CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
"I don't know, Cindy, I don't know," Elsa said, resting her cheek on the back of her hand. "It is not right."
The woman who had been her beautician and closest confidante since a newly diploma'd Elsa Orsós had come to Florida shrugged her shoulders and rasped the emery board over her client's thumbnail. "Well, baby, maybe that's 'cause it's wrong."
Elsa frowned, "But we are so much like each other. We are both so stubborn and proud; we are fighters. We both love best who we loved first—"
"Aw, Elsie! Ya didn't marry a guy who's in love with another chick!" Cindy exclaimed.
Elsa realized abruptly that she hadn't shared that detail with her friend, who had followed the Calavicci marriage from its earliest hints.
"Why not?" she asked. "I love another man."
"So Al's ex is dead too?" Cindy asked, as if that might not be so bad.
"No, she left him," Elsa said. "When he was in Vietnam."
"You know, kiddo, I've been thinking about that. Maybe he should see a shrink."
"He does," Elsa said, shifting on the tanning bed. "Two times every week he sees Doctor Mortmain for his claustrophobia. He is doing far better now. Even in the closet he doesn't panic any more."
"Gee, that's great, Elsie-honey, but maybe he needs therapy for other stuff. I mean, that time where he was sleeping naked under the kitchen table? That sounds like major shrink time to me." Cindy eased Elsa's hand into the bowl of gel resting on the manicure trolley.
"What, because he thinks he's a dog?" Elsa asked sarcastically.
"No, baby, because of the Hanoi Hilton," Cindy said, her voice suddenly hushing confidentially. "Elsie, you know what they say about the guys who got caught over there! Their minds ain't right. They got tortured so bad their brains have gone funny. And who could blame 'em?"
She wheeled herself down to the foot of the tanning bed, continuing her dissertation as she massaged peppermint lotion into Elsa's delicately boned feet.
"I got this book that some pilot who likes to draw made," she said. "I can lend it to you if you like. It's got pictures he drew from his memories of the camp, and they're just awful! I tell you, Else, the stuff they did to our boys! You know they'd put their legs in iron bars and leave 'em like that for weeks, and they wouldn't even take 'em off so the guy could change his shorts?"
Elsa looked up in surprise and disgust. There was an eager, almost voyeuristic gleam in Cindy's eyes, as if she was secretly relishing the thought that such horrors had been perpetrated on American soldiers.
"It was terrible for Al," she said coldly, surprising herself by springing to the defense of a man with whom it seemed she had scarcely spoken in weeks. "It was terrible, what happened over there. He is covered in scars and often has dreams because his mind hurts also. It is not the kind of thing that should be put in a book."
Cindy's face fell. "Aw, Elsie," she said; "I think it's important people know. The stories hafta get told. What about the guys who died over there? You want them to die forgotten 'cause nobody'll talk about it? Maybe if Al talked to the papers—"
"Hah! Those keselyû!" Elsa snorted. Time was only solidifying her hatred of the press. It added insult to injury that while she and Al roamed their big house like two silent storm clouds occupying the same stretch of sky by purest accident, every paper in the country was billing them as a perfect couple whose first child was just around the corner. "They wouldn't know truth if it danced in front of them wearing a silly hat!" she said.
Cindy laughed. "Girl, you're too much!" she said. "But seriously, honey, Al should get help for this stuff."
"I told him that, one night when he woke up screaming, and all he said was I should mind my own business," Elsa told her. "If he doesn't think he needs help, what more can I do? I just wish that we would spend more time together. I got married to have a companion, and it seems that we hardly even talk any more."
"How's the sex?" Cindy asked candidly. Like all of Elsa's close friends she was not afraid to speak her mind.
"It was great," Elsa confessed; "but it's stopped, too. He gets home and I am already asleep, or else he is too tired. He always wears pajamas to bed now, like he doesn't want me to touch him. He doesn't seem interested at all any longer."
"That's weird," Cindy mused. "You think he's got someone on the side?"
"No!" Elsa snapped. Then she paused. "I don't know. He tells me he stays out with the other astronauts…"
Cindy whistled. "Maybe he's still seeing his old girlfriend," she suggested.
"She was his wife. And she disappeared. Al has moved on, just like me," said Elsa.
"Oh, you've moved on, have you?" Cindy asked. She wheeled her sleek black chair back towards Elsa's head with two strong shoves of her arms, then put her hands on her hips. "Because I thought you were still in love with your fella Andy."
Elsa sighed despairingly. "I am!" she said. "I love him too much! But I have a new life now, and a husband. I want to move on."
