Tigers in Red Weather (2 page)

“In that line, I really see the whole film,” the woman said.

“Yes,” the man said, with just a touch of uncertainty.

“And in some ways, it is so Bogart.”

“It does seem like he was the only logical choice.”

Nick looked at Hughes. She wanted to communicate to him how much she loved him for bringing her here, for spending too much money just to have a cocktail, for letting her be herself. She tried to radiate all these things in her smile. She didn’t want to talk just yet.

“Do you know what?” the woman said, her pitch rising suddenly. “We’re at their table. Do you realize we’re at their table and we’re talking about them?”

“Are we really?” The man took another sip from his scotch.

“Oh, that is so Twenty-one,” the woman said, laughing.

Nick leaned in. “Whose table, do you think?” she whispered to Hughes behind her gloved hand.

“I’m sorry?” Hughes said distractedly.

“They said they’re at someone’s table. Whose table?”

Nick realized that the woman was now eyeing them. She had heard her, seen her try to hide her curiosity behind her hand. Nick flushed and looked down at the red-and-white-checked tablecloth.

“Why, it’s Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s table, dear,” the woman said. She said it kindly. “They went on their first date at this table. It’s one of the things they brag about here.”

“Oh, really?” Nick tried to hit a note somewhere between polite and nonchalant. She smoothed her styled hair with her palms, feeling the softness of the suede loosening the hair spray.

“Oh, Dick, let’s give them the table.” The woman was laughing again. “Are you two lovers?”

“Yes,” said Nick, feeling bold, sophisticated. “But we’re also married.”

“That’s a rarity.” The man chuckled.

“Yes, indeed, it is,” the woman said. “And that deserves Bogart and Bacall’s table.”

“Oh, please don’t let us disturb you,” Nick said.

“Nonsense,” the man said, picking up his scotch and the woman’s champagne cocktail.

“Oh, really, you’ve been bedeviled by my wife,” Hughes said. “Nick …”

“Oh, we’d love it,” the woman said. “And she is especially bedeviling.”

Nick looked at Hughes, who smiled at her.

“Yes, she is,” he said. “Come on, then, darling. We’re all on the move for you.”

The martini that arrived reminded Nick of the sea and their house on the Island: clean, briny and utterly familiar.

“Hughes. This may be the best supper I’ve ever had. From now on, I only want martinis, olives and celery.”

Hughes put his hand to her face. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

“How can you say that? Look where we are.”

“We should get the bill,” he said, motioning to the waiter.

“Is everything all right, sir?”

“It’s fine. May we have the bill, please?” Hughes was looking at the door. Not at Nick, not at her red dress, or her shiny black hair that she’d had to keep in a net on the train all the way from Cambridge to Penn Station.

The waiter glided away.

Nick fiddled with her handbag because she didn’t want to look at Hughes. The couple who had switched seats with them had left, although the woman had squeezed her shoulder and winked at Nick when she’d risen. She tried to stop herself wondering what Hughes might be thinking about. There was so much that she didn’t know about him, not really, and although she always wanted to confront, to slice him open in one deft movement and peer inside, something animal in her told her it was the wrong way to proceed with him.

“Sir, madam.” Nick looked up. A man with the air of a walrus had appeared at their table. “I’m the manager. Is anything wrong?”

“No,” Hughes said, glancing around, presumably for the waiter. “I’d only asked for the bill …”

“I see,” the Walrus said. “Well, it’s entirely possible that you weren’t aware, sir, but dinner”—and here he paused, letting his handlebar mustache take full effect—“dinner is on the house for the Navy tonight.”

“I’m sorry?” Hughes said.

“Son.” The Walrus smiled. “What can I bring you?”

Nick laughed. “A steak, oh please, a steak,” she said, and everything else vanished.

“A steak for the lady,” the Walrus said, still looking at Hughes.

Hughes grinned, and suddenly Nick saw the boy she’d married revealed in the untouchable man who’d come back to her. A boy in a stiff cardboard collar and a rigorously pressed blue uniform. And their predicament, which was just like everyone else’s.

“A steak, if you can find one in this city. Or this country, for that matter,” Hughes said. “I wasn’t sure they still existed.”

