Shark Infested Custard (12 page)

       "I called around nine, I think it was."

       "You said you were going to Palm Beach, so..."

       "I know. But I was lonely as hell last night. I wonder if you could come over for awhile this afternoon—around twelve-thirty or so, and I'll fix us brunch. Did you have breakfast, or are you still just eating one meal a day?"

       "All I've had this morning was coffee. I'll be there at twelve-twenty-nine. What shall I bring?"

       "Just yourself. Park in the street, not in the driveway. That's the arrangement I've got with my neighbors downstairs. They use the driveway one month, and I use it the next. And this month they're parking in the driveway. You've got my address?"

       "Your address and your number."

       "Push the bell twice so I'll know it's you."

       My heart was beating a little faster when I racked the phone. At last, I thought, my patience has paid off. I refolded Eddie's list without looking at it, and threw it into the waste basket. Eddie's problems were probably unsolvable anyway.

       I had about an hour and fifteen minutes to shave, shower, select the right clothes, and get ready for what I could envision as the greatest afternoon in the sack I had ever had.

CHAPTER TEN

Jannaire lived on LeJeune, in Coral Gables, in a two-story two-apartment duplex. Her apartment was the one on the top floor. There was hardly any yard in front of the duplex, and there were no garages. The neighbors below, whoever they were, had parked both of their cars in the short circular driveway.

       I had forgotten, when she told me on the phone to park in the street, that there was no parking allowed on LeJeune in the Gables. LeJeune is the main four-lane artery that leads from Coral Gables to the airport, so parking is wisely prohibited. I drove around the corner and parked on Santa Monica. As I walked back I noticed that Jannaire's Porsche was also parked on Santa Monica, half-hidden by a huge pile of rotting vegetation that should have been collected weeks before.

       I buzzed twice, and Jannaire pushed the buzzer from upstairs to open the door. The stairs, in the exact center of the duplex, were steep, and I wondered, as I climbed them, what this architectural horror did to the unhappy people living below, with the big wedge slanting through the middle of their downstairs living room. Of course, architects do terrible things like that in Miami to build houses with additional space on small lots; but Jannaire, with the top apartment, certainly had the better deal of the two.

       Jannaire was wearing a shorty nightgown and a floor-length flimsy peignoir, both sea-green. Her long brown hair was held in place with a silk sea-green headband. She didn't wear any makeup, not even the faint pinkish-white lipstick she usually wore during working hours, and her remarkable odor, which reminded me—perhaps because of the colors she wore—of the Seaquarium at midday, assailed and stung my nostrils like smelling salts. But instead of my eyes watering, my mouth watered, and I felt the firm stirring of an erection. The dark tangle of inky pubic hair was an irregular shadow clearly visible beneath the two thin thicknesses of gown and peignoir.

       She kissed the air, not me, trailed two fingers lightly across my cheek, and told me to sit down. I sat on the long white couch, and gulped in a few quick mouthfuls of airconditioned air as she went into the kitchen to get the coffee.

       The room was furnished ugly with oversized hotel-lobby-type furniture. There were two Magritte lithos on one lime wall, and an amateur watercolor of the Miami Beach skyline on another. A third wall, papered with silver wallpaper streaked with thin white stripes, held a blow-up photograph of Jannaire, taken when she was about nine or ten years old. The blow-up, about three by four feet, was framed with shiny chrome strips. In black and white, it held my interest, whereas the rest of the furnishings only indicated Jannaire's taste for impersonality. Everything else in the room, except for the blow-up photo and perhaps the two Magrittes, would have served as lobby furniture for any of the beach motels north of Bal Harbour. There were even two lucite standing ashtray stands, holding small black metal bowls filled with sand. There were no books or magazines, and two droopy ferns, in brown pots, looked as though no one had talked to them in months.

       I studied the blow-up photo, astonished that such a pudgy, unattractive child, squinting against the bright sun in her eyes (the shadow of the male photographer—probably her father—slanted across the foreground of the lawn) could turn into such a lovely woman. For a moment, the photo reminded me of Don's daughter, Maria, and I shuddered. I was immediately cheered, however, when I thought that there could be a similar future for Maria. Perhaps Maria, too, would be a beautiful woman some day; and for Don's sake, I hoped so.

