THE PROSPECT OF A rainy day made me feel I didn’t have to do anything. My lunch was the first meal my Greek housekeeper had made for me. It was pretty hard to ruin plain scrambled eggs, but she managed it. I put down a whole bottle of red wine with it, and took my book back out on the protected porch with a brandy.
Chantal had not called. I was sort of glad.
The bank of yellow cloud had continued to come on out of the northeast, and the excited feeling of a storm had fallen over the harbor. A steady rain began to fall. The wind hadn’t abated and the sea was up, making the boats rock in the harbor, and the high masts toss wildly. Everything was battened down and seemed suddenly empty of people. I sat and watched it like you would watch an exciting movie.
Outside in the rain the ship’s bell over the upper garden gate jangled, and then the front door bell rang. The old Greek woman opened it. A tallish long-legged long-haired blonde young woman in skintight blue jeans and a bra-less thin cotton shirt came in. She said hello to the maid in Greek.
“Hello there, Mr. Davies!”
My dirty black old heart sort of skipped a beat.
I stood up, out on the porch, as she came leggily down the living room toward me, slightly damp. She obviously knew the house.
And I, standing drink in hand, suddenly saw that long body nude, the way I had seen it yesterday pulling off the black wet suit. And the day before yesterday, striding naked into the water at the hippie beach. And today? Well, today—such a nice quiet cozy rainy today—was such a great day for it, wasn’t it?
“Gosh it’s raining!” she said breathlessly, in her half-childish way. “A lot of wind! But I think it’ll blow over by this evening!”
That eternal cheerfulness, on that perpetual brink of disaster.
“Yes,” I said. “Well, come on out. You didn’t go out today, hunh? Didn’t go spearfishing?”
“No. Actually, it’s all right on the lee side out of the wind. But I don’t like it somehow, in the rain. It puts me down. And anyway I somehow found myself thinking about you all morning. Somehow.”
“You did, did you?” I said.
“So I thought I’d come pay you a visit! You told me to, once, if I ever felt like it. And I thought you probably wouldn’t be out on your boat today!”
“It’s funny. I was just thinking about you, too,” I said. “Would you like a drink?”
“No.” She looked down at her body. “Gosh, I’m all damp.” She was, and it made the cotton shirt cling closer to her. She went over to the railing and looked up at the sky. “Yes, this’ll blow over! Tomorrow’ll be clear!” Then, much softer, “What were you thinking about me?”
“You want me to be blunt?” I said.
“Be blunt,” Marie said. “I like you when you’re blunt.”
“I was thinking about how you’re affected by this killing. You’re very likely to be out of a job, do you know it? Because this thing is going to put an end to the hashish business for some time. That’s going to put a bad cramp in your sources of income.”
“Yes, it sure is. That’s what’s so good about you, you know it? You clear all the shit away fast. Actually, that was part of what I came to talk to you about.” She looked straight at me, open-eyed, honest. “That, and the fact that I’ve been thinking about you so.”
Suddenly she shrugged her hands out, then slapped them against her thighs. “But I’d rather not talk about it all here.”
“I don’t know where we could go,” I said. “Some bar?”
“We could go to my little place,” she said. “I have a room in a private house, where I lived last winter. I’m not using it much now in the summer. I stay up at the Construction. But I have the key?”
I didn’t say anything. It was funny, you didn’t have to do a thing. They would do it all for you. If they decided they wanted a chunk of you.
I gave her a long moment’s look. She looked straight back. There wasn’t much doubt about the rest of it. The silent rider was attached, all right.
“All right,” I said. “Let me finish my drink.” I tossed it off.
Suddenly she giggled. I looked up at her in time to catch something dark that flashed out at me from her eyes. For a split second she looked like an old whore soliciting in a dark hotel doorway.
At the door she said, “You better put something on. In this rain.”
“What about you?”
“I’m wet already. Anyway, I don’t mind it. I like it. And I can change down there.” Again the silent rider.
I put on my old trenchcoat. Then my beat-up old New Yorker’s hat. In the hall mirror I suddenly looked tougher, older, more mean, more like a cop. The hat and trenchcoat looked weird, over my resort clothes and sandals.
“Now I look more like what I am,” I said.
“And more like my daddy,” Marie said smiling.
I smiled wryly. “The middle-aged private dick. Who no longer believes in anybody. And wouldn’t give his own grandmother change of a dollar. For fear of being shortchanged. And rightly so.”
Still smiling she opened the door for us.
Her room was down in toward the town. So we took the upper street, above the house. Twice, when flurries of rain hit us, she huddled against me. But mostly she walked openly in the rain. Twice she put her head back and closed her eyes, lifting her face to feel it. When we got to the house, her hair was wet and her clothes half soaked. But by then I was out of the game.
