Nikki (19 page)

“So there you are,” Dolores said, smiling.

“I must’ve dozed off,” Nikki said, glancing at Dolores and away in confusion. “Where’re the kids?”

Dolores put a forefinger to her lips. “I had a time tearing them away from those toys you brought them; if they know you’re awake, the nap’s all off.”

Dolores extended a slim, warmly tanned bare arm and the two women automatically flowed together, arms going around each other’s waists. They moved hip to hip along the hall and down the stairs.

“Hungry?”

“M’m h’m.”

Jim, wearing coveralls, was in the nook with coffee and a triple-decker sandwich.

Nikki gave him a raised-brow look and said to Dolores, “I thought the yard-maintenance crew came on Wednesdays.”

“You should’ve seen him in an old hat, carrying hedge clippers. I told him all he needed was a pipe to be the perfect peaceful puttering Mr. Wholesome. He looked so virtuous I almost got suspicious.” Her smiled touched them each warmly, but Nikki had a crawly sensation that perhaps her glance lingered a fraction of a second too long. “Sure you two haven’t been up to something?”

“Don’t answer,” Nikki whispered.

“Think I’m stupid?” he whispered back, then smiled widely at Dolores. “Up to something, dear?” he said, rounding his eyes.

“Fools!” Dolores giggled. She gave Nikki a spank. “Scoot in and I’ll make you one of those sandwiches to hold you till dinner. Coffee, tea, cocoa, milk?”

“Please, you sit down and let me get my own. Please.”

“Now when did the princess ever wait on herself?”

“Honest, you spoil me so,” Nikki said guiltily.

“I like to.”

Sitting across from Jim, Nikki kept her eyes steadily on Dolores.

Dolores brought a sandwich and coffee for Nikki, a plate of cookies and some coffee for herself. Jim was at the outer edge of his seat. Dolores slid in with Nikki.

“Truce between you two?” Dolores laughed. Nikki realized that she and Jim usually bantered; this time they hadn’t said a word. Dolores continued lightly, “Jim, did you know Aunt Nikki chose a husband today?”

“Whose?” Evidently he couldn’t resist saying it. Nikki could have killed him; she was sure she flushed.

He bent forward over his plate, chuckling. Dolores said, not so amused, “He’s his own best audience. He slays me. Don’t get so fresh. She fell in love at first sight. Right?”

“Right.”

“My, my,” Jim gave Nikki a wry grin.

“Yes,” Dolores said. “Archer Cole. She found him in the supermarket.”

“On the pastry shelf?” he said.

Nikki giggled, looked at him appreciatively. “Jams and jellies, to be exact. You know him? Oh, I think he’s wonderfully handsome,” she needled.

“I don’t personally care for him.”

“Why,” Dolores said testily, “you hardly know him. Why you’re taking this grumpy attitude is beyond me.” Her words slowed at the end, as if maybe his dislike of Nikki’s suitor wasn’t so far beyond her.

She glanced at Nikki’s profile. “Tell all! What do you think of him at this stage? I assume he did come back to the shopping center and you saw him.”

“Yes,” Nikki said, nodding. Since her experience with Jim, she realized, Archer Cole seemed vague, trivial. “We went for a ride and sightsaw.” She giggled. “I mean we did some sightseeing, and we talked, and you know. Well, I mean, what we said and did was less important than just being together. There in the grocery I got dazzled, and I was in a mood, and I suppose I acted shamelessly, huh?”

“Well,” Dolores said, uncomfortably. Then, remembering something, she laughed. “You remember your first date with Truck Wyzowski when he wanted to pin you right away and you got your haughty little nose up and we marched out? He came chasing after you and that little friend of his, the one he dragged along for me, kept saying to him, ‘you don’t have to chase after any dame.’ Ah, but he did where you were concerned. What I wanted to do was run after you and remind you that Nikki Duquesne is too wonderful to … well, I don’t like to see you not being
proud
.” Dolores looked at her mistily, sat close and hugged her.

Nikki shut her eyes and let her body lean against the softness of her friend, the guilt like a tiny, cold-steel knife in the flesh of her heart. She wanted to rub her face healingly against that rich maternal breast, then slide her cheek against that baby-round cheek and whisper her guilt into that pink little ear. Somehow the guilt-knife would reach that warmer fuller heart and forgiveness would flow from the wound, and again she would be clean.

How sweetly poetically tender, she thought with abrupt revulsion. At the core of these gooey images was the ugly little knife in Dolores’s heart. She hated herself. She sat erect.

