Nikki (11 page)

He lurched out of his chair and tried to grab her. She hissed, “Sit down!”

“I should wash your nasty little mouth out with soap,” he said, shaking.

“You should look at yourself,
that’s
what you should,” she challenged. “Then face me. Go on. Try it. Look me in the eye and deny it. Tell me it’s clean and good and for the sake of my soul or something. Tell me you’d be happy if I didn’t give you cause to spank me.”

“I’d be overjoyed.”

“Then I’m the guilty one. I have an ugly mind. Look at me and tell me that I’m bad, you’re good.”

He couldn’t. Nikki had wanted to walk off, not hit him when he was down. But she’d stayed, rubbed it in.

“You’ve known it for a long, long time, even if that gentlemanly mind of yours wouldn’t permit you to know you knew!”

He protested feebly. “It’s the books you read.”

“I don’t need books to know what my instinct says. My instinct told
me
. Yours told you, too. You knew. You knew!”

He poured himself another large drink.

Nikki shrilled, “Go on. Booze! Kill your senses. Feed your weakness. Oh, that’s grand. I’m so proud, so
proud
of what you’ve become!”

“You hate me.”

“I hate your weakness. You had no right to be weak and false. You had no
right
.”

“You want to break me. You set out to break me. You enjoy thinking you’ve done that.”

“I hate it! Who have I got … who have I got? Why did you
let
me be stronger? Oh, I hate it. I wish I were dead.”

I still do, Nikki told herself. Then she shook her head violently, hurried over to a light switch. She turned on every light in the apartment, and after a while she managed to get to sleep.

Nikki phoned when she woke, again after breakfast, then just before leaving the Peninsula Shore Club locker room; still Dolores was out, at least according to the housekeeper. Shrugging off a vague uneasiness, Nikki left her name and the club phone number and went out for her session with the tennis pro, dangling her racquet by the handle and bouncing it against her shapely knees.

Taking the court in a trim, brief white costume whose pleated skirt added a frisky touch to her long, graceful legs, she paused and stamped her feet out of the sheer pleasure of being on solid, familiar ground. She met the pro briefly at the net and explained, after a companionable interchange of greetings, that she needed work on nothing in particular and everything in general.

During the warm-up volly the pro, a lean, darkly-tanned and unexcitingly handsome man in his thirties, fed shots to her backhand and forehand alternately, with now and then a lazy-sailing high one that made gentle demands on her overhand and brought her body up in delightful leaping extensions. Nikki in turn placed her shots to him so that he could take them to his best advantage, smoothly synchronizing the position of his legs and body with the stroke of his arm.

The day was sunny, and massed white fleets of cloud skimmed across the sharp blue sky. There was an occasional race of shadow down the smooth yellow court, while a fresh breeze ruffled the upper branches of a nearby stand of evergreens and played cleanly over her face and throat and bare arms and legs.

She felt a sensuous pleasure in their harmonious rhythms, in the flights and rounded bouncings of the ball, and in the effortless swing of her racquet and the measured thrumming impact of the ball against the taut, responsive strings. Joy flowed through her like a slow drug.

Abruptly she wondered what time it was and why the hell Dolores hadn’t called. As the ball bounced toward her, she stepped in and murdered it.

The pro’s shallowly handsome face took on a startled look and he barely managed the return. Nikki gave the ball a backhand cut which landed just over the net in a reverse bounce that brought the pro up at a dead end. He barely managed to scoop it back to her; she sent him racing to the back court on the next shot. She kept him on the defensive and chasing all over the court on the next several plays.

Then, starting to run cross-court for a ball, he stopped himself. “Who’s paying who for a workout?” he protested, laughing. “Is this a tournament?”

“I didn’t come here to dance,” she said tartly.

“Then see what you can do with this serve. And remember, you asked for it.”

“I’m waiting.”

He scorched three past her. And on the fourth serve Nikki was infuriated to strike wood and send the ball skying. The pro got himself set for a machine-like powerhouse forehand drive calculated to dust the backline. Nikki had plenty of time to drop back and make the return and save the point. Instead she rushed the net and picked his shot out of the air.

