Rumpelstiltskin

8

Even God rested on Sunday.

Besides, my daughter wanted to know whether we were going to blow today the way we’d blown yesterday, what with traveling from New Orleans and then Tampa and then me rushing off to take care of business while she sat watching television all alone. My daughter has a way of directly demanding attention. She was great at this even when Susan and I were still married, but she has become expert at it since the divorce, working on the principle that parents who have split up are uncommonly receptive to their offsprings’ slightest whims. She really doesn’t have to try quite so hard; I would leap into a pit of molten lava for her.

What I did instead was scan the Herald-Tribune’s Sunday Section for a suitable amusement, proposing and having dismissed in turn: 1) the Annual Bayview Avenue Arts and Crafts Street Exhibit 2) a sculpture opening at the Wexler Gallery on Main Street 3) the annual sale of duplicate plants and orchid auction at the Agnes Lorrimer Memorial Gardens 4) the Calusa County Fair (which Joanna told me she’d outgrown, thanks) and 5) an exhibit of gem stones and Indian jewelry at Pierpont Hall. It was not until I stumbled upon the advertisement for the All-Florida Championship Rodeo in Ananburg that I captured Joanna’s interest. She asked at once if we could call Dale to ask if she’d like to come with us. I dialed her home on Whisper Key and was somewhat relieved when the phone rang and rang without an answer; I really wanted to spend some time alone with my daughter. It was not my fault, as it turned out, that some of that time would be occupied by business — even in Ananburg, a good forty miles from the scene of the multiple murders.

To get to Ananburg, which is in adjoining De Soto County, you drive due south on 41, and then make a left turn eastward on Timucuan Point Road, driving past the Sawgrass River Bird Sanctuary and into acres and acres of cow country. In late April and early May the air out here is alive with love bugs mating in flight and smashing in conjugal bliss into your windshield. The ensuing romantic mess is bloody and gluey, and you’ve got to stop every three miles or so to wipe off the windshield or else drive the rest of the way on instruments. But this was January, and there were no love bugs doing their incessant thing, and the cold front seemed to have drifted mercifully out to sea, leaving behind it a day that was beautiful and bright, with a high temperature of seventy-three degrees promised by all the forecasters.

You did not have to drive very far out of Calusa to realize that the State of Florida was really an integral part of the Deep South. The regional dialects in the place I’ve called home for the past four years were largely midwestern, with here and there a hard smattering of northeastern edge, and — even scarcer — a dollop of Canadian English. But if you stopped for gas out here in the boonies, as we did some sixteen miles from the city limits, the Southern accent was so thick you needed a machete to slice it. The men wore bib overalls here, and boots, and straw hats, and they chewed tobacco and spit it with unerring accuracy; the women wore those patterned cotton things my mother used to call house dresses; the restaurants in the infrequent little towns along the way featured “home cooking,” which invariably meant country ham and black-eyed peas, green beans and fatback, hominy, collard greens, corn bread and — particularly in this part of the country — fried catfish. As we made the drive on an arrow-straight road flanked by grazing land, I could not help but wonder how my partner Frank might have reacted to this landscape and the people who inhabited it.

My daughter had something on her mind.

I can always tell when she’s about to reveal anything of monumental importance because she will sit silently for half an hour or so, nibbling at her lower lip, and fretting the problem until it finally surfaces. It pays to be patient at such times. I’ve discovered after thirteen years of fatherhood that probing does little to unseal Joanna’s lips; she’ll tell me when she’s good and ready, and only then. And usually the revelation will come completely out of the blue, as it did that Sunday on the drive to Ananburg. I’d been rattling on about the rodeo we were about to see and about rodeos in general, and I made what I thought to be a clever remark to the effect that seeing a rodeo once every twenty-seven years was essential to my life plan, not thinking I had to explain to my daughter that since I was now thirty-seven, the last one I’d seen had been when I was ten, when without warning, she said, “What should you do if a boy wants to feel you up?”

I pondered this for a moment, and then answered in a manner that would have guaranteed an immediate objection from an opposing attorney. “Who’s the boy?” I said.

“Well... any boy.”

“You don’t have a specific boy in mind?”

“Yes, I do have a specific boy in mind.”

“Do I know him?”

