The Edge of Honor Page 7

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” she quipped, trying to keep it light. “Actually, it was Tizzy’s idea.

  Tizzy’s another one of the—of my friends.” She had almost said “wardroom wives.”

  “We went to a movie, and then Tizzy decided she wanted to go check out MCRD. I’d never been, and so, well, there we were. We were supposed to meet back at the car at midnight, but—”

  “Tizzy got lucky, and you got left. So what did you think?”

  “I’ve heard it called a meat market. I think it’s a meat market.”

  “But you didn’t care much for being the meat, did you?” he asked. His tone of voice sounded neutral, not accusing, just making a casual observation.

  “No,” she said in a soft voice. “Although for a while there, out on the dance floor, with all those people, it was kind of good just to let go.

  But afterward … well, it was a mistake to go there. That man, that awful man—”

  He nodded slowly in the darkness. Out of the corner of her eyes, she could see the high chain-link fences shining in the darkness along the zoo grounds on either side of the parkway.

  “That awful man is a Marine second lieutenant on temporary duty with a special training platoon. He’ll be shipping out, probably next week.

  Most of that crew in there tonight’s on the way over to the Nam.”

  “How do you—are you a Marine?”

  “Nope. I’m a civilian. I’m an instructor at MCRD.”

  She nodded in the darkness. Then she remembered.

  “You said your name, and that … man backed off.

  Your name was enough to scare him off. What do you, uh, instruct?”

  “Oh, it’s no big deal. I’m in the Physical Training Department. You know, FT? ‘Gimme a hundred pushups’ sort of thing. We instructors have unlimited power to discipline people by ordering up exercise. Nobody wants to be on the bad side of the FT instructors.”

  Maddy had the feeling that he was not telling her the entire truth about what he did, but then the sign for Balboa Park flashed overhead and he took the next exit, circling around in a tight turn to come out a block away from the park. Behind them in the distance, a cluster of office buildings marked the edge of the hills descending down to the harbor.

  The red neon sign for Mr. A’s was just visible on one of the buildings.

  “You don’t look or sound like a PT instructor,” she said.

  “That so? What’s a typical PT instructor look like?”

  “Well, all the ones I’ve ever seen look like middle-aged football players, great big bodies, no necks, you know.”

  He nodded once. “True strength doesn’t always require a huge body,” he said.

  She thought about that as he waited for the light along Park and then made the left toward her apartment building. She remembered with what ease he had lifted her put of the car when she was sick and the way the Marine had scuttled away at just the mention of his name.

  “I guess I saw a demonstration of that tonight, didn’t I?”

  He laughed. “Aw, shucks, ma’am. It warn’t nothin’.”

  She smiled in the darkness.

  “That’s better,” he observed as he pulled up in front of the building.

  “I’d offer to take you to a bar for a drink, but I figure you’re ready for a hot shower to wash this evening away.”

  “You are exactly right,” she said, looking down at her knees. Then she looked over at him. “But I do thank you. I was in real trouble out there.”

  His face grew serious. “Yeah, that’s probably so. I’m glad I was there.”

  “Not as glad as I am.”

  They sat there for a moment. He had left the car’s engine running. He did not look directly at her, but seemed to be staring past her. She sensed he was about to say something else, perhaps ask to see her again, a complication that she didn’t need or want after the experience of MCRD.

  “Well,” she said again, “thank you very much. I’ll get out now.”

  He nodded. “I’ll wait till you get inside.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Autrey. Good night.”

  As she got out of the car, she thought she heard him say, “It’s Autrey, just Autrey.”

  She let herself into the lighted lobby and saw the car pull away. She took the elevator to the fifth floor, then unlocked her apartment door and headed directly for the bathroom, turning lights on as she went.

  After using the bathroom, she went into the bedroom and shucked all of her clothes onto the floor and walked naked back out into the kitchen to the liquor cabinet. She kept her mind blank as she fumbled for a glass and Brian’s bottle of Courvoisier, trying to ignore the trembling in her hands as she poured a hefty measure. Returning to the bathroom, she turned on the shower full force and stepped in, perching the glass of cognac on the rim of the tub. She shampooed her hair, a chore that she normally limited to twice a week. But after MCRD, she knew she smelled of smoke, alcohol, and sweat—and, admit it, girl, fear. She scrubbed her body vigorously, trying to erase the feel of the Marine’s hands and body. Her mind shied sideways as the word rape surfaced. Thank God that man Autrey had come along. She scrubbed harder.

  Once clean, her skin almost red, she tripped the shower valve and put in the tub stopper, allowing the tub to fill.

  She stood in the tub, toweling her hair, while the water rose around her feet. Wrapping her hair in the towel, she sat down in the tub, settling slowly into the tumbling water with a loud sigh. She reached for the cognac and took a sip. When the water was deep enough, she raised her knees and slid her upper body completely under the water, her left arm holding the glass in the air as she waited for the hot water to wash away the last traces of a horrible evening.

