Chapter 2
Carl carried a small bag containing, he explained, his soap, shaving equipment and other vital necessities. It was an extended walk to the motel where Angel and Stanley had their room, but it was a pleasant night, the wind was cool, young bodies were warm and receptive as they brushed against each other. Angel felt as if she were surrounded by maleness as Carl towered over her, his strong arm extending downward around her waist. The talk was small talk, gay, laughing. Bare feet plowed through warm sand and the lights along the strand were rainbow hued brilliance.
"Look!" Angel cried, as a star fell. They paused, watching the burn streak down the sky to fade.
"Man," Carl said, "what a night."
"You like it?" Angel asked gaily. "It's yours. I present it to you."
"Thanks."
"All of it. The sea. The stars. The whole world."
"I'll have to change it, then," Carl said musingly.
"Change it? What for? It's perfect as is."
"Men are dying," Carl said, his voice almost inaudible.
"Carl," she wailed, "for heaven's sake!"
"For no real reasons," he said. "For national pride and for dollars. For heart-felt beliefs and for flagrantly false causes."
"Jeese," she said, pulling at his arm. "You sound like my father."
"I'd like to know your father," he said seriously. "He's a very great man."
"Dad?" she asked. "Great? Hey, how do you know about my father?"
"Everyone knows about Igor Tomsk," he said. He started, as if coming out of a reverie. "But let's cool that, baby. I'm for that shower."
They crept guiltily along the veranda outside the row of glass-fronted rooms until, standing in front of the girl's room, Carl fumbled for the keyhole with the key which had been entrusted to his care and they entered the room without lights until Angel could draw the drapes. When she had completed the isolation of the room she flipped the switch. A bedside lamp lit the room warmly but not too brightly. Carl was standing with his bag in his hand, looking at her strangely.
"The shower is in there," she said, motioning.
He turned, put the bag on the bed nearest the bath, rummaged through it. Angel, heart drumming with increasing insistence, walked to his side and watched as he laid out razor and shaving cream, a wash cloth and a bar of soap.
"There are towels inside," she said.
"Don't want to use all of them. You girls will need some." He threw a towel over his shoulder. "You won't go way?"
The way Angel felt she wasn't going anywhere. Except maybe into the shower with him if he gave her half the chance. She shook her head.
"I promised you something if you let me use your shower," he said, hand in the bag on the bed.
"A pretty," she said, "as you so quaintly put it."
"O.K. Close your beady little eyes."
"Surprise?"
"Surprise," he said. "Close and turn around."
Giggling, she obeyed. After a few seconds she felt his hand on her shoulder. "Don't open your eyes," he said.
He turned her to face him. "Open your little birdie mouth," he said inanely.
"I'm not hungry," she said, giggling.
"Open," he said, more forcefully. She opened her mouth. He put something on her tongue which was sweet and, as she closed her mouth automatically, began to melt with surprising speed.
"Gaaa," she said, shaking her head. "What on earth is that?"
"Just a piece of candy," he said.
"Whew," she said, swallowing the sickenly sweet taste, going to the dresser for a glass and some water from the pitcher of melted ice water there. "Must be home made."
"Sorry you didn't like it," he said, closing the bag. He wasn't looking at her. She rinsed the sweet taste out of her mouth.
"Well," he said. "That shower."
She walked to the drapes and pulled one back a few inches and looked out onto the veranda and the swimming pool below. The nightlights made things look warm and yellowish. She thought a quick dip in the pool would be fun. She heard the water start in the shower and heard the masculine snorts which indicated that Carl was running water over his head. She smiled and hummed a mournfully pretty melody which the folksinger down the beach from them had been singing and walked to flop down onto the bed.
She brushed sand from the soles of her feet by rubbing her feet together, propped her feet onto the white bedspread, cocked one leg over her knee, swung her foot, hummed and looked idly at the ceiling with the sound of the shower in her ears.
"Carl!" she called suddenly. "Are you going to take all night?"
He couldn't hear her. She swung her foot and whistled, a faint little girl-like whistle between prettily puckered lips.
The drapes were moving.
They began to twist and climb themselves and wave in movements like huge snakes. She stopped whistling and shook her head. The drapes stopped moving.
She frowned in puzzlement and looked around the room and the shower roared wetly.
Dizzy from the sun, she thought.
Then the lamp began to grow and grow and it became a sun, warm, yellow, non-menacing but huge and hot and all consuming and she lay on the bed staring at it wide-eyed with her leg crossed over her cocked knee, a small, dark girl in a modified bikini with her dark, short hair mussed from the wind and the sea and accepted the growth of the lamp into a miniature sun because it was natural that it be so and it was natural that the colors in the short dress she'd worji early, had tossed over the back of a chair, blend into a rainbow of beauty while the sound of the shower roared louder and louder, becoming a Niagara, filling the small room and her body sensed a change in the flow of her blood and knew the minute movement of the corpuscles through her veins and she knew her own body as she'd never known it before. In an instant all became clear to her, to the all knowing being she became, the workings of her heart and her internal organs and the flow of messages along her nerves could be followed minutely and . . . and . . . She screamed.
She screamed until the tension burst small blood vessels around her deep, dark eyes but no sound came.
"All." She was saying it over and over. "All. All. All. Answer." The word had the meaning of the world. It was instant wisdom. It was the knowledge of the centuries in one word. Beautiful word. A-N-S-W-E-R. All the rhythm and the beauty of the English language in one word. Her favorite word.