I didn’t know what had changed my mind. Was it the look I had suddenly got of myself in that hall mirror? Maybe it was the way she threw back her head to the rain. I could never have done that, not without laughing.
Whatever it was, I knew I couldn’t go through with it.
Maybe it was the way she huddled against me, for protection, when the rain flurries hit us. I remembered my own two daughters huddling against me in the exact same way, when some tiny disaster in their lives had hit them and they didn’t know what to do about it. Except huddle against daddy. Like Marie. Only, Marie’s disaster was a big one.
Maybe mostly, it was because I was too old. Old enough to be ridiculous.
The house was a nondescript one, with the regular walled garden. She led me back along a walk beside the house to a private door. Inside, it was a poor cheap little room with nothing of anything in it. She had added nothing of herself to it. She could have moved out in five minutes.
The room hurt me, too. Only her diving gear, in one corner, scrupulously cleaned, marked it as hers.
“Such as it is,” Marie said. She shut the door. I turned around and stripped off my trenchcoat and hat, wanting to be rid of the personality they inflicted on me.
When I turned back Marie was standing looking at me with that open, childish face. Maybe she was breathing a little fast. For a split second that same strange, odd, dark look crossed her face. Then it was gone.
To describe it as whorish was too strong, but I guessed it had that in it. A masochism, maybe. Of some special female kind? A kind of whorish delight.
“I’d better change,” she said, and half-sitting on the little bed, stripped off her shirt and picked up a towel.
She never wore a bra, of course. Her breasts were young, and the size of a large cup. There was a shy, vulnerable movement about her, as she dried herself. She dried the breasts first. She didn’t look at me.
“And I’d better dry my hair,” she said. The breasts jiggled deliciously, as she moved the towel. Especially when she bent forward to do her hair.
I felt like a man under some attack. I hadn’t had time or a chance to move. I stood with my back jammed back against the door. I felt my face getting tighter.
“Do you want to help?” Marie asked, looking up through her hair.
“No thanks.” I said it harsher than I meant.
The towel around her shoulders, she tossed her hair back, and stood up. That funny odd “whorish” look was back on her face openly. She unbuckled her jeans belt and unzipped the fly, and pushed her jeans down and stepped out of them. She began to dry her legs, and her belly.
I just stood there. It was one hell of a body she had on her. If she knew how bad I wanted it, I guessed she would be pleased. My hands were jammed down tight and clenched in my pockets. I relaxed them. She straightened, holding the towel in front of her, but not at all protectively, and looked at me.
“Cut it out,” I said hoarsely. “Put some clothes on.”
“You don’t like me?”
“I like you a lot. Now cut it out. It wouldn’t work.”
That strange look went off her face, and the young girl’s look came back on it. “Do you think I’m a whore?”
“If I thought you were a whore, it would work.”
“Well, I am a whore.”
“And I’m old enough to be your father. Now cut it out.”
“I told you I thought I’d try some incest.” She laughed, a girlish tinkle, from that lovely lush nude body that made my teeth ache. Her crotch was lean and sturdy and built for wear and beautifully hairy. “I’ve tried everything else.”
“It wouldn’t work,” I said. “You’d have a bad feeling afterward. Little girls shouldn’t do things that leave a bad feeling afterward. Neither should little boys,” I said.
“Did you know I had an affair with Jane Duval?” she said. She half turned. “Hand me those pants,” she said.
I stepped and got a dry pair of jeans and a shirt lying with them and tossed them to her.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t. But I don’t see why not. And it doesn’t surprise me. Everybody else has.”
“Except you.” She turned sideways and stepped into the jeans demurely and pulled them up.
“Except me,” I said.
Turning her back, she put the shirt on. Then she turned and sat down on the bed.
“Don’t ever do that to me again,” I said, and grinned. “I haven’t got that strong a heart. And I’m no iron man.” The grin felt pretty cracked.
She just looked at me, with that open girlish look, and didn’t say anything. She picked up her hairbrush.
“I suppose I should be ashamed of myself,” she said. “But I’m not. It’s a shame, really.”
“You’ll feel better about it this way,” I said.
“But you wanted me. Didn’t you want me? Terribly?”
“Terribly. As much as I’ve ever wanted any woman in my life. More.”
“Then why didn’t you just take me?”
“Because if I’m going to be your substitute father around here,” I said, “I didn’t think it would look good.”
“I’m really glad that you didn’t do it, really.”
“Good. Fine. That’s great. And I’m just beginning to feel sorry. Look,” I said. “You said you wanted to talk to me about Girgis?”