LIGHTNING CUT A SHARP GASH ACROSS THE SKY, ILLUMINING Rusty’s face and at the same time slicing it as in a swipe of a mighty saber. Then the darkness returned; another roar of thunder hit my ears. Lightning crackled again, followed by an instant roar of thunder—getting close, another typhoon maybe. I was shivering from cold, biting rain. More lightning, Rusty’s face was now permanently etched on the pale sky, blood oozing from the jagged cut that ran from his left temple down to his right jaw. Despite his pain he was laughing at me, delighting in my damnation.
I knew I was asleep, that this was another dream, but some of it wasn’t a dream. I strove desperately to fight my way out of the swamp of nightmare. Lightning sizzled again, thunder exploded simultaneously, I was drenched in icy water, the kamikaze plowed into our ship, it exploded in a mushroom ball, I jumped into the ocean, felt myself being dragged remorselessly toward the ocean floor and crashed into an honor guard from the Yamoto in their dress blues, ceremonial swords poised to strike me.
As I tried to scramble to my feet and run from them, they plunged their weapons into me. I watched in horror as my blood turned the water purple.
Then I woke up, naked, drenched, shivering, exhausted, on my bed. Where was I? What had happened?
I reached for the blanket and pulled it up over me. Why was I sleeping without any clothes or bed cover in the middle of winter?
Where were we? Headed for Hong Kong? That’s where the other typhoon hit us.
Slowly I calmed down, took stock of the room: the French windows with their thin draperies flapping in the breeze, the shape of my foldaway bed, the full moon in the western sky, ducking behind clouds, the thick, rich smell of soil after a heavy rain.
I was in Arizona; Superior, Arizona. In the Picketpost House. It had been hot when I went to bed, so I’d left the windows open, the ceiling fans on, and my shorts off. I must have kicked away the sheets when I was asleep. So the rainstorm, later today than usual, had caught me by surprise, chilled and drenched me.
Nothing abnormal.
Andrea King?
I listened in the darkness. No sound from the other room in the suite. She must be sleeping.
I was conscious then of great sexual hunger.
So what else is new?
“Yes,” said the intelligence officer, whose job was to provide situation evaluations and not moral opinions, “but have you ever been presented with such a golden opportunity?”
“Go away,” I told him. “I’m trustworthy.”
“Barely,” he replied and went away as instructed.
I struggled out of bed, staggered to the windows, and closed them. Damn climate, too hot or too cold. The storm clouds were disappearing and the moon was reasserting its dominance; white light, allegedly representing forgiveness, was glistening in pools of water on our balcony.
Had Andrea closed her windows? Was she shivering too?
Well, I told myself as I crawled back under my sheet, that’s her problem.
I settled down, commanded my muscles and nerves to relax, and hoped fervently—since I had eschewed praying for things—that I could fall back to sleep.
I had dozed off when I heard her scream.
It was not like the cry of protest over the insult from the bathroom scale, but a terrified wail, a woman being raped, tortured, murdered.
Scream after scream after scream, each more pitiable than its predecessor.
Pilots, man your planes!
I charged through the bathroom in one quick leap and banged open the door of the master bedroom.
Andrea sat, bolt upright, in the middle of the vast bridal bed, her eyes closed, her hands clasped on her chest, her eyes jammed shut, her face contorted in horror.
“No, Andrew,” she shrieked. “Please, no!”
I glanced quickly around the room, illumined in the silver light of the moon. No one there. Only a nightmare.
Who the hell was Andrew?
I hesitated. Maybe I was dreaming. Or maybe I wanted to hear the screams. Was this not some sort of cliché? Let her scream herself into wakefulness.
Our suite was the only one open on the top floor. But her screams were loud enough to be heard throughout the hotel. They’d think I was murdering my bride.
“Dear God, Andrew, don’t! I’m sorry! I tried my best! Don’t!”
Who was Andrew? Her husband was John. Her father? Her uncle?
She screamed again, so pathetically this time, as if she were resigned to death, that I didn’t care who he was. I loved her.