"What have you done?"
He was standing there looking down at her, a towel around his bulk, huge, manly. "What have you done to me."
"Easy, baby," he said. "Take it easy." He leaned toward her. She was still in her cocked leg position, but she let her legs fall when he touched her knee.
"Cool it, Angel. Be with it. I'm here." He sat on the edge of the bed, his weight making the mattress groan, springs creak.
He was man. She wanted him. She tried to reach for him, but her arms were shortened and she coldly realized that she was changing, changing, becoming different, her very body altering its shape to reach out for him not with arms but with a burning, growing, all consuming soft thing which was woman to wrap, consume him.
"What did you give me?" One part of her mind, clear, fighting.
"Nothing, kid. A bite of candy."
"Not candy," she said. Spittle drooled down her chin. He reached out to wipe her mouth with his towel. The nap was rough on her face. She coudn't stop drooling.
"I'll get you a towel," he said, rising.
His back, broad, beautiful. Wanted. God, she'd wanted him. Why did he think . . . Why did he think he had, to . . . do whatever it was he'd done to her when he could have had her so easily, just by answering her need, just by asking, just by a gentle touch and she was off the bed, resenting him, running, running on bare feet across a room with a cold terrazo floor which was miles across before she reached, gasping, the door and flung it open to plunge into the dark night lit by the yellow lights but still dark and reassuring, giving her strength as she ran, ran, reaching the corner of the motel with her breath gasping, running, running, a small, dark girl with smoothly tanned skin exposed by her brief bathing suit, attracting stares from passersby as she ran into the street and toward the beach, the sand warm under her feet and somewhere behind her someone calling her name.
"Angel! Angel! Angel!"
All the stars fell leaving a void above. Now it was the sand in her face and she was lying with her face against dampness with the ocean near growing larger but still not frightening. Dark. People around but not noticing. Glowing lights of fires on the stand and, suddenly, child horrors coming at her, growing, things, all the fear of a closed room and loneliness and the threat of . . . of . . . things.
"You really laid one on, huh, chick?"
He was bending over her, and unknown face, in the context of childhood horrors a threat from which she shrank soundlessly as his hand closed over her arm.
"Give you a hand. Who you with? You got a room or something?"
Leave me alone. Leave me alone.
"What have you been drinking, sweetie?" A leer near her face. Sound came this time. The face flinched. "Look, don't do that. I'm only trying to help. You wanta have people thinking I'm killing you or something?"
She screamed and screamed people hearing, coming. The face jerked away. "Look, baby, I'm cutting out. I was going to give you a hand but I'm not buying in for any of this nutty stuff."
People around her. Run. Run. Away from them then with their inquiring voices behind her, getting off the beach for it was home to terrors. Finding the lights of the hardware of civilization ahead, buildings.
A telephone booth. It was not a telephone both at first but it was later as she looked and it stopped being something else and she was saying, stumbling toward it, "Help me, somebody please help me, oh God, help me."
"Help me," she was saying into the dead telephone, standing in the lighted booth with the door partially closed. "Help me. Help me." For outside were things which writhed like huge snakes and colors which flowed and ran and sounds which were un-like any sounds ever heard on earth since the dawn of life and then a firm hand on her shoulder. She turned, ready to scream.
"Angel. Angel."
Dear, beloved, wonderful, rescuing face.
"Oh, Stanley. Stanley."
"Come on, baby."
She walked docilly, Stanley's arm around her. The world was going mad but it was no longer frightening, interesting rather with Stanley there to listen as she described it to Stanley, who laughed. She didn't even question the fact that Stanley was taking her back to the motel. She went without question because she was so grateful to Stanley for saving her. She felt expansive, warm, happy. She was giddily drunk and she hadn't had a drink in hours but it was so funny. She was laughing crazily when they put her on the bed.
"Where was she?"
"In a telephone booth."
"Damn, who did she call?"
"No one, idiot. She didn't have a dime."
"I didn't think it would hit her so fast."
"Idiot. You should have stayed with her."
Voices, just voices. She heard them say the meaningless words and then someone was lifting her, hands under her shoulders.
"Angel. Angel. Come out of it. Do you hear me?"
"Stan? Hi, Stan."
"Angel. I want you to do something for me. Do you understand? I want you to do something for me."
"Sure, Stanley."
"Here, Angel, hold this."
"Phallic symbol," Angel giggled. Her hand held the upright microphone. "Phallic as phallic as phallic," she mumbled, as Stanley held a sheet of paper before her eyes.
"I want you to read this, Angel."
The letters began to unblur. Angel blinked her eyes. The phallical microphone was near her lips, rousing thoughts in her which had nothing to do with the game Stanley seemed to be intent on playing.
"Read, Angel. Read for Stanley."
"There comes a time," Angel began, the words trying to race ahead of her eyes to escape, "when one must speak out."
"S'good," she said. "That's very good."
"Angel," Stanley said, shaking her. "Read it."
"There comes a time when one must speak out," Angel read. "I'm Angel Tomsk . . . " She paused. She grinned up at them. "That's I'm," she said.
"Angel. Angel. Just read it. Just read it right through without any cute comment."
"Carl," Angel wailed, because the phallical thing in her hands was alive, alive. "Carl, I don't want . . . please, Carl."
"I'm here, Angel. I'm here."
"Hold me Carl. I'm scared. There's something wrong. Please."