Ameche stuff.”
“Your breasts are like melons or sea dunes, that kind of stuff?”
“Yes. That’s good. Yes. That’s it. Very good.”
The delicate scallop sculpture of her stomach is fiercely exciting as always.
“Cover me. It’s cold in here.”
After I am undressed and on top of her, I pull the blanket up, then the corduroy spread. Brown dark warmth surrounds us. I pull it over our heads.
“Now talk dreamy to me.”
I begin a slow moaning in her left ear. A slower, rocking exploration.
“Dreamy stuff,” I say to her.
“Yea, really dreamy stuff. Oh, dreamy, dreamy.”
“A chocolate shag sea,” I whisper in her ear and then watch her vacant, grinning face as she brings her legs around my back. Her hands do a tattoo on my back, delicate palpitation that finds the most erogenous zones, taut niches of flesh above my kidneys. Then her fingers go rubbery, slip off and flop back on the sheet. Her legs settle in as if consciousness has gone somewhere else. Has she passed out? I push a bit of the brown spread back. Track light creeps in from the kitchen. She is smiling, face sideways on the sheet, a little curl of saliva coming out of the top of her mouth.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“Is anybody?” she answers, suddenly clamping on me again. “Fooled ya!”
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“You know. You know,” she says slowly flopping back on the sheet. We repeat this game a while, rocking and flopping. Rocking slowly until we both fall asleep.
At dinner in the Ramada’s tiny dining room downstairs, overlooking the front entrance, she seems zombie-like, glazed, indifferent. We pick at Salisbury steaks, and thick, soft French fries, side orders of slaw. The dining room is empty. About twelve tables arranged in straight lines. A counter at one end, apparently for cafeteria style breakfast the next morning.
“It was lots better before all this medication,” she says.
“It was?”
“Sure,” she answers. “You know that. You can tell, too. I’m sure.”
“You had more energy,” I offer.
“I’m sorry,” she returns, pushing her little dish of cole slaw toward me. “Take this as compensation.”
“A fair trade?”
“If you think so.” We fall to silence, mutual mastication.
Pam says, finally, “I suppose people are upstairs in their own kitchenettes.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I should cook for you. Little elegant dinners. Candle-lit dinners in room 412.”
“With harpsichord music.”
“Yes, with harpsichord music and, and, oh, I don’t know. You notice that sometimes I begin a sentence and then it goes away. Just trails off some place like a pennant. I can catch the beginning of it, but then it goes by and I can’t catch the end of it—like skywriters or, rather, you know those planes that fly along the beaches with big signs behind them. When they turn, sometimes you can’t see entirely what the message is. Do you know that?”
“Hmnn.”
“Don’t do that. You don’t have to do that.”
“Sorry.”
Just as our coffee arrives a large, matronly woman wearing excessive orange shaded powder and a boy in bluejeans and a grey, white, and red polo shirt come into the dining room. They take a table against the far wall, but after a few minutes the woman negotiates a change, apparently so they don’t overlook the lobby. The woman received a tall bourbon, apparently without asking for it, then a shrimp cocktail. The boy puts a small electronic box on the table top and begins punching buttons. She gets a second shrimp cocktail and puts it to one side. After a few moments the boy looks up and smiles at the woman, then pushes the box around for her to look at. She inspects the box and then passes him the shrimp cocktail.
I nod toward them and say to Pam, “Our prey.”
“Do you think so?” Pam responds, very interested.
“Yes, indeed. David M. Spendip and friend.”
“She looks ferocious and he looks like a child.”
“Maybe fourteen. It’s hard to tell.”
“He looks older, but dresses younger,” Pam says staring at them.
The woman looks around, cruises her eyes on us and pauses long enough to issue a little chastisement, then insolently tosses her head back toward the boy. Their Salisbury steaks arrive and a glass red wine for the woman. The boy concentrates on the electronic box, pausing only to show the results periodically.
“We have an eleven o’clock interview in their room, 1210.”
“Is that a computer chess kit?”
“Presumably. No sense wasting time with conversation.”
“Amazing. He’s so cute.”
The woman turns around again and returns Pam’s stare, but if she had hoped a simple test of will, she had not quite bargained for the Librium advantage. Pam’s eyes merely take on a recessive soft glow, as if some internal supports or embarrassment mechanisms had gone to sleep. The woman screws her face up tighter and cocks her head. But nothing seems to break Pam’s inert concentration.
Finally the woman says loudly, “Dearie, didn’t somebody ever tell you it’s impolite to stare!”
The boy at this outburst looks up from his computer. I take hold of Pam’s upper arm. She turns toward me, smiling that warm, soft, simple-minded grin. The woman turns back, barks something at the boy who returns to his buttons. I pull Pam up and together we leave.
“You’re not helping much,” I say as we wait for the elevator.
“I know. I know. But did you see how he was playing with those levers? He’s very, very quick, wasn’t he?”
“I suppose so.”
“Do you think that’s what he does all day, plays with that chess machine? I would like that. I could like that a lot.”
I contemplate chastising her, but decide nothing positive would come of it. It isn’t as if she could be blamed, I decide. “Maybe you can talk to him about it.”
“I have a whole list of questions to ask him. I wrote them all out and I’d like to show them to you.”
“Sure.”
“But if you’d rather ask the questions, that’s okay