"Some husband! You don't talk, you're not having sex, and you've only been married six months!" Cindy said.
"For a while I forgot Andrew," Elsa admitted, confessing her darkest secret. "But now… I miss him, Cindy. Why didn't he come home? Why did it have to happen?"
Cindy shrugged sympathetically. "Shit happens, Elsie-girl. And mosta the time it happens to the best people. You want my advice?"
"Yes!" Elsa exclaimed. "Yes, please, give me your advice!"
"Have it out with Al. None of this tiptoeing around each other. Have a big fight. Call him on everything and clear the air a little."
"Do you think that that will help?" Elsa asked.
"Sure!" Cindy said. "Ben and I had the same thing going on after Tamara was born. Only think that broke the silence was the fight!"
Elsa regarded her friend gravely. "Then there must be a fight," she said, falling back on her old formal delivery, for anything else seemed too mundane for the sentiment she wished to express. "For the silence I can bear no longer."
"Of course," Cindy mused; "inside of six months we were divorced!"
She laughed merrily, but Elsa did not. It seemed like a bad omen.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWM
"She doesn't seem interested anymore," Al sighed, pushing the indifferent-looking mystery casserole around his cafeteria plate. "I don't get it. Ever since just before Christmas she doesn't even wanna touch me, let alone—hadada-da-da." He gestured vaguely.
Jim Taggert frowned sympathetically. "From what I've heard most couples go through a patch like that. I know we did."
"You and Lauren?" Al asked, surprised at the notion. "But you're perfect together!"
"Yeah, but Lauren—she's not very happy with herself," Jim said. "It was maybe fifteen months ago, she was scared I didn't love her; though she wasn't beautiful enough—"
"Beautiful enough? She's gorgeous!"
Jim looked him in the eye. "I know," he said gravely. "But she wouldn't listen. Until one day somebody told her that, so that the next time I said it she actually believed me."
"And then you were fine again?" Al asked. Easy for slender, willowy Elsa to say that married women didn't need a little flattery now and then.
Jim grinned enormously. "And now we're gonna have a kid! I'm gonna be a dad! Can you believe it, I'm going to be a dad!"
"You'll make a great dad," Al affirmed. "How much longer."
"Due in two weeks," Taggert said. "She's counting down the days, lemme tell you!"
"I'll bet," Al said, his voice trailing off as his mind floated back to his own domestic disaster.
Jim reached across the table to clap his commander on the arm. "Don't worry. Elsa'll come 'round."
"I'm not so sure," Al said. Yet again, for the thousandth time since that disastrous December morning, he thought that he couldn't blame Elsa for her sudden aversion to him. Who would want to sleep with a man she'd seen doing something like that? Who would be attracted to a skinny body covered in scars? Hell, he was lucky she hadn't banished him from the bedroom entirely.
"Sure she will!" Jim said. "You just got to have patience. Women. Can't live with 'em, can't kill 'em."
"Can't sleep with 'em," Al added.
Jim laughed. "Not if you want to stay out of the doghouse!" Then his face grew sincere again. "By the way, I hear congratulations are in order!"
Al flushed. He had hoped that news of his impending promotion wouldn't travel too quickly. He wasn't even sure why it was being granted. He hadn't done anything to warrant it, and he had only been a Lieutenant Commander for a year and a half, give or take. "It's nothing," he muttered.
"Oh, yeah, nothing!" Jim mocked. "It's great! I can't think of anybody who deserves it more than you!"
"I don't know," Al said. "I think they're just doing it so I have the authority to command Twenty."
"So take it! Jeepers, you're weird, Al. You need to lighten up a little sometimes. Either you're bouncing off the walls or you're beating on yourself."
"That's me," Al quipped. "NASA's original schizoid man!"
Jim was about to reply when a Marine skidded up to the table and saluted crisply.
"At ease, kid," Al said. The boy obeyed.
"Sir!" he acknowledged, and then turned to Jim. "Lieutenant Taggert, sir!" he said crisply. "We've received word that Mrs. Taggert has been admitted to the obstetrics ward of Florida Hospital in Orlando."
Jim went horribly white. "Hospital? Why?"
It was Al's turn to laugh. "Come on, Jimbo! Why do you think? You're gonna be a daddy!"
Jim shot him a look of pure terror. Al couldn't help another chuckle. He turned to the Marine. "Thanks, kid," he said. "Go and tell Mister Yardley that I'm taking Lieutenant Taggert up to the hospital, okay?"
"You don't have to do that…" Jim said numbly. His eyes were enormous and vacant. Al grinned and shook his head.
"The heck you say," he said. "You couldn't find the head right now. Come on, let's go!"