       Jannaire returned with the coffee, and set the silver service on the glass coffee table. I drank my coffee black, which I hated to do, and pointed to the blow-up.

       "Whatever possessed you, Jannaire," I said, "to blow up that snapshot of yourself?"

       "How do you know it's me? Do I look like that?"

       "Not any more you don't, but it's you, isn't it?"

       "No, it isn't me. It's my younger sister. She's dead now, and that was the only photograph of her that I had. She had others... " She shrugged, and twisted her lips into a rueful grimace "... but she burned most of her personal things before she killed herself."

       "I'm sorry," I said. "It's always sad when a child commits suicide..."

       "She wasn't a child when she died. She was twenty-two."

       "That makes it even worse," I said.

       Jannaire stared at me for a long moment with her glinting, sienna eyes, shook herself slightly, and said, "Yes, it does. Now, what would you like for brunch?"

       "Do you have a menu?"

       "No, but if you tell me what you want, I'll tell you what you can have."

       "I'll have you, then."

       "Scrambled eggs? Bacon? Ham?"

       "No. Cottage cheese, with grapefruit segments, two four-minute eggs, fried eggplant, and an eight-ounce glass of V-8 juice."

       "You don't much care what you eat, do you?"

       "Not if I can't have you, I don't. And that's the truth when I'm only eating once a day. I'd rather eat things I don't like when I'm dieting this way, because I'm not tempted to eat any more of the same later on in the day. And I'll have a St. James and soda, too."

       "I'll give you Chivas instead, and fried plantain instead of eggplant, but otherwise, you'll get the breakfast you ordered."

       "Good! I hate plantain worse than eggplant, but it's just as filling."

       That was the beginning of a strange afternoon.

       I could not bring myself to believe that Jannaire did not want me to seduce her. I tried everything I could think of, but I got nowhere. Alter eating the bland, unappetizing breakfast, and I ate alone because she had either eaten already or said that she had, I had two more scotches, switched over to beer when I began to feel them, and talked and talked. I grabbed her, I kissed her, and she got away from me. Once I chased her and got one hand between her thighs from behind, but she cleverly eluded me, fled to the back bedroom and locked the door. She stayed in there for almost an hour, while I drank two more beers, saying she wouldn't come out again unless I promised to let her alone. I promised, reluctantly, and she came out—this time fully dressed, wearing one of her slack suits.

       I was sulky, pissed off and puzzled. There are ways to play the game, and there are certain unwritten rules to be followed. There are variations to the rules, which make the game interesting, but reliable patterns eventually emerge, one way or another, sets of clues, so to speak, and the game is either won or lost. I have won more games than I have lost because I have practiced the nuances and studied the angles a little closer than most men are willing to do. The discernible pattern, insofar as Jannaire was concerned, was the waiting game. By playing hard-to-get and yet by always holding out the musky carrot, I had recognized the classic pattern of her play early in our acquaintanceship.

       She had called me for a date, or a meeting, almost as often as I had called her. She also, when we had met at a bar or a restaurant, paid her half of the tab, thereby establishing her independence. I didn't mind that. Tab-sharing, five years ago, was a rare phenomenon, but during the last couple of years it has happened as often as not—or at least an 'offer'' to pay half is made frequently. The insight required is to gauge whether the woman's offer is sincere, or merely a half-hearted gesture to indicate a show of independence. If it were the latter, and you guessed wrong, accepting the proferred cash, you could quickly lose the girl and the game. But there was no doubt with Jannaire. She would pick up the check, put on her reading glasses, total it silently, and hand me the correct amount of cash for what she had ordered. She didn't share tipping, of course, and in this respect I admired her perceptiveness. Women, when they tip at all, and most women truly hate to leave a tip, undertip-especially in Miami, if they are year-round residents—whereas men like myself, who have a tendency, on other dates, to return to certain places, usually overtip. Overtipping is one of my faults, but I like to do it because I can afford to do so. By getting out of the tip altogether, but by still paying her share of the tab, Jannaire was able to establish her independence and essential femininity at the same time.