I vaulted onto the immense bed and gathered her into my arms. “It’s all right, Andrea, it’s all right. It’s only a dream. Wake up, no one will hurt you. It’s all right.”
She was wearing an old-fashioned white nightgown, long and elaborately lacy, simultaneously chaste and inviting. A wedding nightgown? The only one she owned? A substitute for the white wedding dress she was probably denied?
She was sobbing hysterically now, still mostly asleep and clinging to me for dear life.
“It’s all right, kid, only a bad dream. You’re safe and sound with old trustworthy Jerry Keenan in Superior, Arizona. Nothing to worry about.”
She saw me then for the first time and, despite her hysteria and the horror that had assaulted her, she managed a quick impish grin. “Barely.”
Slowly the rigid little body in my arms relaxed and became limp in my protecting embrace. “Terrible silly dream.”
“What was it about?”
“I don’t remember. They were coming for me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.” She snuggled closer. “The demons who are waiting for me, I suppose.”
“Who?”
“The demons,” she insisted, as though I were being dense. “You know, the ones who watch me till it’s time. It will be soon now. They’re becoming impatient.”
“What are you talking about, Andrea?” I held her even closer. “No one is waiting for you. It’s only me.”
She shook her head as though clearing it of foolishness. “I’m sorry, Jerry, I guess I’m still half asleep.”
“It’s all right now. Nothing more to worry about.”
“Nothing more to worry about.” She laid her head on my shoulder. “The commander will take care of me. Forever and forever.”
“Amen.”
“Praying?”
“ ‘To whom it may concern.’ Or maybe ‘Occupant.’ ”
She laughed at me, tenderly, appealingly, lovingly.
I don’t quite know when in those grotesque few minutes protectiveness turned into desire, indeed desire so implacable that there was no longer a possibility, no longer a thought of resisting it. But by the time she laughed, I had passed the point of no return. The CIC in my brain signed off with a message that sounded like, “You’re on your own, buddy.”
Indeed I was.
I began to kiss her.
“More kissing? Aren’t you bored with it by now?” She shifted in my arms, preparing to absorb affection as well as protection. Her body gave no hint of either resistance or reluctance. “I can’t be that interesting?”
“I haven’t yet begun to kiss you, Andrea,” I murmured into her hair. “There’s so much more of you that I haven’t touched yet.”
“Hmm …” she murmured contentedly. “I hope I don’t disappoint you.”
“Fat chance.”
“Don’t say ‘fat’ after that mean old scale lying to me.”
I slipped the gown off her right shoulder and down her arm, exposing at long last one of her breasts. As I had expected, it was perfect: high, firm, exquisitely shaped.
She swallowed hard, leaned her head against my side, but carefully, so as not to interfere with my work.
There was no hurry, we had all the hours of night and day ahead of us. She had just emerged from horror; the journey to pleasure must be infinitely soothing, smooth, tender. For the moment all that mattered was the proper treatment of this astonishing and delicate breast.
I caressed it, fondled it, kissed it, nibbled it. I brought its pale nipple to rigid fullness. I licked the nipple, took it between my teeth, drew on it as if I were a nursing babe. Then I repeated the whole charming process time after time, always with the utmost care that every touch be tender and light. Passionate violence would come later, far down the road.
She watched me intently. This was a deadly serious business for Andrea King. There was to be pleasure, yes, and laughter, yes; but I was also a neophyte to be studied, mastered, led, guided. Her concern about my proper initiation poured gasoline on the fires of my desire.
She sighed often, twisting her buried head against my chest and murmuring contentedly.
“You’re wonderful,” she said once.
“Raw novice.”
“Gifted lover.”
I straightened her up and moved her away for a moment. There was a faint smile on her flushed face, her jaw hung lazily, her eyes were wide and content. “Not bored yet?”
“Not even begun.”
She shivered complacently. “Marvelous.”
I thought how wise I had been not to begin with Barbara. Then I peeled the gown from her left shoulder and down to her waist. The top of the white linen and lace garment hung against her lower arms, which were clasped, protectively, at her belly.