“I threw myself at his head,” she said flippantly. “I have no idea what he’s like, except physically, and frankly,” she said, giving Dolores a wink and a sly leer, “that’s all that counts.”

“I’m sure,” Dolores said, blinking at her disapprovingly, “you don’t mean that. I’ve managed to find out some things about him this afternoon.”

Jim had gone over for coffee. He came back and laughed jeeringly. “You mean that’s why you went charging out of here after lunch—to go snooping around and checking on Nikki’s date?”

She looked at him with displeasure. “Not exactly snooping and checking.” She pursed her lips at him and turned her attention to Nikki. Jim sat smoking, sipping coffee and watching cynically as she talked. “He’s thirty and he’s had quite a career with a long string of girls. In the past year or so, however, he’s settled down to some extent and has a job and a fairly steady girlfriend, Gloria Clayton. Did he mention her?”

Nikki shook her head.

Dolores considered. “That could mean he doesn’t consider himself tied to her. Or, Nikki, it could mean that he just wants to play around with you. Now they say the girl is Archer’s mother’s choice. Still, they aren’t formally engaged. I’ve seen her, and she’s surely not impressive in looks or personality. I think it’s quite unlikely he’ll let his mother choose his wife, even though Archer does live at home and is greatly influenced by her attitudes.”

Dolores spoke with such a ponderous air and managed still to look so babyish that Nikki broke out laughing and patted her baby cheeks with both hands. Dolores blinked and looked at her suspiciously.

Nikki explained, “Oh, you’re just so damned lovable.”

When Jim laughed, Dolores gave him a long, cold look.

“Oh-oh, Nikki,” Jim said. “Get your furs. This is her disciplinary technique. No bruises, but it’s foolproof. It’s how she keeps the kids in line. Just turns herself off like shutting down the furnace in midwinter, and br-r-r-r, the world gets real cold.”

Dolores cried out in a small, wounded voice, “Why that’s horrible. As if I’d punish them by turning off my love. Why,” she said, agitatedly, “it’s terrible of you, saying a thing like that just to be clever for Nikki!”

He gaped at her, stunned. “A small joke, Sugar’n’ Spice,” he said soothingly.

She swung her knees around and snapped upright, bumping her hip on the table. She crossed to the stove, rubbing her hip, the high heels of her bareback sandals hitting the floor like a series of small firecrackers. She stabbed a forefinger at a button on the electric stove, turned her head to give him a brief smoky glance, pushed back at her hair with her wrist, then gave him a view of her back.

She wore a sleeveless red-and-green-print-on-white cotton dress with a scoop neckline that showed off an attractive crescent of her tanned and nicely formed back. The width of the flaring skirt accented the narrow trimness of her smooth, brown lower legs, and she was, Nikki realized, posing. She rested her whole weight on one straight leg and jutted her hip, the other leg extended, the foot turned, showing off its line to best advantage.

After a few moments she shifted her weight onto the other leg with a nice rolling shift of her hips and a prettily feminine swing of the skirt. She punched a stove button, took a dance turn and came back to the table with the coffee pot. She warmed Nikki’s cup and her own; then, deliberately ignoring Jim’s, flaunted away.

“Begging,” Jim said, only half amused, “just begging for a crack on the seat of the pants.”

“If all you can do from the minute I step in this house is patronize me and laugh at me and accuse me of being a busybody snoop, and if you can’t say one single word to show me you even like me, then you can just get your own coffee.”

“Well, be damned if I won’t. And thank you.” He carried his cup to the stove.

They passed each other like strangers in the middle of the room. She remained standing at the end of the nook.

“Remember your width when you sit back down,” he said, seating himself. “You almost broke the table last time.”

She stepped over and slapped his face. She stood looking down at him, her hands on her hips as he looked angrily up at her.

“You know better than to do that. You know what happens to you.”

She grinned, swung her hips from side to side. “Well, if my figure’s no good any more, let’s see if my kisses have anything to interest you.”

She took his face in both her hands, turned it up and kissed him square on the mouth, once, twice. She drew back, her lips moistly apart, and frowned down at him. She dropped her face rapidly to his, her blonde hair swinging forward almost as though deliberately walling him off. She held the kiss a long time and she went onto one knee on the seat and pressed herself to him and moved her body subtly.

After a few moments Dolores pulled his legs around and sat on his lap, flustered and giggly. He was laughing and fondling her. Dolores patted a yawn.

