle of champagne by its throat and was whistling “Hershey Bar.” His room was orderly, faceless. I’m going to fuck the captain, Frances thought. But he was a man past his prime, and very little was accomplished in his room that night. Frances was impressed by how unbothered he was by his impotency. “It’s very common,” he said.
“I’ve never experienced it,” Frances admitted.
“Very, very common.” Altogether it was as alarming to him as a Wet Paint sign on a park bench, it seemed. “Who’s got room for more?” he asked, popping the bottle and pouring out two glasses. It was low-quality champagne but the bubbles fizzed pleasantly against Frances’s lips and she was amused at her evening’s detour. It occurred to her that, so long as she maintained forward motion, her life could not not continue, a comforting equation that conjured in her a sense of empowerment and ease. She and the captain were lying together in naked embrace, the both of them staring down at the captain’s penis, a glum mushroom caving in on itself.
“Tell me a bedtime story,” the captain said.
“I don’t think I know any bedtime stories,” Frances answered. She thought awhile. “I could tell you about Olivia.”
“Perfect,” said the captain, and he closed his eyes.
“Olivia,” said Frances, “was my governess. She called me Miss Walnut, but I can’t remember why. She had a half-hidden limp, her homeliness summoned double takes, and her private life was, so far as I could tell, joyless. She’d been my governess since I could walk and was more a mother to me than my own ever was. I loved her very much, do you understand? And she loved me, also. We were close for many years, but as I grew older, then our relationship started to change.
“By the age of eleven I was becoming beautiful, so that people began acting strangely because of it. Certain women were cruel to me, for example. They were unshy about this—they wanted me to appreciate their dislike of me. Men, of course, were deferential in a way I’d still call sexual. There weren’t any advances; I wasn’t molested. They were simply looking to the future, putting a pin in something that might be addressed later. Besides all this, I was discovering about money. What it meant to have as much as we had then, I mean, and how rare it was not to have to worry. In short, I was learning that my life was wide open. This went to my head, and I began to affect the airs of my elders: making cutting remarks about people after they’d left the room, sending back food in restaurants, things like that.”
The captain’s eyes still were closed but he wasn’t yet sleeping.
Frances said, “As the snobby phase took hold, Olivia pulled away from me. There was a period of gentle chastisement, I remember. This was followed by a peevishness. Then came a general avoidance. One night I was getting into a bath she’d prepared for me. The water was too hot, so that it burned my foot, and without thinking I spun around and snapped at her. What was she trying to do, cook me? She stared for a while, then began moving toward me. She had such an odd look in her eye; I think she was afraid of her own anger.” She poked the captain in the ribs. “Do you know what she did next? Do you want to guess?”
The captain opened his eyes but said nothing.
“She drew back her hand, and she slapped me so hard in the face that my head almost came off from my shoulders!”
“Yes,” said the captain. He closed his eyes again. “Then what?”
“She went away and I got into the bath and sat in the hot water. My cheek was tingling, and I couldn’t stop shaking. I put myself to bed that night and in the morning Olivia was friendly, as though we’d had some small disagreement. After a week, or a month, she said, ‘Miss Walnut, have you forgotten what happened in the bath?’
“‘No,’ I said.
“‘But why haven’t you told anyone about it?’
“‘I don’t know. I just don’t want to.’” Frances sipped the champagne. The captain’s head was dipped; he was sleeping, now. Frances stared at him for a long while. She drew a lock of silver hair away from his simple face. “I never did tell on her,” she said. “It was something just for us to share. And I knew it was important, even then. Such complicated information, delivered with such concision.”
Frances dressed. The doctor had hung his coat on the back of a chair and she noticed the slip of paper peeking from the breast pocket. It was a handwritten note: Coda: the concluding passage of a piece or movement, typically forming an addition to the basic structure. And after that: Hope this helps, Cap! Dugger.
Frances, smiling, folded the note and returned it to the captain’s pocket. She had occasionally in her life found herself loving men not in spite of but for their stupidity. Suavity was never more than playacting, she knew this, and it endeared them to her that they themselves were unaware of their transparency. She hung her shoes from her hooked fingers, walking barefoot along the dim, carpeted halls to her suite. All were asleep and it was so quiet, and she felt very youthful and glad. Small Frank was up, waiting on the bed. His eyes narrowed as she entered. “Spare me,” she said. “You haven’t got a leg to stand on.” She moved to the bathroom to draw herself a bath. Now she was whistling “Hershey Bar.”