“Oh my.” She swallowed again. “The officer is serious.”
I took possession of her other breast. “He sure is.”
“Do you like me?”
“What do you think?”
“Well, you have good taste in wine.…”
“And”—I lifted my lips from the new breast—”and women.”
“And loving.”
I kept one nipple erect and teased the other into the same condition. Her hand glided down my chest, across my flank and to my loins.
“As soon as I saw you in the station,” she whispered, “I knew I wanted you.”
“And, since you read minds,” I responded, now lightly pushing both breasts against her ribs, waiting for my brain to explode, “you knew I wanted you.”
“In clinical detail.” She threw her head back and then gasped. “Don’t stop, that was approval, not protest. Yes, that’s better. But I never thought I’d get you. I was astonished when I heard your voice asking about my husband.”
“Now you think you have me?”
Her fingers tightened on my loins, I moved the gown to her hips.
“I think we both have what we wanted that morning, so long ago.”
“Yesterday.”
“As I said, long, long ago … do you always come into women’s bedrooms stark-naked?”
“When I hear screams. And this is the first time I’ve been in a woman’s bedroom, as you well know.”
I removed the rest of her nightgown. The nude Andrea King was a greater wonder than I had expected in the continuous fantasies that had tormented my imagination since I had first seen her in the railroad station.
Her breasts were fuller than I had imagined them, her waist more slender, her thighs more deftly carved, the dense auburn underbrush between them more luxuriant. She was a miniature odalisque, both timid and determined, both embarrassed and eager, my slave and my master.
Then neither of us said anything for a long time. Love was not mentioned. It didn’t just then seem to be an issue. I explored her body with by hands and my lips, discovering all its fascinating detail.
So I lost my virginity, which had become, in retrospect, an impossible burden, and lost it to a child more than five years younger than I was, a sweet, clever, ingenious, sympathetic child. She initiated me into the mysteries of sex in such a way that our coupling seemed a promise of a vast and exciting and memorable journey that would last the rest of my life. She gave me the kind of first step on that pilgrimage which she had been denied. And she gave it generously and lovingly, holding nothing back.
Does the first act of love shape all subsequent acts of love? My kids, speaking from professional expertise of one sort or another and careful to exclude reflections on their own experience, offer me the typical psychological conclusion: maybe. The first time can be terribly important, but need not be. You can overcome a bad beginning. You can destroy the positive effects of a good beginning. But for me, perhaps because the beginning had been so long delayed, it was decisive. Despite the horror that would assault and destroy our union in just a few hours, the first act itself will always be with me, a paradigm every time I approach the body of a woman.
Without saying a word, she taught me about love—how gentle it must be even when it is most violent. About women—how much they need sensitive affection. And about life—how we must seize its opportunities before they are lost.
We played, we laughed, we teased, we gently tormented, and finally we drove each other over the brink of passion in uninhabited free fall through space that seemed to last for eternity and longer.
Her pedagogy was carefully tuned to the possible vulnerability of my novice’s male ego. She taught by sigh, by gesture, by gentle guidance, so that I felt not a fool, but like a pilot who has just soloed or perhaps just finished flight training. Not only was I initiated, so her response told me, now I was a pro.
Well, I wasn’t a pro, but at least I had made a presentable beginning. And, with considerable satisfaction, I knew that I had.
The religion teachers in my high school and college classrooms would have said that, if the storm returned and lightning struck us on our vast honeymoon bed, we both would have been damned to hell for all eternity.
That’s what the new pastor at our parish preaches, a man who believes that we’ve lost our sense of sin (sexual sin, he doesn’t seem concerned about any other kind). If I am to take seriously the documents emanating from the Holy See, that’s what the Vatican wants us all to think too.
The big difference between now and 1946 is that no one believes them anymore. In my Catholic days before the war, I half believed them; but my hesitancy to immerse myself in the love game was probably based in great part on other motives (not all of them unworthy, such as affectionate respect for women, which I had absorbed from my father).
What would the various members of my family, experts on ethics each in their own way, judge about our romp in Picketpost House, should I provide them with the details?