“You know him, and you don’t like him,” Joanna said.

“Andrew the Cruel,” I said.

Andrew the Cruel was a fifteen-year-old boy whose name actually was Andrew Crowell, but whom I had rebaptized when he was still fourteen and had promised my then twelve-year-old daughter that he would take her to something called the Spring Frolic at Bedloe, only to call at the last moment to advise her that he had an errand to run for his father and would have to skip the dance after all. Joanna was spending that particular weekend with me, and the way she spent it was in her room weeping from Friday afternoon at five o’clock, when the little son of a bitch called — two and a half hours before he was supposed to pick her up — till Sunday at six, when I finally coaxed her to come out and have some dinner before I took her back to her mother’s. I do not easily forgive little bastards who are mean to my daughter. Joanna, on the other hand, forgave him almost at once. Two weeks later, when she was visiting me again, she spent nearly as much time on the phone with him as she had weeping in her room on the weekend of the dance. Now she wanted to know what she should do if and when, if not already, Andrew the Cruel felt her up.

“Andrew Crowell, Dad,” she said, correcting me. She could call him Andrew Crowell from now to doomsday; to me he would always and ever be Andrew the Cruel, the little prick. It did not help improve my opinion of him to have learned inadvertently from one of Joanna’s girl friends who’d been sleeping over for a weekend several months ago that Andrew was most likely pushing dope and that the “errand” he’d had to run that night of the dance undoubtedly involved picking up grass on a deserted beach someplace. My daughter vehemently denied this allegation. She did not, however, deny that Andrew the Cruel kept snakes. He once offered to bring to my house a pet boa constrictor. I told him that Freud might have had a lot to say about his hobby. He asked me who Freud was. This was my daughter’s inamorato: a pusher, a zoo keeper, and a fucking ignoramus.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

“When did what happen?”

“What you said happened?”

“I didn’t say it happened.”

“Well, when do you expect it to happen?” I said.

“It’s sort of come up.”

“You mean he’s warned you to expect it?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what, exactly?”

“Not exactly a warning, I mean. More like a promise is what it was.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Dad, don’t get uptight, okay? I just want to know what I should do is all. In the eventuality. If what I think is going to happen happens is all.”

“He’s already promised you it’ll happen, is that it?”

“Yes. Well, more or less.”

“How do you mean, more or less?”

“Well, he’s indicated that he finds... you know... that all of a sudden he’s, you know, sort of attracted to, you know, what there wasn’t anything there to be attracted to a little while ago. And now there is. So he’s sort of said he might not be able to... well... what he said was ‘resist the temptation.’ That’s what he said.”

“He wants to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, is that it?”

“What?” Joanna said.

“Little Biblical zoo keeper that he is.”

“Dad, if you’ve got a thing about snakes, that’s your problem, not Andrew’s.”

“I definitely have a thing about snakes, yes. I also have a thing about Andrew.”

“That I know.”

“So why are you asking me what you should do?”

“Because I asked Mom, and she wanted to know if I’d like to go see Dr. Beyer to get a prescription for the pill.”

“The pill!”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Yeah.”

“Has your mother lost her mind? You’re only thirteen years old!”

“I’ll be fourteen in September.”

“September’s almost a year away!”

“She’s thinking ahead, I guess.”

“She’s thinking too far ahead, you ask... I hope you told her no.”

“I told her I’d think about it. Meanwhile, what should I do about Andrew?”

“What do other girls your age do about Andrew?”

“Well, the only other girl who’s ever gone steady with Andrew...”

“Oh, are you going steady with him?”

“Well, yeah, sort of.”

“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”

“We’re seeing each other. And nobody else.”

“Joanna, you’re too young to...”

“Come on, Dad...”

“... be tying yourself exclusively to one boy.”

“Almost all the girls at St. Mark’s have steadies.”

“Does Roxanne have a steady?”

