Interlude in India

Miller tilted his chair back cautiously, with the gentle regard for chair legs that all large men develop. He wanted to be able to watch her as she returned from the women’s room. He stared absently out over the murmuring mass of uniformed coffee drinkers, faces dark and light, bobbing and sipping and staring. Turbaned Indian bearers in dirty white slid by his obstructing back, carrying trays of battered china. Over all, the bitter haze of coffee tang and tobacco smoke, accenting the morning sun slanting across the large room.

Soon the Eurasian girl reappeared, coming toward him with the careful lilt, on her long, thin legs. His face tightened just a bit as he realized for the hundredth time that she swung her hips just a bit more provocatively when walking through a roomful of men. He made aimless motions at getting up until she was safely seated, then relaxed again.

“Coffee’s cold, Sal. Want some fresh?”

She abruptly widened and narrowed her dark eyes, and gave him her smile of enigma — both practiced so constantly that they had become natural to her. “No thank you very much, Billy. What I have will do.” The “Billy” came out with just a touch too much accent on the y, so that it had a faint foreign flavor. He felt a quick rush of irritation, and subdued it, wondering vaguely why one of her tricks of speech, which had been so delightful three months ago, should gradually become so irritating.

Insensitive to his mood, she covertly watched the men at the near-by tables, and tried to remember just how Rita Hayworth had held herself in that café scene. When she was certain that he was no longer looking at her, she made another one of her appraisals of him, from the thinning blond hair, across the florid cheekbones and wide shoulders to the tinsel gold bar stitched to the shoulder of his field jacket. She frowned slightly then and thought. “Two times they will have to promote him and then he will be just a captain, and Ella has a major.” To avoid such disconcerting thoughts she stared at his brown paw resting easily on the table, and stealthily placed her own hand near it. There! How white her hand looked! She glared searchingly at her arm, looking for any signs of the increasing sallowness that Ella had said would come as she got older.

Satisfied, she again looked at his hand and then her eyes traveled to his square corded wrist and a faint, delicious wave of languor began to sweep down her; her eyes followed up the length of his arm to those thick shoulders and to that column of solid, firm throat rising out of his open shirt collar. By now, the excited feeling had become a sort of pulsation and she could feel the old familiar way it seemed to settle in the backs of her knees. He had been staring around the room trying to locate and identify acquaintances, and glanced back at her. What he read in her eyes pushed all minor irritations far away. They leaned slightly toward each other and conversed without words in that old and new language in which they could escape everything around them, and even escape the dozens of irritations that were so steadily growing and breeding in the warm, fertile soil of their essential differences.

Slowly it ebbed, leaving in its place a patient urgency, the same warm, waiting feeling that she had first felt so many months before after he had kissed her roughly when they stood out on the hotel porch after trying to dance in the sodden summer heat of India.

“Time to get back to the mines, Sal.” He began to stir and shake himself slightly, like a large dog ambling forward to some well-accustomed exertion.

“You did not say if you would come to get me tonight.”

“Necessary?”

She bridled and threw her head back, looking through lowered lashes, and he felt a flash of annoyance as he realized how that little trick must have come right out of her mirror.

“What makes you think I won’t have a date?”

“Don’t be a jerk, Baby.”

They angled their way through the tables to the door. She turned and looked up at him, a ghost of vague apprehension in her eyes. “Good-by, Billy.”

“S’long.” And she stood for a moment and watched his receding back, annoyance conflicting with a small feeling of pride in how firmly and quickly he strode away. Hearing the voices of a group of men pushing out of the door behind her, she turned and walked away, glancing into the store windows, admiring the way her short coat furled away from her body in the slight speed of her movement Behind her, the group of officers stood outside the restaurant for a few minutes, gazing after her.

“My God! Look at those colors — purple and yellow!”

“Her mother must have been chased into the woods by a rainbow.”

“Or a mad Englishman.”

“That’s a damn nice little figure, though.”

“Come on, Tommy, you’ve been over here too long.” And they strolled off with the quiet satisfaction of a group of men who have just accurately appraised a woman.

As Miller unlocked the door of his room and stepped aside to let her go in that night, she felt once more that thrilling feeling of high adventure that came with a room that had so many evidences of unrestrained masculinity — military masculinity. There were slippers under the desk, pipes on the mantel, and the bed was disturbed, as if he had napped after lunch. As always, he kissed her hungrily, and then pushed her into a chair by the fireplace while he hunted for the gin and lemon squash. He was fumbling with glasses and humming softly behind her, when all of the little evidences of insecurity that had piled up over the coffee table came back to her. She felt a need to test her security, and began to ask questions about his day at work — getting monosyllabic answers that, in many cases, could have been yes, no, good, or bad.

Finally, when she felt that he was listening in his most offhand manner, she said, “You won’t mind, will you, if I double date with Ella tomorrow night? A friend of her major is coming to town.”

He stopped mixing a drink and straightened up slowly. All the accumulated disappointments and irritations of the past months rushed to his mind. Swaggering with her past the enlisted men, and studiously looking away; hiding his face as he passed his superior officers. Ignoring the faint aroma of strange spiced foods that came from her parted lips sometimes as she lay breathing warmly beside him. Avoiding certain restaurants where he knew she would be a bit too obvious. Controlling the quickened pulsations of his blood as he saw how other men looked at her, and how she answered their knowing analysis. It all bubbled up in him so that the room finally began to look unreal, frozen by the silence that had hung in the air since her question. He walked unsteadily around and faced her, face red and immobile, voice hoarse and low. “Haven’t I had enough Goddamn trouble without you catting off after some hungry joe from the hills?”

“Trouble? Trouble? How have you had trouble?”

“Trouble pretending that you are something you’re not.”

“What do you pretend that I should be since I come up here and stay with you for so many nights?”

“I shut my eyes and pretend that you would only do this with me. That you are any girl from home. That you are...” His voice trailed off.

“Speak! Say what you were going to say.”

“Ask somebody else to tell you. You know anyway.”

She lunged at him, fingernails reaching for his eyes. He grabbed her wrist and flung her back in the chair. The pressure of his hand against her heavy silver bracelet cut her arm slightly. He suddenly realized he felt unaccountably free. He stared at her for a minute with a fond half-smile, and then said softly, “I’m leaving and I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. When I get back you will be gone. No matter what you are, you are also cheap, and a complete bitch.” He walked quickly to the door and closed it quietly behind him.

She sat for a few minutes looking carefully at the small droplets of her red blood that gathered along the scratch on her arm. Then she picked up her purse, opened the door and walked out. Her heels clacked loudly in the corridor as she walked down the hall, carrying her pride like a small Indian bundle balanced firmly on her shining head.