“Say, I need a nap,” she got to her feet. “You will excuse me, Nikki?”

“Go right ahead.”

“After all that wholesome outside work, you could use a nap yourself, Jim!” Dolores observed.

“Who, me?” he said, puzzled and embarrased by Dolores’s obviousness. He seemed to imagine the whole thing was a sort of unfortunate lapse of good manners, something in the nature of an accident.

“Guess that fresh air
does
get you,” Jim said in an apologetic tone.

“You don’t need to apologize. Nikki understands perfectly,” Dolores said, giving her a fixed little smile. “Don’t you?”

Nikki nodded.

She sat listening to them go upstairs, a dry smile around her lips. Without quite getting nasty about it, the Taffy Head had laid it on the line about who was the lady in the big bed in
this
house.

The phone rang. “Thelton residence,” Nikki said into the phone.

“You sound like an answering service,” Archer Cole said. “Know who this is?”

“What do you want, Archer?”

“Do I have to want something? Just wondered how you were, what you’ve been doing. I’ve been thinking about you.”

“That’s nice.”

“I got the impression you were anxious to have me call.”

“I was. So you called.”

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t have. Or is there somebody around so you can’t talk?”

“I can talk.”

“Well, haven’t you been thinking about me?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“No conclusions.”

“You need more evidence.”

“Yes.”

“I dunno. You’re so damned cold suddenly. Is that technique or something?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t admit it if it was.”

“Probably not. I’m frankly in an I-don’t-know mood; now that’s fair. It’s just yes-no, yes-no about you.”

“But you like me.”

“I don’t know you. The fact that I don’t find you physically revolting doesn’t mean much. Maybe you remember a remark of yours … physically you enjoyed me. You made a distinction.”

“I shouldn’t have said that. It was just the mood I was in. You can understand that.”

“Yes.”

“Then how about that golf date in the morning?”

“I don’t really care about golf. You had another date. I don’t want you breaking it, or any other relationship, on my account.”

“That’s really noble,” he scoffed.

“I’d have to borrow clubs.”

“I’ll bring an extra set. Pick you up at nine?”

“I don’t know. Oh, all right.”

“Say,” he said, as an afterthought, “I’m tied up this evening, but I could get loose about eleven, in case you’d like to take a little ride.”

“That’s what the whole call was about, wasn’t it?” she said, annoyed. “A little midnight ride. No thanks.”

“I swear I just now thought of it.”

“Still, no thanks.” She laughed scornfully. “You know what you sound like? You sound like a gentleman. You’re going to deposit your proper young lady, then sneak off to enjoy yourself with something socially unacceptable.”

He laughed at her. “Nikki Duquesne socially unacceptable!”

“Nonetheless …”

“Well, don’t be mad at me.”

He sounded so foolishly appealing she found herself melting. “I’m not,” she said with a little laugh. “Good-bye.”

Nikki wandered across to the bookshelf, got a recent novel she wanted to read, scanned the blurb and the author’s photo. She flipped randomly through the book, which had been on loan to three or four of Dolores’s friends. She balanced the book, resting the spine in her palm and letting it fall open where it would. She scanned the page, lifting an eyebrow and grinning … a love scene!

She shut the book and, juggling it lightly, caused it to fall open on another section … she wasn’t surprised to find that this passage, too, involved a seduction. Evidently she was not alone in possessing a dirty mind, she thought, replacing the book. She wandered out to the kitchen, heated herself some coffee and occupied her mind with not thinking about what was going on in the bedroom at this moment.

It was, she thought with sudden disdain, fake and sheep-like to pretend she wasn’t aware of Jim’s coupling with Dolores. If she let herself, she could imagine every detail, and more than that she could place the two of them in every conceivable variation. It was a sour commentary on her independence of mind if she dared not use her own imagination, when to use someone else’s, such as that of the author of that recent novel, would be perfectly all right, socially approved, even cultural!

She let herself imagine freely, enjoyably, putting the pair of them through a breathtaking series of positions and postures and attitudes and moods, enticingly clothing and half clothing one or both of them. It took on the half-comical aspect of graceless athleticism, and she found herself smiling derisively; seen thus physically, they were rather ridiculous, and in a certain sense she could stand uninvolved above all this passionless fornication. It occurred to her that if she were actually to witness them she would laugh. At once the saying came to her that those who feel find life a tragedy, those who think find it a comedy.