Roxanne was the girl who’d told me one afternoon — while I was squirting Charco-Lite onto the backyard briquettes in preparation for a gala hamburger and hot-dog feast — that Andrew Crowell was probably pushing dope. Joanna, at the time, was swimming in the pool, underwater like a shark. I graciously did not mention Roxanne’s comment until after her father had picked her up that Sunday afternoon. Alone again with my daughter, I confronted her with the bizarre notion that Andrew might be involved in narcotics, and she told me flat-out that Roxanne was full of it. Roxanne had turned fourteen just before Christmas, which made her nine months older than Joanna. She was short and somewhat pudgy, with frizzy black hair and intelligent brown eyes. Her mother was a graduate of Vassar, and Roxanne herself planned to go there one day, as she incessantly informed anyone who would listen. In preparation, she was practicing a scholarly look by wearing black-rimmed eyeglasses. She had told me about the dope matter-of-factly, the way all the kids in Calusa — and maybe everywhere in America — talked about dope.

“Roxanne’s the one who used to go steady with him,” Joanna said.

“Roxanne?”

“Yeah.”

“With Andrew?”

“Yeah.”

This fresh knowledge seemed to lend at least some support to Roxanne’s dope-pushing allegation. I wondered briefly just how “full of it” she actually was, and promised myself I’d get back to this entire subject of narcotics as soon as the more important matter of my daughter’s virgin breasts had been dealt with.

“Well, when she was going steady with him,” I asked, “did she allow him to... ?”

“All the way, Dad,” Joanna said.

“What?”

“All the way.”

“Are you saying... ?”

“Yep.”

“That little Roxanne... ?”

“Yep.”

I shook my head.

“Don’t be so shocked,” Joanna said.

“Shocked? I’m appalled! She’s only fourteen!”

“Everybody does it,” Joanna said.

“Ev—”

“Well, almost everybody. At St. Mark’s, I mean.”

“If that’s the case, you must be considered retarded.”

“Actually, I am. Considered, I mean. In fact, when I asked Roxanne whether I should, you know, let Andrew, you know, do what he said he was thinking of doing, she just burst out laughing.”

“Thought it was funny, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Hilarious.”

“Yeah. So should I? Let him, I mean?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not Andrew.”

“Why not Andrew?”

“You’d be cheapening yourself,” I said.

I could not think of any other way of putting it. I knew I was being miserably inadequate, I knew that I should have come up with some earth-shattering advice to help my daughter find the proper path to womanhood, prepare her somehow for that first tentative touch and glorious response, and all I could say was that with someone like Andrew she’d be cheapening herself, she’d be allowing a person inferior to her to... to soil her somehow.

She was silent for what seemed like a long time. Outside the open windows of the Ghia, the monotonous countryside flashed by. We were still a good twenty minutes from Ananburg, and it was close to one-thirty, and the Grand Entry was scheduled to begin at two sharp. I knew I’d said the wrong thing, and my only consolation was that Susan had given her advice even more stupid. Offering to put her on the pill, Jesus!

“Actually...” Joanna said.

I held my breath.

“I’m not even sure I want him to. I mean... I think you may be right about him, Dad. I’m not sure, but I think maybe you are. And I think if I let him do what he wants, then I’d be letting him take something very personal from me, something I’m not sure I want him to have. Yeah, it’d be cheap,” she said, and nodded.

I said nothing. I kept my eyes on the road ahead.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said, and hugged herself.

In a little while she began humming an Elton John tune even I knew.

We missed the Grand Entry, but we took our seats on the shady side of the arena in time for the invocation and the singing of the national anthem. The first competition of the day was the bareback riding event, and a man sitting next to Joanna and me told us that the one bucking horse no cowboy wanted to draw was Dennis the Menace, whose bucking string number was eighteen. “You watch that horse when he comes out here, whoever draws eighteen,” he said. “That horse’ll just pitch anybody offa him in a matter of seconds.” The third horse out of the chute was, in fact, Dennis the Menace, and the cowboy on his back lasted no longer than three seconds, fulfillment enough of our companion’s prediction. We sat through the calf roping and saddle bronc riding events, and then I asked Joanna if she’d like a hot dog or something, and she admitted that she was starving — my daughter is always starving — but that she didn’t want me to miss the bulldogging event, which the man sitting next to us had said was the most exciting one except for the bull riding, which was the last event on the program. I told Joanna I’d be back in a minute, and then I shuffled my way past the men and women in our row of the bleachers, noting that men and women alike were wearing ten-gallon hats, and wishing I owned the only haberdashery store in Ananburg. As I stepped through the arena gates and began walking toward the food concession some fifty yards away, the master of ceremonies was explaining over the loudspeakers that a pair of cowboys worked as a team in the bulldogging event, the hazer keeping the steer moving straight while the bulldogger himself leaped from his horse and “down in the pocket” to grab the steer’s horns and wrestle him to the ground. A sign over a small wooden building read HOT DOGS, HAMBURGERS, SOFT DRINKS. Jim Sherman was standing in line there with a dozen or more other men and women.