Packy would say pretty much what he said in 1946. Under the circumstances, the power of passion was so great that I don’t see how the issue of serious sin could arise.
My daughter the clinician would say that it was a statistically probable event and, so long as no one was hurt, it might well have been beneficial for both. Still, there is always the risk in such hastily consummated liaisons of considerable dysfunction later on.
My son the young priest would perhaps find it hard to understand why the question would come up; we were on an exploration toward a sacramental union (for which we both hoped, despite our respective reservations and fears). In general, the more chaste such explorations are, the better for both parties. But who can say what is appropriate in an individual case? Finally it is between the couple and God.
“The same thing, I’m saying,” Packy would insist. “Only the vocabulary has changed, not the pastoral insight.”
His namesake would agree.
And my wife, listening to this imaginary seminar with twinkling eyes, would comment, terminating the discussion, “If he hadn’t started then, I would have had to teach him a lot later on. That dreadful girl obviously had some skills at seduction.”
None of this debate occurred to me as the two of us, spent but happy, napped for a little while in each other’s arms. My complaisant woman seemed utterly blissful. And I reveled in that self-satisfied sense of conquest that rewards the male of the species after every reasonably successful exercise in love.
Barbara would never have been like that, I reasoned, nor any of the girls or women I knew. My sister and my mother would be shocked at the suggestion of abandonment so complete.
Looking back on it, I may have underestimated my mother. In fact, I’m sure I did. The nighttime sounds in the next room during the vacations my wife and I took with my parents in later years suggested to me what ought to have been obvious—wantonness comes in a wide variety of packages.
I think most adult men of my generation would be shocked by that discovery. After what happened to me that night of July 23, 1946, barely trustworthy Jerry was pretty hard to shock.
We made love again that night, our hormones keeping up (in my case with some help) with our imaginations and our desires. We frolicked and experimented, explored and trifled with each other, lost our minds with turbulent passion and caressed one another with sweet reassurance. She knew my every fantasy and cheerfully indulged them almost before I knew which one came next.
Early in the morning, when light was breaking in the sky, Andrea stood at the window, her gown clutched at her breasts. I had slipped away when she was sleeping and brought the Kodak into our bedroom. I snapped the shot quickly and hid the camera.
I still have the picture, next to the Compaq as I type these words—head and shoulders, piquant thoughtful face, auburn halo in attractive disarray, lips slightly open, eyes staring into the far distance. A pretty child, chaste and yet, with her delicate and smooth bare shoulders, miraculously erotic.
For all her earthy charm, there is something ever so slightly wrong about the picture. She looks misty and ethereal in the dim dawn, almost ectoplasmic, as if her image had been imposed on the chemicals by a cosmic ray instead of by ordinary light. She’s not quite there, you see.
Yet she was there that morning. As solid as the keyboard on which I’m typing. I slipped up behind her and pried the gown away and let it drop to the floor.
“People will see me naked,” she protested, covering her breasts with her hands. I bent over her and kissed her.
“Who? The voyeur in Phoenix with a telescope?” I removed her hands and replaced them with my own. I kept my lips against hers.
Like a well-satisfied cat, she arched her back against me, stirring me to even greater arousal.
“I think there’s a strong streak of exhibitionist in me.”
“In everyone.” I allowed one of my hands to wander down her body, tickling her on its way.
She giggled and squirmed. “Stop it.”
I didn’t stop it but drew her even closer as my hand continued its journey to the russet forest of her loins, where it amused itself for a time and then journeyed back to her breast.
“You’re driving me out of my mind.” She tried to talk even though her lips were as much my prisoners as her bosom.
I dragged her back to the bed. “That’s the general idea.”
“You never have enough, do you?” She allowed me to place her face down on the bed, her toes touching the floor. “Now you’re going to try another fantasy, aren’t you?”
I certainly was. “I’m running out of fantasies.”
“That will be the day.”
When I showed my wife the picture before we were married, she considered it thoughtfully.
“I can see why you were spooked. The poor little thing does look otherworldly.”
The recklessness of the damned.