It caught him flat-footed and he gave her a look of annoyance mingled with scorn. Nikki walked back to take his next serve, sucking her cheeks to keep from grinning. Nothing so enraged these smug machines so much as a risk that paid off.

He took the next point and game. He won her serve, too, playing a dull, steady game. Several years ago, for a few seasons, he had been fourth or fifth seeded in the national rankings, and his level of competence was high, but he never won a game. Never! Nikki thought angrily, as he took the third straight game. He depended on the opponent to lose, to take the chances and miss. Well, her level of competence was high too, and she was damned if she was going to take a pasting from a machine.

Nikki began to play in dead earnest, despising him every time he chose the safe, obvious return assuming she would eventually miss. When chances came she took them. And she didn’t miss. Angry and tense, her pale lovely face looking more than ever honed, her green eyes vivid, she won her first, then her second game. She was in the process of evening them up at three-all when an attendant brought an extension phone out to the court, calling her name. Still flushed, she took the phone impatiently, and flashed a smile at the attendant while she palmed a loose strand of hair back from her temple.

“Nikki Duquesne!” she answered sharply.

“I surrender!” Dolores laughed.

“Oh, it’s you!” For a moment her green eyes continued to smolder at the pro’s retreating figure; then she swung around and began to pace up and down to keep her hot body from chilling. “I was a little out of breath.” She relaxed slightly. “Thanks for calling. I was beginning to wonder if you were really out, or just out to me.”

“Fool!”

Nikki slowed her pacing, smiled a little. “Well, what I called about was lunch today. Or,” she added hastily, “tomorrow, or sometime soon. Got any holes in your calendar?”

“I was counting on lunch with you today.”

“You were?”

“M’m h’m. I tried phoning you first thing this morning, but they wouldn’t give out your number. Then the instant I got in the house just now, I asked if you’d called.”

Nikki grinned with pleasure, backed over to the net post and, leaning comfortably against it, doubled one leg back and scratched her ankle. “Well, fine. Would an hour from now be all right?”

“Just right. Pick you up then.”

“I didn’t mean,” Nikki began hastily.

Dolores cut in. “I know what you didn’t mean, but we’re eating here. Then we’ll have lots of time to just lazy around and talk about everything.”

“Well.” Nikki hesitated. “
I
invited
you
.”

“You can pay for your meal,” Dolores teased, “or else bring your own and just pay a modest cover charge.”

“I wasn’t trying to be tedious, honey,” Nikki assured her quickly. “But I’ve got presents for the kids, only they’re back in my apartment in town; I hate to show up empty-handed.”

“I’ll dump the kids on Ginny Hawthorne for the afternoon.”

“No,” Nikki cried. “Please don’t do that.”

“They’ll be overjoyed to visit their friends; they’re not being banished. We’ll pick them up later,” Dolores said firmly. “So just relax, and I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Yes, Mama. Bye-bye,” Nikki said.

She left the phone in an all’s-right-with-the-world mood, and with a fine sense of easy confidence resumed play and lost every game.

Forty-five minutes later Nikki walked into the main club entry hall, glowingly fresh from a shower, wearing a snugly belted vivid turquoise silk dress and a smart little tricorn hat which was tilted forward so that one point aimed at the rising arc of her left eyebrow with a frivolous, vaguely drunken air. She was surprised to see that the Taffy Head was already there, looking stiff, shy, and all dressed up, an incredible babyish sweetness about her round soft face. Dolores spotted her and began to glow.

“Hi, Nikki. My, my, but don’t you look fresh and bright! Oh, I’m so glad to see you!”

Nikki stopped a pace away, a foolish little half-smile hovering around her mouth, her eyes wide and warm. She stood for a second or two looking at Dolores, thinking she’d like to muss her fluffy hair and pick her up like a doll.

Then, reminding herself that Dolores outweighed her by a dozen pounds, she eyed her beige sack dress ironically and taunted, “Well, well, I see you’re right in uniform.”

Dolores rounded those big blue eyes indignantly.

“Whee!” Nikki cried. “We’re tender, aren’t we?”

“What did I expect? Something gracious or civilized? I must be crazy,” Dolores said with a touch of exasperation that suddenly gave way to laughter. She stepped forward, gave Nikki a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Come along. I did promise to feed you.”