I didn’t recognize him at first because his back was to me and he was dressed like most of the other men here today — jeans and boots, a western-styled shirt with pearl buttons, a ten-gallon hat. I was more used to seeing him in suit and tie as one of the Greenery’s partners and official greeters, or else wearing skintight swim trunks as he strolled the beach and exhibited his gorgeous suntanned bod. He turned in profile just then to give his order to the girl working the grill, and I recognized that finely chiseled fox nose, and the clean line of his sun-bronzed jaw as he told the girl he wanted two hamburgers and a pair of Cokes. He must have seen me from the corner of his eye; he turned to where I was standing some three customers behind him, and — in a voice that sounded somewhat distant — said, “Hello, Matthew.” He collected his order from the girl behind the counter, paid her for it, and then stopped just beside me where I was standing in line, and whispered, “I have to talk to you.”

“What about?” I said.

“Not here,” he said. “I’ll meet you in about ten minutes, soon as I get this stuff back to Brad.”

“Okay, where?”

“By the ticket office up there.”

“Sure,” I said, and watched him as he walked back to the stands.

When I explained to Joanna that I had to talk to someone, she told me it’d serve me right if she entered the calf scramble, which was the event following the bulldogging, most of which I’d already missed. The calf scramble, as the man sitting alongside us explained, was an event in which every rodeo-attending boy and girl who was so-inclined could jump down into the arena with a dozen or more calves and then try to catch one of the calves and drag it back across the finish line for a cash prize. “It’s usually a boy who wins it, though,” the man said, and Joanna pulled a face. I left her with two hot dogs, a side of French fries, and an orange drink, and went to find Jim Sherman.

He was leaning against the closed ticket counter, puffing on a cigarette. He ground out the cigarette under the heel of his boot when he saw me approaching, and then he took off his ten-gallon hat and wiped the sweatband the way I’d seen Miller do it that day at the orange groves. He put the hat back on his head again.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked.

“I’m glad I ran into you,” he said. “I was planning on coming to your office tomorrow morning. This’ll save me a trip.” He took another cigarette from the package in his shirt pocket, spearing just the single cigarette without removing the package, and then struck a kitchen match on the seat of his blue jeans, and lighted the cigarette, and blew out a stream of smoke, and squinted his blue eyes like Gary Cooper or whichever cowpoke he was playing here today in Ananburg, Florida. “The police’ve been to see me,” he said.

“What about?”

“They wanted to know if I’d threatened to kill Vicky.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I told them I hadn’t, of course.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is I don’t think they believed me.”

“Who’d you talk to? Detective Bloom?”

“No, a man named Kenyon. Irish-looking guy with freckles all over his face.”

“What made him think you’d threatened her?”

“I think you already know,” Jim said, and looked me dead in the eye.

“Yes, I already know,” I said.

“You’re the one who went running to the police, aren’t you?”

“I’m the one who gave them information that might have had bearing on a crime, yes.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I felt obliged to. Nixon almost got impeached for withholding similar information.”

“Nixon was President of the United States. You’re...”

“I’m an attorney. And similarly sworn to uphold the law of the land.”

“So you take what’s essentially hearsay...”

“If you told Vicky she’d be dead...”

“You know damn well what I meant! I was telling her I’d fire her if she bombed at the Greenery! Plain and simple!”

“The words were spoken in anger, they could have constituted a real death threat. Under the circumstances, I think you’d have done just what I did, Jim.”

“No, Matthew, I’m sorry. Friends don’t go running to the cops when they...”

“Vicky was a friend, too.”

“You caused me a lot of trouble.”

“I don’t think so. Bloom himself told me you were probably just threatening to fire her.”

“Then why’d he send a flunky to see me?”

“He had to check. Nobody arrested you, did they?”

