“No, you won’t. Get in the shower,” she said. “Give me your clothes. All of them.”
When he hesitated, she grabbed him by the jersey and pulled him inside.
While the shower water pounded inside the bathroom, she sat in a chair and tried to think. In three days Hershel would be home. She had already resolved that she would make a clean breast of he
r bad behavior with Jack Valentine. Again and again, she had gone over the words she would use. She was drunk when she went to bed with him. She might even admit that she had been drawn to Roy Wiseheart when Hershel was away, and had danced with him in the living room. Nothing really bad had happened, but she was sick with fear and guilt just the same. She would promise never to be unfaithful again, not even in thought. She would be a good wife and go with Hershel wherever he went, even if she had to give up her career.
Her contrition was sincere, her words from the heart. Except for the last part. Her breath came short when she thought about turning down a costarring role that had been offered to her. There was another consideration, one she pushed away from the edges of her conscious mind: She had never loved Hershel Pine.
She had met him at a dance when she was sixteen and he was about to be shipped overseas in advance of the invasion of Italy. He was handsome in his uniform and the center of attention among all the local boys who had never been farther than two parishes from their birthplace. The following night Hershel took her to a movie and an ice cream parlor in Bogalusa and kissed her under a magnolia tree in the park. In the moonlight he became a French legionnaire, a Roman centurion, a British officer in a pith helmet firing his pistol at the Fuzzy Wuzzies attacking the walls of a desert fortress. Hershel Pine was her deliverance from the small-town world of cotton gins and five-and-dime stores and wood-frame heat-soaked churches that groaned with organ music and warnings of eternal perdition.
Roy Wiseheart was dressed in slacks and a golf shirt when he came out of the bathroom, one eye almost shut, the lumps on his face as big as bumblebee bites, the cuts clean of blood. “Sit down,” she said.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
She took bottles of iodine and peroxide out of the medicine cabinet and went to work on the damage done to him in the ring, boiling out each cut with the disinfectant, painting it with iodine. “Ouch,” he said, squinting.
“Does that sting?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“You have a rough side to you,” he said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I tried to kill that kid,” he said.
“He doesn’t sound like a kid to me.”
“I not only tried to kill him, I enjoyed it.”
“Stop talking about it. It’s over.”
“I’ve done it before.”
“Fight someone?”
“Gone after someone with a purpose. Done serious injury.”
“Is that what you came here to tell me?”
“No. I came here to tell you something else. I abandoned my squadron leader when he was limping home. I did it so I could get another kill and be an ace. Two Zeros lit him up. He was trapped in his cockpit. He burned all the way down.”
She placed her hand on the back of his neck. It was as warm as a woodstove. “Maybe you were trying to protect your friend. That would be anybody’s first instinct.”
“My brother was an ace. I wanted to be one, too. I sacrificed another man’s life to satisfy my ambition.”
“I don’t know about military things, but I don’t think you should blame yourself. Wouldn’t your friend tell you that if he were here now? He must have been a good man or you wouldn’t feel remorse. A good man would forgive you. Are you saying he’s not a good man?”
He looked up at her. “Run that by me again?”
She repeated her words. She could see the shine in his eyes. She stroked the back of his head. He stood from the chair, and took the bottle of iodine and the towel from her hands, and set them on the chair. He put his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth. Then he buried his face in her hair, squeezing her body into his, running his hands down her back and sides, kissing her neck. She could feel his manhood swell against her.
“Roy—” she began.
“I love you,” he said. He pushed her arms around his neck and spread his fingers on her rump and lifted her against him. “You have the loveliest figure on earth. Your skin feels like silk. I’m sorry for the way I’m behaving. I think about you all the time.”