       She was a mature woman and well aware of her body. Jannaire had admitted to twenty-nine, so I doubt that she was much more than thirty-one. She was beautiful enough to pick and choose. For every man she turned off by her earthy body odor and underarm hair, and she flouted the latter by wearing sleeveless tops, and taking off her suit jacket in public places—as she had turned off Larry Dolman—she would turn on another man like me who was fascinated by the eccentric, the exotic, the unusual, the untried. Sergeant Weber, my NCOIC at the Pittsburgh Recruiting Station, had told me how sexy luxuriant growths of underarm hair had been to him in Italy during World War II, and to many other GI's, once they got over the initial shock. And it was sexy. Jannaire was a woman who wanted to know a man well as a person before going to the mat with him. She didn't have to fall in love with him, or even pretend to be in love with him, but she did have to like him; and the only way that she could tell whether she liked him or not was to get to know him fairly well. Once I had that figured out, I had set out deliberately to make her like me.

       I thought I had succeeded. I had made my pitches at every opportunity, but I had made them lightly, and without using any hard sell techniques. Her rejections had never been outright turndowns; she merely changed the subject, or smiled without saying anything. It was the old waiting game, one I was familiar with, and a game I was willing to play.

       Alter all, I had some other things going for me, and I could wait as long as she could—perhaps longer, unless she changed the pattern and decided she didn't like me after all—and she would be a more appreciated lay for the delay. And if I lost, in the long run, there was a good deal of solace in the knowledge that the ratio of women to men in Miami, as I had reminded Larry, was still seven to one.

       But here it was, Sunday, pay-off day, and the afternoon had been wasted. What was going on? The brunch invitation, the shorty nightgown, the exposed cleavage of hard, unhampered breasts across the table as I ate the tasteless food, the time and place available—and then, a runaround.

       I sulked, sitting in a deep leather arm chair across from the white couch, and glared at her silently when she sat and faced me. She had combed her bronze hair, or brushed it, I supposed, and it was fuller as it touched her shoulders. Her alluring musky odor was fainter now, because of her jacket and slacks, and her freshly painted lips, playing card pink, almost matched the string of imitation pearls, as large as marbles, she wore around her neck.

       I quit sulking, making an effort to salvage some dignity, buttoned my flowered bodyshirt, and yawned, stretching out my arms.

       Jannaire, I concluded, was a lost cause. I didn't mind losing so much as I minded not knowing why. Although I wanted to leave, I was still curious about the why of the rejection. I was also feeling a trifle logy from the two scotches and six cans of beer, and I had the beginnings of a headache.

       She looked at her watch.

       "Humphrey Bogart Theater will be on in a few minutes. D'you want to watch TV?"

       I laughed. "What's the film?"

       "'Knock on any Door''."

       "He doesn't play Bogey in that one."

       "We could play checkers."

       "We've been playing that all afternoon."

       "You can start sulking again if you want to. I think it's kinda cute the way you can pout with your upper lip without moving your bottom lip. How did you learn that, anyway?"

       "By hanging around cock-teasers in the ninth grade. I thought I'd forgotten how but I remembered how to do it after chasing you around all afternoon. How did you learn such a good game of checkers?"

       "What's the name of the film where Bogey has a plastic surgeon change his face, and then he turns out to be Bogey when the bandages come off?"

       "Did you ever read 'The Chessmen of Mars'', by Edgar Rice Burroughs?" I asked.

       "No, but I read 'Tarzan at the Earth Score''."

       "You agglutinated that. When you were a kid you probably asked your mother for a napple."

       "I did not."

       "Why do you end every sentence with a rising inflection? 'I did not?'"

       "Do I sound that way to you?"

       "Not really. I can't get the little catch in the middle right."

       "You're really angry with me, aren't you, Hank?"

       "Not at this moment. I was for a while, but now I'm merely disappointed. Resigned, I suppose."