“That doesn’t mean they won’t,” Jim said. “Who was the rat, Matthew? Who was so eager to tell you I’d threatened Vicky’s life?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“One of our dumb cunt waitresses?”

“Jim, there’s no sense asking me, I won’t...”

“Melanie Simms? The queen’s handmaiden? Kissing the big rock star’s ass every chance she got? Was she the one, Matthew?”

“Why? Is she going to be dead, too?”

“Touché,” Jim said, and smiled.

I did not take Joanna back to the house I used to share with her and her mother until seven o’clock that night. Susan’s car was parked in the driveway, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was home yet; Georgie Poole may have picked her up in his Mercedes-Benz 450 SL before their weekend jaunt to the Bahamas. I asked Joanna to check, and then I walked over to where Reginald Soames, who used to be my next-door neighbor, was out watering his azalea bushes in the dark. Old Reggie was a bit deaf; he did not hear me approaching. He looked up, startled, when I was three feet from him and said, “You scared me to death, Junior. What’re you doing, prowling around out here?”

“Waiting to see if Susan’s home.”

“You planning a reconciliation?”

“I’m just dropping my daughter off.”

“So whyn’t you go inside like a civilized human being?”

“Tell that to Susan.”

“I will, next chance I get,” Reggie said. “See you got yourself involved in another murder, huh?”

“Not really.”

“Heard on the television you were the last one to see her alive.”

“That’s true.”

“If they arrest you,” he said, “I’ll send you cigarettes.” He burst out laughing, sobered almost immediately, and said apropos of nothing, “People claim you’re not supposed to water at night. I say if you water during the day, the sun’ll scorch everything out. Here’s your daughter,” he said, glancing past my shoulder.

“She’s home,” Joanna said. “Taking a bath. She says to tell you thanks.”

“Tell her she’s welcome,” I said, and hugged Joanna close.

“And, Dad...”

She held me at arm’s length and looked up into my face.

“Really thanks,” she said. “I mean really really.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Do you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

I mixed myself a martini and then went to the desk in the living room and turned on the telephone-answering machine. There had been (and still was) a study in the house I once shared with Susan and my daughter, and that was where the machine used to be. I no longer had a study. The house I was renting on the mainland had two bedrooms and a kitchen, and a combination living room-dining room, and that was all. Well, it also had a swimming pool. A small one, true, but ample enough for a refreshing dip at the end of a sweltering August day, than which there was nothing worse in Calusa than a sweltering September day. The first call had been from Mark Goldman, who wanted to know if we were still on for tennis Thursday morning. The second call had been from a client named Arthur Kincaid, who said he was considering a coal-mine tax shelter and wanted me to look over the offering brochure. The third call had been from Dale O’Brien, who asked me to call her back as soon as I got in. I switched off the machine without trying to find out if there had been any calls after Dale’s. I dialed her number on Whisper Key (I was beginning to know it by heart), and she answered on the third ring.

“Hi,” she said, “where’ve you been all day?”

“I took Joanna to the rodeo. We tried to reach you, thought you might like to join us.”

“I’d have loved to,” Dale said. “When did you call?”

“Must’ve been a little before noon.”

“I was out walking on the beach.”

“Next time,” I said. “Twenty-seven years from now.”

Dale laughed, even though she couldn’t have understood the reference. “What are you doing now?” she asked.

“I just got in. I’ve got a martini in my hand, and I plan to sip it while I listen to the rest of my messages. If there are any.”

“Why don’t you come over here instead?” she asked. “We have martinis here, too.”

“Ah, but this is a Beefeater martini,” I said.

“Will you settle for Tanqueray?” she said.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

Her house was almost at the end of Whisper Key, where a narrow offshore channel ran toward Steamboat Pass and the bridge connecting Whisper to Fatback. A recent Calusa City Council vote had ordained that all bridges would be opened only every half-hour, instead of as previously, when all a skipper had to do was honk his horn to signal his approach and request an immediate raising; it was now almost eight-thirty and the boats out there in the channel were massing for an assault. A pelican, all hunched down into his own feathers, sat on a piling that marked the end of Dale’s property and the beginning of the beach. The sky was riddled with stars.

