The night was everywhere, reaching and black; it filled the car and surrounded Anna. But her dread of the dark had vanished. Without knowing when or how, she had released herself to it—disappeared through a crack in the night. Not a soul knew where to find her. Not even Dexter Styles.
He looked straight ahead as he drove, but Anna sensed his febrile restlessness from across the seat. The bones of his throat moved like knuckles when he swallowed. He must have felt her eyes on him, but he waited a long time before returning the gaze. A new understanding opened between them.
“You look different,” he said softly. “In green.”
“That’s why I wore it,” she said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
* * *
Dexter cracked the car window and let the winter wind rake his face. An intelligent person sat beside him, a girl who was not silly, who would understand whatever he gave her to understand, who intrigued him through some combination of physical attributes and mental toughness, but really it was the latter, because physical attributes surrounded him daily and prompted little feeling. And yet there was a problem with the girl in his car—this smart, modern girl with correct values, joined to the war effort, a girl matured by hard times and familial tragedy—and that problem was that all he could think of doing, in a concrete way, was fucking her. The rest—vague notions that she might work for him, that her toughness could be of use, that she was likely a good shot (taut slender arms, visible in the dress she was wearing tonight); confusion about how they had originally met (had someone introduced them?)—flickered at a middle distance, well behind his need to have her. And even as that need made it hard to drive the goddamn car, he was also thinking: this was the problem of men and women, what made the professional harmony he envisaged so difficult to achieve. Men ran the world, and they wanted to fuck the women. Men said “Girls are weak” when in fact girls made them weak. At the same time, another line of thought was unspooling: Why this? Why now? Why her? Why take the risk when George Porter had just seen them? But those questions were theoretical, to be debated at some future point. For now, the explosive discontent that had been mounting in Dexter since his visit to Mr. Q. two weeks before had at last found an object. And another line of thinking: Where could they go? Somewhere private, somewhere indoors. Lust made an idiot of everyone it touched—Dexter felt stupidity shrouding his head like a hood in the shape of a dunce’s cap. Where? Where? Where?
The queer part was, he’d given hardly a thought to Miss Feeney since driving her to Manhattan Beach right after Thanksgiving. The crippled sister had haunted him a bit, her lustrous eyes above billowing scarves returning to him at odd times for perhaps a week. The healthy one, no. Yet glimpsing her tonight in that green dress had brought a tightness to his chest. He’d watched her through his hidden window and waited for it to pass. But the feeling only ratcheted as he formed his disapproval of the company she kept: that cokie girl, mistress to another woman’s husband, and the date: a fruit, he’d put money on it. Watching her in that dress, he’d found himself recalling Bitsy’s moans through the bathroom door.
As they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, she told him she’d become a diver. She said it in a relaxed way—to break the silence, he supposed, and appreciated. It happened to be interesting, both the topic and the sensation of talking to the same girl in the same car, but with an entirely different object before them. He asked about the equipment, how she breathed underwater, whether she’d bumped up against any dead bodies. But they might have been saying anything.
As he followed the curved shore toward Bay Ridge, Dexter knotted his fingers with hers, which were slender and warm. She pushed her thumb into the flesh of his palm, and a sensation like lightning tore through him, as if her hand were inside his trousers. The air in the car rang and shook. There was one cure for this, and that was to exhaust it.
The old boathouse was an unlikely choice for a tryst, having been the site of a number of Dexter’s business dealings over the years, not all of them pleasant. But the same advantages recommended it in both cases: it was isolated, private, padlocked. Not a mile east of his home, it had so far been spared the Coast Guard’s wartime reconfigurations. Dexter wondered each time he approached whether he would find it razed to the ground.
He parked on an empty street, and the car clicked and sighed into stillness. The dark was absolute. He leaned over and kissed her for the first time, his mind emptying at the lush taste of her mouth. Apparently, she was the last girl in New York who didn’t smoke. He sensed appetite beating inside her like a second heart, larger and softer than her real one, and his impulse—adolescent, surely—was to begin right here, right now. But that was too dangerous. He opened his door and came around and opened hers.
“Let’s look,” she said, and he realized she meant the sea, noticing only then how loud it was. They walked to the dead end and looked out at a ghostly procession of waves, like rows of people in white hats holding hands as they dove into oblivion. Dexter did what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do: kissed her in the wide open. If it were warmer, he’d have liked to pull her down right here, as he’d done under the Coney Island boardwalk with more than one girl of his youth, bathers’ feet dropping grains of sand over them through gaps between planks. But there was no rush. They’d left the club before one; WarTime sunrise was not until eight. Time enough to do all that needed to be done.
The boathouse was a block over, beside a short pier. Dexter opened the padlock with his key and shoved the sticky door, sensing immediately that the place had been occupied since his last visit a few months before. He struck a match on his shoe and lit the wick of the hurricane lamp that was always just inside the door. Its rippling light confirmed his hunch: a whiskey bottle, cigarette butts. This hardly touched him in his present state. He needed to warm the place up. There was no electricity, just a squat stove that heated efficiently once it got going. He shoved in wood. The kindling was gone, but he found a newspaper and lit that, realizing too late that he should have checked the date to get a notion of when exactly someone had been here without his knowledge or approval.