LITMIR.BIZ

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from them by her promise to Alan. She was his. She’d be all his, only his. She loved her celibacy, all the more because she was the most desirable woman there. She loved their desire, even the other women’s, their desire expressed as envy but desire all the same.

      “Telephone, mees.”

      Consuela was a black silhouette against the sky, bending toward her like an angel.

      “Bring it out here.”

      She believed that she and Consuela were buddies. Consuela loved her, she believed.

      “I teenk ees heem, mees. Maybe you want private?”

      Him. Alan. Consuela knew all about him. (So did her father, for that matter, but in a different way, not the sex—at least not the intensity of it—which Consuela cleaned up after.) “Oh, my God—” The coke gave her tremendous focus, mostly on herself, her feelings (lust, loneliness) and she ran across the tiles, feeling her breasts move, feeling all the others’ eyes on her. “In my bedroom, Consuela—”

      She threw herself across the pink bed, grabbed the phone. “Yes?” Her heart was thumping.

      “It’s Alan.”

      “It is you! Oh, my God, I miss you so! You got my vibes, you felt me missing you, didn’t you! I thought I’d come in my—”

      “Kim!” It was a new tone from him; maybe it was the telephone. He sounded uptight. As if he wasn’t listening to her at all. “Kim, I’m coming home for a few days.”

      “You’re not!” She shrieked the words. She rolled on her back. She crossed an ankle over a knee. “Oh, lover, when you—”

      “Kim, my father’s dead.”

      She felt herself go through three distinct stages in a fraction of a second; the coke let her see them clearly. First, annoyance that he would mention such a thing just then; next, fear that something was expected of her; then, heavy, conventional sadness of the kind she saw on television. She began to weep. “Oh—my darling—oh, poor you, I’m so sorry, oh God—”

      “I have to settle his affairs. I’ve got compassionate leave. I’m flying commercial; can you meet my plane?”

      She wanted to say that she’d be waiting with her legs spread, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear (she felt annoyance again, then something stronger than that), and she assured him she’d be there. She wrote the details on her pad, her writing too large, later hard to read. She was still weeping. The tears felt good, a letting-go. It was nice to cry for somebody’s dead dad, she found.

      “I’ve got to go.”

      “But you poor thing. Oh, your heart must be broken! The depth—I mean, this is just so sad. I wish I could tell you how I feel it. So—so—” She wept and wept. She couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop, loved herself weeping.

      But the more she tried to tell him how sad it was, the less he seemed to respond. She wanted him there with her, seeing her weep, making love, weeping and making love at the same time, and she tried to tell him this, tried to get him to see, but he said less and less and less.

      Then she was holding a dead telephone.

      It made her weep even more. She couldn’t stop. Everything was just so sad.

      Her brother’s friend came into the room and shut the door. He was dumb as a stump but gorgeous, hardly eighteen. She told him how sad it was. He told her she had really deep feelings and began to unfasten her bikini top. That felt right to her.

      26 July 1990. 1322 Zulu. Florida.

      Alan Craik hadn’t slept the three nights since he had watched his father’s plane fall away. He was wound up tight with fatigue, his eyes too bright; he made quick movements that didn’t quite do what they were supposed to do, stumbled sometimes. Yet he was alert, and when he lay down and closed his eyes, he remained awake, replaying the horror of it.

      As the 747 dropped toward Orlando, he stared out the window, as if seeing Florida rise up to meet him was important. He was not seeing Florida at all, however; he was seeing meetings with his father, a last one when he had said goodbye in Bahrain. Death hadn’t given them any premonition that it would be the last time. They had been casual, too quick; he had still been nursing resentment at his father’s remarks about Kim, and his father had been anxious to deal with squadron business.

      Alan Craik was confused. He had not known his father well, he decided; was that his own fault? His father had let his mother and stepfather raise him; what did he owe his father’s memory, then? Had his father been a good man? A hero? A model? Where was Alan’s responsibility to his memory? And where was Alan’s part in his death?

      “It wasn’t your fault!” Rafehausen had shouted at him. Alan had stood on the flight deck, the warm air of the Gulf washing over him, babbling, “It was my fault. I killed him. They should have had a real aircrewman up there. I killed my father—” Until Rafehausen had grabbed him and bellowed at him, “It wasn’t your fault! It wasn’t your goddam fault! You did everything you could!”

      He replayed the last moments of his father’s life as the 747 put down. He saw the final gesture, that raised hand before the plane plunged to the water—had that been corny, or was it gallant? And what was he, Alan, in those moments? And where was grief, which, he thought, should have had him weeping, when actually he was alert and efficient and, after those moments of guilt, hard as a stone? Then he began to replay it all as a way of moving to the edge of his consciousness a question that wanted to intrude: With him dead, why am I staying in the Navy?

      He was wearing civilian clothes and had only a knapsack. He came out into the arrival lounge, dodging other travelers who planted themselves wherever their welcomers waited, and Kim was standing at the far side, her back against a pillar, and he smiled automatically, as he did most things automatically just then. She was wearing a black dress and sunglasses and looked tragic and sexy, and it took him an instant to realize that he resented the way she looked, which seemed to require that he be Alan, Kim’s Lover, and not Alan, Mick’s Son. Or simply Alan.

      “My poor love,” she whispered in his ear. “I am so sorry.” She held him just the right length of time and then let go. “Are you terribly hurt?” she murmured.

      “I’m fine.”

      They walked all the way to her car before she spoke again. She held his hand very tight; he knew he was supposed to feel support, love, comfort flowing from her fingers. In fact, he felt nothing. He knew he should not tell her so.

      “We’re putting you in one of the cabanas,” she said across the roof of her Mercedes. “We’ll have to find someplace else for us.”

      “I’ll be at my Dad’s house a lot. All his stuff—”

      She accepted it. Still, driving out of the airport, she said, “I am going to see you, aren’t I?”

      “Jesus, of course.”

      “I’ve missed you so.”

      “I’ve missed you, too.”

      He tried to blot the pictures from his mind and to think of something to say to her, and he said, “Thanks for the letters. They really kept me going.” She had sometimes sent him two a day, always short, not very literate, the envelopes stuffed with mementoes—a scrap of black nylon, something cut from a newspaper, a joke. He had been charmed by them, often aroused, then grew a little weary of their relentless, one-note sexual cheerfulness. They were like directives ordering the world to be happy and start fucking.

      He let one hand rest on her thigh as she drove. The black dress was very short; under it was a black slip, then her bare, golden thigh.

      “Want to go somewhere?” she said.

      “Where?” He had slipped into thinking of his father’s death again.

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