She had mixed a pitcherful of martinis and had heated a batch of cheese puffs as well, and we sat on her patio and listened to the crash of the surf and the final movement of Elgar’s Second Symphony, bassoons, horns, and cellos swelling from the speakers inside the house. Her cat, Sassafras, a calico almost as big as my own cat had been, lay dozing near a potted cactus, totally oblivious to the surf, the conversation, or the broken harmonies of the clarinets, harps, and second violins.

“I enjoyed being in New Orleans with you,” Dale said.

“I’m afraid I wasn’t very good company.”

“I like your daughter a lot, too.”

“Thank you.”

We were silent for several moments. From the speakers, Elgar’s fugal second theme moved fluidly into a reiteration of his first theme. I listened to the thunderous crash of the surf and waited for the sonorously climactic echo of the third theme.

“You took me quite by storm, you know,” Dale said.

“I did?”

“Quite. I mean, asking me out so suddenly. Most men... well, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a vastly experienced woman of the world. When anyone says ‘most men’ or ‘most politicians’ or ‘most’ anything, they’re really talking about their own experience, the people or things they know about. I haven’t been very social since coming to Calusa. But most men” — and here she smiled — “might have been a bit more reticent.”

“Does that bother you? That I...”

“No, no. It was very flattering. And... exciting, Matthew. Your obvious attraction to me. That was very exciting.”

“You’re a very attractive woman,” I said.

“And you. A man, I mean.” She hesitated. “Want to take a walk on the beach?”

I had changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and sandals before leaving the house. Dale was barefoot and wearing a flowing white cotton caftan. I took off the sandals, rolled up the cuffs of the jeans, and followed her down the path, past the pelican asleep on the piling, and onto the beach. The sand was cool underfoot. The sailboats began moving under power toward the pass; it was eight-thirty, and the bridge was open.

“About being taken by storm,” I said.

“Yes?”

“You did, too. Take me, I mean. By storm, I mean. When you asked me out to dinner. And then invited yourself to New Orleans.”

“You have no idea how nervous I was.”

“What do you mean?”

“Making that call. To ask you to dinner. I’d never done anything like that in my life.”

“You sounded very poised and self-assured.”

“Pure bluster.” She paused. “I was terrified on our first date — don’t you hate the word ‘date’?”

“Yes,” I said, and smiled.

“It doesn’t seem appropriate for people our age. Teenagers go on dates, adults...” She shrugged. “Anyway, I was scared stiff.”

“Why?”

“Because it was happening so fast. I hate chitchat. You opened yourself to me almost immediately, Matthew. I was... well, honored, I suppose. And flattered.” She paused. “You’re the only person I ever told about my artist in San Francisco,” she said. “Until then it was something very personal — and very painful — to me. I don’t know why I chose to share it with you, perhaps because — all at once I trusted you.” She paused again. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, Matthew? In the long run? Two people trusting each other enough to expose themselves completely? To each other?” she said, and suddenly turned to me and moved into my arms and kissed me.

We stood locked in embrace at the edge of the ocean, my mouth fastened to hers, her body tight against me; she was naked under the caftan, I realized. We kissed gently, as though we had done this many times before and would do it often again and could therefore afford the luxury of postponement. And then we walked hand in hand back to the house, the surf crashing against the beach on our left, the water rushing in against our naked feet, the last of the boats moving through the pass and into the bay. In her bedroom we undressed without haste and kissed again, our tongues, our hands tentatively exploring, our bodies gliding naked against each other, unhurried. The sheets and pillowcases were a pastel green, cool and a trifle damp to the touch. She took off her glasses, placed them delicately on the table beside the bed, and then lay back against the pillow, her russet hair spreading against the timid green, her nipples a fainter blush of pink. Her pubic hair was astonishingly blond, a pale distant cousin to the deeper-hued hair on her head. I hovered above her for only an instant and then lowered my mouth to hers again.

