He’d his coat on, hat in hand. “Miss Kerrigan,” he said, smiling. “What a lovely surprise.”
“I was—I came—” she stammered, trying to account for her presence. “I dove in Wallabout Bay this morning.”
“In the great big suit?”
“Two hundred pounds.”
“Wonderful. Was the lieutenant pleased?”
“Not at all,” she said. “He was hoping I would fail, and it was my pleasure to disappoint him.” The voice was not entirely her own—a return to the bantering rhythm she and Mr. Voss had fallen into before.
“This calls for celebration,” he said. “May I take you to dinner?”
“I’ll need to bathe.” She was caked with dried sweat. Mr. Voss wore a fine gray suit.
“Why don’t I take you home and wait outside while you freshen up.”
Now that he wasn’t her supervisor, Anna saw no harm in being seen with Mr. Voss; the Shipworker routinely carried small items on the weddings of couples employed at the Yard. She walked beside him along Sands Street, able at last to satisfy her curiosity about its uniform shops and tattoo parlors and dusty windows with small signs advertising “rooms.” But her solitude leered at her from behind the bustle like a mastiff at a window. On the streetcar, she kept her eyes on Mr. Voss and avoided looking at the dark.
In her apartment, she ran a bath. Nell had told her about department stores where girls could go after work to bathe and be styled and made up before their dates. The idea of transformation appealed to Anna. She was tired of herself. She rifled through the frocks her mother had left and found an off-the-shoulder strapless dress of sea-green satin. She adjusted the seams before the tub had even filled. Then she scrubbed herself with soap flakes in the hot bath and shaved under her arms. After drying, she powdered her breasts and neck, painted her lips, and rouged her cheekbones with her mother’s cosmetics. She added a string of pearls and diamond drop earrings—all paste, of course, but good from a distance. She found a pair of silver faux-satin gloves that reached her elbows. Lifting the hair from her neck, she pinned it as best she could—it was heavy and shiny for pins—then added a small round hat to match the dress. When she looked in the kitchen mirror, the glamour girl gazing back at her made her laugh. A disguise! Why hadn’t she thought of this before? She exchanged a wink with her dashing new partner in crime.
Mr. Voss leaned against a wall in the chilly vestibule, reading his evening Tribune. “Miss Kerrigan,” he said when she reached the bottom of the stairs in her mother’s beaded cloak. “I am staggered.”
“And why is that, Mr. Voss?”
“Charlie. Please.”
“Only if you’ll call me Anna.” She felt a niggle of worry; was she certain he didn’t care for her that way?
“I’d been planning to take you to Michael’s, on Flatbush,” he said. “Now I think nothing short of a taxi ride to Manhattan will do.”
“I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.” She’d lapsed into one of the moving-picture voices she and Lillian and Stella liked to use.
They hailed a taxi on Fourth Avenue and soon were crossing the Manhattan Bridge. The East River was a blue-black void, ticks of light suggesting a density of boats. Anna took a long breath. Without the familiar ballast of her loneliness, she felt unmoored, as if she might fall off the bridge into the dark river.
“Tell me something, Charlie,” she said. “Is there a woman at home right now, wondering where you might be?”
He turned to her, serious. “There is no woman waiting for me,” he said. “You have my word.”
“The girls in the office . . .”
“Ah, they love to talk.”
“Could it have hurt you? What they said?”
“Only if it were true.”
She’d been right; they were friends, no more. “Not even a daughter?” she asked. “Waiting at home?”
“I am, so far, childless.”
“A handsome fellow like you, Charlie,” she chided, tumbling back into banter like a bed of feathers. “How can that be?”
“Bad luck, I suppose. Until tonight. Providence has smiled upon me at last.”
“You’ve used that line a hundred times. And you got it from a fortune cookie.”
“Seventy, eighty times at most.”
They were laughing together, reveling in each absurd escalation of their repartee. Anna had always wanted to flirt; now, suddenly, it was effortless.
At Chandler’s, on East Forty-sixth, they ate hamburger steaks with smothered onions and french-fried potatoes, followed by slices of apple pie. They drank champagne. Charlie Voss had a way of asking questions that kept the conversation safely in the realm Anna wished to inhabit: her diving test, Lieutenant Axel’s eccentricities, the progress of the Russians against the Krauts in the Ukraine. The darkness surrounding this well-lighted patch went unmentioned. Anna sensed in Charlie Voss a symmetrical darkness. In moments she felt at the brink of understanding it—some truth about him that was practically in view. But she was left merely baffled.
After supper, as they walked toward Fifth Avenue, Anna took his arm. She felt as she had this morning underwater—unwilling to surface. Charlie Voss must have felt this, too, for he said, “Let’s not call it a night so soon. Have you a favorite nightclub?”
“I’ve only been to one,” she said.
*
Moonshine’s top-hatted doorman was cherry-picking entrants from a crowd that had massed outside the lacquered door. It occurred to Anna that she could say, with some small truth, that she knew Dexter Styles, but it turned out not to be necessary. The gatekeeper admitted them, and Anna’s first impression was that nothing about the place had changed—that this night was a continuation of the last. In the glittering checkerboard arena, she sought out the table she and Nell had occupied. Strangers sat there now, and Dexter Styles was nowhere in sight. After a flash of disappointment, Anna was relieved not to find him. The day with Lydia at Manhattan Beach could remain intact.
A ma?tre d’ showed them to a table at the room’s outer edge, and Charlie ordered champagne. The orchestra’s ominous horns and snares sounded like the approach of a thunderstorm or an army. A wastrel-looking singer briefly silenced the room with her temblor of a voice. Anna and Charlie rushed the dance floor with dozens of other couples. Anna was nervous, recalling how badly she’d danced with Marco last October, but Charlie Voss made it easy. “Thank God you’re such a good dancer,” she said.
“You’ve summoned it forth.”
“Hah! A good liar, too.” She was dizzy from champagne and the pleasure of holding another person. Warm currents of air hummed on her collarbones.
“Anna? Is that possibly you?”
She turned and saw Nell, in strapless peach chiffon, dancing with an older man in a dinner suit. Anna broke from Charlie and threw her arms around her friend. “I can’t believe it,” she cried. “I looked for you everywhere.”