He dragged his friend to his feet and out of the building. Within minutes the sleek green Ferrari was streaking towards Orlando.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMElsa paced angrily. There would be a fight tonight, sure enough. He wasn't going to get away with this. Not likely. She had come home from her appointment with Cindy refreshed and newly tanned and ready to do battle. But the clock had struck six with no sign of her husband. At eight she had called the check-in desk at the Cape. He had signed out at two in the afternoon, leaving no word where he was going. By ten, she was beginning to wonder whether he had run off to join the circus. Now it was almost one-thirty and still there was no word from Al. Cindy's allegations ran through her mind. What if he was out with another woman? It could be. That would explain why he no longer wished to sleep with her.
She sat down in the living room, wrathfully plucking up the book that Cindy had lent her. She thumbed through the pages, taking in the stark ink drawings with little shivers of horror. One especially, a drawing of a man's arms marked by torture, burned itself into her mind, because it could have been Al. The scars were identical to the ones he bore. She put it aside and closed her eyes. Why did such thing happen? Why was there war?
There was a faint rattle as the back door opened. He was home! She sprung to her feet and strode to intercept him in the kitchen, where he was pouring himself a glass of whiskey.
"Where have you been?" she snapped. "I have been waiting for you now for seven hours—no, eight hours! Where have you been?"
"Why?" he asked. "Where do you think I was?"
"That's not an answer!" she shrieked. "What are you doing, sneaking into the house at two in the morning?"
"I'm not sneaking into the house!" he bit back.
"Oh, sure! Coming quietly into the back door, making no sound, creeping around with the lights off!"
"I thought you were in bed and I didn't want to wake you!" Al protested. He continued in annoyance;"And I came in the back door because I drive the Ferrari. We park the Ferrari in the garage. The garage is out back. If you want, I can walk all the way around the house like an idiot so I can come in the front door—"
"I don't care what door you use! I care where you have been all night! So where have you been all night?"
"Elsa, chill out," he said, taking a slug of his liquor.
"Put that away and answer my question, elfajzott!"
"You know, I would really love to know what that word means…"
"Hah! Wouldn't you just!"
"Yeah, I would just!" he snapped.
Elsa tossed her head so that her heavy earrings swung against her neck in a very satisfying way. "So learn a little Hungarian, bena hapsi!"
"Ya know, two can play the language game…" Al said.
"So play it!" Elsa's pride began to falter. She was bickering like a little child. Well, he was no better, and she wasn't the one creeping into the house in the small hours of the morning.
He cheerfully let loose a string of words she didn't know, then suddenly she recognized one.
"Ah! Spanish!" she exclaimed. "That was Spanish! You said perra, you dirty male nozzle! Hah!"
Al frowned pensively. "How come you know Spanish?" he asked.
Elsa halted mid-bluster. She knew Spanish because Andrew had taught it to her. Not that word, that word she had learned from one of his friends, because Andrew would never have used that word, but he had taught her Spanish. And she had taught him Hungarian. And they had made sweet, passionate love to one another in the little cottage by the Sea…
"I learned it…" she faltered, failing under Al's keen, intelligent dark eyes. "I learned it from…from someone I used to know."
He smiled a little and slipped his hand around her waist. "Well, now you're done yelling," he murmured; "I was up at Florida Hospital with Jim Taggert. Lauren had her baby."
Elsa gasped in wonder. "She did? Boy or girl?"
"Boy," Al said smugly. "Handsome little boy, seven pounds four ounces. Looks just like his daddy."
"Yes?"
"Yeah. Bald and wrinkled and grumpy." He kissed her forehead.
"Oh, you are a terrible friend!" Elsa said, batting playfully at his chest.
"No, really?"
"What did they name him?" Elsa asked.
"Jeremy," Al answered. "Jeremy Ferdinand Taggert."
Elsa sighed dreamily. "What a delightful name."
"He's a delightful little guy!" Al enthused.
There was a silence as they leaned into one another, rocking a little and reflecting on this small happiness. Elsa realized that it was the first time they had embraced since the morning she had found Al under the kitchen table.
"Hey, Elsa," Al murmured presently, right in her ear; "do you want to have kids?"
"No!" she exclaimed. "No! Children are trouble! They tie you to the house, they make you a domestic slave, they—"
"Well, good!" said Al, hastily. "Good! I don't want kids either. I just wanted to make sure we're speaking the same language."
"Well, we are!" Elsa said, pulling away and nodding with conviction.
"Well, good!" he said.
As he turned back to his whiskey, Elsa realized with a pang of regret that there would be no lovemaking tonight, either.