Our lips were more demanding now, our tongues boldly pillaging as she spread her legs to me and I eased myself onto her and into her. She was wet and warm and darkly entreating, murmuring softly as I moved into her, lifting one hand to the back of my neck, her fingers widespread there, the other on my shoulder, my own hands reaching under her to clasp her buttocks, raising her to me, open and yielding. Our bodies moved erratically at first, thrust out of synch with counterthrust and grind, polished pelvic bones in accidental collision, until at last we discovered a furious rhythm together and exploited it ruthlessly, liberated jazz artists tumbling to an erotic beat, pillaging a chart for its hidden nuances, fashioning together a melody born of collaboration. “Yes,” she said, and “Yes,” I said, her lips against my ear, my face buried in masses of russet hair against the pale green pillow, “Yes, fuck,” she said, and “Fuck,” I said, echoing her, words and bodies echoing each other and ourselves, until we approached finally that single point in time and space where truly we became each other, no longer echoes but instead a single reverberating, melting, sliding, crumbling, exploding entity. “Oh, God!” she moaned, and twisted savagely beneath me, arching her hips into my own spasm. We fell back together against the tortured sheets and held each other fiercely, helpless in the grasp of the little death that savaged us.

“Wow,” she said, and caught her breath.

“Dale,” I murmured, “Dale.”

“Oh, God, that was good.”

“Dale, Dale...”

“Wow,” she said again.

I explained later how the color of her pubic hair had taken me completely by surprise, and jokingly asked which she was, a genuine blonde or a genuine redhead, suggesting that perhaps she tinted herself for effect at either one place or the other. She told me she was a genuine both and had experienced no end of embarrassment and fear when first she reached puberty and her thatch below began coming in the color of wheat instead of rust. She learned later — at the age of seventeen, to be precise — that her oddly diverse plumage was a cause for further consternation, at least to the male of the species, or at least to the only male who until then had seen her in the buff and who virtually raped her, so bananas had he gone over her rainbow coloration. She was, at the time, a senior in high school, and a very studious one at that, having at the age of ten decided that she wanted to be either a lawyer or a doctor, and opting for the legal profession only after she fainted at the sight of a worm cut in half by an eleven-year-old playmate. A straight-A student (except for Music Appreciation, where she was the only kid in the class who got a C, due to a tin ear she still possessed to this day, no matter how many times she played Elgar’s Second), she had no idea how she’d become involved with the school’s prize jock, he who later lowered her panties on a California beach one runaway night, to discover by moonlight that the hair covering her mound below did not match that on her head, after which he’d gone totally apeshit, strewing his T-shirt and blue jeans and track shoes and sweat socks hither and yon on the sand while she trembled in virgin anticipation of allowing inside her a tool reputed (by three girls on the cheerleading squad) to be equally massive in girth and length. He impaled her on the beach (“I got sand all up me,” Dale said) and then did a little sort of jigging trot afterward, similar to the one he performed on the football field whenever he made a touchdown, and then began baying at the moon like a werewolf. She was afraid he’d lost his marbles completely, and learned only later that he’d been thoroughly stoned that night on grass a friend of his had brought from Mexico, which he hadn’t even had the decency to offer her.

She began to suspect that her quarterback’s mouth was as big as the rest of him when the team’s star tackle stopped her in the school cafeteria one day and asked if it was true about her “permanent.” The moment she realized he was talking about her peculiar pigmentation, she hit him across the bridge of his nose with a convenient history book, almost giving him a permanent (“Disfigurement, that is,” she said), and then drove herself home in the car her father had given her for her seventeenth birthday, a 1966 Mustang painted a fiery red that complemented at least the hair on her head. She then locked herself in her bedroom and began sobbing over her lost virginity and the stupidity of having chosen a moron for her first lover, but the tears magically turned to laughter when she realized he’d been bragging to all his teammates about her “permanent” — the idiot had actually believed she’d had herself touched up in a beauty parlor!