Riding comfortably slouched in a corner of the seat with one leg tucked up, Nikki delivered and Dolores parried tart insults. When they entered the semi-private hill road their playfulness began to feel strained, like a caricature of their college relationship. Nikki sat around straight on the seat, smoothed her skirt over her knees.

“I just love this road,” she said soberly.

The road wound in a series of long climbing straightaways and level turns toward Dolores’s home near the summit of a forested hill. The ground rose steeply on the left and fell away from the right edge of the road. An occasional entrance-drive gap in the wall indicated a home somewhere above, and now and then there was a glimpse through the green-choked mass of trees and vines of a house or grounds. Otherwise there was little to suggest anything but wilderness. A surf-like drone of wind through foliage gave everything an enchanting fairy-tale sense of isolation.

Dolores negotiated the steep, turning driveway in low gear and emerged onto the lovely spacious grounds of her home. “You’ve never really seen the place,” she said, when they got out.

For several minutes they walked around outside. The enclosure, centering around a fine two-story redwood-and-glass house with sweeping panoramic windows and glassed-in roof deck, was walled off at either side by dark-green square-cut Australian pine. It featured velvety front and side lawns interspersed and bordered by dazzling flower beds. In the rear there was a patio, barbecue, children’s pool and playground. The whole of it had the tone of a private paradise resisting the rough thrust of the towering, wooded jungle just outside the little back fence.

Nikki couldn’t help thinking of the place as a neat little patch of jungle put temporarily asleep and prettified, giving an illusion of security.

She looked at Dolores, the words “The Tranquilized Jungle,” on the tip of her tongue. But the Taffy Head, her bright hair blowing loosely back to show a pink ear, looking almost as young as the day they’d met, seemed so softly happy with her little world that Nikki couldn’t say it. Inside the house, she conscientiously appreciated whatever detail Dolores seemed especially to favor. But a passive Nikki wasn’t too convincing, and she got the feeling that Dolores suspected she was being insincere.

At the table, set beside a floor-to-ceiling window, and partyish with flowers, colored plates and mats, she over-ate, then chose the same gooey dessert Dolores was having, instead of sherbet or fruit.

“Shall we go up on the deck?”

Once there, Nikki kicked off her shoes, lay back voluptuously on a chaise, set an ashtray on the flat between the pert upthrusts of her breasts and lighted a cigarette. For a while they just lay on adjoining lounges looking up at the sky. It was warm there in the lee of the high pale-blue glass windbreaks, and she felt like taking off her clothes, but she knew it would embarrass Dolores.

Dolores got up, seated herself beside Nikki and looked gravely down into her eyes. “You’ve been keeping me at arm’s length, and it hurts me, Nikki.”

“Why, Dolores, what a thing to say when I’ve been trying so hard to show you how happy I am to be with you.”

“Too hard,” Dolores said gently. “You’re unhappy, and you’re not letting me help you. I want to, Nikki.”

The hushed tenderness in her voice and the anxiety in her beautiful blue eyes threatened to dissolve Nikki. “The kind of frantic problems I put up with,” she said tartly, “would tear you into confetti in a week.”

“Such as?” Dolores said imperturbably.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve gone on in college, taken a master’s. All this purely physical game-playing—I don’t know. Of course there’s one good thing about sports—you get your reward right now if you win, which I manage to do. I haven’t got anything really to complain about except …” she sighed, “except I’m nowhere, don’t belong anywhere or to anybody. But what the hell! I’m not really unhappy. I thrive on action, tension and excitement.”

Dolores mocked her gently, “Not unhappy, but you’re nowhere and feel you don’t belong anywhere or to anybody.”

“I always meet people in an atmosphere of excitement. They’re in a holiday mood for, say, a tennis tournament. Their own personal actual lives are more or less suspended, and what I get to know isn’t whole people, but parts of people, keyed-up phases of them. And they don’t think of me as a real person, but as a part of the event.

“These relationships can be nice, but the thing that fuses them is the event itself, not the people. It’s as though I never have any contacts except on the crest of the wave.” She waved one hand. “Then the event’s over and they drop back into their solid, serious calm world and go on with their lives.”