“They still exist at the Twenty-one Club, sir, such as they are.” The Walrus snapped his fingers at the waiter. “Two more martinis for the Navy man.”

Later, it was the fleas, again. And Hughes was tired, he said, from the steak. Nick folded her red dress and put on the black nightgown, which he wouldn’t see in the dark. She lay on the bed listening to the noise of the repairmen, working on the ship in the dock. The empty hammering of the steel.

Just outside of Newark, Nick decided to go to the lounge. She had packed three hard-boiled eggs and a ham sandwich for dinner so she wouldn’t have to spend the three dollars in the dining car. But she couldn’t resist the lure of the bar. It had been advertised as serving all the “new” drinks, and she had put aside fifty cents for extras.

The Havana Special. No husband, no mother, no cousin: She could be anyone. She smoothed her gray skirt and applied her lipstick. She inspected herself in the mirror; one dark lock fell over her left eye. She was about to step into the corridor when she remembered her gloves. As she slipped them on, she smelled her wrist once more before closing the door sharply behind her.

Entering the lounge car, with its curved wooden bar and low-slung,
burgundy seats, Nick felt a trickle of sweat begin to pool between her breasts. She ran her gloved hand over her upper lip and instantly regretted the gesture. A waiter approached and showed her to an empty table. She ordered a martini with extra olives, wondering if they would charge her more for them. She pushed back the felt curtain and stared out into the night. Her own reflection stared back. Behind her head she could see a man in a navy blazer looking at her. She tried to make out if he was handsome, but a passing train obliterated his image.

She leaned away from the window and crossed her legs, feeling the shift of her nylons between her thighs. The waiter brought her drink and when Nick offered up her cigarette to be lit he fumbled to locate his lighter. The man across the way stepped in, flicking a silver Zippo. All the young men back from the war carried Zippos, as if they came issued along with the uniform.

“Thank you,” Nick said, keeping her eyes on her cigarette.

“You’re welcome.”

The waiter disappeared behind a partition of frosted glass.

“May I join you?” the man asked. There was nothing hesitant in his request.

Nick motioned to the seat, without looking up. “I’m not staying long,” she said.

“Where are you headed?”

“St. Augustine.”

He had dark hair, slicked back with pomade. He was handsome, she supposed, in a Palm Springs sort of way. Perhaps a little too much cologne.

“I’m going to Miami,” he said. “I’m going to see my parents in Miami.”

“How nice for you,” Nick said.

“Yes, it is.” He smiled at her. “What about you? Why St. Augustine?”

“I have a brother there,” Nick said. “He’s decommissioning his ship. I’m going to see him.”

“How nice for him,” the man said.

“Yes, it is.” This time, Nick smiled back.

“I’m Dennis,” the man said, extending his hand.

“Helena,” said Nick.

“Like the mountain.”

“Like the mountain. How original.”

“I’m an original guy. You just don’t know me very well, yet.”

“If I knew you better, I would feel differently?”

“Who can say?” Dennis finished his drink. “I’m having another drink. Would you like another drink, Helena?”

“I don’t think so,” Nick said.

“I see. Drinking alone. How sad for me.”

“Who knows, if you wait around long enough, maybe you’ll find a companion.” The martini was making her feel brave.

“I don’t want another companion,” Dennis said. He sighed. “Trains make me lonely.”

Nick was aware of the night rushing by, the whine of steel hitting steel.

“Yes,” she said. “They are lonely.” She pulled out a cigarette. “I suppose I will have that drink.”

Dennis signaled to the waiter. This time Nick’s martini had only one olive. For some reason, it made her ashamed.

“What’s your brother like?”

“He’s lovely,” she said. “And very blond.”

“So you don’t look alike.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Well, he’s one lucky guy to have a sister like you.”

“Do you think so? I don’t know how lucky he should feel, really.”

“I’d like a sister like you.” He grinned at her.

Nick didn’t like the way he said it, or the way he grinned, as if there
was a complicity between them. Now that he was too close to her, she could see that he had brown hairs protruding from his nostrils.

“I have to go now,” she said, trying to keep her balance as she rose to her feet.

“Oh, come on.”

“Don’t bother getting up.”