  Surfacing, she took another sip of cognac, welcoming the familiar steadying warmth in her stomach. That goddamn Tizzy Hudson. Had to go to MCRD. But then a voice in her mind intruded: It wasn’t Tizzy Hudson who got to going out there on the dance floor in the middle of a crowd of drunk Marines. Nobody made you slug down three glasses of booze in an hour, and nobody kept you from getting out to the car by midnight. Face it, child,.

  you turned it loose out there. What had that animal said?

  You been shaking your ass at me all night … well, that wasn’t true—she had never seen him. But she had been shaking it, and from long experience, she knew exactly the effect she was having on those men, the ones dancing with and near her, and the others, staring from the tables clustered around the dance floor. You’re still a tease, aren’t you? Your Boston ways coming out even after three and a half years of marriage.

  The problems had begun when she elected to major in business after her freshman year. For all her feigned indifference, the condescending smiles from all those bright northern boys in the business school had at first intimidated and then infuriated her. She could still remember the mocking asides about the southern belle studying men’s work and the patronizing questions about how did one make really good southern biscuits. It wasn’t that she was not making good grades, she simply was not fitting in. She had tried to affect the offhand, understated dress and casual intellectual attitudes of the northern girls but had not been able to carry it off; too many years of Atlanta training got in the way.

  She had become increasingly depressed, until she was rescued by her roommate, Julia, an extremely plain-looking young woman with a flair for economics.

  Julia had set her straight: “You’ve got the brains, Maddy; you simply need to differentiate your markets.

  The business school is a man’s world, so first you have to deal with the men, then you can deal with the business school. With your looks, the secret is simple: Tantalize the bastards. Turn on that southern charm, never appear in class without a lot of attention to makeup, perfume, and flattering skirts, move into their personal space, touch their arms and hands when you talk to them until they’re a bunch of quivering wrecks, and then bat your pretty blues at them with a soft ‘Bye, darling, and t
hanks.” And do precisely the opposite to the professors: Sit up front, pay studious attention, and let your hair fall over one side of your face and stare directly into their faces when they’re lecturing. But don’t do anything, no leg crossing peep show, no asking questions, and never speak directly to them until they first speak to you. Then be shy, be unsure if you should even be taking the great man’s time. The straight ones will want you to come around for after-hours conferences and the fairies will want to know how you manage that hair. You’ve got this dynamite aura of bedroom presence, Maddy, so flaunt it with the boys and withhold it from the men, and you’ll go through this so-called man’s world here like a hot knife through butter.”

  When she had stopped laughing, Maddy had seen the sense of it. Hell, this was no different from the way southern women kept southern manhood in perpetual thrall. Every girl from a good family in Atlanta practiced those rules every day. Her momma would have approved, had Maddy been willing to give her the satisfaction of knowing.

  She had graduated from the business college with distinction, having decimated the sexual psyches of half the business-management class and doing some serious damage to two or three professorial egos. But that was all in the past, or supposed to be. She was married now, and that’s not how married women, especially southern married women, were supposed to act. And yet here she was, pulling the same old game at the Marine Officers’ Club, for God’s sake. She sighed again. This wasn’t where things were supposed to be after three and a half years of marriage.

  Brian in WESTPAC and his devoted wife letting her hair down and her skirts up at the local meat market, and nearly getting raped in the process.

  Momma would definitely not approve of this kind of behavior; in fact, Momma would have pitched a proper fit.

  She leaned back in the water, sliding down until the towel just touched it. She examined her body, shimmering just beneath the surface. Still too short, she thought, but all the basic equipment seemed to be in order. She had full, round breasts, which Brian, ever the sailor, had immediately christened port and starboard. Port was a little bigger than starboard, a source of endless fascination to her husband. She could still wear waist-size 26 jeans, but she would never have a flat tummy, and only her frequent tennis workouts kept her from developing what she would consider thunder thighs. But all in all, she knew she was very sexy and that men usually stopped what they were doing when she came by in a flattering skirt. A lot of good that did her, with her husband over there in some Gulf place. She closed her eyes and let the water do its work.

  Three and a half years—or, to be more precise, three years with, a half year without during the Decatur deployment and his training schools enroute to Hood, keeping score like any good Navy wife. She had met Brian on a Newport weekend during her senior year at college. He was attending a Navy school, and she was part of a mixed-doubles group partying at the Old Viking Hotel in downtown Newport. Her date, an MBA student at the business school, had decided to impress her by drinking himself stupid. She had noticed the young naval officer with the boyish face giving her the eye, and he had moved in from the dance floor, whisking her off into the crowd as the pride of Harvard passed out in a sloppy heap on the table.

  She had just pinched off a steamy relationship with her business-ethics professor after he started talking about breaking up his marriage, so she was subconsciously ready for something different. But Brian, with his aggressive enthusiasm about a Navy career, unassuming ways, and infectious smile, had simply ambushed her. Used to dealing with men on a strictly manipulative basis, she had few defenses against a handsome young man who was genuinely delighted to be in her company, impressed but not threatened by her academic achievements, and lots of fun in the bargain. He thoroughly turned her head.