She became, after that experience, singularly gun-shy about disrobing before the act of sex, opportunities for which were not all that frequent in her home town anyway, unless she chose to take on the rest of the football team. It was not until she entered the University of California at Santa Cruz, eighteen years old and hotly in pursuit of a law degree still some seven years in the future, that she met a boy (“Well, actually, he was thirty-one years old and teaching chemistry”) who put the matter of the disparate top and bottom hair into its proper perspective. As usual (her experience by then had expanded to include one other boy) she had kept herself completely clothed until the lights were out in the small apartment the chemistry professor lived in off campus, and — after they’d made love for the first time — was lying with the sheet securely pulled to her throat when suddenly he turned on the bedlamp and began rummaging in the drawer of the bedside table for a package of cigarettes. Clinging to the sheet as though it were a life raft in shark-infested waters, she waited anxiously for him to turn off the light again. But instead he alternately puffed on his cigarette and ran his free hand over her body (still protected by the sheet) and then slipped it under the sheet and began touching her belly and her breasts and her ribs and finally the hidden triangle of crisp golden hair between her legs, still damp with her own juices and his overflow semen, stroking her until her legs parted ever so slightly in response, continuing to stroke her, his hand under the sheet, until she was twitching with excitement, and then suddenly yanking back the sheet, pulling it free of her hands and her body and her telltale golden patch and dropping his head onto her mound, his tongue at the ready, and pulling back in surprise, and uttering only the single word, “Remarkable.”

He studied her mons veneris and the luxuriant blond growth surrounding it like the mad scientist he was, poking and probing and mumbling and muttering, and finally delivered a learned discourse on the pigmentation of a person’s hair as determined by his or her genes, or more exactly by the amount of “melanin” in the hair cells. If the melanin deposit was a heavy one, the person would undoubtedly have black hair, “and most likely brown eyes,” her learned professor-lover said, “a usual correlation.” If the deposit wasn’t quite so heavy, the result would be dark brown hair, and then light brown hair, and so forth until the very least amount of melanin would produce blond hair. “But red hair,” he said, “ah-ha, red hair!”

Red hair, it seemed, was caused by yet another gene which could be totally overwhelmed by a stronger melanin gene to produce a person with black or brown hair. But if the red-hair gene was there to begin with, and if the melanin dose was a weak one, then the hair would be decidedly red. In Dale’s case, he was willing to bet that the melanin dose wasn’t too terribly weak, else the hair on her head would have been of the bright orange sort you see on so many shanty-Irish girls. A moderate dose would have accounted for the reddish-brown (“And highly attractive, I might add,” he said) color of the hair on her head. Which brought him to the color of her pubic hair, and here he could not resist stroking it again, and even bestowing a professorial kiss upon it.

“It’s relatively safe to say that if a person has red hair, then he is carrying either one or two red genes in addition to a brown gene or a blond gene,” he said. “In your case, I would suggest that you’re carrying one red gene, one blond gene, and one brown gene, which would account for the reddish-brown hair on your head (“I prefer to think of it as auburn,” Dale said demurely, and he answered, “Well, russet, if you prefer”) and the blond hair on your twat. Even among Scottish Highlanders, who constitute the largest percentage of redheads on earth, one will sometimes find a man sporting either a red mustache or red pubic hair whereas the hair on his head may be a raven black. Which brings us once again to the color of the hair surrounding your cooze (“He had a remarkable vocabulary when it came to defining my cunt,” Dale said now) and the possibility that the latent blond gene expressed itself only when fortified by the emergent glandular action in that particular part of your body, a perfectly normal if somewhat unusual phenomenon.”

Dale wasn’t quite sure she believed a word of what he’d said, but she was nonetheless relieved that her now-acceptable “Melanin-Mutant Snatch,” as he’d labeled it, had not driven him to extremes of passionate lunacy, although she doubted that chemistry professors as a group were wont to perform little goalpost victory jigs. She did detect, however, that he achieved orgasm a bit more quickly the second time around. Attributing his alacrity to the intimate knowledge of her he now possessed, she decided that if her strange hair coloring was normal (if unusual) after all, and if it also served to — well, sort of excite men — well, then, the hell with it. She wouldn’t shave it off, as she’d contemplated doing from the moment she turned twelve and began sprouting little blond (blond!) hairs down there, and neither would she color it to match the hair on her head. She would, in fact, flaunt it — the way a woman with a tattoo of Popeye the Sailorman on her backside might cunningly and fetchingly expose it to a lover while simultaneously suggesting he was now privy to her most intimate female secret.

“So I’m flaunting it,” she said, and raised her hips slightly so that the light from the bedside lamp caught the thatch of blond hair between her legs, and then tossed her head forward so that the contrasting russet hair spilled down over her face. She lay that way, waiting, quite still, shrouded in autumn above, in summer below.

I parted the curtains of her Lady-or-the-Tiger hair and kissed her on the lips.