“Don’t get all huffy. I was only kidding.”

Nick walked out of the lounge. He could pay for both her damn drinks.

“Any time you want some brotherly love,” she heard him call after her, laughing, before the compartment door cut him off.

Back in her roomette, she practically ripped her blouse trying to get it off. Her head was pounding. She pulled off her skirt and, standing in only her brassiere and underpants, she bent over the small sink and splashed water over her breasts and around her neck. She switched off the overhead light and pushed the window down to let in some fresh air. The porter had turned down her bed while she had been in the lounge. She sat on it and lit a cigarette. When she was finished with that one, she lit another and pressed her head against the pane. The darkness went by. After a while, she lay down, the smell of the smoke lingering around her.

It was five o’clock in the morning when they pulled into Richmond. The sound of people moving in and out of the train had woken her up. She hadn’t closed the curtains and the window was still open.

“Goddamn it,” Nick said. She tried to inch herself up the bed, aware that she was still wearing only her underwear, for all the boarding passengers to see. The far curtain was just out of reach, so she tugged at the one nearest and got behind it. Standing there, covered only in green felt, she peered out. Nick thought she could detect the earthy traces of the James River. The air was more gentle here in the South. Not like at Tiger House, where the sea took it by force. There
was also the smell of pine, cleaning away the last vestiges of the martinis. She pulled the other curtain shut, slipped into her robe, opened the door and called to the porter for coffee.

She would be in St. Augustine by eleven tonight. And with Hughes. Had she dreamt of him? She tried to remember. The porter came with the steaming coffee. She drank it, watching the sleepy passengers boarding for Florida. Helena would be arriving in Hollywood soon. She wondered what Avery Lewis’s house looked like. Poor Helena. Word had come early on in the fighting that Fen was dead—it had taken him all of two months to get himself married and killed. Who knows what their life would have been like if he had survived? They were both a couple of children and neither one had any money.

Helena’s mother, her aunt Frances, had not made a brilliant marriage either. Still, she had never seemed unhappy that she was forced to make do with less. Nick had never heard her complain about the fact that her older sister had been the one to inherit Tiger House, or marry a man who made oodles in bobbins and spools, while she had virtually nothing. It hadn’t occurred to Nick that her aunt might have wanted things to be different. But thinking now of Helena’s strange, mad dash to get married again, her need to have someone of her own, as she had put it, made Nick wonder if Aunt Frances had ever wished she’d been the one in the big house.

Perhaps it didn’t really matter. After all, Nick couldn’t remember a summer that Aunt Frances and her mother weren’t in each other’s pockets. Even after Helena’s father died, when the Depression came. And even when her own father died and her mother was so unwell. Nick stopped herself. She didn’t want to think about that right now.

She pulled two of the eggs out of their brown paper bag and cracked them on the windowsill, revealing the shiny, white skin. No, everything was new now, just waiting to be discovered. And she would. She and Hughes would do it together. She was hungry for it, she would stuff the world whole into her mouth and bite down.

1945: DECEMBER

N
ick was lying on the floating dock when she heard Hughes pull up in the old Buick. She tried to concentrate on the music coming from the porch across the yard, so she wouldn’t hear the coughing engine or the slap of the screen door as her husband entered the bungalow.

Count Basie’s piano. The worn wood from the dock shed tiny splinters into the back of her yellow bathing suit. Her big toe skimmed the top of the canal. She waited.

When Hughes didn’t come outside, Nick felt relieved. She heard the shower start inside the house as he washed away the dust and paint from mothballing the warship in Green Cove Springs. She imagined his body, the blond hairs on his arms covered in a fine layer of what was once the shell of the U.S.S.
Jacob Jones
. She could picture him slicking his hair back under the water, turning his face up to the spray, his eyelashes like cobwebs catching fine beads. Would he be thinking of her? She wondered this only briefly. She knew he would not.

The cottage was giving off its evening song: the sound of water
rushing through the cheap pipes, and scratchy jazz. Nick hated that cottage, hated its sameness. A rented prefab, it was just like all the others surrounding it: boxy, with a kitchen and bedroom at the front, and a large living room and dining area to the rear, with windows onto a back porch.