  They had dated for three months, mostly in Newport, where he had a bachelor pad out near Easton’s Beach, and only occasionally up in Boston for the obligatory dose of culture. Then he had left Newport for a ship in Norfolk, giving her her first taste of the gone dimensions of Navy life. But the pain of separation had been masked by the excitement of upcoming graduation, the end of school, and dreamy, passionate letters that preceded hurried weekends in New York City, which was budgetarily halfway between Norfolk and Boston. The weekends had started out being touring safaris around the city, but they had increasingly become love-soaked forty-eights in a succession of darkened hotel rooms.

  Brian was the first man she had been with who seemed to assume that they should take love to its natural conclusion and get married. He was completely different from the young men of Boston, most of whom affected a pseudo intellectual indifference to getting involved, because careers, you understand, had to be attended to first. When Brian started talking marriage, Maddy found herself thrilled, although she had had to think about it, because up to now, men had been, generally speaking, means to various ends. Given the events of her late childhood, getting married took on an increased significance.

  Her marriage was definitely not going to turn out like her parents’.

  But Brian, with his genuine affection for her and his sincere belief in the natural course of love, prevailed, and they were married in a simple ceremony at the Navy chapel in Norfolk, with the wardroom officers ofdecatur in splendid crossed-sword attendance. Getting married in the Navy chapel had neatly sidestepped the logistics problem of who put on the wedding, and the captain had happily consented to give her away. Her mother had come, of course, as always the eternal gracious southern lady, the disapproval in her eyes glittering dangerously above the perpetual smile with which she continued to plow through life. Mother, dearest Mother—Mrs. Frances Madison Mcnair, the poor thing, abandoned by her awful husband, the banker. Just like that. Can you just [ imagine? Maddy could just imagine. I had to go all the | way to god damned Boston to get away from Mother and I the cloying social webs of Atlanta, yes, ma’am, GA. I

  She would have given just about anything for her father to have been there. But her father, the banker, had left them one day in the same brisk style with which he had made his fortune in Atlanta after the war, which was with grace, beaming good humor, and politely disarming efficiency. Two weeks into her sophomore year at the Marshall Academy in Buckhead, her father had announced brightly at breakfast one Saturday morning that he was leaving his two gracious southern ladies to get on with the rest of his life. Their big house on Randolph Street was bought and paid for, he declared, and there was a trust fund in the bank for the proper keeping of his wife and the household, and another one for Maddy’s college education, provided that she went to school well north of the Mason-Dixon line. With her mother sitting in stunned silence for the one and only time in Maddy’s living memory, her father had come around the table, kissed each of them on the forehead, paused for a moment in the doorway to survey the wreckage, and walked out of their lives and Atlanta forever.

  For Maddy Mcnair, the next three years at home had been an unsettling time of complicated stories, carefully choreographed social adjustments, a graceful withdrawal from the Driving Club (even though her mother was a Madison, Father had been the member) and other face saving gestures aimed at denning their changed status in proper Atlanta society, and the opening of a deep chasm of antagonism between mother and daughter. Maddy remembered those years as serial images, each framed in a halo of sepia-colored insubstantiality, scene after scene of role-playing propelled by an increasingly urgent longing for the day when she, too, could make a grand announcement and leave her mother. Maddy now understood that most daughters and mothers were bound to battle, but in her heart she still blamed her mother for driving her father away at a time when her own adolescent devotion to him was in full flower.

  When it had come time for her to choose a college, the conditions of her trust fund and the association of the name Massachusetts with everything antithetical to the South led her directly to Boston. The daughter of a banker at least in spirit, if no longer in fact, she had elected to take a degree in financial management.
Graduation with honors had made possible the management intern position she now held with the giant California financial conglomerate, Bank of America. Who would expect her to be on deck at eight-thirty tomorrow— correction, today—Miss. Priss, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, for the morning staff meeting. She groaned and pulled the plug with her toe.

  She got out of the tub, dried off, and slipped into her nightgown. She dried her hair with an electric blower, brushed her teeth, tipped the rest of the cognac into the sink, and went back through the apartment, turning off lights and checking the locks. Slipping into the queen sized bed with a sigh, Maddy turned off the bedside lamp, automatically hugging the second pillow, Brian, she thought, where the hell are you?

  As she tried to squeeze out of her mind the memory of the foregoing hours, she felt more and more like an ass.

  Getting married had not been a trivial proposition for her, especially given what she had been through when her father decamped. Brian had been so different from the boys she had known in Atlanta and in college up north. His love for her seemed to be pretty uncomplicated, and he was direct, fun, interested in life, serious about his career for the right reasons, and determined to do a good job at whatever he tackled, including marriage.

  But the fitness reports from Decatur had been a real surprise, and the scope of his new job in Hood another one. The combination of those two things, the upcoming promotion board and her own distress at the length of the deployment, had not helped matters between them.

  She stared up in the darkness, watching but not seeing the reflections of passing car headlights as they rippled across the ceiling. In retrospect, she also realized that she had not been sufficiently sensitive to how much he wanted children. She could not really put her finger on why she was hesitating, but the more he pushed, the more she had been resisting. She sensed that it was psychological and related to what had happened in her own family, but she had shied away from really trying to figure it put, hiding instead behind her stubborn streak when Brian pushed the issue. And now what? How in the hell do we resolve some of these things by mail?